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Recent linux journal article on doing usability testing on the cheap (subscription required):

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8638

"And screen works even better!"

*** The new package gdb-ui.el provides an enhanced graphical interface to GDB. You can interact with GDB through the GUD buffer in the usual way, but there are also further buffers which control the execution and describe the state of your program. It can separate the input/output of your program from that of GDB and watches expressions in the speedbar. It also uses features of Emacs 21/22 such as the toolbar, and bitmaps in the fringe to indicate breakpoints.

Use M-x gdb to start GDB-UI.

I also wrote an on-line article http://linuxjournal.com/article/7876 a year ago when I thought that Emacs was about to be released. Unfortunately, along with Emacs, my mode is still stuck in the long grass!

By Doc Searls on Wed, 2005-11-16 02:00, Linux Journal

We're hearing tales of two scenarios--one pessimistic, one optimistic--for the future of the Net. If the paranoids are right, the Net's toast. If they're not, it will be because we fought to save it, perhaps in a new way we haven't talked about before. Davids, meet your Goliaths. [read complete essay here]

(it's too bad that hundreds of people have posted in this thread and still there's not one mention of this fine essay; guess it has a ways to go before reaching the audience that needs to hear it)

By Doc Searls on Wed, 2005-11-16 02:00, Linux Journal

We're hearing tales of two scenarios--one pessimistic, one optimistic--for the future of the Net. If the paranoids are right, the Net's toast. If they're not, it will be because we fought to save it, perhaps in a new way we haven't talked about before. Davids, meet your Goliaths. [read complete essay here]

(it's too bad that hundreds of people have posted in this thread and still there's not one mention of this fine essay; guess it has a ways to go before reaching the audience that needs to hear it)

Lengthly but quite on topic:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8673

The carriers are going to lobby for the laws and regulations they need, and they're going to do the deals they need to do. The new system will be theirs, not ours. The NEA principle--Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it, Anybody can improve it--so familiar to the Free Software and Open Source communities will prove to be a temporary ideal, a geek conceit. Code is not Law. Culture is not Free. From the Big Boys' perspective, code and culture are stuff nobody cares about.

That's us: Nobody.

in Linux Journal recently.

automount + ldap.

not trivial at first, though.

something to get you started:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8119

Troll? No. Clever? Thanks, yes I know, but don't let that frighten you.
As an AC I don't get any real chance to defend my side but I can
promise you that I have built at least three _working_ systems.
Jitter can be solved many ways, simple reordering, windowed backbuffering,
lots of fancy stuff - or for a budget DIY system just don't bother about
it too much, it's not like the OP asked for a fully commercial system is it?
Here's a few obvious links to help. I'm guessing you are enraged by my suggestion
because you work for a commercial VoIP provider. What can I say? Please grow up.
I also guess you have never actually built such such a system either, try it, go on,
fire up that C compiler and amaze yourself at how easy it is. Really, you don't need a load of fancy stuff, VoIP hardly even needs a processor, man you could get a 4MHz Z80 to
do most of what is required.

here
here
here
here
here
and here

True, but...

At the moment I have a very limited budget for hardware and a fair bit of free time, so, instead of spending $30 on a commercial firewall/router, I was much happier taking a Pentium 166 box and 2 network cards from my "junk" box, then running Coyote Linux on the lot. This combination has worked for 2 years, and I am happy with it, likely I will run this until the hardware fails (likely some time from now, as the box is almost empty (no hard drive, floppy only used during boot). When this combo does fail then likely I will check my junk box and see what other old/low-end stuff I have then.

In the mean time I have a usefull bit of hardware that I didn't have to spend $ on and it was a fun little project to do...

Intercepting USB data isn't hard, it just requires know-how.

maybe running SetPoint under VMWare, and intercepting the data between VMWare and the hardware? Or, on a sufficiently fast machine, use something like bochs. If, of course, bochs supports libusb. There's a Linux Journal article on snooping libusb traffic.

