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Google has been very good to the Open Source gaming community again this year, there are a total of 7 game projects and 5 game related projects.

The following game projects have been accepted,

• Battle for Wesnoth (ideas), a very cool turn based strategy game in the theme of Heroes of Might and Magic.
• BZFlag (ideas), the classic tank first person shooter game. One of the oldest open source games around!
• Linden Lab (ideas), the makers of Second Life the largest "almost game like" online universe.
• ScummVM (ideas), an engine which lets you play all the classic Lucas Arts games and many more!
• Thousand Parsec (ideas), a framework for building 4x empire building games. Been around since 2001 and growing quickly.
• Tux4Kids (ideas), a group of multi-platform open source educational games for children.
• WorldForge (ideas), one of the original open source MMORPG which has even been mentioned on Slashdot multiple times (original called Altima).

The Summer of Code had a huge impact my own project, Thousand Parsec and I hope that it will again have a significant positive impact. GSoC 2007 helped us develop a number of core utilities that the main developers just would not have time to do. These projects should substantially increase the productivity of new contributors and lower the barrier to entry into development. The huge amount of web traffic brought to our website from just being a mentor organisation can clearly be seen in our web statistics.

This year we are planning to concentrate on improving the player experience. The two ways for achieving this is to create more full and interesting games (rulesets) and making the game clients more attractive and easier to access (such as a web-based client and improving the desktop client).

Out of the three students that where selected last year, two passed their final evaluations. The code that the students produced was of both a high quality and quantity.

One of the students projects, the RFTS clone ruleset, is now one of the most complete and popular of our games (rulesets). The student has continued to help with its development and is now currently considering being a mentor this year.

The other successful student made over 220 commits and produced 28,824 lines of code, more than some of our other long term project members! He has developed a ruleset editor which will make ruleset development significantly easier in the future.

As well, the Open Source Office funded one student in a Summer of Code style outside the program. The student successfully completed the project and we hope the code will soon be rolled out.

Because of the success of our GSoC, our project has actively started to engage with educational instit

As an 'expert' system administrator (albeit unpaid) I have four servers. One is running Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, one is running Microsoft Window Server 2003, one is running Ubuntu Linux 5.10 (Server), and the other is running Apple OS X Server (10.4).

I can tell you now that when I first started my company, although I was a major advocate of Linux, I soon found that I did not have the time to maintain a then Gentoo or custom LFS distribution, Debian was far too heavy to pick up, and Slackware felt a little dated. So I took a look at Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, liked what I saw, and bought a Dell PowerEdge 400SC with an OEM install.

At first Small Business Server was a breath of fresh air. It was easy to maintain, with a full complement of features, having been bundled with Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and Window Sharepoint Services. I actually enjoyed - yes, enjoyed - using it.

Until backup stated to fail. Until my tape drive disappeared. Until the sharepoint website database got corrupted. Until exchange monitoring failed. Until the POP connector started to thrash the CPU. Until the Windows Update website failed to check for updates.

These things happened. I'm not saying that they wouldn't happed with another system, but that is not the point, since they happened to me, and that caused me grief, and time, and money to resolve. I ended up trying to build a new system based on Microsoft Windows Server 2003, since I already had Microsoft specific data (files and tables), but this proved even more difficult to maintain.

I struggled for eighteen months, and then decided to build an Ubuntu 5.10 server. I use Ubuntu on one of my laptop, and had gently learnt the apt- way, and liked it. I set up a server with similar features to the Small Business Server, using Postfix, MySQL, and Plone, and even went some ways to transferring my sharepoint data. It works. It hasn't failed yet.

I bet the guys who took part in the survey only set up a server, installed some applications, and patched it. I bet they didn't try running a business for 18-months, just to see what it was really like.

I must say that we recently purchased an Apple PowerMac, and were so impressed we are now looking at completely switching, hence the OS X Server. It is a dream to install and configure, but we are going to run it for several months until we are satisfied that it can do the job.

Take the free software movement as an example... the movement isn't ruled by anyone, the society of human individuals (programmers) can license their work any way they like, but they _choose_ to push for freedom on to others.

... Thus showing that you understand neither anarchy nor the free software movement.

