You mean the one that rarely, if ever, exists on US keyboards? The last time I actually saw one was on a French-Canadian keyboard. When I was in Quebec. Where they actually use that key.
inetd has nothing to do with networking per se. It doesn't "let you network your computer" - it's just for spawning certain network-facing (usually very simple) services. Most services anyone cares about certainly won't run out of it. And, as others have mentioned, not every server uses NFS or NIS, making portmap unnecessary on most servers (not all; however, if you need to run fam or something on your server, you should be able to make it listen only on INADDR_LOCALHOST, to avoid exposing it to the whole world). These are usually the first daemons I remove or disable on a new install - or replace with openbsd's inetd, if I'm going to be running any inetd-hosted services.
2k3 Datacenter can't support 128 GB on i386; it's not possible, as PAE only adds an extra 4 address bits (going from 32 to 36 bits of physical address space). Also, there are still user process limitations that make it impossible for apps like, say, database servers to address more than 3 GB (not 4 GB; it's a limitation due to kernel address space mappings in a process). x86_64 wipes that out easily, so for healthy sized virtualization environments, it's definitely the preferred environment (and you can still run your i386 apps transparently).
Yes, I own a HDTV, but I won't be going out to re-purchase my DVDs in a new format.
Well, unlike with the VHS to DVD transition, you can (and almost certainly will) have one player that can handle both DVDs and either HD-DVDs or Blu-Ray discs (or both, at least in some consumer players). Your DVD collection will continue to work just fine for the forseeable future, and you can still buy new movies in a hi-def format. Maybe you don't care - however, I do, and the PS3 does pique my interest. Thus far, I've not seen anything on X-Box360 that makes it a "must have" to me. so I'm waiting till the PS3 hits the streets before I make up my mind.
The failure (yes, failure) of UMD movies doesn't necessarily mean anything as far as Blu-Ray's success. You want to know why?
UMDs are *only* playable on the PSP. And as a bonus - you can't watch the video from your PSP on a TV.
This is a whole different ballgame from Blu-Ray - where PS3 is a major upcoming player, but far from the only one. And you can watch Blu-Ray discs on any TV. It's not locked to a handheld only device. Keep in mind, I own - and like - the PSP (I even have a 4 GB Memory Stick Duo for it). I like ripping movies and putting them on it for when I'm traveling. However, there's no use in buying movies on UMD, because I'm paying the same price as for a DVD - and I get (a) no special features and (b) locked to the PSP forever. Not such a good deal.
Given that TCP/IP doesn't work that way, no. IP routing uses a naive next-hop-only routing arrangement; all a single station knows is the next station to pass the packet on to. It doesn't know where it goes beyond that, and has no control over it.
Because they're just obsessed with the idea that if there's a market where money is being made, then they need to buy, cheat or steal their way into it. If *anyone* else is making money at it, they think that (a) they can do so, and (b) they should own that market too. It just seems to be Microsoft's outlook on business that they must have a finger in every pie.
Re:Add Access Control Lists!!
on
EXT4 Is Coming
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· Score: 1
You mean like the ones you get when you mount an ext2 (or ext3) filesystem with the 'acl' attribute? Most distribution kernels already turn on the feature, and it's been in the mainline kernel since 2.6.0 (and I believe it was incorporated sometime late in 2.4.x as well).
I'm going to keep lobbying for IEEE 1275-1994, thanks. (That's OpenFirmware, in case any of you heathens don't know. It's still the only boot ROM with its own song!
Sure, VHS is still "out there", in much the same way that vinyl is still "out there" - you can get a few releases on it, but in terms of common use, it's mostly dead - it has niche uses, but the VHS selection is quickly shrinking at retail stores, assuming they sell any VHS at all. (Fewer and fewer places even bother to keep any VHS, less every day.)
Also, the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players will play all your existing DVDs - unlike the VHS to DVD changeover where (obviously) your investment in VHS was all but obliterated. Supposedly hybrid HD-DVD/Blu-Ray decks aren't too far off, so you'll be able to get one player and play whatever's available. Sure, it'll be expensive initially, but the prices will go down once the technology's proven and the market starts to take it up. That's what early adopters are for.
