The problem with that suggestion is that the people maintaining the code don't have a clue what QA means.
Gentoo developers don't maintain code, they maintain software packages. That means our main objective is to distribute the software to the users without minimal modifications, so that you get pretty much what upstream developers distribute. The only exceptions are when a patch that fixes a bug, security vulnerability or even a build problem, is available, then we would try to integrate it earlier than upstream. We also ensure the build system works, and we have documented policies on how to do that. Besides the regular stabilization process, there is also a QA team responsible for checking minimal ebuild (the portage recipes on how to compile software) quality. I had some commits reviewed by them so believe me when I say they are quite picky: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0048.html
And before people whine - I used Gentoo as my primary distro for around three years. The emerge system is great - but the data inside is crap.
For someone using Gentoo for around three years, that doesn't seem like a very insightful answer does it? What is the "data inside"? Are tou referring to ebuilds?:)
If you want to build your stuff from source and actually have a working system, look at the Debian-based distros. There's this nifty "apt-build" thing that lets you build software with whatever compile options you want (so you can still do -O3 -funroll-loops on everything if you really hate memory), just like Gentoo does
It is not the same thing. I was told by some people that they needed to be constantly asking the sysadmins to install the development packages of scientific libraries in Suse Linux (same applies to debian), depending on the use case, that can take weeks.
And there are packages for just about everything; partially because Debian's been around forever, and partially because "just about everyone" uses Ubuntu now.
Debian is not very famous for up to date software or is it? Sure you can add alternate repositories but you don't need to do that on Gentoo..
The primary difference is that you can build with source code that will actually work, and probably won't blow your system up when you just do a routine update. Wheras with Gentoo, some random kid who's too 'leet for testing might just promote to stable a new version of Xorg or Apache (both real examples from experience) which works fine on his system but breaks everyone else's in the world. And by "might" I mean "will".:)
Obviously the Gentoo's policy on package stabilization can't catch every single package problem out there. The policy was somewhat made to allow a fair trade-off between stability and availability. We could increase stabilization times but software would be available in a less timely manner...
Major breakages are not only Gentoo developer's fault. Sure sometimes a Gentoo developer messes up and makes its users rebuild the entire installed software, but most of the times are either bad decisions from upstream developers or because a major change (which breaks stuff) is really needed. If you understand how library linking and versioning works, I don't think I have to explain further..
Oh and by the way, latest versions of Portage have a nice feature called "preserve-libs" which prevents breakage if the API of a library changes..
I'm posting that mostly because quite a few Gentoo users think that only Gentoo (and maybe some of the BSDs) can easily rebuild a system from source, so they put up with atrocious quality assurance (which is admittedly extremely difficult given the Gentoo user base, and supposedly has gotten better) because they don't know that there are quite usable alternatives that are also mor
With some chance of being modded down, I suggest Gentoo Linux. With Gentoo you can compile your kernel and everything else which might give you some arguable performance increase. Because Gentoo is a source-based distribution, it might help you with scientific development because all the library (boost, itpp, lapack, etc) headers (and source) are immediately available. There is support for scientific libraries like atlas, ACML, etc.. and you can easily change the default library for blas/laplack using a simple command line. You can also find up to date scientific software in the official Gentoo repository. I don't know about you but I find very useful being able to inspect the code of core libraries and patch it for my needs, if needed. Just my 2 cents.
That's a good point! The connection tracking for the state module is handled by the nf_conntrack iptables module, I'm not sure but I think the module will only flush its "cache" when the module is unloaded.. but don't get this for granted, I would need to recheck.. Also, it is easy to check your point in iptables but do *other* (as in proprietary) firewalls do it?
Most Linux systems use IP tables type firewalls and the problem is that if you want to make a change to the firewall, it's hard to modify on the fly without reloading the entire firewall
Can please someone explain me what's wrong with appending and deleting a firewall rule: $ iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -m state --state ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT $ iptables -D INPUT 2
where on earth does this need iptables to be restarted?
if we want to save the firewall state: $ iptables-save >/root/ipt.state
where/root/ipt.state is just a human readable file
and then load the firewall state: $ iptables-restre </root/ipt.state
AFAIK this is not "restarting" iptables, just replacing the entire ruleset in one shot. Again, WTF?
It has been working perfectly for me for quite some years. You don't have to use their voip client either, they provide all the details for use with your favorite voip client. One thing voip always sucked was at NAT transversal, but with I had success at some random wifi networks by just using STUN and the voipbuster provided proxy.