"Melanie Wyne is executive director of the Initiative for Software Choice, a global coalition run by the Computing Technology Industry Association"

"Microsoft is a member of the Washington-based Initiative for Software
Choice, that has written to Australian MPs asking them to oppose open
source preference Bills .."

http://www.sam.org.au/club_news.asp?clubid=4685&ne wsid=3651

"In August 2002, Microsoft became a member of the Initiative for Software
Choice. The ISC has close associations with the Computing Technology
Industry Association (CompTIA) based in Washington DC .."

http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/6927/print

"One editorial labeled Massachusetts' OpenDocument Format plan as the "domino" that will cause other governments and private parties to follow suit," Melanie Wyne

There *is* no mention of a 'domino` or any phrase to that effect on the linked to article. There is this quote thought:

"Heck, it's just standards...Outside of some politicians and some Microsoft-backed industry groups, there's an overwhelming support for this thing," he said. "It's kind of hard to argue against it." Bob Sutor, IBM

http://news.com.com/OpenDocument+format+gathers+st eam/2100-7344_3-5942913.html?tag=nl

"Through privately owned and developed IP, American and European IP companies have given back untold public benefit" Melanie Wyne

This is nonsence. It was because of the lack of IP legislation that companies prospered by utilising a common pool of knowlege. If it had been locked down we would have no national electricty grid, television, radio or a car industry.

What you are trying to do with your IP legislation is get a lock down on the developing markets. So they pay you to use their own software on their own computers.

Linux :-) http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7570

I reviewed a similar book with the same title for Linux Journal a few months ago. If you're into security, you might find it interesting.

I don't know what the limits of JFS are, but it sounds like a nice set up.

This article in Linux Journal ( http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8149 ) talks about doing just that. The hardware costs ring up and don't scale as you get into your capacity ranges unless you can get a deal buying bulk HDDs - something like $10K per 7.5 terabytes

I have done my share of kernel programming and I have always thought that it is pretty horrible that simple device driver bugs can take down the system. Almost all of Windows' Blue Screens are from bad third party drivers. Almost all of the oopses I have seen on linux are from device drivers for extra hardware (I mean drivers not for core common O/S features). On linux device driver debug still seems to be horrible; on Windows it is considerably better but still not as good as application debug.
With common user systems as cheap and fast as they are now, do user mode device drivers make sense? Is the performance worth giving up for the stability? Check out Microsoft's User-mode Driver Framework approach. Here is an old linux journal article on the subject. Does anyone know of other interesting examples of user mode device drivers on any operating systems?

This guy was the first to receive his refund in Australia :

http://www.netcraft.com.au/geoffrey/toshiba.html

Here's how to do it in California :

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7040

For other gems google for "windows refund day"

OpenDocument is not "already" the required document format for Massachusetts. The requirement to save all files in OpenDocument only takes effect from January 1, 2007.

There is a new function, pthread_sigmask(), that is used in much the same way as sigprocmask(), but it sets the signal mask only for the current thread. Also, a new thread inherits the signal mask of the thread that created it; so a signal mask can effectively be set for an entire process by calling pthread_sigmask() before any threads are created.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2121

You can not agree to the Eula, and get a refund, like this guy: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7040 Enjoy!

Are you joking? This is a very ood article about getting a refund if you do not agree to the windows license. It is possable!

You wanna see some funny math...

1. Your usual big box PC is 399. Often in those Dell mailers I get you can buy them on sale for 299.00. Buy one.

2. Now click here and follow directions. 200 bucks back on a Windows refund ain't bad.

3. Resell on ebay.

4. Lather, rinse, repeat

5. PROFIT!

"On a LAN with X remote you can't tell you're not working on the local machine, it's that good."

Oh, dude!

I'll read it to you:

"She told me that she wanted to use a remote client to work on her work machine from home."

Does this sound like "LAN" to you??

And I'll read you some more:

"She told me that windows xp did it so significantly faster that she dumped linux because she could not stand the wait."

And I tell you one more thing, from experience: She is right. She's absolutely fscking right! Repeat after me, three times:

Remote X over a DSL dialup link is unusable for work. Remote X over a DSL dialup link is unusable for work. Remote X over a DSL dialup link is unusable for work.