HVD/FMD/whatever technology, using a fluorescing media layer, has been technology "just on the horizon!" for the past 5-10 years; companies that were going to bring it to market have winked out of existence on several occasions. It certainly sounds like cool technology, having multiple layers and using fluorescent properties to extract the data instead of reflection/refraction; however it seems like a *very* hard thing to mass produce. And really, if its track record to date means anything, I think that's been borne out in the fact that it hasn't yet even approached mass production. Maybe eventually it will come to market and wipe the floor with HD-DVD/BluRay/whatever; however now is not that time.
Is someone seriously saying this is news? I know my dad subscribed to AOL several years ago (I never got the whole story as to why), and got the same runaround - he had to call multiple times before he finally got them to cancel the stupid thing. How do you think they have such ridiculously inflated subscription numbers? Because they have good service?
One problem is that it is not effective for audio software, neither for synthesis programs nor for low-latency recording. I realize this isn't the main purpose of VMWare, but it is my primary application for Windows.
I don't see anyone else going after it; also, it's a very *very* narrow sector of potential use. It's not like it's going to get VMware a lot more sales. And really, given VMware's primary aim, it's not really that interesting to work on. It's not that it can't be done, but the difficulty curve is steep enough that it's not worth doing. 3D graphics for guest OSes is a feature that's apparently partially implemented, but also has a steep difficulty curve, and a narrow target market.
The other big problem is economic. In order to use WindowsXP or anything else with WPA, I need a separate licence for the instance under VMWare (different for EACH VM!), and another licence for the WindowsXP instance in the dual boot. This is an unreasonable restriction, in my opinion.
Not VMware's fault; that's the way Microsoft's OSes are licensed. Don't beat on the messenger here. You have to, if I'm not mistaken, do the same with MS Virtual Server, so this is not VMware specific at all.
That's like asking if "Joe Public" knows what MMX and SSE are, or if he knows what superscalar design or out-of-order execution. He probably doesn't know what level-2 cache is either. "Joe Public" typically barely knows what a processor is, other than "it makes mah com-poo-ter go!" Explaining dual core to them is going to be like explaining SMP or the differences between AMD and Intel CPUs - they don't know, and they don't really care.
Big, gaping holes (the security kind)
on
User Mode Linux
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· Score: 1
Isn't loadable module support still considered a huge security hole in UML? Last I heard (from a guy who used and liked UML), to have a prayer of being secure, the UML kernel had to be built with no module loading support, because you could just build a module for the UML kernel, load it in, and make it do things in the host environment at will?
I dunno, to me, that leaves UML in the category of "interesting toy", even "useful for development"... but not really something you can safely use in production. Or was he mistaken? It seems correct to me, since the only real change is modifying the Linux kernel code to run as a process on another Linux kernel, so it would have all the potential pitfalls of that (i.e., loading untrusted code via runtime loading/linking means it can take total control).
It's not that unlikely; probably Microsoft would include some kind of extension to IE, the Windows shell, or what-have-you that views PDF - with their extensions, of course. And if you can't read the document in your (non-Microsoft-blessed) PDF viewer? "Gee, that's unfortunate, it works just fine on my computer... what's it run? I guess it's called 'Vista', you should try it!" Far as they're concerned, it's not Microsoft's problem, or their problem - they can read it, it must be your problem. How are you going to fight that?
Why is bungie still called bungie? Shouldn't they just be called MS game division?
Because Microsoft still wants people to believe that Bungie still has a shred of independence. I'd say that this pretty well proves that they do not - if they did, this (the fantasy that a port of a now several years old repetitive sequel to a repetitive shooter targeted for an as-yet-unreleased OS being just the thing to push people to buy the OS and new hardware to boot) would have been laughed right out of the board room. Microsoft just needs to end the facade.
Of course, you forget the part where SuperDisk drives apparently committed mass suicide - the place I worked at the time had *many* SuperDisk drives (mostly external USB, though I had an internal IDE SuperDisk drive in my home system at the time as well). They all started failing to read disks, many of them completely shorting out to the point where the users smelled smoke and the units totally ceased operation. I seem to recall a major class-action suit against Imation/3M not long after that.
There was ongoing development for the PlayStation/PSone for several years after the PlayStation 2 hit the streets. There are still GBA games being developed, even though the DS has been out for awhile (don't give me the naming thing, DS is supposed to be the "next leap" in practice, if not in name). It's become more common in recent years, as the "current" systems are still out of the price range of some more casual gamers, and the old systems still remain quite useful, for development of titles to continue.
I'm sure that at this point MS can't wait to get out from under the old XBox though, as it's probably getting kinda expensive sourcing thouse 8-10 GB hard drives, Celeron 733 CPUs and custom graphics chips (since they're one of a quickly dwindling list of consumers for those particular devices - supply and demand, kiddies). They're selling them cheap, but I'm sure the parts still cost well more than the whole, and it's most likely killing them a little inside with each unit one of their contractors ship out. I've no doubt that's a major reason for the XBox's relatively early demise.
No, that would be the slot ID, which as others have pointed out, is *completely* different from the VendorID/ProductID tuple burned into every PCI device's ROM to uniquely (or in the case of a few vendors, not so uniquely) identify just what a particular PCI device is.
So your solution to poor coding habits is to depend on an IDE to do it for you? I don't think that's a good answer. You should have a basic understanding of the syntax of your chosen language - if a statement terminator is necessary, what it is, how blocks are opened and closed, and so on. Depending on an IDE to do it for you is a copout, IMO.
What if, as others have mentioned, you can't use your IDE of choice, but are stuck with another that doesn't give you this feature? What if it's not available/broken for a period? What then? You just can't write code without it? I take advantage of vim's syntax highlighting, but I'm not dependent on it - I can still write code without syntax highlighting, autocompletion, or any of that. If you can't, you're not learning the language, you've learned the development environment.
An IDE is not equivalent to a hammer. It's more like a nailgun - saves a lot of time, and can be very useful, but it's not necessarily needed all the time, and may be overkill. Would you give your kid a nailgun instead of a hammer and nails? I don't think so.
"Using a rock" would be more like hand-editing machine code into a binary file - something which is doable, but generally considered sufficiently primitive that it's not something you'd teach a student to do. You might mention, and even spend a bit of time explaining, that things were once done that way, but that it's impractical for any real general use.
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Strangely, I have an iSight plugged into my (x86, non-Apple) Linux box, and it works just fine...
You mean the one that rarely, if ever, exists on US keyboards? The last time I actually saw one was on a French-Canadian keyboard. When I was in Quebec. Where they actually use that key.
inetd has nothing to do with networking per se. It doesn't "let you network your computer" - it's just for spawning certain network-facing (usually very simple) services. Most services anyone cares about certainly won't run out of it. And, as others have mentioned, not every server uses NFS or NIS, making portmap unnecessary on most servers (not all; however, if you need to run fam or something on your server, you should be able to make it listen only on INADDR_LOCALHOST, to avoid exposing it to the whole world). These are usually the first daemons I remove or disable on a new install - or replace with openbsd's inetd, if I'm going to be running any inetd-hosted services.
2k3 Datacenter can't support 128 GB on i386; it's not possible, as PAE only adds an extra 4 address bits (going from 32 to 36 bits of physical address space). Also, there are still user process limitations that make it impossible for apps like, say, database servers to address more than 3 GB (not 4 GB; it's a limitation due to kernel address space mappings in a process). x86_64 wipes that out easily, so for healthy sized virtualization environments, it's definitely the preferred environment (and you can still run your i386 apps transparently).
Yes, I own a HDTV, but I won't be going out to re-purchase my DVDs in a new format.
Well, unlike with the VHS to DVD transition, you can (and almost certainly will) have one player that can handle both DVDs and either HD-DVDs or Blu-Ray discs (or both, at least in some consumer players). Your DVD collection will continue to work just fine for the forseeable future, and you can still buy new movies in a hi-def format. Maybe you don't care - however, I do, and the PS3 does pique my interest. Thus far, I've not seen anything on X-Box360 that makes it a "must have" to me. so I'm waiting till the PS3 hits the streets before I make up my mind.
The failure (yes, failure) of UMD movies doesn't necessarily mean anything as far as Blu-Ray's success. You want to know why?
UMDs are *only* playable on the PSP. And as a bonus - you can't watch the video from your PSP on a TV.
