Yes, in the 486 era, the BSD kernel was more mature than Linux; it had been hacked on for so many years. It had the best scheduler around and probably better drivers and some other parts were better too.
But that was then, and this is now. Over the last few years, Linux likely has had more interactive usage and more man hours invested in it than BSD over its entire history. I think if you want to claim that BSD is still better than Linux, you need to provide a bit more compelling evidence than you have. Hint: these things can actually be measured and quantified.
I can now run Apache on a phone that's more expensive than my desktop system, and void my warranty and likely have it bricked on the next sync.
Folks, if you want to have iPhone-like features with a programmable device, invest your time and effort into helping with one of the actually open phone platforms, don't waste it on trying to battle with Apple's DRM. Apple doesn't want you to run apps on the iPhone, period.
Of course, recompiling Apache requires so much less smarts than actually creating a nice phone app.
Come on, get real! UNIX is "The UNIX Time Sharing System"; it has traditionally been used on machines with dozens or hundreds of users doing often compute and I/O-intensive things, with mail and news delivery going on in the background, on machines with a fraction of the power of modern desktop PCs. Much of the interactive 3D stuff you see around you started on UNIX workstations. And even the earliest UNIX machines had time slices of 1/60th of a second, and it's gotten faster since.
(I just got another Mac spinning beach ball for about a minute while typing this; jobs running: Firefox and iTunes. And the Firefox window refuses to be dragged while Firefox is doing Network I/O on OS X. So much for interactive responsiveness of OS X.)
What the problem is for sure, I don't know, but I'd certainly like to see it fixed.
I do: OS X runs with backing store by default. That is, OS X uses a boatload of memory in the server to store all the bits making up your windows, and the server uses those bits to give you the appearance of responsiveness even when the application is not responding or poorly written.
X11 has had the same feature for 20 years (occasionally, I have enabled it), it just deliberately left it off by default, hoping that application developers would fix up their apps.
As a user of all 3 (and a few more), I must disagree. EVERY operating system has it's little pauses like you describe, but Linux in particular drags the whole time, just in small incremements.
As a user of all three operating systems (and a few more), I have to say, you're wrong. OS X, in particular, doesn't just have "little pauses", it has annoying fainting spells during which it doesn't respond, lasting from seconds to minutes. Of course, it looks cool doing so: the windows still look alright, and you get a colorful beach ball to entertain you (sometimes).
Linux is where it's at for programming enthusiasts. It would sure be nice to be able to use it for more than that though:).
The X11 desktop developers have finally given in and desktops like Beryl now effectively have backing store on by default, because it's clear that application programmers aren't going to clean up their act, that X11 will have to put up with shitty software ported from Windows and OS X for years to come, and because it's needed for visual effects anyway.
As I was saying, it follows from the high building activity in the US; there are 1-2 million new residential homes being built every year, in addition to rental units and dorms.
You can check the actual numbers on the web. I think there are about 120 million housing units in the US, and their average age is somewhat less than 30 years (the median is going to be even lower).
His point is that the kernels are optimized for servers. That is, focus on throughput, performance, but not latency or responsiveness
As if the market cares. OS X will start spinning its beach ball every now and then and simply not talk to the user for seconds, sometimes minutes, for no apparent reason. Windows has similar blackouts.
Linux interactive responsiveness can perhaps be increased further, but it already beats Windows and Macintosh hands down.
I found that rather funny. Blaming Microsoft for your own lack of creativity and ingenuity.
You got it backwards. Microsoft's m. o. is to identify something innovative in the wild. They may try to buy it cheap. If they can't, they crush it. And a few years later, they copy it and incorporate it into their own systems.
I can't think of a single major innovation that is shipping in a Microsoft product: it's all been ripped off.
Besides, Steve Jobs would very much disagree.
No doubt he would, given that Jobs himself is shipping a 20 year old system.
If you can get a full computer for $100, you can probably get a 16 or 32 core computer for around $1000. So, no, I don't think this is going to stop Moore's law.
The US lags because we set up our telcom infrastructure the first, and thus have the most primitive last-mile connections.
DSL runs fine over old copper; it's designed to. Furthermore, with the US building boom over several decades, most Americans probably have fairly new infrastructure anyway.
Throw in some wide distances between communities and you have the situation we have today.
I used to get Internet access using a parabolic. It was cheap, fast, and simple. Unfortunately, a big phone company bought the provider and killed the technology--another victim of economics, not technology.
Krugman's a fruit
And you're a nut; you make the perfect trail mix together. So what?
