OpenVZ is a subset of a commercial product called Virtuozzo. It provides "virtual private server" functionality similar to FreeBSD jail() or Solaris Zones, including a private virtual network stack, private process space, and such, to each instance. However, it all runs on top of a single (specially modified) Linux kernel. Its advantages are in easy resource sharing among instances - since everything is running under one kernel, resource sharing (disk, memory) is made simpler. However, it has the disadvantage of less isolation - if the kernel crashes or is subverted, the entire system is at risk. Also, unlike with Xen, for example, you can only run Linux distributions (with the same kernel version). You cannot run other OSes (like NetBSD, FreeBSD, etc.).
It doesn't run multiple kernels. It's like a FreeBSD jail() on steroids - has a virtual local network stack and process space, but everything is still running under a common shared kernel. IMO Xen is still far better (and many people agree with me, it seems).
As far as Solaris Zone setup time, I have my own scripts that already set up a new Xen domain in a matter of a couple minutes from scratch for several Linux distributions - Sun's hardly doing anything earth-shaking there...
But they don't even bother to give something back by opening their hardware specs so the people that wrote/write BSD can use their OS on Apple hardware?
Well, if you really want to call it "theirs". The wireless chipset that the "Airport Extreme" cards are built around are produced by Broadcom - and Broadcom has had a multitude of excuses why they can't release open drivers. If you open up your Apple hardware, you'll notice a lot of chips made by other companies, and they're bound to the conditions of the license they acquired use of the technology under. It'd be nice if they could release specs, I agree - but this is one situation where my and your desire on it is irrelevant to them.
The Carbon API isn't going away - my understanding is that those APIs will still be available for applications to use. It's not an emulation/virtualization layer like, say, Classic. Besides, I'm sure there's still no shortage of developers inured in the pre-Cocoa ways of doing things, so killing off Carbon would be silly of them.
If a DVD looks that crap to you, the highly-paid compression engineers weren't doing their job. A *properly encoded* DVD stream looks way better than VHS, in every way.
I need it. I have a 46" CRT projection HD set, and I own several movies on DVD. However, seeing them on cable in high-def puts the DVDs *to shame*. "The Fifth Element", for example (one I own), looks good on DVD, don't get me wrong. But the picture is so much clearer and prettier when I watch it on TNT in HD.
I'm just waiting for my PlayStation 3 - when it comes out, I'll be right there to get one. And Blu-Ray movies will be high on my list of "once I have my PS3" things to get.
Well, for a 4 year old laptop, if those are the only problems, you're doing pretty well. A lot of laptops would be nothing but scrap in half that time - just keep that in mind...
My employer bought me a used Pismo about two and a half years back (it's what I asked for) to run Linux. It was reasonably well taken care of, though the rear panel was all hosed up. I've been using it ever since.
I had to replace the display hinges recently after they failed. I've also replaced the battery - twice, unfortunately. The first time I bought an APC battery pack, thinking what a great deal it was - that was a mistake, I discovered. An Apple OEM pack worked far better. I also had to replace the drive after it died, though I was fortunately able to transfer all the files onto a FireWire hard disk and boot the machine from that while I waited for a new hard drive to arrive. Hooray for booting from FireWire. The drive was one of the older 12 GB TravelStars, so it wasn't too surprising that it ate itself.
The machine itself is still running nicely. It's not the fastest thing out there, but it runs great - I still have no reason to give it up, with the RAM maxed out at 1 GB.
I can only imagine that you were not using Debian sarge when doing this? I've installed Debian on a variety of HP's rackmount systems - including both the DL360 and the 380. Yes, including GRUB. This was not a challenge - I installed Debian on Compaq systems with SMART RAID controllers a good 5+ years ago (on a Compaq ProLiant 3000).
However, I don't install with ReiserFS - ever. I won't touch it with a 10-foot pole, mostly because Hans Reiser is certifiable. (That's another thread, however.)
