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No, I did not count them.

The CS department of University of Helsinki has to my quick estimate about 500 Linux workstations. Naturally most of the servers run Linux too. Maybe someone from the staff could give more exact figures.

It would work only on UP, not SMP systems, it's not possible to "stop" all related threads on all CPU at fault time. The all-thread-to-one-core approach is racey.

Anyway, there are very good reasons why Linus, Alan Cox, David S. Miller, Ingo Molnar, Al Viro and all other big names are against threads: in short they just want Linux to stay a stable, secure and well-performer platform.

On Mac OS X it's a little different, though. The "Types Change" plugin isn't available (yet?). But the "Open Using" plugin isn't really necessary, since you can force-open any file by dragging to an app in the dock while holding down command and option. Hopefully there will be a way to change the type and creator of a file on X soon, and all will be back to normal.

Everything is in the title.... For bug description, see this post on the kernel mailing list.

The user-tools can be download here

This update adds support for the 5.1 cards (including the IR remote, though it's still being reversed-eng'd), AC3 passthrough, multichannel playback (for AC3 pre-decoded in software), sequencer support, dsp effects (flanger, chorus, etc), and much more.

This is the first sync with CVS in almost a year (development was idle between Nov-April). Report any problems with the driver on the emu10k1 mailing, here: emu10k1-devel@opensource.creative.com

P.S. grep -c ... is faster than grep ... | wc -l

http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~reriksso/unix/award.h tml for more details, and other shell tips.

Well, I haven't seen the movie yet, but I'm curious to know how David was created/designed? Does the movie explain any of this? For example, for a robot to feel emotion, actually feel it, not just react to situations/words/etc, then that robot would have to have been made differently than the robots we have today...Not just more advanced or whatever, but totally different. Take for example John Searle's Chinese Room Argument. No matter how advanced the program that runs the robot is, it only reacts to stimuli - it can't really think for itself..ie: it has syntax, but not semantics. Humans have both..

So back to my question, does the movie explain how these robots were/are created/designed? I imagine not as that would be too much for most people to comprehend, but still, I would be curious to know.

~Steve
--

First of all, there is no source code for lzip and I don't like running code that I don't know. So I ran it through strings and found the magic JFIF header. Aha, it's really a jpeg image.

It seems it's not protected by GPL (GNU Public Licence) like most Linux programs, but with The Free Object-Oriented License (FOOL). The licence itself is ridiculous: To indicate your agreement with the terms of this license agrement, you may sign your computer screen. We will wait for you on the other side, brother.

Sorry but I've seen better April 1st pranks in my life..

This is a strange coincidence. I've seen a couple of researches and reports recently that were not made by exactly competent people...

Recently some people from University of Helsinki E-mail-interviewed the readers of sfnet.atk.linux newsgroup (the report is in Finnish). I answered the questions, even when the questions were sort of silly. Well, results were not exactly great either - it just showed that the survey makers had not used Linux before. For example, "Debian" and "Debian 'potato'" were mentioned separately in distribution preference summary, and when talking of StarOffice, many people had said they "use the other word processing program, LaTex" (emphasis mine).

(Okay, that was academic thing and this Evans thing is a commercial report, but interesting coincidence nevertheless)

Of course they're not going to publish anything you throw at them, check out their rules (in Finnish) before you proceed.

Of course they're not going to publish anything you throw at them, check out their rules (in Finnish) before you proceed.

The W3C does have a tool you can use to see if web pages are compliant with their html specifications. Which, of course, almost no one's are.

As far as I am concerned, if this guy's web page is not html compliant, I am not going to worry if mine isn't.

I am working on a social sciences report sadly titled "The social impact of legalisation of software patents within the European Union".

It isn't finished, however I would appreciate comments, and I hope you can find it enjoyable in some way.

Oh here is is.

(Does any one else picture a Matrix style showdown between Bill and Linus' children 20 years from now?)

Patricia is Linus & Tove's first daughter.