Call it schadenfreude, but I'm going to laugh my ass off if this grand noble effort just results in a slew of new ID thieves and scammers in Africa, a Muslim backlash against internet immorality,
So, in different words, there are going to be some people that are going to be emulating US con-men and US religious fundamentalists. So what?
Throwing laptops at kids in shithole countries may sound like a great idea, but that's making a LOT of assumptions (that they'll only use them for good, that the officials in their countries will actually distribute them rather than sell them, etc.).
I suspect that, on average, laptops in what you call "shithole countries" are going to be used a lot more productively than in developed nations; thanks to TV and the web, people around the world have seen how the rich countries live, they want their share, and many of them are going to work hard to get it.
More likely it's because AT&T doesn't want anyone to port VOIP applications (e.g. Skype, Vonage) to the iPhone.
I have VoIP software on my AT&T phone and on my AT&T-connected laptop, so that's clearly not the reason. It also doesn't make much sense given the pricing of voice vs. data: you get better and cheaper calling with a voice plan than with a data plan. Finally, the iPhone data plan is, effectively, more expensive than the other AT&T data plans already.
I don't think that Symbian managed it in version 8 and 9 to build in a ground up security, because the SDK is huge with thousands of classes.
OK, "from the ground up" is probably overstating it, but they are making an effort.
First, Symbian applications do need to get permission in order to get access to private data, phone services, and Internet services. If something equivalent were part of iPhone, it would be a lot less likely that a buffer overflow in Safari could be used to send SMSs.
Second, Java on Symbian requires user permissions for specific capabilities and protects against buffer overflows.
So, overall, while both platforms have problems, I think you're quite a bit better off running a web browser or a Java (MIDP) application on Symbian than you're running a Cocoa application on iPhone. And that's presumably why the iPhone isn't extensible in the first place.
I think the best long-term strategy is to run Java/MIDP on Linux, since Java/MIDP probably has the best security model among the widely-used phone application languages, and Linux has the best security and sandboxing facilities among the widely-used phone platforms. Motorola is moving in that direction, and I expect other phone manufacturers to follow; Nokia has been taking steps in that direction, too.
(And I'm saying that even though I don't particularly like Java.)
Objective C was arguably the technically most superior language for applications development.
That's not even arguable. Like C and C++, Objective-C was a big step backwards compared to the state of the art in programming languages and application development languages in the 1980's. Java isn't a lot better, but at least it has runtime safety.
It was (is!) cleaner and more object-oriented than C++.
My toilet is cleaner and more object-oriented than C++.
You and I know little about the iPhone. It may indeed be the case that running a JVM on it for all apps is a poor choice.
First, I run lots of Java apps on my phone every day, including web browsers, and it works just fine. Second, you don't have to run a JVM in order to run Java; Apple could pre-compile the built-in apps with gcj or another compiler.
No, the reason Apple doesn't want Java on the iPhone is because they want to keep the platform different from other platforms; they don't want it to be just another smartphone.
Damn, mod parent down. Mac OS X is a UNIX-based system, and has exactly those capabilities.
You don't know what you're talking about. Neither UNIX nor OS X have capabilities-based security by default. The term "capabilities-based UNIX security" refers to an optional security feature available on some versions of UNIX.
Explain the intrinsic unsafeness of Objective-C, as opposed to C or C++,
All C-based languages are intrinsically unsafe, and that includes C and C++. If you use one of those languages and you don't have the development processes in place to make sure that you're producing bullet-proof applications (Apple evidently doesn't), people have a right to blame you and hold your feet to the fire over it.
as opposed to Java, and watch us fall asleep while waiting for the Conway's Life game embedded on your home page to load up.
While Java on desktops sucks, there are thousands of mobile Java apps, including several web browsers.
Using Java as the programming language for the iPhone would have made sense from every technical angle. In particular, it would have protected users against buffer overflows in application software, it would have permitted third party programming, and it would have made lots of third party apps available.
Of course, that's the reason Apple didn't do it: they want to control the platform, and they want the platform to be incompatible with the rest of the world.
Simple: EU manufacturers cannot possibly compete with China and other Far East manufacturers on labor costs.
What EU manufacturers? There are no EU manufacturers of these kinds of devices. Even Leica, Siemens, and Phillips are having their devices built in China.
Why didn't Apple find this vulnerability themselves?
In fact, why didn't Apple build their iPhone on top of systems that are intrinsically robust against buffer overflow vulnerabilities, instead of keeping to push and perpetuate intrinsically unsafe technologies like Objective C?
Europeans seem to be sheep when it comes to taxes and other government programs. You'd think that a continent that lived through fascism would be a little more distrustful of their governments, but they seem hell-bent on giving up their money and their power to their governments again. I think it must be genetic: most of the rebellious people left for other shores.
