Actually, it can only qualify as C2 secure with no network connection and no removable media whatsoever (that includes floppy, CD-ROM, Zip, Jaz, or any other removable-media storage device).
When I can run Solaris on a cheap Pentium box, I'll let you know how this comparison works.
Well, really, you can. It's called Solaris/x86. I don't know that I'd use it (most Sun experts I've talked to say that Solaris/x86 is pretty bad, and if you want Solaris, go for SPARC), but hey. Yes Virginia, There Is Solaris on Intel.
The 128 MB swap size issue is no longer true. At least, as of sometime in the 2.1.x series, carrying forward to 2.2.x and 2.3.x (obviously).
I thought groups were for some measure of finer-grained access control too. ACLs would be nice. There are people working on that, though. Oh yea, and everything in Unix is treated as a file. That might have something to do with why security is applied to files. Hee.
Oh yeah, and NT's "journalling" filesystem, isn't. It journals on metadata only. (If you don't know - that makes it completely worthless.)
dselect is slowly being tossed away in favor of the new 'apt' (advanced package tool) system that's being developed. And that's just fine by me - I hated dselect. It screwed up my first-ever Debian (slink) install. I was brave though, and went back and used the (still infantile) apt system instead, and it worked MUCH better. apt-get makes updating an install easy as pie, and console-apt is developing nicely (it has some bugs, yes, but it's quite usable even so).
What Linux need is some stuff arround RPMs (or DEBs). This will be a way to access a repository of RPMs to automatically download (asking first would be a good idea) any dependencies. This woulld allow one to create a RPM with nothing in it but dependencies. So one install this RPM and all the other RPM refered in it will be downloaded and installed.
Sounds something like Debian. apt-get is your friend, and an ncurses frontend is being developed as well. (Don't know about the status of the gnome apt frontend tho.)
Try Debian, esp. Potato, if you really want all the latest updates. Slack doesn't really have a "proper" package management system. Debian is continuing to develop the 'apt' system, which not only provides for package management, but has a mechanism for fetching the latest updates from Debian's package archives. All you have to do is
apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade
then answer some questions to get everything updated to the latest (at least, everything that's installed as a package - and Debian has a package for most everything out there).
If you really need a more stable system, go for Slink (aka Debian v2.1, Potato is being actively developed), but for all the latest updates, go with Potato.
The newer Mendocino-series Celeron CPUs (that actually have L2 cache) aren't that bad. I have a Cel400A in my system now, OC'd to 450 (75 MHz base, 6x mult), and it's nearly as fast as a PII-450. Also, PII's cache only runs at half CPU core speed (despite being larger than that of the Celerons) while the Celeron A (Mendocino) cache runs at full core speed.
So really, it's not THAT bad. If you're on a budget, the speed is decent.
MP3, in simple terms of structure, is just a stream of MPEG frames. Each frame has its own information on the bitrate of the data contained in it. You can start playback at any point in the frame stream. That's why you can have "live" streams that are in MP3 format. (We've all listened to that guy from Canada with his scanner hooked to his computer, streaming cell phone calls...:)
Even if you couldn't, you could just fetch the first frame (or 2 or 3) and then use that as the basis on which to seek. Besides, you'd have to fetch at least the first frame anyway, to determine the bitrate so you can do the calculation for running time. (Of course, this still depends on it being a constant-bitrate stream. VBR streams still won't work. You'd need some kind of metadata stored in a descriptor file of some kind, or something...)
I've had just a couple minor oddities with my Dxr3 kit (one of which seems specific to "The Matrix")...
First of all, when I unpause while connected to a TV, the image tends to do one of 2 things: go black-and-white or get jittery. I can make the weirdness go away by flipping the video back to the PC display, then back to TV output. (Seems to happen when watching widescreen format movies only.)
Also, (more minor) when using the menus, the selection pointer will sometimes start out on something other than the first menu item, but if I press "Enter", it'll perform the action of the first menu item anyway.
The other one is specific to "The Matrix": The "White Rabbit" overlay that is supposed to show up in some scenes doesn't show up until I play the movie a second time. Is this intended, or is this really a bug?
Has anyone else experienced this? I'd just like to know if I'm mental, or what. (I did update the player software to the latest version from Creative's site.)
Yea, there's that audio track... but there's also a third audio track (marked as English in the language selection menu) that is a music-only soundtrack. I haven't yet listened to it, tho. Anyone else listened to it? How is it?
Hmm. Music-only soundtrack with subtitles... could be interesting.
BTW, has anyone else had a problem with the Matrix DVD where the "White Rabbit" overlay for certain scenes where you're supposed to be able to jump to alternate views only shows up the second time it's been played while your player (or machine, in my case - I bought a Creative Dxr3 kit) is on? I don't think it's _supposed_ to be that way.
