Re:Good going, France!
on
UFOs In the News
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Why worry about relevant issues to their national security like an invading mob of Muslim youths waging war on their infrastructure (and winning) when they can declassify documents about unsubstantiated crap and temporarily distract their citizens and the world from their rapidly approaching destruction?
Most of what goes by the name of "national security" is also distracting crap; "invading mobs of Muslim youths" and airplanes crashing into skyscrapers simply are not high on the list of things likely to kill you. The things people ought to worry about and that kill them and others, they like to forget about and are all too happy to be distracted from: nutrition, traffic accidents, poverty, civilian killings during war, global warming, etc.
I have long advocated that, but, for some reason, it won't happen. There are _some_ standards, like VESA, ATA, and various USB device classes (yay!), but everywhere else be dragons: accelerated video, Ethernet, WLAN,... all need drivers written for every card out there.
That's not a big problem as we move towards PCI Express and similar peripheral connects; they use standardized protocols that can be easily virtualized. Of course, the guest OS still may need hardware-specific drivers, but that's no different from virtualizing USB or Firewire.
In my original response, I questioned oohshiny's claim that Star Wars (or any other work) belongs to everyone. These works will pass to the public when the copyright period expires. oohshiny seems to think that it belongs to everyone right now.
Where you are wrong is simply that you misconstrue copyright as ownership. A copyright is merely a specific monopoly, granted to you by the government in exchange for publication; it is not "ownership".
I suggest that oohshiney will change his or her tune when he actually owns or creates something.
I have created a large number of copyrighted and patented works, and I enforce my rights. But I understand that neither copyrights nor patents amount to "ownership".
(Also, as a matter of public policy, I think both copyright and patent terms should be greatly reduced for everybody.)
What you get out of a true communist government is control of every aspect of your life and a subsistence living.
Whether or not to extend copyright or patent protections has nothing to do with what form of government or economic system you have. After all, patents were originally grants by a monarch, usually given out as political favors. A free market democracy can easily decide to get rid of all patents and copyrights and still remain a free market democracy.
You may have a guaranteed job and free entertainment but both will be minimal.
There is little actual evidence for that assertion as far as entertainment is concerned. In fact, historical experience tells us that a lot of great art was created long before copyright.
Money drives entertainment and when the money goes away the investors will all go back to realistate and the stock market.
Even without copyright and patents, money could continue to drive commercial entertainment, it would simply shift to different forms of entertainment and different content.
Yes, you do. Star Wars may be a lousy movie, but it's part of our culture. If you don't know it, there's a lot of stuff you can't do.
You have no right to tell artists what they should do with their work.
It isn't "their work", it is everybody's work. Content creators are simply given a temporary monopoly by the government.
What will happen is they will simply not produce anything. So either way you won't get star wars.
I think it would be great if people didn't have an incentive to create junk like Star Wars--and make no mistake about it, Star Wars is simply the product of a money making machinery with little artistic or cultural value. But given that it's out there and has become part of our culture, we all have to know about it, whether we like it or not.
I'll say that again, because it doesn't seem to be sinking in: if your platform doesn't support DRM, you won't be able to access future high-def content at all, because the people producing that content will not allow you to, as is their "right" based on copyright law.
Copyright does NOT give you the right to put technological restrictions in place; copyright is a deal whereby you publish content that eventually becomes public domain in exchange for a temporary monopoly.
In fact, technological restrictions are in conflict with copyright law: if you put DRM on your content, you have arguably not published the content, and hence shouldn't enjoy the protections of copyright law. It took an extra act of Congress to make DRM stick.
It looks like DieHard (at least in non-replicated mode) mitigates all of the above problems.
First of all, none of what you say invalidates what I was saying: the underlying techniques are well-known, so DieHard is at most an engineering effort.
Is it better than those other systems? I don't think so; DieHard just makes a different set of tradeoffs than other systems. In fact, DieHard can't even find all the problems that Valgrind finds.
