Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Picnic, Pistol, Doggedness
MenuetOS progresses. For those with a taste for esoteric tiny operating systems for low-power systems, the x86 release of Contiki wasn't the only news this week. Lgd writes "Menuet, the 100 % assembly OS, has made quite a few improvements since it was last reported at Slashdot. Menuet has now a simple tcp/ip stack with tiny http, mp3 and email servers, FASM 1.48 assembler and demo applications like the 3d maze."
Perhaps this will lead to a finer toothed comb overall. Jody Whitesides writes "Hello, I want to take a moment to update you about my situation that you posted recently... As of right now, I won my fight with BuyMusic and the Orchard. I have been promptly let out of a contract that was already terminated February 1st of 2001. It seems they had kept me in their catalog on a contract clause that had been overlooked when the contract was signed back in 1999.
As of 5 p.m. pst 07/31/2003 I was given notice that I was removed from the Orchard's distribution. In turn I have since checked with BuyMusic's website and have been swiftly removed from the website and now all has been set right in the world. It seems that even the big corporations don't wish to face copyright infringement.
I want to thank you for running the story as I have no doubt that it helped bring a swift decision in getting my music under my control so that I can best determine how fans will get it into their hands.
I harbor no ill will towards BuyMusic or the Orchard."
MandrakeSoft still not dead (wants to go for a walk). LinuxGeek8 writes "In their latest shareholder newsletter MandrakeSoft made a few statements about their financial position. Their retail sales decreased, while their high-margin sales (oem, club, online sales, etc.) increased. In total their revenue decreased somewhat, while the operating loss decreased. Since January they have been cash-flow positive.
Quoting about their "Chapter 11":
"On January 27th, 2003, the Commercial Court granted MandrakeSoft a six month observation and protection period (similar to a U.S. Chapter 11 procedure). This period will end on July 27th, 2003. The company is pursuing an opportunity to be granted an additional six month observation and protection period. In the upcoming months, the company's objective is to exit the Observation Period with a 'Continuation Plan'."
Things seem to be looking good on the radar."
This is good news for those of us who like all the work that Mandrake has put into making Free software easy to install.
Video Capturing Part 2 at Ars Technica miskatonic alumnus writes "Recently, slashdot reported on an excellent article -- Part I: Video Capture -- of the 3-part series 'Guide to Capturing, Cleaning & Compressing Video' at Ars Technica. At last, Part II: Video Cleaning is now available."
The largest gathering, of a sort. Linda Denison links to these "several articles about GenCon, handily linked to one place!"
From the article: 'GenCon: Freaks & Geeks,' she excerpts: 'My wife wrinkled her nose in response. Computer geeks tend to be clean. They wear clean clothes, and bathe regularly. Usually this is because they live in their mother's house. Probably in their old room. Tabletop geeks tend to wear the same clothes they bought in their early twenties, roughly three belt sizes ago, and aren't well versed in the bathing arts. This is because they live in their mother's basement. The heat sort of exacerbated this problem.'
(We've run a couple of articles originating at this year's GenCon already.)
Sci-Fi Auction Followup... cjustus writes "The live auction mentioned earlier in the week is over... Here are the prices that items went for. The big item? Original George Reeves Superman Costume for $110K ... Harrison Ford's pistol from Blade Runner went for $17K... Any slashdotters bid / win?"
Matching hardware to actual needs is not crazytalk. Michael C. Barnes writes with a followup to the recent mention of his company's low-power MicroServer, which, it turns out, has a larger sibling. "One of the people reading your post did a review of the Microserver HP. ... The person doing the review benchmarked our Microserver High Performance and thought it did a reasonably good job with My SQL."
"Penguin dip" is just an expression. Bill Kendrick writes "This Saturday, August 9th (after the Linux World Expo) San Francisco Bay Area Linux lovers and the people who love them will be gathering at the Baylands Park in Sunnyvale for Picn*x12, the third annual Linux anniversary picnic. Organized by several local LUGs and sponsored by Oracle, this barbecue is a free event for the entire family."
Whether or not you can get to the picnic, FeeDBaCK writes "It has been almost 2 years since the Linux Counter has been mentioned on Slashdot. It was last mentioned in October of 2001 and brought on an impressive number of registrations. Accounts are deleted after 2 years of inactivity, so now is a good time for everyone to freshen up their account, or create a new one if they don't have one already."
MenuetOS looks like some weird screwy version of BeOS! (I have a fetish for this kind of OS.)
Free Food?!!111
The Menuet OS sounds interesting. I'm wondering however if it will ever grow into a fully fledged OS written entirely in assembly. If it does, well, zoom. That'll be one of the fastest OS's on the market easily.
- Sherman
Well I've never heard geeks classified in such a manner. Maybe this could be a major breakthrough! Do I smell the kingdom geekus coming or is that just another tabletopgamerasourous?