Heh. Being able to answer Jamie Zawinski's question. Cool.:)
Now, for my answer:
The main problem is in determining the length (in time, not bytes) of the stream. A lot of the streams that are played over the Internet are encoded using a VBR (variable bitrate) encoder, so you have to check all the MPEG frame headers for their bitrates, do some magic, and get the actual running time of the stream (that kinda defeats the whole purpose of streaming, tho).
If the stream is non-VBR, getting the first frame, getting the content length, and a little math yield the actual running time, and with a byteserving HTTPD on the server end, it shouldn't be a huge problem to do stream seeking with MP3s. It's just those darn VBR streams...
Of course, the actual implementation of seeking MP3 streams over the internet (via Ice/ShoutCast) probably wouldn't be pretty. However, far as I can determine, it should work with constant bitrate streams. As long as they're not realtime streams (but afaik RealPlayer and its ilk can't do that either, for obvious reasons).
XMMS can get through an HTTP proxy. Go to Preferences->Audio I/O Plugins, then select the MPEG 1/2/3 Player plugin, and click the Configure button. One of those tabs (I can't remember offhand) has a proxy option field. Just fill in the address (host:port) of your proxy, and it should use it.
Gee, a "good" version, huh? Wish they'd do that for Linux. Also, I wish they'd dump whatever widget set they're using (looks like highly-customized Motif) and use Gtk+ (if they MUST do C++, use the Gtk-- bindings or SOMETHING)... I just think the RealPlayer/Linux GUI is ugly, and they could do a LOT better with a different widget set. And DGA support (for fullscreen playback) would be good too.
Re:He has no business installing an OS!
on
CNN Installs Linux
·
· Score: 1
Number one is untrue and elitist
Don't think so. Give your average (l)user a machine with a partitioned hard disk (this is giving them one point IN THEIR FAVOR) with JUST a DOS boot disk and a Win95/98 install CD. I don't think they'd be able to get a machine bootable (i.e., get the CD-ROM usable) to get to the actual install phase. At least with NT, it has boot disks that automate the device detection/enabling (like the Linux installer disks).
Also, this person (guy?) claims to have "programmed" (?) at some point in the past. Yet this person has no idea what an OS kernel is? I'd think that to program more than 3-4 years ago took a decent grounding in the basics of how the OS and other lowlevel services work. This seems like a lot of bullshit to me.
Well, pppd on Linux can be built with CHAP-80 support (iirc, the patch is included with the ppp source package, and you have to get a DES library to do it, but it does work).
Where do you get 64 Gb from 32 bits of address space? It'd be more like 32 Gb (4 GBytes).
Re:Suspend works on my laptop and I don't know why
on
On Linux Laptops
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· Score: 1
I recall hearing that (at least on IBM notebooks with the suspend-to-disk (what they refer to as Hibernation) feature) the first partition needed to be a DOS partition, at least big enough to hold the system-image file, and you just had to initialize it in DOS (don't know if you had to do it on each boot - if so, you'd probably hafta run the little init utility then use loadlin to jump to Linux, but if it only needs the file to be inited, then you could just use LILO). Dunno if that helps any, but this is what I recall from a webpage I came across once some time ago...
Re:Running linux on a Toshiba Satellite 2595XDVD
on
On Linux Laptops
·
· Score: 1
I don't have a notebook myself... but what video and audio chipsets is the 2595XDVD outfitted with? The NeoMagic chips (which many notebooks have used in the past) are supported as of XFree 3.3.3, afaik, and many of the ESS Technology audio chips used in notebooks are supported in Linux. (Not all, sadly, but it's being worked on.) So it might work better than you think, depending on what it's got.
Umm. Only the Xeon CPUs have the 36-bit address bus (versus 32-bit for the standard PIIs - and probably the standard PIIIs also) allowing addressing up to 64 GB of RAM. Also, using those top 4 address bits takes special OS support, and AFAIK Linux doesn't support that as of yet, unless these Siemens/SuSE kernel mods also allow for that.
Improper maybe. But come on, be realistic. We're all human here. (Okay, I'm assuming we are all human here. I think this is a safe assumption. Let me know if I'm in error.:) Therefore, we're going to form certain biases like that, regardless of it being improper or what have you. Personally, I wouldn't mind him at all if he'd stop referring to himself in the third person. That's the most damn annoying thing about him. (As others have noted.)
Actually, he's right - S3 acquired Diamond, so once Diamond sells off its remaining stock of nVidia Riva-based and 3Dfx Voodoo(2|Banshee)-based cards, they're gonna be strictly making S3 Savage-based cards.
Apparently internal problems (including embezzlement) are what's ailing Hercules. Or at least, that's the current word on the street about it. They made many good cards, but this (and the Voodoo Rush fiasco, and their making the old Herc mono cards way-back-when) will probably be what they'll be remembered for in the future. Sigh.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it can only qualify as C2 secure with no network connection and no removable media whatsoever (that includes floppy, CD-ROM, Zip, Jaz, or any other removable-media storage device).
When I can run Solaris on a cheap Pentium box, I'll let you know how this comparison works.
Well, really, you can. It's called Solaris/x86. I don't know that I'd use it (most Sun experts I've talked to say that Solaris/x86 is pretty bad, and if you want Solaris, go for SPARC), but hey. Yes Virginia, There Is Solaris on Intel.
The 128 MB swap size issue is no longer true. At least, as of sometime in the 2.1.x series, carrying forward to 2.2.x and 2.3.x (obviously).
I thought groups were for some measure of finer-grained access control too. ACLs would be nice. There are people working on that, though. Oh yea, and everything in Unix is treated as a file. That might have something to do with why security is applied to files. Hee.
Oh yeah, and NT's "journalling" filesystem, isn't. It journals on metadata only. (If you don't know - that makes it completely worthless.)
dselect is slowly being tossed away in favor of the new 'apt' (advanced package tool) system that's being developed. And that's just fine by me - I hated dselect. It screwed up my first-ever Debian (slink) install. I was brave though, and went back and used the (still infantile) apt system instead, and it worked MUCH better. apt-get makes updating an install easy as pie, and console-apt is developing nicely (it has some bugs, yes, but it's quite usable even so).
What Linux need is some stuff arround RPMs (or DEBs). This will be a way to access a repository of RPMs to automatically download (asking first would be a good idea) any dependencies. This woulld allow one to create a RPM with nothing in it but dependencies. So one install this RPM and all the other RPM refered in it will be downloaded and installed.
Sounds something like Debian. apt-get is your friend, and an ncurses frontend is being developed as well. (Don't know about the status of the gnome apt frontend tho.)
then answer some questions to get everything updated to the latest (at least, everything that's installed as a package - and Debian has a package for most everything out there).
If you really need a more stable system, go for Slink (aka Debian v2.1, Potato is being actively developed), but for all the latest updates, go with Potato.
The newer Mendocino-series Celeron CPUs (that actually have L2 cache) aren't that bad. I have a Cel400A in my system now, OC'd to 450 (75 MHz base, 6x mult), and it's nearly as fast as a PII-450. Also, PII's cache only runs at half CPU core speed (despite being larger than that of the Celerons) while the Celeron A (Mendocino) cache runs at full core speed.
So really, it's not THAT bad. If you're on a budget, the speed is decent.
But GNU GhostScript is relicensed under the GPL, so that shouldn't be an issue. If they were using Aladdin GhostScript 5.50, then it'd be an issue...
No. (That's the short answer)
:)
MP3, in simple terms of structure, is just a stream of MPEG frames. Each frame has its own information on the bitrate of the data contained in it. You can start playback at any point in the frame stream. That's why you can have "live" streams that are in MP3 format. (We've all listened to that guy from Canada with his scanner hooked to his computer, streaming cell phone calls...
Even if you couldn't, you could just fetch the first frame (or 2 or 3) and then use that as the basis on which to seek. Besides, you'd have to fetch at least the first frame anyway, to determine the bitrate so you can do the calculation for running time. (Of course, this still depends on it being a constant-bitrate stream. VBR streams still won't work. You'd need some kind of metadata stored in a descriptor file of some kind, or something...)
I've had just a couple minor oddities with my Dxr3 kit (one of which seems specific to "The Matrix")...
First of all, when I unpause while connected to a TV, the image tends to do one of 2 things: go black-and-white or get jittery. I can make the weirdness go away by flipping the video back to the PC display, then back to TV output. (Seems to happen when watching widescreen format movies only.)
Also, (more minor) when using the menus, the selection pointer will sometimes start out on something other than the first menu item, but if I press "Enter", it'll perform the action of the first menu item anyway.
The other one is specific to "The Matrix": The "White Rabbit" overlay that is supposed to show up in some scenes doesn't show up until I play the movie a second time. Is this intended, or is this really a bug?
Has anyone else experienced this? I'd just like to know if I'm mental, or what. (I did update the player software to the latest version from Creative's site.)
Yea, there's that audio track... but there's also a third audio track (marked as English in the language selection menu) that is a music-only soundtrack. I haven't yet listened to it, tho. Anyone else listened to it? How is it?
Hmm. Music-only soundtrack with subtitles... could be interesting.
BTW, has anyone else had a problem with the Matrix DVD where the "White Rabbit" overlay for certain scenes where you're supposed to be able to jump to alternate views only shows up the second time it's been played while your player (or machine, in my case - I bought a Creative Dxr3 kit) is on? I don't think it's _supposed_ to be that way.
