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youtube.com - Best Buy employee, Danielle Kelly, sings her way into holiday campaign.
85 Comments
- Subduction, on 06/16/2009, -4/+106Well, my Mom has been holding off on Linux until now, but once she hears about the improvements to fsync and caching for networked file systems I think she'll dump Windows for good.
- 3242130193, on 06/16/2009, -0/+31Hot. If she thinks that's good, I'm sure that she'll have a blast the first time she installs Gentoo from source.
- JohnFlux, on 06/16/2009, -3/+27Actually the fsync thing is something that could affect people like your mum.
Consider: Your mum is using Gnome or KDE then shuts down. At the moment that KDE is shutting down (and writing out its configuration files) your mum cuts off the power.
Next time the computer is booted, Gnome/KDE has lost all of the configuration settings! Clearly this is something that is very user-visible. This is what the whole fsync argument is about.
(This is because of the way Gnome and KDE write out configuration files. They create a new file then rename it over the top of the old file. They rely on an implicit assumption that the rename will happen after the data is written to disk. This assumption is not actually guaranteed by POSIX, but was adhered to by ext3. However dropping the assumption can lead to speed increases. Hence the debate) - Culyt, on 06/16/2009, -5/+29That was a bug that only affected some specific badly manufactured laptop drives.
It was dealt with ages ago as shown in that link, the one that is from from 3 years ago.
Go pedal your FUD somewhere else. - pingveno, on 06/16/2009, -2/+23Like the Digg servers?
- Tenoq, on 06/16/2009, -1/+21No mention of the working Intel GMA drivers? Personally, I think that's the main advantage of 2.6.30 - you can actually watch Flash again. :p
- LostSoul83, on 06/16/2009, -2/+21When are they going to implement the "protected video path" or "product activation"?
I am so jealous of all my friends who run software which was designed to be defective. - SteveMax, on 06/16/2009, -1/+19Thank God I can legally watch DVDs that I buy at the store on my Linux system. Actually, thank the Brazilian legislation, which is surprisingly more sane on this aspect than its US counterpart.
If it was illegal in your country to drive fuel economic cars, would you blame the economic cars or your legislators? - Culyt, on 06/16/2009, -2/+20Just like your post.
- thecheatah, on 06/16/2009, -6/+22I say its time to celebrate! whats up with all this negativity?
- eraccusa, on 06/16/2009, -0/+14I'll treat this like you are asking a serious question. Our servers with a Linux kernel get updated for kernel releases when the kernel release has a significant improvement that affects server performance positively. Or when the maintainers of a distribution on a sever stops supporting the current distribution release installed. Since we use a distribution's package management to manage updates the latter is necessary. New distribution releases usually have a new kernel. So, the kernel on a server my company manages will be updated at least once every 18 months or 3 years, depending on what is installed on it.
- PsychoBrat, on 06/16/2009, -2/+15You certainly do have a good point there. It *is* a problem that the law is structured such that it is impossible (in many jurisdictions) for free software to legally provide DVD playback.
- Hellahulla, on 06/16/2009, -1/+14Oh yeah, your mum loves a good fsync.
- int19h, on 06/16/2009, -0/+11Where do you have your data from? There are a lot of embedded, server and desktop computer systems in the world, how do you know not most of them are running Linux? Do you have any reliable sources or are you just making this up?
- AdmiralAcbar, on 06/16/2009, -2/+13Are you aware of what a server is?
- JohnFlux, on 06/16/2009, -0/+11Your mum doesn't. That way she needs a hard fsck every day.
- TDDebug, on 06/16/2009, -6/+16These are some nice improvements, I must say.
- LostSoul83, on 06/16/2009, -1/+10Yes, I regularly tell people that this country has a hidden agenda against FOSS because they conspire to stop users from watching their legally purchased DVDs with trustworthy software. I also stopped buying DVDs years ago, because I don't want to fund the conspirators.
BTW the protected video path has to do with Blu-Ray and not standard DVD. - PsychoBrat, on 06/16/2009, -0/+7Item 2 was about general changes that affect (almost) all filesystems, with some concrete examples of what those general changes mean for specific filesystems and end-user applications.
Item 3 was about changes specific only to ext4, which are notable on their own because ext4 is relatively new.
Item 5 was about FS-Cache.
That said, I'm not trying to defend the article -- I agree that he didn't make the organisation of the article very clear at all.
The ext4 and Btrfs developers are not in competition; indeed some developers have contributed patches to both projects. Sure, Btrfs most certainly will be an important part of the "future of Linux", as you say, but it will not be ready for mainstream use for a while. That's where ext4 comes in: to help us get by until then. - theaceoffire, on 06/16/2009, -1/+8I love how your name is an advertisement.
- javaroast, on 06/16/2009, -1/+8Protected video path is another way to say I can't legally record the TV shows I want to record.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9943631-7.html - tomjowitt, on 06/16/2009, -0/+6I ssh'd into your mum and grepped her docs.
- kojot350, on 06/16/2009, -1/+7Works for me...
- pingveno, on 06/16/2009, -3/+9Then don't.
- Subduction, on 06/16/2009, -0/+6Oh for heaven's sake young man, wash your mouth out with SOAP.
- GoldenChaos, on 06/16/2009, -2/+7Wow. I enjoy spreading Linux, but if anybody wiped my harddrive, installed a new OS and migrated my data without my consent, I would kick the living ***** out of them.
