Posts by drag

Ubuntu republic riven by damaging civil wars

The Authors description of Gnome-shell is not terribly accurate.

> Down the left hand edge of the screen is a "favourites bar" to which you can add your most-often-used programs.

More or less.

> A faint background glow shows if an app is running, but not how many windows; it's not really meant for switching between programs.

It's meant for switching between entire programs. When you launch a application it placed a new icon in that. So when you click on the icon for the application it brings it forward.

What it's not meant for is switching between windows. When you choose it it will choose the last used window of that application, if you have multiple windows open.

> This is a keyboard operation – Alt-tab still works, and Alt-` (the key directly above tab) to switch between documents.

Alt-tab switches between programs.

Alt-~ switches between windows in the current program.

Also you can use Alt-tab in combination with arrow keys to select specific windows.

> The developers seemed to envision that the way to keep apps separate would be to put them on different virtual desktops. A virtual-desktop-switcher bar occupies the right edge of the primary screen, and there's an indefinite number of virtual desktops available – always one more than you're using.

On Gnome 3.2 it hides this bar if you are not using multiple desktops. The multiple desktop thing has always confused some users so if you don't use it you don't see it.

> The only way to navigate between windows with the mouse is an overall, Apple Exposé-like thumbnail view. So, if you have lots of windows, all on your first virtual desktop, the overview will be indistinct.

More or less.

Unlike Windows, Gnome never really had the ability to group a bunch of related windows together in the task bar (or whatever) when you had a lot of them open. So no matter what if you had lots of windows open on a single desktop it was always going to be mess.

If you wanted to keep things organized you have to take advantage of multiple desktops. This really hasn't changed from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3.

> The old hierarchical application menus have been replaced with a full-screen search-driven app-picker. Even windows' minimise or maximise buttons are gone.

There are three application 'menus' or 'pickers':

1. Hierarchical (applications are grouped by function in the traditional-like gnome app menu system)

2. Grid display

3. Search.

If you are keyboard centric person the search is the most useful. As you the search is always in focus when you switch to the 'activities' view. You can simply start typing and open the application, or grab it's windows.

like this:

<hit windows key>

type: firefox

<hit enter>

It will pull up firefox or launch it, depending if you have it launched already.

the ctrl- button will modify the behavior to 'launch new window' rather then pull up existing windows.

So:

<hit windows key>

type: firefox

<hit ctrl-enter>

Will launch a new window.

It's a departure from existing WIMP metaphores for managing applications and Windows and it's not intiutive as OS X. But it's a quick flowing user interface and very keyboard friendly once you spend a couple weeks using it. Lots of potential.

Greenland ice loss rates 'one-third' of what was thought

ssshh.... don't confuse the hippies with facts.

"""It seems to be a matter of faith with climate scientists that Greenland has been covered in ice for millenia. However historians tell a different story."""

Don't confuse the hippies with historical facts. It's not a matter of how badly (or even if) bad stuff is happening, it's whether or not there is a possibility of bad stuff happening is what freaks them out.

Sure telling them that historically the mid-evil warming period allowed farmers to grow crops like grapes far further north then previously possible may seem like it would help them understand how the world climate works.... but that it is irrelevant because it MAY not actually work like that.

Sure telling them that the tree ring data that was used to draw the 'hockey stick' graphs turned out to have been a extremely regional phenomena, but it's the possibility that it COULD be a problem makes it worth doing something about and ruining the lives of millions of people through massive government interference with the economy.

Sure telling them that Carbon Dioxide is only about 0.038% and all of human activity may have rose that to about 0.03802% or 0.03805% and though even though carbon dioxide does actually contribute to global warming the amount of carbon released and STAYING in the atmosphere is still in trace amounts and human activities could only really cause a minute amount of change; even with the best estimates. That may be a fact, but it may still be a possible problem in 200 years so freaking out about it now is the only possible solution.

Sure telling them that a great deal of carbon is released due to deforestation caused by subsistence farmers that do not have the knowledge, economics, or technical ability to actually cultivate the land in a way that makes their farming sustainable and the best way to stop deforestation will be to improve the economic livelihood and education of people living in rain forest areas. Teaching them modern farming techniques, modern chemicals, modern cultivated/domesticated plant species, etc etc.

To hippies that is 'not natural' and therefore 'dangerous' and the only solution is to let those people starve to death while freaking out about people driving cars that are slightly too large and trying to make plastic bags illegal. Because that will save the planet.

Paul Allen's patent madness not worth single penny

Paul Allen sucks almost as much as the patent system does.

Just goes to show how worthless patents are at actually promoting innovation.

Here is a guy who spent millions of dollars for the express purpose of gaining patents. Yet all the money and time and effort he put into developing the patents did not yield a single unique idea that was both marketable and not independently created by somebody else.

Those somebody else's created the ideas just as much as he did and made a shitload of money completely without patenting anything.

Now this Paul 'Patented Loser' Allen is now colluding with the USA government to punish them for their successes and efforts by attacking them through the patent system.

Way to lose, asshole.

Google Nexus One 'too popular' in dev phone afterlife

Get samsung galaxy-s if you cannot get Nexus One.

If you can't get your hands on a Nexus One the next most 'open' phone your going to find for Android is going to be from the Samsung Galaxy-S family of phones.

Samsung has been much better then other manufacturers when it comes to open sourcing their stuff and, unintentionally or not, made their phones much easier for people to hack on then any other platform out there.

Not to mention that the performance for these phones is better then any other phone out there, except for some I/O for the onboard flash (which can be fixed).

Deviant Google Android probes Linux kernel re-entry

Android IS Linux.

