Re: Amazon used lisp & C exclusively?

goose wrote:
Ironically, the "breakage" in windows could be easily papered
over with soft links.

OK. I'm not sure what breakage you think would be fixed that way.

Tim's reply hit it right on the head. "they are a very useful and quite powerful tool which allows
you to easily change the behavior/configuration of a system without
needing to change what software is installed." They're a configuration technique. Windows has always had a good configuration subsystem, so most software takes advantage of that rather than needing symlinks.

windows loses this point.

Yep. On the other hand, Linux lacks alternate data streams, reparse points, and a global configuration mechanism that's widely used. Me, I've never found a use for symbolic links that wasn't better served by having a proper configuration system, and I've been using Unix since before it had sockets.

Out of curiousity, what do you use symlinks for that putting the name of the file in a configuration wouldn't do better?

You *actually* thought that "Run as" is the same as "setuid"?
"Run as" is the same as "sudo", perhaps.

Yes. But you can configure it to work on a program. Not exactly the same thing, but similar. You start the program, it's running with someone else's privleges. The "setuid" bit is stored in a place separate from the actual executable, is all.

This actually proves my point that windows users don't realise
that their system lacks many basic things.

As does Linux, when seen from the POV of a Windows programmer.

For all your questions, "man chattr".
This usually goes over most windows users heads too.

Nah. I knew about it. I don't know what all the privs it supports are, off the top of my head. But I'll note a couple things: that subsystem is relatively new, and lots of software doesn't support it.

[re sticky]
You missed this as well;

I don't know what the "this" is that you think I missed. There are at least four uses for "sticky":

1) Keep shared text in swap when not running. Unnecessary under Windows.

2) Keep shared text in memory (Tim's claim, which I never saw in my experience). Probably not supported, but why would you want to do this manually?

3) Write thru directly to device, bypassing block buffering. Windows controls this at the device level rather than the file level. Again, why would you want to control this manually. IIRC, you can control this when you open the file, rather than by setting it on a permission flag.

4) Creator/Owner privlege, which has been in Windows since at least Win3.

Which of these did I "miss"? Serious question. I'm trying to learn. :-)

I'm certain you can write it, but as of now you don't have it.

Never missed it. Just as I expect you've never missed the global distributed transaction coordinator or the transaction queue.

Always a performance gain removing a gui.

Errr, why? We invented virtual memory quite some time ago. I don't see why it's a performance gain to remove a GUI that isn't being updated. Why is it any more of a performance drain than a USB driver with nothing plugged in, or a service listening on a port and not getting packets?

10.Can windows be useful without a gui? Will all the system
programs on a gui-less server still work?
Not all. Nor will the GUI programs on an X machine. So?
You missed this as well (see Tims reply).

But I don't administer machines without using the GUI. I either log in remotely and use the GUI tools, or I use the GUI tools locally and connect remotely to do configurations on Windows servers.

Whups, you mean "themes", I mean "window manager"?
I take this as "no" if so.

No. It comes with two window managers, and you can buy more if you want. You know, the executable that starts up when you log in? That thing. It comes with explorer and progman. If you write embedded Windows software (like for kiosks, say), you can buy ones that are much more limited.

Thats odd, windows installation wipes out my boot sector without
letting me keep it;

Depends on which "boot sector" you mean.

Here's what I did. Install Windows on part1. Install Linux on part2. In Linux,
dd if=/dev/hdb of=linux.bin bs=512 count=1 ; # If I recall exactly
Then I copied linux.bin to my Windows partition (going thru a FAT partition on the way.) Then in boot.ini, I put
C:\Linux.bin="Fedora Linux"
as one of the lines. Now I can boot into Windows, the recovery console, or Linux.

If you managed to put the Linux MBR on there by mistake, use fixmbr to put the Windows MBR back.

You know, you could find this out too, by googling. :-) It would look much smarter than sounding incredulous. ;-)

rest of the world? Your windows installation keeps your boot sector
intact?

Yes. All it wipes out is the MBR. But if you want to "boot linux from windows", it's kind of necessary to have the MBR boot windows, isn't it?

Do you have to setup the bootloader on windows
*after* it hoses your boot block? Thats a little, well, useless.

There are two boot blocks used during any boot. Windows overwrites one.

Yes, marked "experimental". Does Windows write to any of the
filesystems I listed above even though they all have their source
available?

I dunno. I never needed to do such a thing. However, since I did the google for you, maybe you should look into it.

Ironic that NTFS is closed source but linux will attempt
to write, while ext2/3, etc are open source but windows can't
read it, never mind write to it.

Um, didn't I give you a link to the code that lets Windows read ext2/3?

Why would you think you can't talk to other file systems from Windows?
My XP won't.