Are you kidding? I have a HTC Wizard phone (TI OMAP-850) which is full of cool stuff: IRDA, bluetooth, 3G/EDGE, WiFi, 1.2M camera, qwerty keyboard, etc.. I know these are not impressive specs right now but they were 4 or 5 years ago. If you asked me the question: -what can you do with it? I would answer NOTHING!
It was not good as phone, that is, the user interface was not designed for it. I was much much faster taking of my dumb phone out from my pocket and write a text message using t9 than to go through all the menus in windows mobile, launch the messaging program, slide the qwerty keyboard, wait for the screen to rotate and finally write the message. We can argue the hardware was slow, but the truth is that Microsoft made the BIG error of having the software and hardware division separated by a huge Berlin wall. I disassembled the firmware and ended up realizing that it was compiled for the previous generation of ARM CPU, the Wizard's CPU is a ARMv5 and windows mobile was built for generic ARMv4!!! They (HTC probably) could have made the software adequate for the hardware they were selling but they didn't care. Even Linux with a small desktop manager runs faster on my HTC Wizard than the original firmware!!
It was not good as a internet device, the integrated Internet Explorer was slow, and difficult to use with a pen, a real pain in the ass. I preferred to wait and see some article at home instead of accessing it "right away" through the phone using GPRS.
Activesync was a horrible thing, you cannot imagine how much contacts I lost during a sync. Syncing through exchange was also a nightmare, I can never forget this message: "there was a change in the server, all the data in your phone needs to be deleted and synced again". WTF???
The integrated windows media player was another design stupidity, believe it or not, I had to use VLC (a port of it) because windows media player wasted my battery in less then one hour.
It had an integrated "office" suite which, truth to be told, was completely useless - at least for me.
The only thing I found useful on that phone was using third party instant messaging programs which actually worked well (much better than msn messenger). Other thing that worked well was playing games which actually used the pen interface quite well.
The device at the time cost 600 euros, I paid less than half for it in a ebay bid. Still, I feel it was one of the biggest scams of my life, I just still keep it because it runs Linux and is useful for robotics applications. I hope you feel through my wording how pissed off I still am!
You guys are missing the point. What most of people, that is Joe sixpack, really want is a device able to instant chat, go on facebook, "coca cola" like websites, browse youtube, cheezburger and random naked chick on google images. They don't want a device constantly popping up alerts saying you are insecure, devices that go slower than turtles with adware, antivirus, malware, antimalware etc.. They don't want to be annoyed with auto-updates, they just want to come back from work, sit on the couch and open whatever website they heard about at work. They want to be able to plugin memory cards, USB storage to see family pics. And, IMHO, current state of tablets already do all of this..
So I kind of predict this decision will cost this guy his career in a couple of years..
There are a lot of Europeans that would buy a Nokia just because it is Nokia and not because it runs whatever crap they put on it.
That's probably sort of true but I imagine European cell phone users are a bit more discerning than that...
Europeans pretty much grew up using Nokias, they were even part of our lifestyle when Nokia first introduced colorful clip-on cellphone covers. Now, despite Androids and iPhones, people still need dumbphones (mostly for our 2nd phone, different carrier) and Nokia is still the right brand for it. By killing their dumbphone product line (which was based on symbian) Nokia will pretty much lose a lot of clients which won't move to highend phones. Although we cannot really consider WP7 highend, it is definitely not lowend because they provide a lot of cruft which people don't need (market place, live services, etc..).
However I kind of expect WP7 to damage that respectable image that Nokia has on European consumers.
Actually I don't think so - WP7 is a pretty good reboot, it's not like they just re-skinned the old Windows Mobile. I think if people bought phones with it just because they were Nokia, they would not really be that unhappy with a WP7 phone. So I don't think this will hurt Nokia unless for some reason they ceased being good at designing hardware (which seems unlikely).
For the sake of Nokia, I really hope they succeed with WP7 and be in the right conditions again to continue developing Maemo. However with the new Elan/Microsoft head, I don't think this will happen anymore..:(
Allowing themselves to be completely hijacked by Elan/Microsoft for a last ditch futile attempt to promote WP7 is nothing short of astounding.
Well.. it was a smart decision from Elan/Microsoft. Here in Europe, Nokia remains as a respectable and reputable cellphone brand. There are a lot of Europeans that would buy a Nokia just because it is Nokia and not because it runs whatever crap they put on it. However I kind of expect WP7 to damage that respectable image that Nokia has on European consumers.