Overall, I think retroactive attempts to fix C/C++'s memory management and runtime safety problems by fiddling with the memory allocator are pointless: there just is no good solution that works well for everything. C/C++ with any such hack is still going to be worse than if you just port everything to Java or C#.
(And are you sure you know what "mitigate" means?)
So the fact we have maintained a presence in orbit for years at a time has no bearing?
Indeed, it doesn't. Those orbital habitats are fully supplied from earth. Zubrin's proposal for a stay on Mars involves extensive robotic preparation. We can sort of imagine how that would work, but until it is tested and deployed simply will take decades.
Why would it take decades to take an evolutionary (not revolutionary) next step?
Because, again, the problems with Zubrin's proposal are not related to rocket science, they are related to robotics and software.
These techniques are old hats: several malloc implementations offer randomization, and ElectricFence finds pointer errors by spreading out and aligning allocations across virtual memory.
In practice, however, a decent set of test cases together with valgrind will make any of those runtime gymnastics unnecessary.
Just because unix is old doesn't mean it was not an elegant, simple design.
Some aspects of UNIX were elegant at the time; large parts of it were bad design from day one.
Sun is at least adding new and useful functionality to its 35 year old OS. [...] Hence, of the two obsolete OSs, solaris is better than linux. Pretty simple huh?
Well, see, that's the point: it's not better for me. Solaris lacks functionality that I want, and the extra functionality it has (including ZFS and DTrace) is useless to me. And Solaris has no demonstrable advantage in terms of reliability or performance (in fact, traditionally, Sun has been poor in both areas).
That makes plenty of sense. Might want to switch to windows, its WAY more popular than linux, and obviously by your reasoning that means its far better.
Windows is not an open source operating system, and using closed source software is simply too risky. If Windows and.NET were open sourced, I'd consider it.
And to call people like Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson "not particularly good programmers" is beyond insane. You clearly have absolutely no fucking clue what you are talking about. C and unix are two of the most elegant designs in the history of computing.
Yeah, we get it: UNIX is a religion to you. To most of the rest of the world, it's simply a way of getting work done.
More widely used means you value popularity contests over quality.
I certainly value Linux popularity over what Sun erroneously considers "quality".
So, why are they in the kernel then? Oh right, linux developers have not standardized, they have many redundant filesystems included in the kernel.
They are not "in the kernel"; you get a choice to configure them if you like. Why do you get that choice? Because Linux kernel developers know that the market and the users are the proper place to make such choices.
And that's really the fundamental difference between Linux developers and developers working at companies like Microsoft and Sun: developers at those big companies think that working there proves that they are smarter than the rest of the world. Sun's problem is arrogance.
No, they don't think that. Shockingly enough, they do not define their lives or their work by moronic FUD from MIT losers.
Indeed: Sun engineers are so arrogant that they wouldn't define their lives by anything anybody else says, they just keep churning out one bad idea after another.
Sun is the company that delivered crap like NFS, NIS, NeWS, SunOS, the Java type system, Java sandboxing, and Java Swing. ZFS and DTrace will likely continue that tradition.
The article in Videobusiness is correct in what can be done to revoke keys, but it's wrong in what that means.
It only takes a single compromised player to copy content, and once compromised, that player can be used in perpetuity to rip any and all disks published up to that point. There is no way to undo that.
Furthermore, if players like this get compromised every few months, we know that it's a fairly high probability event. Together with the previous observation, that means that pretty much every disc will be perfectly rippable by pirates using simple software (no need even to hack into hardware).
What this sort of nuisance DRM protects against is consumers backing up their HD-DVDs, watching them on iPods, etc. That's a shame, really. But I think, in the end, that will just mean that the formats are at great risk of simply being overtaken by on-line distribution. If people have to put up with DRM anyway, they might as well go to iTunes and other sites like that. And downloaded content at least can be backed up even if it is protected by DRM.
Look at the FIVE FUCKING FILESYSTEMS! How in hell is that the simple, don't duplicate effort unix way?