That's good news about Mandrake, and it's good to see that some of their financial success is coming from community support (i.e. the club). It'd be interesting to get a breakdown of figures to see how much they rely on it.
Mandrake have put so much back into the community that it'd be fitting for the community to then help keep them afloat. It'd be a short-term disaster if they went under.
I'm #85934. I think I saw that Slackware reminder to register a thousand times (certainly three different installs) until I finally gave in and registered.
Too bad, for some weird reason I really wonder how low a # I'd gotten if I'd registered ASAP
Oh, well. At least I got #24 of 1283 in the 2.4 kernel pool. But I truly digress
Belief is the currency of delusion.
What ramifications will this have in the consumer marketplace?
I notice that like a lot of assembler OSes it doesn't seem too modular. (That's fine, though, considering that it's just 70K!) All the utilities which are needed are builtin. Which brings me to the question I wish to ask for any who are more informed than I?
Is there a simple way of interfacing with the GUI to produce dialog boxes and the like from a simple shell? I'm thinking of something like xdialog or gdialog in UNIX/Linux systems with X/GNOME installed.
Bash script for FP whores
The reserve price of US$40K on a complete TOS uniform for Scotty wasn't met.
Anyone got any obvious jokes about the fact that it's a RED uniform?
|>
Here be Dragons
"Menuet, the 100 % assembly OS,
:-)
As opposed to those languages that aren't assembly in some form...
The coolest voice ever.
I have an ATI Radeon 8500 All-In-Wonder rotting away in my machine, and some Hi-8 tapes that I'd like to digitize... :-(
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
I thought you might find that interesting.
Free Food?!!111
Yes, it is true. You can distribute it to whoever you want in both Original and Digested form, and are allowed to charge a modest distribution fee for this service.
However, if you choose to distribute the food in Digested form, you must also make the Original availeable to the public.
The unofficial
good stuff
Scotty's formal uniform didn't do any better.
.
Neither did a whole bunch of other cool
stuff
What, doesn't anyone want to pay $8000 to dress up as Imperious Leader?
|>
Here be Dragons
One can make dialog boxes from a noninteractive shell program on a Linux box if you have GNOME (or even X) installed. If you have X installed, just type "dialog" at your shell prompt.
Roy Jones is fighting Corrie Sanders!!!
To see how the pros do it check out the products from Digital Rapids.
. ht ml
http://www.digital-rapids.com
here is a link to their video processing, all hardware pre-processing with amazing results in real-time.
http://www.digital-rapids.com/Products_DemoRoom
We are using some of these boards for our digital dailies at the post house and they are amazing, sadly enough however, no linux drivers yet.
You'll note that the rank stripes are for a Lieutenant J.G., though by the end of TOS Scotty jumped up to Lieutenant Commander. Roddenberry explained this with some silly story about giving the actors promotions instead of raises. But I suspect that he really had no idea what the stripes meant. A lot more of Star Trek was invented by other people than members of the Church of St. Gene will admit.
Oh, So i guess its alright for movie pistols to be sold on ebay and not my pistols.
What's it called? Parting of the Waves?
Where the Music Matters
That picnic could be a good place for SCO lawyers to deliver legal papers to violators of their copyright. Anyone in attendance running Linux, wearing a Linux related T-Shirt, etc could get sued.
BTW, a tip for you. You can order bound manuals for the Pentium I/II/III/4 directly from Intel's website AT NO COST.
Gotta pointer to specifically where on their site to get them? Thanks!
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
There was no carpet munching at the Linux picnic, except by the females there. The males seemed to prefer the tube steak.
Oh wait, that was the Mac picnic.
No, no. It was the Linux picnic.
keep the topics to one pleeze.
Not to be mister negative but...
Being that slashdot is pro-Linux. You think the editors would have been nice enough to give Linux counter its own Article instead of being buried in a slashback. The Counter wasn't even mentioned on the main page.
It's all Politics
They're assembly until the assembler assembles them into machine code.
Oh god, I'm SUCH a karma whore...
Pentium manuals in download or dead-tree form.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Please RSVP if you can attend so we can estimate the amount of food needed.
If you take somebody else food and combine it with food of your own you could get a nasty case of gastro.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
As the posting says, there is no fee to attend. The costs of this year's picnic have been picked up by Oracle.
And a bit of trivia: the Sunnyvale Baylands Park where the picnic is held is also one of the sites where filming took place for Revolution OS. For anyone who's interested, we can show you the boardwalk area where the interviews with Michael Tiemann of Cygnus (now CTO of RedHat) took place.
They're 100% machine language. As in, they're patterns of charged and discharged capacitors in RAM, as well as patterns of current flow in the CPU.
So don't quibble.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
His name was Christopher last I looked...
Q.
Insert Signature Here
In other news, we are talking with a lawyer and hope to have some news soon about our status on buymusic.com.
