[rescue] This Just In: HP to buy Compaq

[Mike Meredith]

On Wednesday 05 September 2001 20:17, you wrote:
> Linux has definitely risen to prominence in the server arena before
> its time. 

Eh? I have used, am using, and will use linux on servers in a 
production environment. It's as stable as I can expect on x86 hardware. 
I certainly wouldn't replace any of my larger Sun or Compaq Alpha boxes 
with linux, but there's still plenty of places it will go and function 
perfectly well --- better than NT.

> you see to it, it's easy to believe for an end-user that Linux is the
> end-all be-all of operating systems.

There is of course no be-all/end-all o/s, although possibly Genera 
comes close :)

<snip lots of probably legit linux criticism>
> Many Linux 'fans' over the years have touted the speed of the ext2
> filesystem versus ones like FFS or UFS. ext2 gets its speed because
> it performs asynchronous writes and NO CONSISTENCY CHECKING except at
> fsck time. With the inclusion of XFS, this situation is getting
> better.

Or ReiserFS and ext3.

In practice, ext2 is very slow at fscking but I haven't lost any data 
because of the unsafe practices, and I have been using it since 1993.

> In my estimation, the virus-like attachment of
> GPL code (even in a seperate library) to whatever code uses it, no
> matter what the license, is not freedom. It's enslavement. Again,
> that is just my opinion.

I believe that LGPL libraries are safe to use without "infecting" your 
own code, although I'm hardly a lawyer.