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Unix Operating Systems Software

USENIX Reports 69

Posted by michael from the apropos-BSD dept.
bruce writes: "O'Reilly has just put up a page with conference reports from USENIX. The BSD BoF session sounds like it was pretty interesting, lots of info there." Yes, "*BSD is Dying" posts are up 75%, thank you very much.
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USENIX Reports

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  • Re:Hi, you're full of shit (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    That's pretty comical. Uninformed, but comical. Windows developers invest time in the Windows platform because it actually makes them money. See, you can actually make a profit creating Windows software, as opposed to Linux software. That's their justification.

    Oh, and there you go telling fibs again. Windows developers are the ones who go around belittling everyone? Dude, most Windows developers don't even give a rat's ass about Linux developers to belittle them. Just because they're ignoring your latest whine of the hour doesn't mean they're belittling you. They just have better things to do than listen to the paranoid rants of the mental lightweights who account for most of Linux's "voice." Now, if you're not aware of Linux advocates propensity to bitch about everything and everyone not associated with Linux or GPL, you're living in a dreamland. Either that or just trying to fool people.

    Ahh, and about Perens -- are you just guessing, or telling more lies for the readers? Perens said that the BSD guys were dupes because they had the nerve to release code under the BSD License, thereby giving anybody the freedom (remember that word, Stallman fanboys?) to do what they want with it, and not care who uses it. So again you're wrong, Perens's statement had nothing to do with making deals with Microsoft, but hey, nice try.

  • Re:Hi, you're full of shit (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    > Just because they're ignoring your latest whine of the hour doesn't mean they're belittling you

    I'm a windows developer, not a linux developer (in the semi-embedded space). I've noticed atrocious cognitive dissonance effects among embedded windoes developers when presented with (a) linux or (b) the even better (for embedded systems) QNX.

    It is possible to make money on linux, particularly in the embedded space. The people who can't make money on linux tend to be the pure-software-only houses... And good riddence to bad shovelware, I say.

  • Re:anti-bsd posts up 75% on slashdot!!!!! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yep, there's an increase of anti-bsd stuff, just as MS swing their anti-GPL campaign into overdrive - and a key part of their strategy is probably to attempt a "divide-and-conquer" approach between the BSD and GPL camps. I'd say that the sudden increase in overblown trolls is a direct result of this. Worryingly, there's also a group of very earnest .NET fans, preaching the MS party line as if they'd been to a scientologist "improvement" course or something, but for MS stufff...

  • Then by the same logic.... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    remember that BSD users are still rabid and
    intolerant. In fact most power *users* of any following are. It's part of the reason that there are 3 *BSDs.

    Given there are over 180 Linux versions, then using your statement, there are MORE rabid Linux users. All pushing 'thier' version.

    The 'BSD is dying' gal doesn't help, nor does the /. crew in letting it keep geting posted. VA doesn't grok that being a 'linux' only company, while saying you are 'Open Source' isn't going to fly. Or, perhaps now they do after looking at thier stock pice.

  • I think the statement that Windows 2000 can handle as much or more traffic then any other server just because the MS sites are some of the highest traffic isn't that accurate.

    We don't know how many servers it's taking to power all that do we? There might be twice as many Windows 2000 boxes driving that load as there driving Yahoo.

    (Yahoo is second to MS according the Media Matrix - http://www.mediametrix.com/data/thetop.jsp)

    I'll admit that Windows 2000 is better than Windows NT 4 - However it's not nearly as stable as Linux or a BSD in my experiance.
  • Same here. No BSoD. However IE does get crashy on me. After using IE on Win9x/NT/2000/Mac OS Classic/Mac OS X - It seems to me that the most stable version of IE is the Classic MacOS Version.

    My Windows 2000 install does two strange things.

    1. Leaving it running with no open Applications running, it slowly starts to page into virtual memory alot - after 24-36 I have to reboot.
    2. For some reason it will cause my motherboard to give me an overheat alarm, even though Red Hat running on the same box will not. The overheat problem just started a couple months ago.

    Dispite those issues...it's a better Windows...not that that means much :)


  • So what if there are 7 "anti-bsd posts" ??

    Statistics folks, statistics !

    75% is an impressive number, but remember that after your second installation of any OS you have done 100% as many as the day before !! (assuming you won't do them both on the same day)
    --
    echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb15CB32EF3AF9C0E5D7272 C3AF4F2snlbxq'|dc

  • You must be hanging with the wrong kind of people.

    The Linux users' group in Portland, OR many years ago renamed itself to the ``Portland Linux/UNIX Group", & the mailing list has carried threads about other flavors of UNIX like Solaris, AIX as well as *BSD since then. (We don't get as many posts about *BSD because, I guess, there are older, more established lists that can answer those kinds of questions faster.

    And my ISP has ran on FreeBSD for the last few years -- & if I had a problem with his choice of UNIX flavor, I wouldn't still be using my shell account there on a regular basis.

