Yes, it does. There are a range of choices when you compile, but the threaded MPM is the default. There is also a Win32-specific multi-threaded engine.
The one correction I'd like to make is that we disabled the threaded MPM by default after 2.0.16 was released. And, we've actually removed the threaded MPM *after* we released 2.0.28. The threaded MPM has been superceded by the "worker" MPM (our names aren't the greatest). The "worker" MPM is essentially threaded (but has multiple processes to increase redunancy) - you'll see us call this a MPMT (multi-process/multi-thread) MPM.
There is a discussion on-list about whether we should enable threading MPM by default if the OS supports it. It's an open question, but for now (and what is in 2.0.28), we use prefork by default. A configure-time option allows the selection of which MPM it should compile with.
FWIW, special platforms (like Win32) have their own MPM that is specific to their OS. The "worker" MPM is targeted towards UNIX-like platforms (Linux, Solaris, etc.).
Is open source heading toward a model where some of its dominant programs are available for free only in crippled versions lagging behind the proprietary releases?
I doubt that. As an active Apache developer who doesn't really have any ties to a company with a vested interest in Apache, I work with the Covalent people every day. And, I doubt that the open-source version of Apache HTTPD will lag behind any version that Covalent or IBM has. In fact, I bet that the version that Covalent will release on Monday will include some bugs that have already been fixed in the open-source version.
Where I think companies like Covalent come in is to support corporations that *require* support. Their price ($1495/CPU or something like that) isn't targeted towards people who would be interested in the open-source version, but for corporations that can't ever afford to have their web server go down.
Covalent also offers some freebies (such as mod_ftp). I think under Apache 2.0, it is sufficiently easy for someone to come in and write a module that handles FTP. It's just that no one has had the inclination to write one. And, I bet if someone did, it just might eventually be better than the one Covalent wrote.
VA is a little different from Covalent as, IIRC, they are the sole owners of Sourceforge, but Covalent is just a part of the Apache community (an active one though).
And if so, what does that say about unpaid volunteer contributions? Are they really for the public benefit, or for the benefit of a proprietary developer? If the latter, why volunteer?
I work on what I want to work on. People who work at Covalent have a "direction" on things to work on. As an unpaid volunteer, I get to work on whatever I feel like at the moment. I'll take that any day of the week. But, there is a definite value to getting paid to work solely on Apache.
Other problems with crippled free versions have been noted here before, such as having to pay for documentation on ostensibly free software, or needing a proprietary installer to effectively install a supposedly free system.
FWIW, I believe this is definitely not the case with Apache. The docs are freely available and the Win32 installer is one donated by IBM (I think, I forget - someone donated it).
At this point, I would judge the current httpd-2.0 codebase as beta-quality. There have been lots of improvements made to the Apache 2.0 codebase since 2.0.16 was released - I would expect that we have a much better codebase now than was in 2.0.16. I would expect you to have an even better experience with our next release whenever it occurs (or you may use CVS to obtain the up-to-the-minute version!).
Yes, we're way overdue releasing Apache 2.0 as a GA (we started thinking about 2.x in 1997), but that is a testament to our quality - we will NOT release Apache 2.0 as a general availability release until we are all satisfied that it meets our expectations. "It's ready when it's ready."
We have a very good stable product in Apache 1.3. We must match the quality expectations we've set for ourselves in the past. And, almost everyone in the group is keenly aware of that.
Hmm, interesting point. Yeah, I have typically recompiled most of the RPMS (it took sooo long for RedHat to release the Alpha RPMS after the SRPMS were available).
But, I still have not had any luck compiling a kernel for my Alpha other than the standard RH kernels. Either that, or they would be remarkably unstable. Not sure if anyone else has had this problem.
As far as SRM goes, I didn't realize that Compaq dropped the support for it. Maybe I should look at SRM again. It might be worth checking out. I believe I read somewhere that you could not switch back from AlphaBIOS->SRM. I still have AlphaNT installed on one of them, and I'd like to keep it around (Office is installed...).
The RH6.1 Alpha is relatively stable, but does have some problems. GNOME is particularly horrific on RH Alpha (causes HARD crashes - absolutely insane). Pretty much forces the use KDE. Also, the GNOME issues requires the removal of ALL Gnome RPMS (it still tries to tie in with KDE). Since I use KDE most of the time, it doesn't bug me except for the fact that I lose GDM. That really stinks. If someone has a decent replacement for GDM, I'd love to hear about it.
The GNOME issues that I see have occurred on both Alphas that I use. It is not something that I am doing wrong. =/
I'd also love to see FreeBSD use AlphaBIOS for its bootstrap instead of SRM. I don't want to use the SRM console! Ugh. AlphaBIOS is nice, and why is only Linux supporting it (NT does too)??
Anyone have a technical reason why Samsung is using 288MB instead of 256MB? Looking at their press release doesn't help. I am not familiar enough with RAMBUS to know more...
0.17 micron seems small. Can they expect to produce enough of this? I thought I read that there are only a few fab plants that can produce 0.18 micron chips - I imagine it must be even smaller 0.17 micron chips.
I'm not sure how many people have watched A&E's Investigative Reports (great show!). I remember an episode a few months back (recently reaired I believe) that talked about the civil confiscation of goods by law enforcement agencies.
One of the more egregious confiscations were by some yahoo Florida police officers. They would stop only BLACK drivers (they showed them giving white drivers off with only a warning) who they suspected of anything (stop sign, drunk, lane change). Any money that they found in the car they would confiscate. They just blanketly claimed that they believed the money was drug-related, so therefore under Florida's confiscation laws, they could legally take the money. Of course, they pissed off enough people that it appeared on the ACLU's radar. Well, IIRC, the ACLU was actually powerless since the law gives the discretion to the officers. They do not NEED ANY PROOF whatsoever to claim the money.
