Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 30th Mar 2010 22:32 UTC, submitted by aaronb
It's time for bed over here, but before I turn in with a nice cup of tea and a Gilmore Girls episode, we've got some good news for you: SCO has been dealt yet another major blow in its baseless lawsuit against Novell. A jury has ruled that Novell owns the UNIX copyrights - not SCO.
Thread beginning with comment 416202
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-11
And finally, you talk about quality in your OS then go on to discuss BSD desktops, well my experience has taught me that a key quality desktop OSs should have is ease to build and maintain. The ports method on FreeBSD (as much as I loved it for the server) wasn't a patch on pacman (Arch) or apt-get (Debian) in terms of ease and speed of delivery. Sure, you might enjoy tinkering, but most desktop users don't.
pkg_add has existed on FreeBSD for many, many, many years. There's even a pkg_upgrade that can be used on binary-package-only systems (no ports tree installed). And the major ports managements tools (portmaster, portupgrade, portmanager) all include support for binary package upgrades.
Member since:2007-03-26
pkg_add has existed on FreeBSD for many, many, many years. There's even a pkg_upgrade that can be used on binary-package-only systems (no ports tree installed). And the major ports managements tools (portmaster, portupgrade, portmanager) all include support for binary package upgrades.
Good point. I'd forgotten about the binary package managers.
The other points still stand though. As good as FreeBSD is and as much as I liked it myself, it's not the jack of all trades and as such there are occasions where Linux is the sane solution over FreeBSD.
And I don't mean in an elitist or Linux-fanboy way either as I run a variety of platforms, many of which are non-Linux *nix.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 17:04 UTC
"But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.More News »
Sponsored Links
Member since:
2007-03-26
That depends on the distribution
As opposed to a lack of drivers on other platforms?
ALSA and PulseAudio are desktop tools and on the whole Linux is a better desktop OS than BSD or Solaris.
If we're talking about desktop systems then the base system should be transparent to users - which, for the most part, it is on desktop distros (eg Ubuntu). In fact, the very reason I dislike Ubuntu is because I wanted to play with the base system.
However, if we're talking about server systems, then why even mention ALSA / Pulseaudio as I'm struggling to think of any enterprise solutions that would require a soundcard let alone a sane sound driver model.
Furthermore, while BSD can make a perfectly adequate desktop OS (I've had FreeBSD as a working desktop as well as dedicated a file server), Solaris (read vanilla Solaris, NOT OpenSolaris) does not.
And finally, you talk about quality in your OS then go on to discuss BSD desktops, well my experience has taught me that a key quality desktop OSs should have is ease to build and maintain. The ports method on FreeBSD (as much as I loved it for the server) wasn't a patch on pacman (Arch) or apt-get (Debian) in terms of ease and speed of delivery. Sure, you might enjoy tinkering, but most desktop users don't.