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Some marmosets are naturally chimeric some substantial portion of the time. This leads to wacky fun for researchers because it is perfectly possible(depending on how the different cell populations ended up distributed in the mature monkey) for an individual to show one genotype on blood tests; but produce offspring that appear to be genetic descendants of their brother or sister....

Just to be sure, we'll probably have to homogenize any animals and/or small children we wish to study in the future.

Since the biggest Toyota runaway story has turned out to be a problem exists between seat and pedals situation... is this all hype with no science behind it?

It sounds like someone just pulled an excuse out of the "BOFH excuses file" (clickety clickety) :

"BOFH excuse #254:

Interference from lunar radiation"

I'd rather have ext4 than XFS!

It was just one of those nasty intersections between real-world usage patterns and and unexpected consequences of an intended feature (isn't the whole point of extent-based filesystems that we can do stuff like delayed allocation?) Sadly, I guess Canonical can't yet afford to pay to have hundreds of users sitting in labs typing randomly at PCs like MS can.. but OTOH, isn't a beta release a good substitute?

And let's not forget, Ted produced patches PDQ. He had a bit of moan at the same time, but he did produce patches. That ranks pretty low on the prima-donna scale in my book :-)

If you're running XFS, you certainly do want a UPS.

I haven't got one, and I got fed up with losing data when I had a power outage, or a kernel crash (some of the drivers for my hardware are a little dodgy.)

I'm back on ext3 now while I wait for ext4 to stabilize.

No, it really does have some interesting observations, with some very scary implications:

One of the first things that will happen, is that the memory DIMMs will no longer be refreshed properly (DRAM needs to be refreshed constantly otherwise it will loose it's data) and very rapidly, the memory will contain only garbage. The hard drives and DMA controller however, will run a bit longer; so if data is being written to disk, the DMA controller will keep reading data from memory, but it has no idea that this data is corrupted.

What's really scary is that these hardware "facts" that are being used as a proof are based on an email from some random web site.

All systems I have used in the past 5-10 years, even the cheap ones, had built in monitoring (lm_sensors). It's hard to believe that these voltage monitoring chips are not driving either an interrupt or the main reset line on the motherboard when one of the voltages goes below a certain threshold.

The police found inside Hans's car "found a blood stain on a sleeping bag stuff sack that measured one inch by three inches". After testing, "Nina Reiser could not be excluded as its donor."

At this point, the GPL is mostly irrelevant to the Open Source movement. Once hailed as a means to safeguard the communal creation, exchange, and improvement of software, it's now being subverted by companies and individuals generating their own licenses loosely based on the GPL but permitting the commercial extension/closed-binary distribution of code for the right amount of money.

Huh? I really don't get what you're saying. You seem to be implying that the GPL and its way of doing open source predates other ways of doing it and other licenses. I don't think history agrees with you.

For one thing, some of the earliest open source software was simply released into the public domain. That's sort of the ultimate in permissive licensing -- way more permissive than the GPL is. Back in the 1980's, it was quite common for free software to be public domain.

Second, the GPL seems to have originated in June 1988, whereas the BSD license seems to have originated in June 1989. In my mind, that makes the BSD license and the GPL pretty close to contemporary. Both the BSD project and the GNU Project have histories that stretch several years back before the late 1980's, so in a sense those dates are not that significant and they are just the particular point that both groups felt it was necessary to be more formal about the licensing.

So, my perception is that there have been three strong open source traditions for quite some time: (1) GPL-style, and (2) BSD-style, and (3) public domain. The idea that non-GPL style free or open source software is a new thing just doesn't seem to fit with reality to me.

"Macromedia: Get over yourself. You're good, but not that good."

I'm hoping Adobe changes Macromedia's backward personality, too. Of course, Macromedia must be really bad if Bruce Chizen can fix the company. (Mr. Chizen looks more than a little crazy in that official photo, as though he were a fox assuring chickens of their safety.)

Mr. Chizen is the CEO who bought Adobe millions of dollars in bad publicity with the handling of the Skylarov situation. For example:

"Bruce Chizen -- President, Director, CEO Adobe
John Warnock -- Co-Chairman Adobe
Charles Geschke -- Co-Chairman Adobe

"... These are the individuals that could have had Dmitry home last July. Instead they thought it would be fun to play with Dmitry, Adobe's reputation, and the money of Adobe's stockholders. ... If there were justice in America, these such persons would be spending Christmas in a cardboard box under the freeway overpass."

