*sigh* ok, I can't say that I know one way or the other whether AltiVec is a Motorola or IBM addition to the design. But here's what I can tell you.
IBM is already using AltiVec in it's embedded PPC setups - mostly routing equipment. Has been for close to a year.
Having already been familiar with AltiVec as the brain inside a piece of networking equipment, I thought it somewhat odd when it started getting hyped as an MMX-beater.
Furthermore, IBM and Motorola have reversed their decision to go separate ways with PPC design.
Re:Can I have one too please?
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Digital VCRs
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Readline support on my remote controll? Sheesh, I'd rather walk over to my computer and type in a playlist from there. Trust me, I've used ir remotes that let the user punch in alphanumerics, it's an exceptionally crude way of entering data.
However, given a flexible music librarian system, it would be great to be able to select category groups by remote controll. Say you could select what genere of music, and then what era, and hit play. Wouldn't that be a lot easier than manually selecting a dozen tracks?
What he fails to realize is that there's an awful lot of lone-horse open source programming going on.
This happens for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with money.
First, and most common, is the back yard doghouse effect.
The community model has every one of us keeping our dogs in a big kennel in the park. This is what's most sociable, right? If you're a dog owner, I can tell you're probably shaking your head violently. Especially if yours is of the female persuasion.
Most people would prefer to keep their dog in their own back yard, separate from other peoples dogs. For the same reasons (purity, ownership, etc) many people prefer to write their own pet programs.
Second, ignorance. A lot of people falling into the "annoyed" model have no clue what anybody else is doing to solve the problem. I know this isn't often the case, but there are some apps for which there is no other conclusion.
My Completely Biased OpenSource Fragmentation Quotient (CBOSFQ) currently stands at 11. Checking FreshMeat's appindex today, there are 11 individually packaged ident servers. This does not include one program written to test ident servers, nor does it include a transparent irc proxy.
All of these ident servers have one or two of about 3 features (with the exception of pidentd) - they allow masqueraded ident (poorly), or they allow a specific false ident response (unwise), or they allow a random ident response (will get you kicked off a server)
The existance of eleven ident servers is inexcusable. This is a very simple service we're talking about.
The worst part is, all of the "advanced" ident servers with special features seem to be about half baked. Instead of one really good alternative ident server, we have 10 of them that are almost but not quite.
Anybody who thinks the open source movement represents some kind of utopian marxist society is smoking something. Nine out of ten open source users and programmers would settle for free beer.
I agree that the bounty method of encouraging open source development comes from a flawed concept, but the end result is no worse than what most people are churning out already. Probably better, because the guy signing the check probably wants a finished product.
My assertian is not that they would obviously be more advanced.
My assertion is that technology builds upon itself.
Having started from a different point, how can you assume that another culture would reach the same conclusions?
Leaps in technological complexity occur when a culture learns to do something it previously didn't know it was ignorant of.
Human science has suffered various huge setbacks.
Hydrolic technology was cut off at the knees when it was decided that it was far better to employ hundreds of manual laborers to open the temple doors than to build an experimental device using sand.
The library at Alexandria was burned. We don't know what we lost.
It took spanish missionaries 14 years to destroy all the collected writings of the maya. We don't know what we lost. Their religion, their science, their literature, their poetry. All gone. Just because they weren't christians. (OK, they say they were performing human sacrifice too, but that's still no reason to erase their history)
Alchemists were so feared and loathed that they obscured their writings so much we're not sure what most of them were doing. A lot of them thought they could spontaniously generate mice by leaving a box with a sweatty shirt and some wheat in a field, but they can't all be wrong.
Millions of people in third world countries die of gastric disorders because they still believe the popular teachings of an early medic who said the best way to deal with a leaky bottom is to avoid liquids.
Furthermore, many of the important technological advancements of the last few hundreds of years have been purely accidental.
If you don't believe me, research the history of polymer plastics. Read about how the search for artificial crop fertilization revolutionized explosives. Read about the discovery of the diode.
A lot of important things came to be because of someone who was looking for one thing and stumbled on another.
A few years ago a japanese college student who was bad at math used 1000 times as much catalyst as he was supposed to and stumbled upon a polymer that conducts electricity and can hold a charge. How often does this kind of thing happen?
Who would have figured that an inordinately difficult method of printing (lithography) would allow the miniturization of transistors?
Why would you assume that a completely foreign history would advance the same technologies?
Maybe when they find us, they'll be utterly enthralled by jello.
Given the fact that human technology has advanced more in the last 100 years than all previous recorded history, it's assumed mathematically that an alien culture is more likely to be well ahead or well behind of us. We spent thousands of years dicking around and then lept into this era with a vengance.
What if Babbages machine was built and functioned within his lifetime? the british government poured millions of pounds into trying to build it, but the metalurgical technology wasn't up to it. We might have entered the information age much earlier.
