From brutal experience I can attest to the fact that most people on Slashdot, save myself, are not that smart. ;)

GC

A few things:

1) the yarchive.net article makes assertions about how some of the advantages "have no basis in fact" but provides no proof. So this article fails miserably as any sort of counterexample. Additionally, it's from 1998... hardware is much more powerful now.

2) The real world tech article by Linus is interesting, but I'm not sure I would consider Linus unbiased in this case.

Choose your counterexamples better, my friend. ;)

GC

I think the fact that Andrew Tanenbaum riduculed Linux in 1993 for being an "outdated architecture", when Minix just got paging working last year after 20 years of development, encapsulates my point completely.

I understood your argument up to this point, but then you had to resort to a "he didn't add this to minix until 20 years after it was started, so he must suck" argument which, in spite of it being dressed up in technical language is another "argument against the man" (i.e. Ad Hominem) attack against someone who has spoke out against Linux.

It's easy to find fault in the person making the argument. What's harder is to argue the actual point. Part of the issue with microkernels is that, yes, they are, typically, quite slow... but that's not what I was referring to. More specifically I was referring to the translators which run in userspace on HURD. This is a powerful capability which Linux doesn't have. It illustrates a fundamental element of design which is something that HURD can leverage in the future.

Personally, if it's all about technical superiority, I think we should all be using Plan9 OS.... but that's just me. ;)

But you also have to remember.... the machines they were judging Mach and other microkernels on at the time were not very powerful. Today's machines are orders of magnitude faster. I believe that such an architecture would have no problems on todays hardware.

GC

Some guy from GNUStep is calling Slashdot irrelevant? Glass houses, my good sir.

Wow... Ad Hominem much? And if you don't know what that means, perhaps you should dig out a latin textbook someplace and learn something.

But you see, you've proven my point here. You reject GNUstep because it's not GNOME or C++ or something else you're used to. You reject it just because it's the thing to do. Because the herd does it. You do this to HURD in the same manner.

What I'm asking the community to do is to take a step back from all of this sycophantic bullsh*t and take a critical look at itself. What good has this exclusionary attitude had for the open source community? None. The only good it has done is to force many, potentially good, projects into non-existence.

GC

This posting illustrates something very interesting: Why slashdot is irrelevant.

Any community that becomes so ingrained in the belief that it is superior is bound for failure. Because once you start believing no one can be better than you, you start to become complacent. The architecture on which HURD is based is technically superior to Linux. Whether this technical superiority translates to superiority in the marketplace is another issue entirely.

In my opinion the slashdot community consists of a lot of wannabes and not a whole lot of doers. Instead of criticizing and making fun of projects which are new or different why don't you embrace them and welcome them? This is one of the reasons I think the open source community has stagnated in recent years.

GC

I believe that the USPTO should be fined when patents are declared invalid. Who those fines should be paid to is another matter. I also believe that the examiner who reviewed the patent should, at the very least, get a mark on his or her record to indicate any patters within the organization with regard to issuing poor patents.

I do not believe in software patents. They are, fundamentally, wrong and indefensible. Every other country in the world has rejected them except for the United States. What I mentioned above, however, would remove the cavalier attitude of the USPTO with respect to issuing patents of poor quality. It would make them think twice about the novelty of an idea and would make them be VERY sure that the patent covers something worthy of patentability.

Software patents need to be struck down in general.

GC

All Linus did was write a kernel and all of the things that the article credits him with inventing, were already part of the free software landscape prior to his posting to the minix group.

How do I know? BECAUSE I WAS THERE. I remember the posting on the minix group and I remember the first versions of Linux being passed around University of Maryland when I was going there. This so called "Open Innovation" is an emergent property of Free Software. So, please, get your facts straight, and stop your hero worship.

GC

Science is based on self-correction. No fact in science is taken on faith or considered to be sacred.

That being said there are certain constants in science whose origin have not been discovered, but they have been measured, one example is Planck's constant another is the acceleration of gravity. Even these, however, are subject to constant study as to why these values are what they are. Indeed, even the nature of gravity is understood while it's effects are very well understood the origin of gravity is not known.

All of these things and many more are evidence that, while we don't know everything, there is no reason to think that anything is outside of the realm of understanding. Science is always seeking answers... always improving itself.

By contrast, faith encourages blindly accepting things without proof and also doesn't seek to self correct and asks a person to accept things as gospel without question. Examples of faith are religions which simply ask you to accept myths, such as creationism, and that there is some all knowing sky-father who, for some reason, created us all and suddenly just left and decided never to show himself for the ensuing two thousand years. All of which flies in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary. Faith would have you ignore the evidence and simply accept what you're told like a good little sheep.

So, there is a stark contrast between faith and science. Faith doesn't self correct and expects blind acceptance. Science, constantly questions itself, self corrects and expects to be questioned constantly from every angle to disprove it's theories in order to improve them. Based on the observable fact that there are completely opposite things, they assertion that they are in any way the same thing is completely wrong.

Clear enough??

Yours, GC

More like from the "We don't really want you watching and we're not really open and want to make it more difficult for you to monitor unecessary government spending department."

GC

OO is just another tool for programmers to use. It is by no means a panacea. I agree that it should be taught AFTER a class in functional programming and, perhaps, even after the student learns about how the computer actually works (assembler, computer architecture).

GC

"Time flies like the wind, fruit flies like a banana." -- Groucho Marx

This is a classic example of context which a machine would fail to get. :)

I would like to see an automated engine figure that one out.

GC

He's refusing to break other architectures so that a fix for ARM can go in? Umm... okay.. it sounds to me like the fix was probably not up to snuff.

It sounds to me that to fix the problem rather than forking would be much easier. Right now I'm forced to wonder if the fork breaks other things. I'm also now concerned about possible incompatibilities with my project. I suppose since it's ABI compatible there should be no problem, but I've heard promises like that before. Only time will tell.

Why exactly is he being crucified for this and, also... why is he being taken massively out of context on slashdot?

GC

We'll make our own, we don't need your patent licenses or your code, thanks.

Good luck licensing something which has already been made obsolete by so many other formats. mp3 is a thing of the past.

There are other players and encoders which you threatened action over in the past so, what's changed? Now you want to release the source AND be able to sue people for using it without a license? Ummm... I don't think so.

Thanks, but no thanks. GC

I love how some people from other countries try to stuff all Americans into one category and say "All Americans are like this or that." We're not, we're all different.

The fact of the matter is that too many people feel like the Government should take care of thier kids for them so that they can go on living thier care-free lives. This is bullshit and nonsense.

GC

By watching what they do when they get home with it. And by the teachers watching.

The only other alternative is that there will then be an "arms race" to lock down the machines and, believe me, some kids know the machines MUCH better than their "teachers."

The schools will start pushing for better controls, kids will get expelled or suspended for putting certain programs on thier system and so on and so on and so on.... YAY for the public school system.

Full disclosure: I have two kids myself, so I'm not just throwing this opinion out there without having a stake in it. :)

GC