"""Can you install Maemo/Meego on your Nexus One? Can you install Maemo applications on Android? Both Android and Maemo/Meego are Linux, right? Thought so."""

What? You did not even wait for somebody to fucking answer?

You CAN if you want to. You'll have to port it yourself. ARM is not x86 were your dealing with standard hardware and standard BIOS. With ARM each platform has unique features you have to take into account and a few of the drivers are closed source. Mostly to do with the radio.

But I run Debian in chroot on my Android phone. Why? Because I can.

And for your viewing pleasure:

Nexus One hacked with USB Host mode.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-bLOc1qnMM

USB Video card, running LXDE on external display. Keyboard. Everything.

Android IS Linux. It just does not use X Windows by default. You could install it if you wanted to.

With Android: DRM is optional

"""You say that tivoized and locked down device running mangled version of Linux kernel does not "represent the antithesis of every value and ideal of Linux"?"""

If you purchase a phone that does DRM then that would be the case, but nobody is forcing you to do that. There are relatively open phones you can hack around with if that is what you care about.

I don't run the stock firmware on my Android phone and I am never going to purchase a Android phone that has DRM in it's bootloader to prevent me from running a custom firmware.

First SMS Trojan for Android is in the wild

sure, whatever.

>> Does the Google Marketplace even exist in Russia?

No clue. If not then you can just use SlideME marketplace. Google App Marketplace is not the only game in town.

>> If it does is it limited to free apps only, which is the case for the vast majority of the Marketplace stores outside the 13 or so 'lucky' countries that have full stores?

That's not really that bad. The vast majority of Android Apps are free or are ad driven (or whatever). Only a small minority is pay-for. This is one of the big differences between the iPhone vs Android markets.

>> If so, wouldn't Russian drones be far more likely to look for their apps outside a non-existent or extremely limited store and wouldn't they therefore be at much greater risk by default rather than through user-stupidity?

If you enable installing non-market apps then, yes, your increasing your risk no matter what. There is no way to avoid this.

If you make something fool proof the world will make a better fool.

""Refine the Android security model a wee bit more and this problem would go away.""

Ummm.... no they can't.

Lets see how to 'infect yourself':

1. Dive into the settings on your phone and enable the ability to install applications from third parties

2. Visit suspicious Russian Website

3. Locate APK file. Download it.

4. Start the installer.

5. Give the application permission to use SMS

6. Shrug when it does nothing and then forget about it and do not uninstall it.

You cannot fix stupid no matter how many layers of security you add onto a system.

This is a 'violation of security' along the same lines as if you called 'MAFIA-R-US', inviting a heavily armed man wearing a mask to your house, open up your wall safe for him and then walk away to go get groceries is a violation of your security.

Ballmer's 'lost generation' note finds resonance

happy thoughts vs reality

"Real computers, toys, and the selling to the masses,

Why is the Linux kernel the choice for super computers ?"

Because it is cheap, it's easily customizable to different workloads, HPC folks were familiar with Unix, and (most importantly) it stays out of the way of the custom applications that do the brunt of the work.

"The original DOS was selected because it was incapable of competing against UNIX. IBM was wise."

Ever try to run a Unix system on a 16bit processor with 512K of RAM? I think not. Unix was expensive and was much to large for the hardware. MS-DOS was cheap and ran just fine.

Plus it helped that:

"Oh, that's run by Bill Gates, Mary Gates' son." --- John Opel: IBM President and close personal friend of the Gate's family.

You put the rest of the pieces together.

"NT was chosen by Microsoft because it was not UNIX and they believed it was good enough to be competitive (with Intel's help - oops)"

NT was not 'chosen' by Microsoft. Microsoft hired a bunch of VMS creators and programmers to help them write a new enterprise OS kernel and they wrote NT Microkernel. Once they figured out a Microkernel was a shit design they went with a hybrid approach that formed the basis of what is now the most popular non-embedded OS in existence.

"NEXT was too early"

Next was a decent Unix system with a high-tech windowing system designed to run on overpriced and unmarketable hardware.

Which Apple purchased, along with the CEO, hacked on Next for a few years and eventually cranked out OS X, because Apple could not write a new OS from scratch to save their lives.

"UNIX is the evolutionary predecessor to is non clone Linux (Unix like)"

Unix was hacked together to play video games on a otherwise fairly worthless PDP7 and was designed to be a amusing anti-Multics.

Once it was realized that writing everything assembly was a shitty idea the C programming language was created and Unix was rewritten.

There it languished for a while as a academic toy because AT&T could not sell it because of rules the USA government pushed on them in response for allowing them to maintain government-sanctioned monopoly over the telephone networks.

Then the BSD hackers came along, developed TCP/IP as a error resistant network stack for a military research project, released it as freeware. This turned Unix into a networking powerhouse and lead to it's commercial success.... which went on for a few years until the corporations that licensed the AT&T copyrights then proceeded to around and sue BSD folks.

Unix has been slowly going down the toilet ever since.

"Microsoft is toast because they were never competitive technically"

Yeah right.

"Amiga (never marketed well in its functional life)"

Amiga was a proprietary shit OS doomed to failure. It continues to serve as a example of what not to do.

"unix - is dying slowly only because its wild child replacement is still a teenager rebel in the minds of the old school thinkers. (Linux)"

Unix worked best when it was open and people shared. Once it got all proprietary then it splintered and the life of a application developer for Unix turned into shit. Microsoft then ate their lunch.

Now Linux is working because the licenses require everybody to work together and forces people to share.

"Linux became because the world really does need something that works.

Linux is what is found on REAL computers today. go look.

