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And their website is here.

Some data about FedSat, a Scientific R&D microsatellite that's due for launch on the next H-2A from Tanegashima:

Firstly, the on-board software is in Ada-95, using the 3.13p version of GNAT as the compiler and RTEMS as the Run-time Kernel. Both Open-Source, and the 'p' in "3.13p" means public, free-as-in-beer. The on-board software was developed mostly by Software Improvements, a bunch of software professionals who are heavily into SLCMs, CMM, etc. And lo, it worketh, on-time, under-budget.

The ground station is another matter. OASIS was tried, but couldn't do all that was required. In a spectacular case of less-than-wonderful-judgement, VB on Windows was used for development. After a while, they got some software pros to work on that one too, rather than the hack'n'slash electronics engineers. Well, it partially works - enough so that a few months or years after launch, it will do most of what's wanted.

Moral: if it's important, and has to work first time, every time, do it in Ada and open source, and use the principles described in the parent article. If it's not so important, and can be fixed up afterwards, you're still better off using Ada, though Java's a good second choice. The only reason Ada's so good is that it makes it easy to adhere to good software engineering principles, such as teamwork, smart design, and open standards.

• Separate Public view and private view -> Interfaces between teams made easier
• High-level (generics, tasks etc) and low-level (address clauses) features ease design task
• Standardised - Ada-83 was standardised as Mil-Std-1815A in January 1983 and later as ISO/IEC 8652:1987, Ada-95 as ISO/IEC 8652:1995.Copies of the LRM (Language Reference Manual), style manual etc are all freely available on the web.

A.Brain, Rocket Scientist

Some data about FedSat, a Scientific R&D microsatellite that's due for launch on the next H-2A from Tanegashima:

Firstly, the on-board software is in Ada-95, using the 3.13p version of GNAT as the compiler and RTEMS as the Run-time Kernel. Both Open-Source, and the 'p' in "3.13p" means public, free-as-in-beer. The on-board software was developed mostly by Software Improvements, a bunch of software professionals who are heavily into SLCMs, CMM, etc. And lo, it worketh, on-time, under-budget.

The ground station is another matter. OASIS was tried, but couldn't do all that was required. In a spectacular case of less-than-wonderful-judgement, VB on Windows was used for development. After a while, they got some software pros to work on that one too, rather than the hack'n'slash electronics engineers. Well, it partially works - enough so that a few months or years after launch, it will do most of what's wanted.

Moral: if it's important, and has to work first time, every time, do it in Ada and open source, and use the principles described in the parent article. If it's not so important, and can be fixed up afterwards, you're still better off using Ada, though Java's a good second choice. The only reason Ada's so good is that it makes it easy to adhere to good software engineering principles, such as teamwork, smart design, and open standards.

• Separate Public view and private view -> Interfaces between teams made easier
• High-level (generics, tasks etc) and low-level (address clauses) features ease design task
• Standardised - Ada-83 was standardised as Mil-Std-1815A in January 1983 and later as ISO/IEC 8652:1987, Ada-95 as ISO/IEC 8652:1995.Copies of the LRM (Language Reference Manual), style manual etc are all freely available on the web.

A.Brain, Rocket Scientist

What's the difference between what is referred to as the baseline in a VLBA, and what we're talking about here? If you increase the baseline, you increase the "aperture", right? But that doesn't increase the sensitivty, right? Is the real advantage of a huge array of dishes designed and operated as one telescope (as opposed to an ad hoc assembly) the things that are involved in this story -- i.e., data communication bandwidth and control?

Interferometers are very differnt beasts to normal radio telescopes. Single dish scopes look at a single area of the sky, and their sensetivity is proportional to the collecting area (square of diameter). Their angular resolution is proportional to the diamater. When I say the are pointing at a single area of sky, the telescope is actually looking at one point the size of the angular resolution - you may choose to look for a long time, gathering a spectrum (or looking at a pulsar) of that single point, or you may scan the telscope back and forth slowly to generate an image (with resolution equal to the angular resolition of the telescope).

