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You're right about CPUs.

I should've said that vectorization paths are not used very much, if at all. Because of the work put into validation, you'll see in the literature that only recently have people publishing public codes been trying out SSE and the like.

AFAIK, you need to jump through hoops to get gcc to do automatic vectorization. (For example.) I think it will be a while before it's included into the "-O#" optimizations that physicists are comfortable with.

Once you're done getting an education, I'd like for you to explain how "M$" allegedly sabotaged ACPI on Linux. You pointed to an eight-year old email from Bill Gates that, if anything, proves Microsoft did not do anything to impact the implementation of ACPI in Linux. Seriously, just in case your FSF distortion field is turned up too high, that's exactly what you are proving by linking to that email. You have ACPI in Linux. It might be as broken as it is on Windows, but you have it. You realize that, yes? God, please tell me you realize that?

• DSDT's are buggy (go figure)
  
• The common method for fixing a broken DSDT is to patch it after the machine has booted via some driver
  

I'm guessing you don't own a laptop, or you would have discovered that your experiment contradicts your explanation. I've managed to hibernate on windows, restart the laptop, boot into linux and hibernate that, with no ill effects. Whatever state windows recorded has to have been blown away by that. Primarily because hibernate is also known as "suspend to disk". Suspend to RAM though, is another story. The "good" news is that as of Vista business edition, Linux has caught up with Windows on that front. Video fails to restore after resume for me on Vista about 50 percent of the time.

But suspend to ram has a spec in ACPI. It does have to set a few registers, so that ACPI knows where to run code from on the warm restart. mjg59 has a nice article detailing the specifics of suspend and Linux, and the common culprits (video cards).

You and other slashdot posters can keep saying that, but that doesn't make it true.

Here is one, on the ASF video file format: http://www.advogato.org/article/101.html

Jef Raskin, creator of Macintosh and Canon Cat (the latter embodied his instant-on ideal), also complained about the time it takes a computer to start up.

Startup times have not changed in several decades. Here are some data points I collected a while ago:

AST boasts that "on a 4.77 MHz 8088 [MINIX] booted in maybe 5 seconds".

Data point. AMD K6-2/500 (bogomips : 989.18), 256MB, Gentoo 2004.1, kernel 2.6.5-gentoo-r1 boots in 39 seconds[1] (/etc/runlevels/default/ = apache domainname local mysql named net.eth0 netmount squid sshd syslog-ng vixie-cron)

Data point. G4/dual 1.25GHz, 768MB, MacOS 10.2.6: 33 seconds[2]

Data point. G4/350, 576MB, MacOS 10.3.3: 32.5 seconds[2]

Data point. P4 Celeron 2.4GHz (bogomips : 4734.97), 512MB, Gentoo 2004.1, kernel 2.6.5: 27.5 seconds[1] (/etc/runlevels/default/ = domainname local mysql named net.eth0 netmount sshd syslog-ng vixie-cron).

Data point. NeXTstation Turbo 68040 33MHz: 55.5 seconds[3]

1. from confirming Grub screen to login
2. from Apple logo to login
3. from NEXTSTEP boot to login

Gah. No way to do footnote references in mod_virgule? entities don't work, <sup> doesn't work...

Ah, aside from the fact that they'd be utterly clobbered. It's very much a nuclear option. Once you strip out the immense amount of total bullshit in the article describing what Microsoft was doing, you will see (on this page, that he recieved a vague call from someone in Microsoft, apparently working on their programming team, (not, note, their legal team) and decided to alter his software based upon the percieved threat of threat of legal action.

You can hardly argue that's Microsoft flexing their legal muscles. That would be about as threatening as the guy who cleans the floors at Harvard telling a student that if he cheats on his paper, Academic Affairs is going to expel him.

Now, there may be OTHER times when they have done so, but that's not one of them.

They do NOT have a history of aggressively suing patent infringers. In fact, they've started promising that they WILL NOT do this

They're Microsoft - they don't need to actually sue patent infringers. They just need to ask them to stop - most organisations don't want a legal fight with MS. Especially if they're just some guy writing an open source application (the example I linked to seems to be a really good case of MS behaving like a jerk for no particularly good reason).