Why else do you think that it... and none of the others, is the largest, fastest moving software project in the history of computing...

Its Linux flexibility and its awesome GPL It will survive its attackers because it has all of the right aspects to survive...

all the rest is marketing."

No:

All the rest is Linux gaining acceptance by the business computing so it can gain the funding and proper developer resources required to make it survive.

Redhat is the best thing that has ever happened to Linux. IBM is a huge asset. HP, SGI, Oracle, etc etc.

Look at Android:

For years people been trying to hack together a acceptable highly mobile version of Linux for phones and other handhelds. It was not until a major USA for-profit corporation took Linux and developed a decent application development environment and showed everybody else in the 'community' how to make a mass marketable Linux-based OS before Linux has gained.

Right now Android is #1 smartphone in the USA. In the past few months it has surpassed even RIM in terms of sales and sits at 33% of the market and RIM with 28%. (Apple is down in the low teens and is losing market share: even with the iphone 4) . It is selling to the tune of 200,000 new Linux systems per day. +800% growth since the same time last year. By this time next year it will only be second to Nokia in terms of world-wide smartphones.

Android and Linux proves that if combine sharing of code and ideas in a open manner (with copyright and patent restrictions nullified as best as possible) with a huge for-profit motivation that business provides you can be hugely successful.

THAT is what Linux needs. Screw marketing: these are _RESULTS_.

Freedom + Profit = Win.

'Be careful' warning accompanies latest Linux kernel

whatever.

@JustanKOS:

You obviously do not know what the term 'linux-next' refers to.

trying to figure out how to balance between developer enthusiasm and stability has been the main point of Linus's job for most of his professional life. All he does is review code. That's pretty much it. This is why 'git' was created, this is why linux-next was created, etc etc etc.

This has been going on for decades now.... and you have not noticed any of it?

Oracle-Sun merger faces full monopoly probe

The blind criminals leading the sheep.

> Oh, so you prefer the American (and increasingly British) approach of allowing companies to screw everyone whichever way they please in the all consuming pursuit of 'growth'...?

The other choice is letting governments screw you over.

The difference is that paying Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM is voluntary... You can always use something else like Linux and MySQL even if it's less then desirable.

However if you don't pay your government and don't obey their rules (no matter how obnoxious or stupid) they send armed men to your house to take everything you own, take you away from your love ones, destroy your life, destroy your career, and throw in a cage if you resist them too strongly. And they couldn't give a shit less.

If a world were your a fucking moron if you trust your government I'll take the capitalist approach, thank you very much.

Open-source firmware vuln exposes wireless routers

DD-wrt != Openwrt.

REG READER FAIL

At least read the article and have a clue about what your talking about before you start spouting off about how other people suck.

DD-wrt has a fancier web interface, but OpenWRT has always been much more solid and professional.

Chrome OS: Windows killer?

Google Fail.

Google will never break compatibility with it's online services and applications with Microsoft Windows.

Therefore, besides being pretty, Chrome OS will never, ever, offer any functionality that you can't get just by installing Windows and using Internet Exploder.

So _always_, as in 100% of the time, a user using "Chrome OS" will experience a large reduction in capabilities and flexibility compared with just running Google Apps on Windows.

Ergo.. Chrome OS hype is VERY misplaced. It will never displace Windows because Google will never be able to offer a online platform that is exclusive to their OS.

Open-source .NET splits for extra Microsoft protection

C# language still has uses outside of .NET

""Mono & .NET are platform abstraction layers. This allows code to run on all platforms in this framework."""

C# and Mono's .NET are like C++ and Winelib.

Using those languages and that environment you can produce software in Linux that will run natively on both Linux AND Windows.

"""Is it just me or is this useless? This will be like saying that if you use Java the language and the compiler you are ok, but use the APIs and we'll get you later.""""

It's like saying you can use C++ and write your own compiler your 'ok', but if you try to emulate Win32 through Wine you are not.

"""The most useful part is the APIs which are not covered by this pledge."""

Well .NET is a huge sprawling monster. Mono can never hope to keep up with the Microsoft in this case. So therefore it's only going to be able to support the popular parts of .NET, which will require some porting effort for the majority of .NET applications. However once your done then it's cross platform.

So the .NET stuff in Mono is of limited usefulness unless you really like to program in ASP.NET instead of Ruby or PHP.

However C# and the CLI are still useful without .NET and in Linux you can use Gnome environment and the C# language to produce software. That way your using C#, but without the .NET APIs. It's like using C++ in KDE without using Win32 APIs.... It's perfectly possible.

Using C# and CLI that allows a intermediate level programming language to be useful in the Linux desktop. With Gnome desktop the primary programming languages are C, C#, and Python. There are lots of bindings with different languages, but those three languages are the most popular, best supported, and you can depend on them being present on a 'full' gnome installation.

And if your interested in supporting multiple platforms then GTK and most of Gnome is cross platform so you can write your apps once and get support in Windows and OS X.

So ultimately the usefulness of the Microsoft 'promise' is going to be limited to how much you like C# and prefer to use that language over C or Python.

In other words... C# is a programming language, it's just a formal way of describing programs in text like any other language. Just the same as C or Ruby or whatever. The CLI is the 'compiler' for the language, more or less. Making it possible to take the intermediate bytecode created by interpreting the C# language and then executing it with all the JIT goodness and whatever else.

So Microsoft is essentially saying "It's ok to use C# and write a proper interpreter, but don't think we are going to let you get away with duplicating Windows" (duplicating Windows is essentially what you'd end up having to do if you want to do all of .NET anyways)

Linux patch sidesteps Microsoft's TomTom patent

Your thinking to hard.

