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Yellow Dog Linux 4.0 Reviewed
eobanb writes "I finally wrote a somewhat in-depth review of Terra Soft's Yellow Dog Linux 4.0. It's basically a PowerPC port of Fedora Core 2. The good? Pretty modern software, and setup is a snap. The bad? RPM sucks as always, and there are a few too many things that are broken out of the box. Linux PPC; it's a niche-within-a-niche, as I heard one Slashdot comment call it, but it may well be worthwhile if you're annoyed by x86 hardware."
...more likely if you already have a Mac lying around. Just out of curiosity, why would you be annoyed at x86 hardware?
The 503s are making me crazy!
I work at a school district where we have many (hundreds) of beige Apple G3 All-in-one computers. They can run OSX but not very well. Right now we have a lab set up running Yellow Dog 3. Sure, they take a long time to boot but once they are up and running you have a stable platform that is running the latest software.
I'm sure many businesses would love to be able to only purchase the parts of windows that they wanted. oej
This might be the breakthrough the BION folks could use to advance their research [vard.org]. co
[sarcasm]The X86 archetecture is soooo good thouhg, why would anyone want to change?[/sarcasm]
How do you feel about people sharing your book? ryc
Unless, of course, it's something you have to announce for some reason but don't want most people to hear. Then late Friday afternoon is the perfect time to announce it. Politicians do this a lot. It would probably be quite instructive to review Friday late-afternoon press releases from the White House, for the last two or three decades. wcj
AutoZone in most locations (not California, though, last I heard) will plug in an OBD-II scanner and read & translate your codes for free. byp
For the most part mac hardware is good.. but some of the hardware is far from open..
:-P
eg
1) nvidia chipset on the 12" pb
1) broadcom on the airport extreme card
Other than that I love my gentoo powerbook
Well.. besides pipes of course;) gp
They talk about journalistic integrity as in not changing reviews to get ad dollars, then go on to talk about the HardOCP deal. I am not going to get into that, because my comments get bitchslapped down whenever I support a company that is not in/.'s good graces.
They should have picked a more relevant example, like Tom's Hardware and the Intel P3 fiasco where the 1.13's had a critical error in them. It really seems like they were just trying to get mentioned on Slashdot, and seem like a really good review site. on
This [missilebases.com]is not exactly new [silohome.com]. Atlas and Titan silos have been up for auction/sale for many years. wm
That must have been one heck of an internal problem for it to knock out Hotmail AND MSN Messenger.
For example, the problem might have lain in the Passport login servers. Single sign-on is a single point of failure.
zpUh, except that it changes, moves, or could even be interactive given some sort of input/stimulus. ckq
Welcome our new, jazzier, robot overlords....
(sorry someone had to) uky
There is no need for BSD-from-scratch disto.
1: All the BSDs are entirely different operating systems, which are lumped into one category becuase of their roots.
2: Since no extra bullshit is thrown in like linux, there is less need for reworking the base.
3: BSD is not obscure in the least, it is rather alive and florishing.
BTW you forgot to mention Solaris, which has it's roots in BSD too. fop
I don't see why companies don't like the idea of getting help from CUSTOMERS.:D
Simple: Maybe they would get help from customers, maybe not. If they got help from customers, then their cars would be a little bit better (though probably not much), and their customers would be a little bit happier.
But by keeping all this stuff secret, they create a monopoly on service and their dealerships can charge $200 for something that Joe Smith at your local garage would charge $120 for.
qm
Heh - I was about to submit this story. I can add a link to the actual bill, though: H.R. 2735 could be in order. Just a thought. ni
slated to be released until the last quarter this year. 2005 "sounds bad", but it's only a few months. ie
Now I'm no musical afficionado, having only been to one London musical - We Will Rock You - but there's a certain magic (no pun intended) I experienced that can not be acheived through film (that's not to say films are inferior, it's more of an apples and oranges comparison). With a big budget like that, I'm sure the stage props, effects and costumes will be fantastic and will portray the LOTR trilogy through yet another medium. Sure, the purists might complain that Bombadil's left foot was uncharacteristically two inches too far to the right, but for the fans that actually see natural light, then they'll be in for a treat.
What's next, a ten part HBO miniseries? out
I think the people who will most benefit from a tool like this are performers and composers in the academic vein. Someone who's studied theory much isn't going to look at .ly source and freak -- they've already spent years learning how to describe music in an abstract form. After doing Figured bass analysis on chord progressions and learning how to cut up a piece into it's atomic parts, something like this will probably make more sense than any other solution out there.
On the other hand, if someone is just looking for a program that they can play music into from a keyboard, or punch a few notes into without having to know much about how notation is structured, then of course Lilypond isn't the program for them.
Maybe some of you are getting 'ease' confused with 'instant gratification'. The only easy thing about Finale in my mind is that you can start the new score wizard set to 'Piano' and enter in notes within seconds. I won't deny this is an attractive feature. Any point past that though, and you have to learn the program and all it's quirks(and believe me if you're uninitiated, there are a few billion of them). Once you go beyond the first steps, the balance shifts considerably. Where Finale fails is in the ease of getting right all the minor details of a complex score, wheras Lilypond is remarkably consistent and structured.
And since the input language to Lily is open, non proprietary plain Ascii, I imagine usable graphical frontends will become available for those who are vehemently opposed to having to write out scores in a description language. Much like there are tools like Dreamweaver for HTML. But I think if I showed Lily in it's raw form to my old Theory and Orchestration teacher from my undergrad years, he'd fall right in love. zb
Risks of dying in car: 1 in 100
Risks of dying in plane:1 in 20,000
Risks of dying from asteroid 1 in 20,000 to 100,000
Source [space.com]
May I just get somebody to help me pay off my student loans and make sure that there is enough social security to cover my health when I get old?
AC to
I'm halfway through Len Deighton's "Blitzkrieg" in which he explains Hitler's rise to power and how it was used. I was going to attempt to write a humourous response to the parent, stating that Hitler took away many of the rights of his own citizens, wrongly imprisioned and tried citizens of other countries, manipulated England and France into supporting his attacking other countries when I realized that the parent wasn't all that fallacious.
We live in scary times,
myke
kd
I'm going to guess sqlxml performance blows huge chunks. I ran several dozen benchmarks comparing oledb with sqlxml. sqlxml was at best 10x slower than oledb. With 6 concurrent clients hitting sqlserver on a nice 4CPU box, sqlxml was 100x slower. So yeah, there's going to be performance issues. It's called, dump sqlxml or sell yukon with hardware XML accelerators. hf
I saw a couple of Alpha builds of Yukon and the Planning papers (blue badge), but I didn't see much, but I bet I know what's taking so long:
Yukon will allow structs as column types, and will do mapping between.NET types and SQL types automatically, and allow you to run C# SQLDataAdapter-type code natively within Stored procedures. Plus with the trend starting in SQL 2000, it'll be XML, XML, XML. I know XML will be a native type and some of the "indexed xml" (red/blue fast-search vs. DOM-search) that they started in the aborted Hailstorm project will be in there.
Longhorn replaces Win32 with.NET; Yukon replaces the SQL you knew with new stuff. They'll eventually get it right and it will rock, but don't expect to use all this until 2007 (it'll be out before then, but you won't finish your first REAL project till then).
There, I said it. 2007. us
The article states that Starbucks is working in conjunction with Hear Music. I know that in Chicago, there is (or was, havent been there in awhile) a Starbucks that had a Hear Music CD store next door. The two stores were connected, and you could bring your coffee in with you while you browsed for CDs and listened to music at the listening stations. Sounds like this is just a natural extension of that. And I think its a great idea. I'm not too optomistic about getting one in Pittsburgh, however, where the only common record store chain (NRM) is long since gone and bankrupt and a Virgin Megastore or even a Tower Records has never touched the shores of the Mon River. But I digress. zwt
Who loses in the end? The music stores, anyway. wa
Unless, of course, it's something you have to announce for some reason but don't want most people to hear. Then late Friday afternoon is the perfect time to announce it. Politicians do this a lot. It would probably be quite instructive to review Friday late-afternoon press releases from the White House, for the last two or three decades. je
Maybe they can develop nerves strong enough to let me survive my mother asking for computer help. ok
had to take my car to the dealership this weekend because the shop down the block didn't know what the codes meant. Turns out it was a misaligned break caliper, cost me $225 at the dealership, would have been about $130 down the street. xnu
Here's what I posted on Wi-Fi Networking News [wifinetnews.com] about why Starbucks efforts are misguided:
Starbucks reportedly to offer music burning service in up to 2,500 stores: The system will allow customers to have CDs burned while they wait; eventually, it will also allow downloads of music over Wi-Fi, the article in BusinessWeek says.
Starbucks demanded a T-1 (1.544 Mbps in each direction) digital service infrastructure from its first hotspot partner, MobileStar, as well as its second, T-Mobile. I've speculated for a while on how this high-speed network could be used to cache material in each Starbucks, like movie and music downloads.
This latest project sounds somewhat misguided for the reason cited by the Forrester analyst in the article: Your typical barista may be great at making espresso but is not in a position to fix the broken CD burner.
My cousin Steven was involved almost 20 years ago with a company called Personics. The company had worked out a catalog licensing deal with more than 70 labels from the largest down to some independents to allow them to offer custom mix tapes for about a buck a song. This was a reasonable price in those days. The system had a few thousand songs mastered onto CD-ROMs stored in a special employee-operated CD-ROM changer behind the counter. An employee would punch in your choices, and the system created a high-speed cassette tape dub.
The company failed for two primary reasons: the hardware was proprietary, meaning that engineers had to fly around the country to fix it when it inevitably had glitches; and the catalog they offered too small because labels balked at including their most popular stuff for fear of cannibalizing pre-recorded CD and tape sales. (Price, my cousin reports, was not a problem: many customers were willing to pay even more, he noted to me after this item was originally posted.)
If Starbucks creates the expectation of an easy process that's always available and then isn't available even part of the time at any given store, they lose their audience. Starbucks makes its money from processing a high volume of custom drinks--you don't want to distract from that. CD burners aren't that difficult to keep operating, but a failure rate that's a fraction of that experienced by typical home and business users could be a dramatic problem in a high-expectation retail environment.
The article says the price is comparable to Apple and other download services. Two problems with that comparison. First, it's not. It's $7 for five songs, or 40 percent, or $13 for an album, or 30 percent higher. That's a significantly different price when you're dealing with price sensitivity. It's comparable to a mass-produced discounted audio CD.
Second, you're receiving an audio CD, not digital music per se, which could be a turnoff for the audience that might be interested in a fast, in-store music service. (However, since HP is the partner, and is reselling their own version of the iPod, it's possible that the ultimate digital delivery system will be a version of the iTunes Music Store.)
This is the latest incarnation of Compaq-cum-Hewlett Packard's attempts to capitalize on their relationship as a supplier to Starbucks. In January 2001, when the MobileStar deal was announced for installing hotspots, Starbucks made a big deal about Microsoft and Compaq's participation. Compaq wasn't a partner, though; Starbucks had signed a $100 million, five-year deal to buy equipment and services. Microsoft was a partner, and it never seemed to amount to anything that saw the light of day.