    Geoff

  • Definitely agreed that we can't be sure on the total cost per page served, etc (there should be a TPC for active-content webpages...or is there?). I have found Windows 2000 to be incredibly stable as a core OS (in other words I have never seen a BSOD or any critical fault on 2000, nor has it slowed down over time or shown any metric that there is an appreciable resource leak), however there are some things that irritate me. For instance previously explorer.exe would crash probably twice a day on me (which would necessitate a task manager/kill process/run process explorer.exe cycle), though with SP2 that has disappeared (I think it's related to ICQ's constant cycling of the toolbar icon), however that is not even remotely a critical OS fault and it would have zero effect on a server.

  • Indeed, it may be speculated that MS _need_ the server-side .NET on BSD, because Win2000 sure isn't up to the amount of traffic MS's own .NET servers will be able to take :-) - chances are, they'll use BSD servers identifying themselves as win2000 (they've done it before...)

    Windows 2000 can handle as much or more traffic than any other server. Microsoft.com, one of the most trafficked sites, is Windows 2000. Unfortunately there are lots of clueless newbies out there who fuxxor the system up significantly and then claim that "Windows 2000 sucks!", but you learn to filter that out.

    It's already screwed up - C# itself might be "standardised", but without the full implementation of the .NET APIs it won't be very useful

    To port the .Net Framework would be a massive bitch because that Framework largely relies upon the underpinnings of the Windows platform (which is why the framework hasn't been submitted to any universal authority). For example OLEDB, MSMQ, security ACLs, etc. I am very impressed at how amazingly comprehensive the .Net Framework is, and it might shut-up the anti-Win32 wankers out there (bah who am I kidding? Those wankers haven't bothered with facts since day one, so they'll still be going strong).

  • I think that its still important to remember that there are Linux users that are not Linux zealots.

    I will say that I am a big Linux supporter, but the reason that I am a big Linux supporter is because Linux has been around for a long time, it is a PC UNIX-like O/S that has enabled me to not see BSODS for a really long time. It has also helped me understand the O/S's that run on high performance computers and thus get better jobs when I had gotten out of school.

    I had gone to work for a company after school that used FreeBSD on its build servers, building large data warehouses for web publishing. I programmed for/administered these machines. I like FreeBSD a lot.

    I now teach people how to be Solaris admins (in an official, Sun supported way). I like Solaris a lot. Some of the things that Sun Hardware and Solaris does on things like their Starfire machines is out of this world.

    The virtual server that I run my web site on (okay there isn't anything to the website, but I've written some cgi's that run on the webserver) is BSDI. I've had an account there for over two years now and the system has gone down once for any noticable amount of time. That's cool.

    Now here I am a Solaris instructor, liking Solaris a lot, but not considering myself a SunOS zealot. I just happen to know a lot about it. I still run Linux on my desktop (past 6 years), as I said first because I was sick of BSODs, but now because linux has better device support than any of the other PC based forms of UNIX (and because I'm sick of BSODs). I don't run Linux on my desktop because I want it to take over the world, I run Linux because it runs well. If I ran a local server I would probably run something like FreeBSD, but for now I have no need for that. I run Linux because I want relatively good device support on an O/S that is somewhat similar to what I have to work with every day in my classes and that doesn't crash so often. Typically my system only goes down now when I have to move locations or when I have to upgrade the kernel.

    I'm not a linux zealot, I'm not a UNIX zealot, but I refuse to run Windows.
    ---
    "Everybody knows the moon's made of cheese."
  • Saying that "wine doesn't run on PowerPC" is close to the truth, but little informed. The wine application would be useless on the PowerPC platform, because wine was written to emulate the Win32 API, not the x86 CPU. Therefore if you were to build wine on PowerPC, it wouldn't do anything useful because you probably don't have any Win32 software compiled for PowerPC laying around. However, winelib (the core of wine) *can* be used to port Win32 software to the PowerPC platform. You would compile winelib on PowerPC, then compile your Win32 app on PowerPC. You've ported with a minimum of effort. This is what the original poster was suggesting. That MS could use winelib to port their Win32 .NET platform to UNIX like platforms without rewriting everything.

    The point that OS X doesn't use X Windows is totally valid. Porting the .NET GUI API to BSD would give them almost no leverage in porting to OS X. In order to port to OS X, they'd still have to do a *lot* of work to port the winelib GUI code to the Cocoa API.

  • Slashdot won't do that because it would embarrass the whole "Linux is taking the world by storm!" crowd to see that even at the biggest Linux propaganda site on Earth, most people still use Internet Explorer. I wish someone would put the question to Taco sometime when he's speaking, so that he can't just duck it the way he does here. Must be that "new journalism" thing. ;)


    Cheers,

  • Well, the other bad thing about OS X is that unless you have a high-end G3 or G4 with 256+ megs of ram, the thing runs like shit. All those nifty little things like the genie effect take loads of CPU, and if you don't have AltiVec or a fast CPU, you notice the slowdown. OS X is quite cool and a commendable effort, but only if you have the hardware to run it.
  • Fairly pointless responding to an AC, but I think you'll find that I do. [microsoft.com]

    Anyway, the simple fact remains, MS have not exactly proven themselves trustworthy in the past .Usually, they supply a substandard product on other platforms (Mac IE seems to be a major exception), and then point at the product on windows and say "look how crappy $OUR_PRODUCT is on $NOT_OUR_PLATFORM, you should switch to $OUR_PLATFORM". This sort of circular logic, unfortunately, seems to sway a lot of people, who seem oblivious to the $NOT_OUR_PRODUCT possibilities, thanks, usually, to FUD and propoganda in MS-controlled media.