Linux developers have created and standardized on one file system: ext. All the other file systems are either there for compatibility (FAT, NTFS, HFS+), or the result of duplication of effort among commercial vendors (IBM, SGI, Reiser, Apple, Sun, etc.). Interestingly, given the choice of those supposedly enterprise-class file systems from IBM and SGI, Linux users still stick with ext.
and only a complete fucking moron would be stupid enough to pretend that linux is a good unix.
There is no such thing as a "good UNIX". UNIX is an embodiment of the "worse-is-better" philosophy. Linux embraces that unapologetically; I don't think anybody seriously claims that Linux is a good design, they just use it because it's there.
What's so pathetic about Solaris is that its designers actually are such fools that they are thinking that they are doing "the right thing". Adding DTrace and ZFS doesn't magically fix Solaris, it just adds more crap to it.
"I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft-a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less." said Thompson.
Yes, just like UNIX was a backlash against MULTICS.
Implimenting unix poorly, completely missing out on the elegance and beauty of unix, and after unix was already obsolete
UNIX was never elegant or beautiful, and its creators never were particularly good programmers or designers (just look at the V6 and V7 source code, or the design of the C language). The reason UNIX was successful was because it was simple, cheap, easy to hack, (barely) good enough to get the job done, and ran on popular hardware. That's the tradition Linux continues.
The OS where just booting a STABLE (yeah right) kernel (2.6.13 was it?) would TOTALLY TRASH YOUR DATA
Well, I have had no problem with the 2.6 releases; the distribution I use tests kernels carefully before putting them into production. Maybe you should start using a better distribution. (Your comment is ironic given how buggy and flaky Solaris has been historically; I think the last machine that "totally trashed" my data was, in fact, a Sun.)
You are seriously going to pretend linux is better than solaris because its more stable and proven?
Both Linux and Solaris are piles of shit. The difference is that Sun is busy working on making its pile ever bigger and smellier and their marketing department is trying to pretend that it smells like roses.
If I have to choose between two crappy operating systems, I prefer the one that's more widely used, has more drivers available for it, doesn't come with a marketing department behind it, has more software available for it, and that overall does as little as possible. And that happens to be Linux, until someone actually comes out with something that doesn't stink.
SharePoint is going to me Microsoft's collaboration tool of choice
Well, yes, it's Microsoft's choice, but it's apparently not the choice of users.
and not only does Linux not play with it, it doesn't have a competing offering.
There are several Sharepoint-equivalents for Linux. They don't seem to be very popular, however, which leads me to believe that they are not what users actually want. Given a choice, people seem to go for other collaboration solutions.
Zubrin posits the ability to have a 500 day outpost provided in the same mission mass as two Apollo moon missions. That my friend is NOT something requiring decades. [...] Zubrin posits the ability to have a 500 day outpost provided in the same mission mass as two Apollo moon missions. That my friend is NOT something requiring decades.
When I say "sustainable presence", I mean something like a 500 day outpost ("sustainable" compared to the hit-and-run Apollo-style missions). The technology for making that happen just doesn't exist, and even if we started on it now, it would take decades to actually test and deploy it. It's not rocket science that's the problem, it's computer hardware and software.
Solaris's codebase is derived from UNIX. But that doesn't mean that Sun's developers follow the UNIX philosophy. In fact, many of the original UNIX developers loathed the crap that came out of Berkeley and Sun.
ZFS and DTrace are miles beyond what linux has today
Yes, they are. And that's a bad thing.
not for philisophical differences, but because it's really, really tough to come up with advanced technology in your moms basement.
Good; real-world operating systems shouldn't contain "advanced technology", they should contain proven technology.
Maybe Sun should lock up their developers in their mom's basements as well, because they sure as hell don't seem to be able to manage their software development processes otherwise.
In what way were Sun NFS and NIS big open source successes? I mean, apart from the fact that NFS and NIS absolutely suck as technologies, Sun released their source long after other people had created their own, independent implementations.
Complete system probes are something completely new in the world of computing,
Yes, and that statement in itself makes them suspect. The UNIX philosophy has always been to provide minimal "good enough" solutions for clearly defined needs, not complete, all encompassing solutions to anticipated problems.