With interferometers, you have a bunch of telescopes. The fundamental unit is no longer a single dish - it is now every combination of 2 dishes. At ATNF narrabri, there are 6 dishes, so there are 15 combinations (5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1) (I remember once having to step through each baseline individully, for each frequency for each observation we made, for each.... something else, to mitigate some interference manually, to get the best possible image I could generate for some nifty work I was asked to do) of pairs. The resolution is now a function of the distances between all the pairs.

You generate an image immediately, by getting the fourrier transform of the signals from the pairs, as the earth rotates. To generate the optimal image, with an East West synthesis telescope (such as Narrabri) where the X -resolution is (almost) the same as Y-resolution, you have to let the earth rotate a half turn, ie you sit there imaging for 12 hours. I have gotten away with observing for 4 before, but that was a very specific project. Other telescopes can sometimes do a "snapshot" mode, where you observe for a few minutes or hours, without too much loss of information. But basically, you don't have to scan the telscopes anymore, the centre of the image is where you point the telescopes, and the size of the image can be as big as the resolution would have been if you were using just one telescope.

The resolution you get is effectively from the farthest separated dishes, and the biggest structure you can see is from the resolution of the closest dishes (this all comes from the fact that you have to perform an inverse fourrier transform of the data coming from the pairs, and there are bits missing from the fourrier plane, where there aren't telescope pairs). With a single dish, you can see structures of any size bigger than the resolution. But an interferometer is missing all these bits where telscopes aren't situated, and in particular, has effectibely a hole in the middle of the "telescope" the size of the distance between the closest dishes. So there is an upper limit on the size of structures you can see (as well as a lower limit).

So occasionally, there have been tricks where you combine the high resolution data from interfereters with the low resolution data from a single dish, and you generate a very accurate and imformative image. This was done for generating a map of the Large Magellanic Cloud (no URL handy). But this needs a lot of work and telescope time, both hard to come by.

The sensetivety goes only as the size of the physical collecting area. So 1 square kilometer indeed is much better than the previous 1/30 or so sqaure kilometers we have had in a single setup. Note that, if the telscope is set up in Western Australia, (where I certainly hope it will :), then the resolution will be dictated by how big Australia is. About 1 milliarcsecond, or about 1000 times better than the average pre-interferometer resolutions you could get with optical telescopes on the ground, and 100 times better than hubble, keeping in mind that a radio telescope of the same size as an optical telescope will always have a resolution many thousands of times less (the ratio of the wavelength of optical light to radio light).

I apoligise in advance for confusing you all, but it is kindof a complex topic, and no doubt my head will explode now as well!

You wouldn't believe how increasingly difficult it is to do decent Radio Astronomy these days. Heck, the processor in your laptop or desktop is likely radiating right in "L" band (about 1.4 GHz). We thought big hulking monitors were bad until we measured the E/M interference from flat panel displays (it's bad). We're struggling to deal with the onslaught of laptops, 802.11b wireless equipment, PDAs and the like at places like Green Bank. And don't even start to talk about Iridium...

We got an email on the ATNF system about a month ago from a friend of mine (Daniel Mitchell - no doubt his web page ought to have a bit of info) who researches interference mitigation. He said the people who had been operating at 1.4GHz (or was it 2.8?) had finally turned off their bloody transmitter. Much elation! I've had to work around that bloody frequency before.

With current interferometers (ATNF narrabri is one) you get rid of some of the interference by default, because hopefully, the signals go to the 2 antennae in the single baseline at the same time, cancelling each other out (I believe this is a gross simplification, I can't remember the full details). Daniel is working on a small peice of equipment at Narrabri for his thesis, where he will be able to get rid of the interference from several land and satellite transmitters completely, by mixing it back with the signals to each of the telescopes. He is researching, along with many others, how best to do this with SKA. One way it to grab a whole bunch of nulls (destructive interference between all the telescopes) and chuck them in the direction of the offending transmitters. Again, I know no details!

Incidentally, somewhere, I have a photo from inside the observing room at Narrabri, which is surrounding by a Faraday cage (along with the friggin big correlator computers downstairs), where you can see at the controlling desk 4 or those little LCD beasties. Nice :)

One of the proposals for the SKA is to use an array of Luneburg lenses, which are basically big balls of polystyrene like material. The material is a dielectric differentially doped so as to focus the incoming signals. Instead of moving a large dish, you only need to move the receiver to focus on a particular signal.