Microsoft is a gigantic company. What one group in Microsoft does really should not reflect on other parts of the company.

It sounds a bit insane, but the reality is that Microsoft is BOTH friendly and unfriendly.

It's really quite simple when you look at it from a distance. Microsoft is friendly towards software that runs on top of Windows. Microsoft's Windows is their cash cow and if people would run Apache and PHP on Windows rather then Linux then Microsoft will do everything in their power to make it a reality.

It is when people try to move away from Windows is when Microsoft will start getting mean. It's very simple.

Microsoft takes Gazelle secure browser on road trip

Holy Over Engineering, Batman

""""

Gazelle is a kernel that tries to sidestep these issues by treating the browser as a self-contained operating system. It's designed to protect website instances from each other and from the host machine by managing access to the PC's underlying resources.

Microsoft senior researcher Helen Wang working on Gazelle said Microsoft's work could lead to browsers evolving into multi-principal - translated: multiple website - operating systems. "Web applications would take a giant step forward in functionality and quality."

"I would like to see Web applications achieve function and quality parity with desktop apps," Wang said on the Microsoft Research site. "That's the ultimate goal of this research."

""""

OR.. they could not be huge ivory tower morons and realize that Google did a better job at solving the problem by running each website as a seperate process and taking advantage of the native platform's sandboxing capabilities.

You get all the same benefits without having to run a OS on top of a OS and replicating a crapload of already-existing functionality. Way to over-engineer, Microsoft Research.

Pirate Bay website sinks as 'sell out' accusations fly

wf pirate bay, wtf

amazing... people who think that they should get everything for free are selfish, ungratefull, and unreasonable!!!

Wow. I didn't see that one coming.

Buzz Aldrin weighs into NASA

NASA SUCKS

The space shuttle is a antiquated, obsolete, expensive, and fragile. The idea that your relying on god-damn heat tiles to protect pilots is just insane. One fracture and your toast.

Meanwhile you have a private owned and operated corporation that primarially designs kit planes for moderatly wealthy nerds were able to launch a old geezer into _space_ using a cheap airplane and a fiberglass tub attatched to a rocket booster.

And not only that they were able to take that same hunk of crap and launch again with a single week turn-around.

Seriously... With NASA you have this huge fucking rocket jet designed in the early 1970's vs a small corporation launching up a fiberglass tube polited by a old coot. The astronaught that controlled the Scaled Composites's SpaceShipOne was born in 1940.

That alone should be a complete wake up call that NASA is doing something SERIOUSLY FUCKING WRONG.

If that doesn't convince you take a look at this:

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2009/06/window-damage-on-atlantis-threatens-six-month-delay-to-sts-129/

Then take a look at this:

http://library.thinkquest.org/05aug/01145/pics/ship/SS1/Spaceship_One_cockpit_in_flight.jpg

See the difference?

I know the perfect plan to save NASA billions of dollars.

Here is what they do:

Completely F-OFF and offer 10 billion dollars to the first private corporation that produces viable means to get to the moon. Then offer a 30 billion dollar prize to the first corporation that can get a practical means to orbit a manned space station around Mars.

Bingo. Problem Solved. Look at it this way.. It took less then a decade using 1960's techology to get the first people on the moon. Now we have 2000 techology and they are figuring 20 years to get to the moon again?

I can pretty much garrentee that if they offer the technology and prizes to private industry we will have small moon bases within the next decade.

Opera Software reinvents complete irrelevance

Whatever. Opera sucks. That is why nobody uses it. Well, nobody that matters anyways.

"""Europeans are suffering from GDP envy? That might be right for the rest of the continent, but GDP pr. captia in Norway is 10% above that of the US. I suspect the GNP envy goes the other way."""

Nope. Your wrong. Nobody here in the USA gives a flying fuck what the GDP of Norway is. Sorry.

In fact we are mystified* why somebody in Norway would know or care what our GDP is. We barely care ourselves..

In fact it's mostly irrelevent except for those dickwads that think watching "CNN Money Hour" will somehow unlock some secret to their monetary happiness in 20 years or so. (which is won't. Those talking heads are nothing but a bunch of fuckwits. If they knew what they were talking about they would be too busy being rich to waste their time on some boring TV show)

*Then ten seconds later we remind ourselves how much we kick-ass and wonder no longer.

Dell axes hackintosh makers' favourite netbook

wow.

""When will netbook makers understand that we need at least 1000 pixels of vertical resolution to be able to do anything remotely useful."""

Speak for yourself. I like my Dell Mini 9, but I get the majority of my work done on a old Dell Inspiron 4100 notebook running a whopping 1024x768. That with 1.13ghz P-3 processor and 512MB of ram. It's quite fast enough, too. Plenty of screen realistate. This is used for writing a shitty ton worth of documentation and doing software testing. I have more powerful machines that I remote into for tasks like virtualization and whatnot.

If you need to have a 1900x1080 resolution and 4GB of RAM to do anything useful.. whatever your doing, your doing it wrong. Unless your a graphics artist or CAD worker or something.

I mean.. seriously.. do you have your screen filled up with 800 pixels worth of toolbars or something?

It's too bad. Dell Mini 9 worked great for Linux, too. The Mini 10 and 12, as far as I can tell, require the proprietary Poulsbo driver for the GMA 500 graphics. Which sucks.

Inside USB 3.0

Firewire is dead. Give it up already.

"""""

The people who need lots of fast data transfer that doesn't hit the CPU aren't going to use USB. The people who don't care about a few seconds of transfer time and a slight CPU hit will use USB to get stuff done and they might even be happy.

