GNU Hurd To Develop SATA, USB, Audio Support 274
An anonymous reader writes "Hurd, the GNU micro-kernel project that was founded by Richard Stallman in 1983, may finally be catching up with Linux on the desktop... Plans were shared by its developers to finally bring in some modern functionality by working on support for Serial ATA drives, USB support, and sound cards. There are also ambitions to provide x86-64 CPU architecture support. GNU Hurd developers will be doing an unofficial Debian GNU/Hurd 'Wheezy' release this year but they hope for the Debian 'Jessie' release their micro-kernel in Debian will make it as part of some official CDs."
Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
Finally, 2013 is the year of Hurd on the desktop!
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GNU/Slow down, first we need the year of GNU/Hurd on any GNU/hardware from this GNU/century...
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Re:Finally! (Score:4, Funny)
Absurd (Score:4, Insightful)
Its fucking absurd that USB support and sound cards and SATA support is news in an operating system today.
Re:Absurd (Score:5, Insightful)
Any user oriented system in development (as HURD clearly is) has to add support for USB, sound cards and SATA at some point. That is no reason for ridicule. ... "very" ... slowly. That may or may not be a reason for ridicule, depending on your character.
This particular project does development in an openly visible way, so you can see the daily progress. That is still no reason for ridicule.
This particular project progresses
Re:Absurd (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but "some point" is usually fairly promptly. HURD has been in development for decades. USB has been out for over a decade. SATA has been out for about 8 years?
They can't expect people to support/develop/test it if it won't run on anything.
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They can't expect people to support/develop/test it if it won't run on anything.
Perhaps they should pick a virtual machine runner (e.g. VirtualBox) and make sure the emulated hardware it presents is well-supported by hurd, and then get back to doing microkernel R&D.
Re:Absurd (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, and for a system that's been in development as long as HURD has, that point was over five years ago. The fact that they're only doing it now is very much a reason for ridicule.
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While on paper, they've been 'targeted' at the desktop, that's not been the story for a while, although that may change w/ the Windows 8 fiascos.
Are you still talking about the HURD in that sentence? That's pretty funny. Ever since Linux became a viable kernel for the GNU system, the HURD has been targeted squarely at dreamers and unemployed kernel developers.
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Re:Absurd (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking of which, why is HURD being developed on a closed platform like the x86? Yeah, the x86 spec is fully published and all that, but it's Intel's IP, while x64 is AMD's. It's not like any company that feels like it can just pick up the databook and build an x86 compatible CPU - they would be running afoul of Intel's patents. And isn't GNU about 'protecting our freedoms', and shouldn't anyone w/ the money and resources be able to just take any databook and build a CPU compatible w/ the rest?
So instead of creating one more OS for the already crowded market, why doesn't HURD use OpenRISC as the basis for its design? The hardware design for OpenRISC 1200 was released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), while the models and firmware were released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). So this sounds just perfect for building a complete libre system. Please don't tell me that the problem is w/ Verilog itself not being a GPLed software. Maybe the GNU guys can write something like GVerilog so that hardware simulations will be Libre.
The other option - develop it on the Lemote computers that use the Loongson CPU, which RMS finds satisfactorily 'free'. Then further development of HURD can be done by the Chinese, maybe even the People's Liberation Army of Programmers (PLAP) and endorsed by the Beijing regime, and will be the official OS of all Chinese. HURD will then become the #1 OS in the world
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Any user oriented system in development (as HURD clearly is) has to add support for USB, sound cards and SATA at some point.
Yes, and that "point" came about a decade ago.
That is no reason for ridicule.
Sure it is. If ANY other OS was just now adding support for those things, they would be laughed right off of Slashdot.
Re:Absurd (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why should I bother? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why should I bother to use this kernel? What benefit would it give me over using just the regular Linux kernel or *BSD?
Re:Why should I bother? (Score:5, Funny)
Why should I bother to use this kernel? What benefit would it give me over using just the regular Linux kernel or *BSD?
Its name is a mutually recursive acronym!
Re:Why should I bother? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a microkernel, check Wikipedia.
Basically you will get clearly slower performance, but possibly much more reliability/stability, security, and all the benefits that go with modularity.
The point is that
a) computers will get so fast that the performance hit doesn't matter in standard programs
b) people hope to find ways of improving performance somewhat more into the direction of monolithic designs (=all the major platforms in use)
c) some application areas simply put additional stability over performance, so if we had a working microkernel... (no, Minix isn't good enough)
For now, best take it as a research project.