How can you assume that human understanding of physics encompasses all of reality? We don't make the rules you know, we just try to understand them.
I'm not calling possible alien technology obviously more advanced. I'm saying it's most likely, well, alien.
It's a pretty safe bet that your Powerbook won't be able to uplink with the mothership.
This is a guy, with no ties to SETI, with a prerecorded chunk of data, that most astronomers believe is of dubious value. It comes from a very slim section of the radio spectrum. just a handfull of Khz wide, if i remember right.
You're not searching for a needle in a haystack. You're searching for a quark in a haystack.
Furthermore, recent advances in RF technology have made it clear that it's positively idiotic to believe that alien life forms would be using the same modes of radio transmission we do.
Take for instance ultra-wide-band transmissions. They broadcast across the entire spectrum with exceptionally high power, but they do so in picosecond pulses, and the FCC says they can't discern them from background radiation. They don't know how to classify UWB because, while it does interfere with important things like air traffic controll, you never know you're being interefered with.
So lets say aliens use ultra wide band transmissions. is the granularity of SETI data finer than picosecond? Doubtful.
As humans we seem to have an understanding of amplitude modulation, frequency modulation, and phase modulation. phase modulation is still experimental and of questionable value. We're just starting to understand pulse modulation. How many more kinds of modulation are there?
The man who discovered frequency modulation was branded a mad scientist and fired from RCA for wasting precious corporate resources on his hair brained ideas. How many people are quietly researching modes of transmission that don't currently fall into recognizable catagories of reasonable physics?
We're not going to pick up interstellar cell phone calls and listen in on greys discussing family matters. At best we're likely to hear the RFI generated by their equipment. And that's assuming their technologies are vaguely similar to ours. An optical processor doesn't emit RFI. Maybe they use an energy form that doesn't fit into our concept of physical law.
The neat thing about history is, we build upon the past. Having started from an entirely different point, why would a completely foreign culture do things anything like we do?
It looks like MTRR support may or may not be really hairy.
I mean, you're installing two CPU's on a motherboard that's designed for one. Obviously there's no SMP support in the bios.
Even some SMP bioses make the error of only configuring the MTRR registers on the 1st cpu. I'd be surprised if a uniprocessor bios tried to configure the MTRR registers on a second cpu.
I can vouch for the fact that Linux SMP's just fine on Celerons. I'm using a pair of modified MSI MS-6905's and a pair of Celeron 366's in a dual slot 1 LX based motherboard.
However, I can also tell you that MTRR problems can be ugly. My dual celeron refused to load X until i replaced the PCI video card with an AGP video card. For some reason the PCI video card wasn't being set up correctly. I could have fought with it, but i didn't think a 2 meg #9 Motion 771 was worth all that much trouble, and got a G200.
This isn't to say it probably couldn't be worked around. They also may have figured out some way of tieing the MTRR's together. What I'm saying is, if there isn't a workaround in the hardware, or some kind of a bios update (unlikely), it probably won't work out of the box until the kernel is updated to match it.
Yes, they do use NT for a thing or two. They also use FreeBSD for a few things, and Linux for a few other things. I have met their CTO and toured their datacenter. Likening them to MindCraft is uncalledfor.
Out in utah there's an outfit called AirSwitch that's been experimentally running 10mbit ethernet across neighborhoods. They are testing 100mbit networks recently, and shouldn't have any trouble running that.
Their equipment is Not Normal - their hardware is somewhat modified off the shelf equipment, and their cabling is a proprietery design custom manufactured for them. But all you need inside your house is a regular ethernet interface.
That is why i don't use WindowMaker. A lot of things they have done are good, and elegant, and useful.
But if you want me to use a window manager that only wraps the top and bottom of a window, and won't let me resize unless i grab the bottom, you have GOT to be kidding yourself.
and WHY is that the way it does it? because it's "more correct". Correct my hiney, it's counter-intuitive.
Not too long ago, a member of the WindowMaker dev team wrote an article wherein he pointed out that instead of having menu bars with a list of menus and then sub menus with tearoffs, that we should have just one menu, with several tearoffs, as that would be "More correct". He admitted it would make a lot of people angry, but insisted that that's the way it should be done.
Personally, I gauge the quality of a software product according to two rules. It has to basically work, and it can't piss me off.
This is why i use icewm. Because FEEL is more important than LOOK.
The Debian distribution panders to developers, and that's about it. The design reflects it. The documentation reflects it.
I'm not an idiot but I don't have the time to ferret out every last little fact. I don't appriciate when the docs for something assume I'm already in the know, and contain a lot of references to things that "ought to just work" and things that "should" happen.
I recently attempted to install Debian 2.1 on a DEC Multia. Was a complete bust. The docs are just the Intel docs with the header changed to reflect Alpha systems. They didn't even change the part about bootable CDs, and ElTorito is only supported by intel systems.
What's more, the few fleeting installation notes in the README are false. And nobody on the mailing list felt like responding to an installation problem experienced by every single person who attempts to follow those instructions.
Let me be perfectly clear on this - if you use the MILO commandline in the Debian 2.1/Alpha installation README, you are guaranteed failure.
And why didn't anybody give a rat's posterior about my problem? I'm just a user.
I'm no fan of RedHat, but, the RedHat/Sparc community was far more helpful when i was messing around with old sparcstations.
I loaded up USWorst's ordering page (still the poorest excuse for a business in the west), filled in my vital info, clicked submit.
USWorst rep called me the next day, verified my info, told me 10 days.
Cisco 675 DSL Router/Bridge arrives on my doorstep free of charge the next week. Cisco lists these at $399 on their ordering page. I'm not renting or leasing it, I own it. Far be it from me not to accept a loss leader.
I check with my isp (XMission, best in the state of Utah), make sure everything's hunky-dory. They give me my static IP, no extra charge, no bothering around with DHCP.
My installation target date arrives. I haul out the little thinkpad that could and hook it up to the ethernet and serial ports on the Cisco. Plug the Cisco into the phone jack. Plug the phone into the jack on the back of the Cisco.
I talk to the Cisco through the serial port, follow the configuration instructions in the booklet USWorst sent me, reconfigure the tcpip on the thinkpad, and I'm able to ping the world.
In all the excitement, the fresh (not frozen) pizza I had baking in the oven burned to a big carbon slab. Didn't even notice the smoke pouring out of the kitchen until well after I'd installed my 2nd nic in my server, made the requisite changes to my firewall configuration, and started ooing and ahhing at the download speeds and ping times.
All in all the roughest part of my DSL experience was related to installing the filtered phone jack on the wall of my appartment. I figured I'd pull the plate off and find a nice little up-to-code connection box. I discovered that that wall was constructed of 3/4 inch plywood, and that they'd installed the jack apparantly by chizzling a hole in the plywood with a screwdriver or something until they could pull the phone cord through it. Used one of those cheezy flat wall jacks with the punch-down blocks.
The filtered jack is surprisingly overengineered. Printed circuit board with a few capacitors on it and two sets of screw-down terminals, jumper wires leading to a set of screw-down terminals next to the actual jack. Another set of jumper wires leading to a set of screw-down terminals on the backside of the plate. Another set of screw-down terminals attached to those.
Had to get a shallow connection box from Eagle. That was sorta hard to find. You'd figure it'd be with the electrical stuff, but you have to go past electrical and past lighting and into plumbing to get to the conduit supplies. Go figure.
"If it weren't for reverse engineering, all of our PCs would say 'IBM' on them... "
This is completely untrue. The IBM PC was based on designs readily available to the public. The entire idea was to replace the DataMaster with a system based on the 8088 (big upgrade from the 8080) without re-inventing the wheel.
Almost every single component and design in the original PC was based on published schematics available in periodicals for anyone to use. This includes the ISA bus, the CGA graphics card, the way they used the keyboard controller as a half-baked MMU, just about everything.
On the other hand, Phoenix corporation *did* have to reverse-engineer the system BIOS. This was one of the first big cases of reverse-engineering. Phoenix BIOS was so good (for the times) that eventually IBM started using it.
But the Nintendo emulators are slightly different. They emulate both proprietary firmware and proprietary hardware. This isn't to say that they aren't perfectly legal, but Phoenix corp carefully documented their clean-room engineering procedure as they did it.
It's simple. You hire two teams of engineers. One team is fairly familiar with the product, the other needs to be able to truthfully make the statement that they've never messed with it.
The first team takes the product appart piece by piece, examines how it functions, and writes a specification for how the device should function according to their observations.
This specification is given to the second team of engineers, who, like i said, have never seen the inner workings of the product. They, in turn, design a product to match the specification they have been given.
Thus, the engineers responsible for the design of the product have never had the opportunity to examine the inner workings of the original, but are still capable of creating a fully functional equivalent. No laws broken, several toes stepped on, fairly expensive, but air tight in court.
The problem is that it's getting harder and harder to find engineers who haven't been under the hood already.
Nintendo has been pushing their argument that all emulators are inherently illegal for at least a decade. I remember a big stink about this on FidoNet.
It's actually a pretty unwise argument for them to make. There are lots of perfectly legal uses for emulation. Stating that all emulators are illegal is going to make them look stupid in court.
The thing about Ballmer is that he's such a complete butthead that nobody takes anything he says seriously.
This is a tremendously advantageous sort of guy to have as your corporate figurehead during a period of persecution. It doesn't matter what the man says, people will just mutter "Moron . . " and get on with their day.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a guy in some backwater town nobody ever heard of in Utah, concieved of a word procesing system that would get the heck out of your way and let you edit your text without any fancy crap eating up screen realestate. And back then it was 80x25, folks.
And lo, as the years passed, he did improve it, and it was possible to mark text and copy it to another document with a half a dozen keystrokes.
And yay, it was possible to do anything you wanted without stopping what you were doing, as long as you were willing to memorize a few arcane combinations. And there were grandmasters who coded macros, and could do several things with the slightest wiggle of a finger.
And tho the program was fruitful and the people were able to create a great many clean documents with it, the people did bitch, and say that queer key combinations confounded their minds, and that it was far too hard to get ahold of a replacement template, and that the help system was "silly".
And the GUI and the Mouse did come to befriend the most Perfect of stream editors, and the people were happy.
But behold, the mouse had fleas, and was suspected of having parasites. And indeed, the situation was quite buggy, and an editor both small and without strength did make strides ahead of it.
And then there came Novell, who did confound the minds of it's users. And later came Corel, who had seen the competition, and decided to become like it. And they did do away with keystrokes, and it became impossible to do anything without holding a rodent in your hand.
And the features did creep, and the menus did grow like a fungus in a well dampened area, and the Readers Digest police set up shop, and it became impossible to type "GLibC" without having it replaced with "Glib", and there were marks of many colors underlining the words of many, mocking them, and making several ill suggestions.
And lo, it was beheld that it was a uniquely inept way of creating a document. And indeed did few buy it. And lo, Corel was frightened, and did finally start giving it away, so that someone, anyone would use it.
This is obviously paranoid ramblings. But that doesn't surprise me.
What surprises me here is that it doesn't seem to bother anyone that we've come to the point where nobody questions the assumption that our government isn't any more trustworthy than the latest despot-of-the-week.
It surprises me that our government accepts the fact that we've grown cynical of their sincerity, and isn't worried about it.
If you ever get to meet one of your favorite musicians, especially one of the less wealthy ones, ask them where they get their food money.
All except the extremely successful will tell you that the bulk of their income is from touring. They get a cut of the take at the door, and they make a killing on tshirts and posters and other merchandise at the show.
This is the way the recording industry has always been. the recording industry gives the bands a raw deal, giving them an average of 80 cents per cd. Their argument is that without the distribution channels the record industry provides, nobody would know about them, and they wouldn't be able to have profitable tours.
MP3 takes that paridigm and flushes it down the toilet. the RIAA is pretty worried that their argument for the 90 / 10 split they have with the artists is about to become harder to argue.
Some of my favorite musicians have been asked by fans what they think about MP3. Their worry seems to be that MP3's dilute the artistic product of an album - a box with artwork and the layout of tracks in a particular way. Someone downloading just one track, doesn't experience the same effect as someone having the whole album to hold in their hands and examine while listening to the music. When an album gets converted to MP3's, it's no longer a "thing", it's just files on a disk.
Of course, all this could be solved with a downloadable album format. It'd be pretty easy to tarball a bunch of MP3 files with some jpegs and some playlist information. Build in a theme that automagically takes over your mp3 player when you open that album. Good idea, no?
This distributed project is mostly hype. Here's why.
First, because SETI@home is in no way affiliated with SETI. That's right. it's Just Some Guy.
Second, because the data being tested represents a relatively brief recording from an extremely narrow slice of the spectrum which most astronomers believe to be of dubious value.
This is the introduction to the "general performance tips" section of the apache manual.
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Apache Performance Notes
Author: Dean Gaudet
Introduction
Apache is a general webserver, which is designed to be correct first, and fast second. Even so, it's performance is quite satisfactory. Most sites have less than 10Mbits of outgoing bandwidth, which Apache can fill using only a low end Pentium-based webserver. In practice sites with more bandwidth require more than one machine to fill the bandwidth due to other constraints (such as CGI or database transaction overhead). For these reasons the development focus has been mostly on correctness and configurability.
Unfortunately many folks overlook these facts and cite raw performance numbers as if they are some indication of the quality of a web server product. There is a bare minimum performance that is acceptable, beyond that extra speed only caters to a much smaller segment of the market. But in order to avoid this hurdle to the acceptance of Apache in some markets, effort was put into Apache 1.3 to bring performance up to a point where the difference with other high-end webservers is minimal.
In many states they could sue the devil for his evil influence, and get summary judgement when he fails to show, too. Might be more effective. (Though you'd have a hard time collecting, unless you sold the judgement to a collection firm)
Wouldn't it be nice to never fsck again? Or, atleast, to be virtually guaranteed that foregoing extreme funkyness, data will never be needlessly corrupted.
In a journaling filesystem, changes to files are not activated until they have been cleanly completed. