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Slashback: HAMnation, Books, Criticism
Reversing the dilithium crystals is not an option in this case. $FFh writes: "AMSAT-DL President (and P3D Project leader) Dr. Karl Meinzer, DJ4ZC, provided ANS with additional information regarding AO-40's recent S-band transmissions on 2401.305 MHz:
Ian, ZL1AOX, has succeeded in loading IPS software and a minimal operational package into AO-40. As a consequence, AO-40 is now sending telemetry (A blocks) that will enable an analysis of the status of the spacecraft.
A first (quick) look has revealed that some temperature sensors and possibly some current sensors have been lost by whatever incident caused the telemetry transmissions to stop. However, the power situation, in particular the battery voltages, look nominal.
We will now start a detailed analysis of the situation; the command stations will continue to follow a conservative philosophy with the primary target of not causing any additional damage along with retaining as much evidence as possible for the analysis of the incident.
Furthermore, command stations will now try to uplink the entire operational software package, which in particular should establish positive control over the power generation system. From there on, the communications capabilities of the spacecraft will be explored. The 2-meter transmitter is considered off limits for the time being (in case that it may have been damaged and thus might have the potential to cause the IHU to crash). The risk is too large before the Warte-Orbits and Command-Assist programs have been updated to reflect the actual capabilities of the satellite available after the incident.
In summary, we can state that the command stations have now regained control over AO-40. During the next few days we hope to learn to what extent the satellite was damaged and to what extent this will impact mission targets."
Read up -- then spread some praise or some griping! bcrowell writes: "The Assayer is a web site for user-contributed book reviews, with a focus on free books. All reviews are free information. We now have 35 free books on computer science in our database, almost all without reviews. A common argument against free books is that without a publisher, there's no way to filter out the junk -- if you'd like to prove otherwise, it's time to do some reading!"
Dissecting Mandrake 7.2: Beyond Eye Candy Linux Tests writes: "Linux Tests published their first review of a distribution. Linux-Mandrake 7.2 was chosen as the first victim -- umm -- first distribution. Linux Tests did the installation several different ways over several weeks timeframe in order to answer the age old question, "Is this right for someone new to Linux?" Find out if this distribution answers the question well."
Their review reflects my experience with Mandrake 7.2, as well -- some glitches, a lot of slickness, and some problems with the manual vs. reality. (On the other hand, Mandrake remains one of only two distributions I would recommend to parents and siblings at present.)
The Linux Tests' site looks like a great resource, too -- three guys grousing is a cool basis for a web site! It will be nice when hardware manufacturers realize that a perhaps small but significant fraction of their buying audience is paying a lot more attention to their products then they may be used to. Publishing specs is always nice, eh?
Now kiss, make up, and have fun, ok? DaGoodBoy writes: "John Roderick, the Director of Rosen Interactive, contacted us with a rebuttal to some of the statements our member Kenneth J. Hendrickson in his recent "Report on the 2nd Real-Time Linux Workshop" which ran here on Slashdot. Details are available here"
Mandrake 7.2 is a nice installation, but there is a problem compiling with g++ and sys/io.h. I ended up just grabbing io.h from my Redhat 6.2 box and everything is fine now
There is absolutely NO excuse for requiring a re-install of the operationg system when hardware changes. In my opinion, that is a serious liability. What happens if you have a motherboard failure (stuff like that happens), and the motherboard is discontinued, or now ships with another bios or is a newer revision. I agree totally that motherboards are not all the same (I'm not that naive--I've designed microprocessor-based systems and written BIOS routines, etc. I know that there can be significant, important differences in motherboards, even if they are the exact same models but different revisions--this is reality even in much simpler systems like I worked on). Also, What if you want to make several "Images" of a drive to ease installation of W2K Pro, but can't count on all the PC's to be IDENTICAL?
Obviously, for mission-critical stuff, you would have a backup server in the event of hardware failure, but you still need to restore the primary machine. Instead of puking out a STOP 0x7b when it encounters a certain driver/hardware mismatch (as has often happened since NT 3.51) why can't Win2k catch the exception and continue with the "generic" drivers, and allow the user to correct the problem without an invasive repair/re-install process? THERE IS NO GOOD REASON why it can't. Microsoft already allows you to boot in "VGA Mode" if you change video cards. This could be extended to all subsystems.
Yes, there ARE countless different motherboards. However, all decent ones have the same entry points into the black box. They all have PCI and AGP slots, they all support the same BIOS calls and so on. Why can't Win2K (even if only in "Safe Mode") deal with the common denominator in the event the "optimised" configuration no longer applies. I know it seems harsh to hold Win2K to those standards. However, if I'm a company paying tens of thousands a year in licensing fees, a "smarter boot sequence" to save many hours of IT work isn't just a "nice" thing. If the FREE competition appears to be superior in that respect it would be something I'd DEMAND in return for those thousands I gave to Microsoft--particularly then they won't even give me the tools (ie. source code) to make improvements myself (improvements I'd be willing to share).