Mr. Chizen also headed another effort to get bad publicity for Adobe: Dealing with the originator of Killustrator in a socially inept way.

Mr. Chizen followed that with a socially backward way of dealing with Chinese piracy. Adobe may ditch China sales. This time, someone else at Adobe tried to mend the damage by saying Mr. Chizen was wrong.

Thanks to a miracle of modern science called the Flashblock extension, Flash embedded in a web page appears as a sylized F in Firefox. A welcome relief since almost everything done in Flash is a childish demand for undeserved attention.

--
Trying to make one book explain all of life makes some people crazy enough to kill.

First off I am dumbfounded that you have not sold a single copy of your software :( It looks really nice though and I'm sure if I had a need for an HTML editor I would consider your software!

But I believe we already have some glowing examples of effective anti-piracy measures:

#1) Counter-strike. The video game. Yes, Valve's CD-KEY system actually works here because in order to play the game you have to connect to a server. To be able to connect to a server your CDKEY has to match one of the keys in their database. To be able to play your EXE cannot be cracked/modified as MD5 checksums stop you from joining. I'm sure there are ways around this but I haven't read about anyone who has effectively cracked this mechanism for multiplayer yet. MMORPGs are another good example.

#2) Windows. Microsoft gave up on focusing on the individual user a long, long time ago as Bill Gates realized the real money isn't in individual sales as much as it is in contracts with pc manufacturers to have windows preloaded on new PCs. It would be a little harder for DELL to put a pirated copy of Windows XP on every single computer they sell, so Microsoft eliminates piracy here by making the user buy Windows before they get the computer. Of course, there are ways around this too.

#3) Extreme dongles. Forcing the users to attach a dongle to the computer while running the program makes things harder on the crackers. Not impossible to crack, but more effective then not having it.

But overall the most effective copy protections involve some sort of online "serial # check" or program integerity check of some kind. Since your users are web developers then they'll most likely be online anyways this may work. But another poster pointed out that as long as you are letting people download a "time limited trial version" that unlocks by simply entering a serial code then you've got a problem since the most effective crack is to simply fool your program into thinking trial mode never ends.

It may be better to just distribute a "crippled" version that cannot unlock and let people who buy the software get an "unlocked version" that pings you with a serial number. You start to see 2 serials pinging you, then you block the serial and tell the owner to contact you for a new #, etc.

Course people will think your software is spying on them by pinging back to you.. so definetely go out of your way to explain whats going on to the user.

Good luck!

I'm sorry, but this is slashdot. If I don't link to it, someone else will ;-)

It will require a work force of 384 slaves, 34 slave drivers, 12 engineers, 2 turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree. The work will need to be managed by a command team composed of 234 bureaucrats, 2347 secretaries (at least two of whom could type), 12,256 paper shufflers, 52,469 rubber stampers, 245,193 red tape processors, and nearly one million dead trees

(Score:-1, Plagiarism)

You can also check out kernel traffic, which has weekly summaries of the major events and decisions that occur on the list. This is probably your best bet, not that you're going to like the answer.

I'm not sure if MS aren't talking about something different from what most of this discussion thinks they are. Rather than showing the thread of discussion of whole emails (which we're all used to in other clients) it might be they mean something more like this old discussion of what e-mail discussions should look like by Ka Ping-Yee..

In case you manage to /. that, the idea is that it shows the responses to pieces of your email - the kind where someone says "see my responses inline" and responds to each of your points piecemeal, then you do the same to their responses, and so on.

I've often thought it would be cool to write something to parse emails the KPY way, but the heuristics would have to be pretty damn clever to deal with supercite. Specifically what I wanted was something that combined KPY's ideas with text-autosummarization , and some 'author ranking' information to produce mailing list summaries from gmane which are like Kernel Traffic and Cousins, or the now-defunct Eclectic.

Oh well, I can always wait until MS put this in Outlook 2010 ;)

Linus himself says very little on the whole binary vs. source module issue.