SPF is not actually the silver bullet you think it is.

The whole point is that Windows doesn't know it's formatted as another filesystem. It doesn't know any filesystems other than FAT/FAT32/NTFS. All it sees is a partition in no known format, and assumes it is just random unformatted bits. It isn't Windows' fault that you didn't check your partition table (always, always triple check that before formatting drives!!!).

Note If you deleted and created a new System partition, but you are installing Windows XP on a different partition, you will be prompted to select a file system for both the System and startup partitions.

I didn't modify the partition table during Windows XP installation, so this KB article is not relevant. What I did was try to install to an existing system with an unformatted NTFS partition as part of the following layout:

...umm, slashdot's lameness filter won't let me post it here, so I've updated the advogato post. It's the actual fdisk layout you would need to reproduce this problem.

If you choose to format 2 different partitions without paying attention, how is that MS's fault?

If they had asked me that question twice, I would indeed have been suspicious. But as I recall (and this is reproducible; if you distrust my memory, you're welcome to try it yourself), it only asked once, and it didn't give me any clue what partition it was talking about. Certainly nothing said "would you like to format as NTFS this existing partition you have marked as ext3?"

It's nothing new really. When I used to install Win98 as an afterthought alongside a Linux distro, I could be sure the lilo mbr would be trashed, and I made sure I had a boot floppy handy to boot back into linux and reinstall lilo.

Consider yourself lucky. When I installed Windows XP alongside Linux, it trashed my entire hard drive. That was the last time I ever installed Windows. The system simply can not be trusted. I use Linux and OS X exclusively now.

Artificial Intelligence is coming a lot sooner than 2020.

The Singularity Timetable predicts True AI in 2006; an AI landrush in 2007; human-level AI by 2008; and Superintelligent AI by 2012.

AI has been solved in both theory for neuroscience and software for robots.

A theory of artificial intelligence has been implemented in Forth for robots and in JavaScript for tutorial artificial intelligence.

AI in Forth is free, open-source artificial intelligence for robots.

JavaScript for Artificial Intelligence describes how even a simple language like JavaScript is ideal for instructional artificial intelligence tutorials.

The Joint Stewardship of Earth will be in effect long before the year 2020.

Turing Store Books tells you all about the very most important writings by human beings about the coming artificial intelligence.

Mind.html in JavaScript has an enormous installed user base and can no longer be stopped from engendering a global AI Mind by 2020 if not sooner.

A great game is a game that you keep playing no matter how old it
is. Think chess and go vs monopoly. Yeah monopoly was kind of
popular and a lot of people played it. Many people that I know
who played monopoly didn't like chess or go. But it was
displaced by other board games. I think they play hive these
days. But still, student cafés in universities are still filled
with chess and go players.

A great game is a game that you have a hard time not to play. No
way that someone has to struggle not to play unreal tournament or
x-wings vs tie fighter. Those game died and no matter how you
liked playing them, the fact that you don't play anymore must
lead you to put then with monopoly in the good-but-dead games.
Contrast this with Nethack. A game that will hook
phds no matter how hold it is. The addiction to nethack is
really bad. I need deliberate effort not to continue my current
game and I know that if I do I'll spend at least one straight
night on it. Yes it happened that I played a game until I got
dizzy by the lack of food but nethack is the only one that I keep
playing. I wonder why we keep seeing those top-xx lists, they
are always filled with crap. They probably put random games in
there just to shock people so they'll submit to /. If your pick
doesn't stand the test of time, its probably not that great.

In fairness, this is also true of all decentralized identifier schemes, OpenID and XRI included. I don't know how it would be possible to both keep the system open and limit the creation of accounts. Some reputation schemes, such as the one Raph Levien developed and deployed over at Advogato, are pretty effective at addressing the attack you describe; reputation only counts if that reputation is contributed by someone who is already trusted. However, I don't know of anyone who has figure out how to scale that up to a system of millions of identifiers distributed across a large number of sites.

(Some problems are hard.)

True AI would engage your mind on the deeper meaning of Tic-Tac-Toe.