Yes, I do have a double standard w.r.t. Win2k vs. Linux. It's because they are two different situations. Linux isn't "perfect" or "optimised for everything". However, it is free (monetarily) so you get more than you pay for. It is also Free (open source) so I can contribute improvements. Until MS Windows is Free (open source if not monitarily) I will not be nearly as forgiving with it's shortcomings.
</rant>
You would be amazed at just how much technical detail is available on the various NASA web pages. It takes some digging, but the nasa.gov site is not short on geek content... at least not the last time I surfed through it.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
As instructed in the slim Win2K manual, I removed drivers for hardware specific to my motherboard (sound, AGP, etc) but missed the IDE controller stuff. I even booted off of CD into an emergency command-prompt mode and tried picking around in there. Still BSODed. In desperation I did the repair/re-install.
Also, I never said I was surprised at it overwriting all my updates. I fully expected it. My beef is that I was reduced to doing the restore for new hardware in the first place. I expected more from a highly touted, expensive operating system (OK, not as expensive as some commercial UNIX solutions, but pricy for me nonetheless). At least it could have let me in in "safe mode" (it BSODed even then) using generic drivers (if Linux can have them why not Windows?). I was further aggrivated by the need to reboot after EACH HOTFIX. I expect the odd one if they are kernel related, but to patch a security hole in the browser?
As for the twenty reboods you are almost right--it was SP1, upgrade to strong encryption, IE 5.0 to 5.5 and 14 hotfixes.
The thing a lot of people forget or don't know is that aerospace computers have to be radiation hardened. So the latest processors just plain aren't feasible in a hostile space environment.
Isn't the StrongARM computer an experiment, in that it's not a traditional radiation hardened processor, but rather an experiment in shielding a regular chip enough to put it up in that kind of environment??
Hay thar.
Penguins keep very good journals. The Linux Pimp
--It's Pimptastic!--
Like when Mom wants me to fix her Win95 box over the telephone? Yeah, that only happens about once a week.
(And I'll bet the satellite's easier to explain things to than my Mom.)
When will people get it through their thick heads that there is much more to "usability" and "user friendliness" than a slick installation? It's great if a user can install the system easily, to be sure. But once that slick installation is done with, you've got a user left staring at an XDM login screen or a console login, thinking, "Okay, what next? How do I get into linux? What do I do?"
System installation is simply a means to an end (the means - installing an OS. the end - an installed OS). Why do we need fancy X-based gui installers that let you play tetris while the packages are installing? The goal of an installation tool is to get the packages on the system, and get the system setup in more-or-less working order. Too much effort has been wasted by the likes of Redhat, Mandrake, Corel, Caldera, and even SuSE (though YaST1 is still an excellent installer and system management tool) developing ever slicker installation routines, while that effort could've been put to use somewhere important, like writing better documentation, or increasing usability of system management tools (linuxconf is a joke), or other more-worthwhile endeavors.
How often does a typical Linux user install any Linux distribution? Aside from the newbie who probably should reinstall every other week or so (knowing you'll be reinstalling eventually is a good way to clear your conscience about "breaking" the system while learning), the loonies that need the latest and greatest Redhat, and reviewers who focus all too much on installation, for most of us installation is a one-shot deal. We install the system, tweak it, and then let it run for who knows how long.
It simply boggles the mind, seeing developers spend so much effort on something that is such a small percentage of the overall user experience, and then seeing users encourage such behavior. Installation needs to be "Good Enough", meaning it's fairly easy to comprehend (a good manual and help system goes a long way, here) and doesn't screw up your system. It doesn't need a gui, and it doesn't need to play games.
periodically, I install mandrake, and it's a dream, it sets up all my hardware perfectly, Mandrake 7.2 got our i810's @ school hardware accelerated beautifully, and it's nice & pretty & polished. And I'll turn to spike (my best friend, co-sys-admin, and a BSD guy) and go "Spike, why don't we use mandrake?", and he'll say "apt", and then I say "right", and then he'll say "BSD style init.d" and I'll say right, and then he says "normal, non propietary, non-linuxconf boot & config scripts", and then I'll smash the mandrake computer with a boxed copy of debain 2.1
In the article, it says that Mandrake doesn't include Apache .
It is true that Mandrake 7.2 Desktop Edition that you see on Walmart, Staples, etc doesn't include Apache and other server stuff (but they include lots of games), since they are meant for pure desktop. However, both the Download and Professional edition does include complete server stuff such as Apache, Webmin, ProFTPd, etc.
They include an optimized version of Apache by SGI - Advanced Extranet Server, which is said to be 900% faster than the regular Apache - according to SpecWeb96. Click here to see the screenshot of its webserver: http://www.cyest.org/mandrake.