Re:Why should I bother? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Microkernels have progressed a lot since Mach 3, but HURD is, from what I understand, still based on Mach 3. OS-X is based on Mach 3, but it is not a microkernel design in that things that are normally in the kernel in monolithic OSs, such as device drivers, are still built into the kernel. There has been a lot of advances in microkernels, but after trying 3 of them, GNU reverted to Mach 3.0 just b'cos development on those alternatives had frozen. But like I mentioned above, they could have tried Minix 3
Re:Why should I bother? (Score:4, Informative)
In a microkernel the device driver would be running as a lower priority process communicating with the rest of the operating system via message passing. Rather than running in the same CPU ring level of protection and potentially crashing the OS when you have a driver bug.
That word doesn't mean what you think it means (Score:3)
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OS X has a hybrid micro kernel, that mostly powers a desktop platform (true server implementations exist). I did a year's worth of research on kernel-level memory allocation in the context of real-time systems, and OS X's kernel design surprisingly came out head and shoulders above Linux and (not surprisingly) Win32 and in many scenarios, better than specialized kernels such as VxWorks.
Unfortunately I never had a chance to extend my research to QNX, which has a true microkernel. But microkernel performance
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Just to get things straight:
XNU (the Darwin kernel) utilises modules and message passing (signals), which is indeed a feature first pioneered in microkernels (by design). The current WinNT kernels do the same, and also call themselves "hybrid". Linux is almost there with modules and IPC signals.
All of this is, starting from a monolithic approach, 3% of the distance towards a microkernel (the 3% is arbitrarily thrown out, but you get the point: they are basically monolithic), and calling them "hybrid" is jus
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I think I'm going to go with the documentation on XNU and the guy who just did a year of research on kernel memory allocation over some 7 digit Slashdot weirdo whose only reasoning is "marketing fluff".
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Because their programs are so slow to begin with, they can't handle any slowdown. /snarky
Really, who cares? (Score:2, Insightful)
I think Poor Richard has lived in an ivory tower far too long. Ideals are laudable, but the world moves on and reality trumps pedantry every time. Bill Gates didn't get to be, well, Bill Gates - by trumpeting Basic and DOS until people started saying, "Who?" He cut corners and compromised and, ahem, borrowed good ideas. It made him a gazillion dollars. And Richard, for all I agree with your ideals, and for better or worse, Bill Gates influenced the course of development of the personal computer more th
Re:Really, who cares? (Score:5, Funny)
But hey, he may get lauded by Tanenbaum for staying with a microkernel design.
freedom and respect (Score:2, Insightful)
mr reizel: if you've ever sat down and thought out a set of principles, then decided to stick to them no matter what happens, then you will understand. forget that it's about "software freedom" for a moment: just sit down and think, "have i ever actually come up with some principles, and am i prepared to dedicate my life to those principles and ethics"?
if the answer is "no" then for fuck's sake please stop criticising people who *have* decided that their principles are more important to them than any amoun
Re:freedom and respect (Score:4, Funny)
back to the story: one of the individuals, a norweigan major, was then tasked to go off and "groom" any individual that he could find who had the potential to create a full "Free" operating system. the person he found: Linus Torvalds. you should be able to work out the rest of the picture.
I used to work there too. This is complete and utter hogwash. We already had operating systems 50+ years ahead of even Solaris that we got from the Aliens in return for mending their crash-landed flying-saucers.
And that was at RAF Fairford in 1980, running on a special secret version of the Motorola 68000. To this day all NATO supercomputers run this hyperkernel on a military-spec 68k emulator on the bare metal.
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O.o so let me get this straight, you're claiming that Linus is a united states military/nsa figurehead and made Linux because both organizations somehow knew. That some time over a decade after the first windows release, that it would be so easy to break into.
. . . .
Please do everyone a favor, step away from the keyboard.
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one of the individuals, a norweigan major, was then tasked to go off and "groom" any individual that he could find who had the potential to create a full "Free" operating system. the person he found: Linus Torvalds. you should be able to work out the rest of the picture.
Wut.