Linux' "multiple excellent file systems" are nothing special--the best of them work acceptably, but that's it.
Yes, and that is exactly what a UNIX file system should be: "nothing special". If it's any more than that, it's suspect. And that's why everybody is actually running ext3 without ACLs or extended attributes on Linux, even though there are far more advanced file systems already available.
ZFS will transform small-storage computing in a few years.
Maybe. If it does, then (and only then) will Linux incorporate a minimal set of features to provide just those aspects of ZFS that have turned out to be useful in practice. And, most likely, the actual Linux implementation of those features will end up being completely differently from the ZFS implementation, and much simpler.
As always, failing to learn anything from the vastly superior operating systems it pathetically fails to copy.
Indeed, and that's a deliberate and careful choice. It's a choice that has allowed UNIX to survive for 30 years, while one "vastly superior operating system" after another has come and gone.
Everything about linux is a half dozen not quite good enough "solutions" that are miles behind solaris's offerings.
Yes, and that is why Linux will continue to be successful while Solaris will fail.
I know its pretty standard for gnubies to not know anything besides linux, and speak of linux's greatness out of ignorance, but go read up on dtrace before spewing bullshit.
Sigh. I've been a UNIX hacker since V7. My experience tells me that morons like you are found in large numbers in every generation of computer users and OS designers, and I guess I just have to resign myself to the fact that there is nothing that can be done about it.
Linux [...] capabilities are like primitive caveman tools compared to [...]
Yes, that's the UNIX philosophy.
but to dismiss the contributions of Sun's engineers (or Microsoft's for that matter) is to ignore history and to ignore some truly innovative contributions to the field.
Before UNIX, there was a system called Multics. A big company invested lots of money in it, it had lots of really advanced features, and a lot of smart people contributed to it. It's also dead. Sun and Microsoft are making the same mistake the designers of Multics made. These people aren't "innovative", they are fools that are repeating decades-old mistakes.
Linux will provide those bits of functionality of ZFS and DTrace that users actually need, and it will do so in the incremental and minimalist way typical of traditional UNIX designs.
I don't know yet what the UNIX-style equivalent of ZFS and DTrace will be, but it's pretty clear that it will look very different from ZFS and DTrace.
By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognised as larger and more active than the Linux community -and every competing OS developer community except Microsoft's will have copied the key ideas including its organisational structure
Yeah, because Sun's "organizational structures" for open source projects have been such huge successes, right?
the core provisions in the community development license
Oh, Sun loves software licenses that lets big companies like them take advantage of open source developers to improve their proprietary products; they have stated as such publicly. Fortunately, the direction that open source licenses are going is the opposite.
and Solaris specific technologies including ZFS and Dtrace.
Linux already has tracing technologies and it has multiple excellent file systems, as well as a roadmap for ext4. Maybe ZFS and DTrace will have some small influence on their evolution, but for the most part, Linux will go its own way there.
Even in existing cars, firmly built-in electronics makes no sense: it's usually overpriced and often obsolete by the time the car ships.
What cars should provide is connectors for antennas and power (cigarette lighter, USB, and FireWire). The car might transmit some odometry and sensor information via Bluetooth, as well as support the Bluetooth hands-free and audio profiles using a built-in amplifier and speakers. Maybe it should also provide some mount points for electronics. That's it.
What Ford/Microsoft are doing is bundling and tying. I think in this case it's going to backfire. I won't buy a car with that shit preinstalled.
Not initially, but in one or two hundred years, who's to say how autonomous the colony will be.
To achieve autonomy, a Martian colony would need many millions of inhabitants (and that's a conservative estimate). Where are those people going to come from? And where is the energy, oxygen, and food to support them going to come from?
Tell you what: after someone demonstrates autonomous settlements like that in, say, Siberia or the Arctic, then we can reconsider settling Mars.
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Why worry about relevant issues to their national security like an invading mob of Muslim youths waging war on their infrastructure (and winning) when they can declassify documents about unsubstantiated crap and temporarily distract their citizens and the world from their rapidly approaching destruction?