Free software is the perfect example of governance. It arises from the grassroots, the workers writing the software, but it is there nevertheless. Take a look at projects like Debian. "Debian" is essentially defined by its huge policy document, a body of law which defines what does and what does not get distributed. Debian even has a constitution, a leader, elected annually, a cabinet (technical committee), law enforcement (the security guys) etc.

And it's not just Debian. FSF, Fedora, FreeBSD all have similar organisations.

So even if you publish your own software on your own private website eventually you'll have to conform (or your software will be packaged to conform) to all this law, if you ever want it in a major distribution.

Rich.

Take the free software movement as an example... the movement isn't ruled by anyone, the society of human individuals (programmers) can license their work any way they like, but they _choose_ to push for freedom on to others.

... Thus showing that you understand neither anarchy nor the free software movement.

Free software is the perfect example of governance. It arises from the grassroots, the workers writing the software, but it is there nevertheless. Take a look at projects like Debian. "Debian" is essentially defined by its huge policy document, a body of law which defines what does and what does not get distributed. Debian even has a constitution, a leader, elected annually, a cabinet (technical committee), law enforcement (the security guys) etc.

And it's not just Debian. FSF, Fedora, FreeBSD all have similar organisations.

So even if you publish your own software on your own private website eventually you'll have to conform (or your software will be packaged to conform) to all this law, if you ever want it in a major distribution.

Rich.

Take the free software movement as an example... the movement isn't ruled by anyone, the society of human individuals (programmers) can license their work any way they like, but they _choose_ to push for freedom on to others.

... Thus showing that you understand neither anarchy nor the free software movement.

Free software is the perfect example of governance. It arises from the grassroots, the workers writing the software, but it is there nevertheless. Take a look at projects like Debian. "Debian" is essentially defined by its huge policy document, a body of law which defines what does and what does not get distributed. Debian even has a constitution, a leader, elected annually, a cabinet (technical committee), law enforcement (the security guys) etc.

And it's not just Debian. FSF, Fedora, FreeBSD all have similar organisations.

So even if you publish your own software on your own private website eventually you'll have to conform (or your software will be packaged to conform) to all this law, if you ever want it in a major distribution.

Rich.

Take the free software movement as an example... the movement isn't ruled by anyone, the society of human individuals (programmers) can license their work any way they like, but they _choose_ to push for freedom on to others.

... Thus showing that you understand neither anarchy nor the free software movement.

Free software is the perfect example of governance. It arises from the grassroots, the workers writing the software, but it is there nevertheless. Take a look at projects like Debian. "Debian" is essentially defined by its huge policy document, a body of law which defines what does and what does not get distributed. Debian even has a constitution, a leader, elected annually, a cabinet (technical committee), law enforcement (the security guys) etc.

And it's not just Debian. FSF, Fedora, FreeBSD all have similar organisations.

So even if you publish your own software on your own private website eventually you'll have to conform (or your software will be packaged to conform) to all this law, if you ever want it in a major distribution.

Rich.

Three Ubuntu for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven Damn Small Linux for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine Linspire for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One Debian for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Debian to rule them all, One slocate to find them,
One distro to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Debian where the apt repositories lie.

http://www.debian.org/misc/children-distros

Debian "unstable" Sid is upgraded every day, or at least several times per week.

Debian "testing" is upgraded several times a month.

Debian "stable" is upgraded every one or two years.

Take your pick.

I chose "unstable" which is stable enough to be on my home machine. I have never had any serious issues, so far, after one year of usage.

For a production server I would use "stable" but for a research machine the "unstable" looks like a good choice. I guess the people who built it would know what to do.

The only one I have avoided is "Debian experimental"... :)

http://www.debian.org/ for the world

http://damnsmalllinux.org/network-install.html

• Get TOMSRTBT and boot it
• Configure network
• Download install script
• Download image and use install script

Java also has a very nice concurrency library: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/concurrency/index.html and VERY good parallel collections library.

Yes I know. But that is a function of Java class library not of the language itself. I written similar libraries for embedded projects using C++ and any language that supports encapsulation and has support for / or have access to semaphores can easily be made thread safe. My personal favorite use of such objects are FIFOs that transport messages between threads (and processes).

Ok, now you can see the second person who claims that Java is extremely fast.

References: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=javaxx&lang2=gcc - Java is generally about 20% slower than optimized C, thanks to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotSpot compiler.