    So far, they have a set of client side .NET (windows forms) classes that only work on windows, and a vaporware murmuring of any client-side support for other platforms (note that the may be willing to sacrfice some server side installations in order to maintain their desktop monopoly, but I doubt they'll expend much effort to get the client-side working to a non-sub-par level on other platforms - and if a third party does get, say, the linux .NET clone working better, then they'll simply up and change the APIs and/or data formats in the next "official" release - just like what happens to Wine, Samba, OS/2, MS Office clones, etc...)

  • It could be argued, that IE _is_ the new platform, of course...
  • Well, I would concur - in those cases where those that say they know what they are talking about _don't provide evidence to back it up_ - Which I did. And I wouldn't say that a short (by non-AC standards) reply, without using my +1 bonus, is shouting particularly hard :-).

  • Re:scariest thing (Score:4)

    by DGolden ( 17848 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @01:26AM (#118583) Homepage Journal
    It's already screwed up - C# itself might be "standardised", but without the full implementation of the .NET APIs it won't be very useful. And the forthcoming BSD-platform release will not include any client-side GUI support - MS is keeeping that bound to GDI on the windows platform, initially (they may be using Corel's wine-expertise to later bring client-side to BSD and thereby mac os x).

    Indeed, it may be speculated that MS _need_ the server-side .NET on BSD, because Win2000 sure isn't up to the amount of traffic MS's own .NET servers will be able to take :-) - chances are, they'll use BSD servers identifying themselves as win2000 (they've done it before...)

    So MS's plan seems to be Windows on the client, BSD on the server for real reliability, and Win2000 on the server for the real suckers...

    See the discussions on this article [slashdot.org] for more details.

    Remember, microsoft-man speak with forked tongue...

  • yes, the Indexing Service is a beyotch. I'm a Win32 developer, so I use VC all day. I've had compilation failures because the Index Service decided that it should index (and lock) the compiler's intermediate .obj files. :-( And I've had net shares that I cannot 'net use /d' because the Indexing Service thought that indexing (and locking) files on a remote file server was a great idea. sigh..

    at least the Indexing Service is not as bad as Office's FASTFIND.EXE. :-)

  • Okay, *BSD so far lacks SMP support (except in Darwin/MacOS X).

    btw, FreeBSD has supported SMP since FreeBSD 3.0 [freebsd.org]. Yes, its SMP support has been weak (ala Linux 2.0), but FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT has much better SMP support [freebsd.org] (ala BSDI).
  • But really how much did Apple do here?

    You answered the question yourself:

    "and built a new GUI with some nifty features"

    A new GUI with nifty features is NOT a trivial undertaking. After all, how long have people been trying to do this for UNIX? Decades. Did any of them match OS X? Nope.

    NO PLANS TO PORT OS X TO x86 HARDWARE!

    Actually Darwin, the UNIX bit of OS X does run on x86.

  • Well, the other bad thing about OS X is that unless you have a high-end G3 or G4 with 256+ megs of ram, the thing runs like shit.

    Obviously, this isn't a very technical explanation. If you're not running Classic frequently*, a G3/400 + 128MB DIMM ($899 + ~$50) should be very comfortable. At 256MB, you should be very happy regardless of what you run.

    There are some aspects of the OS that take additional resources because they are much more complex than equivalents in Mac OS or the typical X11 window manager. For example, under Quartz, every window has a backing store, which takes a bunch of memory. Additionally, Quartz considers the compositing attributes of all windows on the screen before rendering, which is what enables the transparency features -- although this means it takes slightly longer to render. Quartz also anti-aliases all text sent to the screen. But the results (for apps that use Core Graphics for text) are several mangitudes better than what I've seen on Mac OS 9 or Windows

    Apple is taking advantage of advances in hardware to provide new functionality to users and developers. These parts of the OS are very new, and still have room for optimization. It's also been said that Quartz does things that video cards are not used to accelerating, so everything is being shifted to the CPU. Both of these issues will improve over time.

    As of today, there are plenty of areas of Mac OS X that perform substantially better than their Mac OS 9 counterparts. Virtual Memory is vastly better, the Java VM is not only worlds faster and stable but supports JDK 1.3, OpenGL is faster, file I/O is generally faster, TCP/IP is faster. The biggest problem areas are Quartz and Carbon, which are the newest core pieces of the system.

    I imagine a plain Darwin installation running XFree will probably perform very similarly to some sort of BSD or Linux distribution on the same hardware. But you're not going to have a lot of things that are present in full-fledged Mac OS X. You will ultimately trade off functionality and features for resources.

    (* Classic is the Mac OS 9 compatibility environment for Mac OS X. It's very well integrated with native apps, but has an unending hunger for system resources. As more native apps show up, the less need there will be for Classic, and memory requirements for running a given number of apps should drop dramatically.)

    All those nifty little things like the genie effect take loads of CPU

    Type this in the terminal:

    defaults write com.apple.Dock mineffect scale

    Rather than the relatively "expensive" genie effect, this gives you a very simple animaton when you minimize a window.