Systems like Symbian have mobile security built in from the ground up; for example, the system asks before any new application can access phone data or the network (similar to capabilities-based UNIX security).
Evidently (and, I suppose, not surprisingly), an OS X-based phone lacks these safeguard. I guess that's the real reason Apple has been refusing to permit third party phone apps on the iPhone, even though they don't cause problems on other phones: the iPhone software architecture just doesn't seem designed for it.
If the GPL v3 objections are real and widespread, then the GPL v2 forks will survive.
If the GPL v2 objections are unfounded or astroturfing, then the GPL v2 forks will die.
I think the grumbling will blow over; I don't see any serious problems with the GPL v3. In fact, the fact that GPL v3 is compatible with more open source licenses seems like a big advantage.
The question is not why still cameras are now considered to be the same as video cameras, the real question is why they are taxing video cameras to begin with!
And the best solution to this "horrible" inconsistency is to abolish the tax on video cameras, not to arbitrarily extend it to other devices.
And... as I pointed out in my first response to you: You're quoting the people who have a vested monetary interest in perpetuating the lie.
I'm not "quoting", I'm giving you numbers. Are you saying the NSF is lying about the percentage of foreign graduate students? Are you saying the NSF is lying about the drop in computer science graduate students?
Where are YOUR numbers?
Wrong. Foreigners come to study here for two reasons: 1) because they want to, or 2) because there are systems which profit off of taxpayer dollars by hyping the importation of foreign students.
Of course, both universities and companies profit from taxpayer dollars; that's the whole point of having government programs: to provide profit-based incentives for companies to do things that are good for the nation.
And the goal of that funding is to keep the US internationally competitive and to benefit the US economy as a whole; it is not to ensure high salaries or full employment for special interests like you--and such attempts are futile anyway.
If you can't compete against Indian and Chinese programmers on both salary and skill, you need to find a different kind of job, no matter what H1B policy the US government adopts. That's just plain and simple economic reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, in the 486 era, the BSD kernel was more mature than Linux; it had been hacked on for so many years. It had the best scheduler around and probably better drivers and some other parts were better too.
But that was then, and this is now. Over the last few years, Linux likely has had more interactive usage and more man hours invested in it than BSD over its entire history. I think if you want to claim that BSD is still better than Linux, you need to provide a bit more compelling evidence than you have. Hint: these things can actually be measured and quantified.
Too bad Apple didn't come up with the rather elegant and intuitive solution of the iRiver Clix:
d ex.aspx
http://www.iriveramerica.com/prod/ultra/clix/
http://www.iriveramerica.com/prod/s_series/s10/in
I can now run Apache on a phone that's more expensive than my desktop system, and void my warranty and likely have it bricked on the next sync.
Folks, if you want to have iPhone-like features with a programmable device, invest your time and effort into helping with one of the actually open phone platforms, don't waste it on trying to battle with Apple's DRM. Apple doesn't want you to run apps on the iPhone, period.
Of course, recompiling Apache requires so much less smarts than actually creating a nice phone app.
That's why I gave 16-32 cores for a machine 10x as expensive, making a tradeoff between market size and cheap addition of cores. Get it?
Come on, get real! UNIX is "The UNIX Time Sharing System"; it has traditionally been used on machines with dozens or hundreds of users doing often compute and I/O-intensive things, with mail and news delivery going on in the background, on machines with a fraction of the power of modern desktop PCs. Much of the interactive 3D stuff you see around you started on UNIX workstations. And even the earliest UNIX machines had time slices of 1/60th of a second, and it's gotten faster since.
(I just got another Mac spinning beach ball for about a minute while typing this; jobs running: Firefox and iTunes. And the Firefox window refuses to be dragged while Firefox is doing Network I/O on OS X. So much for interactive responsiveness of OS X.)
What the problem is for sure, I don't know, but I'd certainly like to see it fixed.
:).
I do: OS X runs with backing store by default. That is, OS X uses a boatload of memory in the server to store all the bits making up your windows, and the server uses those bits to give you the appearance of responsiveness even when the application is not responding or poorly written.
X11 has had the same feature for 20 years (occasionally, I have enabled it), it just deliberately left it off by default, hoping that application developers would fix up their apps.
As a user of all 3 (and a few more), I must disagree. EVERY operating system has it's little pauses like you describe, but Linux in particular drags the whole time, just in small incremements.