You can see pictures of a Luneburg lens (which was made in Russia) and an artist's conception of the array at the CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility website.

One of the proposed locations for the SKA is in Australia and a number of schools are involved in the SEARFE Project which hooks up a radio receivers to a computers to produce a database of radio frequency usage ("pollution") across the country.

One of the proposals for the SKA is to use an array of Luneburg lenses, which are basically big balls of polystyrene like material. The material is a dielectric differentially doped so as to focus the incoming signals. Instead of moving a large dish, you only need to move the receiver to focus on a particular signal.

You can see pictures of a Luneburg lens (which was made in Russia) and an artist's conception of the array at the CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility website.

One of the proposed locations for the SKA is in Australia and a number of schools are involved in the SEARFE Project which hooks up a radio receivers to a computers to produce a database of radio frequency usage ("pollution") across the country.

Modula-2 or Ada or Logo I have not seen a wisper about in years. from what I recall Logo was to be the teaching language of the future ( back in the mid 80's ), Ada was to be the next big thing is the 80's, and modula-2 was to replace C

The first language I programmed in was FORTRAN II back in the 60's, when I was under 10. The code had to be run at the Nuclear Research Establishment at Harwell in the UK. Remember, there weren't as many computers around back then, maybe 10 in the country. It made being a pre-teen 31337 haX0r difficult. :-)

The last time I programmed in FORTRAN - FORTRAN 77 in fact - was for the communications facilities for the State Electricity Commission of Victoria, a system to help restore power in case of emergency. That was in 1987.

I still use Ada - recently for the spaceflight avionics for a scientific research satellite, and will be teaching a course in it to some people doing the avionics for a helicopter in a couple of weeks. Though the use of Ada has shrunk, it's making a strong comeback in the field of avionics, where a crash in the program could mean the crash of an aircraft.

My advice to the original poster - by all means learn FORTRAN as a fifth- or sixth- language. Even the 95% Godawful languages(VB..) can teach you something. There are times I use Java and think "why the HECK can't it have feature X of Ada-95?". There are times with Ada-95 that I say "Damn, feature Y is so clumsy compared with Java." FWIW Matlab seems to be the way of the future for non-software engineers to quickly do calculations and display the results graphically, it's a pretty good FORTRAN replacement. What EXCEL is to accountants, Matlab is to scientists.

Neale, who travelled 2946 km with his position being plotted online, and also Heather.
While I'm here, a related tangent: FLIP

Neale, who travelled 2946 km with his position being plotted online, and also Heather.
While I'm here, a related tangent: FLIP

....as there is the free 2.4 Ghz alternative and both use similar technology and products can easily support both bands?

Oh crap? I didn't realise it was 2.4 GHz. Can someone with knowledge tell me the exact frequency?

I just remember observing at the Australia Telescope last summer at 2496 MHz.

Just another hurdle to overcome, I guess..... :(

I find it quite interesting that you refer to CFC science as good, whereas global warming isn't so good, as about a year ago I had the honour of attending a lecture by F. Sherwood Roland (who won a chemistry nobel prize for his work on CFCs and the ozone), and he stated that he believes that the IPCC's conclusions (that the earth is warming and humans play a very significant role in this warming) are correct.

Also, urban heat effects have been accounted for. Sometimes climate skeptics on PR mode claim that they haven't, but this is simply FUD on their part. If you want scientific references for this, ask I can supply (however, these aren't online), but in the mean time, this QA sheet from CSIRO (an Australian scientific research organisation) contains info on heat islands.

LL

But on a serious note, what's wrong with 2.4.14 besides having to patch loop.c by hand? Kernel Newsflash doesn't have anything to say about it, and I haven't had problems with it myself (haven't had time to get up to 2.4.16 yet) . . .

I was working on systems that would learn what you liked to watch by simply taking note of what you would watch and then make recommendations based on time, day, and you could even tell it what mood you were in (I always thought that part was a bit more of a gimmick). It would also automatically record your favourite TV shows if you weren't there, just in case you wanted to see it later.

Now I don't know who developed this stuff first, but seeing as Canon already has patents in this area, I would have side with them.