This is a whole different ballgame from Blu-Ray - where PS3 is a major upcoming player, but far from the only one. And you can watch Blu-Ray discs on any TV. It's not locked to a handheld only device. Keep in mind, I own - and like - the PSP (I even have a 4 GB Memory Stick Duo for it). I like ripping movies and putting them on it for when I'm traveling. However, there's no use in buying movies on UMD, because I'm paying the same price as for a DVD - and I get (a) no special features and (b) locked to the PSP forever. Not such a good deal.
Given that TCP/IP doesn't work that way, no. IP routing uses a naive next-hop-only routing arrangement; all a single station knows is the next station to pass the packet on to. It doesn't know where it goes beyond that, and has no control over it.
Because they're just obsessed with the idea that if there's a market where money is being made, then they need to buy, cheat or steal their way into it. If *anyone* else is making money at it, they think that (a) they can do so, and (b) they should own that market too. It just seems to be Microsoft's outlook on business that they must have a finger in every pie.
You mean like the ones you get when you mount an ext2 (or ext3) filesystem with the 'acl' attribute? Most distribution kernels already turn on the feature, and it's been in the mainline kernel since 2.6.0 (and I believe it was incorporated sometime late in 2.4.x as well).
I'm going to keep lobbying for IEEE 1275-1994, thanks. (That's OpenFirmware, in case any of you heathens don't know. It's still the only boot ROM with its own song!
It's probably .flv, preventing you from just playing it (though ffmpeg should let you convert it to something not so terrible).
Sure, VHS is still "out there", in much the same way that vinyl is still "out there" - you can get a few releases on it, but in terms of common use, it's mostly dead - it has niche uses, but the VHS selection is quickly shrinking at retail stores, assuming they sell any VHS at all. (Fewer and fewer places even bother to keep any VHS, less every day.)
Also, the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players will play all your existing DVDs - unlike the VHS to DVD changeover where (obviously) your investment in VHS was all but obliterated. Supposedly hybrid HD-DVD/Blu-Ray decks aren't too far off, so you'll be able to get one player and play whatever's available. Sure, it'll be expensive initially, but the prices will go down once the technology's proven and the market starts to take it up. That's what early adopters are for.
HVD/FMD/whatever technology, using a fluorescing media layer, has been technology "just on the horizon!" for the past 5-10 years; companies that were going to bring it to market have winked out of existence on several occasions. It certainly sounds like cool technology, having multiple layers and using fluorescent properties to extract the data instead of reflection/refraction; however it seems like a *very* hard thing to mass produce. And really, if its track record to date means anything, I think that's been borne out in the fact that it hasn't yet even approached mass production. Maybe eventually it will come to market and wipe the floor with HD-DVD/BluRay/whatever; however now is not that time.
Is someone seriously saying this is news? I know my dad subscribed to AOL several years ago (I never got the whole story as to why), and got the same runaround - he had to call multiple times before he finally got them to cancel the stupid thing. How do you think they have such ridiculously inflated subscription numbers? Because they have good service?
Too bad there was no NT 3.0... :)
One problem is that it is not effective for audio software, neither for synthesis programs nor for low-latency recording. I realize this isn't the main purpose of VMWare, but it is my primary application for Windows.
I don't see anyone else going after it; also, it's a very *very* narrow sector of potential use. It's not like it's going to get VMware a lot more sales. And really, given VMware's primary aim, it's not really that interesting to work on. It's not that it can't be done, but the difficulty curve is steep enough that it's not worth doing. 3D graphics for guest OSes is a feature that's apparently partially implemented, but also has a steep difficulty curve, and a narrow target market.
The other big problem is economic. In order to use WindowsXP or anything else with WPA, I need a separate licence for the instance under VMWare (different for EACH VM!), and another licence for the WindowsXP instance in the dual boot. This is an unreasonable restriction, in my opinion.
Not VMware's fault; that's the way Microsoft's OSes are licensed. Don't beat on the messenger here. You have to, if I'm not mistaken, do the same with MS Virtual Server, so this is not VMware specific at all.
That's like asking if "Joe Public" knows what MMX and SSE are, or if he knows what superscalar design or out-of-order execution. He probably doesn't know what level-2 cache is either. "Joe Public" typically barely knows what a processor is, other than "it makes mah com-poo-ter go!" Explaining dual core to them is going to be like explaining SMP or the differences between AMD and Intel CPUs - they don't know, and they don't really care.
