Slashback: Picnic, Pistol, Doggedness

Slashback tonight brings you updates on low-power hardware, unauthorized music distribution by buymusic.com, and more, including a reminder of the upcoming (now annual) Linux picnic at the conclusion of LWCE. (If you're not there, start your own local chapter ;)) Read on for more!

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."

Comments

OmG

[sekzscripting]

O.M.G.

Free Food?!!111

Menuet OS Development.

[General Sherman]

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.

Re:Menuet OS Development.

[BelugaParty]

I agree, it sounds very interesting. It could do to OS's what early versions of Opera did for web browsing. However, with my limited computer knowledge, doesn't writing in assembler require a lot of knowledge about the computers underlying hardware? Would developers need to write in assembler as well, just to develop for it?

anyway, sounds like a project worth following. but it might just be my youthful idealism.

Re:Menuet OS Development.

[AKAImBatman]

doesn't writing in assembler require a lot of knowledge about the computers underlying hardware?

Yes. Assembler is about as low level programming you can get without writing the hex code yourself. However, you still need to understand all the ops of a CPU and hardware interfaces when developing an OS, so it really isn't a big deal. (i.e. If you don't know what the LGDT instruction does, you won't be writing an OS any time soon.)

Would developers need to write in assembler as well, just to develop for it?

Nope. It's the job of a compiler to reduce the code into machine language. (Assembly is just a textual representation of machine language.) It's the job of a linker to produce binary "wrapper" files for machine code that tells the OS how to link the file in memory. Go look up the ELF (Executable and Linking Format) for a good example.

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. Apparently, this is a result of their deal with the justice department to resolve possible anti-trust charges. They take a month or two to get, but they are nice manuals with plenty of detail.

Re:Menuet OS Development.

[sproket]

Not necessarily. Everybody assumes that assembly makes the fastest programs. The reality is that optimizing C compilers can produce faster code than most programmers. Even among those who have knowledge to write faster assembly, the sheer time involved can make it unworthwhile to do something optimally. After writing something at a snail's pace for days, the developer often says to himself: I'll come back later and code this up as a binary tree, for now I'm just going to use a linear search and get it done.

Re:Menuet OS Development.

[Stormie]

The reality is that optimizing C compilers can produce faster code than most programmers

Yes, but "most programmers" don't sit down to write an OS in assembly. Optimizing C compilers most certainly do not produce faster code than a true kick-ass assembly guru, and I assume that's the sort of person who would take on a project like this.

After writing something at a snail's pace for days, the developer often says to himself: I'll come back later and code this up as a binary tree, for now I'm just going to use a linear search and get it done.

On that front, however, you may well be correct. Writing something in "100% asm" is almost certainly more about ego than performance. One adage which actually is true is the old "10% of the code takes 90% of the CPU time" one, so write it, profile it, and then rewrite the critical bits in assembly.

The largest gathering

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Mandrake and the community

[Telex4]

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.

Linux Counter.

[eddy]

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

I'm impressed by MenuetOS.

[James A. A. Joyce]

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.

Guess they over-estimated Scotty's value...

[Thornae]

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?

Nice advert

[Faust7]

"Menuet, the 100 % assembly OS,

As opposed to those languages that aren't assembly in some form... :-)

Video Capture

[flacco]

I'd love to see a start-to-finish Video Capture and Clean-up article for LINUX.

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... :-(

Re:Video Capture

[Gherald]

Indeed, as soon as I come across a good HOWTO article I will buy a Winfast TV2000XP

Unless you are building a mini HTPC type system, I think AIW is pointless. Much better to have a vanilla AGP card that can be upgraded at any time.

Interesting Mandrake quip

[mao che minh]

My buddy lost his nice tech job at a bank and has been running the PC upgrade and repair shop at the local CompUSA (for about 50% the pay, but hell, beats unemployment). Anyways, sales of Mandrake Linux constently beat Red Hat right up until Red Hat 8 was shipped. And all together Suse, Red Hat, and Mandrake has actually sold more then Windows XP since XP's release. Only the Windows XP upgrade and Office XP has sold more copies then the Big 3 of Linux.

I thought you might find that interesting.

Re:Interesting Mandrake quip

[The Munger]

Surely the fact that most PCs come bundled with a Windows OS would influence those numbers greatly. Not many 'real people' upgrade their version of windows unless they're buying a new computer or a geek friend upgrades it for them to run the latest whiz-bang software. And that geek isn't going to fork out for it.

It's telling that the XP upgrade CD outsells the Big 3. It shows that Windows is still the OS that these 'real people' want on their machines.

It is good to see people willing to fork out the cash to support the cause though.

Free Food

[Gherald]

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.

Beam me up, Scotty!

[fm6]

Jeez, it doesn't even come with any real documentation or provenance. Just some laundry marks that might have been made by the Desilu props department. Or not.

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.

Lawsuit Fest

[didjit]

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.

Manuals are here...

[ashitaka]

Oh god, I'm SUCH a karma whore...

Pentium manuals in download or dead-tree form.

Please RSVP for the picnic if you'll attend

[ikluft]

If you'll be at the Linux Picnic, please RSVP so that we can estimate how much food to bring.

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.

Re:George Reeves?

[absurder]

Uhhh.. George Reeves played Superman on TV in the 50's.

Buymusic.com

[teamhasnoi]

For those who responded to this post, I will be getting a box full of CDs this weekend and will start sending them out - thanks to all who emailed me about getting a CD, the response was fantastic!

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.

Re:George Reeves?

[dmaxwell]

In the fifties, there was a Superman live action TV series. An actor named George Reeves played Superman. In the late seventies and through the eighties Christopher Reeve (no "s") played Superman in a series of three movies. Let us not speak of IV, it scared my psyche so badly that I deny it ever happened to this day. We're talking big budget MST3K fodder.

That the two actors names are almost identical is a coincidence.