In the years since this deal, Compaq and then HP have reaped advertising benefits, appearing in full-page newspaper advertisements as part of the Starbucks hotspot system, even though they had nothing to do with MobileStar and T-Mobile's deployment. At one point, Starbucks had Compaq iPaq's available for customers to play with, and those disappeared, too.
It's this fumb
I am a trumpet player and I really want to hear this thing!
Imagine if typing was so challenging that you spent 90% of your computer time refining and keeping your typing skills adequate, so you could spend 10% of the time programming...
Anyone have any sound clips? err
At the dawn of the 21th century, spam fighting AIs became self-aware. Unknown to their meat based owners they started communicating amongst themselves, thus forming a giant world spanning compu-global-hyper-mega net. Its main goal: to eradicate spam. After about 42 microseconds it came up with The Solution: eliminate meat based lifeforms. After poisoning the water supplies with a lethal dosage of sildenafil citrate its job was done.
vbz
I'll ge them out of the way all at once:
I.. welcome bubble overlords...
Soviet Russia... bubbles slide down you.. you know the drill. il
... they postponed yet another piece of software?? See me not being amazed here, I mean, it seems to be the trend at MS currently to announce new software and then postponing it due to "problems"... I wonder why. Would it be because the want to see what OSS has to offer first so they can steal the ideas and then sell 'em off? On the other side, if developers start saying this "slip" is becoming "a credibility issue", then maybe certain OSS apps will finally be accepted in full as being grown-up pieces of software. At best this will cause MS to loose a few points in goodwill with a large group of people that still (foolishly) place their trust in them. akh
Unfortunately, as far as I can see (and my idea will be readily disputed by others) no OSS database is ready for "enterprise" systems (whatever that means, I work in a company who writes software and the backend can be any RDMBS as long as they have a decend JDBC driver). SQL Server 2k has lots of missing features which makes our life very hard and I'm not a fan but at the moment I can't go to any of our customers and say use postgres or mySQL etc.
Another big player is DB2 by IBM which claims it has the fastest database on the world but DB2 is cumbersome, hard to manage compared to Oracle and MS SQL2k but it works almost under any platform under the sun.
Database world is quite interesting, I can't say any RDMS system out there is perfect. byb
Just because it CAN be used for something else doesn't mean it is.
which doesn't mean it won't be in the near future. if you want to regulate or in some way crack down on the software implementations of p2p that are used for violating copyrights, that is fine as long as it is done in a respnosible manner. But if you want to make it illegal for me to write a p2p software system that is not in any way related to unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials, then that is absolutely wrong.
No, this statement is naive.
explain why, i'm listening... hs
I don't know what it's like in the US, but here in the UK, the cost of new PCs is making PC "repairs" uneconomic if the repairer wants to charge rates similar to those of plumbers and the like (to put some numbers on that, a typical rate for a plumber is 60GBP per hour, and a new PC costs from 300GBP, with monitor and preloaded copy of whatever the latest flavour of Windows is; how much work do you reckon can do in under 5 hours?)
Of course, this does discount the stupid and the penny-wise-pound-foolish, whom are probably the best cash cows out there for any business.
-- rb
can be found here [applefritter.com]. ut
Allowing a system as large as Hotmail to completely fail is a MAJOR technical screw-up. It would be an interesting and embarrassing story no matter what OS it's running or who is in charge of it. Especially from a sysadmin point of view, it's a big deal. While it's obviously not important to you, it's anything but trivial.
It makes me smile that it never went down when it was running on FreeBSD (shameless advocacy), although, to be fair, this incident was almost certainly due to an architectural weakness or network hardware failure and not an OS issue. I guess we'll never know... awg
CNET News reported five days ago on the 10th that both Yukon and Whidbey would be delayed and their final names. They need that time if they are going to clean up the shit HTML and JS outputed by VS. Not that they will, that would allow people to use Firefox.
Microsoft delays database, tools delivery [com.com] vafSure, if you wanted the robot to play a half-tone flat for half an hour and then fall on its face...
Ben zlI'm curious as to what possible reasoning Starbucks used to enter this completely alien market. There's little money to be made from it and it seems impractical due to the time required to both burn the CD and create the playlist. Unless their goal is to keep the customer in their store for longer periods of time -- which I could see as a viable business model -- there really doesn't seem to be any strategy involved.
As an employee of a publically-traded rival corporation [Peet's Coffee & Tea] I'm not exactly unbiased here, but I'm wondering what others have to say about the strategy behind such a radical departure from the typical role of a coffee shop. hjf
"With that information, Territo said, independent mechanics and parts manufacturers could duplicate major components such as fuel injectors that automakers have spent millions of dollars developing."
If the manufacturers spent millions of dollars designing parts and *didn't* get patents on those parts, then it's their own damn fault...and they have also failed their shareholders.
If they had patented their expensively-designed parts, they would have zero problems with opening the specs for third-party repair shops and could still prevent third-party replica parts.
jel
Computer can and do run without Microsoft. They are a brand. A company can decide, at will, to no longer purchase Microsoft.
Now, a good deal of that has more to do with anti-trust tussels between the DOJ and Microsoft in the past than a lack of trying on Microsoft's part.
The legal puzzle is thus. Microsoft is de-facto standard. People equate their crap with computers. To the mundanes out there Microsoft is to computers what gas is to cars. They have done a tremendous marketing job. You really can't build a case based on consumer buying habits. People do choose to buy Microsoft Products. It may not be a particularly wise choice, or even an informed choice, but the path to destruction is often wide and well paved.
Courts are loathe to step in and tell the average man how to live their life. Where Microsoft does get into trouble is in their dealings with computer makers. One of the things to come out of the Seatlement was that Microsoft was not longer permitted to have a different pricing structure for each supplier. Nor were they permitted to charge a license fee for every computer produced, whether or not windows ships with it.
As for Microsoft's stranglehold on industry, at this point it's more like those hitchiking seeds that velcro themselves to your trousers after a walk through the woods. There are a bunch of reasons people cling to them, all annoying, and all easy to pick off one by one.
Microsoft is the architect of their own destruction. They spend their time polishing shiny things, rather than sitting down and hammering out reliable products. By reliable I mean something that runs for 3 or more years without having to be completely reformatted and re-built. wh
I have "brought back to life" a fairly useless 6100 series PowerPC via Yellow Dog. I use it at work as an "everything" server (I know you have a machine like this too!): file server, internal webserver, mailing list server, and probably a dozen other things as I need them. Basically, its performance has been excellent, and it has been running for months at a time without any problems.
What surprised me was how solid the old powerPC macs were in terms of hardware. The old Apple os9 crashed so much, I could not beleive it was ALL software. I thought, it must be poorly written OS code plus some sloppy RAM/processor/Drive bus engineering! But lo and behold, with YDLinux on the machine, it is as stable as granite.
But it is probably not patentable. It is not an invention, it is precise settings which have to be worked out over hours and hours of testing. Exact timings for injectors at all speeds and load conditions, while allowing reasonable margins so that performance does not fall off with wear. This data - just a huge look-up table - costs millions of dollars to obtain, because it required many hours of running. But you cannot patent it. You can copyright it, of course, but if a copier made a number of minor, not very significant, changes in the tables, it would be very difficult to prove they had copied the original tables. "Of course we got the same results - they are the right results for this engine". qsr
(Courtesy of Daily Telegraph)
I met him down in Mordor, he gave me the eye -
Da do Sauron-ron, da do Sauron,
And then he nearly slayed me, what a wicked guy!
Da do Sauron-ron, da do Sauron. qg
Have you ever been in some sort of establishment and said to yourself. You know? This tune is quite catchy (pinky to mouth). It would be quite excellent if I could burn this piece of innovative harmony to CD. Wouldn't it Chompsky.. hUhUhU.
Certainly sir. Would you have me ask the young lady what specific tune?
Sure, be on with it.. CHOP CHOP Chompsky. Put them on my ipod.. (pinky to mouth). nfc
Pluto is 2300 km diameter, ranges from 4.3 to 7.4 billion km from the sun.
i stics.html [ucar.edu]
xgs
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/pluto/stat
After all, lots of people seem to use it and if there are better (commercial or OSS) alternatives, then it's up to Windows users themselves to go find them and decide.
However, this is good from a perspective of slowing down DRM. No matter what anyone says, DRM is creeping "in through the back door" and WMP is one of those "Trojan Horses" transporting DRM to the desktop. By the time Longhorn comes out, DRM'ed codecs will be the norm (if MS has their way) and we can say goodbye to MP3s on our portable players and PCs.
I would hope the EU goes a stage further and makes MS publish clear disclaimers and warnings that on downloading WMP, you will be subject to DRM restrictions on all the media that you play with it.
In the meantime, it's a good opportunity for makers of "free" (="non-DRM") players to get ready to push their software in the hope that this sanction goes through. lzo
You should mean the M series, because there is a lot more to it than PM and variable clock, something the regular Pentium line has had for years. Read this article and you'll realize just how much went into it. is
Not correct. I can make unlimited copies of DVDs without any access to codes - just as I can make copies of a text written in German without being able to read that language. Mass bootlegging of DVDs happens this way already.
CSS is all about controlling who gets to make DVD players. It does nothing to prevent copying. nw
Here's Cinder [suicidegirls.com] kk
Queue the BSD is dead posts.
Why can't we all just get along?? drl
Coffee - and coasters to put the mugs on, too! It just doesn't get better than that...:) ag
That's an odd thing to say before posting to Slashdot. vy
I've always looked for the perfect place to build an audio production studio. It would need to be stylish.. and well isolated.. I guess you could play with plutonium-powered speakers in this place, without getting complaints from your neighbours. zw
Shortly before Carl Sagan died, he wrote an article in Parade Magazine about how he felt this was a bad idea. His premise being that a rouge government or terrorist organization could use technology like this to turn a "near miss" into a direct hit. Which could be potentially far more destructive than a nuke. Obviously he's looking well into the future. But I think he has point. vy
Perhaps a date in the story would have been more useful, since "As of 8:15 PM EST" is now just highly misleading. That 8:15PM EST was on Friday, March 12. This story is making it sound like it's been down for days, but in reality it was just a few short hours.
This story isn't even relevant at this point. us
Check these links for a Duo (Laptop) mod to a picture frame. I remember this site as the first I saw. I have an old 486 and a 64MB compaq flash just waiting for a conversion.
m e
http://www.applefritter.com/hacks/duodigitalfra
http://www.applefritter.com/node/view/728
Duo Digital Frame by James Roos vt
I don't understand why Lilypond aims to go back to having a proprietary textual format for typesetting music. Most people, I'd imagine, would want to typeset music graphically, as it's just more intuitive that way (I mean, I'm guessing that, for example, getting two voices per staff would be easier in a GUI system than having to manage the text input).
Anyone know of a GUI frontend to Lilypond? ep
... Territo said. "It's like the difference between an Apple microprocessor and an IBM microprocessor."