Well, follow that link. There's all kinds of things that neither Windows nor Linux do if you don't install the software. :-)

Nope, clean install of ubuntu can handle almost any office
file, while a clean install of windows can handle TXT or RTF.

That would be incorrect (in that second part). And when you start getting *interesting* office files, it gets messy.

16. Reading PDF files?

Yes. So?


17. Creating PDf files?

Yes. So?



Now I'm curious; after installing XP I could neither
read nor write PDF without first installing more
software.

Right. You asked if Windows needed more attention before it could read PDF. The answer is "Yes, it does."

All my "no" answers mean "windows does this out of the box".

18. Firewalling a network (and NATing my LAN)?

No. (It's called Windows Connection Sharing.)

I think you're being a bit facile when you claim that a Linux box can
NAT and firewall your LAN "without further attention".

My firewall/NAT machine sitting behind the 33600 modem
here has been running error free for years; One maintenance
task in 3 years (or longer) was because the hard drive
finally gave in.

And the NAT/firewall machine needed no further attention after installing Linux, at all, right? As in, you didn't need to configure the NAT and the firewall? :-)

You simply mean
that the required executables are there. It's certainly not ready to go.

Er. On my machine it was.

Cool. How'd it know whether it was supposed to be a NAT or firewall or a desktop machine?

Nope, it's simply adding text to a file, like typing an email.

Yeah, I can imagine. :-)

Less time than on windows for all of them (because the packages you
need
are either all there installed (SuSe) or on one of the disks that came
with
the package you bought or would run under wine).

Excellent! What package besides GNU Money does double-entry bookkeeping and US tax preparation? Because GNU Money doesn't do either of those, last I checked a couple months ago.

Games; sure I can't run games I want on Linux, but all this
does is equate Windows with nintendo.

I was always amused when people would tell me my Amiga is "just a game machine". I got to answer "Oh, you mean a real-time 3D physics simulation engine?"

My point was that the list is much longer for windows than
for linux.

Sure. A Linux distro comes with more software on the disk, while with Windows you have to download what you want.

Just because you cannot do it does not mean that the
task is without need.

Well, I'm serious, tho. There are some things that the OS can "optimize". Is Tux using the same kernel and device drivers? If so, I don't really see the "optimization" benefits.

Sure you can't drive a car across a lake, that was just to illustrate
that if your "task" is not envisaged by microsoft, then you
will not be able to it (why I mentioned tux).

Sure. And for a great number of things, to do it with Linux you'd have to do a lot of work yourself. But they're computers, so you can make them do what you want.

26. Create finely-tuned fast-loading OS so that drivers
don't have to be loaded at bootup (built in drivers).

I believe so.

I'd like to know how, seeing as how you don't have the
source (or linkable object files) to create a custom kernel.

But because of that, the customization possibilities are exposed without you having to dork with the kernel. If you mean "put drivers in the same physical file as the kernel is in for a desktop or server install", that's a corner case that if you're worried about, don't use Windows. On the other hand, the Windows kernel is spread over a whole bunch of different files already, so why would you?

Certainly in cases where it matters, like Windows CE, you can select which drivers you get.

Thats true; although if you (although I believe it was KT)
are going to bemoan the fact that Linux users spending
time meddling with their kernel and having a ball is wasting
time, then you are going to have to acknowledge that windows
tends to need more maintenance in this area than anything
else.

The difference is that with Linux, the smart people fiddle. With Windows, the dumb people fiddle and the smart people have to fix it.;-)

Not really, Grandmothers use Ubuntu (You know, I'm sure
about the spelling) without getting drive-by downloads. Windows
gets infected without downloading and running anything.

Not lately. And I expect that if lots of grandmothers use ubuntu, lots more would get infected.

So you spend no time installing the OS after the system
gets hosed? You just copy files over and they run without
any OS?

No. I put the CD in, I let it run a couple minutes until it says "would you like to do a full unattended restore?" I type "Y".

Just like you do.

Well, in most Linux installations its generally sufficient to store
md5 checksums of system binaries offsite and compare
once a day (all automated of course). This is literally a
20 line script scheduled to run once a day (midnight?).

Why would you think this would be harder with Windows? This is already built in for system files.

and I wouldn't try to write ASP.NET code with Linux.

Well, .NET runs reasonably well under Linux so I can't think
of why ASP.NET won't.

But I'm not just running it. I'm writing it, debugging it, etc. MS's dev env is orders of magnitude better than anything I've seen on Linux.

My point is, if your system is missing something,
how will you know that you are missing something?

Yeah. But I think the same is true of Linux advocates.

--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
This octopus isn't tasty. Too many
tentacles, not enough chops.
.

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