If programmers were licensed and legally responsible for the code they create, what about large scale projects? When you have several people working on an application, there is no way to say that when the pieces come together, side effects will not occur. As well, a program written for one hardware platform may have hardware specific quirks when moved to another platform (this includes moving to the next version of a chip, motherboard, etc)
I remember from my university days in my computer ethics class a discussion about this. The non-CS people in the course thought we should be licensed, but as they were shown the real uncertainty of programming and ensuring a program does what you want, they tended to back off.
Who would stake their career on a piece of software working when you cannot guarentee all other aspects of the application working as promised. Besides, can you see a company like MS getting rid of the licenses stating 'We take no responsibility for the product you are using, but we retain all rights over it.'
Importance of a good compiler on IA-64
on
Gcc for the IA-64.
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· Score: 2
John Taschek over at PCWeek has an interesting editorial about just how important getting a good compiler will be for all OS's, not just Linux. He suggests that MS is going to have serious problems with the port, since the EPIC architecture is vastly different from the traditional Intel CISC architecture that MS is used to. For RISC vendors, they are used to dealing with extremely complex compilers.
Having GCC working well on IA-64 will go a long way to further the impact of Linux, especially if GCC works much better than any compiler out of Redmond. Even if Windows 2000 runs on IA-64, if the applications crawl, not too many people are going to choose that OS over another.
The Internet was working swell on traditional Unix, Macintosh and Windows NT before Linux was much more than a glimmer in Linus' eye, and it will work better whether or not the true believers pull off a miracle and slay the dragon.
It seems that the author doesn't really know what runs the Internet. NT and Linux are roughly the same age, within a year or two. It has not been until very recently that NT was even used as a server on the Internet. It has mainly been larger Unix servers and as of the last few years, Linux servers.
As many have stated previously, this is pretty much a troll, probably intended to get this reporters name on the map and get hits generated for his papers website. It's people like this that have gotten the corportate computing world into the mess that it is in.
You people just don't get it, do you?
on
Why Kids Kill
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· Score: 1
You don't need a semi-automatic assault weapon to defend your home (if you can't hit the guy with the first shot, you're screwed anyway), and I don't think they need to be as common as they are
This is an excellent point. I do not propose a total ban on guns. I realize people want to hunt, and that the vast majority of gun owners are very responsible. As was stated in the comment, I do think that the NRA fighting for the right to use semi-automatic weapons with armour piercing ammunition is a bit excessive. How many deer wear Kevlar these days?:)
I can also understand wanting to have a weapon for home protection, especially in certain areas. It is not safe in many places, and unfortunately, the need for such strong measures has become almost required.
Perhaps if the gun control advocates in the US would start taking a softer, well informed and well thought out stance, then they would get further. By standing up and shouting for gun control, most people in congress just seem to turn a blind eye. It doesn't help that the strongest lobby group in the US right now is the NRA.
In Canada, we do promote caution and training for weapons. In Nova Scotia, to get a handgun requires psychological counselling to find out why you want one (and you thought a 3-day waiting period was bad:) In addition, potencial owners are required to take courses on the use of all firearms, so all weapon permits carry that restriction. Hopefully the day will come when the US will take a similar stance. Perhaps not as strict, but with safety as the foremost concern.
You people just don't get it, do you?
on
Why Kids Kill
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· Score: 1
I always enjoy listening to people who are against gun control, they sound very much like the tobacco lobby trying to tell the world that smoking has not been absolutely proven to cause cancer and kill people.
People have stated that mass killings have occured in countries with strict gun laws, which is true. But, how often does it occur? For Canada, not very often. On a per capita basis, how many deaths are related to guns in countries like Canada and the UK as opposed to deaths in the US? Making guns much harder to get will not stop things like this, but it will make things like this much harder to do.
To argue that to make life safer requires arming everyone reminds me of a T-shirt I saw once, which said 'Fighting for peace is like f***ing for virginity.' If the American society would stop glamourizing weapons, and treat them as deadly tools, perhaps then people would not feel the need to carry weapons.
Both of these articles are just examples of Microsofts attack strategy. They seem to be trying to find a weakness in the OSS model that they can exploit and use to rid themselves of this threat. This is just an example of the 'You get what you pay for' attack, something that products like Apache and Linux have all but defused.