As a user of all three operating systems (and a few more), I have to say, you're wrong. OS X, in particular, doesn't just have "little pauses", it has annoying fainting spells during which it doesn't respond, lasting from seconds to minutes. Of course, it looks cool doing so: the windows still look alright, and you get a colorful beach ball to entertain you (sometimes).
Linux is where it's at for programming enthusiasts. It would sure be nice to be able to use it for more than that though
The X11 desktop developers have finally given in and desktops like Beryl now effectively have backing store on by default, because it's clear that application programmers aren't going to clean up their act, that X11 will have to put up with shitty software ported from Windows and OS X for years to come, and because it's needed for visual effects anyway.
Hoooo boy, on what basis do you make this claim?
As I was saying, it follows from the high building activity in the US; there are 1-2 million new residential homes being built every year, in addition to rental units and dorms.
You can check the actual numbers on the web. I think there are about 120 million housing units in the US, and their average age is somewhat less than 30 years (the median is going to be even lower).
His point is that the kernels are optimized for servers. That is, focus on throughput, performance, but not latency or responsiveness
As if the market cares. OS X will start spinning its beach ball every now and then and simply not talk to the user for seconds, sometimes minutes, for no apparent reason. Windows has similar blackouts.
Linux interactive responsiveness can perhaps be increased further, but it already beats Windows and Macintosh hands down.
I found that rather funny. Blaming Microsoft for your own lack of creativity and ingenuity.
You got it backwards. Microsoft's m. o. is to identify something innovative in the wild. They may try to buy it cheap. If they can't, they crush it. And a few years later, they copy it and incorporate it into their own systems.
I can't think of a single major innovation that is shipping in a Microsoft product: it's all been ripped off.
Besides, Steve Jobs would very much disagree.
No doubt he would, given that Jobs himself is shipping a 20 year old system.
If you can get a full computer for $100, you can probably get a 16 or 32 core computer for around $1000. So, no, I don't think this is going to stop Moore's law.
Furthermore, there's always the gamers...
The US lags because we set up our telcom infrastructure the first, and thus have the most primitive last-mile connections.
DSL runs fine over old copper; it's designed to. Furthermore, with the US building boom over several decades, most Americans probably have fairly new infrastructure anyway.
Throw in some wide distances between communities and you have the situation we have today.
I used to get Internet access using a parabolic. It was cheap, fast, and simple. Unfortunately, a big phone company bought the provider and killed the technology--another victim of economics, not technology.
Krugman's a fruit
And you're a nut; you make the perfect trail mix together. So what?
Call it schadenfreude, but I'm going to laugh my ass off if this grand noble effort just results in a slew of new ID thieves and scammers in Africa, a Muslim backlash against internet immorality,
So, in different words, there are going to be some people that are going to be emulating US con-men and US religious fundamentalists. So what?
Throwing laptops at kids in shithole countries may sound like a great idea, but that's making a LOT of assumptions (that they'll only use them for good, that the officials in their countries will actually distribute them rather than sell them, etc.).
I suspect that, on average, laptops in what you call "shithole countries" are going to be used a lot more productively than in developed nations; thanks to TV and the web, people around the world have seen how the rich countries live, they want their share, and many of them are going to work hard to get it.
More likely it's because AT&T doesn't want anyone to port VOIP applications (e.g. Skype, Vonage) to the iPhone.
I have VoIP software on my AT&T phone and on my AT&T-connected laptop, so that's clearly not the reason. It also doesn't make much sense given the pricing of voice vs. data: you get better and cheaper calling with a voice plan than with a data plan. Finally, the iPhone data plan is, effectively, more expensive than the other AT&T data plans already.
I don't think that Symbian managed it in version 8 and 9 to build in a ground up security, because the SDK is huge with thousands of classes.
OK, "from the ground up" is probably overstating it, but they are making an effort.
First, Symbian applications do need to get permission in order to get access to private data, phone services, and Internet services. If something equivalent were part of iPhone, it would be a lot less likely that a buffer overflow in Safari could be used to send SMSs.
Second, Java on Symbian requires user permissions for specific capabilities and protects against buffer overflows.
So, overall, while both platforms have problems, I think you're quite a bit better off running a web browser or a Java (MIDP) application on Symbian than you're running a Cocoa application on iPhone. And that's presumably why the iPhone isn't extensible in the first place.
I think the best long-term strategy is to run Java/MIDP on Linux, since Java/MIDP probably has the best security model among the widely-used phone application languages, and Linux has the best security and sandboxing facilities among the widely-used phone platforms. Motorola is moving in that direction, and I expect other phone manufacturers to follow; Nokia has been taking steps in that direction, too.
(And I'm saying that even though I don't particularly like Java.)