By the way, I'm not Mandrake's employee. I'm just a Gnome programmer and Mandrake's fan.
The halfway house is Debian Unstable. Debian has a different scale of stability - the "stable" release is REALLY stable but rather old, and the "unstable" release has very current packages, yet is still stable enough to use.
If you're worried about the distribution breaking, you don't have to always upgrade everything at once (though many Debian users will attest that upgrading everything at once is fun). Start from the current unstable, then use apt-get like you'd use rpmfind, installing the new version of a package when you find that the old version doesn't cut it. This way you don't run into things like constant XFree86 upgrades.
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Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
I'm going to take a guess and say SuSE.
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Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Who gives a rats ass. I've been kicked off now for the third time because of trading metallica files. I've promptly deleted all of them and now change the station every time Metallica comes on. Besides now with the nifty program audioGnome, I can log in to as many networks as I want and Metallica can't do a damn thing about it. The link for audioGnome can be found here: http://opennap.sourceforge.net/#clients
"We're so tough we're made of nerf!" --D&D Character Tagline
Installation is not ease-of-use, it's ease-of-installation. To compare ease-of-use you have to compare use after installation. It has been pointed out before that including installation when comparing Linux vs MS is a faulty argument unless you're comparing installation of both.
It's also a composition error to project the behavior of the installation program on to the behavior of the program being installed; just because InstallShield does a pretty installation of a bad DOS program won't change how the DOS program behaves.
What is pronounced as "ham" is written as "radio amateur".
If Linux is going to compete against MS on the desktop market, it needs to be easier to use. I don't want to have to hunt around and recompile the kernel just to get sound (this is my biggest complaint with Linux distros right now.) I don't want to poke around with mysterious .conf files just to get a periphial working.
It seems that Mandrake has come a long way towards making Linux much more user friendly. While Linux distros still have a long ways to go, its good to see that they're on the right track!!
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Disregarding the idjits above, this is pretty good purely for the mandrake review. I amUsing RH 7.0 now, but on trying to install an earlier verson of mandrake it was a breeze to install, but had a problem with my vid. card (NVidia GForce II MX)and couldn't start X.
Did anyone see something in the article about compatible video cards? (What am i missing?)
Mandrake, generally is pretty good though, esp. for those just beginning, except most stuff is written with RH in mind right now.
Why yes, all my base are belong to you.
How did you guess?
I had problems with my NVidia Geforce II MX card as well, under Mandrake 7.1. I did a clean install of 7.2 on a new hard drive and made sure to choose XFree86 4, and then went to Nvidia's site and downloaded the rpm's for the kernel and GLX (I actually think I had to get the source rpm for the kernel, because I upgraded my kernel), and installed those, and now it works like a charm, and runs Quake 3 with no problems (which is of course the only reason to own a computer).
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Someone was tring to find their way around a pc that I set up with mandrake 7.1. They guy was a windows user and he had the question "how do I use this without the mouse?" Damn good question. Too bad the answer seems to be "no way in hell!"
When is kde/gnome going to fix this major little problem.
that's pretty cool. two people discussed issues about flavors 'o' linux without screaming "you suck" at each other.
linux really is going pro.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
How is this any easier in Linux? We made a common boot image for Linux to install on some of the school's lab PCs, not realizing that several had NVidia TNT2 cards and some had TNT cards. The whole thing came crashing down... way before we even got to X.
In fact, I can't think of a single OS which would catch something as drastic as a motherboard change without at least a partial reinstall (like Win2K allows you to do. Don't know if you have that option in Linux).
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
The Mandrake review states that Mandrake 7.2 does not include Apache. I've done several installs of 7.2 and I can verify that it DOES install Apache. If they chose the workstation install, it may have not installed it by default. I always choose development because that installs nearly everything.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
I've installed Mandrake 7.2 from both the 4-CD "commercial boxed set" with Star Office and several other non-free apps, and the 2-CD "GPL" version from Cheapbytes (same as the download.)
There are significant differences between the two editions! The 2-CD GPL version gives you more choices during the install, and seems to install more command-line tools. It seems targeted a little more at someone who has used Linux before. The 4-CD Commercial version has an even more simplified install, and seems targeted at someone coming from Windows. This is frustrating when there are certain things that the simplified install just does wrong - like networking setup, or not installing a command line FTP client!
Also, even when you tell it to install "everything", it doesn't. That's a pain - I have a fast machine and a 40GB drive, and having to go through the CD's after a fresh install adding more RPM's that the installer skipped is just a nuisance.
Still, it's my favorite, perhaps because I have learned my way around it by now. I've used each Mandrake since 6.0, and now I know how to fix things to work the way I like them.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
I've been a user of mandrake for the last year and a half and I have always liked what they did with their distro. However, it looks like they are doing some odd changes to their layout for the next release of the distro. Well, at least it looks that way based on what the new Mandrake Cooker stuff is looking like (yes, yes, Cooker is beta/alpha, don't base opinions on it, etc, you'll shoot your eye out, may cause birth defects) For example they changed the layout of the 2.2.18 source code to point to /usr/src/linux22 (I assume they have a similar /usr/src/linux24 for 2.4 kernels). However you can't get any headers for 2.2.18 from Mandrake for Cooker, but you can get headers for 2.4.0.whateverthehellthelatesttestkernelwas. It also looks like Mandrake is trying to integrate the Alsa drivers with their distro now with the inclusion of alsa-0.5.10 in their kernel source. It would be nice if I could get the headers from Cooker for 2.2.18, but I guess Mandrake is more focused on getting a 2.4.0 kernel as the default for the next release of the distro. Any people working on Cooker care to speak up? Thanks!
Are you nonmundane?
http://www.nonmundane.org/
I mean, the claim made by the reporter is a pretty fair generalization. It looks like the other two 'OS's mentioned in the rebuttal are so specialized they're more like proprietary firmware.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
> An update on the health of troubled HAM satellite Oscar 40
Typical rookie mistake; it's "ham" not "HAM" radio.
--
Joe
Sometimes if you're not unlucky a windows installation will go quick and clean with no hitches. Woe to the newbie user, though, who has to do his/her own installation -- especially if something doesn't go as MS planned it. I have a friend who had a pretty good understanding of Window. Sometimes, however, even he would head home completely frustrated after spending a day (or two) trying to get windows to install properly on some box.. If it had been a user doing the installation, I think that Linux would have been an easy sell at that point.
My own experience is that a Linux installation is far easier than a Windows installation. Of course I've actually installed both of them. That makes me unusual. Most newbie users have never actually seen an MS install disk out of it's envelope. For the sake of their sanity, they should keep it that way.
`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
It takes patience, and a lot of persistance. Congrats to the ground operators whose persistance paid off.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Notice how the Ham's information contains a lot more details that would be of interest to geeks? I think its cool they talk about 2.4 GHz links, the 2M repeater, and the code they are uploading to Silicon on Saphire microprocessors. That is the kind of info that makes these tiny satellites seem real. Of course, bouncing a 2M signal off of a hamsat from Belgium into Latvia makes it seem real and usable. Here's hoping they get the whole satellite working again.
Do we ever see such detail in a NASA press releasae? Not really. Its for your own good, you understand.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Hi. Could someone answer a simple question for me please? I'd like to know if there is a distribution that is sort of a halfway house between Debian and the Commercial distributions. What I mean is that Debian is famed for being highly stable but quite curmudgeonly when it comes to integrating new features. The commercial distributions, such as Mandrake 7.2 as mentioned in the article, often have all the latest whizz-bang add ons, but possibly at the expense of stability, for the paranoid at least. What I would like to know is, is there a distribution that is a halfway house? A distro that is reasonably up to date, easy to install, etc etc, but without being too ill-considered? I would be very interested, because currently I use SuSE 6.2, and have been considering Debian but I have been put off by the difficulty of its install and the age of its packages, as well as the lack of KDE. Thank You Very Much in advance!
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Shielding is often ineffective because if you hit shielding with a high-energy particle the result is a bunch of low-energy particles that are even worse as far as memory and logic cells are concerned. The preferred shielding material is tantalum which is expensive and very difficult to machine, and adds mass to be lofted to orbit. Static rather than dynamic logic is more rad-hard and uses less power, so the StrongARM is a very good choice for a satellite.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
With the big-publisher filter out of the way, we should hope to see more niche or small-market content (or content that might not be appreciated by big publishers) become available.
Andamooka: Open support for open content.
We purchased the Linux-Mandrake 7.2 Complete version from a computer store.
Does anyone know if that is a difference between the downloadable ISO images and the "Complete" version?
Using the downloadable ISO and an expert install I installed Apache straight from the initial setup. I also noticed that the apache rpms are available under Mandrake/RPMS on the install CD (not the supplimental CD)
Linux is almost as easy to install as windows98, given someone with a reasonable level of technical knowledge, however many PC users are simply not that technical.
Whilst they may benefit from Linux and all its plethora of free (as in beer and speech) software, they still cannot be expected to install it themselves.
Its a chicken and egg situation, people use windows because its what came with their PC
BillG has the resellers sewn up.
If Linux is going to compete against MS on the desktop market, it needs to be easier to install/configure. Once Linux is installed and configured, it tends to be at least as easy to use as anything else out there, if not easier, simply because it doesn't go belly-up and demand to be reinstalled, used in safe mode, or whatever. A machine with Linux properly pre-loaded by the OEM is no doubt a joy to behold.
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