    - Scott

    --
    Scott Stevenson
    WildTofu [wildtofu.com]
  • Apple took BSD and built a new GUI with some nifty features to make the Mac community accept it. Don't get me wrong I love BSD and I think that OS X will be good for it. But really how much did Apple do here?

    BSD is a major part of Mac OS X, but it's not like Apple took FreeBSD and slapped a GUI on top of it. In Mac OS X, BSD provides:

    - The process model (PID, signals)
    - Unix security model (users, permissions)
    - posix threads
    - BSD sockets
    - unix tools and libraries

    Apple created:

    - Quartz: window server, graphics library, 2D rendering, printing system
    - Cocoa: incredible object-oriented development environment
    - NetInfo (open source): Mac OS X's distributed auto-configuring network services system
    - OpenGL implementation
    - Java implementation
    - QuickTime - used for all kinds of graphics stuff
    - Carbon: APIs that Mac toolbox apps can be ported to to take advantage of modern OS features (represents a HUGE amount of work on Apple's part)
    - Classic: An environment that allows the vast majority of exist Mac applications to run on Mac OS X
    - All the system-level and user-level glue that allows all this stuff to work seamlessly together for the masses

    Mac OS X's kernel is a modified version of Mach 3.0.

    - Scott
    --
    Scott Stevenson
    WildTofu [wildtofu.com]
  • fast boot so you can crash sooner

    Hrm. FreeBSD has always booted much faster for me than any version of Windows I've ever run. Man, 4.0-RELEASE was just damn snappy booting.

    --
    SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)

  • hard-core technical issues (Score:4)

    by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Friday June 29, 2001 @11:56PM (#118590) Homepage Journal
    To everyone behind censoring proxies: sux to be you.
  • I know I'll get modded down for saying this, but some Linux supporters have an attitude that reminds me of things said in the Communist Manifesto. (shrug)

    Damn right you'll get modded down. I'm not commenting on this thread because the last time I got involved in a thread posting my honest opinions, I got modded down by the Slashdot rank and file for "trolling" (which I wasn't...see the Jargon File entry [tuxedo.org] for the correct definition) to the point that I was actually censored: my account was disabled.


    I've given up on Slashdot as a place for honest discussion. If you dare to post opinions counter to the Slashdot orthodoxy, you're slammed and censored.
    --

  • BSD isn't going anywhere any time soon contrary to what a troll thinks. In fact BSD should have an easier time in the upcoming months via way of (evil drum roll) Microsoft.
    This week, Microsoft announced that it will work with Corel to port the .NET Common Language Infrastructure and the C# programming language to open-source OS FreeBSD, a Linux competitor ... Contrary to reports, this porting effort doesn't constitute an implementation of .NET on FreeBSD, but involves only some of the low-level technologies that are part of .NET. Microsoft's decision to use FreeBSD rather than the far more widely used Linux is reportedly because of the company's disdain for Linux's GNU Public License (GPL), which Microsoft has described as "Pac-Man like" and "a cancer." The FreeBSD license is reportedly far more amenable to Microsoft because the license doesn't require the author of commercial works to provide the source code to others, as does the GPL.
    [source [wininformant.com]] My only pseudo concern with FreeBSD is, I wish they would scrutinize what is released via the ports more, this way they wouldn't have to release patches as much as they do, but again in comparison to Linux, as with OpenBSD many services aren't run off the back, and as with OpenBSD, unless you're going to pkg_add /cdrom/packagaes/ALL || make install /usr/ports , you're not going to have as many issues as you would with other OS'. For the Linux zealots yes you have your `secure Linux` variants, and you also have advisories for those too [check Linux Security [linuxsecurity.com]], Trustix, EnGarde, etc. they're all there. NetBSD is a sleeper for all, it's still a nicely written BSD, and I think it'll be around for a while. Open is well Open, and isn't going anywhere soon, love or hate Theo & Team OpenBSD but I still feel comfort knowing soom rootard isn't going to to anything to my servers at any give time.
  • That's "threatens", not thretense. It's took me almost 20 seconds to figure out what you where talking about there. I'm not picking on you directly, I'm simply getting tired of people that attempt to contribute to the dialog (mutlilog?) and can't even come close to something like spelling correctly. Good spelling is a mark of intellectual involvement in a topic. On the other hand, I do agree that a C# implementation on FreeBSD would probably influence Sun a fair ways towards creating a native Java SDK and byte-code compiler.



    Dive Gear [divingdeals.com]
  • There's a simple answer to that- all of us BSD users who just love UNIX don't take the time to write "nice book" or in some cases will just not notice the book was even printed (I never heard of your book before)

    Many more BSD users are less vocal about their beliefs; it also seems to me that those who tend to say "linux sucks" have been "on the BSD bandwagon" for a lesser amount of time and want to separate themselves from their Linux past. It's really no different than the Freudian defense mechanism of reaction formation.

    To conclude, if you're going to judge BSD users on the vocal ones, you're going to judge them all on Brett Glass et. al. That's not fair. We're all pretty vocal if you ask us about BSD, but most of us don't have a desire to shove BSD down the throats of others. If you want a real impression of BSD users, base it on productive discussion on BSD mailing lists (sure they get out of hand sometimes.. nobody is perfect) and NOT slashdot, linux news sites, or even IRC.

