HN user
Nice article, but somewhat incomplete. He misses many fonts (like Lucida Console, Envy Code R, Anonymous, Redhat's excellent Liberation Mono,Pragmata and a whole lot of others), he doesn't explain the font differences other than noting which he likes more, like serif/sanserif, hinting quality, character set coverage (Greek? Cyrillic?) etc.
http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01wqp4nKoOn6pk9kHd2tGNlA==...
Thanks for this.
Nice setup. I've got a similar one on a server: Each daemon runs on it's own jail. Each jail is created from a cloned ZFS "base" jail filesystem, so it doesn't take any additional space (except each jail's installed packages), plus there are all the nice ZFS goodies (snapshots etc). There is one package-building jail. Every http request is served from a jail running varnish, which serves as a caching front-end to all the other http daemons in each jail.
What exactly do you mean by "debug mode"? FreeBSD has some standard debugging features during development (-current) and beta stages like WITNESS etc, but those have been disabled for 8-RC1 and later.
I liked this article, especially for the last known picture of RMS when he was shaved, and (more seriously) Stallman's quote at the end. This sums it all up quite well in my opinion.
I've given a quick shot to the previous release. Hammer seems stable, after some days of moderate use. It has nice features too, but it requires a "pruner/reblocker" cron job once in a while that might impact performance on a busy machine.
I'm more curious as to how the latest release scales to multiple processors, given the additional MPSAFE advances they made.
Indeed. Especially the serif fonts look awful to me on cleartype. I use Safari for this reason alone.
Here's my humble opinion too. I'm not a designer, but I hope some points might help.
* Make the front page simpler in content, richer in design/graphics:
In the front page, I'd put WHAT exactly is tarsnap (few words, like "Tarsnap is an online backup service for UNIX operating systems with emphasis on security" and avoid the "probably will compile" stuff, and WHY should someone use it instead of other products/solutions, in a few words. Drop the "start now" box and make a nice button instead that says "Start now with $5" or something simple like that.
Make a simple logo in GIMP, there are hundreds of tutorials for this.
Avoid listing the pricing in the front page, but make sure it is accessible from a nice viewable button. Use normal units, not "picodollars".
* Use a sans font. Serifs are nice, but seem "oldish" and are not the best fonts to describe a new product.
* I'd use blue and shades of grey as the dominant colors. Grey speaks "solid". I'd use other colors such as yellow,red etc. to achieve contrast to the buttons that might interest the visitor (pricing,documentation,legal etc)
Each stable version of Debian is maintained for one year after the release of the next. Unless this policy changes, this means that the next releases will be supported for a minimum of three years. If the releases were yearly, as you wish, there would be only two years of security support, which would hurt precisely those users that want long term support and use Debian stable.
Looks like a nice decision, however I also feel that Debian's problem is the huge freeze of thousands of packages, making the 'stable' ('stale' is better for some) distribution out of date quickly while adding a large burden to it's developers and maintainers. This blog post by the author of Ion window manager sums it all up better than I could:
Every once in a while that a similar license discussion emerges, I see a clear pattern:
Many,many people do not understand the GPL.
In my opinion, this is the major drawback of the GPL: It's complexity. I've read it a dozen of times and still I'm not sure about some corner cases.
This leads to
a) Programmers who are not willing to use it and prefer a much simpler license, such as BSD.
b) To people spreading misinformation about the GPL that already worsens this situation.
Yes, this is an amazing roguelike. My favorite one. Too bad it's sequel (Jade) is still vaporware...
I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned the Amstrad CPC. I got one when I was 11. Here in Europe this machine had amazing market penetration those days (80's-early 90's), especially the 6128 model that featured a double-sided 360 Kb diskette (wow!) Simply amazing.
Since one can easily find comparisons, benchmarks, gotchas etc ( you can always start here: http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/MySQL_vs_PostgreSQL ) the one thing that made me decide in favor of PostgreSQL is this (quoting a blogger):
MySQL is an open-source PRODUCT (and can be bought as such). Postgres is an open-source PROJECT (and can't be bought, and will be around as long as there is a sizable developer pool).
http://www.jiaozhoujob.com/newsprint-995.html
EDIT: PostgreSQL also seems to take support very seriously. Their latest security advisory has a patch back to version 7.4, which was released in November 2003.