Here you will find the "we will tell you what we are doing without actually telling you what we are doing" spiel, if you're interested.

I was working on systems that would learn what you liked to watch by simply taking note of what you would watch and then make recommendations based on time, day, and you could even tell it what mood you were in (I always thought that part was a bit more of a gimmick). It would also automatically record your favourite TV shows if you weren't there, just in case you wanted to see it later.

Now I don't know who developed this stuff first, but seeing as Canon already has patents in this area, I would have side with them.

Here you will find the "we will tell you what we are doing without actually telling you what we are doing" spiel, if you're interested.

Here in aus, m$ is in bed with the govt.; only bad things can happen, and they get away with a lot. Example:

CSIRO, the govt. research organisation, a critical and important group as far as R&D is concerned, is migrating its email systems so that ALL users have to use M$ Outlook.

The result has meant that everyone who has switched over to Outlook shares an addressbook which lists EVERYONE in the organisation (1000's of people).

This means that when the latest worm does the rounds, havoc ensues, as it gets mailed out to 1000's of people at a time.

I'm scared. R u?

Thats right - and CSIRO have been using units from SensAble to develop a couple of Haptic appications.

Notably, the use of a haptic 'workbench' so that several people can work on a single model - eg. several surgeons on the one 'virtual' patient.

Go see the writeup here

Where this gets really funky is when you take an idealised tissue model of a person and combine that with an actual CT or MRI scan - the generated model will be a close approximation to an actual patient (so you can 'practice' beforehand!).

Thats right - and CSIRO have been using units from SensAble to develop a couple of Haptic appications.

Notably, the use of a haptic 'workbench' so that several people can work on a single model - eg. several surgeons on the one 'virtual' patient.

Go see the writeup here

Where this gets really funky is when you take an idealised tissue model of a person and combine that with an actual CT or MRI scan - the generated model will be a close approximation to an actual patient (so you can 'practice' beforehand!).

The link in the story to the "America" map is wrong - it points to the map for November 19, 2002. Here's the November 18, 2001 map.

The North America link directly from SlashDot is misleading. The map linked was for 2002. The map for this years leonids reflects a time of Nov 18th 10:01 UTC. (The 2002 map shows Nov 19, 10:29 UTC)

Although you are probably looking for a digital solution, don't overlook the solutions that already exist. Security camera VCR's (available at RadioShack et al.) can put 24 hours (or more) of video on a single VHS tape. Get a few VCR's (at $200 each), and a pallet of VHS tapes at Sam's club, and you could record all the video you want!

Geez, I wish I could recall the rate that the Very Long Baseline Interferometry (radio astronomy) people record at. At the Australia Telescope, they have a bank of 8 or 10 modified VCR's that are controlled automatically from the upstairs computers, and write the stream of raw data at something like 10GB/s (can't quite remember, dagnamit) and take the tapes back to HQ in Sydney (never underestimate the bandwidth of a stationwagon full of tapes - must be thousands of times faster than their pipe to Sydney) and correlate all the telescopes' signals there.

Tapes are changed manually, but that is all. The rest is automatic. Reliability is good, but doesn't need to be perfect (corrupted byte? Well, just discard the 10 second interval around it), but more than a few bytes every now and then will lose you a lot of data (hmmm discard this 10 seconds - then then 10 seconds after that, and 10 more....)

TimC.

Effectively, you are electrolysing water while adding value to the natural gas. You can also capture the waste CO2 more easily.

Go here for more

Alex

Does anyone know of any reviews of the current leading open source platforms?
The only link I could source the explicitly mentions JBoss is CSIRO Australia report.
Suggestions?

In Linix, the /dev/hd* files represent the hard drives. /dev/hda is the first drive, /dev/hdb is the second drive, and so on. The number at the end is the partition, for example /dev/hda1 is the first partition of the first hard drive and /dev/hdb3 is the 3rd partition of the 2nd hard drive.

I agree that the way Linux accesses devices is outdated and unintuitive. This is something devfs is working on.

Do you know how many states of water there are? Not to mention somewhere you are going to have to define a pressure, a temperature etc. You don't exactly want to end up with a circular reference in there....