• His daughter Patricia
• Another of Patricia
• Tux

• His daughter Patricia
• Another of Patricia
• Tux

• His daughter Patricia
• Another of Patricia
• Tux

Linus home page

--

Umm, no. This would not be Torvalds 2.0, rather, it would be Linus 3.0. If you go to his homepage, you can see Linus 2.0. No pictures of 3.0 yet, or the source photos. 8;o)

Fujitsu and Sony are already on, Hitachi and NEC are expected...but this chip only has an edge in a limited market (laptops and assorted PDAs). Plus they outsource the manufacture of the chips to IBM. The cynic in me would say this is another case of CEO's buffing the company image before their IPO...

"Transmeta, which filed in mid-August for an initial public offering, is gaining in stature within the industry and on Wall Street..."

They do have Linus Torvalds onboard and Paul Allen's cash behind them, but that doesn't mean you have half a decade lead time over Intel or AMD. Bottom line: the market for PDAs and laptops is small. Their production set up is small. If the Suits at Intel or AMD decide to throw money at the problem, they could play catch-up faster than you might think.

I just read the 7 so-far posted features. It's a touching story. Even though I don't personally know the author it hurts. I really hope that they eventually catch the cracker and help him out of his condition. Poor guy.

As I have told you many times (and as you can see from my mail address tld) I live in Finland. I truly really honestly did not know the situation was that bad.

My host has been cracked once (through mIRC scripts which a friend of mine sent me, thought I could trust him). I have been probed for BO and netbus and what not but I have never faced or even heard of this level of cracking activity.

I know that some sites have been cracked (University of Helsinki among them) but for the first time of my life cracker activity comes this close. I wonder if it is just that I don't know or is there really that much difference between Finland and the States?

I know plenty of people who happily run out-of-the-box linuxes, even non-patched Windowses with some shareware/freeware FTP servers and such running on their static IP connections. I wonder how easily is one of those compromized. Seconds?

After all, the initials FIN should belong to our one true Finn, and nobody else!!

(Is what it should have looked like.)

Considering it out performs Win200's webserver with this

• Want to have a fancy job? Contact one of the small but powerful geek companies.
  
• Want to play it safe? Apply for anything at Nokia HQ.
  

• Want to have a fancy job? Contact one of the small but powerful geek companies.
  
• Want to play it safe? Apply for anything at Nokia HQ.
  

Good mingling of Consciousness and QM here:
here
I can't speak for his physics (he gets into manifolds and such) but the ideas are right on.

With a simple cronjob and Perl's wonderfulLWP module package, not to mention the other implemtations of tracking web-pages, any relativly smart administrator should already be doing this.

I once made such a short Perl script to check the links on my own web pages: http://www.iki.fi/kaip/linkkuri.html

I said directly that moving to a 64-bit processor does not solve the 2038 problem because the C standard defines time as a long and a long as 32 bits. Breaking either breaks working programs. Here is an idea of what needs to happen.

As for large amounts of data, yes I have had to worry about the 2 GB limit on production systems. I have in the past gone to contortions to break up files so that they would avoid that limit. I am perfectly aware of the issues, and your glib claim that you would just fix the issue with any code you used is utter idiocy from someone who clearly doesn't understand the issues.

For instance large file support in Perl (and hence any program written in Perl) is a new feature that you can choose to compile perl 5.6.0 with. (If you choose to install on a production system, install the latest patches as well. I am serious about this.) Giving Perl that support took a fair amount of work. (Hint, you need to make sure it never tries to seek when it can't...) If you have any older version of Perl, I really recommend that you open a pipe to or from from a program (eg cat) that understood 64-bit files. Guess why I know this?

As for development vs production kernels, it depends what you are doing. For most production purposes, most people should not be using development kernels. If you have any brains you don't use .0 releases either, you let the distributers hit the main bugs first.

As for ReiserFS, it supports files larger than 2 GB. Whoop-te-do. So does Ext 2. Has for years. That doesn't mean that on a 32-bit system you can actually address the bit on the end...