  • Notwithstanding the fairly obvious facts that WINE doesn't run on PowerPC and MacOS X doesn't use X Windows, I would say that "yeah, you really do know what you're talking about."
  • That would be cool... If slashdot logged the submitter OS and browser type... especially for AC... we could even have aggregate statistics for each user...
  • I think that its still important to remember that there are Linux users that are not Linux zealots.
    I absolutely agree. I don't want to come across as implying that all Linux users are zealots. I do lament that due to a vocal minority, it's easy for folks to make the assumption that they are representative of the Linux community in general.

  • Re:anti-bsd posts up 75% on slashdot!!!!! (Score:5)

    by szcx ( 81006 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @02:13AM (#118598)
    This is something I've been pondering for a while. As a group, the *BSD folk seem to be happy to coexist with other systems while the majority of (vocal) Linux supporters are hell-bent on Linux World Domination and if you're not 100% on board the Destroy Microsoft bandwagon, then you are the enemy. The phrase "use the best tool for the job" in some peoples minds has been interpreted as "use the best tool for the job... so long as it's Linux".

    There are zealots everywhere -- hell, I know people who go absolutely rabid if you get coffee from Starbucks instead of Seattles Best -- but sometimes it just seems the Linux users could learn a thing or two about tolerance from their *BSD cousins.

  • Another neat note on the site.... since MS wants to put C# on to BSD nativly, it thretense Sun... interesting stance... IBM already has a darn fine java environment for FreeBSD, and other platforms.. I wonder if this comes true...
  • I tend to agree, as a former linux user... I had great fun with linux kernel and slack. I say sorry for being so overly broad in generalizing the linux community. However, every group has its weirdo's, and I've noticed an increase of anti-xBSD rehtoric on /. recently. REally, I just think its interesting to see it plastered on Oreilly.
  • I think that was the best statistic.... shows the insecurity of the Linux folks..... and ofcource, what else do they have to compare thems selves to? Yeah.... In their minds they be competeing with bsd folks, yet the bsd folks tends to ignor them and simply do code. But serriously BSD folks dont' hate anything,nor compete, we just love unix.... WE don't hate windows... hate is such a negative things to do.... dwell on possitive stuff. ;-)
  • But really how much did Apple do here?

    It doesn't matter. The license matters.

  • that's Maynard's "cute" way of refering to the GPL

    s/"cute"/accurate/

    It is viral. I've seen GP* supporters come out and say it is viral as well and maintain that that is a good thing. Jay is merely saying it is a bad thing. If you actually bother to look through his postings you will also discover why he thinks that is a bad thing. Why not have people choose a license with their eyes wide open? If someone really wants to GPL, fine. But a newcomer should not be led to believe that GPL is the One True License... at least not without seeing alternatives and then making up their own mind. I see no men of straw in his statements.

  • While I tend to agree with you, and am myself a freebsd user and openbsd follower, remember that BSD users are still rabid and intolerant. In fact most power *users* of any following are.

    It's part of the reason that there are 3 *BSDs.

    And while someone in #freebsdhelp on efnet is just as likely to be running mirc on win2k (using a freebsd NAT box) as they are BitchX in an xterm, the universal sentiment is that 'Linsux' really sux, hence the preponderance of @linuxsucks.com et al dns tags.

    What Linux *does* have is a high fad/hip/cool factor which leads to lots of bandwagoning... and banbwagoneers tend to be rabid (vapid) ignorant users (zealots).
  • Nothing in my post implies that there are no reasonable users.
  • That is a correct extension of that logic although many of those versions of Linux are customized for the task at hand, not because of strong beliefs.

    The /. crew is a necessary evil. Unfortunately, like usual in real-life, less than good quality became dominant.
  • Not for FreeBSD, but for NetBSD:
    "native port of the Sun JVM in progress"

    NB: I still wonder, why Sun doesn't release a "reference" open source implementation of a JVM if they want "the Java platform" to become a wildly adopted standard...

  • > Because Sun wants to force all VMs to be 100% compatible with the specs. With an open source VM,
    > who knows what kind of changes people might make?

    And when they start implementing their VMs from scratch, because they have no reference implementation (see kaffe), this will not happen, yeah right!

    Remember: It has worked for TCP/IP (4.2BSD), it would have worked for Java too. A missed chance IMHO.

  • Every single BSD advocate I've met or read articles by has not only been zealous, but rabidly so, to the point of insulting every other operating system or point of view. Things like the GPL being "viral" and GPL software authors "stealing from the community", the Linsux line, the widely-distributed picture of Chuck raping Tux, and other such things don't paint a picture of a "tolerant" community to me.

    OTOH, I find that a vastly larger percentage of Linux users and developers are polite, approachable, helpful, and provide well-balanced opinions. The loud-mouthed detractors of Windows, BSD, and whichever DE/WM they don't use are a definite minorty.

    BSD people I find to be even more zealous and rabid than Windows users, and that takes a lot.

    Yes, BSDs are technically superior to Linux in many ways. And I'd be surprised if it weren't - not only are they older, but their development heads often had more experience with managing development (from what I've seen). So they've got the technical excellence, and some good dev teams, but the community that's grown up around them tends to be very hostile and exclusionary.