"""""

People with half a brain that need the faster performance will simply buy a computer with a slightly faster CPU and not give a crap either way.

Firewire is full of failure because it requires much more intellegent hardware then what USB does. Each device that uses Firewire is just going to be more expensive. Instead of spending money on smarter devices most people would simply prefer to get a faster computer.

That's all. It's not very complicated. After all; what the hell is all those extra cores in your system going to do for you? Make you type faster in Microsoft Office? Download your porn faster?

No. They make your computer cheaper and more flexible.

Wolfram Alpha - a new kind of Fail

Judging by the contempt and derision in these comments...

..... That MAKES TED MY FAVORITE FUCKING AUTHOR OF ALL TIME.

TED! YOU KICK-ASS!

Do NOT give those bastards one inch, they'll take and it use every bit of it they can to shove you up against the wall and take away your AWSOMENESS.

Banned US shock-jock demands Clinton intervention

No British Freedom of Speech, obviously.

"""

..he's a news flash you braindead moron. Your laws (contary to what you believe) do not apply outside the USA.

:"""

Yes we Americans know that you people have no real freedom of speech. That your subject to monitoring and control by your government. We know that what you say and what you do is subject to government laws that filter out views that the government disagrees with.

But your court systems do get very excited about libel and slander. Which is what is happening to him. Mostly originated from elements in your government, your government-controlled media, and other media that is friendly to the ruling party.

"""

And besides, it's you country's hysteria and unfounded panicing, has led to these stupid laws being founded in the first place.....

"""

Yes. It's the USA's fault that British people have no freedom to dissent or talk out anymore lest they get fined, fired, banned, deported, or arrested for causing strife.

Or class conflict or upsetting the Muslims or whatever other brain-dead excuse that your government can dream up in order to eliminate the ability for people to disagree with them publicly and get heard.

Oh. Savage is not a shock Jock.

A shock jock is a person that goes and does toilet humour for the sake of shocking poeple.

He is a right wing political commentator who tends to get excited about his viewpoints. He isn't even extreme. Which is why your government would like to see him and other people like him minimized. They don't want to allow viewpoints into your country that run contrary to the status quo that they want to establish.

At least for now you people still have the internet and the ability to listen to other country's radio shows...

I wonder how long before that is going to be taken away from you?

Any Internet filtering laws yet?

Sphinx - text search The Pirate Bay way

@Big Chris

Way to miss the point here.

The point is that I know you fanboys love your database and every time you see the term 'MySQL' printed anywere... in comments or in a article, even in a article (like this one) that talks about how you DO NOT WANT TO USE MYSQL... you people show up and talk about how much postgre is. It's like a compulsion, a disease, and it has to stop.

Nobody cares anymore.

Beyond that... I HATE ALL SQL DATABASES.

Why? Because they are the most abused thing imaginable.

First off... The vast majority of websites that use SQL database for storage.. well.. they don't need it. In fact they would be much faster and be better designed if they didn't use SQL at all and used flat files and file-system backed storage rather then shoving everything into some binary blob. They would be simplier, easier to back up, easier to setup, permissions handled easier, less prone to corruption, and quite a bit faster.

That covers about 90% of the users that go on and on about Postgre vs MySQL. They are wrong and stupid for using a SQL database in the first place. It's just stupid.

There are SQL databases that store my URL history... I have video games that store scores in databases... there are music playing applications that store music databases in SQL format. If I try to install a stupid web application for doing some simple-stupid automation on a remote machine it tries to pull in MySQL or Postgresql or some other shitastic thing.

Why? Because web developers don't know how to do jack shit other then using SQLfor storage. They think it scales, they think having websites running from multiuser relational databases make sense. They are under some delusion that SQL databases are fast and secure.. they won't think out of the box and never learned how to do anything else. Then they stop being web designers and try to be application designers and well... when all you know how to use a hammer then every problem is a nail waiting to get hammered into submission. Round hole, Square Peg? Goddammit.. just smash it hard enough with SQLite and it'll fit perfectly!!! The repair manual says to tighten to 15 foot pounds? Well.. dammit Postgre is ACID COMPLIANT! Smash that bolt down with that and your garrenteed success. If you hit it hard enough then the leaks are going to have to stop, it's physics!

Sure, sure for a lot of things SQL makes sense, but usually it doesn't.

STOP THE POSTGRE MADNESS. WE KNOW. WE UNDERSTAND.

"I'm still amused by how many people use the nightmare that is MySQL when PostgreSQL is more scalable, quicker, powerful and featured. "

Well that would be amusing indeed. Except, of course, PostgreSQL is not actually more scalable, nor is it quicker, nor does it have nearly the same amount of features and flexibility (aka power) that MySQL does.

What Postgresql fans seem to like most about Postgresql is that it's simply not MySQL.

This is a point that has become VERY clear every single time that MySQL comes up in any article anywere on the entire fucking internet. I could write a entire 400 page article about the history of databases and computing and put a single line mentioning MySQL anywere and, with absolute reliability, you'll have at least one PostgreSQL fanboy stand up and say how much he loves Postgresql becuase it is not MySQL and he does not understand why MySQL is so popular despite the fact that it's MySQL and MySQL sucks.

The reality of hte situation is that there are lot of things that are not MySQL (Dirt, humans, Oracle, IBM, video cards, desks, etc etc) and while Postgresql is one of them it's not a really good reason to actually use Postgresql.

While there are actually very good reasons to use MySQL over Postgresql and people actually do know databases very well actually do end up choosing MySQL for really valid reasons. Despite the fact that a average postgre fanboi doesn't see this or understand why...

Moblin 2.0 Linux goes alpha (again)

Moblin is fine.