That'd be a negative. I think that's kind of a hard problem to solve - and since the solution is *very* niche in scope, it's not one that is presently getting a huge time investment.
Also, even if the birth was (relatively) complication-free, reaching full-term in zero-G might make it fatal for a baby to return to Earth-level gravity. That would be a bitter pill to swallow, indeed.
What I'd really like to see is a means by which we can automagically deny telemarketers from reaching us. They could still try, but they'd never get patched to our personal line. I'm not sure the phone companies would be able to implement this, however.
Oh, they probably _could_... but it's not financially fattening enough for them to consider it worthwhile. They'd rather sell more services that are supposed to get rid of phone spam and don't - that way they get to bleed both sides of money. What a place to be, huh?
That's why I don't have a landline - just a cell phone. (Of course, rumor has it that that won't protect me much longer... sigh. All good things must end, eh?)
Well, unfortunately we're counteracting what, I think it's safe to say, is evolution in action. Some animals are unable to reproduce, for whatever reason, through whatever natural means. Should we then invest the effort to do the same thing for every mated pair of animals? Humans are animals, y'know. (We just happen to have large brains and the power of speech, and we think we're the center of the universe.)
The trouble is we're letting emotional issues get in the way of nature's ways doing their job. How much messing around is too much? And why aren't we telling couples who are unable to reproduce naturally, or that know their offspring would have serious conditions, that they should adopt?
MJ/l is megajoules per litre, which is a representation of potential stored energy per unit of mass. Of course, I'm not sure how good the quoted amount is exactly, relative to gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, etc.
At an application layer, you don't need to know or care whether your writing for x86, PPC or ARM, you write to the framework and APIs provided by the OS / runtime of your choice. If that OS/runtime works on other architectures you simply cross your fingers, say a little prayer and recompile.
Not exactly. Especially with anything requiring high performance, like using vector features of the host CPU, often requires some customization for the architecture. In Apple's case, they provide APIs for a lot of that sort of thing, but they can't cover every need.
My, admittedly limited, understand of OS writing is that the exact opposite is true. You are dealing with the processor directly and performance is crucial so ASM is used a fair bit.
Er... not _that_ much. Do you use Linux? Have you looked at the kernel? You should. Particularly you should observe the relatively small section of the kernel tree that's architecture specific, let alone the amount that's actually assembly. It's not that much really. That's because the kernel, once it knows the basic operations on the CPU, will be dealing with a lot of the same (or very similar) hardware regardless of the CPU - PCI bus controllers, display controllers, input devices, storage controllers, network controllers, IPC code, etc. The wide majority of things, once you get past the basics, are going to be pretty universal.
and yet Apple said that with just a single, secret, dept. they managed to get their microkernal up and flying on two vastly different system architectures. (I think microkernal is probably the key word here)
If they couldn't keep the core of the OS working on more than one architecture (and considering the pedigree of some of their developers, this should be a cakewalk), then I would have to call them "stupid". As was pointed out, OpenStep and Mach were already platform agnostic before Apple took an interest. That's what OS X is built on. And no, the microkernel has little, if anything to do with it, as OS X is not a "true microkernel" OS. It runs a mostly unmodified *BSD kernel on top of Mach, just making use of some handy Mach features (like its IPC, which is (ab)used widely as part of Aqua/Quartz).
My thought has always been, that if MACH is so well designed that it can be this easily ported to x86 and PPC simulateously, there is nothing stopping Apple from supporting Cell, ARM or SPARC within a few months of an announcement.
Er... Cell == 64-bit PPC core with lots of vector units strapped on. It wouldn't be much of a "port", and given they've abandoned the Power family, I doubt they'd turn around now. Apple doesn't care about SPARC - that's Sun's baby, and they're rather on the expensive side. (Oh yeah, and there's only one company making SPARC-based laptops - Tadpole - and they're not going to be setting any records for battery life.) ARM has lost its former glory now that it's owned by Intel (see xScale), these days it's almost exclusively used for embedded purposes. In short, you're drawing at straws.