Most of what goes by the name of "national security" is also distracting crap; "invading mobs of Muslim youths" and airplanes crashing into skyscrapers simply are not high on the list of things likely to kill you. The things people ought to worry about and that kill them and others, they like to forget about and are all too happy to be distracted from: nutrition, traffic accidents, poverty, civilian killings during war, global warming, etc.
Something like "wipe" is needed for rotational magnetic media. For flash, a simple cat /dev/zero > /dev/sd... is sufficient.
I have long advocated that, but, for some reason, it won't happen. There are _some_ standards, like VESA, ATA, and various USB device classes (yay!), but everywhere else be dragons: accelerated video, Ethernet, WLAN, ... all need drivers written for every card out there.
That's not a big problem as we move towards PCI Express and similar peripheral connects; they use standardized protocols that can be easily virtualized. Of course, the guest OS still may need hardware-specific drivers, but that's no different from virtualizing USB or Firewire.
In my original response, I questioned oohshiny's claim that Star Wars (or any other work) belongs to everyone. These works will pass to the public when the copyright period expires. oohshiny seems to think that it belongs to everyone right now.
Where you are wrong is simply that you misconstrue copyright as ownership. A copyright is merely a specific monopoly, granted to you by the government in exchange for publication; it is not "ownership".
I suggest that oohshiney will change his or her tune when he actually owns or creates something.
I have created a large number of copyrighted and patented works, and I enforce my rights. But I understand that neither copyrights nor patents amount to "ownership".
(Also, as a matter of public policy, I think both copyright and patent terms should be greatly reduced for everybody.)
What you get out of a true communist government is control of every aspect of your life and a subsistence living.
Whether or not to extend copyright or patent protections has nothing to do with what form of government or economic system you have. After all, patents were originally grants by a monarch, usually given out as political favors. A free market democracy can easily decide to get rid of all patents and copyrights and still remain a free market democracy.
You may have a guaranteed job and free entertainment but both will be minimal.
There is little actual evidence for that assertion as far as entertainment is concerned. In fact, historical experience tells us that a lot of great art was created long before copyright.
Money drives entertainment and when the money goes away the investors will all go back to realistate and the stock market.
Even without copyright and patents, money could continue to drive commercial entertainment, it would simply shift to different forms of entertainment and different content.
you don't need star wars. Really, you don't.
Yes, you do. Star Wars may be a lousy movie, but it's part of our culture. If you don't know it, there's a lot of stuff you can't do.
You have no right to tell artists what they should do with their work.
It isn't "their work", it is everybody's work. Content creators are simply given a temporary monopoly by the government.
What will happen is they will simply not produce anything. So either way you won't get star wars.
I think it would be great if people didn't have an incentive to create junk like Star Wars--and make no mistake about it, Star Wars is simply the product of a money making machinery with little artistic or cultural value. But given that it's out there and has become part of our culture, we all have to know about it, whether we like it or not.
I'll say that again, because it doesn't seem to be sinking in: if your platform doesn't support DRM, you won't be able to access future high-def content at all, because the people producing that content will not allow you to, as is their "right" based on copyright law.
Copyright does NOT give you the right to put technological restrictions in place; copyright is a deal whereby you publish content that eventually becomes public domain in exchange for a temporary monopoly.
In fact, technological restrictions are in conflict with copyright law: if you put DRM on your content, you have arguably not published the content, and hence shouldn't enjoy the protections of copyright law. It took an extra act of Congress to make DRM stick.
It looks like DieHard (at least in non-replicated mode) mitigates all of the above problems.
First of all, none of what you say invalidates what I was saying: the underlying techniques are well-known, so DieHard is at most an engineering effort.
Is it better than those other systems? I don't think so; DieHard just makes a different set of tradeoffs than other systems. In fact, DieHard can't even find all the problems that Valgrind finds.