    But posting something that doesn't critcize Linux, the nebulous "Slashdot mentality", the even more nebulous "Linux community", RMS, ESR, or the GPL is an easy way to not only get moderated down, but to attract endless flames, so I've no clue why I'm doing this...


    -RickHunter
  • I understand Jordan was speaking about his MacOS X work, not FreeBSD.

  • Search for: "Linux sucks":

    Results 1 - 10 of about 2,320. Search took 0.62 seconds.

    Search for: "BSD sucks":

    Results 1 - 10 of about 32. Search took 0.11 seconds.

    I rest my case.

  • you really want to see:
    Operating System Sucks-Rules-O-Meter [zgp.org]

    From their page:
    This operating system quality and approval metric is based on a periodic AltaVista search for each of several operating systems, directly followed by "sucks", "rules", or "rocks".

    there's also one for programming languages [earthlink.net] and some other things - check out the bottom of the first page.

    -f

  • NB: I still wonder, why Sun doesn't release a "reference" open source implementation of a JVM if they want "the Java platform" to become a wildly adopted standard...

    Because Sun wants to force all VMs to be 100% compatible with the specs. With an open source VM, who knows what kind of changes people might make?
  • I was just reading this [oreilly.com] and have been trying to find more info about this legal threat. The blurb in the article seems to be all that I can find.

    Why I'm looking for more info as I though that the openssh project was closely tied to openbsd. If I'm mistaken it still makes no sense. The openbsd project has been around much longer than that of openssh.

    Anyone have more knowledge of this or some links? Thanks.

  • I see where you're coming from. I do think Open Source will eventually wipe out the business value of day-to-day software (if it hasn't already).

    Folks, here's the thing: if you're going to create a software startup, here's where I think your profits are going to come from in the future:

    -games
    -vertical-market applications
    -consulting

    Linux is just fine for any of those settings.

    /Brian
  • (I think that puts it rather nicely; a touch of irony as trollbait, y'know...)

    The vast majority of Linux and BSD zealots are either idiots or doing a massively effective job of trying to look like it. This is the same sort of reason that I respect politicians like John McCain and Jim Jeffords -- principles are all well and good, but they aren't going to get things done when an agreement has to be reached.

    The fact is that the BSD people are sharing because they feel like sharing, and the GPL people are sharing to make a point. I side more with the GPL people myself (mostly because I don't want my own code abused) but I really have no problem with either side.

    The technical issues involved are not at issue here, are they, really (except when dealing with Windows)? Okay, Linux is obnoxiously ad hoc in places. Okay, *BSD so far lacks SMP support (except in Darwin/MacOS X). Neither one fits an OS guru's idea of "purity" (again, except for Darwin/X and xMach). The fact is that technical arguments are as bad as political arguments for being vague -- a little PR can turn any stupid design into a feature with enough mindbending (witness Apple's proud declaration of the early 90s that they didn't like DMA, or old-line DOS zealots talking about being able to replace memory managers as if there wasn't actually a need to do so).

    I don't think the zealots are getting us anywhere. RMS has essentially shot his mouth off into irrelevance; ESR (though I don't consider him a zealot, really) is close to doing the same thing. Theo De Raadt puts out an excellent OS, but he's fast becoming a laughingstock for his attitude. Meanwhile we've got companies like Apple and Sun who are in fact contributing back and instead of praising them for getting a start and politley encouraging them to get in step with the community they're serving, the zealots rip into them for biting the hands that feed them.

    (Let me let you in on something: of course they've got an agenda. It's called making money. Shut up, take what they'll let you take, and tell them (not us) what else you want. Enough pressure, they will listen.)

    The fact is that I support both Linux and BSD, and it's not just because I'm Mac/Unix bytesexual. At the end of the day, these two sides will be the survivors when everything else has gone to hell, simply because they're the only ones guaranteed to still be out there in a form that someone can pick up and run with ten, twenty, fifty years down the road.