Objective C was arguably the technically most superior language for applications development.
That's not even arguable. Like C and C++, Objective-C was a big step backwards compared to the state of the art in programming languages and application development languages in the 1980's. Java isn't a lot better, but at least it has runtime safety.
It was (is!) cleaner and more object-oriented than C++.
My toilet is cleaner and more object-oriented than C++.
You and I know little about the iPhone. It may indeed be the case that running a JVM on it for all apps is a poor choice.
First, I run lots of Java apps on my phone every day, including web browsers, and it works just fine. Second, you don't have to run a JVM in order to run Java; Apple could pre-compile the built-in apps with gcj or another compiler.
No, the reason Apple doesn't want Java on the iPhone is because they want to keep the platform different from other platforms; they don't want it to be just another smartphone.
Damn, mod parent down. Mac OS X is a UNIX-based system, and has exactly those capabilities.
You don't know what you're talking about. Neither UNIX nor OS X have capabilities-based security by default. The term "capabilities-based UNIX security" refers to an optional security feature available on some versions of UNIX.
Explain the intrinsic unsafeness of Objective-C, as opposed to C or C++,
All C-based languages are intrinsically unsafe, and that includes C and C++. If you use one of those languages and you don't have the development processes in place to make sure that you're producing bullet-proof applications (Apple evidently doesn't), people have a right to blame you and hold your feet to the fire over it.
as opposed to Java, and watch us fall asleep while waiting for the Conway's Life game embedded on your home page to load up.
While Java on desktops sucks, there are thousands of mobile Java apps, including several web browsers.
Using Java as the programming language for the iPhone would have made sense from every technical angle. In particular, it would have protected users against buffer overflows in application software, it would have permitted third party programming, and it would have made lots of third party apps available.
Of course, that's the reason Apple didn't do it: they want to control the platform, and they want the platform to be incompatible with the rest of the world.
Simple: EU manufacturers cannot possibly compete with China and other Far East manufacturers on labor costs.
What EU manufacturers? There are no EU manufacturers of these kinds of devices. Even Leica, Siemens, and Phillips are having their devices built in China.
Why didn't Apple find this vulnerability themselves?
In fact, why didn't Apple build their iPhone on top of systems that are intrinsically robust against buffer overflow vulnerabilities, instead of keeping to push and perpetuate intrinsically unsafe technologies like Objective C?
Europeans seem to be sheep when it comes to taxes and other government programs. You'd think that a continent that lived through fascism would be a little more distrustful of their governments, but they seem hell-bent on giving up their money and their power to their governments again. I think it must be genetic: most of the rebellious people left for other shores.
Systems like Symbian have mobile security built in from the ground up; for example, the system asks before any new application can access phone data or the network (similar to capabilities-based UNIX security).
Evidently (and, I suppose, not surprisingly), an OS X-based phone lacks these safeguard. I guess that's the real reason Apple has been refusing to permit third party phone apps on the iPhone, even though they don't cause problems on other phones: the iPhone software architecture just doesn't seem designed for it.
Obviously, the squirrels were behaving in a suspicious manner.
If the GPL v3 objections are real and widespread, then the GPL v2 forks will survive.
If the GPL v2 objections are unfounded or astroturfing, then the GPL v2 forks will die.
I think the grumbling will blow over; I don't see any serious problems with the GPL v3. In fact, the fact that GPL v3 is compatible with more open source licenses seems like a big advantage.
The question is not why still cameras are now considered to be the same as video cameras, the real question is why they are taxing video cameras to begin with!
And the best solution to this "horrible" inconsistency is to abolish the tax on video cameras, not to arbitrarily extend it to other devices.
And... as I pointed out in my first response to you: You're quoting the people who have a vested monetary interest in perpetuating the lie.
I'm not "quoting", I'm giving you numbers. Are you saying the NSF is lying about the percentage of foreign graduate students? Are you saying the NSF is lying about the drop in computer science graduate students?
Where are YOUR numbers?
Wrong. Foreigners come to study here for two reasons: 1) because they want to, or 2) because there are systems which profit off of taxpayer dollars by hyping the importation of foreign students.
Of course, both universities and companies profit from taxpayer dollars; that's the whole point of having government programs: to provide profit-based incentives for companies to do things that are good for the nation.
And the goal of that funding is to keep the US internationally competitive and to benefit the US economy as a whole; it is not to ensure high salaries or full employment for special interests like you--and such attempts are futile anyway.
If you can't compete against Indian and Chinese programmers on both salary and skill, you need to find a different kind of job, no matter what H1B policy the US government adopts. That's just plain and simple economic reality.