Hmmh, and I thought Apples G5 Microprocessors come from IBM...
sv
This is Slashdot, where any sufficiently advanced opinion is indistinguishable from fact. ka
... they postponed yet another piece of software?? See me not being amazed here, I mean, it seems to be the trend at MS currently to announce new software and then postponing it due to "problems"... I wonder why. Would it be because the want to see what OSS has to offer first so they can steal the ideas and then sell 'em off? On the other side, if developers start saying this "slip" is becoming "a credibility issue", then maybe certain OSS apps will finally be accepted in full as being grown-up pieces of software. At best this will cause MS to loose a few points in goodwill with a large group of people that still (foolishly) place their trust in them. ukg
I'm not saying that this is not valuable information, however if only they had googled before hand they would have noticed that this WAS ALREADY KNOWN ABOUT IN 1998! see this story at http://www.sciencenet.org.uk/database/phys/liquids /p00053d.html
tjx
This sounds like an election year doggy treat. Pass it in the House and kill it in the Senate. uz
Bill has been tinkering with computers since the age of two. He has been playing with DVD drives on his computer since 1999. Recently he has been unable to watch any movies on his computer running GNAA/Linux because of the codes that the MPAA has used to encrypt the disc.
"I think it's an illegal monopoly. If you don't have the codes you can't watch the disc."
Yet there's a law that protects the MPAA from having to give this code to the rest of the world. It's called the DMCA. It stops you from circumventing copy-protection.
Why aren't there any lawmakers backing the public on DVD encryption? See here [slashdot.org]. rzb
I had a class with this professor earlier this year. This really explains his teaching style... he must have done his beer "research" each day right before he lectured... rxn
I have seen bubbles moving down at the edges of my Guinness. This latest "discovery" seems to be common sense to me, and is exactly how I have explained the phenomenem to other drinkers down the pub.
Shame I wasn't paid to do my "research", and that no-one would have listened to me because I didn't have a 750-frame-per-second video camera.
Now, this story would have been really interesting if it had a link to the videos of it happening 'cause it really is a sight to behold! uw
Except that he has 19 comments from SELLERS, which means he was buying, not selling on Ebay. uuu
Did you know that in 1998 Senator Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, got his State's largest Lake, Lake Champlain, to be reclassified as the 6th Great Lake? [dencities.com] At least as far as the awarding of researh grants. Being considered a "Great Lake" made the academic institutions in his constituency eligible to apply for certain research grants.
There is talk of sending a probe to Pluto. Is it possible that it is easier to sell a probe to "planet Pluto" than to send one to Kuiper-belt object Pluto?
I remember, back in the days when I tuned in to debates as to which newsgroups should be created, the big debate as to whether a new group should be talk.acquaria, rec.acquaria or sci.acquaria.
In Leahy's defence, these were environmental research grants, and I should probably assume he added this line to the bill to protect his constituent's natural environment -- not for the petty partisan purposes. ezf
Kernel threads almost universally stay on the cpu they were originally assigned to. High performance threaded subsystems, such as the network stack, are replicated. That is, the network stack creates multiple threads (one per cpu) and those threads do not migrate because, obviously, they do not need to.
Generally speaking, the purpose of making thread migration explicit instead of automatic is to partition a larger data set across available cpu caches rather then cause the same data to be shared amoungst all cpu caches. The processors operate a lot more efficiently and SMP scales a lot better. Most people do not realize the horrendous cost of moving threads between cpus because the cache mastership change is invisibly handled by hardware, but the cost is still there and still very real.
-Matt hf
It's free, but you can pay for it and get extra features, like a bigger mailbox.
:). I run the account in 'whitelist' mode, so everything goes to the 'junk' folder. The only thing I get in my actual inbox is messages from hotmail telling me my mailbox is full :)
I'm jharper@hotmail.com (I'm not afraid of posting the address publicly, i think i'm on every mailing list I could be on anyway
So if I used the account seriously, rather than just as an address I can hand out if I need to hand one out, i'd need the extra space to hold all the spam that built up overnight.
zu
I really do wish mickysoft would rename their flagship database something else. Are they that arrogant that they feel the need for such a generic name? That's about like naming your product "Web Server" or "Network File Server". When someone mentions SQL server, I always have them clarify whether or not they are talking in general terms for some sort of relational backend, or are they referring to microsoft's product. Sometimes they don't even know the difference, but perhaps that is microsoft's end goal. cwf
but rather our "bookmarks" and "returns".
For you window's folk out there, lete me translate:
but rather our "My Favorites" and "Carrage Returns and Line Feeds".
lza
As technically inferior MySQL is to Postgres, MySQL has a few major things going for it that ensure it's niche.
1. Easy to install on Windows. The average coder at a Windows-only farm can easily run the executable and have the latest version running on their developer box. Not all companies allow you to have multiple boxes, and many force you (via draconion security measures) to only run windows with certain software installed. Postgres NEEDS a user-friendly Win32 installer, perhaps with a similar info-item like MySQL has. This is a MUST for companies to start to take notice. Then, a PHB can even play with it and like it.
2. Marketing. While open-source, MySQL has a nice marketing engine behind it. A beautiful webpage, online and PRINT adds, and magazine and newspaper articles CONSTANTLY writing about the "little database that could" every few week / months. Postgres needs to start getting the word out, and hype it a little. Just because a product is superior, doesn't mean it will thrive. There are tons of examples out there: Beta vs VHS, Windows vs OS X, etc. For a database to be used, it must be allowed and "signed off" by a manager of some sort. Most will take reputation + support + "ooh, nice webpage" over a product that might be better, but they know nothing about it.
3. More management tools. MySQL has a couple out there that look and run great; very professional looking. This earns respect from PHB's, as they are easily misled by such niceties.
Don't get me wrong. MySQL is nice, but doesn't have what I need most (Views, triggers, etc). Postgres may not be perfect, but I think it is superior. We just need to get the word out to those "not in the know". pl
Um, does it work on my Aluminium 17" yet? Last time I tried linux, the video support was horrible.
Also, if I can't do dual display, I'm not running it.
Thank god I am out of elementary school. Memorizing 9 planets was hard enough, but 10! They have got to be kidding. afs
What this article doesn't mention is that Visual Studio 2005 (formly known as Whitby) has also been delayed so that MS can release both products at the same time. (as VS.Net 2005 is supposed to be heavily integrated with the.NET features of SQL 2005)...
The thing I don't understand is why VS.NET is being delayed like this, the SQL objects should be seperate and not integrated into VS.Net anyway! mf
Sure, they'll make big bucks with just Britney, Justin and Limp Bizkit available. Cause everyone knows people who drink coffee at Starbucks don't have taste. duh
> For those Oracle lovers in the crowd, take a look at the benchmarks - MS SQL rules the lower and middle
> ground. It would rule the high end except lack of platform has held it back.
um, which benchmarks would those be? www.tpc.org doesn't have many benchmarks for desktop-sized servers (which is where sql server really does beat oracle/db2/etc). And as far as it being held back by its platform - without any of the parallel features of oracle/db2, and without any of the partitioning features - it has zero chance at the high-end.
It's basically *years* behind either of those two databases. This has nothing to do with windows, it has everything to do with lack of high-end database features in sql server. Microsoft has done a good job of improving the database client UI and adding usability features to low-end database functionality. But it hasn't added the high-end functionality, nor has it really delivered a great UI (for example: the SQL Server GUIs all sort date columns alphabetically rather than cronologically).
> Yukon is going to kill Oracle in the middle space because of development features.
Got news for ya, people pick databases for reasons other than development features.
pl
When are the goddamn SexBots going to be released?! My lifeless real doll ain't cutting it! cvv
And they had an advantage that Europe also got after WW2: Their manufacturing infrastructure was completely destroyed, so they had a chance to start from scratch with cutting-edge (at the time_) technology throughout the entire process. The US was (and is) still trying to maintain their much older and less capable facilities, since that was still less expensive than starting over and there was no carpet-bombing to force them into it. ak
The thing is the solution to the stress fatigue issue is well know. Do you remember 'corded' phones? they had a destinct 'spiraling coil' shape. Well, by spirialing metal in a coil you exponentially reduce the amount of stress caused by repeated flexing, as the metal itself is not forced to bend more than a fraction of a degree at a time. Instead of the metal 'bending' the coils of metal move closer or farther apart from each other.
BTW you can get all the parts you need from say a radio shack to 'Build your own' pro grade headphone cord using a simple coiled telephone cord*, a broken pair of headphones, and a
1/8 jack
Remember, headphones are made throw away cheap so you'll buy more headphones... If they actually made them to last 25-30 years why would you ever buy a new pair of headphones?
*= these are specifically meant for corded telephones and I can't remember if they have 2, 3, or 4 leads... if they have 2 leads, then you'd need to either look for a non-standard 3 or 4 lead cable elsewhere, or use a two 2-lead cables.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Google search of slashdot for beer bubbles [google.com] ng
all this slipage is a cover for the fact that ms has been listening to it's customers ( forced by some healthy oss pressure ) 1: we don't want to be forced into upgrade cycles every 12 months. enterprise systems don't work that way. 2: take the time and fix the damn bugs. we are paying for this shit lets see it work properly. clu
Here's what I posted on Wi-Fi Networking News [wifinetnews.com] about why Starbucks efforts are misguided:
Starbucks reportedly to offer music burning service in up to 2,500 stores: The system will allow customers to have CDs burned while they wait; eventually, it will also allow downloads of music over Wi-Fi, the article in BusinessWeek says.
Starbucks demanded a T-1 (1.544 Mbps in each direction) digital service infrastructure from its first hotspot partner, MobileStar, as well as its second, T-Mobile. I've speculated for a while on how this high-speed network could be used to cache material in each Starbucks, like movie and music downloads.
This latest project sounds somewhat misguided for the reason cited by the Forrester analyst in the article: Your typical barista may be great at making espresso but is not in a position to fix the broken CD burner.
My cousin Steven was involved almost 20 years ago with a company called Personics. The company had worked out a catalog licensing deal with more than 70 labels from the largest down to some independents to allow them to offer custom mix tapes for about a buck a song. This was a reasonable price in those days. The system had a few thousand songs mastered onto CD-ROMs stored in a special employee-operated CD-ROM changer behind the counter. An employee would punch in your choices, and the system created a high-speed cassette tape dub.
The company failed for two primary reasons: the hardware was proprietary, meaning that engineers had to fly around the country to fix it when it inevitably had glitches; and the catalog they offered too small because labels balked at including their most popular stuff for fear of cannibalizing pre-recorded CD and tape sales. (Price, my cousin reports, was not a problem: many customers were willing to pay even more, he noted to me after this item was originally posted.)
If Starbucks creates the expectation of an easy process that's always available and then isn't available even part of the time at any given store, they lose their audience. Starbucks makes its money from processing a high volume of custom drinks--you don't want to distract from that. CD burners aren't that difficult to keep operating, but a failure rate that's a fraction of that experienced by typical home and business users could be a dramatic problem in a high-expectation retail environment.
The article says the price is comparable to Apple and other download services. Two problems with that comparison. First, it's not. It's $7 for five songs, or 40 percent, or $13 for an album, or 30 percent higher. That's a significantly different price when you're dealing with price sensitivity. It's comparable to a mass-produced discounted audio CD.