    One rant from a rabid middle-of-the-roader,

    /Brian
  • I like Apple now because of OS X. I like (to an extent) their new GUI. I think that what they are doing to extend BSD into a new community and a vast user base (compared to the current BSD community this puts them competitivly sized with the Linux community) is excellent. I just think that credit for the powerfulness of the Unix platform they are buildning should be given to BSD. And, on another note, anything in italics was a quote from the BoF, so don't shoot me down for what they said.
    other reply stuff:
    My BSD boot deals with several network daemons so it can be a little slow at times (compared to Windows boot... but windows doesn't serve apache during boot now does it)
    "It doesn't matter. The license matters."... thank you for saying that... I hope Apples license gets better so that we can call this all open source.
    Once more I will say Apple good job (or Jobs), and that this is not a negligable undertaking... but by itself they don't have an OS and so there should have been credit to BSD in that quote (that is what I meant.... but when you post at 2AM you really can't be held accountable for saying stupid things)... well until next post
  • Well... in anticipation of the massive anti-BSD flaming ahead I decided to say this... BSD is doing just fine thank you. BSD (in the BSDLites) was really a hacker project and out of that has grow a robust server. It isn't GPL, but I don't hold that against them. Frankly I find that on my old peice of crap computer BSD is seriosly the best way to go.
    now to reply to the real post:
    • Points of Intrist in the BoF Post:
    • "Mac OS X has the power and openness of Unix, with the simplicity and friendliness of a Mac"
      Apple took BSD and built a new GUI with some nifty features to make the Mac community accept it. Don't get me wrong I love BSD and I think that OS X will be good for it. But really how much did Apple do here?
    • What went to WindRiver:... FreeBSD-related work
      And yet again there is the shadey sound of Windriver playing with words about FreeBSD. It isn't possible for them to OWN FreeBSD, but watch them overstepping their bounds guys.
    • OpenBSD received a DARPA grant to continue the security work its been doing.
      Still trying to get at Mitnicks encrypted data (read porn) eh big bro?
    • OpenBSD Received a legal threat from OpenSSH.com, demanding that they change the OpenBSD name, which they refused (good for you!)
      Because you know that the goals of Open Source software projects are purely evil... they were planning on trying to sell back the name and then dominate the world muuuaaahhahahahahahah hah ha ha ha ah ahhh ahhha ah....
    • FreeBSD: [Jordan Hubbard] Mentioned he was working on speeding up the boot process...hey, that'd be nice!
      yeah I seem to recall the boot being a little slow when I last booted a month ago... of course Microsoft has already got the golden pair... fast boot so you can crash sooner.
    • AMD and Intel step up FreeBSD efforts
      I really hope this leads to them competing on who can donate the most money to Open Source.
    • Microsoft renounces evil, switches to FreeBSD
      I seem to recall Hotmail switching from BSD to 2k (so thats why my email got so much slower and less predictable)
    • NO PLANS TO PORT OS X TO x86 HARDWARE!
      Damn, I guess I won't be doing the OS-X benchmarking then.
    • OS X: Fully integrated JDK 1.3
      woohoo... I am a java programmer, and while some many people around here hate java support of it will promote Open Source
    • OS X: Key productivity applications (MS Office...)
      I wonder if StarOffice will come bundled for a little of taste of Microsofts own medicine (but IE MUST come preinstalled)
    one last thing.... if you haven't read/used any O'Reilly books, then your really missing out.
    "Peace, Love, Linux" -Leo Laporte, TSS [thescreensavers.com]
  • I think you either misunderstand or troll.

    When you compare Linux zealots to everyone else, you are really comparing GPL zealots to everyone else.

    GPL zealots believe that the GPL is the One True Way. You can't have a One True Way and not hold everything else in low esteem.

    The GPL represents a philosophy about the right way to live. Some people may think software licenses are trivial, but it is the details which combine to form the big picture.

    You cannot expect tolerance. A programmer should not tolerate bugs. A GPL zealot should not tolerate BSD-like licenses. The GPL grand plan is not as effective when they exist.

    This is the mindset of the GPL zealot. I should know, I am one.

    And you should not buy Starbucks coffee because Starbucks follow unethical business practices. Why are people not interested in ethics? Ethics are all we've got to distinguish ourselves from animals.

    So perhaps you'd rather we all just forgot about ethics, and tolerated wrong-doing.
  • But serriously BSD folks dont' hate anything,nor compete, we just love unix.... WE don't hate windows... hate is such a negative things to do.... dwell on possitive stuff

    I have one word for you: BULL

    When I was writing my book, Linux IP Stacks Commentary for Coriolis, I took pre-publication copies of the book to the THINK conference and let people there paw through them. Let me summarize the reactions I got, by "class":

    Admitted Windows Fanatics (AWFs): "I don't understand any of this. Where is the Visual Basic?"

    Macintosh Evangalists: well, they didn't say anything -- they were too busy reading and in most cases taking notes. One of them got violent when someone tried to pry the spiral-bound book out of his hands. Fortunately I was able to satisfy the curiosity of the newcomer with another copy that I had held back for just such an eventuality.

    Sun advocates: "Hey, this doesn't look anything like the W. Richard Stevens books." (The pre-publication proofs didn't have the dedication in the front, so at that time no one was aware that we authors had a double dedication: To Jon Postel, Primary Mover and Shaker, and to W. Richard Stevens, the guy "who illustrated TCP/IP" for all of us.)

    BSD mavans: "Hey, why are you writing this crap about Linux? BSD is way cooler [I refuse to spell this last word the way the BSDfolk tend to say it] and needs more press!" When I point out that the Stevens books already document the NET3 implementation, which I understood to be the core of the BSD stack, they replied "well, we need more bookshelf space devoted to BSD."

    There were other, less-easily catagorized responses, which is why this doesn't add up to 100. :)

    "We just love UNIX"? Then why is the ONLY hate mail I've received about the book (aside from regular demands to write a second edition covering the 2.4.0 stack) come from *BSD folk? Why does the only mail that contains the word "traitor" come from people who profess allegiance to the Little Red Devil? NOT ONE MEMBER of the fruit group, not one member of the Gremlins-for-Gates parade, not one member of the three-letter-word SUN fans, not one member of the Amiga/BeOS niche-dwellers have written a discouraging word.

    (And the really, really funny postscript to all this: I'm bring up a NetBSD box here for some consulting work, because the client insists on it. No rationale based on fact. I'm not kicking, mind you, because NetBSD will do the job.)