Overall, I think retroactive attempts to fix C/C++'s memory management and runtime safety problems by fiddling with the memory allocator are pointless: there just is no good solution that works well for everything. C/C++ with any such hack is still going to be worse than if you just port everything to Java or C#.
(And are you sure you know what "mitigate" means?)
So the fact we have maintained a presence in orbit for years at a time has no bearing?
Indeed, it doesn't. Those orbital habitats are fully supplied from earth. Zubrin's proposal for a stay on Mars involves extensive robotic preparation. We can sort of imagine how that would work, but until it is tested and deployed simply will take decades.
Why would it take decades to take an evolutionary (not revolutionary) next step?
Because, again, the problems with Zubrin's proposal are not related to rocket science, they are related to robotics and software.
These techniques are old hats: several malloc implementations offer randomization, and ElectricFence finds pointer errors by spreading out and aligning allocations across virtual memory.
In practice, however, a decent set of test cases together with valgrind will make any of those runtime gymnastics unnecessary.
Just because unix is old doesn't mean it was not an elegant, simple design.
.NET were open sourced, I'd consider it.
Some aspects of UNIX were elegant at the time; large parts of it were bad design from day one.
Sun is at least adding new and useful functionality to its 35 year old OS. [...] Hence, of the two obsolete OSs, solaris is better than linux. Pretty simple huh?
Well, see, that's the point: it's not better for me. Solaris lacks functionality that I want, and the extra functionality it has (including ZFS and DTrace) is useless to me. And Solaris has no demonstrable advantage in terms of reliability or performance (in fact, traditionally, Sun has been poor in both areas).
That makes plenty of sense. Might want to switch to windows, its WAY more popular than linux, and obviously by your reasoning that means its far better.
Windows is not an open source operating system, and using closed source software is simply too risky. If Windows and
And to call people like Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson "not particularly good programmers" is beyond insane. You clearly have absolutely no fucking clue what you are talking about. C and unix are two of the most elegant designs in the history of computing.
Yeah, we get it: UNIX is a religion to you. To most of the rest of the world, it's simply a way of getting work done.
More widely used means you value popularity contests over quality.
I certainly value Linux popularity over what Sun erroneously considers "quality".
So, why are they in the kernel then? Oh right, linux developers have not standardized, they have many redundant filesystems included in the kernel.
They are not "in the kernel"; you get a choice to configure them if you like. Why do you get that choice? Because Linux kernel developers know that the market and the users are the proper place to make such choices.
And that's really the fundamental difference between Linux developers and developers working at companies like Microsoft and Sun: developers at those big companies think that working there proves that they are smarter than the rest of the world. Sun's problem is arrogance.
No, they don't think that. Shockingly enough, they do not define their lives or their work by moronic FUD from MIT losers.
Indeed: Sun engineers are so arrogant that they wouldn't define their lives by anything anybody else says, they just keep churning out one bad idea after another.
Sun is the company that delivered crap like NFS, NIS, NeWS, SunOS, the Java type system, Java sandboxing, and Java Swing. ZFS and DTrace will likely continue that tradition.
The article in Videobusiness is correct in what can be done to revoke keys, but it's wrong in what that means.
It only takes a single compromised player to copy content, and once compromised, that player can be used in perpetuity to rip any and all disks published up to that point. There is no way to undo that.
Furthermore, if players like this get compromised every few months, we know that it's a fairly high probability event. Together with the previous observation, that means that pretty much every disc will be perfectly rippable by pirates using simple software (no need even to hack into hardware).
What this sort of nuisance DRM protects against is consumers backing up their HD-DVDs, watching them on iPods, etc. That's a shame, really. But I think, in the end, that will just mean that the formats are at great risk of simply being overtaken by on-line distribution. If people have to put up with DRM anyway, they might as well go to iTunes and other sites like that. And downloaded content at least can be backed up even if it is protected by DRM.
Look at the FIVE FUCKING FILESYSTEMS! How in hell is that the simple, don't duplicate effort unix way?