They seemed to jump over the Embrace phase though, and go directly to Extermination. We don't even have consumer statistics on Nokia's WP7 products and they already announced the extinguishment of Symbian. Yes, sounds like the beginning of a zombie Nokia to me..
To be honest I've been impatiently waiting for a ARM-based netbook running Linux, during the last two or three years. Judging from previous/. commenters, I'm by far not the only one. With the latest happenings regarding the negative Nokia-Microsoft agreement and the continued beneficial commitment of Intel in supporting an open platform, I now realize that I'm mobilized to support Intel. I'm looking forward to acquire a Intel-based embedded Linux solution in the future and hopefully motivate myself in related opensource development.
The FCC monitors all TV broadcasts and stiffly fines broadcasters for violating decency rules, yet there are no penalties in place for retailers who sell violent games to kids.
Right! Because clearly there is no other way of watching past TV broadcasts.
I think the guy behind TheKevinButler twitter account thought the twittered PS3 master key was some kind of coordinates, that's why he replied "you sank my Battleship?". After someone from Sony realized it was in fact the master key, the marketing team must have removed the related post. Makes sense.. no?
YEP. Most people don't actually care if the devices are open or closed, they don't even notice it until they need to migrate their data (contacts etc..) to a new device. Things like having special incompatible cables and software for each device is also perfectly normal for them, it has been like that since forever so people is somewhat used to it.
As I see it, the only difference now is that Apple provides polished products that actually work with minimal effort. It is a big win for everybody except for us, hackers, that want control over every piece of hardware and software.
hadn't posted since "...by airrage on Friday July 28 2006, @11:52AM." so just thought I would log back in and say hello. I shall now go back to my experiments. Good day to you sir!!
Slashdot Mirror
there you go
sent!
sent
I am sorry but your reply is sliding a little into a flame war and possibly out of context, so I'm going to stop right here.
The problem with that suggestion is that the people maintaining the code don't have a clue what QA means.
Gentoo developers don't maintain code, they maintain software packages. That means our main objective is to distribute the software to the users without minimal modifications, so that you get pretty much what upstream developers distribute. The only exceptions are when a patch that fixes a bug, security vulnerability or even a build problem, is available, then we would try to integrate it earlier than upstream. We also ensure the build system works, and we have documented policies on how to do that. Besides the regular stabilization process, there is also a QA team responsible for checking minimal ebuild (the portage recipes on how to compile software) quality. I had some commits reviewed by them so believe me when I say they are quite picky:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0048.html
And before people whine - I used Gentoo as my primary distro for around three years. The emerge system is great - but the data inside is crap.
For someone using Gentoo for around three years, that doesn't seem like a very insightful answer does it? What is the "data inside"? Are tou referring to ebuilds? :)
If you want to build your stuff from source and actually have a working system, look at the Debian-based distros. There's this nifty "apt-build" thing that lets you build software with whatever compile options you want (so you can still do -O3 -funroll-loops on everything if you really hate memory), just like Gentoo does
It is not the same thing. I was told by some people that they needed to be constantly asking the sysadmins to install the development packages of scientific libraries in Suse Linux (same applies to debian), depending on the use case, that can take weeks.
And there are packages for just about everything; partially because Debian's been around forever, and partially because "just about everyone" uses Ubuntu now.
Debian is not very famous for up to date software or is it? Sure you can add alternate repositories but you don't need to do that on Gentoo..
The primary difference is that you can build with source code that will actually work, and probably won't blow your system up when you just do a routine update. Wheras with Gentoo, some random kid who's too 'leet for testing might just promote to stable a new version of Xorg or Apache (both real examples from experience) which works fine on his system but breaks everyone else's in the world. And by "might" I mean "will". :)
Obviously the Gentoo's policy on package stabilization can't catch every single package problem out there. The policy was somewhat made to allow a fair trade-off between stability and availability. We could increase stabilization times but software would be available in a less timely manner...
Major breakages are not only Gentoo developer's fault. Sure sometimes a Gentoo developer messes up and makes its users rebuild the entire installed software, but most of the times are either bad decisions from upstream developers or because a major change (which breaks stuff) is really needed. If you understand how library linking and versioning works, I don't think I have to explain further..
Oh and by the way, latest versions of Portage have a nice feature called "preserve-libs" which prevents breakage if the API of a library changes..