And FreeNX over the same DSL link is blazingly fast. You can hardly tell the difference of FreeNX-over-DSL from a local session. And it is nearly as fast over a dialup modem or dialup ISDN link.

FreeNX beats Windows RDP out of its pants.

So an OSS solution for this type of software doesn't have the familiar advantage of cost due to it being free (as in beer). But this doesn't mean that this mail server software doesn't have a significantly smaller TCO. And the AJAX interface is a nice touch. But things like how well the software can handle disk failures, how easy it is to do backups, how easy it is to handle 1 million mailboxes, etc. are the factors that make mail server software succeed or fail.

Note: Exchange doesn't do any of these things well.

While not quite a million users, HEC Montréal switched from Netscape Messaging Server running on AIX to Postfix/Cyrus/SquirrelMail running on Linux. Linux Journal ran a really nice article and a follow-up about their transition.

One of the first things the school did was figure out how exactly their current system was failing them. Their old AIX boxes were being stressed just by the volume of mail coming through the system, they had little power left over to do any sort of filtering. This led to users getting drowned in unwanted e-mail which only exacerbated the existing load issues. This is one of the first things you need to do, figure out why your current system isn't working properly. You'll be better equipped to fix the problems when they've actually been identified.

HEC Montréal also went for heavy redundancy and specialization. Instead of a handful of servers sharing all of the tasks equally each node in the cluster has its own job with every class of job having a backup server. Every job is going to take a beating with so many users, even if only a fraction of them are using the system at any given time.

I'd say the most important part of what you're doing will be modeling your current use. Are you getting a ton of traffic from viruses and worms spreading over your internal network? Do you get huge amounts of spam traffic to users? In such cases filtering at your SMTP servers will relieve the rest of the system from extraneous traffic. While you might need really beefy external SMTP servers you won't need nearly as much storage space on a SAN or NAS.

While not quite a million users, HEC Montréal switched from Netscape Messaging Server running on AIX to Postfix/Cyrus/SquirrelMail running on Linux. Linux Journal ran a really nice article and a follow-up about their transition.

One of the first things the school did was figure out how exactly their current system was failing them. Their old AIX boxes were being stressed just by the volume of mail coming through the system, they had little power left over to do any sort of filtering. This led to users getting drowned in unwanted e-mail which only exacerbated the existing load issues. This is one of the first things you need to do, figure out why your current system isn't working properly. You'll be better equipped to fix the problems when they've actually been identified.

HEC Montréal also went for heavy redundancy and specialization. Instead of a handful of servers sharing all of the tasks equally each node in the cluster has its own job with every class of job having a backup server. Every job is going to take a beating with so many users, even if only a fraction of them are using the system at any given time.

I'd say the most important part of what you're doing will be modeling your current use. Are you getting a ton of traffic from viruses and worms spreading over your internal network? Do you get huge amounts of spam traffic to users? In such cases filtering at your SMTP servers will relieve the rest of the system from extraneous traffic. While you might need really beefy external SMTP servers you won't need nearly as much storage space on a SAN or NAS.

However, I'd personally ask Google. They've done it and even their search engine has information. I found an interesting link from there detailing the deployment of a large hundred thousand user mail system, from the architecture to the software located on Linux Journal.

Mercury Systems and terraSoft Solutions ( YDL ) plan a Xserve-like machine. No price yet.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8541
http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/mercury /xr9.shtml

Have a look at A Statistical Approach to the Spam Problem which as far as I can tell describes the Bogofilter approach. Which seems to be

1. Calculate the probabilities p(spam|word) for each word in spam. The formula is a modification of the standard bayes rule to account for new words not found in corpus. As the the number of emails containing the word increases it does tend to the standard Bayes rule.
2. Combine the probabilities for all the words in the email. This step is where the Chi squared test comes in.

A lot of the debate seem to on precisely what we mean by Bayesian. It true to say that Bogofilter is not a Naive Bayes classifier, but it does use techniques of Bayesian inference.

Have a look at A Statistical Approach to the Spam Problem which as far as I can tell describes the Bogofilter approach. Which seems to be

1. Calculate the probabilities p(spam|word) for each word in spam. The formula is a modification of the standard bayes rule to account for new words not found in corpus. As the the number of emails containing the word increases it does tend to the standard Bayes rule.
2. Combine the probabilities for all the words in the email. This step is where the Chi squared test comes in.