Linux developers have created and standardized on one file system: ext. All the other file systems are either there for compatibility (FAT, NTFS, HFS+), or the result of duplication of effort among commercial vendors (IBM, SGI, Reiser, Apple, Sun, etc.). Interestingly, given the choice of those supposedly enterprise-class file systems from IBM and SGI, Linux users still stick with ext.
and only a complete fucking moron would be stupid enough to pretend that linux is a good unix.
There is no such thing as a "good UNIX". UNIX is an embodiment of the "worse-is-better" philosophy. Linux embraces that unapologetically; I don't think anybody seriously claims that Linux is a good design, they just use it because it's there.
What's so pathetic about Solaris is that its designers actually are such fools that they are thinking that they are doing "the right thing". Adding DTrace and ZFS doesn't magically fix Solaris, it just adds more crap to it.
"I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft-a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less." said Thompson.
Yes, just like UNIX was a backlash against MULTICS.
Implimenting unix poorly, completely missing out on the elegance and beauty of unix, and after unix was already obsolete
UNIX was never elegant or beautiful, and its creators never were particularly good programmers or designers (just look at the V6 and V7 source code, or the design of the C language). The reason UNIX was successful was because it was simple, cheap, easy to hack, (barely) good enough to get the job done, and ran on popular hardware. That's the tradition Linux continues.
The OS where just booting a STABLE (yeah right) kernel (2.6.13 was it?) would TOTALLY TRASH YOUR DATA
Well, I have had no problem with the 2.6 releases; the distribution I use tests kernels carefully before putting them into production. Maybe you should start using a better distribution. (Your comment is ironic given how buggy and flaky Solaris has been historically; I think the last machine that "totally trashed" my data was, in fact, a Sun.)
You are seriously going to pretend linux is better than solaris because its more stable and proven?
Both Linux and Solaris are piles of shit. The difference is that Sun is busy working on making its pile ever bigger and smellier and their marketing department is trying to pretend that it smells like roses.
If I have to choose between two crappy operating systems, I prefer the one that's more widely used, has more drivers available for it, doesn't come with a marketing department behind it, has more software available for it, and that overall does as little as possible. And that happens to be Linux, until someone actually comes out with something that doesn't stink.
SharePoint is going to me Microsoft's collaboration tool of choice
Well, yes, it's Microsoft's choice, but it's apparently not the choice of users.
and not only does Linux not play with it, it doesn't have a competing offering.
There are several Sharepoint-equivalents for Linux. They don't seem to be very popular, however, which leads me to believe that they are not what users actually want. Given a choice, people seem to go for other collaboration solutions.
Zubrin posits the ability to have a 500 day outpost provided in the same mission mass as two Apollo moon missions. That my friend is NOT something requiring decades. [...] Zubrin posits the ability to have a 500 day outpost provided in the same mission mass as two Apollo moon missions. That my friend is NOT something requiring decades.
When I say "sustainable presence", I mean something like a 500 day outpost ("sustainable" compared to the hit-and-run Apollo-style missions). The technology for making that happen just doesn't exist, and even if we started on it now, it would take decades to actually test and deploy it. It's not rocket science that's the problem, it's computer hardware and software.
Solaris is UNIX , via SVR4.
Solaris's codebase is derived from UNIX. But that doesn't mean that Sun's developers follow the UNIX philosophy. In fact, many of the original UNIX developers loathed the crap that came out of Berkeley and Sun.
ZFS and DTrace are miles beyond what linux has today
Yes, they are. And that's a bad thing.
not for philisophical differences, but because it's really, really tough to come up with advanced technology in your moms basement.
Good; real-world operating systems shouldn't contain "advanced technology", they should contain proven technology.
Maybe Sun should lock up their developers in their mom's basements as well, because they sure as hell don't seem to be able to manage their software development processes otherwise.
Yep. Ever hear of NFS? NIS?
In what way were Sun NFS and NIS big open source successes? I mean, apart from the fact that NFS and NIS absolutely suck as technologies, Sun released their source long after other people had created their own, independent implementations.