Regards,
Ben

check the physics. God and creation are alive in there if you care to look.
(course if you're into believing the Bible is literally true this is a waste of time)

No, the kid was just typecasted to the parent of the same class. This is fair because then a girl would be "Valerie 2.0".

Or, perhaps someone was trying to say "Bruce's kid", in a geeky sort of way. I think that's what Linus was saying here.

However, abandoning common sense and continuing on with an alternate interpretation of the can of worms you insisted on creating where there was none before...

Using multiple inheritance and polymorphism correctly is bad enough in C++, and hyphenated names are kludgey in English, and I don't think the populace is ready for the gender-bending implications if the kid were Bruce-Valerie-2.0, possibly with both genders and other conflicts.

Basically, typecasting is incompatible with political-correctness, which just goes to show that programming languages are direct, to-the-point, and don't care about those wussy Humanities issues of fairness, children with more than one parent, or the English language.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

• Pricing.

  It is notoriously difficult to get pricing information for QNX.

  I have heard differing reports on comp.os.qnx, including that it is "very expensive, hundreds of dollars per system," or, on the other hand, the vague answer of "you can license it reasonably economically." (With no definition of what "reasonably economical" means, of course.)

• If people should start thinking of QNX, then they should also start thinking of:
  • VSTa

    A copylefted system that "lifts" ideas from QNX and Plan 9

    It looks like development has not been terribly active lately.

  • MIT Exokernel

    Again, not terribly active, but an interesting OS kernel.

  • EROS

    Eric Raymond thinks it's mindblowing, so the Eric Raymond Personality Cult should all be preparing to drop Linux in favor of EROS. (Of course, it isn't yet capable of self-hosting, which indicates that it's not all that useful at this point. But, to cultists, usefulness is irrelevant...)

  • Possibly even Hurd

    It's different from the other options; certainly not a tiny OS option...

  • eCos
  • RTEMS

    Which, like QNX, appears to be used in some reasonably critical system environments...

  • Fiasco

    Which is a "lighter microkernel than Mach"...

  • On Linux, people interested in QNX should almost certainly look at SRR -- QNX API compatible message passing for Linux

    This is the critical programming abstraction that QNX uses heavily which isn't all that widely used on traditional UNIXes, namely asynchronous messaging.

  These are all interesting alternatives, albeit not all being of identical levels of interest.

There is indeed a version of grep for XML-based records. It's called sgrep (structured grep) and "is a tool for searching and indexing text, SGML, XML and HTML files and filtering text streams using structural criteria." It is based on the concept of regions, i.e. nonempty text substrings that are typically occurrences of constant stsrings, SGML tags, or meaningful text elements recognizable via delimiting strings or the built-in SGML, XML and SGML parser.

Risto Siilasmaa (CEO of DataFellows) commented the issue at the Information Society-seminar (which Linus Torvalds attended) in Helsinki on Wednesday: "My strongest guess is that Transmeta doesn't actually do anything."

There is some speculation that Transmeta's employees just hang around at their office and sell the company for a good price after this fuzz. Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen mentioned that he has actually been in front of Transmeta's office and stated that the office has darkened windows and no visitors are allowed there.

1) They hired Linus Torvalds.
2) Oh.. there is no number 2

Transmeta must be as interesting as the university of Helsinki.

The physically most interesting primes correspond to primes near prime powers of two: at this stage not possible to explain why electron corresponds to Mersenne prime M_127 or intermediate gauge bosons correspond to M_89.

What does this mean? Well, aside from the fact that 89 is a bit more awkward for my NVM theory than I might like, I would suggest it means that there is less of a conflict between "computer science" and the study of nature than people might otherwise believe.

The core laws of von Neumann's quantum logic (e.g.: S' = T**-1 S T ) are presented by von Neumann as being based on a great deal of "physics". However, they have been shown by Tom Etter of the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association as being theorems of the relational calculus that have important engineering ramifications for quantum computing!