Kurtis then went on to talk about the DEA and how they have the federal auction. I believe that our wonderful US govt. is the proud owner of a casino and a multi-million dollar house. They do not seem that interested in selling those items. They like it.
Fourth amendment is but a distant memory. The sad fact is that the government can seize property whenever they want. Good luck getting it back.
Just as a quick quip about Ramsey, I belive it is the same issue as the gun manufacturers being sued by victims of crime committed with their guns (I know others have brought this up). The US has forgotten that people are ultimately responsible for their own actions. They ARE. No one else can make me believe otherwise. Any person who thinks that society is entirely responsible for the actions (good or bad) has been smoking the wacky weed a bit too much.
Okay, while I was not the person who talked to IBM directly (gee, you went to my website, good for you!), my understanding was that he talked to every person under the sky about getting our system to work with Java. He talked to their marketing people who assured them that Java would be entirely supported by IBM. He then asked for an example (Alan Cox's "show me the code"). Their technical people failed to produce one line of code that would run under OS/390. Eventually after dragging several VPs on both ends into it, we finally got something running on the system (this was mid-summer). Mind you this was on their beta OS running on a test proc. slice - we needed this on our production environment by the end of the summer (a company that dependent on it is not going to run their production m/f on an beta OS - even IBM's). However, by now, I believe that IBM has officially released the OS version that supports Java natively (but I may be wrong - I am no longer at IM).
However, since we used CICS (as do most IBM shops), we wanted CICS/Java connectivity on OS/390. And, that was what ultimately killed it. While Java was technically supported by the OS, their killer app did not support it. What they said is that all of the COBOL would have to be rewritten to conform to Obj. COBOL standards, then the Obj. COBOL could call C++ wrappers which could then call Java (and that was only if we installed every beta they had). In something so performance driven, this was not an option (never mind beta code). We were trying to make this faster NOT slower. At the same time, we had to support the legacy COBOL code. Ingram has so much COBOL code that forcing a rewrite of any subset of the code becomes a logistical nightmare. We eventually settled upon having a J/Gate (Java->CICS) architecture. Far from our ideal, but at the time, it was our only option. IBM failed to deliver what their customer needed when they needed it. Now, in six or seven months, IBM may finally get their heads out of the sand and support Java in CICS in a reasonable manner. But, Ingram is now a lost cause in that respect.
So, to clarify my position a bit, yeah, OS/390 supports it. CICS doesn't. If you aren't using CICS, then why use OS/390? Yeah, DB2 and all of that is supported in OS/390, but IMNSHO CICS is still the lifeblood of the OS/390 series...
BTW, you are indeed correct, IBM's machines kick Sun's ass clear across the room. And, in a place where IBM has so much clout, they should never have let Sun in the door. Now that Sun has their foot in the door, some are seriously considering dumping all IBM products and turning into a strictly Sun shop.
Sun delivered, IBM did not. That is what matters in the end...
No, I'm not talking out of my ass. I worked at a shop that was an ideal IBM shop (running OS/390, CICS, etc.) and were trying to implement Java (E-commerce and EJBs). IBM kept giving us the run around on Java support and OS/390. Our feeling was that they don't want to support it. If they open the door to Java-land, then why use IBM servers? Unless of course, they beat the crap out of everyone else's Java implementation.
We eventually went with Sun's E10k servers. We tried, but IBM basically just said that Java was not meant for their high-end machines. In personal computing and maybe RS/6000 land, Java is not deemed as a threat, but as far as enterprise level computing goes, they are SCARED or clueless (your pick).
I also said that chances are that it will not replace OS/390. See the post from the guy who has talked to the Linux/390 developer. It'd be nice if they ported CICS and VTAM (and everything else) to Linux. But, it ain't going to happen. They have too much invested in them to let them walk to another OS. IBM may release Linux/390 so that in our case where we want to use our IBM hardware we can use *different* software that is not part of the OS/390 fold, but is supported by Linux (et al).
If this is true (highly doubtful), this would definitely send shockwaves throughout the enterprise class server industry. If IBM believes Linux is ready to run on their heavy metal boxes, then some serious (re)consideration of Linux is going to occur in the next few months.
However, after personally seeing IBM run away from Java on the mainframes (running OS/390-MVS), I have to doubt this is true. IBM looked scared to death of Java on the mainframes. For the personal computers (i.e. with Jikes), they really seem to embrace Java, but on their enterprise class servers, they seem to be frightened to death of it. After all, if they support Java, then why not just use Sun boxes? Of course if they do such a thing, they'd have to do it better than anyone else (including Sun) - not to say that they aren't capable of this, but they'd have to try really hard. =)
This could also mean the beginning of the end of OS/390 (MVS) - maybe IBM finally decided that they no longer want to mess with having to recompile or support weird programs on their OS. Just give them a little VM (or actually processor slices most likely) and let them run their own little OS that will allow them to run their weird apps. Keep all of the VTAM and CICS stuff under OS/390 though. I'd be pleasantly shocked if they came out with full-blown support for Linux though... Oh, man, CICS Server on Linux/390 - oooh, wow - there would be a lot of people jumping into to learn Linux really quickly if that happened.
But, rumours are rumours for a reason. I'd be curious to know whether Linus knows about stuff like this - would a company tell him that they were porting Linux to XYZ hardware platform?
VA Linux now uses SuSE as the "official" distro. So what? Big deal. I'd just reformat it to RH (or a clean SuSE install). Still coming with Linux, not Windows. In general, I don't like most OSes default installation procedure. I want a BLANK formatted hard drive. I know what to do after that. =) After all, I'm OS agnostic (should start a movement...). But, this is why I build my own systems...