Now, at CSIRO, they are researching into using a super spherical ball of silicon, about 8 cm across, and weighing 1kg. It is spherical to an accuracy of 8nm, and was built by the same glass grinders that build lenses for our precision instruments and telescopes. We have shipped one or two overseas (and have one or two in .au), so that people around the world can test 'em.

Pretty cool in all - I watched the guy pick it up with cottonwool, in the same room that I was in - no contaminant free clothes, either - it is pretty robust. It is all part of an international effort to produce new standards of mass etc - the platinum bar in Paris is getting a bit old. IIRC - CSIRO are researching another method, but can't remeber what it was....

You could even define it as the energy in some huge number of photons of a particular wavelength. :-)

Hmmm - which unfortunately comes back to a density of photons, and a length cubed, which unforteunalty comes back to that damn platinum bar in Paris. IIRC - it has a chip in the corner of it too - Ooops. I just dropped your metre - my, how you have just grown!

To give a very rough idea of why Space stuff is both hard and expensive, here's a small article on what a satellite has to go through:

To give some idea of the environment a satellite has to work in, try this.

First, to simulate launch, attack a chain to your satellite-wannabe and drag it around behind your car on a rough road for 2 minutes at about 30 mph. It should be switched off throughout, then switched on immediately before the next bit.

Stick it in a tumble drier for a minute, to simulate the tumbling after separation. It should be able to right itself after you take it out if attitude control is important (like so you can point antennae towards earth....)

Stick it in the freezer, turned to max Cold. Then, while it's at -20F, take it out and stick it in an oven at about 250F. After a few cycles, half an hour of each, then put it in the microwave and set it on "high" for 10 minutes. Repeat continuously for the period it's supposed to operate, and it should work without a hitch throughout.

I can't think of an easy way to simulate vacuum (you get some interesting outgassing with many components, shorts, conductive glunk accumulating everywhere), but the above should be enough for a basic test. More complex and realistic ones are much tougher to pass.

(The above based upon personal observations at our clean room, and vibration, vacuum-and-heat torture chambers etc for FedSat-1, a Scientific research micro-satellite based on SIL components due to go up on a NASDA H-2A booster next year).

I'm just team-leading the software development BTW, I'm no hardware junkie. Programming for a 5-year life cycle where errant cosmic rays not just may but will randomly flip bits, and it's still gotta work, is non-trivial, but doable. Kinda neat and really interesting too.

In space, no-one can go up there to press CTRL-ALT-DEL.

Interferometry is very neat - I always thought the VLA was bigger than that though - ATNF is 6km long (in the east west dirn - the north south thack is new and not used yet - awaiting reciever upgrades)
Problem is, you do actually lose information - all those gaps in baselines, say if there is no basline between 2 scopes with distance x metres, then you are missing a peice of infomation in the fourrier plane - and you have to deconvolve to fix this up - which no one knows whether really works - and under what circumstances it breaks down. It also introduces quite bad side effects for some images - I am dealing with a source now that beams in with a difference flux once imaged, compared to before the fourrier transform - not good.
Incedentally, on Contact, that alien sound sounds awfully like our helium cryogen pumps :)

The reason we don't have these large arrays of optical telescopes has to do with the nature of light. Radio waves have such a large wavelength that aligning several telescopes along the exact parabolic curve of a simulated large reflector is not difficult (radio waves can be anywhere from several inches to several hundred feet long).

The scopes arem't arranged in a parabola - a delay is introduced by a very fast and large computer :), to offset the geometric delay. Here at Usyd, we have a 1 km array in optical which sort of works (not very sensetive yet though - awaiting new detectors and people)

An optical telescope array presents a much more difficult problem. Light in the visible spectrum has very small wavelengths (less than an inch). Thus, aligning even two telescopes along the proper parabolic curve for interferometry is extraordinarily difficult on earth.

An inch?!! Less than micrometer! And a micrometer is fairly easy to adjust for - just the sensetivity is very low - you need to collects photons in real time and try to correct for the atmosphere. We dont have the luxury of 22 metre dishes - our siderealstats are only 20 cm wide each.