Complete system probes are something completely new in the world of computing,
Yes, and that statement in itself makes them suspect. The UNIX philosophy has always been to provide minimal "good enough" solutions for clearly defined needs, not complete, all encompassing solutions to anticipated problems.
Linux' "multiple excellent file systems" are nothing special--the best of them work acceptably, but that's it.
Yes, and that is exactly what a UNIX file system should be: "nothing special". If it's any more than that, it's suspect. And that's why everybody is actually running ext3 without ACLs or extended attributes on Linux, even though there are far more advanced file systems already available.
ZFS will transform small-storage computing in a few years.
Maybe. If it does, then (and only then) will Linux incorporate a minimal set of features to provide just those aspects of ZFS that have turned out to be useful in practice. And, most likely, the actual Linux implementation of those features will end up being completely differently from the ZFS implementation, and much simpler.
As always, failing to learn anything from the vastly superior operating systems it pathetically fails to copy.
Indeed, and that's a deliberate and careful choice. It's a choice that has allowed UNIX to survive for 30 years, while one "vastly superior operating system" after another has come and gone.
Everything about linux is a half dozen not quite good enough "solutions" that are miles behind solaris's offerings.
Yes, and that is why Linux will continue to be successful while Solaris will fail.
I know its pretty standard for gnubies to not know anything besides linux, and speak of linux's greatness out of ignorance, but go read up on dtrace before spewing bullshit.
Sigh. I've been a UNIX hacker since V7. My experience tells me that morons like you are found in large numbers in every generation of computer users and OS designers, and I guess I just have to resign myself to the fact that there is nothing that can be done about it.
Linux [...] capabilities are like primitive caveman tools compared to [...]
Yes, that's the UNIX philosophy.
but to dismiss the contributions of Sun's engineers (or Microsoft's for that matter) is to ignore history and to ignore some truly innovative contributions to the field.
Before UNIX, there was a system called Multics. A big company invested lots of money in it, it had lots of really advanced features, and a lot of smart people contributed to it. It's also dead. Sun and Microsoft are making the same mistake the designers of Multics made. These people aren't "innovative", they are fools that are repeating decades-old mistakes.
Linux will provide those bits of functionality of ZFS and DTrace that users actually need, and it will do so in the incremental and minimalist way typical of traditional UNIX designs.
I don't know yet what the UNIX-style equivalent of ZFS and DTrace will be, but it's pretty clear that it will look very different from ZFS and DTrace.
By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognised as larger and more active than the Linux community -and every competing OS developer community except Microsoft's will have copied the key ideas including its organisational structure
Yeah, because Sun's "organizational structures" for open source projects have been such huge successes, right?
the core provisions in the community development license
Oh, Sun loves software licenses that lets big companies like them take advantage of open source developers to improve their proprietary products; they have stated as such publicly. Fortunately, the direction that open source licenses are going is the opposite.
and Solaris specific technologies including ZFS and Dtrace.
Linux already has tracing technologies and it has multiple excellent file systems, as well as a roadmap for ext4. Maybe ZFS and DTrace will have some small influence on their evolution, but for the most part, Linux will go its own way there.
My prediction: OpenSolaris is going to be a dud.
Even in existing cars, firmly built-in electronics makes no sense: it's usually overpriced and often obsolete by the time the car ships.
What cars should provide is connectors for antennas and power (cigarette lighter, USB, and FireWire). The car might transmit some odometry and sensor information via Bluetooth, as well as support the Bluetooth hands-free and audio profiles using a built-in amplifier and speakers. Maybe it should also provide some mount points for electronics. That's it.
What Ford/Microsoft are doing is bundling and tying. I think in this case it's going to backfire. I won't buy a car with that shit preinstalled.
Not initially, but in one or two hundred years, who's to say how autonomous the colony will be.
To achieve autonomy, a Martian colony would need many millions of inhabitants (and that's a conservative estimate). Where are those people going to come from? And where is the energy, oxygen, and food to support them going to come from?
Tell you what: after someone demonstrates autonomous settlements like that in, say, Siberia or the Arctic, then we can reconsider settling Mars.