Objective C performance is about the same as Python: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=javaxx&lang2=python - i.e. Java is in general more than 1000% faster.

Oh, and Java GUI can be fast - check Google Android, it has a very nice custom Java GUI, which works blazingly fast on 200MHz CPU.

You show benchmarks for Java versus C, python versus C, and only provide conjecture that loosely links ObjC versus Java via Python. Unfortunately, you provide no benchmarks comparing ObjC to Python or more importantly ObjC to Java. You did show references for Java, C, and Python but none for Objective-C

It's refreshing to see someone come to the aid of Java. I like Java (and have used it since forever), but I just don't quite fully believe that Java is "faster" than Objective-C. I really don't know why it should matter...

The really cool thing about Objective-C is that you don't have to compare it's speed with C. You can write actual C code in your application. It looks like you can write your dynamically linked objects in Objective-C (which makes the GUI programming nice at least that's what I've heard) and you can write your bare-metal stuff in C. Java only offers JNI.

Java also has a very nice concurrency library: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/concurrency/index.html and VERY good parallel collections library.

Yes I know. But that is a function of Java class library not of the language itself. I written similar libraries for embedded projects using C++ and any language that supports encapsulation and has support for / or have access to semaphores can easily be made thread safe. My personal favorite use of such objects are FIFOs that transport messages between threads (and processes).

Ok, now you can see the second person who claims that Java is extremely fast.

References: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=javaxx&lang2=gcc - Java is generally about 20% slower than optimized C, thanks to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotSpot compiler.

Objective C performance is about the same as Python: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=javaxx&lang2=python - i.e. Java is in general more than 1000% faster.

Oh, and Java GUI can be fast - check Google Android, it has a very nice custom Java GUI, which works blazingly fast on 200MHz CPU.

You show benchmarks for Java versus C, python versus C, and only provide conjecture that loosely links ObjC versus Java via Python. Unfortunately, you provide no benchmarks comparing ObjC to Python or more importantly ObjC to Java. You did show references for Java, C, and Python but none for Objective-C

It's refreshing to see someone come to the aid of Java. I like Java (and have used it since forever), but I just don't quite fully believe that Java is "faster" than Objective-C. I really don't know why it should matter...

The really cool thing about Objective-C is that you don't have to compare it's speed with C. You can write actual C code in your application. It looks like you can write your dynamically linked objects in Objective-C (which makes the GUI programming nice at least that's what I've heard) and you can write your bare-metal stuff in C. Java only offers JNI.

What a load of bullshit. Objective-C has much better performance than Python (shootout) and it beats Java in both CPU time and memory use in almost all of the shootout programs (shootout).

What a load of bullshit. Objective-C has much better performance than Python (shootout) and it beats Java in both CPU time and memory use in almost all of the shootout programs (shootout).

>As for threading, Obj-C has an atomic attribute, @synchronized attribute, exception handling across threads, NSLock, NSRecursiveLock, NSConditionLock, and Semaphores. As for Java, you have the monitor attribute, synchronized, and event handling. I believe that both languages do adequately support threads. Both languages are subject to the limitation imposed by their host OS. Ok the JVM could perform multitasking in its own time slice, but boy would that suck...

Java also has a very nice concurrency library: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/concurrency/index.html and VERY good parallel collections library.

>You are the first person I have seen (outside of Sun) that has used "extremely fast" and "java" in the same sentence. Do you have references?

Ok, now you can see the second person who claims that Java is extremely fast.

References: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=javaxx&lang2=gcc - Java is generally about 20% slower than optimized C, thanks to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotSpot compiler.

Objective C performance is about the same as Python: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=javaxx&lang2=python - i.e. Java is in general more than 1000% faster.

Oh, and Java GUI can be fast - check Google Android, it has a very nice custom Java GUI, which works blazingly fast on 200MHz CPU.

>As for threading, Obj-C has an atomic attribute, @synchronized attribute, exception handling across threads, NSLock, NSRecursiveLock, NSConditionLock, and Semaphores. As for Java, you have the monitor attribute, synchronized, and event handling. I believe that both languages do adequately support threads. Both languages are subject to the limitation imposed by their host OS. Ok the JVM could perform multitasking in its own time slice, but boy would that suck...

Java also has a very nice concurrency library: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/concurrency/index.html and VERY good parallel collections library.