However, I almost hate to think that when I buy a VA Linux system, I'm *paying* for the OS. Wasn't that the whole deal of open-source? Don't want it? Don't pay for it.
Seems like we are becoming our enemy, not becoming different.
What? Carmack has said that he WILL release all binaries (and patches) after the Linux and Mac retail boxes have been delivered. To ID, they don't care about the binaries - they care about the levels (WAD, whatever format they use now...). If you have that (legally), then ID will offer you all binaries that you can handle. They've gotten your money - they don't want to charge you double for using different platforms (which is my gripe with Loki - essentially the same game on Windows but you must buy a different box for Linux - stupid, stupid, stupid).
Carmack is just doing this so that if there is a market for Linux or Mac games, the retailers realize this. IMHO, this is a great move on his part.
I think most professors do not care if or when students share notes. What they do care about is when corporations come in and try to make money off the notes. This is the important factor to most professors. If someone wants to give the notes away, fine. If they want to make money, at the very least have the courtesy to inform the professor about it. If he says fine, you make money. If not, well, you find another professor to leech.
Here at UCI, one of the local note-taking places is in trouble because they were selling verbatim notes without professor's permission. The professor of this class saw a student with the verbatim notes and he asked him where he got the notes. The student said he bought the notes from this company. The professor went down there and asked the clerks whether or not they had the professors permission to replicate these notes. They, of course, said that they did (and only used notes that have been authorized by the professor). Well, of course, they had no such permission. The company is in a bit of trouble now.... =)
Because this company is not under the auspices of the UC system (there is a student-govt. run notetaking place here on campus), they are currently trying to figure out what to do with them. Apparently, the professor can sue for IP violations (and is debating whether or not to do so). For people who keep an eye on the news, this is the same company that was involved in the cadaver scandal a few weeks back...great ethics at this company!
I also believe as part of conduct, it DOES indeed forbid us from taking notes and selling them without permission. IIRC, it also says that all notes and lectures are the IP of the professor (unless otherwise stated).
The GEB example is a good one. With, one slight flaw though. However, instead of the Tortoise being the one to outwit the Crab it is the store that sells the record players to the Crab. =) If they keep changing the medium, we are going to keep getting screwed royally to buy new players.
Personally, I hope that the record companies understood that there was a 99.999999% chance that the encryption was going to broken. I bet they have some fail-safe plans. I believe some people have mentioned as such before that they still have some tricks up their sleeves.
But, to see the encryption fail soooooo stupidly, it has to hurt DVD's chances on the whole. Didn't Xing THINK that someone would reverse engineer their buggy software? Hell, maybe that was their idea (one little programmer not encrypting the code brings down DVD - hahaha).
I disagree with the author's opinion that TNG sucked. It didn't. I liked TOS a bit better, but I thought TNG was nothing to be ashamed of. DS9 was a bit more cerberal than most would like, but I liked it as a change of pace. IMHO, I thought the show took a turn for the worse (debatable though?) when they added the Defiant to the station. I never really understood the whole Dominion thing. Voyager was cool the first year. It was a change of pace from DS9 and was action-centric (as DS9 was focused on the mind, Voyager is squarely focused on the body).
I think that Voyager diverged greatly in the second season. It lost its way. Then, they added 7 of 9. While most of the viewers today, only watch it because of Jeri Ryan, I think it is a cheap publicity stunt. She adds nothing of value to the series. The Borg - been there, done that. (I am Locutus of Borg - WOW, was that a great cliffhanger!). I remember waiting for months on how the next TNG season would begin. It was fun. People on BBSes would be chatting back and forth arguing about how the next season would start. We were hardly disappointed by the TNG cliffhangers. Alas, DS9 and Voyager lacked that aura.
The recent movies (after IV - the best bar none - okay, II was great as well) have all danced around the themes of ST. They do not have the magic that a single episode of TOS or TNG had. It was all about special effects not about plotline (as has been beaten to death by others here on/.).
Berman and everyone else at Paramount needs to go ahead and devote a new movie (or series) that refocuses the franchise on plot and story with REAL characters with a twist of action every now and then to keep the audience awake(!). It is something that is sorely missing from the franchise right now. When they rediscover Roddenberry's formula (they will - someone will...), ST will be just as good as it ever was. If they have to take a hiatus in production of ST related shows or movies, so be it. It'll be the stronger for it in the long run.
I can't wait until II and IV are on DVD (especially II). Too bad it will be a few years (bad Paramount, bad Paramount). Wonder if DVD will survive until then...
There is a known problem with Microsoft Exchange 5.0 (and 5.5) that in certain circumstances can cause an NT machine to take a LONG time to reboot (approx. 1-2 hours). I believe that a machine with Exchange will be the winner because of this problem (which I spent days with MS trying to track down this problem).
This problem is apparently due to a service deadlock (i.e. the service does not respond to the kill command). There is a registry entry (what a shock!) that dictates how long NT will wait for a service to shutdown. Of course, this is a PER service command. If you have a deadlocked service subsystem (as can occur in certain circumstances with Exchange), it will take approximately * to bring the system down. I believe the default is 5 minutes. Changing it to ten or twenty seconds does a lot of good. =)
Looking at the website, the leader with 49 min has Exchange running on it. Maybe we should notify him of this registry entry... Nah...
I am sorry, but the age of T1s taking over the world is long gone (and hence/.ers pining for them). Cable modems and DSL provide far faster connection speed for much cheaper.
T3 coop? Hey, I'm there. Or, how about some of that Internet2 bandwidth (>100MB/sec)?? With enough people, I am certain that the price could be around $200 per person...(you'd need about 100 or more people though, but 100 people for a T3 - still damn fast).
In all seriousness, I loved my Legos when I was a little kid. I created my own virtual world to play in. Sparked my imagination. Now, I'm programming virtual worlds. Same kid, only bigger toys.