I'm posting that mostly because quite a few Gentoo users think that only Gentoo (and maybe some of the BSDs) can easily rebuild a system from source, so they put up with atrocious quality assurance (which is admittedly extremely difficult given the Gentoo user base, and supposedly has gotten better) because they don't know that there are quite usable alternatives that are also mor
With some chance of being modded down, I suggest Gentoo Linux. With Gentoo you can compile your kernel and everything else which might give you some arguable performance increase. Because Gentoo is a source-based distribution, it might help you with scientific development because all the library (boost, itpp, lapack, etc) headers (and source) are immediately available. There is support for scientific libraries like atlas, ACML, etc.. and you can easily change the default library for blas/laplack using a simple command line. You can also find up to date scientific software in the official Gentoo repository.
I don't know about you but I find very useful being able to inspect the code of core libraries and patch it for my needs, if needed.
Just my 2 cents.
That's a good point! The connection tracking for the state module is handled by the nf_conntrack iptables module, I'm not sure but I think the module will only flush its "cache" when the module is unloaded.. but don't get this for granted, I would need to recheck..
Also, it is easy to check your point in iptables but do *other* (as in proprietary) firewalls do it?
there is still something missing, isn't there :<P
Most Linux systems use IP tables type firewalls and the problem is that if you want to make a change to the firewall, it's hard to modify on the fly without reloading the entire firewall
Can please someone explain me what's wrong with appending and deleting a firewall rule:
$ iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -m state --state ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
$ iptables -D INPUT 2
where on earth does this need iptables to be restarted?
if we want to save the firewall state:
/root/ipt.state
$ iptables-save >
where /root/ipt.state is just a human readable file
and then load the firewall state:
/root/ipt.state
$ iptables-restre <
AFAIK this is not "restarting" iptables, just replacing the entire ruleset in one shot.
Again, WTF?
Next step.. Modify the malware to prompt the user to install Linux?
http://dev.gentoo.org/~tove/stats/gentoo-x86/cvs-log-sum.txt [gentoo.org]
I'm number 20 on that list, having recently surpassed 10k commits to Gentoo myself (in 7 years). The top of our list is somebody with 70k commits.
That's impressive and we don't even count what's going on in the overlays..
http://www.voipbuster.com/
It has been working perfectly for me for quite some years. You don't have to use their voip client either, they provide all the details for use with your favorite voip client.
One thing voip always sucked was at NAT transversal, but with I had success at some random wifi networks by just using STUN and the voipbuster provided proxy.
Are you kidding? I have a HTC Wizard phone (TI OMAP-850) which is full of cool stuff: IRDA, bluetooth, 3G/EDGE, WiFi, 1.2M camera, qwerty keyboard, etc.. I know these are not impressive specs right now but they were 4 or 5 years ago. If you asked me the question: -what can you do with it? I would answer NOTHING!
It was not good as phone, that is, the user interface was not designed for it. I was much much faster taking of my dumb phone out from my pocket and write a text message using t9 than to go through all the menus in windows mobile, launch the messaging program, slide the qwerty keyboard, wait for the screen to rotate and finally write the message. We can argue the hardware was slow, but the truth is that Microsoft made the BIG error of having the software and hardware division separated by a huge Berlin wall. I disassembled the firmware and ended up realizing that it was compiled for the previous generation of ARM CPU, the Wizard's CPU is a ARMv5 and windows mobile was built for generic ARMv4!!! They (HTC probably) could have made the software adequate for the hardware they were selling but they didn't care. Even Linux with a small desktop manager runs faster on my HTC Wizard than the original firmware!!
It was not good as a internet device, the integrated Internet Explorer was slow, and difficult to use with a pen, a real pain in the ass. I preferred to wait and see some article at home instead of accessing it "right away" through the phone using GPRS.
Activesync was a horrible thing, you cannot imagine how much contacts I lost during a sync. Syncing through exchange was also a nightmare, I can never forget this message: "there was a change in the server, all the data in your phone needs to be deleted and synced again". WTF???
The integrated windows media player was another design stupidity, believe it or not, I had to use VLC (a port of it) because windows media player wasted my battery in less then one hour.
It had an integrated "office" suite which, truth to be told, was completely useless - at least for me.
The only thing I found useful on that phone was using third party instant messaging programs which actually worked well (much better than msn messenger). Other thing that worked well was playing games which actually used the pen interface quite well.
The device at the time cost 600 euros, I paid less than half for it in a ebay bid. Still, I feel it was one of the biggest scams of my life, I just still keep it because it runs Linux and is useful for robotics applications. I hope you feel through my wording how pissed off I still am!