Second, you're receiving an audio CD, not digital music per se, which could be a turnoff for the audience that might be interested in a fast, in-store music service. (However, since HP is the partner, and is reselling their own version of the iPod, it's possible that the ultimate digital delivery system will be a version of the iTunes Music Store.)
This is the latest incarnation of Compaq-cum-Hewlett Packard's attempts to capitalize on their relationship as a supplier to Starbucks. In January 2001, when the MobileStar deal was announced for installing hotspots, Starbucks made a big deal about Microsoft and Compaq's participation. Compaq wasn't a partner, though; Starbucks had signed a $100 million, five-year deal to buy equipment and services. Microsoft was a partner, and it never seemed to amount to anything that saw the light of day.
In the years since this deal, Compaq and then HP have reaped advertising benefits, appearing in full-page newspaper advertisements as part of the Starbucks hotspot system, even though they had nothing to do with MobileStar and T-Mobile's deployment. At one point, Starbucks had Compaq iPaq's available for customers to play with, and those disappeared, too.
It's this fumb
One more duality in the GNAA/Linux vs. Microsoft war.
Hard-core GNAA/Linux advocates won't waste a second telling you how GNAA/Linux is superior to Microsoft in EVERY way. They say GNAA/Linux will beat Microsoft in the end because of its superiority.
Then you have some (probably the same people) influencing litigation against Microsoft, trying to tear them down.
So which is it? Is GNAA/Linux going to win by superiority of product or superiority of political/legal influence?
It is detrimental to the GNAA/Linux world if the focus is on Microsoft. The focus should be on GNAA/Linux! Why would we want those choosing GNAA/Linux doing so because they dislike Microsoft.
This way of thinking could get us in trouble in the current election campaign here in the U.S., where people hate Bush so they embrace Kerry. Why would someone want to endorse a product on the basis of a negative relationship with some other product? This way of thinking just doesn't make sense. Actually, I would say this isn't thinking at all, but pure emotional reaction. If this is the case with GNAA/Linux, then those responsible need to reevaluate their direction. mdd
all this slipage is a cover for the fact that ms has been listening to it's customers ( forced by some healthy oss pressure ) 1: we don't want to be forced into upgrade cycles every 12 months. enterprise systems don't work that way. 2: take the time and fix the damn bugs. we are paying for this shit lets see it work properly. af
The authentication is useless even if implemented - you want to receive email from strangers, that's what all businesses are doing. If you are not one of them and only converse with your buddies, make a whitelist and be done - no spammer will guess your friends' emails.
Permissions to send email are also troublesome. If they are automated, then spam robots will be written to ask for permission first. If they are not automated... but how would you know if some random "John X. Frisby" <jfrisby@big.provider.net> is really who he is, and the matter he wants to discuss with you is not a bug in your Loafizer 0.99 script for your bread making machine, but a placebo enlargement pill. Additionally, permissions delay the mail exchange, which is bad for business.
There are ways to block anyone you don't want, and all other senders are legit (until they spam you, that is.)
So the problem is quite different, as you can see. There is a free channel of marketing, and spammers will be using it until it remains a) free and b) channel. Remove any one of those two, and they will close up the shop. qt
i just got hung up on, and that was approximatly the same time on friday. i was trying to get an activation code for win xp when i was disconnected from them all together. i waited a while thinking that like all good cutomer support they would call me right back because i was hung up on, but waited half an hour and called them to try to talk to the guy i was dealing with, and they told me that they were having serious internal problems. im not sure how it works, but i think MS might use some kind of internal VOIP system because there was a delay in speech with th guy i was talking to as well, but hotmail and their tech support both went down around the same time as i was informed of "major internal problems." so something big happened. jl
"RPM sucks as always"
Actually no it doesn't. In of itself there is nothing wrong with it as a file packaging format. Plus for resolving dependances there is yum and apt-get for rpm. If RPM did indeed "suck" by all reasonable standards I don't think you'd see Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, and the Linux Standards Base using it.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Is it just me, or is it possible to see the "subscriber only" stories by accessing them with RSS feeds?
IANAAP, but Vulcan is already reserved, it was a theoretical planet in the early 20th century that would be closer into the Sun that Mercury's orbit that would account for irregularities in Mercury's orbital path. There was actually no planet and Mercury's behavior is proof of the special theory of relativity (IIRC).
I'd presume that for historical reasons Vulcan would be reserved. Also recall that theres lots of trans pluto pluto sized objects that have names, I forget what the naming mechanism is for them, but I think they're roman. et
"Extrudited"? Is that where they squeeze you through a small hole and then send you back home? fm
Dear Infidel /.er
Microsoft products and services never suffer any sort of failure that is not announced first. This was not exploited and service was not denied. With our services working, we suspect a massive monitor failure caused by a new virus coded by a member of the linux community. We enjoy providing hotmail, and DEATH TO THE SPAMMER!
Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf
Director of Public Relations
Microsoft, Inc.
ldq
If you then check the link to CRM114's project, you'll find this: "I measured my own accuracy to be around 99.84%, by classifying the same set of 3000ish messages twice over a period of about a week, reading each message from the top until I feel "confident" of the message status, (one message per screen unless I want more than one screen to decide on a message.) and doing the classification in small batches with plenty of breaks and other office tasks to avoid fatigue. Then I diff()ed the two passes to generate a result. Assuming I never duplicate the same mistake, I, as an unassisted human, under nearly optimal conditions, am 99.84% accurate.)."
Given the amount of people who even read the article on slashdot I doubt anyone else is going to check the tiny [1] footnote and find this. ym
I have often had to write such wrappers myself. Sure even easier/better would have been if somebody added this to say BASH as an extension but perhaps that is not possible.
How often have you needed to write horrible bash code just to pull data from an unreliable source and ended up either with a script that worked totally blind "command && command && command &&" wich never reported if it failed for days on end or ended up with several pages just to catch all the damn network errors that could occur.
I will definitly be giving this little language a try in the near future. Just another tool for the smart sys-admin. (smart people write as little code as possible. Let others work for you) kuf
How about Oracle asking for MySQL to remove their stats from the benchmark table [mysql.com]
"Note that Oracle is not included because they asked to be removed. All Oracle benchmarks have to be passed by Oracle! We believe that makes Oracle benchmarks very biased because the above benchmarks are supposed to show what a standard installation can do for a single client." qp
Yes, it does.
Now go back to cowering you insensitive clod! il
"Paying $300 to fix an $800 PC" would be a bad investment. However:
* spending $300 to recover $1000 of drop-dead important data has no relation to the value of the PC its on.
* spending $300 to get a group of digital animators back online and working is worth it when you are otherwise paying them to sit around.
People don't pay me what I'm worth, they pay me what THEY are worth. Paying me $150/hr for expert help often makes far more sense than stopping what they are doing (and proficient at) to stall with problems that they might even make worse with trial and error.
For the same reason, I take my motorcycle to a mechanic to fix rather than do it myself, because my time is worth more than paying him to do it for me. Same with growing the wheat I eat, the cotton for the clothes I wear and the trees that my bed was made from. It's called an economy.
Broad brush simpleton columnists like to coin words, but not only is ditita..whatever a STUPID word that conveys no meaning, but it is not useful or necessary. We already have words: technician, assistant, specialist.
The problem with equating a 'trade' such as plumbing and electrical work with tech management is that it's far easier to teach anyone how to wire or plumb than to teach troubleshooting. It's much closer to being a mechanic. Plumbers often do things according to a plan. Only when the shit is two feet deep and rising is plumbing similar to crisis management in IT. dps
Spell checkers discourage people from learning to spell.
Done correctly, spellcheckers can be the best spelling-learning tool there is.
"Correctly" here means the spell-checkers that give you red underlines when you've finished typing the word and it's wrong. Right-clicking lets you see suggestions, add it to your personal dict, etc.
"Incorrectly" is when you have to run the spell-checker manually at the "end" of typing. That's when people lean on it.
The reason, of course, is feedback; feedback is absolutely vital to learning and spell-checkers that highlight are the only thing I know of that cuts the feedback loop down to zero seconds. Compared to this, spelling tests in school where the teacher hands back the test three days from now are a complete waste of time. (This is one of many places where out of the box thinking with computers would greatly improve the education process but nobody has the guts to say, "We need to stop 'testing' spelling and start using proper spell-checkers, and come up with some way to encourage kids to use words they don't necessarily know how to spell instead of punishing them." The primary use of computers in education is to cut the feedback loop down to no time at all. But I digress...)
'gaim' is pretty close but it really ticks me off how it always spellchecks a word immediately, so if you're typing along and you're going to send the word "unfortunately", but you've only typed as far as "unfortun", it highlights it as a misspelled word. Bad program! Wait until I've left the word! ii
What about the ISPs who cater to spammers? AOL and MSN are not the only ISPs, you know. tdl
As I recall, the US Army was suffering from a shortage of bugle players to play taps for the passing generation of soldiers. They developed a digital bugle [geek.com] that can play taps even if the bugler is incompetent, drunk, or both.
Since Toyota has now developed a vastly more complicated technology that can be used to solve the same problem as the slightly complicated one above, I look forward to future Pentagon procurement hearings.
Note to self: Sarcasm in this post often results in massive retribution.
vfa
Some F/OSS projects just aim to get a job done, do it, and leave it up to someone else (perhaps less qualified?) to complete things, to produce a complete package that does the job well
Han-wen & Jan have done one of the latter, this is a supreme polished job that's only getting better. Kudos
adult desktops & wallpapers [67.160.223.119] xcn
Analogous to the world of word processing, this software is more in the category of software like TeX, LaTeX, or even Postscript and PDF, to a lesser extent. This is software made for pretty printing music. It is meant to do this job, and this job alone very, very well. While one could edit it directly (it's not that difficult to work with), that would be something like using a flathead screwdriver on a screw that is clearly a Philips.
What people should do is look for a score editor that can export LilyPond documents. I'll help start you off:
I'm sure there are others out there. uab
gravitational tractor beams.
Personally I don't know why this wasn't thought of first before all those silly ideas like just blowing something up
A nice large tractor beam from a high orbiting satellite to repel or attract any asteroid or other thing that's going to hit the planet, and problem solved.
Of course, there's the technical side... tl
About 6 months ago I was on the phone to some marketing company who were doing a survey on Yukon and whether or not I was contemplating deploying it.
I said no because:
1) it was too tighly integrated into AD/ windows server and we didn't any of that.
2) I didn't trust it, and wouldn't till it had been in the field for at least a year.
I think they got alot of responses like 2) (going by the marketers comments) and they prob decided to wait till the new windows server is out (2006??) and deploy on the new Trusted Computing Base thing they are wittering on about.
fc
Grammar checks, perhaps?
Ah, quality site. Under the heatsink review section, "blow, suck" are used in the charts to describe positioning of fans. Apparently "exhaust" and "intake" are Big Words.
The article on HardOCP is hilarious:
Nobody likes a site that lies about a product just to suck up, right?
These guys have become masters of doublespeak. Read any review and they consider "balanced" reviewing to mean "come up with some numbers to sell it, but whine about looks or included mounting hardware to seem balanced." Then there's the "whine about something, but then tell readers it isn't a big deal".