"""

..to see this get somewhere, but no doubt MS has a plan for killing this.

"""

It's definitely going somewhere. One of the major reasons why the numbers of Linux being installed on Netbooks didn't grow with the number of Netbooks being sold is because each Netbook variant also produced their own custom operating system.

Sure the hacked up versions of the Linux desktop that made it's way into various Netbooks were nice to look at and use, but to be really useful users are still going to want to install their own applications and games and whatnot. There is only so much many people you can keep happy with old versions of Firefox and OpenOffice.org.

Advanced users, much to their dismay, found that installing standard Linux distributions required massive amounts of tweaking to properly support their Netbook's hardware.

Look at this way:

You see one of the biggest problems with Linux, in terms of hardware support, isn't that hardware support sucks... it's just that hardware support lags so heavily.

Think about it. The 'proper' way to get new support for hardware in Linux is to go through a process were you submit your patches to the Linux kernel folks on their mailing list. Once you get their attention then you will have to edit your code and resubmit it 3 or 4 more times before it's close enough to a good shape to were they will take it in and introduce it.

And typically, because of trade secrets, support for new hardware doesn't happen until AFTER the hardware is released. This is much less bad then it used to be (once people figured out that Linux developers had no problem with singing NDAs).

But lets assume...

So Asus releases a new Netbook. It requires modifications to the Linux ACPI stuff to support the new variation. It also needs a new driver for the ethernet and a update to the driver for the wireless and webcams.

Alright. In Linux that is easy to do. Hackers have all that stuff working on patched kernels within weeks of the new hardware release.

So after a couple month stay on the in a development branch of the kernel the new code is given the go-ahead to be entered into the mainline branch of the Linux kernel. That takes about 2 months.

However the kernel doesn't do releases every month. Each new kernel version is only released every 3 months, or so.

So that is 2 weeks + 2 months + 3 months release cycle. So we'll assume that so far about 4 months have passed since the new Netbook has released.

But that means that only benefits users that build their own kernels.

For most users they use pre-compiled kernels from their distributions. Ubuntu and Fedora only release new systems every 6 to 8 months.

SOOOOO... Between getting the netbook released and getting new hardware support into distributions means that your looking at about a 4 month to 10 month lag here.

============================

What this gets you is that:

A. Users can't install new applications on their hacked up Netbook-specific distribution easily.

B. To install new applications they will have to install a different Linux OS. Like Ubuntu... however Ubuntu wont' have hardware support built-in for another 8 months, at least.

What makes it worse is that most people won't know this. They'll try to install their own Linux version if they can get that far (which most won't) and then they'll see about 15 pages of Wiki horseshit that they will have to wade through to get good hardware support again.

Sooooo... this means 'Fuck Linux I am using XP'. People need to get work done.

==============================

With Moblin they will provide all the hardware support for Netbooks out-of-the-box.

They also will provide a build service that ODMs and OEMs can use to build their own 'custom' version of Linux. As a added bonus between making the OEM's life easier and Linux much cheaper to develop the build service will make sure that all the APIs are there and unified for the Moblin platform.

This means that you will have a standardized set of APIs for the Linux netbook folks that will enable users to easily install new applications, which will have top-notch support for all their hardware.

Soo.. Linux + Top notch hardware support + Easy to install Applications and standard API for ISVs to target.

This is exactly the advantages that Windows XP has over Linux on the netbook desktop....

=====================

And even if Moblin dies a flaming death it's improvements to boot performance, drivers, and other things (like GTK CLutter) are being adopted by other distributions as fast as they are being introduced by Moblin.

Microsoft's new search - Built on open-source

Re: Oninoshiko

""""

NT with SFU is actually a much better Unix system then Linux, easily acheving that because at has, at least at one point, acheved SUS (Single UNIX Specification) complience. That is a feat that no linux distro has ever acheved.

""""

That's all nice and such. But certifications like that tend to lose their meaning when you actually have to end up using and support it. I was talking about 'better' in a real sense, as in something people tended to prefer to use and not in 'Oh, look I made the guys that own the Unix trademark happy and slightly richer' sense. :)

Maybe Cygwin... certainly not SFU.

""""

Windows Services for Unix has been a product of Microsoft's for years. It is under the GPL and my understanding is that Microsoft has complied with the terms of that license.

""""

Umm.... Noo.....

Not that I am aware of. Unless something has changed in the past couple years since I last looked at it.

For the record: SFU allows you to run POSIX environment on the NT kernel. Unlike other systems, NT is designed from the beginning to support multiple different sort of personalities. The Win32 environment is one of them... and POSIX is another one.

Apparently, from investigating strings embedded in SFU's binaries the bulk of the code actually originated from OpenBSD. Probably choosen due to the security and cleanliness of the code. This means that most of SFU originated from the BSD license.

This, of course, is nothing new. Microsoft has always stated that it liked the BSD code. It's very nice license that doesn't require Microsoft to contribute anything back to it's contributers.. so obviously they like it. The GPL requires people to contribute their changes back to the 'community' so Microsoft doesn't like that. Pretty simple stuff here to understand.

The BSD usage of Microsoft can be traced back to the original TCP/IP stacks it introduced into it's early Windows versions when the Internet came and gave them a nice reality check that was about as pleasant as getting hit them in the back of the head with a gigantic wet eel. Of course the port was shit and so was the stability of the OSes that used it... but whatever.

Are you confusing SFU with Cygwin?

Cygwin is, indeed, a GPL'd POSIX-like environment. It's provided by Redhat under the GPL that provides a Linux environment on top of the Win32 environment. So that has a quite a bit different approach to the same end.