--
BMO
Re:Really, who cares? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd-and-linux.html [gnu.org]
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alternatives (Score:3)
mr reizel: i did a prior post covering the software freedom aspect of what you wrote, but it's just as important to recognise that the linux kernel is a one-man show, effectively. if you don't like what mr linus has to say, then tough shit.
the GNU/Hurd project is therefore a fall-back - a safety net, so to speak. unfortunately it deviates from even what FreeBSD does, in its layout and presentation at userspace level [because it uses RPC message-passing between kernel and userspace], so they've given thems
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I think Poor Richard has lived in an ivory tower far too long. Ideals are laudable, but the world moves on and reality trumps pedantry every time. Bill Gates didn't get to be, well, Bill Gates - by trumpeting Basic and DOS until people started saying, "Who?" He cut corners and compromised and, ahem, borrowed good ideas. It made him a gazillion dollars. And Richard, for all I agree with your ideals, and for better or worse, Bill Gates influenced the course of development of the personal computer more than you ever will.
Well said. I think it's about finding the right balance between academical correctness and practicality. For example the Linux kernel vows to GPL, but is also rather promiscuous regarding taking patches and new code from people.
What I also have observed lately is that at the end of the day, money makes quality software. Thus I wish also open source projects could find some kind of good funding models to accelerate their progress.
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[...] What I also have observed lately is that at the end of the day, money makes quality software. [...]
Which is why Microsoft, SAP, Adobe and other highly lucrative companies only ship perfectly stable and solidly secure software. Oh, wait! They don't.
What makes quality software is a clear-cut development process including all phases from the drawing-board to QA as equal priorities. Which for commercial software translates to spending shitloads of money and for everyone in the industry including FOSS to kicking out the amateurs and employing proper software engineering from top to bottom, left to right.
Re:Really, who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
Bill Gates didn't get to be, well, Bill Gates - by trumpeting Basic and DOS until people started saying, "Who?" He cut corners and compromised and, ahem, borrowed good ideas. It made him a gazillion dollars. And Richard, for all I agree with your ideals, and for better or worse, Bill Gates influenced the course of development of the personal computer more than you ever will.
What a shallow comparison! There are people whose main motivation does not come from how much money they can make or how much power they can gain over others. RMS's motivation does not even remotely have anything to do with Bill Gates' motives or 'comparing of penis length' type rituals such as 'Who has had most influence on PCs?'
People who are mainly motivated by power and greed tend to ridiculde and diminish the achievements of these people. But in the long run, their rantings doen't count. In two hundred years from now people will very likely still read the novels of Thomas Pynchon, but absolutely nobody will give a fuck about the iPhone 5. (Apple and Microsoft will probably not even exist any longer in 200 years. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that the free software movement will be alive and well in 200 years from now, even if it might have been outlawed by then.)
Re:Real artists ship. (Score:5, Informative)
Not only did Stallman write EMACS, but he also wrote parts of GCC, the debugger, and gmake. These are not negligible contributions.
Re:Real artists ship. (Score:5, Informative)
You'd be surprised how often Stallman's name appears in a Man page for something REALLY useful in Linux. The only reason you don't hear about more recent projects from him is because a lot of the stuff he's written follows the UNIX ideology of giving people a lot of really small tools that can be combined in unique and useful ways.
Granted none of the stuff his name appears on works outside of the terminal, but 50% of my day in Linux is spent in a terminal because I do embedded development. The guy's tools just work, which is great.
Re:Real artists ship. (Score:4, Interesting)
You'd be surprised how often Stallman's name appears in a Man page for something REALLY useful in Linux. The only reason you don't hear about more recent projects from him is because a lot of the stuff he's written follows the UNIX ideology of giving people a lot of really small tools that can be combined in unique and useful ways.
Granted none of the stuff his name appears on works outside of the terminal, but 50% of my day in Linux is spent in a terminal because I do embedded development. The guy's tools just work, which is great.
Not directly, but many of them contain bindings for running in GUI frameworks. gdb is a good example.
GCC (Score:5, Insightful)
GCC history [gnu.org]
And. of course, if it wasn't for RMS and GCC. Linus would not have been able to get a 'free' compiler for his project.
RMS is the seed of all of this. Don't knock him or his values. It is why we have a great 'free' OS (in all it's varieties) today.
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RMS coded GCC by himself - it was only later others got on board:
Let's just keep in mind that the first few versions of gcc were no gems. In fact a very bright undergraduate could have written something better. I know because several of them did. Eventually when other people joined a lot of work went into making gcc a good compiler.
Re:Real artists ship. (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
And different artists shipped different things (Score:3)
But real work happens when you start shoveling dirt. Stallman preaches benevolent communism, but he doesn't practice it.