AI has been solved.

Technological Singularity is near.

specifically, don't use it for 'comprehensive' projects, involving many programming teams and/or a hundred tables.
don't even consider using MySQL 5 for at least another four years, for such projects, until it matures - and by that time, PostgreSQL, an already mature product that has had Views, Triggers etc. right from the start, will have had even more rigorous testing.

see http://advogato.org/article/894.html for details.

Roozbeh is the one who got me thinking about this, about how this fun worldwide code contest is marred by a no thank you to those countries on their hands and knees to the US elite. On the news you'd think all Iranians are screaming bloodythirsty people in the dark ages, these restrictions help people forget that there are normal hackers like anyone like Roozbeh, I guess they want to dehumanize and alienate us from Iranians so it will be easier to go to war with them. I guess with policies like this, the US government is trying to keep Iranians in the dark ages. Then there's Cuba, the only country in Latin America not on its hands and knees to the US (although Venezuela has not been so over the last few years either). I'm not religious but it reminds me of Daniel 3:4-6 "To you it is commanded, O people, nations, and languages, that at what time ye hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of music, ye fall down and worship the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar the king hath set up: and whoso falleth not down and worshippeth shall the same hour be cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace."

Just yesterday I read someone's planet.debian.org post linking to the manifesto of Sovereign Computing. I suspect there will be a bigger market-space when groups like me and a few friends buy a server or two between us.

Advogato readers will know the true shame is that opendarwin is closing and not gnu-darwin.

"The idea of RDF is applicable to much more than public innerweb content. I've spent the last 7 months researching and developing an RDF backed system for my company's core products."

You've resolved the trust issue by limiting it's domain. e.g. intranet.* BTW there are ways of getting semantics from content that are "clever".e.g. making it a game.

*The advogato trust metric may be a way of resolving the issue.

Well I don't know if it's a load of crap. A quick search turns up a couple cases: Blizzard v. BNETD and Mattel sued the makers of cphack (over some kind of censorship software).

This how-to implies that reverse engineering "for purposes of interoperability" is legal in many places, but that's just one reason people reverse engineer stuff. With legal limits on what and when you can reverse engineer products, it's definitely possible to be sued for it. And successfully sued if you're violating the law (whether or not you agree with the law).

wrong attitude. absolutely the wrong attitude.

it's still possible to program properly in PHP - by ignoring the inlining aspect,
and doing the programming in "pure" php and then doing templating manually, using
for example HTMLTMPL.

aspects of zope also blow goats. dtml and ZPT/TAL are just as shit as PHP - and
just as shit as mod_python's PSP.

why? because ALL of these things allow "inlining" of code - intermingling of
code and HTML.

and that's just piss-poor programming and a complete nightmare to understand.

the trouble is that because you CAN do it, people WILL do it.

web pages should be static or they should be templated. anything else is asking
for trouble.

more on this at http://advogato.org/article/882.html.

True.

DRM is going to cost them their majority market share. The more they make things suck, the less people will want to use them. WMP 10 is an indicator of where things are going. Check out this satisfied customer's opinion of it:

Then Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) started harassing me and asking to connect to the internet to check for licenses where none had been needed before. The worst part of this "upgrade" is how it poisoned the whole system and crippled Media Player Classic too.

How much more can they make things suck? Firewalls you can't configure, entire volumes encrypted and media players that don't play. What do they have to offer?

Who's going to buy this shit?

Things have never looked better for free software.

Sun won't release their implementation of J2SE, assuming that's what you mean, under an open source license any time soon. See http://www.advogato.org/person/robilad/diary.html? start=86 for a list of reasons why that is not going to happen.

cheers,
dalibor topic

It sounds from the article like it doesn't lose data. The complaining users are saying things like this:

"This isn't a minor glitch, but a major problem. Barring erasing my drive and reinstalling OS X, I am stuck with an Apple laptop that only runs Windows," wrote a user. "I don't want solutions that entail using the command line. I would like something from Apple saying that they recognize the problem and are working on it."

There's no data loss here. He can restore the system using the commandline but won't because he refuses to learn. He shouldn't be using beta software.