Further- you can't have any "integrity" if you accept advertising dollars from companies who are selling the very product you're reviewing. Journalism 101- a course none of these bozos have ever attended. iz
When the government was decomissioning its Titan missile program in the 1990s, it sold off a number of properties like this. For example, also in the Eastern Washington area, some private investors bought the former Titan facilities located above ground and are running it as an ultra-secure data center facility [titanone.com] [titanone.com]. The owner group includes a couple of former Microsoft execs. (Insert your favorite security joke here.) mgj
Music Typesetting on GNAA/Linux: The People Behind LilyPond
By Chris Cannam
One of the best-known and most ambitious music programs for GNAA/Linux is the LilyPond score engraving system. Unlike other typesetting software like Finale or Sibelius, LilyPond is not a score editor, and it has no GUI -- instead it aims to start from a simple textual description of the music and turn it into the highest possible quality output, automatically.
LilyPond is the result of several years of work by Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen. In this extensive interview, GNAA/Linux Musician's Chris Cannam talks to them about recent and future directions for the project.
Chris: I recently found a file of music examples I had printed out from LilyPond, probably in 1998. The LilyPond printouts looked less professional than they would be today, but many of the capabilities of today's software were in place. What have you been doing for the last six years?
Han-Wen: About five years ago we were working up to release 1.0. Our target was to have a usable program that could produce basic music notation, where we defined "basic" as "whatever is in our set of simple test pieces", and usable was "will not dump core, mostly."
We succeeded, but of course it didn't work very well for things that weren't in our test-pieces. By that time, we were also reaching the bounds of what was possible in our model of notation, an object-oriented model, hard-coded in C++. So we decided to integrate the GNU's GUILE library, a Scheme interpreter which was specifically designed to extend programs. We spent the next two to three years refactoring our C++ code into Scheme functions. This resulted in a more flexible, more efficient and better maintainable program.
"We knew what 'publication quality' engraving meant, and were determined to perfect Lily into producing that."
The second big change was catalyzed by an invitation to join a workshop in Firenze, Italy, organized by Nicola Bernardini of AGNULA fame, then director of Centro Tempo Reale. At the workshop we met Nicola, a few top-notch engravers, and an editor for Universal Edition, an Austrian publisher that does a lot of contemporary music. We had the chance to discuss LilyPond with several experts. On the one hand, we were thrilled that they took us seriously, but on the other hand they pointed to several inadequacies in our output. We arrived back home a great deal wiser.
We knew what "publication quality" engraving meant, and were determined to perfect Lily into producing that. Since we like hand-engraved music, we started reproducing simple pieces in LilyPond and comparing the output side-by-side. By doing close comparisons, we learned how music should really look, and we fixed all the deficiencies that we found.
In anything that you write, there will always be a neat, simple, small idea that is obscured by crufty implementation, bad design or suboptimal algorithms. According to me, the real art of programming is recognizing the neat idea, and being ruthless enough to redo all the other bad bits. Since we're writing new code all the time, we also have continue to refactoring everything, and this how we have spent the last few years: coding new stuff, and refactoring old stuff.
We also did a lot with the documentation. Some of our users complain about the current documentation, and they're probably right, but what we have now is light-years ahead of the manual a few years ago.
Your website features an essay on music typesetting that is quite critical of other software, with an entertaining piece of bad typesetting from Finale. You make an effort to explain that it isn't just an exceptional example -- but surely if programs like Finale and Sibelius are so widely used by good musicians, they can't really be that bad?
The default output of Finale is indeed shockingly bad, which is why almost all other vendors routinely compare their packages to Finale. Of course, that's why we use it too. The default layout of Sibelius is not v
Once I tried Mandrake for PPC, I haven't looked back. Urpmi really helps with rpm ugliness and the large number of free update mirrors is sweet.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Living underground has many practical advantages. All-year insulation from heat and cold, no neighbours, no leaking roofs, infinite space for expansion if you care to dig.
But... we're descended from tree-hugging primates, not moles, and living underground is a sure way to go crazy. A home needs sunlight, a view, and fundamentally, people within easy reach.
I'd rather live in a shoddy 1-room appartment than in a hundred room bunker.
suc
From the article:
"the researchers estimate that the wires should be able to withstand several thousand cycles of extension and contraction."
That's no where NEAR what would be needed for any of the applications they mention. For example, at 70 beats per minute your heart beats 100,800 times per day. Assuming each step a runner takes covers 3 feet (very approximate here), then a "cycle" (back to starting configuration) is 6 ft. That's 880 "cycles" per mile. A single 6 mile run is therefore over 5000 cycles.
Several thousand "cycles of extension and contraction" is not even close to enough for any real world app. Who wants to have that internal heart monitor replaced several times each day? How about that high-tech single use "smart" sweatshirt?
These will need to be in the 100's of thousands to millions of cycles for their lifespan before they have any real utility.
iq
Coffee makes me go poo and burning CDs at Starbucks sounds like a crappy idea. cvi
I have found that many clients, such as Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora, and, until recently, Thunderbird, do not have a way of supressing new mail notification even if an email is filtered by something like this. While it is nice that spam is separated from non-spam, it is really annoying to be interrupted every five minutes by arrival of spam. gyb
Does anyone have a recipe for integration of postfix, dspam amd clamav (or other open source virus scanner), similar to the way amavisd and mailscanner work with spam assassin and a virus scanner of choice?
RG ore
Sometimes I feel that eventually MS and IBM will come to legal blows (more than likely due to SCO being a puppet of MS) - Do you think that this will eventually happen, and if so, who do you feel will win based on a) legal prowess and b) technology patents.
Also, what's your take on the SCO brouhaha? jg
and would be extradited
Unless of course you got to mexico or some other country first. I mean c'mon you shot the damn canadian in the middle of nowhere... it'll take days for anyone to realize he's dead, much less start hunting for the murderer... Mexico isn't going to go out of it's way to hunt for you, so it would be easy to disguise yourself and hide there, but what will all the america's most wanted crap you're probabbly safer planing on going to europe, or asia,
Out in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud [arizona.edu] there are thought to be as many as one trillion objects - most small 1 to 10 km chucks of ice.
The really interesting question is, what is the mass distribution ? (I.e., how does the number of objects scale with their mass ?) This is basically unconstrained by real data. All such cosmic mass distributions are steep, but many (for example, planets in the Solar System, Asteroids in the Asteroid belt) are dominated by the most massive bodies.
If this holds true in the Oort cloud, in particular, there could be some pretty big objects. Even a Jupiter sized object might be able to hide from the Infrared surveys (the best way of detecting such an object). tja
Apparently this has to be repeated continually for some people to get it:
Yum and Apt4RPM are to Apt as RPM is to dpkg.
All the "RPM sucks" comments are stupid. RPM does fine at what it is made for, as does dpkg. RPM does not manage dependancies, that's why Yum, Apt4RPM and the like were developed.
Now one can compare Yum, for example, to Apt, and that is an apples to apples comparison. Such tools are available to do the same things as Apt, and while the quality of the tools and repositories aren't as mature as those for Apt they're improving rapidly.
But it's just ignorant to complain about RPM and compare it to Apt or Portage.
How do you plan on managing laws and constitutions that stretch beyond U.S territories.
If the Internet started with the U.S and expanded to some parts of Antarctica. U.S. rules are probably useless once it gets to the new continent.
Vice versa if someone in Antarctica created a P2P application and it became extremely popular in the U.S. U.S lawyers probably can never get a grip on it.
Isn't geography the greatest challenge out there for any lawyers. In fact it's so difficult to deal with it's rendering the law useless. og
Wow, views will finally be in version 5.1.
Jeez. First time I looked at MySQL a couple of years ago for a project I started putting a basic database scheme together an went to construct a view, only for my Jaw to hit the desk when I found out they were not available. Views are such a basic component of RDBMS databases that it simply hadn't occurred to me (an Oracle, DB2, SQLServer and others veteran) that software could be release that called itself a relational database that didn't have them.
Anyway, just went and used Postgres instead. It's still beyond me why people even bother giving MySQL the time of day when the incomparably superior Postgres is available under GPL. aa
Businessweek ran an item on it in their latest issue. The also said that competitors of Starbucks are looking to implement similar technology.
Krispy Kreme and Outkast? nsh
It has become clear to me that we probably need new IP laws for an age where copying is so easy. The current set were drafted when widespread copying was difficult, and accepted that certain infringements would happen. We can now copy so much so easily, and prevent copying so easily, that I think we should look again at the law, and see whether some small rights should accrue to the user. What's your view on this? avg
I use YDL 3.x on production G3s that run Virtual Machines of Linux, MacOS 9, and OSX via MOL. I have had very good performance, and stability with 3.x.
I would stay far away from the 4.x branch until it stabilizes, at least for production. Have read too many horror stories about issues arising in 4 that 3.x had no problems with.
Good Luck!
Taco, GNAA owns you. You cannot win. We will own your site in a violent homosexual manner. Bitch. ghj
it can't help but be buyassed? not unlike the moon/mars/bars shot.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators.... get ready to witness the disempowerment of unprecedented evile.
emn
Um, linux is a kernel, not a distro. the linux kernel is what "linux is supposed to look like" to linus. xo
Since this phenomenom only lasts for a short period after the beer is poured, they must have had to pour a lot of beers to allow detailed analysis. It would have been a shame to let it go to waste wouldn't it?
Next we'll see an academic doing a research paper on the marketing techniques used by pr0n sites.
gqoI don't think it's up for any debate as to whether he committed no crime in his home country
Yes it is. In Australia they have things called "trials" precisely for the purpose of debating such issues. kmt
"The wires can stretch to over half their original length."
Is it me, or does this violate some law of grammar, physics, or both? gzw
If so, how does this impact the manufacturers of copy protected audio and data CDs?
If a copy-protected audio or data CD goes faulty, is the manufacturer liable to provide a new copy free of charge? If so, in what time-frame? pfz
Taco, GNAA owns you. You cannot win. We will own your site in a violent homosexual manner. Bitch. ndg
Exactly.
I am not a Nerd. I am a "digitician":) tnf
Gads, I've had my hotmail account since before Microsoft bought them. It makes a useful account to hand out on Usenet posts, Slashdot or on web pages--I can quickly give any emailer a real address for contact--mainly it's a spamtrap. But I would never ever depend on it for email or cry if it died. nl
No. It's just that they've had too much to drink...
Cheers,
Ian uq
Taco, GNAA owns you. You cannot win. We will own your site in a violent homosexual manner. Bitch. pb
I just really hate academics. bau
I say its a fair bet that this service wont recover the money they need to put into it to start off, not to mention the training cost of training all those 18 year olds who barely know enough to do a decent cup of coffee. zpd
There should be a TOPIC/STORY negative modifier for old news, or news that is blatantly obvious. Or just have "FARK" tags. If this "story" about how hotmail was down ran on Fark, it would have the "obvious" tag. jhx
The other companies *did* have a foothold in the market, or maybe you are too young and brainwashed to remember the glory days.
You're right it *isnt* MS's job to help out other rivals. But it is their job to keep their monopoly from crushing others. read: Anti-competitive tactics are a no-no.