  • I agree. While OSX was in development, Apple would publish documentation on ADC [apple.com] about their progress. The developers ran into many problems due to the huge differences between UNIX and the old MacOS. Some of the problems were related to HFS volumes, application resource forks and the concept of moving files anywhere and not having the application break. These are things many Mac users take for granted and probably haven't even thought twice about under OSX. I wish Apple had archived those docs because they were a pretty good read.

  • What's even more interesting is the fact that OpenBSD was being used on high-volume web sites far longer than Linux. It's only with the release of the 2.4.x version Linux kernels that Linux finally now has the ability out of the box to run high-volume web sites. I think the impetus of Dell and IBM to support Linux on a large scale is a good reason why the 2.4.x kernel was finally finished.

    Besides, the zealotry of much of the Linux crowd has turned off way too many IT managers out there to start with. I know I'll get modded down for saying this, but some Linux supporters have an attitude that reminds me of things said in the Communist Manifesto. (shrug)
  • And what's so bad about the communist manifesto? I don't think anyone has a real problem with the ideas presented in it, it's just in practice it leads to major suckage. Are you scared because the Free Software movement is a workable form of the Communist ideal?
  • The O'Reilly BSD BOF pages states that Darwin supports both Objective C and Objective C++. Isn't that like saying you play both kinds of music, Country and Western?

    A search on Google and Darwin's search page turned up nothing useful. But then I came across this Objective C FAQ [faqs.org].

    It says that Objective C++ is a co-mingling of Objective C and C++ syntax that is accepted by Apple's compiler.

    I always thought that Darwin used gcc with the objective-c syntax engine. Maybe the Apple complier is something new. Does anyone know the history of this?
  • The Perl Journal is running a scripting language comparison "What Languages Rule" [lehigh.edu]

    It runs every hour and says Python rules 18.1 over Perl's meager 4.9. Ironic, but at least they are honest.

    It also says VB sucks. Which is no surprise. Unscientific surveys have shown a decline in VB jobs and usage with a rise in Java.
  • Especially those high volume single processor servers eh?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • "And thanks to a Red Sox loss to the (cough)Devil Rays(/cough)"...

    This has got ot be the first time I've seen an educated sports reference in an otherwise purely computer related article. That he went to a Socks game @ Fenway is not a big suprise. But he knew that the Devil Rays sucked [yahoo.com] . I'm impressed.

  • I wish those that are moderating would READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE before declaring something "Off Topic".

    I fail to see how responding to something that was in the article can be off-topic. Would the coward that modded the parent down explain to me why he/she chose to do so?

  • We have this nice western word that gets used to describe the Unix situation: Balkanization.

    The modern zealot kiddies have picked up where the old lumbering commercial UNIX firms have left off, turning minor technical or philosophical differences into a religious civil war.

    The fact is that that nearly all Unix systems are 95% identical from a user interface point of view, and that while there is no single OS "UNIX" anymore, the fate and popularity of various Unix OSes are intimately linked together, against proprietary minicomputer systems in the old days, and against proprietary personal computer system now.

    Yet, we have major divisions over twiddly little details such as the thread implementation or the init scripts. This ripples outward until you have the jihad kiddies essentially committing fraticide against each other, and the Unix platform as a whole. Not to mention the OSS licencing issues which have always been more of a debating point (with Microsoft now taking the stand) than anything more than normal due course to developers.

    This entire attitude comes from the false idea that platform growth is zero sum game. Every X user is one less Y user, etc,etc. (You can be sure that Bill Gates doesn't see the computer market this way!) Therefore, if you can't convert Windows users to your Unix, it pays to wage a civil war against other Unix users.

    This wouldn't be so much of a problem if there was zealous advocacy of and interest in the growth of the Unix platform as a whole, because the technical and cutural issues would be seen in context. Until people start looking at the big picture, the ongoing fraternal flamewars will continue to hurt the platform.
  • I believe Micorsoft has actually given up most of its exclusive rights to C# and has submitted it to a standards committee. This means anyone is free to design a C# compiler. In a year of so we could see a version of gcc that compiles C#. Surprising behavior from M$, but it could really benefit a lot of software designers out there. Hopefully it doesn't get screwed up somewhere along the way.
  • I have no problem with BSD, and have been using Linux for over 4 years now & run my site securly with it. I run BSD on a P90 to play with. The only thing I have against BSD is the people who use it, and complain when Linux beats them in the market.

    I am against M$. Yes, I am. I use Win2000 on my workstation & tops @24 day uptime, wich isn't 1/2 of the OpenBSD box, or 1/15th of the Linuxbox's. Win2000 may, or may not have a BSD TCP/IP stack in it. But according to the Duke Of URL's postings a LONG time ago, Linux 2.2 & 2.4 beat 2000, which makes me believe that either BSD needs work, or 2000 needs work.


    1. Chinese food. No soul food here.
    1. I'm no punk bitch !!!
    2. I'm no punk bitch neither !!!
  • The above is not meant to troll, or start a flame war.


    1. Chinese food. No soul food here.
    1. I'm no punk bitch !!!
    2. I'm no punk bitch neither !!!

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