A highly recommended habit for all parents to encourage their children to get hooked on to. The rewards are endless and eternal...
I believe that IBM's support of Java is highly unlikely becuase I recently spent the summer at a large IBM shop (CICS and COBOL-based) doing Java-based programming. We wanted to take some of the CICS-based processing and change them to a Java EJB architecture. Whenever we tried to get a straight answer out of IBM, they dragged their feet and gave us the run-around.
They first said that it was easy to use Java on the OS/390 (err, MVS...) and CICS. Understand that there were thousands of legacy COBOL programs and CICS transactions that we could not afford to break in switching over to a new architecture. The Java implementation would also have to talk to our databases (ancient VTAM) in order to maintain legacy conversion. But, we asked IBM for an example on how to do this. They could not provide one. We then asked for when Java would even be available as a CICS language (write the Java base and have a CICS-transaction wrapper). Well, in order to do this, IBM said that we needed to write a C-wrapper around the Java code so that our legacy COBOL code could continue to talk to the functions (i.e. COBOLJava is not supported). Not an acceptable answer. We went around and around while we got shuffled from division to division. No concrete answer ever appeared from IBM. We finally came to the realization that IBM wants nothing to do with Java... Any solutions would have to be off-the-shelf (and not IBM).
The poor guy who was talking with IBM kept trying and got the run around. One day, he'd tell his bosses that we can do it, the next, he'd have to report that IBM said it couldn't be done.
That said, I would not be shocked to see IBM support it in their lower-level servers, but from my experience this summer, they do not want anything to do with Java on their enterprise-class mainframes.
Well, I received my invitation to go to the Loki Hack, and I was quite shocked. My initial reaction was, "Huh? Me? Why?" I then shifted moods to, "Wow! I should go!"
But, then I came to a dilemma. Loki only notified us on October 1st (the contest began Monday, the 11th). My biggest problem was a) finding a cheap ticket on such short notice and b) I'd have to miss a week of classes here at UC Irvine. I could live with missing classes (it wasn't the best of times though, but I could have done it), but I thought it was unfair that we had such short notice to plan our trip. I searched around the web and ended up at CheapTickets.com. I could find a flight that kind of got me there for around $300. However, if you've dealt with CheapTickets, they want to send your ticket via snail-mail and it MIGHT have been there by that Friday (I was supposed to leave Sat. morning - cheapest flight out was then!). However, after emailing Kat from Loki about my dilemma, she suggested that I could pick up the tickets from CheapTickets's office in Fullerton (about 30-40 min away by car). Only problem is that I don't have a car. So much for that. I was not going to spend $300 and have even the slightest possibility that I was not going to get my ticket. I don't believe that that was fair. I'm not even going to broach the hotel rates ($69/night for the cheapest room). Again, Kat suggested that I might be able to find someone who was willing to open up their room for me (or I could sleep in the Hack room). Neither possibility excited me greatly.;-)
Then, I stopped and thought about it for a while. I have been flown to interviews before on 2-day notice (as evil as everyone thinks Microsoft is, they did that for me...) and they paid all expenses. Now, you have to be silly to think that Loki will not try to hire some of these people that they liked from the Hack (they even admit as much on their Hack FAQ). My thought was, "Why should I pay $500 to give somebody some good PR?" ($500 includes all misc. expenses and is a conservative number). The answer of course is that I got to play around with some cool Linux game source code. But, is $500 worth this honor? In the end, I decided that it wasn't.
As some people suggested to me, if I had already been going to ALS, then this would have been a no-brainer and I would gladly have done it. But, that was not the case. In perusing Loki's pages about the Hack, it is quite interesting to note that there are a substantial amount of students were from the Atlanta area (Ga. Tech, etc.). The "older" people appeared to be employee of companies (who get a salary and can probably afford $500 more than a starving college student).
It would have been a great experience, but I passed it up. I have a feeling there will be more opportunities. In fact, Loki has mentioned that since I live in their neck of the woods (in Orange County), that they may look to hire me for some open positions. Cool. I would not have a problem working for them. The difference is that I'd be getting paid. That's the difference. I'll hack all you want if you pay me. If I am doing it out of my own free will, then I guess that I have certain restrictions that I place upon myself.
The music I listen to depends upon the mood that I am in. (Gee, that's helpful...) Thankfully, I have a large CD collection. I also don't recommend listening to one CD over and over again on the same day. It'll get on your nerves WAY too quickly. Get a CD changer, or use MP3s and burn compilation CDs (fit 6 or 7 CDs onto one CD-R - wee!). However, legal issues probably dictate that you should only make MP3s out of CDs that you own (even that is a bit shaky)...
However, I have found that upbeat music does work really well when you are trying to code something up quickly. Softer music (i.e. '50s style Jazz) can put me in a bit of a trance, so that I find myself approaching the problem from a different perspective. It is really a balancing act that you must follow. However, there is also a time when you do need to have peace and quiet to approach a problem. But, not all of the time though!
Anyway, my web site (see above) has specific comments on artists that I usually find myself listening to. But, that does not exclude any other group...
IMO, he basically started many people thinking about nanotech (and this was in the '50s). There are some remarkable things coming from nanotech (IIRC, there are some remarkable things coming out of U of Michigan in nanotech).
There is plenty of room. We just need the technology and sophisitication in order to harness it. Somebody will achieve this technology (who and when are the important questions, not if). When it happens, Moore's Law will just chug along as usual (as it always has).
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Dexter Gordon is also not to be missed. Try out 'Our Man in Paris' and 'Go' for some stellar Jazz albums.
Yes, it does. There are a range of choices when you compile, but the threaded MPM is the default. There is also a Win32-specific multi-threaded engine.