Heh. Being able to answer Jamie Zawinski's question. Cool. :)
Now, for my answer:
The main problem is in determining the length (in time, not bytes) of the stream. A lot of the streams that are played over the Internet are encoded using a VBR (variable bitrate) encoder, so you have to check all the MPEG frame headers for their bitrates, do some magic, and get the actual running time of the stream (that kinda defeats the whole purpose of streaming, tho).
If the stream is non-VBR, getting the first frame, getting the content length, and a little math yield the actual running time, and with a byteserving HTTPD on the server end, it shouldn't be a huge problem to do stream seeking with MP3s. It's just those darn VBR streams...
Of course, the actual implementation of seeking MP3 streams over the internet (via Ice/ShoutCast) probably wouldn't be pretty. However, far as I can determine, it should work with constant bitrate streams. As long as they're not realtime streams (but afaik RealPlayer and its ilk can't do that either, for obvious reasons).
XMMS can get through an HTTP proxy. Go to Preferences->Audio I/O Plugins, then select the MPEG 1/2/3 Player plugin, and click the Configure button. One of those tabs (I can't remember offhand) has a proxy option field. Just fill in the address (host:port) of your proxy, and it should use it.
Gee, a "good" version, huh? Wish they'd do that for Linux. Also, I wish they'd dump whatever widget set they're using (looks like highly-customized Motif) and use Gtk+ (if they MUST do C++, use the Gtk-- bindings or SOMETHING)... I just think the RealPlayer/Linux GUI is ugly, and they could do a LOT better with a different widget set. And DGA support (for fullscreen playback) would be good too.
Number one is untrue and elitist
Don't think so. Give your average (l)user a machine with a partitioned hard disk (this is giving them one point IN THEIR FAVOR) with JUST a DOS boot disk and a Win95/98 install CD. I don't think they'd be able to get a machine bootable (i.e., get the CD-ROM usable) to get to the actual install phase. At least with NT, it has boot disks that automate the device detection/enabling (like the Linux installer disks).
Also, this person (guy?) claims to have "programmed" (?) at some point in the past. Yet this person has no idea what an OS kernel is? I'd think that to program more than 3-4 years ago took a decent grounding in the basics of how the OS and other lowlevel services work. This seems like a lot of bullshit to me.
Well sure, no one's born knowing Unix
:)
Well, maybe YOU weren't. My parents had UNIX knowledge implanted in my brain shortly after birth. It comes in very handy.
</ridiculous>
Well, pppd on Linux can be built with CHAP-80 support (iirc, the patch is included with the ppp source package, and you have to get a DES library to do it, but it does work).
Where do you get 64 Gb from 32 bits of address space? It'd be more like 32 Gb (4 GBytes).
I recall hearing that (at least on IBM notebooks with the suspend-to-disk (what they refer to as Hibernation) feature) the first partition needed to be a DOS partition, at least big enough to hold the system-image file, and you just had to initialize it in DOS (don't know if you had to do it on each boot - if so, you'd probably hafta run the little init utility then use loadlin to jump to Linux, but if it only needs the file to be inited, then you could just use LILO). Dunno if that helps any, but this is what I recall from a webpage I came across once some time ago...
I don't have a notebook myself... but what video and audio chipsets is the 2595XDVD outfitted with? The NeoMagic chips (which many notebooks have used in the past) are supported as of XFree 3.3.3, afaik, and many of the ESS Technology audio chips used in notebooks are supported in Linux. (Not all, sadly, but it's being worked on.) So it might work better than you think, depending on what it's got.
Umm. Only the Xeon CPUs have the 36-bit address bus (versus 32-bit for the standard PIIs - and probably the standard PIIIs also) allowing addressing up to 64 GB of RAM. Also, using those top 4 address bits takes special OS support, and AFAIK Linux doesn't support that as of yet, unless these Siemens/SuSE kernel mods also allow for that.
Improper maybe. But come on, be realistic. We're all human here. (Okay, I'm assuming we are all human here. I think this is a safe assumption. Let me know if I'm in error. :) Therefore, we're going to form certain biases like that, regardless of it being improper or what have you. Personally, I wouldn't mind him at all if he'd stop referring to himself in the third person. That's the most damn annoying thing about him. (As others have noted.)
Actually, he's right - S3 acquired Diamond, so once Diamond sells off its remaining stock of nVidia Riva-based and 3Dfx Voodoo(2|Banshee)-based cards, they're gonna be strictly making S3 Savage-based cards.
Dave Cutler talking out of his ass. That's what it was. He wants to create a UNIX-killer. What'd UNIX ever do to him? :)
Apparently internal problems (including embezzlement) are what's ailing Hercules. Or at least, that's the current word on the street about it. They made many good cards, but this (and the Voodoo Rush fiasco, and their making the old Herc mono cards way-back-when) will probably be what they'll be remembered for in the future. Sigh.