As time goes on, MS will continue to attack from several angles, looking for one to one to do major damage. If the OSS community is vigilant and stays away from the same tactics, it will come out on top.
So read the articles, make a good argument to counter the statements, and watch the fun as a dinosaur tries to avoid extinction.
It's nice to see that the media is taking this test for what it is. I was worried for the last couple days about seeing headlines about how Linux sucks compared to NT without any research.
Now, the article does suggest that Linux has a ways to go with SMP/RAID support, but it does not suggest that it cannot rise to this. I think this benchmark is useful, not as a true representation of the facts, but it does show the community what it has yet to accomplish, and that the goal is well within reach.
As I read the configuration, the NIC configuration really jumped out at me. They explicitly set the NICs to 100Mbit, and set them to bind to one CPU each. Now I don't know much about the EEPro 10/100, but will it automatically use 100Mbit on Linux without explicitly using it? As well, if they didn't bind the NICs to each CPU in Linux, won't you get a bottleneck as all 4 cards fight for the CPUs?
I also noticed that the NT box was tuned by someone who is obviously very well versed in NT internals. The Linux box appears to be an out-of-the-box install, with the proper settings turned on. They didn't even include the/etc/conf.modules and kernel boot line.
One more thing, notice the cache TTL and max number of open files for IIS. Both are set to very high settings, which will ensure that files will not be paged out during the runs.
I was at the BEA users conference in February, and at the advanced topics in TUXEDO, the PM for that product announced that they were releasing TUXEDO for Linux sometime this summer. In fact, they are considering going one step further. They are considering giving away a single user SDK license along with allowing you to download TUXEDO off of their website. This will let developers work on TUXEDO on their home machines, altho load testing on such a setup it out.
They started looking at this after buying Tengah and seeing that allowing the DL of WebLogic generated large amounts of interest. I for one was quite excited to hear the news, I can't wait to grab it!
Yes, I wondered this as well. I wonder how much code is a hack to fix a hack to get a feature into Windows quickly and out the door. I also wonder if several of MS competitors will take a very close look to see if any of their own code has been 'borrowed' and put into Windows. Hmm....I wonder if we will find any GPL'd code in there buried somewhere deep:) Probably not, GPL code works well, unlike some other bits of code.....
After reading this article, it occured to me that MS may be using its tried and true tactic by embracing the term 'Open Source' then extending its definition. If it starts talking its own version of open source to everyone, claiming Windows is just that, then the public will believe them. They probably figure that the OSI group will not attack them for trademark infringement.
By altering the very definition of what is/isn't Open Source, MS may be trying to attack Linux and other OSS projects from a completely different angle. As well, if they cannot change the definition outright, then muddling the definition may be enough. MS hates to play on other peoples terms, they try to fit the terms to their own needs.
That being said, I somehow doubt that the OSI or the community in general would sit quietly by if such a thing were to happen.
Never any source code for these things. Why?
on
SETI@Home For Linux
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· Score: 1
I thought the source code problem was due to restrictions of exporting encryption code to agents outside the USA/Canada. I realize that the algorithm is freely available, but as I understand the export restrictions, it's the source code that cannot be sent outside the country, not in electronic form anyway.
As for non-encryption idle CPU tasks, the blessed client reason does seem to make sense, but only when combined with some sort of authentication mechanism.
Perhaps d.net and SETI@Home will work together
on
SETI@Home For Linux
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· Score: 1
Sorry, I didn't mean that you wouldn't be credited, what I meant was that there is no guarantee that anyone will find anything.
I agree tho, just the chance to have my name associated with that find is worth it!
Perhaps d.net and SETI@Home will work together
on
SETI@Home For Linux
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· Score: 1
It might be a bit of a stretch, but perhaps with enough interest, the distributed.net folks could help out the SETI folks. As many have stated in previous posts, it's only a matter of time for the 64bit encryption to be broken. While looking at encryption strength is important, there are more interesting things for that much computing power to work on.
Unfortunately, there is no contest involved, and no guarantees of finding anything at the end, but there is always that chance...
I have to agree here, while Goldstein had some very interesting points to make, I think having the two of them work from the same dictionary would have been more productive.