The one correction I'd like to make is that we disabled the threaded MPM by default after 2.0.16 was released. And, we've actually removed the threaded MPM *after* we released 2.0.28. The threaded MPM has been superceded by the "worker" MPM (our names aren't the greatest). The "worker" MPM is essentially threaded (but has multiple processes to increase redunancy) - you'll see us call this a MPMT (multi-process/multi-thread) MPM.
There is a discussion on-list about whether we should enable threading MPM by default if the OS supports it. It's an open question, but for now (and what is in 2.0.28), we use prefork by default. A configure-time option allows the selection of which MPM it should compile with.
FWIW, special platforms (like Win32) have their own MPM that is specific to their OS. The "worker" MPM is targeted towards UNIX-like platforms (Linux, Solaris, etc.).
I doubt that. As an active Apache developer who doesn't really have any ties to a company with a vested interest in Apache, I work with the Covalent people every day. And, I doubt that the open-source version of Apache HTTPD will lag behind any version that Covalent or IBM has. In fact, I bet that the version that Covalent will release on Monday will include some bugs that have already been fixed in the open-source version.
Where I think companies like Covalent come in is to support corporations that *require* support. Their price ($1495/CPU or something like that) isn't targeted towards people who would be interested in the open-source version, but for corporations that can't ever afford to have their web server go down.
Covalent also offers some freebies (such as mod_ftp). I think under Apache 2.0, it is sufficiently easy for someone to come in and write a module that handles FTP. It's just that no one has had the inclination to write one. And, I bet if someone did, it just might eventually be better than the one Covalent wrote.
VA is a little different from Covalent as, IIRC, they are the sole owners of Sourceforge, but Covalent is just a part of the Apache community (an active one though).
I work on what I want to work on. People who work at Covalent have a "direction" on things to work on. As an unpaid volunteer, I get to work on whatever I feel like at the moment. I'll take that any day of the week. But, there is a definite value to getting paid to work solely on Apache.
FWIW, I believe this is definitely not the case with Apache. The docs are freely available and the Win32 installer is one donated by IBM (I think, I forget - someone donated it).
At this point, I would judge the current httpd-2.0 codebase as beta-quality. There have been lots of improvements made to the Apache 2.0 codebase since 2.0.16 was released - I would expect that we have a much better codebase now than was in 2.0.16. I would expect you to have an even better experience with our next release whenever it occurs (or you may use CVS to obtain the up-to-the-minute version!).
Yes, we're way overdue releasing Apache 2.0 as a GA (we started thinking about 2.x in 1997), but that is a testament to our quality - we will NOT release Apache 2.0 as a general availability release until we are all satisfied that it meets our expectations. "It's ready when it's ready."
We have a very good stable product in Apache 1.3. We must match the quality expectations we've set for ourselves in the past. And, almost everyone in the group is keenly aware of that.
Hmm, interesting point. Yeah, I have typically recompiled most of the RPMS (it took sooo long for RedHat to release the Alpha RPMS after the SRPMS were available).
But, I still have not had any luck compiling a kernel for my Alpha other than the standard RH kernels. Either that, or they would be remarkably unstable. Not sure if anyone else has had this problem.
As far as SRM goes, I didn't realize that Compaq dropped the support for it. Maybe I should look at SRM again. It might be worth checking out. I believe I read somewhere that you could not switch back from AlphaBIOS->SRM. I still have AlphaNT installed on one of them, and I'd like to keep it around (Office is installed...).
Later,
Justin
The RH6.1 Alpha is relatively stable, but does have some problems. GNOME is particularly horrific on RH Alpha (causes HARD crashes - absolutely insane). Pretty much forces the use KDE. Also, the GNOME issues requires the removal of ALL Gnome RPMS (it still tries to tie in with KDE). Since I use KDE most of the time, it doesn't bug me except for the fact that I lose GDM. That really stinks. If someone has a decent replacement for GDM, I'd love to hear about it.
The GNOME issues that I see have occurred on both Alphas that I use. It is not something that I am doing wrong. =/
I'd also love to see FreeBSD use AlphaBIOS for its bootstrap instead of SRM. I don't want to use the SRM console! Ugh. AlphaBIOS is nice, and why is only Linux supporting it (NT does too)??
Later,
Justin
Anyone have a technical reason why Samsung is using 288MB instead of 256MB? Looking at their press release doesn't help. I am not familiar enough with RAMBUS to know more...
0.17 micron seems small. Can they expect to produce enough of this? I thought I read that there are only a few fab plants that can produce 0.18 micron chips - I imagine it must be even smaller 0.17 micron chips.
RAMBUS - vaporware (or will I be shocked?).
-- Justin
I'm not sure how many people have watched A&E's Investigative Reports (great show!). I remember an episode a few months back (recently reaired I believe) that talked about the civil confiscation of goods by law enforcement agencies.
One of the more egregious confiscations were by some yahoo Florida police officers. They would stop only BLACK drivers (they showed them giving white drivers off with only a warning) who they suspected of anything (stop sign, drunk, lane change). Any money that they found in the car they would confiscate. They just blanketly claimed that they believed the money was drug-related, so therefore under Florida's confiscation laws, they could legally take the money. Of course, they pissed off enough people that it appeared on the ACLU's radar. Well, IIRC, the ACLU was actually powerless since the law gives the discretion to the officers. They do not NEED ANY PROOF whatsoever to claim the money.
Kurtis then went on to talk about the DEA and how they have the federal auction. I believe that our wonderful US govt. is the proud owner of a casino and a multi-million dollar house. They do not seem that interested in selling those items. They like it.
Fourth amendment is but a distant memory. The sad fact is that the government can seize property whenever they want. Good luck getting it back.