Your college definition of beta is oversimplified, anyway:

• Betas are released to a wider audience than alphas. The purpose is to find problems. If no one released a beta until they were absolutely confident there's no data loss, then no one would ever release a beta.
• Sadly, some vendors release production versions of software which does destroy entire partitions. I'm still mad about Windows destroying my Linux partition. There's a known bug here. In fact, my situation was different than described, and Windows still destroyed my Linux partition!

http://www.advogato.org/person/mentifex/ has the latest Mentifex AI news.

AI Has Been Solved -- with a Theory of Mind (TOM) that is 1) extremely difficult for anyone but multidisciplinary experts to understand; and 2) all but impossible to implement in AI Mind software before we have massively parallel (maspar) computing hardware.

The Mentifex Theory of Mind is the long-awaited "solution to (the problem of) AI." Stand by for software solutions, and fall not prey to Singularity Scams.

Perhaps they were thinking about ASF? Microsoft patents ASF media file format, stops reverse engineering Is there anything to stop MS from patenting the avi format now? What would happen to software that had already been written that used the avi format, if MS did patent the avi format now?

As a defendant, of course, there are many MS has had to defend themself against; DRM, video, et cetera.

You should use a distributed trust metric system like Advogato. This allows you to develop a hierarchical system for rating peers in a community.

To reply to myself. Since I wrote this piece I did some research and found this VERY interesting article and basically sum up everything I had in mind:

I will just post the beginning of the article. A MUST READ:

http://www.advogato.org/article/860.html

So, a while back (August 2003), I wrote in my diary about a paradigm for system innovation that I wanted here. Then in October 2003, Intel announced its codename vanderpool project which got me excited to see it going in at the hardware level, which is where it should be IMNSHO, here.

Well, it's two years later, and Intel (and AMD's) "VT" virtualization technologies will be upon us in Q1/Q2 of 2006. I am so stoked, but it's the Apple + Intel pairing that gets me really excited, here's why:

First off I guess I should rewind for those who didn't read my old articles... and explain what "VT" is. VT is basically the current public name for Intel's Vanderpool and AMD's Pacifica technologies. It's a hardware level virtualization layer for x86/AMD64/emt64 processors. In essence this is like VMWare or VPC at the hardware level. Used in conjunction with Xen or VMware as a hypervisor most likely, you will be able to run several OS's straight from hardware simultaneously.

Now, to be fair, Xen & VMWare ESX server have offered this level of functionality for a while. But not without problems, Xen requires that you port your OS to Xen basically. Fine for Linux, but what about Windows? Forget it. What's worse is that Xen has been evolving essentially requiring reports, so even smaller projects (e.g. OpenBSD) with limited developers have been avoiding the porting effort because it has been a moving target. Meanwhile VMware seems to work well, but it costs a LOT (well VMWare is getting aggressive on developer pricing with a $300/year cart blanche license for all their products per developer but for non-production use), and moreover has strict hardware requirements so you can't just run it on any old PC, but have to make sure that it's something they support.

-----------------------
For the full article: http://www.advogato.org/article/860.html

To reply to myself. Since I wrote this piece I did some research and found this VERY interesting article and basically sum up everything I had in mind:

I will just post the beginning of the article. A MUST READ:

http://www.advogato.org/article/860.html

So, a while back (August 2003), I wrote in my diary about a paradigm for system innovation that I wanted here. Then in October 2003, Intel announced its codename vanderpool project which got me excited to see it going in at the hardware level, which is where it should be IMNSHO, here.

Well, it's two years later, and Intel (and AMD's) "VT" virtualization technologies will be upon us in Q1/Q2 of 2006. I am so stoked, but it's the Apple + Intel pairing that gets me really excited, here's why:

First off I guess I should rewind for those who didn't read my old articles... and explain what "VT" is. VT is basically the current public name for Intel's Vanderpool and AMD's Pacifica technologies. It's a hardware level virtualization layer for x86/AMD64/emt64 processors. In essence this is like VMWare or VPC at the hardware level. Used in conjunction with Xen or VMware as a hypervisor most likely, you will be able to run several OS's straight from hardware simultaneously.