Personally, I would love to have seen a face-to-face discussion between them. I think then we would have seen a more balanced article, assuming they debated the meaning of hacker off the record, that one would probably go on for days:)
I was still in University when SW was rereleased. Several of us actually got the prof to cancel class so we could go down to the theatre and get tickets for the show. I plan to petition for the same thing this time around (altho this time I am in the position just to leave work and tell them whatever:)
I wonder if MS will allow someone other than themselves to setup and run this demo. As others have stated, they do not have a stellar track record for videotaped evidence.
The fact that MS is doing it this way suggests that they have already done the benchmark, and they have figured out a way they think they can turn this to their advantage. So don't be too surprised if they blow the benchmark away, (just don't ask them how they did it, I am sure this would just be a waste of time.)
After reading this, it became clear that MS is getting rather nervous, to say the least. When something they don't like appears, start the FUD engines churning and try to destroy their economic base, just wait out the company until it goes under or is primed for buyout. Unfortunately, that is completely useless against the Linux community.
Even if MS is successful in turning away the corporate community in the short term, Linux will continue as always. In fact, I can see the FUD having the opposite effect on developers, getting them so enraged by the bad press that they go out out of the way to create excellent software. MS is now at the beginning of a very long struggle. They are a not so immovable object facing a truely unstoppable force.
So let MS chatter on, the best that they can do is slow down Linux in the short term. As with all empires, this one too must fall, nature strives for entropy, MS cannot maintain its order forever.
So take this article for what I did, a good laugh. More of these will come along, and the community must be ready to take them with a grain of salt. Letting MS generate discord will let them gain the upper hand.
I have to agree with this thread, why can a company like this be so blatently misleading and then just say 'Oops...I didn't really mean to say that.' If any one of us tried this, we would be forking over a bunch of money for a contempt charge, or spending an evening in the care of the state.
Does this mean that Sierra is breaking its trend for releasing what are barely beta games as final releases? I remember the first release of Lord of Magic was so buggy, I spent most of my time just seeing what was broken, it was almost a game in itself.
This is something I have said to people time and time again. If current situations forgives past transgressions, does this mean that in the future, if a person is charged with a crime they did in the past, that being a nice person will allow them to get off? 'Oh...I know he killed all those people, but he hasn't killed anyone for years now, so we shouldn't convict him.'
Breaking the law is breaking the law, nothing you do can change the past.
Slashdot Mirror
If programmers were licensed and legally responsible for the code they create, what about large scale projects? When you have several people working on an application, there is no way to say that when the pieces come together, side effects will not occur. As well, a program written for one hardware platform may have hardware specific quirks when moved to another platform (this includes moving to the next version of a chip, motherboard, etc)
I remember from my university days in my computer ethics class a discussion about this. The non-CS people in the course thought we should be licensed, but as they were shown the real uncertainty of programming and ensuring a program does what you want, they tended to back off.
Who would stake their career on a piece of software working when you cannot guarentee all other aspects of the application working as promised. Besides, can you see a company like MS getting rid of the licenses stating 'We take no responsibility for the product you are using, but we retain all rights over it.'
John Taschek over at PCWeek has an interesting editorial about just how important getting a good compiler will be for all OS's, not just Linux. He suggests that MS is going to have serious problems with the port, since the EPIC architecture is vastly different from the traditional Intel CISC architecture that MS is used to. For RISC vendors, they are used to dealing with extremely complex compilers.
Having GCC working well on IA-64 will go a long way to further the impact of Linux, especially if GCC works much better than any compiler out of Redmond. Even if Windows 2000 runs on IA-64, if the applications crawl, not too many people are going to choose that OS over another.
The Internet was working swell on traditional Unix, Macintosh and Windows NT before Linux was much more than a glimmer in Linus' eye, and it will work better whether or not the true believers pull off a miracle and slay the dragon.
It seems that the author doesn't really know what runs the Internet. NT and Linux are roughly the same age, within a year or two. It has not been until very recently that NT was even used as a server on the Internet. It has mainly been larger Unix servers and as of the last few years, Linux servers.
As many have stated previously, this is pretty much a troll, probably intended to get this reporters name on the map and get hits generated for his papers website. It's people like this that have gotten the corportate computing world into the mess that it is in.