Isn't loadable module support still considered a huge security hole in UML? Last I heard (from a guy who used and liked UML), to have a prayer of being secure, the UML kernel had to be built with no module loading support, because you could just build a module for the UML kernel, load it in, and make it do things in the host environment at will?
I dunno, to me, that leaves UML in the category of "interesting toy", even "useful for development"... but not really something you can safely use in production. Or was he mistaken? It seems correct to me, since the only real change is modifying the Linux kernel code to run as a process on another Linux kernel, so it would have all the potential pitfalls of that (i.e., loading untrusted code via runtime loading/linking means it can take total control).
It's not that unlikely; probably Microsoft would include some kind of extension to IE, the Windows shell, or what-have-you that views PDF - with their extensions, of course. And if you can't read the document in your (non-Microsoft-blessed) PDF viewer? "Gee, that's unfortunate, it works just fine on my computer... what's it run? I guess it's called 'Vista', you should try it!" Far as they're concerned, it's not Microsoft's problem, or their problem - they can read it, it must be your problem. How are you going to fight that?
Why is bungie still called bungie? Shouldn't they just be called MS game division?
Because Microsoft still wants people to believe that Bungie still has a shred of independence. I'd say that this pretty well proves that they do not - if they did, this (the fantasy that a port of a now several years old repetitive sequel to a repetitive shooter targeted for an as-yet-unreleased OS being just the thing to push people to buy the OS and new hardware to boot) would have been laughed right out of the board room. Microsoft just needs to end the facade.
Of course, you forget the part where SuperDisk drives apparently committed mass suicide - the place I worked at the time had *many* SuperDisk drives (mostly external USB, though I had an internal IDE SuperDisk drive in my home system at the time as well). They all started failing to read disks, many of them completely shorting out to the point where the users smelled smoke and the units totally ceased operation. I seem to recall a major class-action suit against Imation/3M not long after that.
There was ongoing development for the PlayStation/PSone for several years after the PlayStation 2 hit the streets. There are still GBA games being developed, even though the DS has been out for awhile (don't give me the naming thing, DS is supposed to be the "next leap" in practice, if not in name). It's become more common in recent years, as the "current" systems are still out of the price range of some more casual gamers, and the old systems still remain quite useful, for development of titles to continue.
I'm sure that at this point MS can't wait to get out from under the old XBox though, as it's probably getting kinda expensive sourcing thouse 8-10 GB hard drives, Celeron 733 CPUs and custom graphics chips (since they're one of a quickly dwindling list of consumers for those particular devices - supply and demand, kiddies). They're selling them cheap, but I'm sure the parts still cost well more than the whole, and it's most likely killing them a little inside with each unit one of their contractors ship out. I've no doubt that's a major reason for the XBox's relatively early demise.
No, that would be the slot ID, which as others have pointed out, is *completely* different from the VendorID/ProductID tuple burned into every PCI device's ROM to uniquely (or in the case of a few vendors, not so uniquely) identify just what a particular PCI device is.
So your solution to poor coding habits is to depend on an IDE to do it for you? I don't think that's a good answer. You should have a basic understanding of the syntax of your chosen language - if a statement terminator is necessary, what it is, how blocks are opened and closed, and so on. Depending on an IDE to do it for you is a copout, IMO.
What if, as others have mentioned, you can't use your IDE of choice, but are stuck with another that doesn't give you this feature? What if it's not available/broken for a period? What then? You just can't write code without it? I take advantage of vim's syntax highlighting, but I'm not dependent on it - I can still write code without syntax highlighting, autocompletion, or any of that. If you can't, you're not learning the language, you've learned the development environment.
An IDE is not equivalent to a hammer. It's more like a nailgun - saves a lot of time, and can be very useful, but it's not necessarily needed all the time, and may be overkill. Would you give your kid a nailgun instead of a hammer and nails? I don't think so.
"Using a rock" would be more like hand-editing machine code into a binary file - something which is doable, but generally considered sufficiently primitive that it's not something you'd teach a student to do. You might mention, and even spend a bit of time explaining, that things were once done that way, but that it's impractical for any real general use.