After some homework, we did *not* sign anything with 'The Orchard'. We had our CDs manufactured by a company called 'Oasis', and agreed for a song to be put on a sampler. That's it.
'The Orchard' and buymusic.com are blatantly violating copyright in the worst way (selling the infrigements).
Personally, I don't care if this CD is on p2p (I plan to make files available after this is taken care of), but when someone charges for these songs without our knowledge and pockets the proceeds, that is not cool.
Thanks again for all those who emailed for a CD and to chat about it, many more are available, so feel free to contact me and buy one ($5+shipping) if you like the samples.
nobody told me that they were gonna wash them... :(
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I for one will welcome our assembly-optimized overlords!
Buy a firewire card. Borrow a DV camcorder that supports capturing video from an analog input. Then connect the analog out from your Hi8 to the analog input of the DV cam. Record the signal from the Hi8 cam onto the DV tape. Then output the captured DV footage via firewire.
This may seem like it would take more time than it would to directly capture the video via the AIW, but having experienced all the hassles of analog capture via an AIW--dropped frames, and a myriad of other problems--this has worked out best and fastest for me. YMMV
that got our spoonless Ted into all that trouble with agent Smith.
Why does anyone care what's happening on BuyMusic.com, since you can't even get into it on Linux. (Or any Apple OS, or even on Windows, unless you're using IE 5.0+). I haven't been back since I found that out on my 1st visit--using Mozilla.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
Indian: Thats crazytalk
Lisa S.: No, it's true.
Indian: No, thats my brother, Crazy Talk.
I bought an early model of Anonymous Coward, used as a prop in a segment which was cut from "Hackers". It seems to sometimes be useful, although I don't expect to get much recognition with it.
Wait a minute. I seem to recall that the set from TOS was acquired by the Smithsonian! I smell a con.
Its free as in beer not free as in speech ... erm ... or ... speech not beer ... or ...
I confused myself.
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
I submitted this story the other day, no other than infoworld has it that mandrake's enterprise edition beats redhats, suses and turbolinux' enterprise editons.
Didn't get placed. Is it just me who thinks that mandrake only is news for the slashdot editors when they have financial reports, or when the words mandrake and bankrupcy are found in the same sentence?
I bet Mandrake is still the number one distribution measured in both install base and ease of use. It certainly has been number one over the last few years. Now Infoworld claims theyre the top enterprise linux as well. Slashdot's editor pretty much like any other publication seems to wants to see Linux as a battle between RedHat & Suse with the real geeks using debian or gentoo. Maybe its part of this silly punish the French campaign?
gah!
[peeve mode off (not really)]
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
Jonah Hex
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
...everybody else that Orchard is still infringing against by leaving their stuff on BuyMusic? Have you gotten assurances from them that they're looking at the *rest* of the catalogue for trouble spots, or are they just sitting around waiting for squeaky wheels like you?
I'm confused... "It seems they had kept me in their catalog on a contract clause that had been overlooked when the contract was signed back in 1999." Overlooked by who, you or them? I interpret this as meaning that you were under contract with them but didn't know it, so they did have the right to sell your music, but then they graciously terminated the contract when you asked them to. Is this right?
Writing stuff in assembly is extremely overrated.
Many optimizations that compilers can do, like inlining, software pipelining, and loop unrolling are often difficult to do by hand, and at best result in assembly code that is a nightmare to maintain. (Before you jump up and tell me that macro assemblers make inlining easy, well, it's not true. They make cut-and-paste easy, but to really do inlining you need to optimize the pasted code in its new context, which means register-allocating the surrounding region with the code there; removing dead branches, etc.) Other optimizations are just so tedious (register allocation) that nobody could bear to do them constantly by hand while writing code. Instead, they resort to macros, calling conventions, and global variables -- so that their code ends up looking like the output of a non-optimizing C compiler. (Just search for a win32 assembly tutorial, you'll see what I mean.)
Assembly does have its advantages, in two ways: Most compilers are optimized for speed, not space. Assembly programs usually come out to be much smaller than C programs (some of this has to do with linker stupidity). For embedded devices where you can count the bytes available on a few thousand hands, writing in assembly is sensible. Second, fine-tuning an inner loop or two in assembly is sometimes necessary to get the best possible performance. But just writing it in assembly will not get you the performance benefit; you also need to hand-optimize it like crazy, and only a few kinds of routines are amenable to this kind of thing. In any case, these are both "small scale" projects.
I'm no fan of C, but writing a "fully fledged OS" (ie, for the PC) in assembly is retarded. It will be impossible to maintain and debug, subject to security holes like crazy, and probably won't be faster than an operating system written in a programming language because it becomes more and more difficult to use clever algorithms when you use lower and lower level methods. Clever algorithms are where the real performance gains are.
Dont you belong in that article about comic books and obscenity.