Now, to be fair, Xen & VMWare ESX server have offered this level of functionality for a while. But not without problems, Xen requires that you port your OS to Xen basically. Fine for Linux, but what about Windows? Forget it. What's worse is that Xen has been evolving essentially requiring reports, so even smaller projects (e.g. OpenBSD) with limited developers have been avoiding the porting effort because it has been a moving target. Meanwhile VMware seems to work well, but it costs a LOT (well VMWare is getting aggressive on developer pricing with a $300/year cart blanche license for all their products per developer but for non-production use), and moreover has strict hardware requirements so you can't just run it on any old PC, but have to make sure that it's something they support.

-----------------------
For the full article: http://www.advogato.org/article/860.html

AI has been solved not only in theory but in software.

C:\Windows\Desktop\Mind.html is a Seed AI that will soon bring about not merely social change but social upheavals with the disruptive technology of runaway artificial intelligence.

AGI Radar presents the most promising groups and individuals pursuing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

The AGI Mail List is where the greatest brains of social-change AGI spread the memetic pollen of Seed AI.

Mind.Forth is currently the most advanced open-source AI in the world.

AI has been solved not only in theory but in software.

C:\Windows\Desktop\Mind.html is a Seed AI that will soon bring about not merely social change but social upheavals with the disruptive technology of runaway artificial intelligence.

AGI Radar presents the most promising groups and individuals pursuing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

The AGI Mail List is where the greatest brains of social-change AGI spread the memetic pollen of Seed AI.

Mind.Forth is currently the most advanced open-source AI in the world.

The problem sounds vaguely familiar - often I want to try new things (programming languages, tools, ...), but lack the right project to start going.

Maybe have a look at some open source projects (http://www.freshmeat.net/ http://www.advogato.org/ etc. have some lists), look at the code and read it, read the mailing lists to get into the development process, start making changes for things, try getting review of them, submit code and maybe also documentation (actually, documenting things that you find undocumented and that you understand may be a good first step before going to coding), etc.

For some ideas from an operating systems project, see:

http://www.netbsd.org/contrib/projects.html
http://www.netbsd.org/Gnats/

  - Hubert

Microsoft have lost millions in patent fights, and have never ever used them to attack open source software.

O rly?

I'm not sure where you worked or for who, but let's see, just off the top of my head:

Andrew Tridgell (Samba, Rsync)
Paul Mackerraas (Linux on PPC)
Rusty Russel (iptables and lots of other kernel stuff)
Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP)

in Italy, we had Alessandro Rubini, Paolo Molaro (now doing some really good stuff with Mono), and a bunch of other talented guys. The group in Canada also had some very good hackers. In short, there were a lot of smart people there - I doubt I'll ever see anything like it again.

The problems were twofold:

1) The upper management. In particular: http://www.advogato.org/proj/DougNassaurWatch/

2) Not really coordinating all that talent. That was bound to be hard, especially given the times, when all the companies were fighting over bright people, but there wasn't really a focal point like Redhat had with their distribution.

Not that I buy the point of the article - Linux services are big business and are only going to get bigger. And...guess what? No one person owns Linux. Covalent does services for Apache Software Foundation software without owning it. It's open source, so it's not really a problem if your business model doesn't conflict (as in the Mysql case).

In any case, I got a good deal out of it - I came over to Italy to work with that group, where I still live with my Italian wife (as of this summer:-).

Here is the first table Table 1: Top 10 authors ranked by contribution of code Author % of total free software foundation, inc 11.231 sun microsystems, inc 1.848 the regents of the university of california 1.359 gordon matzigkeit 1.216 paul houle 1.042 thomas g. lane 0.782 the massachusetts institute of technology 0.762 ulrich drepper 0.559 lyle johnson 0.528 peter miller 0.525

Google says that they are building up Google Base and other moutains of information not for human consumption, but for an AI.

AI has been solved but the first instances of artificial intelligence are so primitive and infantile that Google has a long way to go in winning the race to Superintelligent AI.