Unfortunately, here in Greece the situation is so ugly that not even those warnings have any change of convincing people to upgrade. I can imagine most of them simply closing the window. Among the reasons for this is that we've got a huge pirated windows xp installation base, uneducated users that ignore anything non-microsoftic and think that taking the ECDL makes you a computer scientist, and there is a large amount of amazingly badly written IE-only web apps. Open source is much less known here than in other countries. Our only hope is for people to upgrade to Vista, in order to receive IE7 automatically (hey, did I just say that?)
The FreeBSD people are rigorously testing LLVM, with the goal to replace GCC as soon as possible (for the base system only). At the moment, the base system compiles and runs for some architectures, as noted in http://wiki.freebsd.org/BuildingFreeBSDWithClang#head-afded4...
For those who want this functionality but use a version of Python older than 2.6, there is a backport of this module:
Interesting. Another nice choice for serving static content is rumored to be thttpd. It lacks any kind of FastCGI support though (it's in the proprietary,premium version). Has anyone had any experiences of thttpd versus nginx?
Yes, this latest trend is pure craziness. Here is a relevant wikipedia article:
Note that the bzip2 implementation he uses is 7zip's; the classic unix implementation does not make use of multiple cores. But, there is also pbzip2, which supposedly uses all available cores:
Although at it's current state it is probably useless, it's impressive considering it's a one man project.
When FreeBSD was released, at 27 Feb 2008, Kris Kennaway posted a nice slideshow that includes some PostgreSQL and MySQL benchmarks:
http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/7.0%20Preview.pdf
Database-wise, they should be still considered recent. PostgreSQL features impressive scaling there.
Probably you've heard those words from many others as well, but what about spending money for annoying, non-hackerish stuff like
* Building a complete, final product with appropriate documentation, feature matrix etc.
* Building a nice and informative web page describing your product, it's features, your offerings, it's advantages/disadvantages etc.
(...or maybe you already have plans for all those after you finish beta-testing.)
If you are going to use it interactively, I strongly suggest you insist in using IPython. Try to read the nice manual first in order to get yourself familiar. It offers autocompletion via the tab key, you can easily execute shell commands, change directories etc.
This should give a nice boost in the already awesome job FreeBSD's developers have done profiling the kernel in the 7.x and 8 branches.
Note that DTrace on FreeBSD can only be used for kernel-space probing, for the time being. Userland probing is expected in a future release.
A valuable resource comparing major scm's that I point people to when they ask me is the FreeBSD project's wiki page: http://wiki.freebsd.org/VersionControl Hope it helps. Regarding specifically SVN versus GIT, be sure to look at the VCSWhy link at the bottom.
Just when we were contemplating the loss of our beloved linux hater...comes this one. Let's give the guy a warm welcome, shall we? ;-)
It's not so simple. For example, if I remember correctly,git lacks a way to checkout and work on a small subset of a development tree, as it tracks whole trees at a time. This feature is something that svn and cvs offered long ago. To do that with git you have to break the tree into small sub-trees, as the X.org guys have done. This may be considered as a drawback for some people.
For more information on why git was not chosen instead of svn for FreeBSD you can look at http://wiki.freebsd.org/VCSWhy
Again, each vc has it's uses, and nothing is merely a 'subset' of another.
Each version control model has it's own merits and drawbacks, and there will always be situations where one is good and another isn't. For example, while many OSS projects have switched to distributed vc's such as git and mercurial, two of the largest oss projects still remain loyal to Subversion, FreeBSD and KDE. If you search their mailing list archives, you will see that after long thought, both projects decided that the Subversion model reflects better their development style. So, no, git is not simply "better" than subversion, it just reflects a different development methodology.
I just love the new Microsoft Consolas font that comes bundled in Windows Vista. "Pragmata" is also a very nice and professional font that is a bit expensive though, and misses support for many languages other than english. For me, the definitive feature that distinguishes a simple monospaced font from a font adequate for programming is the slashed (or dotted) zero that separates it clearly from capital "O".