Just as a quick quip about Ramsey, I belive it is the same issue as the gun manufacturers being sued by victims of crime committed with their guns (I know others have brought this up). The US has forgotten that people are ultimately responsible for their own actions. They ARE. No one else can make me believe otherwise. Any person who thinks that society is entirely responsible for the actions (good or bad) has been smoking the wacky weed a bit too much.
Later,
Justin
Okay, while I was not the person who talked to IBM directly (gee, you went to my website, good for you!), my understanding was that he talked to every person under the sky about getting our system to work with Java. He talked to their marketing people who assured them that Java would be entirely supported by IBM. He then asked for an example (Alan Cox's "show me the code"). Their technical people failed to produce one line of code that would run under OS/390. Eventually after dragging several VPs on both ends into it, we finally got something running on the system (this was mid-summer). Mind you this was on their beta OS running on a test proc. slice - we needed this on our production environment by the end of the summer (a company that dependent on it is not going to run their production m/f on an beta OS - even IBM's). However, by now, I believe that IBM has officially released the OS version that supports Java natively (but I may be wrong - I am no longer at IM).
However, since we used CICS (as do most IBM shops), we wanted CICS/Java connectivity on OS/390. And, that was what ultimately killed it. While Java was technically supported by the OS, their killer app did not support it. What they said is that all of the COBOL would have to be rewritten to conform to Obj. COBOL standards, then the Obj. COBOL could call C++ wrappers which could then call Java (and that was only if we installed every beta they had). In something so performance driven, this was not an option (never mind beta code). We were trying to make this faster NOT slower. At the same time, we had to support the legacy COBOL code. Ingram has so much COBOL code that forcing a rewrite of any subset of the code becomes a logistical nightmare. We eventually settled upon having a J/Gate (Java->CICS) architecture. Far from our ideal, but at the time, it was our only option. IBM failed to deliver what their customer needed when they needed it. Now, in six or seven months, IBM may finally get their heads out of the sand and support Java in CICS in a reasonable manner. But, Ingram is now a lost cause in that respect.
So, to clarify my position a bit, yeah, OS/390 supports it. CICS doesn't. If you aren't using CICS, then why use OS/390? Yeah, DB2 and all of that is supported in OS/390, but IMNSHO CICS is still the lifeblood of the OS/390 series...
BTW, you are indeed correct, IBM's machines kick Sun's ass clear across the room. And, in a place where IBM has so much clout, they should never have let Sun in the door. Now that Sun has their foot in the door, some are seriously considering dumping all IBM products and turning into a strictly Sun shop.
Sun delivered, IBM did not. That is what matters in the end...
Later,
Justin
No, I'm not talking out of my ass. I worked at a shop that was an ideal IBM shop (running OS/390, CICS, etc.) and were trying to implement Java (E-commerce and EJBs). IBM kept giving us the run around on Java support and OS/390. Our feeling was that they don't want to support it. If they open the door to Java-land, then why use IBM servers? Unless of course, they beat the crap out of everyone else's Java implementation.
We eventually went with Sun's E10k servers. We tried, but IBM basically just said that Java was not meant for their high-end machines. In personal computing and maybe RS/6000 land, Java is not deemed as a threat, but as far as enterprise level computing goes, they are SCARED or clueless (your pick).
I also said that chances are that it will not replace OS/390. See the post from the guy who has talked to the Linux/390 developer. It'd be nice if they ported CICS and VTAM (and everything else) to Linux. But, it ain't going to happen. They have too much invested in them to let them walk to another OS. IBM may release Linux/390 so that in our case where we want to use our IBM hardware we can use *different* software that is not part of the OS/390 fold, but is supported by Linux (et al).
Later,
Justin
If this is true (highly doubtful), this would definitely send shockwaves throughout the enterprise class server industry. If IBM believes Linux is ready to run on their heavy metal boxes, then some serious (re)consideration of Linux is going to occur in the next few months.
However, after personally seeing IBM run away from Java on the mainframes (running OS/390-MVS), I have to doubt this is true. IBM looked scared to death of Java on the mainframes. For the personal computers (i.e. with Jikes), they really seem to embrace Java, but on their enterprise class servers, they seem to be frightened to death of it. After all, if they support Java, then why not just use Sun boxes? Of course if they do such a thing, they'd have to do it better than anyone else (including Sun) - not to say that they aren't capable of this, but they'd have to try really hard. =)
This could also mean the beginning of the end of OS/390 (MVS) - maybe IBM finally decided that they no longer want to mess with having to recompile or support weird programs on their OS. Just give them a little VM (or actually processor slices most likely) and let them run their own little OS that will allow them to run their weird apps. Keep all of the VTAM and CICS stuff under OS/390 though. I'd be pleasantly shocked if they came out with full-blown support for Linux though... Oh, man, CICS Server on Linux/390 - oooh, wow - there would be a lot of people jumping into to learn Linux really quickly if that happened.
But, rumours are rumours for a reason. I'd be curious to know whether Linus knows about stuff like this - would a company tell him that they were porting Linux to XYZ hardware platform?
Later,
Justin
So what?
VA Linux now uses SuSE as the "official" distro. So what? Big deal. I'd just reformat it to RH (or a clean SuSE install). Still coming with Linux, not Windows. In general, I don't like most OSes default installation procedure. I want a BLANK formatted hard drive. I know what to do after that. =) After all, I'm OS agnostic (should start a movement...). But, this is why I build my own systems...
However, I almost hate to think that when I buy a VA Linux system, I'm *paying* for the OS. Wasn't that the whole deal of open-source? Don't want it? Don't pay for it.
Seems like we are becoming our enemy, not becoming different.