A lot of the debate seem to on precisely what we mean by Bayesian. It true to say that Bogofilter is not a Naive Bayes classifier, but it does use techniques of Bayesian inference.

Linus has to patrol his trademark or lose it... look at how much trouble they had to go to when William R Della Croce, Jr trademarked it before and started demanding money...

As for the Mac dates, I relied on these IMG stories:

• Neverwinter Nights PC Gold, Mac News
• MacSoft to Publish Neverwinter Nights (official announcement of Mac version June 12, 2002)
• Friday, August 1, 2003 : MacSoft Ships Neverwinter Nights

Most of you probably do not remember him. He fraudulently registered the Linux trademark in 1996 and asked people to pay for use of the name "Linux".

Many of you now seem to think the name Linux does not need to be protected. You either have short memory or are too young to know what battles Linus had to fight to get here.

Most of you are free-loaders anyway. Interested only in what you are getting for free and contributing nothing back. Most of you given half the chance would have really cashed out on Linux, unlike Linus Torvalds.

See: http://www2.linuxjournal.com/article/2425 for some of the history.

Show me one working, paid graphic arts professional who is using the Gimp versus Photoshop in their daily life and I'll eat every word I'm typing. That user does not exist.

LinuxJournal Article

fxguide.com Article

I hope they taste good.

This article makes a good case for ATA over Ethernet. The main difference the article points out between AoE and iSCSI is that iSCSI is dependent upon TCP/IP, which has quite a bit of overhead associated with it.

Whether it's better or not, I don't know. Just remember that every technology was once new.

Start here:

Amateur Video Production Using Free Software and Linux

Follow the threads at the end of the article for updates.

Enjoy,

Incidently, Houdini 8.0 has just been opened up for a public beta. Anybody can download it for free from www.sidefx.com. Check out the "Apprentice" link at the bottom!

Pixar writes their own (Marionette, I believe its called), Dreamworks uses Maya and a host of internally developed apps and plugins (for example), but I'd be willing to bet that most of the post-production work is done using Avid or FCP (and of course stuff like AfterEffects), which, for the most part, don't run on linux (Shake does, and it's damn sweet).

Most smaller companies (commercials, doing stills for magazine ads, and artists) still use commercial products, like Maya, Lightwave, or Animation Master, mostly, I think, for support reasons, but also because, at this stage, they still have features that are missing from Blender (camera/lens types, focal length and depth, and some heirarchy differences). As for cinellera, I don't know many people using it at all (any personally). No one teaches it in film classes, as far as I can tell, and most home users who have the time to mess around with it and understand it either a) also have the money for a cheap mac and use iMovie, which while nowhere as powerful, is good enough for a lot more than you'd expect or b) also have enough time and expertise to get a cracked version of premiere (of FCP if they have a mac) and just use that.

.. as I unpacked it for the first time from its happy foam box, plugged it into the telly, and proceeded to clik-clik away on its beautiful little chiclet keys. oh, how i love that oric-1, even still today.. trips back home to the family wouldn't be the same without a quick crank of the treasurebox in the attic, a "10 PING; ZAP; SHOOT; EXPLODE; GOTO 10" or two ..

#2: Then, a few years later, the same smell (only much, much, much more intense) when I unpacked my first MIPS Magnum pizzabox, placed it on my desk, watched it boot, and prepared to port my code to it .. oh my, how the raw power of me, professional C programmer, felt that day.

#3: Booting Yggdrasil-Linux on my ol' 386 about 2 years after the Magnum experience ..


#4: booting new hardware i had a small hand in developing for the first time.

LDAP for security Part 1;

Linux LDAP Tutorial;

Enjoy,

The lawsuit is in an effort to make *use* of that capacity.

To answer the question, what is Drupal...

Drupal is the open-source CMS behind:

• KernelTrap
• SpreadFirefox
• Gnome Footnotes
• Linux Journal

and many more sites. Even if you don't know Drupal, you've probably visited a Drupal site before. Drupal is known for its modular architecture, clean code and developer friendlyness.