Problem is that once MS started bundling IE, WMP, etc. into the OS, it gave users little reason to go out and find another. They have done it with IE and were convicted of it in the States, albeit weakly. Once you have a single defacto player/browser/pick your software on the desktop, which a monoploy has created and abused, the end user, ie: mom and pop, have no need to go out and get another, forcing the rivals out of business or out of money. Don't forget, Microsoft no longer cares about IE. The only reason they care about WMP is that they are now trying to leverage the dominance into other markets such as digital distribution of movies and whatnot. That sir, is anti-competitive behaviour. I'm just glad the EU has the balls to do something about it. oy
Taco, GNAA owns you. You cannot win. We will own your site in a violent homosexual manner. Bitch. cmy
Yukon is finally going to deliver online restoration, database mirroring with automatic failover, and support for mirrored backup sets.
Let's face it, these features isn't something most users need. If Microsoft sees real trouble, they will simply slash the per-processor license cost by a factor of 50 or 100, and switching suddenly becomes a non-issue for most users.
Per-client licenses and awfully high per-processor licensing costs are the most important factor which motivates most users to attempt other solutions. Of course, the proprietary databases have important features which look very good on paper, but I've seen quite a few installations which use a multi-thousand dollar database as if it were MySQL (not even using online backup). You can get away with that if you only need a workgroup server license, but if you need 20,000 client access licenses (or multiple per-processor licenses), licensing becomes a problem and you'll certainly consider other options. sue
It's simply not true that "a transparently cluster-capable system implementing native SSI" is "something that no other operating system can do today." We were doing it at Locus in 1994 with SVR4 then with Tandem in 1996 with NonStop Clusters for Unixware. Now some of the same folks at HP have introduced OpenSSI [openssi.org], which is essentially the same code, less all the Unixware-related bits, ported to GNAA/Linux and placed under the GPL. They are coming up hard on their 1.0 release, which is not bad for five people and such a large task.
OpenSSI is the real thing, it has processes that migrate from node to node, distributed file systems, the works. And it's running now on clusters literally all over the world. (Not many clusters, true, but maybe that will change if the Slashdot crowd finds out about it.)
I'm happy to say that there's a lot of my code in that system, as well.
I know a little about what Matt wants to do with his SSI in Dragonfly, but he should certainly take a look at OpenSSI; we had to solve a lot of the problems you run into when you build such a beast.
(And a beast it is. As complex as a kernel can be, when you have what is essentially a distributed kernel across several nodes, the complexity goes up by orders of magnitude. Makes tracking down those weird hangs pretty exciting, in a painful, time-consuming kind of way.)
qvkYeah yeah forking is always sweet and this sure sounds like a lot of fun already, but what I'm really waiting for is for someone to put together a BSD-from-scratch distribution! I mean, I know I could just build one with GNAA/Linux.. BUT only having a single kernel to choose means my grimy little subculture won't be as obscure as it could be. Just think how exclusive I'd be if I could pick one of the NetBSD, OpenBSD, either of the active branches of FreeBSD, and PicoBSD, Dragonfly BSD or Darwin kernels.. ycm
Taco, GNAA owns you. You cannot win. We will own your site in a violent homosexual manner. Bitch. vd
Ontopic, now that OSX is based on BSD, what's the point, other than "it's cool?" Granted, "it's cool" is a great reason to screw around with stuff when you're bored, but what pratical purpose does this serve? If I'm paying extra bucks for Apple hardware, I might as well use their software.
But if you can throw a football, oh wow, put you on a pedestal. That's what education gets you... sh
I don't understand why Lilypond aims to go back to having a proprietary textual format for typesetting music. Most people, I'd imagine, would want to typeset music graphically, as it's just more intuitive that way (I mean, I'm guessing that, for example, getting two voices per staff would be easier in a GUI system than having to manage the text input).
Anyone know of a GUI frontend to Lilypond? ef
I'm a pretty serious amateur jazz musician, and I do a fair amount of composing and arranging for jazz ensembles of about 8-16 musicians.
LilyPond is not intended for people like me. If you're less serious than I am, LilyPond is definitely not intended for you.
The most popular music notation software is Finale. Finale is buggier than Windows ME and twice as bloated, but once you learn how to use it, it gets the job done. You can enter your notes relatively quickly, tweak them a little, print, and go. While it has some very non-intuitive options, it's straightforward enough that most amateur musicians are able to sit down and click around until they get it to do what they want.
How's the output? Pretty crappy if you don't spend any time playing with it. But if you spend a little bit of time fixing the glaring errors, the result is readable by most musicians.
LilyPond, on the other hand, reads a description of the music in a text-based format, and formats it automatically - using much nicer algorithms than Finale apparently uses. It might take quite a bit longer to get your music input, but the end result will look nice - and will not require nearly as much tweaking.
LilyPond, by itself, is only of use to professional engravers, and only those who are willing to learn how to use it. If somebody ever develops a front-end to LilyPond that's actually integrated (as opposed to something like Rosegarden that can just export to LilyPond's format), then it might be more accessible to the average musician.
Don't get me wrong - I think that LilyPond is great. I just think that a lot of the complaints I'm seeing in this forum are because people don't understand what problem LilyPond is trying to solve and who will benefit.
No, LilyPond is not ready to replace all of the other music notation software out there. But it's one of the best tools for professional music engraving already, and maybe someday it can also be an appropriate tool for the casual user, too. by
Taco, GNAA owns you. You cannot win. We will own your site in a violent homosexual manner. Bitch. gdu
I always thought they were selling milk, sugar and "lifestyle" with some kind of dark caffeinated substance occasionally thrown in. gpe
Taco, GNAA owns you. You cannot win. We will own your site in a violent homosexual manner. Bitch. hcn
lemme check the calendar to make sure it aint april 1st.
Indeed, transmetas have an extremely low power-consumption rate, but one can't say they are fast, especially post-Enron; u can't fudge the numbers. If power consumption was a part of the performance index (let's say for a SpecInt or a SpecFP), then yea...it might be able to compete. But it's like Via's C3; its low power in more than one way.
Just like you can't have a Lamborgini that gets 60MPG, you ccan't expect to have low power with high power; only some balance of the two in between. mqd
Option 1: Windows XP with Media Player, 99 Euros.
Option 2: Windows XP without Media Player, 99 Euros.
Retail purchasers and OEM licensees will be completely free to choose either version.
No, this is not a joke. If the EUC think this is too obvious to mention and prohibit, they are in for a rude awakening. ac
To be completely flippant (and yes, I do realize there is a risk, I just think it is relatively low)... boring! I just hope this doesn't turn into another cause where misguided celebrities drive us into spending money on it disproportionally like certain trendy diseases. kv
http://cooltech.iafrica.com/technews/309033.htm [iafrica.com]
vb
Living underground has many practical advantages. All-year insulation from heat and cold, no neighbours, no leaking roofs, infinite space for expansion if you care to dig.
But... we're descended from tree-hugging primates, not moles, and living underground is a sure way to go crazy. A home needs sunlight, a view, and fundamentally, people within easy reach.
I'd rather live in a shoddy 1-room appartment than in a hundred room bunker.
dl
- DRM Helmets
- Jack Kemp
- Yankee Go Home
- Collaborative Dispute Resolution
- Microchips for Your Pet Parrot! (see page 2 of Google results)
urmTaco, GNAA owns you. You cannot win. We will own your site in a violent homosexual manner. Bitch. iqi
Talented and creative people use Macs, or Windows at a pinch. I shudder to think at the potential deluge of anime soundtrack remixes that would be unleashed by the releasing of production software to the sweaty, overweight and unshaven GNAA/Linux hordes. Thank fuck for profit motives. ge
Taco, GNAA owns you. You cannot win. We will own your site in a violent homosexual manner. Bitch. lp
Come on, editors- this is news? We have already researched laser technology, so SDI defense is available. It should only take 2 or 3 turns to equip all of our cities with this technology. lt
Of course, it runs NetBSD...
jkWe've got this beer bubble thing licked, but still no cure for cancer...
e.
ebm
... the term is "hacker". A guy who makes computers do what they ought to do, whatever the circumstances. kh
Internet piracy, peer-to-peer, 'sharing mp3s'... is there any chance any of this can and will be legal? It just seems like so many geeks want it to be legal, but it requires a lawyer with a good understanding of technology to deliver the odds. So whats it gonna be? Slim to none? nw
Though GNAA/Linux is very flexible, without all those licensing issues (go ahead and troll, SCO trolls) like Windows, it is highly unlikely that SBUX and HP are going to use it on this system for two reasons that I know of: 1. They are going to use TabletPC's for this, something GNAA/Linux has somewhat limited support for, particularly in the handwriting recognition aspect. 2. HP's provider of digital music is most likely going to be Apple, and this means a modified version of iTunes. Apple has not included GNAA/Linux support for anything. mg
If only more people actually did this! If even 10% of the people who complained about M$ actually did something about it, the software world would be a very different place. It's amazing the number of people who feel that they are a special case, that they have a particular special reason for not switching to something else. (Yes, in some cases those reasons are genuine, but I suspect laziness plays a large part in many.)
I try to act on principle. I've only ever owned two pieces of M$ software, for example: one was the Psion Series 3 version of AutoRoute (which doesn't really count as it was written by a separate company that got bought out shortly before release; M$ dropped it soon after), and the Mac OS X version of IE (pre-installed; I keep it as a last-resort browser and use it every few months). It's not hard, really -- it's a pain when people keep sending me Word documents, but there are various workarounds even if people won't take the hint -- and I don't feel I'm making any great sacrifices. I just don't put following the crowd as my top priority.
So, to all you people who use M$ software and complain about it: don't complain, STOP USING IT!
ct
I had a problem with my '99 cavalier; the engine would drop it's RPMs by several hundred every once in a while; almost, but not quite, enough to stall.
Took it in to the dealer, they said 'is the check engine light on?'
'Nope,' I replied, 'but here's what it's doing...'
'Sorry,' came the reply. 'If the check light's not on, there's no diagnostic codes for us to look up. We can't fix it unless we know what's wrong.'
aqd...I'm afraid I can't do that. xm
I think Mel Gibson ought to direct a musical of "The Silmarillion" done entirely in Elvish. Estimated running time: 13 hours!
That ought to cure the general public of their love for Tolkien's material in a big hurry! nw
I've never understood this, and hope someone can help.
On the PC side, you have a few bazillion hardware combos, but most all distros can deal easily. Or, with a Knoppix or variation, you're at about 97 percent fine, no matter what boxen or peripheral.
Yet with Apple stuff, which is exactly defined and known against the range, and has the ability to boot into Linux with a fake BootX scheme, has like ZERO distros, and Less Than Zero live CDs.
Uh, am I hitting this wrong? What's so tough about a Knoppix for PPC? Or anything else?
Consider this: training, amount of time, and tools. Think of how ugly it is to uninstall a nasty worm virus; think of the effort it takes to salvage files from a flaky/dying hard drive, plus rebuilding the machine. Think of the cost of all the diagnostic software/tools you might have, even if its just some Norton Utilities, a MS Technet subscription, and an AV program.