Either one is quite nice, although I prefer the GNU environment for it's superior tools and usability over a hacked up BSD one.

Then there is other tools like Xming that provides X Windows compatibility for Windows and all that happy horseshit.

All in all with a small amount of effort Windows XP can be turned into a actually nice little Unix OS.

Of course it's still a shit Unix environment compared to Linux or OS X... but people tend to make the best with what they have and either tool provides a nice way to get the Unix tools and Unix source code compatibility without the Linux hardware headaches.

history is hilarity.

Oh. And the Xenix reference above is hilarious.

Ya sure. Most people don't know this but Microsoft got it's start as a Unix company, not a DOS company.

Microsoft purchased some Unix licenses and used that to produce Xenix for the x86 platform. They sold licenses to different folks and most of them ended up powering the POS (Point Of Sale) terminals that were popular among the Pizza Hut and BlockBuster sorts.

Microsoft hired the SCO folks to hack on Xenix for them.

Of course that is SCO as in 'Santa Cruz Operations', which sold most their software to Caldera Linux folks and created a split-off company developing Java web app environments that got purchased by Sun Microsystems which then got purchased by Oracle. It was the "Caldera Linux"-turned-"SCO Group" that ended up being the huge assholes after they were stomped into the ground by IBM.

So ya.. the success of Unix as a powerhouse OS can be pretty much traced to the BSD originated TCP/IP protocol stack and other Unix improvements that people took from BSD. As thanks the Unix folks then turned around (At that time it was Novell that owned that shit) and sued the BSD folks for making them all rich.

I guess Microsoft benefits from that heritage also.

Go Open Source! And remember folks.. the BSD license is _always_ better then the GPL because IT IS MORE FREE!!!!!!

Open source closes gap on Microsoft's next Silverlight

Silverlight crap > Flash shit

Meguel is Meguel. He likes the stuff from Microsoft and he is a big fan of the stuff they do right. He is also a lover of Open Source/Free software and all that. His first move in his carreer was to apply for a position in the Internet Explorer development staff. Tried to convince them to open it, even. But couldn't get the visa to program in the USA.

So combine those two features (love of open source and admiration of Microsoft) and you get things like Gnome and Mono.

Which isn't bad. Gnome, dispite all the KDE fanbois's objections, is the standard Linux desktop environment. It's the most stable one and provides the most advantages to both software open source developers and proprietary ISVs. It provides the most usable desktop and is the simpliest for new users to use.

Mono is fine also. I prefer to have a combination of Python and C, were appropriate, but whatever. It's personal taste.

All the MS hate isn't doing anybody's any favors. They are not satan incarnate nor are they any worse then Adobe, Apple, Oracle, or any other company that makes almost all their money off of proprietary software. If you have any doubts who is the bigger asshole google for "apple sues". For every one Microsoft sues lawsuit you'll find at least 3 for Apple.

In the case of Silverlight it's a open format and documented. Microsoft encourages Moonlight, even going as far as to license codecs for Moonlight users to use.

Meanwhile Adobe flash is still proprietary shit with a 2 half-working open source attempts at compatibility.

If given a choice between Adobe's closed source undocumented crap and Microsoft's documented crap with a decent open source version.. I'll take silverlight every time.

Windows 7’s XP Mode — Virtually worth the effort

XP Mode. Been there. Done that. Microsoft is catching up to 4 years ago.

> The VM machine is firewalled off the the network. Virueses can not penetrate

> directly to it through common cracks and vulnerabilities.

Virus writers (the ones that actually do the writing, not the script kiddies that use them) are quite a bit more sophisticated then your typical application writers.

They already have their Windows 7 ports ready to go. So, yeah, targetting the VM is a waste of time. It'll be much more effective and easier to target Windows 7 directly.

Plus it does not sound like the XP VM will be standard on all Windows 7. It'll be a OEM option or whatever, which means it'll cost more or be only avialable for certain machines. So, again, trying to go after XP in a VM is silly since it'll be limiting the potential targets.

----------------------------------

> An OS with virtualization built in is a nonentity? Really?

*shrug*. It's nothing special.

Mac users have been happy using Parrellels for a long time now. It's not part of the OS, but they were the first ones to really use desktop oriented VMs in a very large manner. Sure there was Vmware, but that was mostly for developers and such. Parrellels on Mac concentrated on desktop integration.

Every single Linux distribution shipping today has built-in virtualization technology that is much more sophisticated then any sort of Virtual PC happy crap. The kernel-level virtualization that Linux supports effectively turns the Linux kernel into a hypervisor. It's performance and feature set rivals any other full-virtualization solution out there... Xen, ESX, or Hyper-V.

Actually with Hyper-V vs KVM I'd say that KVM is superior. For example it has the ability to do live migrations between machines (which is something that Microsoft says isn't really something customers want, which is complete horseshit). It can also migrate between IA64 and AMD64 machines, which is something that nobody else can do.

It'll be displacing Xen as the premier Linux VM solution pretty soon. For example Redhat is using KVM for the basis of the virtualization features that are going to be shipping with Redhat 5.4.

The only serious thing lacking is easy desktop integration, which is why Sun Microsystem's Virtualbox is more popular among the Ubuntu crowd.

------------

For my 'XP mode' on my Fedora desktop I use Virt-Manager to manage the hardware, samba, and remote desktop, for the integration. Rdesktop supports remote desktop protocol 5. Sound works. Copy-n-paste works, etc.

I don't allow the XP VM to access my real desktop folder, althoug obviously I could if I wanted to. But I care about security, so instead I share out a couple folders form the XP installation which get automatically mounted to folders on my desktop.