>You are the first person I have seen (outside of Sun) that has used "extremely fast" and "java" in the same sentence. Do you have references?

Ok, now you can see the second person who claims that Java is extremely fast.

References: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=javaxx&lang2=gcc - Java is generally about 20% slower than optimized C, thanks to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotSpot compiler.

Objective C performance is about the same as Python: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=javaxx&lang2=python - i.e. Java is in general more than 1000% faster.

Oh, and Java GUI can be fast - check Google Android, it has a very nice custom Java GUI, which works blazingly fast on 200MHz CPU.

As for Java being faster? Well, the benchmarks disagree. And, of course, there are ways of making Objective-C as fast as C if you have some bottlenecks where you're willing to sacrifice a little flexibility.

I can definitely see a business case for Java on the iPhone - there is a lot of existing Java (particularly J2ME) code out there for mobile apps. With a JDK that had a nice UIKit wrapper it would be possible to reuse a lot of the existing code and just add a new UI.

Hogswallop. Deliberate features that happen to allow the circumvention of security are not as common as buffer overflows, but they certainly happen, and serious security people consider them to be vulnerabilities (what else would they be?). ActiveX is one. Debian categorizes them as "design flaws" in their advisories. To say that it's not a vulnerability "in the traditional sense", or recommend that people disable the impossible-to-secure system "when you aren't using it", is a bunch of crap.

You can't do that with pdfs (well, if you want to save it anyways)

Actually, you can, and yes you can save it.

See xournal for an example.

1. GNOME is mostly ported, last I heard. I don't use a desktop environment, so I'm not sure what is and what isn't. But I've heard that a few developers do use it on their Hurd machines.
2. Firefox requires XULRunner, which has not been ported. I don't know how straightforward that would be. I don't know about the status of Epiphany/Konqueror either. I've been using Dillo lately, but I think I'm going to run the Hurd in Xen and use remote X to get my Firefox 3 fix :)
3. Battle of Wesnoth, unfortunately, does not build on GNU. Looking at http://packages.debian.org/lenny/wesnoth, one dep that is not satisfied is SDL, and the package doesn't list hurd-i386 as a supported arch.

Son of a bitch! He got modded up.

Debian! Debian! SUSE! SUSE! Hippopotami! Hippopotami!

You can actually use it right now:
http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/

You can actually use it right now:
http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/

[T]here's a clear distinction here between people who are developing open source software and engaging in non-commercial distribution on the one hand, and people who are engaging in commercial distribution and use on the other hand. With respect to the former, meaning developers and those engaged in noncommercial distribution, this new covenant not to sue, with respect to patent rights, is applicable.

On the other hand, with respect to companies that are engaged in commercial distribution, or use internally, there is a need to obtain a patent license where there are applicable patent rights, and we're committing to make these patent licenses readily available.

1. Debian
2. Ubuntu
3. Red Hat
4. ...

Nope. This has already been addressed in the most recent X.org release. In fact the goal of this release is automatic hardware hotplugging support with no config files.

Actually it already works now. I'm running Ubuntu 7.10. Not too long ago I plugged in a beamer into my VGA port, and it... just worked! No configurations, no restart, it Just Worked(tm).

If you're going to whine, at least make an effort to stay up to date with the facts.

and worst I cant find initng any more in debian repos.OK I got it!initng is orphaned in Debian :p read this you Debianites: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=426268

Maybe you have heard about this groups of people called `distribution makers'? You can check http://www.redhat.com/, http://www.debian.org/, http://ubuntu.com/, and so on. I hear there is a whole site dedicated to simply listing linux distros! They surely are not the developers of all the code they package, you know.

The fact that the GPL is a license on distribution is a hardly a semantic point: it is essentially the whole point of the license!

You claimed that "the developer is the party bound by the license, not the user": one can but conclude that you have not even read the license (nor the many faqs out there explaining in painstaking detail what the license says...)

I cannot find any reference to initng in the Debian repositories, but Upstart is in Debian experimental http://packages.debian.org/experimental/upstart

I did a "grep -i" on the term "splice" in my /usr/src/linux/.config and it came up empty.

  I did not include KVM support in my kernel on purpose.

  As this http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=9;filename=patch;att=1;bug=464953 patch points out, it's in the general fs splice.c code, so I think it is more serious than I originally had thought.

  For some reason, (if someone can substantiate this I would appreciate it) I could get neither code to work on a CentOS 4.6 machine setup as a server).

  I'm buying into the idea that it may be based (a little) on kernel config options, but an official patch would be bet

The parent bug for this is http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=464945

This also has a patch to the debian kernel tree to fix it: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=54;filename=patch;att=1;bug=464945

Hopefully will hit the apt mirrors shortly, as I don't fancy trying to get my head around make-kpkg (which never worked for me) at 10pm on a Sunday.

The parent bug for this is http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=464945

This also has a patch to the debian kernel tree to fix it: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=54;filename=patch;att=1;bug=464945

Hopefully will hit the apt mirrors shortly, as I don't fancy trying to get my head around make-kpkg (which never worked for me) at 10pm on a Sunday.

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=464953

The workaround posted in a follow-up in that thread works. I had a few vulnerable (tested) machines that I cannot reboot even if a patched kernel is released in the near future. I tried that fix, then tried the exploit again. The exploit no longer worked after using the fix (workaround).

Those machines were debian x64.

Ubuntu kernels do not appear to have vmsplice enabled by default.

Wake me up in a year, when it's the 10th anniversary of Bruce Perens' mailing list post: It's Time to Talk About Free Software Again.

The term "open source" was coined to avoid talking about freedom, under the rather stupid assumption that business people don't want to hear about it. Here's the thing: business owners are some of the most vehement seekers of their own freedom, so if you talk to a business owner who is frustrated with vendor lock-in and tell him that he can have the freedom to do away with this crap once and for all, he'll listen. Perhaps some short-sighted middle managers will resist the idea, but if you convince the people at the top, those middle managers will be irrelevant.

I've heard plenty of stories I've heard about companies who "open sourced" their products, expecting to cut their development costs and improve their product quality by using the free labour of volunteers (like ESR observed in The Cathedral and the Bazaar), only to later give up because there are a finite number of volunteers, and their product just wasn't interesting enough. We shouldn't be promoting "open source" to software suppliers; What we should do is teach software consumers that they can demand freedom, and software developers will have no choice but to supply it.

We need to talk more about "free as in free markets". "Open source" just represents a preoccupation with technical details (source code) that business owners ultimately don't care about, and serves more as a buzzword and a source of unrealistic expectations than as a long-term promotional tool.

Are you retarded, my dear sir? If you look at the link you posted, a bit above, you have table of what values you can fit in those datatypes. Not hard to figure out. Creating a cluster is not something obvious? No, I guess it isn't. Maybe you should go RTFM or use a distribution that does that for you.

As for unsigned integers and you not being able to figure it out... Please stick to MySQL, thank you.

No worries, you can use alien to listen to the songs. They will just be scattered across your system in really weird directories.

In addition to the other tools mentionned by /.ers, there are 2 root-kit checking tools that are worth mentioning :
- chkrootkit
- rkhunter

They are scripts that scan the system for known root kits, weird behaviours and hidden files in unusual places.
They can both be used to scan an offline system (booted from a live-cd and the system mounted under some directory),
and a live online system (they check the system for suspicious behaviour that may reveal a root-kit trying to hide it self - for example the "ps" command doesn't show the same processes as the "/proc" directory could mean a root-kitted "ps").

They are available in a lot of distributions (Debian Etch has them in the repository - probably the corresponding Ubuntu has them too) and the packages usually come with "cron" entries that can automatically scan the system and email a report to the administrator.
They are also downloadable and installable from their websites and feature configuration files that cover the most frequent distributions.

You should install them, run some initially check, (eventually edit the script to remove some false positive, i.e.: hidden files about which the script complains but which are normal part of the system), and add crontab entries to do daily checks and e-mail you positive results.
This will help you against having your server rootkited.

-----------------------

Another tool worth mentioning is ClamAV.
That's an open-source signature-based virus scanner, whose maker have been praised for their very fast response time in case of new emerging threats.
You could set it up to periodically check files in the directories that are served. (/srv/www, /srv/ftp, etc.)
The scanner is not very fast, but supports some specialized-hardware acceleration (it might be worth considering it if the server is rather important, and gets significant mail-traffic too). Some teams are also working on GPGPU hardware acceleration (mentioned in nVidia's book "CPUGems 3").