The first one is the NGST, or Next Generation Space Telescope. This will have a large solar shield (basically, a large sheet of mylar to reflect heat away from the mirrors). It will have several octagonal mirror surfaces, and will unfold to be about 8 meters across (Hubble is less than 3). It will also have various infrared and microwave cameras built in, so dangerous "upgrade" missions won't be required nearly as much.

It's going to L2, which means it will never be serviceable - have to get it right the first time. But if it does work, it is in a stable point, so it will last forever (for small values of "ever").

All in all, though, there is so much left to learn from deep space, it almost makes you cry. I find the whole endeavor rather exciting.

Hell yeah! I personally am watching out for the Square Km Array , and somewhat hoping it ends up out here in .au, 'cause it will be coming online just about the right time for me to do science on it :).

I suspect a lot of the jokes might be somewhat lost on non-Australians, but there's still a LOT in there for everyone. The American national anthem is my personal favourite.

They keep doing really nice shots of the dish from the ground and the air. Beautiful colours, and a really nice setting.

Parkes is around 3-4 hours from where I am (Sydney, Australia). I've never seen the dish first hand, but after seeing the movie, I'm keen to go see the dish now. I might go take a look-see at our other radio telescope (the Australia Telescope) too now. That one is a doozy!

URL for the Parkes Observatory is at http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/, and the Australia Telescope Compact Array http://www.narrabri.atnf.csiro.au/ (This one is an array of five small dishes that move along a 3Km long rail track).

One good thing about being so far from anywhere is that conditions are great for observatories down here!

I suspect a lot of the jokes might be somewhat lost on non-Australians, but there's still a LOT in there for everyone. The American national anthem is my personal favourite.

They keep doing really nice shots of the dish from the ground and the air. Beautiful colours, and a really nice setting.

Parkes is around 3-4 hours from where I am (Sydney, Australia). I've never seen the dish first hand, but after seeing the movie, I'm keen to go see the dish now. I might go take a look-see at our other radio telescope (the Australia Telescope) too now. That one is a doozy!

URL for the Parkes Observatory is at http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/, and the Australia Telescope Compact Array http://www.narrabri.atnf.csiro.au/ (This one is an array of five small dishes that move along a 3Km long rail track).

One good thing about being so far from anywhere is that conditions are great for observatories down here!

There is a whole heap of information about Parkes and the Apollo 11 broadcast at this CSIRO site, including lots of interesting technical info that didn't make it into the film, including original audio from the NET 2 comms loop.

--

Just to point out that the Parkes facility is not a satellite tracking station. It is an observatory for radio astronomy, and is still the largest in the southern hemisphere.

It is also still used by NASA for receiving data from deep space missions such as Galileo.

This report, has a detailed description of Parkes Observatory's support for the Apollo 11 mission. It includes video clips, sounds and technical details.

There is a C like programming langage for Xilinx FPGAs developed at CSIRO. Here's an example .

You can also "roll your own" using the perl modules from btOOL.

My general dissatisfaction with the freely available tools means that a bibliography manager will be one of my first programming projects when I lay my hands on an OS X box in a few weeks (drool...)

The usual method, which I have had sucess with, is to simply ignore the refresh rates, and specify in your favorite Distro's X configuration program that you have a 1200x1024 or whatever monitor.

Searching google suggest that people have some difficulties with the card on this laptop (not the screen per se) http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~steveh/inspiron/gw9300. html suggests a change to lilo.conf to initialise the adapter on boot.

Welcome to the world of making linux work on less than generic hardware. It's not as bad as that last snetence makes it sound actually, and is getting better all the time.

What you need to do is search ont he web and find people who have already done it and posted their results. And if you find anyhting new, post it yourself. I'd do it for mine, except for my laptop I can't better the work of Graham Williams!

Anyway, local industry is happy - they were never even remotely in the running for the Government tenders. Now it's up to the individual govt departments as to when and if to outsource.

Short form is, when the US has finished with its current President, can we please have him? He seems to have a clue, and we won't let him near any female interns with big hair. You can keep Dubs and Chainsaw tho - we have enough people like that running the country already :-)

A friend of mine does biological research for CSIRO in Australia. He pointed out that the problem with DDT is that it doesn't bio-degrade. It stays in the form DDT or, if it does break down, it breaks down to some nasty chemicals.