The CPU performance is very close to native. The Disk I/O is still using emulated hardware so the performance is average and would be on par with Virtual PC. The network performance is using paravirt drivers so that it's fast enough to comfortably running a full resolution XP desktop at full colors.

Youtube works even, as does any music. Plays, looks, and sounds fine. Hulu videos cause it to choke a bit, unfortunately.

But that is 'ok'. The native 64bit flash for Linux works fine. Bugs are mostly gone with recent versions.

Windows XP Mode: Certify like you mean it

Looks like Microsoft finally took a lesson from IBM.

Ha. XP mode. That's cute.

I've had "XP mode" for a couple years now on my desktop. Running Linux, of course. And native applications are, indeed, better. I also have "OS X Mode", "FreeBSD Mode", "Vista Mode", "OpenBSD Mode", and "Debian Mode". A mode for every mood.

KVM on Fedora kicks-ass.

Will Oracle kill MySQL? Who cares?

GPL is a problem for some. That is what made MySQL profitable, silly

The problem is that they were probably hoping to make money from their software.

Apparently the only way some people can figure out to make money is by using copyright law to restrict supply and then profit from any potential demand. Works for Oracle, Works for Microsoft.

GPL precludes that approach.

But......

What happenned to MySQL is the same thing that happens to any Open Source project that Sun has control over. Sun gets all stuck up, pisses off people that want to work for them, for free, and drives them away from contributing to said project.

Then they go and throw a few 'real' engineers at the problem and then releases some substandard peice of shit. The MySQL 5.1 release immediately put people on edge.... The 5.4 isn't helping anybody.

That is why you have things like Drizzle, MariaDB, and OurDelta. That sort of thing is a response to Sun's governance of MySQL. I mean you didn't have those forks and branches before Sun took over and MySQL was actually profitable and produced decent enough software.

The same thing is happenned with OpenOffice.org. Sun Microsystems refuses to accept fixes, patches, improvements, and other things becuase.. fuck if I know. They just don't work well with others.

That is why you have things like Go-OO.org. Thats generally the actual OpenOffice that Linux distributions ship. With that you have performance improvements, better document compatibility, better VBA script compatibility, and lots of other improvements, bug fixes, and features.

I have a feeling that Oracle may get some very bad Sun flu pretty soon...

Windows 7 and the Linux lesson

(Untitted)

""""

"However, Windows 7 was finished ages ago. Yes, we had the beta in October - but since then very little in the build appears to have changed. We've had performance improvements and bug fixes, but Microsoft's been on the triage fast track, to the alarm of some early testers."

Ok lets break this down shall we?

Win7 being finished? yeah doubtful seeing as its a damn beta. Beta means just that unless you forgot the definition.

"""""

Ya.. first you have the Alpha, then the Beta, then the Gamma, Delta, Then for a ways later you have the Nu release (this confuses a lot of people), then the Xi, and a few releases later then you have the Pi, Phi, and later on the Psi. Finally you have the Omega.

What does that get you then.. you loop right around to Alpha and you get:

Microsoft 7 Alpha and the Omega: DESTROYER OF WORLDS!!!

""""

"Yet the evidence speaks for itself."

Can I see this "evidence" you speak of? Oh right, YOU DONT WORK FOR MICROSOFT. Moving on

""""

Ha. He can probably use ThePirateBay.com's search function as well as anybody else. Try it some time. As the people at work say: "Software is the free shit that I run on my computer"

""""

Wouldnt you "construct" fancy packaging (ignoring the SKU pricing since that is irrelevant here" to catch the eye of those who are looking for something? Guess you dont care about making a profit eh? And as for the endless meetings you know this how? Oh right its a guess.

""""

My guess is that, yes, he doesn't care about turning a profit on Windows 7. He probably cares more about having usable software released on time and writing sarcastic remarks about companies you can't. After all he does write for the Reg.

I don't really the logic here though. How is Microsoft releasing their software in SKU's going to make him any money? I suppose stranger things have happenned.. like Microsoft convincing people that Windows 7 can run on a netbook.

""""

Commodity? Tell me how much of a commodity it is when EVERY GAMER uses it? What about Businesses? And pretty much everyone of the other 88% that use it? Explain how its a commodity please.

""""

Main Entry:

com·mod·i·ty Listen to the pronunciation of commodity

Pronunciation:

\kə-ˈmä-də-tē\

Function:

noun

1: an economic good: as a: a product of agriculture or mining b: an article of commerce especially when delivered for shipment <commodities futures> c: a mass-produced unspecialized product <commodity chemicals> <commodity memory chips>

2 a: something useful or valued <that valuable commodity patience> ; also : thing, entity b: convenience, advantage

3 obsolete : quantity, lot

4: a good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (as brand name) other than price

5: one that is subject to ready exchange or exploitation within a market <stars as individuals and as commodities of the film industry — Film Quarterly>

Hrm. Mass produced unspecialized product... A good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins... (as in profit margins per unit)..

Ya Windows is not a commodity at all since everybody uses it.

""""

As for IBM's Eclipse, you have firm numbers of how many jumped on board? Whats that? Maybe 1 million? Ok then I guess that most of the worlds population there then.

""""

What is a firm number, exactly? Is that opposite of a warbly number? Is '1 million' a firm number or a sort of watery, squishy one?

How many people use Visual Studio then... The Worlds Population - 1 million Eclipse users? What is that... about 5 billion people (give or take a million)?

Probably that is a sort of soft number with downy insides that have been kinda urinated on by a kitty in one corner by accident, but is still quite comfortable as long as you point your feet towards that end.

Windows: 7 Billion Served.