And then, yeah, I'd never call them again. - FluffyArmada, on 06/16/2009, -0/+5Who the hell uses Gentoo binaries? Anything past a stage3 file and you're not really using Gentoo! The wasted hours are a FEATURE! :D
[ I miss stage1/2 being officially supported... but those don't really matter anyways. Unless you're doing something really weird. ] - 3242130193, on 06/16/2009, -3/+8Of COURSE. Come on, their name is WESTERN Digital. Since when has anything Western been better made than something Japanese? Don't you guys read about CARS??!!?
couldnt help meself... - dizam, on 06/16/2009, -1/+6I created a dual boot partition on my cousin's laptop, as an emergency "gotta update facebook" option. She used it and a couple of times, and didn't liked it. Most end users find even the smallest change annoying.
- kanningt, on 06/16/2009, -6/+11linux ftw
- Paranoidmarvin, on 06/16/2009, -0/+5Indeed, Intel drivers have been pretty screwed since 2.6.28. I understand that a lot of things have changed in the video stack... GEM, UXA etc, so things have been a little bad.
But using 2.6.30 and the latest Intel drivers from GIT, I am really getting the performance that GEM and UXA promised from the start! - PsychoBrat, on 06/17/2009, -0/+5LostSoul83: Granted, the "protected video path"-DVD connection was wrong.
However, CSS on DVDs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Scramble_Syst ... is almost as bad in this context. It's still illegal to use free software to work around this in many jurisdictions, as the CSS license requires that royalties are paid for every device that implements it. - loginfliggle, on 08/09/2009, -0/+5I feel bad that I can only digg you up once.
- alexgdorman, on 06/16/2009, -3/+8http://lmgtfy.com/?q=linux+news
- HigherLogic, on 06/16/2009, -2/+6Came up fine in Opera 9.6 *shrug*
- warp99, on 06/21/2009, -1/+5"you would think Microsoft is genius being able to nail it 95% of the time!"
No it's the manufacturers of network cards hitting it for Microsoft 100% of the time by providing the correct drivers. It's easy to look good when you have someone else doing the actual work. - mspiegle, on 06/16/2009, -1/+5So with FS-Cache, can I use an SSD drive to help speedup the access times of the magnetic-based RAID5 volume on my workstation? Sure seems quite a bit cheaper than building a RAID5 volume out of SSDs.
- d0brii, on 06/16/2009, -1/+4You abs ppl are obsessed with masturbation,
- wwwluckyro, on 06/16/2009, -0/+3Be the cool dude?
- pokobunt, on 06/17/2009, -1/+4The 80's called, they want their complaint back.
A lot of distro's worked out of the box for me, Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, Fedora, Mandriva, etc. - knobbysideup, on 06/17/2009, -1/+4spend $20 on a decent wifi card (intel) instead of the broadcom crap that has to be wrapped. Hell, I can even run kismet the same time I'm actually using the wireless network on the laptop I just bought.
- Culyt, on 06/16/2009, -2/+4I think something more people will care about is the speed and I/O speed improvements.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article& ... (from RC7 not final)
Anyone have any idea on how much faster the boot time is? - shrewduser, on 07/03/2009, -0/+2old dos games work in dosbox (which is on linux) better than they do on windows. so that's covered.
as for windows games that have no native linux version, there's wine, which is great for some things not so great for others. - FKnight, on 06/16/2009, -4/+6Another way to say "protected video path" is "being able to legally watch DVDs that I buy at the store on a computer."
- 3242130193, on 06/16/2009, -2/+5Isn't 3 a subset of 2? In any case, I disagree with most of 3 anyways. The future of Linux desktops (servers, not so much) is btrfs. And if I'm to wait until Debian Squeeze adopts 2.6.30, welllllll.....
5 is a part of 2 too. Maybe 2 was just too broad. - shrewduser, on 07/03/2009, -0/+2it was kind of fun when digg was a tech news site, now it's just full of people who whine at news they deem unworthy, and don't realise they can simply filter out linux news.
- MicrosoftBob, on 06/16/2009, -1/+3*peddle
- bigsteve, on 06/30/2009, -0/+2I'll never understand the people who complain about tech news on a tech news site...
- Bowie, on 07/02/2009, -0/+1"Step by step, Linux keeps getting better".
1999 called. They want to know what Linux's desktop marketshare is.
I love Linux, too.. don't get me wrong, but...Here's the problem:
The one thing, the one easilly addressable thing that's keeping Linux from going mainstream is KDE and GNOME's decade-long addiction to imitating other desktops, primarily Windows. Going back to the very beginnings of each of these desktops, their primary goal has been to closely imitate the look and feel of a craptastic design that everyone essentially hates, but must get used to---Windows. So, what's the result? People now have the choice between a commercial desktop that sucks and fails, versus a free desktop that tries to suck, and fails. People don't want to use Windows, let alone a cheap-looking knockoff. Hence, no interest in the platform. Great kernel, craptastic desktop.
Disagree with me? I dare you to go find screenshots of every version of GNOME and KDE that ever came out, and compare them side to side to what Microsoft was *already* offering at the time. At every turn, both projects, rather than simply stop and ask themselves whether or not certain features were a good idea or not, simply imitated what Microsoft was doing. Every year, every release, it's obvious to any outside observer interested in Linux as a platform that it's a cheap, pitiful knock-off of something they already know they don't like. You and I are literate enough to make the distinction between the kernel and the desktop. Joe Consumer isn't, and Joe Consumer doesn't care. He just wants to see funny videos on the web and send email.
We're 10 years in, with no meaningful change in market share. As far as i'm concerned, both GNOME and KDE failed, and should be left to history. It's time to move on to other offerings, or begin a new project that aims to provide the user with usefulness and functionality without constantly trying to imitate what is, by nearly everyone's evaluation, a GUI layout and functional design bordering on inexcusable.
For me, right now, that's OS X. It's Unix, and it's beautiful. It does not suck. It does not fail.
Lets hope the next Linux desktop effort, whatever it is, can put OS X to shame by looking sharper, working better, and running faster. -
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