This will help you get some protection against website that you're hosting that may have been hacked into (with bugs in PHP pages, for exemple) and are now serving malwares.

-----------------------

Because the way malware evolve, you may have to upgrade the above softwares to later versions than those shipped with your OS.
Some distribution propose it in their security updates.
For Debian, keep in mind that this kind of "later version requirement" packages go in the "volatile" repository and not the "security" one, modify your sources accordingly.
("security" : we keep the exact same version for stability reasons and only patch critical errors.
"volatile" : for security reasons, some packages (mostly various scan engines) may require updating to a later versions.
"volatile-sloppy" : warning, the packages are really different. b0rkage of config files may ensure (mostly software like gaim/pidgin).

This is a page with a top 100 of various security tools which may also inspire you (for example they mention a webserver scanner called Nikto).

Also, always keep in mind that a compromised machine is not a machine that you can trust. Thus in addition to creating new entries in you crontab, you should also test your machine offline as part of the security checks.
For example, occasionnaly, when you have to take your server offline for planned updates (rebooting to newer kernel version or non hot-plugable hardware upgrades) you may want to scan your system while booting on a LiveCD in case the root-kit are efficient enough to go undetected once they are active.
(That is, if the conditions allow you to perform such a scan : the machine is physically accessible, you can plan in the

You mean outside of waiting for an official package?
There is a package called kernel-package that makes thing a little easier and produces a .deb that you can install with "dpkg -i"

http://myrddin.org/howto/debian-kernel-recompiling/
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch08s06.html.en

or http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=kernel+debian+way

I'd rather the energy was put into GNU/Linux. Most Windoze users will take years to embrace KDE but the trolls will call GNU/Linux a "second class citizen" as the Ars author did because Windoze and OSX users could run newwer code from easy to install binaries. KDE 4.0 will take time to get into stable distributions. Had the effort been spent on GNU/Linux, KDE 4.0 would all be in Debian testing already. Right now, it requires unstable archives. While that's a better performer than any version of Winblows, it's more effort than I'm willing to go to. I'd rather the effort was taken to shoring up some bugs in KDE 3.5 and getting 4.0 out the door. The more comfortable you make people in their slavery, the longer they will stay there.

If only someone would point that out to Microsoft.. the most obvious exception to your relationship.

No kidding. If it wasn't for Microsoft, I could have used the word "quite" instead of "often". It's not enough to have millions of beta testers (err, I mean customers) - you have to provide a way to listen to them. Collecting $99 or $249 to open a PSS ticket (and then spout worthless advice such as "do an in-place Windows reinstall" instead of providing a fix) doesn't cut it.

At least free software gets this right.

I'm not as old as some people around here, so I wasn't around for the first pong days, but I was using a PC back around Kindergarten. My dad was/is an accountant and got the computer for his office. I don't remember which one I played first, but there were three of them. Xonix, Bouncing Babies, and Ninja Mission

The reason I got into programming though was combination of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.

-- all 18000 of them, because they're sorted by use, not difficulty (e.g., newbie->'luser'->user->etc.) Back to square 1a :-|

NO SIGNATURE? NO EXECUTE.

Hmmm, like this perhaps? Debian has implemented integrity-checking of updates for quite some time now...

When it comes to Debs, I have no idea how to build Debs. Ubuntu and Debian lack the SSH/Kerberos mass deply ability and are even HARDER to recompile than RPMs.

sudo apt-build install applicationname

Good for aeroplanes I suppose, but still not small enough.

Small is good. For me, I prefer carrying 3.5-5" PDAs and 9-12" subnotebooks. And even 12" is already too big. What I realy want is a robust ThinkPad with modern technology at or below 12".

What can you do on a small screen? Well, lots of things. What you lose in screen size you gain it three times in productivity thanks to flexibility in using your machine anywhere you want. I use my PDA (HTC Universal) and my 8.9" Flybook while walking, for example. This means that I am productive at times that other people aren't, which increases my earning power. Many showstopping software bugs were fixed and important emails have been written while I was walking down the street. It also helps me stay fit (and also increase my knowledge, I even read books while walking).