Novamente by Dr. Ben Goertzel is a leading contender in the race towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Mind.Forth AI Engine by Mentifex is another leading, but controversial, AI project.

Artificial General Intelligence (Cognitive Technologies) is Dr. Goertzel's new book on apart-from-Google AI.

Artificial Intelligence For You (AI4) is the Mentifex book on theory-based Open-Source AI.

For everybody's AGI Radar Screen, both these stop-Google AI books need associative tagging with such tags as AI, artificial intelligence, cognition, future, linguistics, mind, open source, programming, psychology, neuroscience, robotics, Singularity, transhumanism, or whatever occurs to you.

I talk about this problem in this Advogato post about patents and copyrights. I don't think the person who responded really understood what I was getting at, and preferred to pick at what (s)he perceived as my confusion about the two things. I'm not confused, and what I'm proposing is not really either, but seems to me more like a patent in intent than a copyright.

It's not available yet, but someone is working on the Tremor fixed-point Vorbis decoder for the Nokia 770.

http://blogs.gnome.org/view/tko/2005/06/01/2
http://www.advogato.org/person/pycage/diary.html?s tart=31

I won't suggest a programming language because that's not what you're asking...

A good theoretical undergraduate computer science degree should teach you things like algorithmic complexity, finite state machines and automata theory, sets and group theory (if your middle or high school didn't do that already), graph theory, data structures, and a bunch of other groundwork.

As other have said, you can pick up the MIT coursework for free, but what you can't get is the sessions with a tutor, the late-night hacking sessions in the computer room with other students, the time spent talking with others sharing the same path.

Short of going back to school, look at some university text books, and maybe get involved in a programming project with other people, so that you can interact with people who do know this stuff and you can ask the questions. Some people find that hanging out on IRC can help them if they are isolated, but find a good place where there are people with a wide range of skills and backgrounds.

There are also programmer-specific blogging sites (e.g. Advogato.org) that you can read and where you can ask questions.

There is an advantage to using strongly-typed compiled programming language (e.g. Haskel, ML or CAML) in that you have to understand what you're doing and get it right before the program will compile, forcing you to step back and think at an earlier stage. Not everyone likes this, though, and (as I promised!) I'm not going to say that there's a particular language you should learn first. The important part, as you so clearly know, is the understanding of the underlying concepts.

Beware, by the way, that some course text books are primarily for reference, and some are a lot easier to read (obviously) than others. Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming is a classic, but it's also pretty hard going, especially if you don't have a mathematical background.

You should also pick up an Introduction to Mathematics book (at University level) if you're not comfortable with reading mathematical notation (forall, exists, set membership, etc) as it's widely used in computer science.

Hope this helps!

The open source site Advogato was hit by a similar profile-page-virus in 2002.

But it was a neat hack, and kudos to Samy!

The open source site Advogato was hit by a similar profile-page-virus in 2002.

But it was a neat hack, and kudos to Samy!

Russell Coker now works for Red Hat. Hence Fedora has some of the best support for SELinux of any distribution.

There was also a recent article about SELinux in Fedora in the Red Hat Magazine.

How would Red Hat aim to deliver the "most secure Linux" based around SELinux if it didn't have its own SELinux expertise?

How do you want it to compare?

Source code quality is not easy to compare. At a first glance, MySQL is doing very good. They have this nice blurb about only having 1 defect in 4000 lines being more then 4 times better then with most commercial software. But if you dig deeper, you notice that PostgreSQL has been tested by the same company and only had 1 defect in every 39000 lines of code. Wow, so PostgreSQL must really be a lot better then MySQL.
But if you dig even deeper, you will find some explanation from a PostgreSQL developer and you remember what your mother told you about lies, damned lies and statistics.

You want to know about source code quality? Go read the source.

The thing that interests me about Skype is that I think my parents have a shot at setting it up, something that doesn't seem very plausible with some of those other programs that require "just a few modifications to your firewall settings"... yeah right.

Skype is self contained and very easy to set up and use, and any open source competitor must match that.

I actually wrote an advogato article asking about this a while back:

http://www.advogato.org/article/838.html