I could see Apple shipping the boxtop mini, for 200 bucks that plugs straight into you Hi-Def TV and [...]
Er... no. Apple already has a business. They tried going in on the Pippin years ago, and that died a pretty quiet death. I doubt Steve Jobs cares a damn bit about the set-top box market.
Well, then by all rights it should do nothing at all. But the fact that (at least according to the story) it has the property of fighting it off _might_ be useful. Obviously there's more research to be done, but if this discovery could be used to halt the spread of HIV, I'd say that could be huge news.
It sounds more like you're letting the parents out of their responsibility. The parents are, in pretty much every sense, the party who is (or should be) in ultimate control of their kids. How are game age ratings, clearly denoted on game packages and explained clearly on the ESRB's web site (and explained as part of their advertising campaign), "hostile" to parents? If you can _read_, you should be able to understand them.
Lousy parenting is what shouldn't be accepted or explained away - parents need to step up and take a little responsibility.
I guess I don't consider cryptic zone files (ala DJBDNS) better than SQL tables. Structured storage is a very nice thing, and it makes it a lot easier to manage. Also, I've heard at least some good things about PowerAdmin (though I haven't used it myself, since our requirements were such that a custom frontend was necessary).
If you think that DJBDNS is as good as it gets, you really need to check out http://www.powerdns.com/. We switched to it at work (I pushed it, really), and I wrote a nice custom web-based frontend so our customers can manage their DNS domains independently - they can even create new ones as necessary. It's taken DNS out of the "necessary evil" realm, and brought it into a realm of being a "useful service". I recommend it heartily.
(No, I'm not a developer or otherwise affiliated with the project - just a very satisfied user.)
Slashdot Mirror
Other posts have covered it, but a quick summary:
OpenVZ is a subset of a commercial product called Virtuozzo. It provides "virtual private server" functionality similar to FreeBSD jail() or Solaris Zones, including a private virtual network stack, private process space, and such, to each instance. However, it all runs on top of a single (specially modified) Linux kernel. Its advantages are in easy resource sharing among instances - since everything is running under one kernel, resource sharing (disk, memory) is made simpler. However, it has the disadvantage of less isolation - if the kernel crashes or is subverted, the entire system is at risk. Also, unlike with Xen, for example, you can only run Linux distributions (with the same kernel version). You cannot run other OSes (like NetBSD, FreeBSD, etc.).
It doesn't run multiple kernels. It's like a FreeBSD jail() on steroids - has a virtual local network stack and process space, but everything is still running under a common shared kernel. IMO Xen is still far better (and many people agree with me, it seems).
As far as Solaris Zone setup time, I have my own scripts that already set up a new Xen domain in a matter of a couple minutes from scratch for several Linux distributions - Sun's hardly doing anything earth-shaking there...
But they don't even bother to give something back by opening their hardware specs so the people that wrote/write BSD can use their OS on Apple hardware?
Well, if you really want to call it "theirs". The wireless chipset that the "Airport Extreme" cards are built around are produced by Broadcom - and Broadcom has had a multitude of excuses why they can't release open drivers. If you open up your Apple hardware, you'll notice a lot of chips made by other companies, and they're bound to the conditions of the license they acquired use of the technology under. It'd be nice if they could release specs, I agree - but this is one situation where my and your desire on it is irrelevant to them.
The Carbon API isn't going away - my understanding is that those APIs will still be available for applications to use. It's not an emulation/virtualization layer like, say, Classic. Besides, I'm sure there's still no shortage of developers inured in the pre-Cocoa ways of doing things, so killing off Carbon would be silly of them.
Well really, if Windows "just works" on them, as has been rumored, then any x86 Linux distribution should work equally well, with no special changes.
If a DVD looks that crap to you, the highly-paid compression engineers weren't doing their job. A *properly encoded* DVD stream looks way better than VHS, in every way.