What can you do with a laptop that you can use only on a desk? Not much. And while you use it your spine suffers unless you have a very good ergonomic office. Now imagine being able to work while hiking in nature or while standing in line at the bank. You have no desk in these situations (except by luck, for example I have found a nice place where I go hiking and it has some rocks at the right configuration that they behave just like a desk! but this is rare), and yet with a subnotebook you can work just as well. The associated time savings add up over time and you can soon find that your typical day has not 24 but 32 or 48 hours in it.

Doing this with 15.4" laptops isn't easy (I have tried it, with a ThinkPad!). What mobile nomad technology professionals and other very busy persons need is a small subnotebook, smaller than 12" (a perfect size I think is between 7" and 9"), equipped with the right pointing device controls and other features to allow use while walking or standing (Flybook for example has a nice trackpoint at the correct location and a cord to secure your subnotebook to your arm in case it is about to fall down). PDAs are good for short emails, viewing documents, quickly testing something in Python or quickly SSHing to your server, but they aren't good for serious work (this may change with HTC Shift, however). So what we really need is subnotebooks at the right size to keep them with our hands in front of us while walking. And they should be GNU/Linux-compatible (who wants to work with Windows? Debian lenny with some tweaking is great for me) and have USB ports so that we can connect 3G Internet modems (or incorporated GSM/HSDPA modules like Flybook, but I have found USB ports a bit easier for setting them up in GNU/Linux). That's what technomads want.

The current subnotebook offerings by other manufacturers are not really very robust, and many have various problems with GNU/Linux. A robust GNU/Linux-compatible ThinkPad at small dimensions would be great. How could Lenovo ignore this important market?

Looks like Kubuntu already released a CD to install KDE 4.0 alongside your KDE 3.0. There are releases for openSUSE and Debian also, but it looks like other distributions are still working on it (including Fedora/Red Hat and Madriva).

Have a look at Clean (http://clean.cs.ru.nl/) for a use of pointers (internally) that makes for efficient execution. An interesting read concerning the subject is found here:

http://clean.cs.ru.nl/contents/Addison__Wesley_book/addison__wesley_book.html

Actual benchmarks to show the efficiency can be examined here (note the comparison is with C-versions of the same algorithms compiled on gcc):

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=clean&lang2=gcc

Here's Java 6 (server version) for comparison:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=java&lang2=gcc

You'll notice that differences are mainly in the memory footprint, already known to be attributable to the large number of libraries (classes) loaded into the vm at start-up, something the Clean runtime isn't quite as encumbered with:

(Java) http://java.sun.com/docs/books/performance/1st_edition/html/JPRAMFootprint.fm.html

So, the difference in speed is often-times negligible, and it's been shown that the memory footprint can be reduced to a size where you can run an embedded jvm in a mobile phone (really!), and rumour has it that someone even wrote an operating system in Java, but the memory footprint still seems the biggest culprit:

http://www.jnode.org/node/573

In other words, it's not Java - the language, but Java - the massive OO-framework, and JVM - the specific implementation, that's the problem. Even C++ or C with an OO-framework can be made into a large memory footprint, if you can believe it:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx

Then, of course, memory is cheap:

http://www.simmtester.com/page/memory/memprice.asp

But, the over-use of which, sometimes stays with us as itching bugs for too long:

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/11/firefox-3-add-o.html

If memory serves me right (http://www.google.com), there's something to be said of the virtues of garbage-collection applied to systems programming:

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/

and the actual (memory and) time efficiency of such an attempt:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/d.php

But I could be wrong. After all, no-one in their right mind would ever attempt to write an operating system in something like, say, Lisp:

http://cbbrowne.com/info/lisposes.html

- let alone design an actual computer around it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine

It simply wouldn't run. No, the skills of an engineer depend solely on the language he/she speaks, not on the abstract concepts he/she masters, applied to whatever tool he/she chooses to use/create.

That is why I propose we all forget about abstraction all-together, and revert to coding like this:

010101100001111010110101101101111101111...