The concensus on the list is that since Linux is licenced under the GPL it is up to the maker of binary-only modules to support them. The kernel and modules are designed to be a single unit, and compiled as a set. That means that when the kernel changes, the modules are changed as well -- sometimes not just the entry points, but also the internal APIs. Extentions to Linux should be in user space, not in the kernel. If a module needs to be in the kernel, the mainline kernel developers aren't going to bother working on someone else's code if they won't show the code!

This is discussed multiple times on the Linux kernel mailing list.

Not everyone who reads slashdot reads LKML

I would recomend taking a look on Kernel Traffic. At least read the headlines, they are available as RSS. Personally I have KNewsTicker showing headlines from Slashdot, LWN, KT, and a few Danish news sites. (BTW where do I send bug reports about KNewsTicker, is slashdot appropriate? :-)

Actually, they aren't required by Wine's license. And the CVS hasn't gone anywhere, it just doesnt have the copy protection stuff needed to play these commercial games. For reasons explained here

If you want to keep up to date on the conference and other happenings, but don't have time to attend or even slog through the mailing list(s), this is a good place to go.

Over the past few days, each summary has been updated, so if you haven't visited here before, stop reading Slashdot and go there!

Linux Kernel

Wine

GNU Enterprise

KDE

If you want to keep up to date on the conference and other happenings, but don't have time to attend or even slog through the mailing list(s), this is a good place to go.

Over the past few days, each summary has been updated, so if you haven't visited here before, stop reading Slashdot and go there!

Linux Kernel

Wine

GNU Enterprise

KDE

If you want to keep up to date on the conference and other happenings, but don't have time to attend or even slog through the mailing list(s), this is a good place to go.

Over the past few days, each summary has been updated, so if you haven't visited here before, stop reading Slashdot and go there!

Linux Kernel

Wine

GNU Enterprise

KDE

If you want to keep up to date on the conference and other happenings, but don't have time to attend or even slog through the mailing list(s), this is a good place to go.

Over the past few days, each summary has been updated, so if you haven't visited here before, stop reading Slashdot and go there!

Linux Kernel

Wine

GNU Enterprise

KDE

If you want to keep up to date on the conference and other happenings, but don't have time to attend or even slog through the mailing list(s), this is a good place to go.

Over the past few days, each summary has been updated, so if you haven't visited here before, stop reading Slashdot and go there!

Linux Kernel

Wine

GNU Enterprise

KDE

If you want to keep up to date on the conference and other happenings, but don't have time to attend or even slog through the mailing list(s), this is a good place to go.

Over the past few days, each summary has been updated, so if you haven't visited here before, stop reading Slashdot and go there!

Linux Kernel

Wine

GNU Enterprise

KDE

I haven't seen any Linux distribution use an approach like that yet. (They allow Gnome/KDE to start esound/arts, of course. But those don't work with legacy /dev/dsp apps, and neither has great audio quality)

I think the conclusion was that software mixing is a user-space job,

Clearly software mixing falls under the category of "hardware abstraction", which is a job for the OS. Whether it happen in kernel or userspace is up to the implementors.

However, the Linux developers strongly support backwards compatibility. And existing software (like quake1) expects to open /dev/dsp to make noise. This means a kernel-based interface to software mixing is the only way to go. (I suppose the kernel could use a trick to feed data sent to /dev/dsp into userspace code, then back down into the real sound driver)

PS. The thing is called JACK (or jackit ?). The Jacks project is something completely different.

No, SMB is and always has been a very published spec.

Are you intentionally lying? Or just ignorant?

SMB is not an officially published spec. Notice how that informative page you linked is not provided by Microsoft, and in fact describes the fruits of external reverse-engineering efforts.

(In recent years, pressure from successful reverse engineering projects has pushed Microsoft to reveal partial protocol details. But they're not complete, and it wasn't "always" published as you claimed)

By claiming that SMB is a published spec, you denigrate the enormous effort put in by Trigdell, Allison & cohorts to puzzle out how it works, often dropping down to the level of sniffing ethernet packets.

For further verification that "reverse engineering" is a COMPLETELY VALID description of Samba's development history, see any article, interview with one of the authors, including one conducted on Slashdot. Or just read their own mailing list even.

Google search
Kernel Traffic

I don't think it's a failure. Why _should_ one tree have to try to make everybody happy? We want to try to make it easier to keep the couplings in place by striving for portable infrastructure etc, but we would only be hampered by a philosophy that says "everything has to work in tree X", since that just means that you can't afford to break things.