I need it. I have a 46" CRT projection HD set, and I own several movies on DVD. However, seeing them on cable in high-def puts the DVDs *to shame*. "The Fifth Element", for example (one I own), looks good on DVD, don't get me wrong. But the picture is so much clearer and prettier when I watch it on TNT in HD.
I'm just waiting for my PlayStation 3 - when it comes out, I'll be right there to get one. And Blu-Ray movies will be high on my list of "once I have my PS3" things to get.
Well, for a 4 year old laptop, if those are the only problems, you're doing pretty well. A lot of laptops would be nothing but scrap in half that time - just keep that in mind...
My employer bought me a used Pismo about two and a half years back (it's what I asked for) to run Linux. It was reasonably well taken care of, though the rear panel was all hosed up. I've been using it ever since.
I had to replace the display hinges recently after they failed. I've also replaced the battery - twice, unfortunately. The first time I bought an APC battery pack, thinking what a great deal it was - that was a mistake, I discovered. An Apple OEM pack worked far better. I also had to replace the drive after it died, though I was fortunately able to transfer all the files onto a FireWire hard disk and boot the machine from that while I waited for a new hard drive to arrive. Hooray for booting from FireWire. The drive was one of the older 12 GB TravelStars, so it wasn't too surprising that it ate itself.
The machine itself is still running nicely. It's not the fastest thing out there, but it runs great - I still have no reason to give it up, with the RAM maxed out at 1 GB.
I can only imagine that you were not using Debian sarge when doing this? I've installed Debian on a variety of HP's rackmount systems - including both the DL360 and the 380. Yes, including GRUB. This was not a challenge - I installed Debian on Compaq systems with SMART RAID controllers a good 5+ years ago (on a Compaq ProLiant 3000).
However, I don't install with ReiserFS - ever. I won't touch it with a 10-foot pole, mostly because Hans Reiser is certifiable. (That's another thread, however.)
Or it could be they don't believe in VTEC stickers...
That'd be a negative. I think that's kind of a hard problem to solve - and since the solution is *very* niche in scope, it's not one that is presently getting a huge time investment.
Also, even if the birth was (relatively) complication-free, reaching full-term in zero-G might make it fatal for a baby to return to Earth-level gravity. That would be a bitter pill to swallow, indeed.
What I'd really like to see is a means by which we can automagically deny telemarketers from reaching us. They could still try, but they'd never get patched to our personal line. I'm not sure the phone companies would be able to implement this, however.
Oh, they probably _could_... but it's not financially fattening enough for them to consider it worthwhile. They'd rather sell more services that are supposed to get rid of phone spam and don't - that way they get to bleed both sides of money. What a place to be, huh?
That's why I don't have a landline - just a cell phone. (Of course, rumor has it that that won't protect me much longer... sigh. All good things must end, eh?)
Well, unfortunately we're counteracting what, I think it's safe to say, is evolution in action. Some animals are unable to reproduce, for whatever reason, through whatever natural means. Should we then invest the effort to do the same thing for every mated pair of animals? Humans are animals, y'know. (We just happen to have large brains and the power of speech, and we think we're the center of the universe.)
The trouble is we're letting emotional issues get in the way of nature's ways doing their job. How much messing around is too much? And why aren't we telling couples who are unable to reproduce naturally, or that know their offspring would have serious conditions, that they should adopt?
Dear FEMA:
Stop whoring for Unca Bill. It's disgusting.
XOXO
American Geeks
Er, that's per unit of volume, not mass, since litres aren't grams...
MJ/l is megajoules per litre, which is a representation of potential stored energy per unit of mass. Of course, I'm not sure how good the quoted amount is exactly, relative to gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, etc.
That would be the TurboExpress. If you saw "Enemy of the State", you saw one of them.
Are you trying to tell me it's not true? I think research is in order. I'll start researching funding for this right away...
At an application layer, you don't need to know or care whether your writing for x86, PPC or ARM, you write to the framework and APIs provided by the OS / runtime of your choice. If that OS /runtime works on other architectures you simply cross your fingers, say a little prayer and recompile.