Later,
Justin
What? Carmack has said that he WILL release all binaries (and patches) after the Linux and Mac retail boxes have been delivered. To ID, they don't care about the binaries - they care about the levels (WAD, whatever format they use now...). If you have that (legally), then ID will offer you all binaries that you can handle. They've gotten your money - they don't want to charge you double for using different platforms (which is my gripe with Loki - essentially the same game on Windows but you must buy a different box for Linux - stupid, stupid, stupid).
Carmack is just doing this so that if there is a market for Linux or Mac games, the retailers realize this. IMHO, this is a great move on his part.
Later,
Justin
I think most professors do not care if or when students share notes. What they do care about is when corporations come in and try to make money off the notes. This is the important factor to most professors. If someone wants to give the notes away, fine. If they want to make money, at the very least have the courtesy to inform the professor about it. If he says fine, you make money. If not, well, you find another professor to leech.
Here at UCI, one of the local note-taking places is in trouble because they were selling verbatim notes without professor's permission. The professor of this class saw a student with the verbatim notes and he asked him where he got the notes. The student said he bought the notes from this company. The professor went down there and asked the clerks whether or not they had the professors permission to replicate these notes. They, of course, said that they did (and only used notes that have been authorized by the professor). Well, of course, they had no such permission. The company is in a bit of trouble now.... =)
Because this company is not under the auspices of the UC system (there is a student-govt. run notetaking place here on campus), they are currently trying to figure out what to do with them. Apparently, the professor can sue for IP violations (and is debating whether or not to do so). For people who keep an eye on the news, this is the same company that was involved in the cadaver scandal a few weeks back...great ethics at this company!
I also believe as part of conduct, it DOES indeed forbid us from taking notes and selling them without permission. IIRC, it also says that all notes and lectures are the IP of the professor (unless otherwise stated).
Later,
Justin
The GEB example is a good one. With, one slight flaw though. However, instead of the Tortoise being the one to outwit the Crab it is the store that sells the record players to the Crab. =) If they keep changing the medium, we are going to keep getting screwed royally to buy new players.
Personally, I hope that the record companies understood that there was a 99.999999% chance that the encryption was going to broken. I bet they have some fail-safe plans. I believe some people have mentioned as such before that they still have some tricks up their sleeves.
But, to see the encryption fail soooooo stupidly, it has to hurt DVD's chances on the whole. Didn't Xing THINK that someone would reverse engineer their buggy software? Hell, maybe that was their idea (one little programmer not encrypting the code brings down DVD - hahaha).
Later,
Justin
I noticed on the new Kernel.org site is a link to Transmeta. It seems that they updated the site. Cool.
No Secret Messages Here - Uh-huh.
Later,
Justin
I disagree with the author's opinion that TNG sucked. It didn't. I liked TOS a bit better, but I thought TNG was nothing to be ashamed of. DS9 was a bit more cerberal than most would like, but I liked it as a change of pace. IMHO, I thought the show took a turn for the worse (debatable though?) when they added the Defiant to the station. I never really understood the whole Dominion thing. Voyager was cool the first year. It was a change of pace from DS9 and was action-centric (as DS9 was focused on the mind, Voyager is squarely focused on the body).
/.).
I think that Voyager diverged greatly in the second season. It lost its way. Then, they added 7 of 9. While most of the viewers today, only watch it because of Jeri Ryan, I think it is a cheap publicity stunt. She adds nothing of value to the series. The Borg - been there, done that. (I am Locutus of Borg - WOW, was that a great cliffhanger!). I remember waiting for months on how the next TNG season would begin. It was fun. People on BBSes would be chatting back and forth arguing about how the next season would start. We were hardly disappointed by the TNG cliffhangers. Alas, DS9 and Voyager lacked that aura.
The recent movies (after IV - the best bar none - okay, II was great as well) have all danced around the themes of ST. They do not have the magic that a single episode of TOS or TNG had. It was all about special effects not about plotline (as has been beaten to death by others here on
Berman and everyone else at Paramount needs to go ahead and devote a new movie (or series) that refocuses the franchise on plot and story with REAL characters with a twist of action every now and then to keep the audience awake(!). It is something that is sorely missing from the franchise right now. When they rediscover Roddenberry's formula (they will - someone will...), ST will be just as good as it ever was. If they have to take a hiatus in production of ST related shows or movies, so be it. It'll be the stronger for it in the long run.
I can't wait until II and IV are on DVD (especially II). Too bad it will be a few years (bad Paramount, bad Paramount). Wonder if DVD will survive until then...
Later,
Justin
There is a known problem with Microsoft Exchange 5.0 (and 5.5) that in certain circumstances can cause an NT machine to take a LONG time to reboot (approx. 1-2 hours). I believe that a machine with Exchange will be the winner because of this problem (which I spent days with MS trying to track down this problem).
This problem is apparently due to a service deadlock (i.e. the service does not respond to the kill command). There is a registry entry (what a shock!) that dictates how long NT will wait for a service to shutdown. Of course, this is a PER service command. If you have a deadlocked service subsystem (as can occur in certain circumstances with Exchange), it will take approximately * to bring the system down. I believe the default is 5 minutes. Changing it to ten or twenty seconds does a lot of good. =)
Looking at the website, the leader with 49 min has Exchange running on it. Maybe we should notify him of this registry entry... Nah...
Later,
Justin
I am sorry, but the age of T1s taking over the world is long gone (and hence /.ers pining for them). Cable modems and DSL provide far faster connection speed for much cheaper.
T3 coop? Hey, I'm there. Or, how about some of that Internet2 bandwidth (>100MB/sec)?? With enough people, I am certain that the price could be around $200 per person...(you'd need about 100 or more people though, but 100 people for a T3 - still damn fast).
Justin
One word: wow.
A toilet that runs Linux! And, didn't someone say that Linux doesn't work well in embedded systems? This'll show them.