I don't know about you, but this is the sort of result that makes me glad I work with computers -- well -- at least glad that I've been investigating relational semantics as the proper foundation for programming environments since the early 80's rather than committing Occam's Chainsaw Massacre.

By accepting the 'honor' Linus accepts the authority of the presenter. I say Linus should reject it out of hand, because in the end you have to ask yourself, "Is the university honoring me, or am I honoring the university?"

It is also interesting how it is the University of Stockholm that is now honoring Linus. How come? Linus is Finnish, and has studied in the University of Helsinki, not in Stockholm.

But of course this is all good PR for Stockholm University, as people generally are confused about Linus's origins and constantly mix his country of origin (Finland) with his native tongue (Swedish). This way at least some of the audience can be easily led to believe he was a Swede, after all, and studying in Stockholm. As you pointed out, this is more about Stockholm University honoring itself than Linus. A clever trick, anyway.

A good starting point would be ftp.cs.Helsinki.FI/pub/Peo ple/Torvalds_Linus/v2.2/

That's because, either you're a beginner with Python or your editor doesn't support correctly Python syntax (or both). Personally, when re-indenting more than 2 lines I systematically use jed, emacs or xemacs keystrokes for block reindenting. That's why I don't have these errors.

BZZZT! To me, a language should not be dependant on the features of an editor. I can't always control the tool set available to me on a host machine. Vi is the lowest common denominator. If it breaks with Vi, it's not useful to me.

Yes that's the problem. The lowest common denominator makes programming Python difficult. But changing the syntax just to match the lowest common denominator is too much to ask.

Nearly every other language I use (i.e. C, C++, Perl, JavaScript, SQL, hell even VBScript) does not necessarily require a special editor.

But they are better with a special editor (parenthesis matching, color highlighting, indentation,...). With emacs, you can even run the Python debugger, very handy when trying to debug code for which "print"-based debugging isn't convenient. Python just happens to be one of the worse language to program with a basic editor. That's probably why for instance there was a Win95/NT Python Survival Kit fitting on one diskette that included Jed, and a distribution of Python (now quite outdated: Python 1.4).

> If you are trying to generate javascript code from Python, then it is intrisequely problematic ;
Again, welcome to web applications. :)

I wasn't clear here: in this case "intrinsequely" meant that it was inherent to the problem being solved: whether using Python, Perl, Java, C++, Icon, ML is irrelevant since the result would have similary ugly (or worse). Only using Lisp syntax can save (nicely even!) from this mess. Or writing a pre-processor.

>"But the point is that 99% of the Python programmers aren't obligated to write code in a enviromnent that can't be fixed to handle spaces correctly or aren't generating Python code, that couldn't be post-indented by a simple script: why should they accept a huge syntax change because of the remaining 1% programmers ?"

I don't quite get this... The way I perceive the above is that 99% of Python programmers are there because of natural selection. The rest of the converts have wandered away because of frustrations (and not just with whitespace), so of course the remaining Python-ites have it good. :) Why should it change? I doesn't have to... but if it wants all those programmers who turned away from it, then that's why.

Well if it changes, it will turn away part of 99% programmers :-(. Natural selection is probably only partially true: converts may have changed of editor to suit their language rather than the reverse :-) The indentation/block terminators issue alone isn't a big deal, because it is purely a syntaxical issue and becomes easily transparent (provided that you don't get burned by errors induced by indentation, that is) ; it is easier to adapt to than Perl '$', '%', '@' because these have a semantic meaning (can't be automatically added by a tool).

Supporting an alternate syntax would be doable, but would probably result in a huge mess (with people systematically converting back and forth between the two syntaxes). It would be quite easy for the editors to automatically add block markers when loading a python file and remove them when writing the source to disk (which is exactly what the 400 lines long script Tools/scripts/pindent.py does), but this won't solve the problem of basic editors in non-controlled environment. It certainly would give me strange feeling to add "end if", "end while", "end for" that would be simply thrown away when saving :-), but of course its a matter of taste.