Who shipped Emacs and GCC?
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Wow, so in this thread we have one person who personally blames RMS for Hurd being the way it is, and immediately afterwards a reply saying that RMS doesn't do any real work anyway. Which is it?
They're not mutually exclusive. If a project leader spends all his time bloviating instead of working on the project, that can explain lack of project progress. (Note: I really don't know to what extent this is the case here, just saying...)
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Wow, so in this thread we have one person who personally blames RMS for Hurd being the way it is, and immediately afterwards a reply saying that RMS doesn't do any real work anyway. Which is it?
It's both.
"Hurd, the GNU micro-kernel project that was founded by Richard Stallman in 1983
Stallman never had in any interest in doing any real work and that is, at least partially ,why Hurd is what is it.
RMS not doing work is WHY Hurd is the way it is! (Score:2)
RMS is The Man behind Hurd; it's as much a single-origin project as is Linux - and if he did as much work, and were as effective a leader/manager generally, as Linus, Hurd would probably be the bleeding-edge OS right now.
But he'd rather yell half-nonsense about Freedom Über Alles and eat his toe jam. Just sayin'.
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When the hell does he find time to do that? He spend a lot of his time answering people's emails. In fact most, I think.
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Umm, both? If Stallman actually put some work into in, Hurd would probably be a functioning OS by now.
Presuming he has the skills, of course.
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How can something that isn't there be a pile of shit? :)
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Market Share [netmarketshare.com] - MS operating systems run on over 90%+ of personal computers, OS X on about 5% and Linux on about 1%.
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What does Hurd have? It's as half-baked as it was in the 1990's, and for all practical purposes, there are better free OS on the market now. Heterogeneous OS is largely useless if no one uses the alternative, not even counting the fact that all the GNU stack that makes it GNU/Linux is still there, making the point of heterogeneousness largely moot.
However, it's the foundation that develop
What? (Score:5, Funny)
No kidding (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, the Hurd guys either need to get with it, or just quit. It is stupid to have something this completely out of date and keep pretending like it'll be relevant. No, if you want your kernel to have any chance at relevance it needs to support modern features. Yes, that means SATA, x64, and so on. None of these are new things, by any stretch of the imagination.
If they lack the resources or drive to get this kind of thing done in a timely fashion, then just let it go. There is no point to releasing a kernel 10+ years out of date (as the parent points out, SATA hit in 2003) particularly when there are plenty of options that ARE up to date.
MINIX (Score:5, Funny)
At this point, they may give Minix 3 a run for their money. Yee haw!
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Minix 3 is no longer aimed solely at education. It's now trying to become general-purpose.
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Well, Minix [minix3.org], which was previously just a teaching OS, is now one aimed at certain markets, such as embedded.
It was only with the third version, MINIX 3, and the third edition of the book, published in 2006, that the emphasis changed from teaching to a serious research and production system, especially for embedded systems.
Of course, Minix 3 is licensed under the BSD license, since Tanenbaum endorses the BSDL philosophy more than the GPL. That may have been the only reason GNU didn't use Minix 3.
Not in Debian (Score:5, Informative)
they hope for the Debian 'Jessie' release their micro-kernel in Debian will make it as part of some official CDs.
Sorry, but Hurd is being demoted to a second-class (ie, unofficial) port. The rules [debian.org] say that a port that fails to be included in two subsequent releases, gets moved to the debian-ports [debian-ports.org] ghetto, with shining neighbours like hppa (long dead) or sh4 (never has been).
In some ways, that's a pity -- like, improving other code by forcing removal of buffer overflows/asinine truncations related to PATH_MAX. In others, well, it's Hurd...
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Has Debian already decided to do that? The scenarios are different - the reason hppa is dead is that the PA RISC has been dead for years. That's different for HURD.
Also, another question - is HURD going to be somewhat portable, if not as widely ported as Linux is? Will it be there on Alwinner, Loongson & other such CPUs?
Duke Nukem is a Punk (Score:5, Funny)
It is good that Hurd is a live project regardless of how much production use it sees. It explores kernel design theory; valuable work in itself.
Still, I can't help a little ribbing.
founded by Richard Stallman in 1983,
Duke Nukem? Feh. Only took 15 years to go gold. Hurd is 30 and they just started working on sound cards.
