This confusion is both astonishing, given the length of time GNU has been around. Yet it is also understandable, for many there's a missing distinction between GNU vs Linux project vs FreeBSD etc etc. The GNU operating system website explains the distinction pretty clearly on its home page.
> I often wonder why Microsoft doesn't just bite the bullet and adopt Linux as the kernel for Windows
What is to gain? It's not like the Windows kernel is bad or useless. You'd have to redo the Windows API on top of a kernel that works very differently. Any gains here are marginal and there's a lot of cost involved.
It's not like the Windows kernel is bad or useless.
The NT kernel is pretty darn good, so long as it's not polluted with things that don't belong in it. It shares a lot of heritage with the VAX kernel. A lot of the same people worked on both. If you don't molest it, the NT kernel can (and does) run ultra high reliability things like RAID arrays.
RAID is not very reliable. Here is an example that I tried the other day in MD RAID 1. I made a 2-disk array, zeroed it, wrote a sector of garbage at 1MB into one disk directly, cleared caches, ran a scrub and did not see any warning about the inconsistency. It relies on the drive firmware to verify the low level formatting parity, so things like misdirected writes (which my writing garbage was meant to simulate) go undetected. There are plenty of other problems too, but that is just one example. Anyway, at scale, you can count on RAID to be unreliable. If you want something reliable, use ZFS.
> I often wonder why Microsoft doesn't just bite the bullet and adopt Linux as the kernel for Windows.
What does the Linux kernel offer them to merit the pain of doing that?
Also, why the Linux kernel in specific instead of adopting any of the other kernels intended to provide a UNIX environment such as XNU, FreeBSD's kernel, Illumos' kernel, etcetera?
They have the technology to switch in the form of drawbridge. Whether they have sufficient incentive to do that or that one option is more desireable than another is another story.
>I often wonder why Microsoft doesn't just bite the bullet and adopt Linux as the kernel for Windows.
Linux doesn't have the massive data collection apparatus that Windows 10 does. If they released an OS with the Linux kernel + NSA, there would be no reason to use it over some other Linux distro.
Microsoft makes a lot of money from selling and analyzing your data. The main purpose of Windows at this point is the data collection tools.
This got downvoted, but aside from the snarky remark, it is a good point that Windows' main profit these days is probably data collection - or at least it's heading that way.
It got downvoted because it's blatantly untrue, as is your comment. Windows' profit comes from licenses, same as it always did - the W10 upgrade was free for personal copies, but business users still pay, as do people who buy a new computer. The idea that Microsoft is making a big chunk of its money through data selling is baloney.
So you're saying they gather all that personal data for... no reason whatsoever? There have been so many threads on HN about Windows 10's privacy invasive settings, and here I'm being told they do no such thing?
Well how do you know it's baloney if you can't trust Microsoft? If they aren't selling it then I'm sure they're just handing it over to the NSA and god knows what other world governments, which is even worse.
It's just a matter of time until there's a massive data breach/leak and all of Microsoft customer data is on public display.
+1. I highly recommend Ha-Joon-Chang's books, I've learned a lot about economics from him. He puts forward a strong argument that economic policy must be flexible, and shift with evolving times and technological changes. In other words, he's highly critical of ideologies, like f global free markets, or trickle down economics.
..or that for some individuals, those who suffer bipolar (such as myself) or clinical depression, there's a biological factor that has little relation to past circumstances.
I think it's generalization to say that it doesn't apply to those who are clinically depressed. I know many (previously) clinically depressed people who it definitely does apply to.
Hi, founder here. My question, I guess, is "why is that a bad thing?"
Visual Studio (and particularly, Visual Basic that preceded it) succeeded in opening up the ability to make useful programs to a huge population. As an industry, we've let the complexity of the web overwhelm us since then - but with Anvil, we're trying to do something similar by lowering the barrier to making useful web apps.
The test command has certain rules depending on the number of arguments.
The most pertinent rule is:
For one argument, the expression is true if, and only if, the argument is not null.
In this case
[ -n $var ]
is the same as
test -n $var
$var is not quoted, so when this command is run, word splitting occurs and therefore $var is null. Which there falls into the one argument rule above.
I wonder if the frat house culture, the opulent office, the drink up debauchery and the "holacracy" may create a delusional sense of grandiosity that permeates from the company level to the employee? Just a thought.