You don't need a semi-automatic assault weapon to defend your home (if you can't hit the guy with the first shot, you're screwed anyway), and I don't think they need to be as common as they are
:)
:) In addition, potencial owners are required to take courses on the use of all firearms, so all weapon permits carry that restriction. Hopefully the day will come when the US will take a similar stance. Perhaps not as strict, but with safety as the foremost concern.
This is an excellent point. I do not propose a total ban on guns. I realize people want to hunt, and that the vast majority of gun owners are very responsible. As was stated in the comment, I do think that the NRA fighting for the right to use semi-automatic weapons with armour piercing ammunition is a bit excessive. How many deer wear Kevlar these days?
I can also understand wanting to have a weapon for home protection, especially in certain areas. It is not safe in many places, and unfortunately, the need for such strong measures has become almost required.
Perhaps if the gun control advocates in the US would start taking a softer, well informed and well thought out stance, then they would get further. By standing up and shouting for gun control, most people in congress just seem to turn a blind eye. It doesn't help that the strongest lobby group in the US right now is the NRA.
In Canada, we do promote caution and training for weapons. In Nova Scotia, to get a handgun requires psychological counselling to find out why you want one (and you thought a 3-day waiting period was bad
I always enjoy listening to people who are against gun control, they sound very much like the tobacco lobby trying to tell the world that smoking has not been absolutely proven to cause cancer and kill people.
People have stated that mass killings have occured in countries with strict gun laws, which is true. But, how often does it occur? For Canada, not very often. On a per capita basis, how many deaths are related to guns in countries like Canada and the UK as opposed to deaths in the US? Making guns much harder to get will not stop things like this, but it will make things like this much harder to do.
To argue that to make life safer requires arming everyone reminds me of a T-shirt I saw once, which said 'Fighting for peace is like f***ing for virginity.' If the American society would stop glamourizing weapons, and treat them as deadly tools, perhaps then people would not feel the need to carry weapons.
Both of these articles are just examples of Microsofts attack strategy. They seem to be trying to find a weakness in the OSS model that they can exploit and use to rid themselves of this threat. This is just an example of the 'You get what you pay for' attack, something that products like Apache and Linux have all but defused.
As time goes on, MS will continue to attack from several angles, looking for one to one to do major damage. If the OSS community is vigilant and stays away from the same tactics, it will come out on top.
So read the articles, make a good argument to counter the statements, and watch the fun as a dinosaur tries to avoid extinction.
It's nice to see that the media is taking this test for what it is. I was worried for the last couple days about seeing headlines about how Linux sucks compared to NT without any research.
Now, the article does suggest that Linux has a ways to go with SMP/RAID support, but it does not suggest that it cannot rise to this. I think this benchmark is useful, not as a true representation of the facts, but it does show the community what it has yet to accomplish, and that the goal is well within reach.
As I read the configuration, the NIC configuration really jumped out at me. They explicitly set the NICs to 100Mbit, and set them to bind to one CPU each. Now I don't know much about the EEPro 10/100, but will it automatically use 100Mbit on Linux without explicitly using it? As well, if they didn't bind the NICs to each CPU in Linux, won't you get a bottleneck as all 4 cards fight for the CPUs?
/etc/conf.modules and kernel boot line.
I also noticed that the NT box was tuned by someone who is obviously very well versed in NT internals. The Linux box appears to be an out-of-the-box install, with the proper settings turned on. They didn't even include the
One more thing, notice the cache TTL and max number of open files for IIS. Both are set to very high settings, which will ensure that files will not be paged out during the runs.
Good day,
I was at the BEA users conference in February, and at the advanced topics in TUXEDO, the PM for that product announced that they were releasing TUXEDO for Linux sometime this summer. In fact, they are considering going one step further. They are considering giving away a single user SDK license along with allowing you to download TUXEDO off of their website. This will let developers work on TUXEDO on their home machines, altho load testing on such a setup it out.
They started looking at this after buying Tengah and seeing that allowing the DL of WebLogic generated large amounts of interest. I for one was quite excited to hear the news, I can't wait to grab it!