Could you provide a link to the articles you read?

Hi Dalibor,

I am not aware of Kaffe, or gcj, or GNU Classpath biting Sun hands

Kaffe accepts donations from Microsoft to implement Microsoft's contested extensions.

The leader of the Free Software Foundation (under whom GCJ/Classpath is developed) starts an uncalled for flamewar over Java's status.

Sun could easily "punish" projects for stuff like this (through more restrictive licenses, withholding key information from the public, etc.), but they don't. They're nice people, not intending to throw up any barriers. Yet time and again they are painted as an evil entity to be defeated for no reason what-so-ever. Thankfully, cooler heads usually prevail. Unfortunately, these cooler heads are usually not the OSS community or fan base. :-/

A sumpercomputer? Like this one?

Considering that the CIA's World Fact Book is regualrly cited on slashdot, and the majority of the data they analyse is from public sources I'm sure you'd be surprised at how much you could probably get from them(You can even take a virtual ture of their campus). Also remember that Larry Wall used to work over at the NSA when he started developing Perl for internal use and that the "No Such Agency" is the hub of SE Linux developement. Our secretive spooks are surprisingly will to share when they can.

It's not like telling a programmer how to communicate with the underlying hardware is going to tell them how it (the PCB/silicon) was designed, so why make this information secret?

Yes it does. Haven't you ever read a datasheet that revealed something cool about the way a device works?

Sometimes, for performance reasons, the device interface cannot be too abstract. The API will often end up mirroring a device's internal architecture, possibly exposing something novel that competitors haven't figured out yet. Nat Friedman, in an interview, commented on how graphics card manufacturers are understandably reluctant about providing open source drivers because more and more magic is being done in software.

One possible solution would be to move the magic into the firmware (though some people would consider this unacceptable) and present an abstraction to the OS driver. This might work. Then again, this might be just as inefficient as creating the abstraction in hardware.

http://www.freshmeat.net/projects/passwordms

There was an article about password storage and management some time back in the "Linux Journal". I think this is the article on their web site here:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7853

Here: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8038

It is from the June 2005 issue. Covers OSS neuron simulations. Not available online unless you are a subscriber. (I'm not and lent my boss my copy. If someone can skim through this and post a link to the OSS project(s), please do so.)

I have a dual boot machine with an Athlon 64 3200+ and 1GB of RAM. And I find that Linux (Debian with Gnome) performs _much_ better than Windows XP. At least more to my liking. Note that all that follows is drawn from my own (subjective) experiences with the two operating systems.

There are several issues here as far as I can tell:

• The performance of the scheduler
• The way processes are swapped out to disk
• The way windows are drawn

Linux has seen much development in the scheduler over the last year or so (since 2.6 was released). It has improved to the point now where I believe it's superior to XP's. I tend to multi-task fairly heavily so this affects me directly.

The swapping behaviour of Windows XP seems to be absolutely abysmal. When you have several processes open, even with 1GB of RAM, things still get swapped out! I mean when you have say Firefox and Thunderbird open, you spend say 1/2 an hour writing some email, then alt-tab back to firefox, you have to wait up to 10 seconds for it to be swapped back to RAM. This is something that _never_ happens in Linux. Until RAM is exhausted, Linux barely touches the swap file.

The way windows are drawn is actually a plus for Windows in terms of performance. Windows has the window drawing routines in its kernel, and thus will probably always be faster than Linux in terms of the snappiness of window redraws. Now, I'd like to point out that this makes me nervous. Doing something like that in kernel space just sounds like a bad idea to me. I'm left wondering how many BSODs are caused by this "optimisation".

This issue was the reason a friend of mine gave for switching back to Windows from Linux. Mind you that guy used 800x600 as his screen resolution, so his mind obviously runs in a different way than mine ;) I just can't stand the window manager in Windows. Annoys the hell out of me. I'll take slightly slower screen redraws any day if I never have to have my focus stolen again! :)

Oh, and if you're looking for ways to speed up your linux desktop, maybe try this Linux Journal article: Optimising Desktop Performance