Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Mon, 29 Jul 1996 20:58:18 +0200 | From | Alessandro Suardi -- mailuser account <> | Subject | Re: This is really Ridiculous |
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Brian,
unless you have the chance to see with your own eyes the commercial OS's source code, I doubt you can tell whether your Win95 crash is due to a hardware problem, a software flaw (maybe coming from an odd mix of config options ? :) or a typo.
Anyway by now you'll probably have noticed that the Linux kernel developers (I'm not among them, I work as a tech consultant at Oracle Italy, with 4yrs hunting SunOS and Solaris bugs - remember Solaris 2.1 ? no ? lucky man ! - while working as sysadmin and DBA at my previous workplace) mostly share a view that goes:
1) Linus is THE maintainer, and he is wise enough to do the right thing all the time, whether it comes from his mind or from a bright suggestion. (Other Linux geniuses, please do not assume I am telling there's only Linus. You know who you are.)
2) Linus definitely lives 24 hours a day, though his work on the kernel may make us think he goes from 48 to 72 hours a day.
3) The 2.0 series is not yet stable, but who used 1.3.60 to 1.3.90 feels it's already great. Not enough to be put on CD and made a RedHat 4.0 or the like, granted... but the testing process is more like distributed computing than a centralized thing. Linus actually is one person, again. (BTW I had zero crashes/hangs since 2.0.0 - now at 2.0.10)
4) Linux is free. You may tell the developers you found a bug, they will even fix it; there is no reason you should get nervous for a typo. I guess who made the typo already slapped himself - we have a bunch of proud guys, IMHO.
My own 2 cents:
- You can't install Oracle on {HP-UX, AIX, Olivetti SVR4 Unix} from CD straight because the first two OS's do not fully support the file name extensions on CD (so you have to run a dumb program that takes a file containing the non-extended filenames and makes symlinks to them for a few THOUSAND files, not very fast indeed), the third (my surprise today) does not even support iso9660 fs, you need to install software that comes separately from the OS. Ask about Linux.
- I benchmarked gawk 2.15.6 against HP-UX 10.01 awk a few weeks ago on a testcase that produced 60MB output: HP-UX awk ran at ~40000 records/minute, gawk at ~62500. What now.
I could go on, but I already said a lot. Oh, I share the developers' view, in case you doubted.
--alessandro
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