Yes, I wondered this as well. I wonder how much code is a hack to fix a hack to get a feature into Windows quickly and out the door. I also wonder if several of MS competitors will take a very close look to see if any of their own code has been 'borrowed' and put into Windows. Hmm....I wonder if we will find any GPL'd code in there buried somewhere deep :) Probably not, GPL code works well, unlike some other bits of code.....
After reading this article, it occured to me that MS may be using its tried and true tactic by embracing the term 'Open Source' then extending its definition. If it starts talking its own version of open source to everyone, claiming Windows is just that, then the public will believe them. They probably figure that the OSI group will not attack them for trademark infringement.
By altering the very definition of what is/isn't Open Source, MS may be trying to attack Linux and other OSS projects from a completely different angle. As well, if they cannot change the definition outright, then muddling the definition may be enough. MS hates to play on other peoples terms, they try to fit the terms to their own needs.
That being said, I somehow doubt that the OSI or the community in general would sit quietly by if such a thing were to happen.
I thought the source code problem was due to restrictions of exporting encryption code to agents outside the USA/Canada. I realize that the algorithm is freely available, but as I understand the export restrictions, it's the source code that cannot be sent outside the country, not in electronic form anyway.
As for non-encryption idle CPU tasks, the blessed client reason does seem to make sense, but only when combined with some sort of authentication mechanism.
Sorry, I didn't mean that you wouldn't be credited, what I meant was that there is no guarantee that anyone will find anything.
I agree tho, just the chance to have my name associated with that find is worth it!
It might be a bit of a stretch, but perhaps with enough interest, the distributed.net folks could help out the SETI folks. As many have stated in previous posts, it's only a matter of time for the 64bit encryption to be broken. While looking at encryption strength is important, there are more interesting things for that much computing power to work on.
Unfortunately, there is no contest involved, and no guarantees of finding anything at the end, but there is always that chance...
I have to agree here, while Goldstein had some very interesting points to make, I think having the two of them work from the same dictionary would have been more productive.
:)
Personally, I would love to have seen a face-to-face discussion between them. I think then we would have seen a more balanced article, assuming they debated the meaning of hacker off the record, that one would probably go on for days
I was still in University when SW was rereleased. Several of us actually got the prof to cancel class so we could go down to the theatre and get tickets for the show. I plan to petition for the same thing this time around (altho this time I am in the position just to leave work and tell them whatever :)
I wonder if MS will allow someone other than themselves to setup and run this demo. As others have stated, they do not have a stellar track record for videotaped evidence.
The fact that MS is doing it this way suggests that they have already done the benchmark, and they have figured out a way they think they can turn this to their advantage. So don't be too surprised if they blow the benchmark away, (just don't ask them how they did it, I am sure this would just be a waste of time.)
After reading this, it became clear that MS is getting rather nervous, to say the least. When something they don't like appears, start the FUD engines churning and try to destroy their economic base, just wait out the company until it goes under or is primed for buyout. Unfortunately, that is completely useless against the Linux community.
Even if MS is successful in turning away the corporate community in the short term, Linux will continue as always. In fact, I can see the FUD having the opposite effect on developers, getting them so enraged by the bad press that they go out out of the way to create excellent software. MS is now at the beginning of a very long struggle. They are a not so immovable object facing a truely unstoppable force.
So let MS chatter on, the best that they can do is slow down Linux in the short term. As with all empires, this one too must fall, nature strives for entropy, MS cannot maintain its order forever.
So take this article for what I did, a good laugh. More of these will come along, and the community must be ready to take them with a grain of salt. Letting MS generate discord will let them gain the upper hand.
I have to agree with this thread, why can a company like this be so blatently misleading and then just say 'Oops...I didn't really mean to say that.' If any one of us tried this, we would be forking over a bunch of money for a contempt charge, or spending an evening in the care of the state.
Does this mean that Sierra is breaking its trend for releasing what are barely beta games as final releases? I remember the first release of Lord of Magic was so buggy, I spent most of my time just seeing what was broken, it was almost a game in itself.
This is something I have said to people time and time again. If current situations forgives past transgressions, does this mean that in the future, if a person is charged with a crime they did in the past, that being a nice person will allow them to get off? 'Oh...I know he killed all those people, but he hasn't killed anyone for years now, so we shouldn't convict him.'
Breaking the law is breaking the law, nothing you do can change the past.