Misguided (Score:5, Funny)
I don't believe it's wise to spend scarce resources trying to add support for every new johnny-come-lately PC technology that may or may not pan out in the end.
Instead, it would be better to keep focused squarely on how to more perfectly isolate each functional element of the kernel from the other functional elements. There's always room for improvement in abstraction and isolation of intra-kernel services. This is what the Hurd needs to take the time to make sure they get right before they start adding random features.
Re:Misguided (Score:5, Insightful)
Being able to run on a somewhat modern computer (they all come with SATA drives and USB ports nowadays - no support for those two basic technologies means your kernel just won't work on any hardware that's not totally obsolete by now), and being able to actually use all the hardware in that computer, is a fairly important feature of a useable OS, imho.
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Or you could just use Minix 3 and let it die.
use (Score:5, Interesting)
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Why does anything always have to do with practicality or use. Tinkering with new or old operating systems can be compared with learning and messing with new or old math or physics. I guess that when developing some USB drivers for hurd, you learn more than improving a given drivers for linux. The later is like reading and understanding and improving on a paper which is "well known", the former like breaking new grounds.
Because software is engineering, not science.
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Because software is engineering, not science.
Says who? Maybe some purely experimental projects (and I'm not necessarily saying Hurd is one) can be very useful too.
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HURD not founded in 1983 by RMS (Score:5, Informative)
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So instead of being 30 years old it is only 23 years old?
No disrespect.
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Hey, this is slashdot, and geeks are obsessive about details.
Someone complaining about your post because it's really 23 years, four months, and six days, in...three...two...one... :)
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By work started on the operating system, he is referring to the user-land side of things. Basically, most of the command line stuff that you interact with in an implementation of GNU/Linux. GNU is basically user-land, and Linux is kernel-land. The marriage of the two gives you the most widely used Linux desktop platform.
woot (Score:2)
HURD vs QNX (Score:5, Informative)
Re:HURD vs QNX (Score:5, Informative)
I know. QNX does a lot of things right. The company, though, is notorious for driving its customers and employees nuts. It's been sold twice, one to Harmon (car audio) and then to RIM (now Blackberry). The code went from closed source to open source to closed source to open source to closed source. During the latter part of the Harmon period, you could download the entire kernel source.
The developer community was fed up by this. During the open source periods, there were QNX builds for many major open source products, like Firebird (what Firefox was first called) and GCC. Those are no longer maintained.
The QNX kernel is only about 60K bytes on x86 platforms. All it does is message passing, CPU dispatching, memory management, and timers. There's also a built-in process called "proc", which is a few hundred K. All device drivers, file systems, and networking are in user space. One of the great things about having such a tiny kernel is that it can be fully debugged. It needs to be changed very rarely. It can be put in ROM and stay unchanged for the life of the machine. In many embedded applications, it is. If the Hurd kernel is much bigger than that, they're doing it wrong.
You can still get QNX for free [qnx.com] for non-commercial purposes. Few people do.
"I'll do it when HURD is released, mom" (Score:5, Funny)
At first, my excuse was "I'll do it when we have a black president mom", believing that we will never have a black president.
Then Obama came along, forcing me to change my line to "I'll do it when Duke Nukem Forever is released, mom".
I was sure DNF was never going to be released. Then one day, I saw the headlines: "DNF is on stores". WTF? this too, after Obama?
But now I got a 100% certain thing: "I'll do it mom, but when HURD is released!"
Come on HURD devs, do not dissapoint us. Don't you ever dare finish it!
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Because "wheezy" is the codename for the upcoming Debian release [debian.org], for all architectures, not just a specific system like the Raspberry Pi.
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Sorry, but development time is a scarce resource. We have real problems to solve.
I for one find missing support for SATA, USB and sound to be real problems.
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You draw the line as deeply as you can while still being able to make forward progress moving it downward, and accumulating popularity has some value too. Saying you shouldn't work on free software/hardware unless it achieves 100% free at every level means you'll never get anywhere. GNU tries to advance on multiple development layers when it can, but it can't completely ignore the economics of mass production.
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Re:And when will Linux on the desktop catch up? (Score:5, Funny)
Catching up to the last in the race is no achievement.
Wrong - catching up with the last in the race is a great achievement - you've just managed to bypass the rules of logic.
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Catching up to the last in the race is no achievement.
Wrong - catching up with the last in the race is a great achievement - you've just managed to bypass the rules of logic.
Or you're a whole lap ahead!