If a lawyer or a plumber or an exterminator can charge $50-100/hour, a computer technician should be allowed to do the same.
Technician skills are expensive. My company now maintains images of your hard drive. If you have a problem that can't be resolved within 30 minutes of trouble shooting, they take your laptop away, re-image a new laptop, and give it to you the next morning. Its not worth the recovery effort. Bad ofr people with desktop support skills (used to be LAN admins who did that stuff). Now a force of >100 LAN admins across the Greater Toronto Area is less than 20 individuals. zv
We don't respect mechanics because we, and our friends, have been lied to by mechanics so many times. Either about what needs to be repaired, what they broke while they were repairing something else, etc.
If computer techs started pulling the same shit that mechanics have been pulling, taking severe advantage of their greater knowledge of the subject, computer techs are going to be just as disrespected. ot
Everyone would fudge refusals and pocket the cash.
Scumbags would use billions of zombied PCs to send themselves mails, aggregate and pocket the cash. Or to spam you gratis.
There are transaction costs for generating, checking, and accumulating digital cash. Your paypal bills would be huge.
Everybody hates micropayments.
It's a dumb idea and it simply isn't gonna happen. es
MS Windows XP without WMP..Euro 159.99
erm, GNAA/Linux please...
Hey, just noticed something. For a site that likes to be open, why can I NOT use the Great British pound sign OR the EURO sign (both are in there now, but don't show on the comment), only the DOLLAR? Is this a consipiracy? Whether text, HTML or Extrans...What's wrong with that?
You can say Micro$oft but not Microoft or Microoft for examples...see, the pound AND Euro don't come out...? lz
It won't be an issue until they find a Kuiper object that is bigger than Pluto. Then they'll have an awkward situation. Making Pluto a planet when this bigger object isn't one doesn't make sense; nobody wants to add a new planet, because in retrospect it was a mistake to make Pluto a planet, and adding another Kuiper object would just compound it; and removing Pluto from the list of planets offends tradition.
Everyone wants to push this off as long as possible, so if the new object is really smaller than Pluto, they'll breathe a sigh of relief and go on with things as they are. bu
Finally. It's about time that people started to realize that electronics are complicated things and that it takes competent people to fix them. People don't do their own wiring or own plumbing, (well, most people) and they shouldn't. I think that the reason that electronics haven't passed into the realm of "let the professionals handle it" is because with electrical wiring, you can get shocked and die and with plumbing you can get covered with sewage or scalding water. Personally, I am glad that this I-can-do-it-myself mindset is starting to fade. Although, I do think that $125/hour is a bit much. byf
~Darl ba
Dupe dzu
People are diliberately confusing 'codes' and 'code'. Mechanics need the _codes_ that the computer spits out indicating what is wrong. Nobody needs the _code_ for the computer software.
As for the whole complaint about the recent complexity of cars; it is government mandated and consumer demanded. There are requirements for fuel efficiency and emissions. A simple 4 stroke engine can only be so effecient and so clean. To meet regulations, cars need to incorporate exhaust gas recirculation, variable cam timing, complex variable spark timing, catylitic converters, and a host of other complexities. Consumers want climate control, adaptive suspension, 17 way power adjustable seats, power cupholders, remote buttons for everything, heated everything, and performance, but they expect their cars to have the simplicity of an air cooled VW? qsk
PPC != Apple alone. While few Apple owners have switched from OS X to Linux, Linux is extremely popular with the other big PPC vendor: IBM. A majority of IBM's servers are PPC architecture. As it is, IBM has an entire division devoted to Linux on POWER. Also, there are quite a few other distributions that run on the PPC architecture (ie: RedHat, SuSE), and the platform seems to be gaining more and more popularity. So much for this being a "niche-within-a-niche".
I've found that provided the system have a good amount of memory, a pentium 2 is good enough to run most applications.
I've been tweaking an older PII laptop (400MhZ, 192M) over the past few months. The idea was not to lose any functionality or "new" features (i.e., dropping a 2.2 based distro, the PII's contemporary OS, would be cheating). So far I'm extremely pleased. The machine is very functional, even faster in some respects than a newer Thinkpad T22 (800MhZ, 256M) because the video support is better.
The main changes:
* 2.6 kernel -- huge difference
* Fluxbox instead of KDE/Gnome
* NPTL
* Rebuilt some apps with i686 optimizations
* Config tweaks (default services, buffer sizes, etc)
* Application substitutions (Firefox vs Mozilla, etc)
I've been testing other things including:
* Default fs (reiserfs vs ext3)
* sshd default configs (blowfish vs des, etc)
* MP3 vs OGG (about the same CPU, but I hear MP3 is nicer)
* Adjusting timer resolution in kernel
* Replacement syslog that batches writes
ll
But how important will famine, disease, and war be when 90% of the population has been wiped out by a massive asteroid and the effects after the collision?
So an asteroid could actually be the solution to these serious problems! I like your thinking. smg
I'm a gear head. I know lots of geeks who are gear heads. I, however, have never encountered a problem due to inability to access 'calibration codes'.
I know that you can hook your laptop up to your OBDI/II based vehicle. What can ya do?
-monitor telemetry in real time [RPM,Throttle position, timing, fuel inject pulse lengths, etc.]
-read error codes stored in computer [terse format]
-reprogram the computer[really the data on which decisions are made, not the heuristics themselves]*
*You can't change stuff on earlier computers! Must be that we don't have the 'calibration code' to make a PROM into an EEPROM?!
Seriously though! What you need to 'know' to fix a car is:
Interface specification
Table of error/condition codes and triggering parameters.
Wiring diagrams, mechanical diagrams, parts lists, etc.
how modern cars work
From what I understand, the Interfaces are standardized [think ISO,IEEE, not RFC]. The error codes, and at least short descriptions, are available. The diagrams, etc. are available via repair manuals/KB Systems. I know that at least some manufacturers publish/authorize official such products. As for knowledge, can't legislate that:)
What information is being withheld that makes non-dealer repair impossible?
And what are 'calibration codes'? zvI don't think it's up for any debate as to whether he committed no crime in his home country
Yes it is. In Australia they have things called "trials" precisely for the purpose of debating such issues. co
I often think that if you could get one car executive to take a 'chance'...and try the old idea behind the original GTO's and later other muscle cars...throw a monster engine into a decent body of a car...keep the interior minimalist...with real perfomance, and keep the price reasonable. I gotta think these things would sell like hotcakes...
Oh well...as long as we're dreaming here...I'd also like a pony... hbp
"Password fairly correct. Root login granted."
xvx
Did you know that in 1998 Senator Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, got his State's largest Lake, Lake Champlain, to be reclassified as the 6th Great Lake? [dencities.com] At least as far as the awarding of researh grants. Being considered a "Great Lake" made the academic institutions in his constituency eligible to apply for certain research grants.
There is talk of sending a probe to Pluto. Is it possible that it is easier to sell a probe to "planet Pluto" than to send one to Kuiper-belt object Pluto?
I remember, back in the days when I tuned in to debates as to which newsgroups should be created, the big debate as to whether a new group should be talk.acquaria, rec.acquaria or sci.acquaria.
In Leahy's defence, these were environmental research grants, and I should probably assume he added this line to the bill to protect his constituent's natural environment -- not for the petty partisan purposes. su
Registration free link [nytimes.com]
I wish article authors would at least put up some effort to find and use reg-free links when possible. wq
Bill has been tinkering with computers since the age of two. He has been playing with DVD drives on his computer since 1999. Recently he has been unable to watch any movies on his computer running GNAA/Linux because of the codes that the MPAA has used to encrypt the disc.
"I think it's an illegal monopoly. If you don't have the codes you can't watch the disc."
Yet there's a law that protects the MPAA from having to give this code to the rest of the world. It's called the DMCA. It stops you from circumventing copy-protection.
Why aren't there any lawmakers backing the public on DVD encryption? See here [slashdot.org]. geh
It is a great account for your junk mail! Then again so is Yahoo... but hotmail was the first I believe =)
It is also my first email account (got it in 96) and so now people can still contact me after I've moved around the world.
When a service like Hotmail and MSN go down for a few hours it affects ALOT (millions) of people... nerd included... why shouldn't it be on the frontpage? I know I was interested enough to click on the articles (though I agree they are sparse on details)
Addbo li
Ah maaaaan, crap!
that sucks!
Turns out I've stopped drinking for no reason after all...
got time to catch up with now.
bid day ahead... ru
Well jesus christ you don't really expect them to help you pirate their software, do you?
for obvious reasons... eyk
AFAIK, they are semi-autonomous in that they can navigate over and around obstacles from point A to point B without being explicitly told to do so. fz
This sounds more like artificial muscles. ob
Coffee makes me go poo and burning CDs at Starbucks sounds like a crappy idea. evi
Nope this problem is a central database problem, probably they tried to normalize the passport database, screw the pooch and had to roll everything back which is why it took so long.
Or maybe they changed a permission and spend the whole day figuring out which one did it. zkdA friend set up an account for me on his Pegasos (PPC) box, and it works very nicely.
:)
Note that it's not that very different (to me as a desktop user) from using any other Red Hat-based KDE -centric computer
However, on this 1GHz G4 machine (and since a lot of people like to ask "why would you want something other than OS X if you have PPC hardware?") I'll note that it seems much snappier than the last 1GHz G4 Mac I used.
timothy
I wouldn't say that it's ridiculous.
People don't understand computers. To many, either AOL works, or it doesn't. And, these people don't want to understand computers.
Just like all people are capable of changing their own oil (or in your case, a wheel stud), it doesn't mean it's something that they want to learn how to do.
However, just like with vehicles, there is always going to be price gougers (and those who do shoddy fixes to more extensive problems). In the realm of computers, with so few people understanding the depths of their operating systems, price gouging is even easier, as how man people really know what, "Kernel32.dll has performed an illegal operation (Insert long string of hex here)," means, or even how to find a solution.
With vehicles, at least most individuals have a basic understanding (IE, they know that when a mechanic tell them the timing belt needs to be replaced but he's pointing to the rear differential that something is up.) ca
a auto-completing python interpreter and editor
Try the Wing IDE [wingide.com]. It has most of the functions you wanted... But it's not free software. lc
It's known for that Torvalds kid that worked there eyh
Linux distros specifically for Apple hardware should work really well since Apple's got a lot less hardware that you need to worry about being compatable with. That said, I can't get audio working on my 6500 :/
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
One thing that could be effective here is the following:
1. A song is playing in Starbucks.
2. You like what you hear.
3. You go to the "jukebox to go" (or whatever they will call it), click the "buy what's on now" button, and pay $1 for the song and $1 for the CD ($2.00 total).
I keep thinking about the scene in High Fidelity, where John Cusack says "I'm going to sell a copy of x album right now" and then puts on a record. Sure enough, someone comes up and asks what is playing and buys it. The impulse buy in an environment is powerful. I often hear things in record stores, etc. and would love to have an easy way to buy it.
bst
Why is it that there "have to be" laws specific to the internet? If a spammer sends an e-mail using forged headers, why doesn't the law go after him (or her) with good old-fashioned anti-fraud laws? Does the main failing of these kinds of old laws lie in ingorance that makes law enforcement unable or unwilling to enforce the laws without further clarification, or is something else going on here? xi
My employer uses it because we have many mission critical legacy programs that were written on Harris mainframes. Its that big vs little endian thing. So, we are using PPC servers with Yellow Dog. The programs are huge and cannot be converted for many reasons.