I'd much rather keep the freedom to break stuff, and have many separate trees that break _different_ things, and let them all co-exist in a friendly rivalry.

And my tree is just one tree in that forest.

So it's not a bug - it's a FEATURE!

I think you're right.

In a kde context it might also to refer to this, a new component in the build system.

oh ya forgot this one too: Oragami Underground

The linux kernel list has not been too happy with Promise's support. In the latest Kernel Traffic, their support is starting to be reintroduced into the kernel proper, with some reservations:
"Elsewhere, Andre Hedrick was not so happy. After looking over the code, he complained that it was completely obfuscated, and added that he had severed all ties with Promise."

Be forewarned.

Please forgive me for being vague, but there is a statement along the line of the previous poster, somewhere in the kernel developers mailing list, from some bitter IBM kernel developer. He had delivered not only some patch, but also an entire kernel based on his work. Then, some woman (IIRC) from the legal dept at IBM contacted him effectively saying - Hey, we are NOT delivering a distro.

I don't remember who/when or what it was, but, it was within the last two/three years. I wish I could be more helpful here; I was a keen reader of the Kernel Traffic at the time where I may have read it. Anyhow, it does make sense in that IBM has been very aware of the risks of delivering a distro.

I hope someone out there has a better memory than I.

Yeah, who is the guy anyway. Oh wait, he's a kernel developer who has worked on journaling file systems (Tux2,ext3). Your parent was not bogus, he was right. Just because you flush things to disk aggressively doesn't mean they are always consistent. There are still short times where things would mess up if the machine lost power. With full journaling the file system is *never* inconsistant. The only thing you'd want sync for is the push the latest cache versions out to disk; but it would be best to do that on a journaling FS.

Replying to point (2):

The scheduler in 2.6.xx is hyperthreading-aware.
It knows that switching a process from one hyperthread to another on the same cpu is less expensive than switching to another physical cpu (becaus both first- and second-level cache reside on-die), but it also tries to balance load on physical cpus.

While >=2.4.19 supported hypterthreading up to a certain point it happend that two processes were running on the same cpu while the other (physical) cpu was running idle. This does not happen with the new ht-aware scheduler.

Look here for a (compressed) version of the initial discussion.

A bit more OT. Did you know that the Linksys WAP54G access point is based on Linux?. Somewhat strange, that there are no linux drivers for Broadcom 802.11g wireless NICs.

It's right here.

Thanks in advance!

But the IPC overhead consumes less than 1/100th of 1 percent of the time it takes to draw a window or widget when running locally.

It's not the overhead of IPC that makes a difference when you're reaching for extreme speeds- it's the fact that there's another process involved at all. If the data magically transferred between processes instantly (as shared memory does, and Unix sockets virtually do), the user still won't get a response until the OS gives the other process a timeslice.

The history of the WINE project shows many examples of this effect (here's an old one). They emulate Microsoft Windows(tm) features using two processes: wine (for the application itself) and wineserver (for the Windows(tm) OS features). They use very fast IPC between those processes- but the mere fact that wineserver is a separate process at all means they aren't able to approach the speed of executing in the real Windows(tm) environment, where system calls happen inside the same process.

(Naturally, X11 toolkits make many fewer calls needing server roundtrip than a Windows(tm) application does, as they weren't built under the assumption that those things are free. The example of WINE is just to illustrate that context-switch can be an appreciable overhead, regardless of IPC speed)

Back in the 100MHz Pentium days, I was running FVWM, which was very quick and snappy even on the machines of the day.

I have tried Microsoft Windows 95(tm) and fvwm95 on the same 100mhz Pentium computer with a 16 meg ATI Mach64 card. Opening a popup menu on the Microsoft product took an imperceptible time. The menu produced by clicking the desktop background in fvwm, however, produced a delay that was easily detectable to a human operator (which means it was at least 40 milliseconds)

Let's say gtk+ is ported to X as a module, and the gtk+ libraries are modified to look for this.

After such a drastic change, the entire character of the X11 display system would've been altered. Yes, X11 allows arbitrary extensions to be created (and negotiated between client and server, with the possibility of fallbacks). But just because a system is extensible, it doesn't mean speculation about far-out possible additions is at all relevant to the question of how the system works today.

You bash it.