Justin
Hey, you! Leggo my Lego. =)
In all seriousness, I loved my Legos when I was a little kid. I created my own virtual world to play in. Sparked my imagination. Now, I'm programming virtual worlds. Same kid, only bigger toys.
A highly recommended habit for all parents to encourage their children to get hooked on to. The rewards are endless and eternal...
Later,
Justin
I believe that IBM's support of Java is highly unlikely becuase I recently spent the summer at a large IBM shop (CICS and COBOL-based) doing Java-based programming. We wanted to take some of the CICS-based processing and change them to a Java EJB architecture. Whenever we tried to get a straight answer out of IBM, they dragged their feet and gave us the run-around.
They first said that it was easy to use Java on the OS/390 (err, MVS...) and CICS. Understand that there were thousands of legacy COBOL programs and CICS transactions that we could not afford to break in switching over to a new architecture. The Java implementation would also have to talk to our databases (ancient VTAM) in order to maintain legacy conversion. But, we asked IBM for an example on how to do this. They could not provide one. We then asked for when Java would even be available as a CICS language (write the Java base and have a CICS-transaction wrapper). Well, in order to do this, IBM said that we needed to write a C-wrapper around the Java code so that our legacy COBOL code could continue to talk to the functions (i.e. COBOLJava is not supported). Not an acceptable answer. We went around and around while we got shuffled from division to division. No concrete answer ever appeared from IBM. We finally came to the realization that IBM wants nothing to do with Java... Any solutions would have to be off-the-shelf (and not IBM).
The poor guy who was talking with IBM kept trying and got the run around. One day, he'd tell his bosses that we can do it, the next, he'd have to report that IBM said it couldn't be done.
That said, I would not be shocked to see IBM support it in their lower-level servers, but from my experience this summer, they do not want anything to do with Java on their enterprise-class mainframes.
Justin
Well, I received my invitation to go to the Loki Hack, and I was quite shocked. My initial reaction was, "Huh? Me? Why?" I then shifted moods to, "Wow! I should go!"
;-)
But, then I came to a dilemma. Loki only notified us on October 1st (the contest began Monday, the 11th). My biggest problem was a) finding a cheap ticket on such short notice and b) I'd have to miss a week of classes here at UC Irvine. I could live with missing classes (it wasn't the best of times though, but I could have done it), but I thought it was unfair that we had such short notice to plan our trip. I searched around the web and ended up at CheapTickets.com. I could find a flight that kind of got me there for around $300. However, if you've dealt with CheapTickets, they want to send your ticket via snail-mail and it MIGHT have been there by that Friday (I was supposed to leave Sat. morning - cheapest flight out was then!). However, after emailing Kat from Loki about my dilemma, she suggested that I could pick up the tickets from CheapTickets's office in Fullerton (about 30-40 min away by car). Only problem is that I don't have a car. So much for that. I was not going to spend $300 and have even the slightest possibility that I was not going to get my ticket. I don't believe that that was fair. I'm not even going to broach the hotel rates ($69/night for the cheapest room). Again, Kat suggested that I might be able to find someone who was willing to open up their room for me (or I could sleep in the Hack room). Neither possibility excited me greatly.
Then, I stopped and thought about it for a while. I have been flown to interviews before on 2-day notice (as evil as everyone thinks Microsoft is, they did that for me...) and they paid all expenses. Now, you have to be silly to think that Loki will not try to hire some of these people that they liked from the Hack (they even admit as much on their Hack FAQ). My thought was, "Why should I pay $500 to give somebody some good PR?" ($500 includes all misc. expenses and is a conservative number). The answer of course is that I got to play around with some cool Linux game source code. But, is $500 worth this honor? In the end, I decided that it wasn't.
As some people suggested to me, if I had already been going to ALS, then this would have been a no-brainer and I would gladly have done it. But, that was not the case. In perusing Loki's pages about the Hack, it is quite interesting to note that there are a substantial amount of students were from the Atlanta area (Ga. Tech, etc.). The "older" people appeared to be employee of companies (who get a salary and can probably afford $500 more than a starving college student).
It would have been a great experience, but I passed it up. I have a feeling there will be more opportunities. In fact, Loki has mentioned that since I live in their neck of the woods (in Orange County), that they may look to hire me for some open positions. Cool. I would not have a problem working for them. The difference is that I'd be getting paid. That's the difference. I'll hack all you want if you pay me. If I am doing it out of my own free will, then I guess that I have certain restrictions that I place upon myself.
Justin
The music I listen to depends upon the mood that I am in. (Gee, that's helpful...) Thankfully, I have a large CD collection. I also don't recommend listening to one CD over and over again on the same day. It'll get on your nerves WAY too quickly. Get a CD changer, or use MP3s and burn compilation CDs (fit 6 or 7 CDs onto one CD-R - wee!). However, legal issues probably dictate that you should only make MP3s out of CDs that you own (even that is a bit shaky)...
However, I have found that upbeat music does work really well when you are trying to code something up quickly. Softer music (i.e. '50s style Jazz) can put me in a bit of a trance, so that I find myself approaching the problem from a different perspective. It is really a balancing act that you must follow. However, there is also a time when you do need to have peace and quiet to approach a problem. But, not all of the time though!
Anyway, my web site (see above) has specific comments on artists that I usually find myself listening to. But, that does not exclude any other group...
Justin
I think Richard Feynman said it best many years ago:
There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom by R. Feynman
IMO, he basically started many people thinking about nanotech (and this was in the '50s). There are some remarkable things coming from nanotech (IIRC, there are some remarkable things coming out of U of Michigan in nanotech).
There is plenty of room. We just need the technology and sophisitication in order to harness it. Somebody will achieve this technology (who and when are the important questions, not if ). When it happens, Moore's Law will just chug along as usual (as it always has).
Justin