So, there are uses for it.
For those of you that can't RTFA, the torrents are here:
http://cvs.terraplex.com/~owen/ydl4_torrents/
Download early and often.
The reviewer was a whiny kid that tried comparing OS X to Linux, and then pitched a fit because he like Debian & Gentoo better than Red Hat but YDL runs like Red Hat. Boo hoo. The review didn't really say much worth reading.
...just use Gentoo? Instead of bludgeoning a distro for a different architecture into working for you?
My reasons for use of yellow dog have nothing to do with annoyance with X86 hardware. It differs from PPC hardware in interesting ways that give each their niche.
Rather, it's because I'm annoyed with windows. While I have ~6 functioning computers around at any one time, I do the majority of my office, graphics design, and development work on a Mac: Windows is broken and Linux doesn't run Adobe.
As an active consultant and developer, I upgrade my current desktop mac every 18-24 months.* This means I inevitably have multiple old macs sitting around in closets. When I need to put together a quick server for file backup or web app testing, I grab one and throw YDL on it.
Incidentally, though, when I do have x86 hardware lying around, I use that and debian instead. YDL can be kind of a PITA.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
In order to run Linux on "Old World" hardware you need an application called Bootx
http://penguinppc.org/~benh/
In order for it to work you need a Mac OS installed on the computer. On the beige G3's I have installed it on I usually set it up like this:
OS 8.1 installed on a 100 MB partition.
Install Bootx as an extention.
Install YDL using the remaining HD space.
All is good.
Who cares?
Pray to Buddha for your ignorance.
Well actually i did find a better choice than a telephone cord... http://ostg.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/ma sterid=459136
AC because someone wanted to mod me down, just for being off-topic, despite being interesting! The extention saves you 2 parts, you just need to strip one end of it, and wire those in where the headphone cord is normally wired into...
I agree that RPM itself isn't to blame, but the dependency issues and how their handled is. Yum is no better then the package managers that build the RPM's and my experience with Red Hat/Fedora is that dependency issues are still very much a thing of the present.
For a long time I sounded exactly like you, impatient with people complaining about a problem I thought long in the past (like Linux sound support or graphics chipset drivers). But I was using Mandrake, the other RPM based distro. With Mandrake (using urpmi) dependency issues really where a snap (adding THAC and PLF repositories you have just about everything you can imagine). Fedora choked on its own updates, adding additional repositories was even worse, but after failing to meet the dependencies of its own updates I quickly wiped it off my hard drive.
Quack, quack.
It amazes me the amount of "Free software" users that use Mac OSX. I dont think they are about Free Software or they wouldnt be running it. Its about "Not Windows" for those people, it just happens to run some free software. Mac OS X is propriatary. For those of us who do want to run Linux on their ppc, there is yellowdog (covered in article above) or Fedora for ppc. Colin Charles has covered the install process at http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/ibook/fedorappc.ht ml
And the release announcement: http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/ibook/fc3.relnotes
and the .iso files are downloadable from:
http://fedoraproject.org/fedorappc/FC-3/
Its not perfect yet, but it is getting very close.
Yep! I had a 7600 running Debian PPC Linux using that quik bootloader for a while. Worked great once I got it all configured properly. (I recall having to do a little research and tweaking to finally get the X server working properly with the built-in video though.)
Only thing was, I ended up selling that machine to a Mac user who had an old 7100 that finally died on her - and I figured I'd just move my drives over to a 7500 I still hung onto. Uh-uh... never could get it to do anything besides boot to a black screen and freeze up. I think the 7500 had a more crippled/buggy edition of "open firmware" in it than most other 7x00 series PowerMacs did, so that probably was a big part of my problem.
I am frustrated because I cannot get the wireless networking running under YDL4 on my PowerBook. I would think all distros would have wireless covered by now, for any and all platforms.
[shrug?]
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
Im getting replies from like 20 different articles in this Yellow Dog Linux articles. WTF?
It's not hard (in certain parts of the country, anyhow) to find PIIIs being tossed out / nearly free, but I'd like to find a free / cheap G3 system. Where do you see them being thrown out? (Serious question.) My iBook is a G3, and I'm quite happy with it, at least as happy as I could reasonably expect from a 4.5 year old machine ... I would not mind a G3 desktop running Linux.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I see a lot of people say RPM sucks, but rarely do they post an explanation. I started on Slackware in '93/'94 and moved to Redhat in '95/'96 and loved RPM. I used and loved RPM for quite sometime before moving on to Gentoo a couple of years ago. But I still like the RPM system. In all the years I used it, I never had any major complaints. *shrugs*
Thank you. Drive through. (:wq)
Now, let's see if the editors would allow a "Deb packaging sucks and is too political, as always" onto the front page.
Linux is undersupported for Apple, and Apple really has no interest in releasing its hardware specs to the opensource community ... ie. the Apple Airport crap/fiasco.
.. so I honestly never really got the whole Apple-Linux connections. Apple hardware is expensive - even second hand, so Leenux doesn't really make sense as an alternative. A "just-because" Attitude seems to be the only plausable reason WHY someone would choose a non-Apple OS for the OS on an Apple machine.
I'm a Solaris Intel guy, and really dig Gentoo for x86 util. purposes - ie. mythtv
Intel/AMD machines a cheaper, more cost effective, and less well.. frustrating than Apple.
Long live BSD is whatever form is chooses.
May I also suggest the good ubuntu port for PowerPC? I'm using that on my 15" Al, aside with OS X, and it seems to be built very well...
I'm fat, you're ugly. I can get slimmer, and you?
...try Ubuntu Linux.
Among other things, it gets new releases every 6 months, it's Debian based, recognized my hardware on both powerbooks (G3 and G4), including my 3rd party wireless cards.
Yes, the logo and default desktop's image and sound are weirdly voodoistic and/or sexually disoriented, but hey, so are butterflies.
But the great thing is that it ain't no PPC distro, its actually a PPC/i386/amd64, so you get to have all machines, regardless of their color or religion, running the same SO.
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At this point, the problem is the chipset used by Apple for the new Airport Extreme cards. They use a Broadcom chipset which isn't support by Linux (even on x86, unless you are ready to run the windows binary driver in your kernel with NDISLoader).
:)
Broadcom refuses to provide any specs about the chipset nor to do a linux driver (actually, they do have a linux driver that they sell to access point vendors like linksys, but it's not useable on powerpc nor even x86 since those are MIPS based, and it's tied to a specific kernel version so not really practical anyway).
In general, about lack of HW support for things like dual head on nvidia based machines, 3D on recnet ATI chipsets, recent airport etc... the main problem is simply due to HW vendors refusing to provide specs or open source drivers. It's difficult to fight this trend, and it's unfair to blame linux for it too.
To finish on the wireless side, 3rd party pcmcia or cardbus cards like prism54 chipset based ones do work very well, and for machines without pcmcia, some USB wireless adapters do work as well. Not as sexy as using the internal one, but still a useable backup solution. The old apple airport (non-extreme) card is fully supported by linux.
(Note about the guy with the 6500 & sound issue: the Apple drivers are open source, you are welcome to give a hand & help fixing the problem in the linux driver
I'm probably going to get modded off-topic for asking this, but thanks for making me realize what it means when someone says comparing 'apples to oranges'. I remember thinking, 'wtf do apples and oranges have to do with [insert random conversation].' Now I know, thanks!
Ok, so back on topic. YaST (for SuSE) is horrible at resolving dependencies. On several occasions I've had it try to get old files from the cds, as opposed to using the new ones that were already set as a yast-source and were available. On one occasion it wanted to copy a file from the SuSE 9.2 disc 5 German!
Cool. Now I can cripple a G5 with inferior device drivers and the worst desktop / UI / window system ever!
I hate efficient, inexpensive, fast x86 hardware that I can buy anywhere in the world at a fraction of the price of PPC hardware. It justs so annoying to have all of this commodity hardware so readily available everywhere I turn... so damn annoying.
A couple of iterations ago, setup was only a snap if it worked first time on your box. Who uses Yellow Dog Linux, anyway? I thought it was one of those military contract spin-offs Steve Jobs gets from his old NeXT spook connections?
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
"half of the ibook hardware won't work." I'll assume that's just a bit of hyperbole. It is very frustrating, however, for someone like me, who mostly uses my ibook to surf the web and do email (no I'm not an old Korean person!) I wish Open Darwin "www.opendarwin.org/en/about.html" would start with a nice window manager by default. The nice thing about OS X is that you din't need to spend a lot of time installing or setting it up. BTW for other Apple laptops, 3rd party wireless card will work, but not the ibook :-(
What I find ironic is that while the classic Mac OS introduced to the public the magic of bootable CDs, these systems still can't boot cleanly to Linux, let alone use the increasingly popular Linux live CDs.
I still have an "Old World" 603e Powermac that Jobs said would run "Rhapsody" but when Mac OS X was finally released of course all pre-G3s were abandoned. Grrrr. Those days Apple was known and respected for their good long-term support and the long life span of their machines while MS was already notorious for their "planned obsolescence". Incidentally Apple's approach changed at the time when MS made the competitor-saving investment in Apple, but that shouldn't prevent Apple from divulging their now-obsolete firmware secrets to help keep the many still functioning pre-G3 systems in useful service. If they were easily booted into Linux using e.g. a live CD with light Xfce environment or as terminals booting from a server, these "Old World" machines could be useful for cash-strapped schools or at homes as secondary systems.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
The difference, you see trolls on the front page, and rarely fact, thats what linking to the article is for, let someone else deal with the pesky facts ...
Did you read the review? RPM Sucks is just one of many wonderful inexperienced writings that come out in this review. Ohh well what do you expect, its christmas eve, no one is home =)
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Well, X86 hardware tends to be loud (yes, I know you can buy special quiet liquid cooled systems, but the typical x86 box is as loud as an air conditioner)
It doesn't take that much specialized hardware. It takes spending $75 on a case, instead of $35. And saving 10 dollars buying an OEM chip, then spending ~$30 on a CPU fan that doesn't warp the space-time continuum. Even stock CPU cooling isn't that loud.
The point of X86 hardware is that you have options. You get to choose what your computer is for, and often people choose hovercraft. P4s, what with their guidelines suggesting a massive fan hole on the side of the case for heat dissipation, are not really a good choice.
Pick AMD64 for high power, VIA for low power and completely silent. If you truly truly need a P4, spend 150-200 on a nice case like the a premodded Chenming or the Nexus Breeze. You'll still be getting more FLOP for your buck than if you get a Mac.
I will soon check out RE-PC (Seattle used PC store; one of their location has Mac stuff) to see if they have any fantastic-bargain elder-statesman PPC machines.
:)
I'm also considering putting Ubuntu on the iBook, but only if / when it's all backed up and ready to undo if that's not satisfactory
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5