Re-read my post, and you'll see that "bash" isn't nearly applicable.

I run X11 for hours each day, for work, web-browsing, DVDs (a crime), and even high-speed gaming. But I'm unable to evangelize it to my friends, because it feels to them as if there Mhz dropped 35% when running Xfree86.

http://www.compiere.org/

http://www.gnue.org/

Also check the Kernel Cousin for information:
http://kt.zork.net/GNUe/index.html

For that reason I wouldn't dare attempt it while there are two options that trade just a little of that sense of immediacy for a more digestable format.

The famous Kernel Traffic by Zack Brown.

Web Archive of kernel mailing list.

Kernel Traffic

Huzzah!

Now give me a cookie.

Looks like Jens Axboe released a patch against 2.4.19-pre10, but I'm not sure it made it in.

Did you see "Journalling Support For IDE In 2.4" he released later for 2.4.21-pre4-bk and 2.4.20 in Kernel Traffic? Might be close to what you are after. . .

http://zork.net/refund/
Google 'windows refund'--it's a work in progress with little result so far.

In december 2002 Linus said,
"At least to me a choice of license by the _original_ author is a hell of a lot more important than the technical legality of then limiting it to just one license."

May I recommend reading the always excellent Kernel Traffic? This particular issue was first delt with here, so it's not news to anyone that reads Kernel Traffic.

Remember that this code was written and maintained by Intel anyway; in fact, any patches done to the code from outside Intel were redone internally by Intel so they could reuse the code for other uses. ("We have to determine the problem the patch fixes and then do the fix ourselves." - from the Kernel Traffic writeup.)

In december 2002 Linus said,
"At least to me a choice of license by the _original_ author is a hell of a lot more important than the technical legality of then limiting it to just one license."

May I recommend reading the always excellent Kernel Traffic? This particular issue was first delt with here, so it's not news to anyone that reads Kernel Traffic.

Remember that this code was written and maintained by Intel anyway; in fact, any patches done to the code from outside Intel were redone internally by Intel so they could reuse the code for other uses. ("We have to determine the problem the patch fixes and then do the fix ourselves." - from the Kernel Traffic writeup.)

There is a detailed discussion of this in the Linux Kernel Traffic from the Jan 22-27 issue.

You don't get it do you? XRandR is not vaporware! I am not saying "it should be fixed any time soon now", I am saying it WILL be fixed by the next release of XFree86. Support for XRandR WILL be included in the next release of GNOME and KDE.
Want more proof? Look here, here, here, and here.

Comments like yours are so typical: denying the entire existance of a project just because it's a work-in-progress. You're exactly like the people who said fontconfig is just talk and vapor, one day before fontconfig was suddenly released.

* 60 posts in 302K by "Martin J. Bligh"
* 57 posts in 383K by William Lee Irwin III
* 46 posts in 179K by Andrew Morton
* 43 posts in 199K by Zwane Mwaikambo
* 34 posts in 128K by Rob Wilkens
* 33 posts in 118K by Greg KH
* 31 posts in 323K by Adrian Bunk
* 30 posts in 419K by Osamu Tomita
* 29 posts in 119K by Rusty Russell
* 27 posts in 81K by DervishD

Our Boston City Clerk, Boston Public Library and Boston City Archives routinely violate the spirit of state and local freedom of information principles and sunshine open public meeting principles. Boston Public Library departments deflect or deny access to legitimately public information about long range planning for city library departments collections and services such as department curators' annual reports. Boston City Clerk denied access to the legitimately public more complete stenographic minutes of public meetings of our City Council.

See also
http://zork.net/~dsaklad

Our Boston Public Library, the so called Massachusetts Library
of Last Recourse, deflects people interested in our Sound Archives collections.
Of interest are the recordings of now defunct local broadcasters.
Shelf lists are public record, but BPL has
violated state freedom of information principles!

See also
Weblog. Guide to Problematical Library Use. Boston Public Library.

Stories
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.com/ stories

Updates
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.com
http://zork.net/~dsaklad

Rick Hohensee anounced his campaign on the
linux-kernel mailinglist

Peder

You might have more success with these origami masterpieces.

If not, well, at least you've done something with your hands .

(caution: not work-safe)

You might have more success with these origami masterpieces.

If not, well, at least you've done something with your hands .

(caution: not work-safe)