If I recall correctly, once in your body, DDT doesn't leave. It gets stored in your fat.

I don't care how safe anyone claims it to be. Let's stick to pesticides that actually break down to innocuous substances.

DevFS is maintained by Richard Gooch, and is most certainly not part of ReiserFS. Its website is here.

This is an Australian government project; some of the most clued-up people on the Net regarding metadata, and positively amazing by government standards. I hope they do something neat with metadata mark-up, or RDF.

Here are some links to Australian technology in the same field

Eco-mmodore a full size standard sedan, which is normally powered by a 3.8l V6 or 5.7l V8, using australian developed hybrid technology.
aXcessAustralia prototype - a consortium of australian auto component manufacturers have built a prototype car using the same technology, developed by the CSIRO.

The DevFS FAQ is here, and if you read it you'll see that the changes are ALOT deeper then just the names. It goes as far as, IIRC, actually ELIMENATING the age old idea of major and minor numbers. Regardless, read the FAQ it's intresting :)

It stands for Device File System. It seeks to make the naming of devices more like the naming of files, so that users no longer need to create a link to the device.

Apparently this feature has been in new kernels since kernel .46.

There is some concern that it creates unneccesary overhead. However, users and authors of device drivers don't need to utilize or even know about this feature if they don't want to.

In particular, I was impressed by this argument:

Having your device nodes on the root filesystem means that you can't operate properly with a read-only root filesystem. This is because you want to change ownerships and protections of tty devices. Existing practice prevents you using a CD-ROM as your root filesystem for a *real* system. Sure, you can boot off a CD-ROM, but you can't change tty ownerships, so it's only good for installing.

In general, using devfs sounds like it does some things a bit more cleanly than the traditional /dev, but it does a *lot* of things more cleanly. Sounds like a win.

Normally, I agree that announcing the latest development kernel on Slashdot is a little silly - after all, if you're running the devel kernels, you know where to look for them.

However, this kernel release IS newsworthy. Why? Well, take a look at this posting to the linux-kernel mailing list:

[PATCH] devfs v158 available

If you can't be bothered to follow the link, here's the important sentence from that posting: This is the patch that was sent to Linus and included in 2.3.46-pre5. That's right boys and girls, DevFS is now part of the standard Linux kernel. This is wonderful news, and amazingly hasn't yet sparked off any great flamewars on the mailing list (those of you that read the list will know that mentioning DevFS on it has seemed akin to posting about atheism on an evangenical Christian newsgroup). For more information about DevFS, have a look at Richard Gooch's kernal patch page.

I'm still amazed that this has happened.

• Procfs

Can someone enlighten me a little bit more on the issues. I'd sure like to get rid of all the crap hanging out in /dev on my system, and i'd rather not have to patch my kernel twice everytime I upgrade.

Stealth bombers are designed to be 'invisible'. They are a 'hole' in the air. This works well because most radars searching for bombers are on the ground. Air with nothing in it is blank, so a B2 blends right in.

It's when you scan downwards that things fall apart. In Australia the the CSIRO built the Jindalee over-the-horizon radar. It works by bouncing radar signals off magnetised sections of the far upper atmosphere.

The short form is: "Hmmm ... what's this in Nevada? It's a batwing-shaped hole moving at 600mph. Now I wonder what that is?"

Australia. Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the south-east pacific...

be well;

JC.

Rubini's book is mostly about kernel version 2.0. Some of the examples don't work out of the box, but reading Richard Gooch's Kernel API changes from 2.0 to 2.2 might help.

Oh, but I always read your Kernel Newsflash, so nothing can happen to me!!

But somehow I don't you've signed with your real name.

Anyway, I do have a clue about the Linux kernel, and no, I haven't read the patch. For whatever reason, I do trust that Alan Cox did check all of it.

Sure, one day a stable kernel will come out with a bug that will cause filesystem corruption for lots of people. It'll catch a few hundred people. And one day my harddisk will crash as well.

But a trojan in the stable kernel is just totally unlikely. Trojans are much more likely to show up in the huge amounts of other software that can be grabbed from the net. And do you think that kernel developers check all the (non-kernel related) sources that they compile?

So what you want is something like Kernel Newsflash?