But wait, that is itself an abstraction - Turing must have suffered from premature abstraculation. No, let's hear it for using copperwires instead of silicon, so we can attach some large, hand-

Have a look at Clean (http://clean.cs.ru.nl/) for a use of pointers (internally) that makes for efficient execution. An interesting read concerning the subject is found here:

http://clean.cs.ru.nl/contents/Addison__Wesley_book/addison__wesley_book.html

Actual benchmarks to show the efficiency can be examined here (note the comparison is with C-versions of the same algorithms compiled on gcc):

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=clean&lang2=gcc

Here's Java 6 (server version) for comparison:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=java&lang2=gcc

You'll notice that differences are mainly in the memory footprint, already known to be attributable to the large number of libraries (classes) loaded into the vm at start-up, something the Clean runtime isn't quite as encumbered with:

(Java) http://java.sun.com/docs/books/performance/1st_edition/html/JPRAMFootprint.fm.html

So, the difference in speed is often-times negligible, and it's been shown that the memory footprint can be reduced to a size where you can run an embedded jvm in a mobile phone (really!), and rumour has it that someone even wrote an operating system in Java, but the memory footprint still seems the biggest culprit:

http://www.jnode.org/node/573

In other words, it's not Java - the language, but Java - the massive OO-framework, and JVM - the specific implementation, that's the problem. Even C++ or C with an OO-framework can be made into a large memory footprint, if you can believe it:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx

Then, of course, memory is cheap:

http://www.simmtester.com/page/memory/memprice.asp

But, the over-use of which, sometimes stays with us as itching bugs for too long:

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/11/firefox-3-add-o.html

If memory serves me right (http://www.google.com), there's something to be said of the virtues of garbage-collection applied to systems programming:

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/

and the actual (memory and) time efficiency of such an attempt:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/d.php

But I could be wrong. After all, no-one in their right mind would ever attempt to write an operating system in something like, say, Lisp:

http://cbbrowne.com/info/lisposes.html

- let alone design an actual computer around it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine

It simply wouldn't run. No, the skills of an engineer depend solely on the language he/she speaks, not on the abstract concepts he/she masters, applied to whatever tool he/she chooses to use/create.

That is why I propose we all forget about abstraction all-together, and revert to coding like this:

010101100001111010110101101101111101111...

But wait, that is itself an abstraction - Turing must have suffered from premature abstraculation. No, let's hear it for using copperwires instead of silicon, so we can attach some large, hand-

Have a look at Clean (http://clean.cs.ru.nl/) for a use of pointers (internally) that makes for efficient execution. An interesting read concerning the subject is found here:

http://clean.cs.ru.nl/contents/Addison__Wesley_book/addison__wesley_book.html

Actual benchmarks to show the efficiency can be examined here (note the comparison is with C-versions of the same algorithms compiled on gcc):

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=clean&lang2=gcc

Here's Java 6 (server version) for comparison:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=java&lang2=gcc

You'll notice that differences are mainly in the memory footprint, already known to be attributable to the large number of libraries (classes) loaded into the vm at start-up, something the Clean runtime isn't quite as encumbered with:

(Java) http://java.sun.com/docs/books/performance/1st_edition/html/JPRAMFootprint.fm.html

So, the difference in speed is often-times negligible, and it's been shown that the memory footprint can be reduced to a size where you can run an embedded jvm in a mobile phone (really!), and rumour has it that someone even wrote an operating system in Java, but the memory footprint still seems the biggest culprit:

http://www.jnode.org/node/573

In other words, it's not Java - the language, but Java - the massive OO-framework, and JVM - the specific implementation, that's the problem. Even C++ or C with an OO-framework can be made into a large memory footprint, if you can believe it:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx

Then, of course, memory is cheap:

http://www.simmtester.com/page/memory/memprice.asp

But, the over-use of which, sometimes stays with us as itching bugs for too long:

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/11/firefox-3-add-o.html

If memory serves me right (http://www.google.com), there's something to be said of the virtues of garbage-collection applied to systems programming:

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/

and the actual (memory and) time efficiency of such an attempt:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/d.php

But I could be wrong. After all, no-one in their right mind would ever attempt to write an operating system in something like, say, Lisp:

http://cbbrowne.com/info/lisposes.html

- let alone design an actual computer around it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine

It simply wouldn't run. No, the skills of an engineer depend solely on the language he/she speaks, not on the abstract concepts he/she masters, applied to whatever tool he/she chooses to use/create.

That is why I propose we all forget about abstraction all-together, and revert to coding like this:

010101100001111010110101101101111101111...

But wait, that is itself an abstraction - Turing must have suffered from premature abstraculation. No, let's hear it for using copperwires instead of silicon, so we can attach some large, hand-