You guys are missing the point. What most of people, that is Joe sixpack, really want is a device able to instant chat, go on facebook, "coca cola" like websites, browse youtube, cheezburger and random naked chick on google images. They don't want a device constantly popping up alerts saying you are insecure, devices that go slower than turtles with adware, antivirus, malware, antimalware etc.. They don't want to be annoyed with auto-updates, they just want to come back from work, sit on the couch and open whatever website they heard about at work. They want to be able to plugin memory cards, USB storage to see family pics. And, IMHO, current state of tablets already do all of this..
So I kind of predict this decision will cost this guy his career in a couple of years..
There are a lot of Europeans that would buy a Nokia just because it is Nokia and not because it runs whatever crap they put on it.
That's probably sort of true but I imagine European cell phone users are a bit more discerning than that...
Europeans pretty much grew up using Nokias, they were even part of our lifestyle when Nokia first introduced colorful clip-on cellphone covers. Now, despite Androids and iPhones, people still need dumbphones (mostly for our 2nd phone, different carrier) and Nokia is still the right brand for it. By killing their dumbphone product line (which was based on symbian) Nokia will pretty much lose a lot of clients which won't move to highend phones. Although we cannot really consider WP7 highend, it is definitely not lowend because they provide a lot of cruft which people don't need (market place, live services, etc..).
However I kind of expect WP7 to damage that respectable image that Nokia has on European consumers.
Actually I don't think so - WP7 is a pretty good reboot, it's not like they just re-skinned the old Windows Mobile. I think if people bought phones with it just because they were Nokia, they would not really be that unhappy with a WP7 phone. So I don't think this will hurt Nokia unless for some reason they ceased being good at designing hardware (which seems unlikely).
For the sake of Nokia, I really hope they succeed with WP7 and be in the right conditions again to continue developing Maemo. However with the new Elan/Microsoft head, I don't think this will happen anymore.. :(
Allowing themselves to be completely hijacked by Elan/Microsoft for a last ditch futile attempt to promote WP7 is nothing short of astounding.
Well.. it was a smart decision from Elan/Microsoft. Here in Europe, Nokia remains as a respectable and reputable cellphone brand. There are a lot of Europeans that would buy a Nokia just because it is Nokia and not because it runs whatever crap they put on it. However I kind of expect WP7 to damage that respectable image that Nokia has on European consumers.
They seemed to jump over the Embrace phase though, and go directly to Extermination.
We don't even have consumer statistics on Nokia's WP7 products and they already announced the extinguishment of Symbian. Yes, sounds like the beginning of a zombie Nokia to me..
To be honest I've been impatiently waiting for a ARM-based netbook running Linux, during the last two or three years. Judging from previous /. commenters, I'm by far not the only one. With the latest happenings regarding the negative Nokia-Microsoft agreement and the continued beneficial commitment of Intel in supporting an open platform, I now realize that I'm mobilized to support Intel. I'm looking forward to acquire a Intel-based embedded Linux solution in the future and hopefully motivate myself in related opensource development.
Thanks Gunjan for your words.
From TFA
The FCC monitors all TV broadcasts and stiffly fines broadcasters for violating decency rules, yet there are no penalties in place for retailers who sell violent games to kids.
Right! Because clearly there is no other way of watching past TV broadcasts.
I think the guy behind TheKevinButler twitter account thought the twittered PS3 master key was some kind of coordinates, that's why he replied "you sank my Battleship?". After someone from Sony realized it was in fact the master key, the marketing team must have removed the related post. Makes sense.. no?
From TFA:
They use an efficient algorithm written in Javascript.
Is it me or they are using two incompatible words in the same phrase?
YEP. Most people don't actually care if the devices are open or closed, they don't even notice it until they need to migrate their data (contacts etc..) to a new device. Things like having special incompatible cables and software for each device is also perfectly normal for them, it has been like that since forever so people is somewhat used to it.
As I see it, the only difference now is that Apple provides polished products that actually work with minimal effort. It is a big win for everybody except for us, hackers, that want control over every piece of hardware and software.
Sure it does look like our P2P servers will last longer than humanity in the case of a nuclear Armageddon. : P
hadn't posted since "...by airrage on Friday July 28 2006, @11:52AM." so just thought I would log back in and say hello. I shall now go back to my experiments. Good day to you sir!!
you must be new here..
Why fuck around with C++ when you can code it all in C, like CGI programmers did twenty years ago
Why to program webpages in C when you can do it in ASM?
Oh wait! I know where this is going...