Not exactly. Especially with anything requiring high performance, like using vector features of the host CPU, often requires some customization for the architecture. In Apple's case, they provide APIs for a lot of that sort of thing, but they can't cover every need.
My, admittedly limited, understand of OS writing is that the exact opposite is true. You are dealing with the processor directly and performance is crucial so ASM is used a fair bit.
Er... not _that_ much. Do you use Linux? Have you looked at the kernel? You should. Particularly you should observe the relatively small section of the kernel tree that's architecture specific, let alone the amount that's actually assembly. It's not that much really. That's because the kernel, once it knows the basic operations on the CPU, will be dealing with a lot of the same (or very similar) hardware regardless of the CPU - PCI bus controllers, display controllers, input devices, storage controllers, network controllers, IPC code, etc. The wide majority of things, once you get past the basics, are going to be pretty universal.
and yet Apple said that with just a single, secret, dept. they managed to get their microkernal up and flying on two vastly different system architectures. (I think microkernal is probably the key word here)
If they couldn't keep the core of the OS working on more than one architecture (and considering the pedigree of some of their developers, this should be a cakewalk), then I would have to call them "stupid". As was pointed out, OpenStep and Mach were already platform agnostic before Apple took an interest. That's what OS X is built on. And no, the microkernel has little, if anything to do with it, as OS X is not a "true microkernel" OS. It runs a mostly unmodified *BSD kernel on top of Mach, just making use of some handy Mach features (like its IPC, which is (ab)used widely as part of Aqua/Quartz).
My thought has always been, that if MACH is so well designed that it can be this easily ported to x86 and PPC simulateously, there is nothing stopping Apple from supporting Cell, ARM or SPARC within a few months of an announcement.
Er... Cell == 64-bit PPC core with lots of vector units strapped on. It wouldn't be much of a "port", and given they've abandoned the Power family, I doubt they'd turn around now. Apple doesn't care about SPARC - that's Sun's baby, and they're rather on the expensive side. (Oh yeah, and there's only one company making SPARC-based laptops - Tadpole - and they're not going to be setting any records for battery life.) ARM has lost its former glory now that it's owned by Intel (see xScale), these days it's almost exclusively used for embedded purposes. In short, you're drawing at straws.
I could see Apple shipping the boxtop mini, for 200 bucks that plugs straight into you Hi-Def TV and [...]
Er... no. Apple already has a business. They tried going in on the Pippin years ago, and that died a pretty quiet death. I doubt Steve Jobs cares a damn bit about the set-top box market.
Well, then by all rights it should do nothing at all. But the fact that (at least according to the story) it has the property of fighting it off _might_ be useful. Obviously there's more research to be done, but if this discovery could be used to halt the spread of HIV, I'd say that could be huge news.
It sounds more like you're letting the parents out of their responsibility. The parents are, in pretty much every sense, the party who is (or should be) in ultimate control of their kids. How are game age ratings, clearly denoted on game packages and explained clearly on the ESRB's web site (and explained as part of their advertising campaign), "hostile" to parents? If you can _read_, you should be able to understand them.
Lousy parenting is what shouldn't be accepted or explained away - parents need to step up and take a little responsibility.
I guess I don't consider cryptic zone files (ala DJBDNS) better than SQL tables. Structured storage is a very nice thing, and it makes it a lot easier to manage. Also, I've heard at least some good things about PowerAdmin (though I haven't used it myself, since our requirements were such that a custom frontend was necessary).
If you think that DJBDNS is as good as it gets, you really need to check out http://www.powerdns.com/. We switched to it at work (I pushed it, really), and I wrote a nice custom web-based frontend so our customers can manage their DNS domains independently - they can even create new ones as necessary. It's taken DNS out of the "necessary evil" realm, and brought it into a realm of being a "useful service". I recommend it heartily.
(No, I'm not a developer or otherwise affiliated with the project - just a very satisfied user.)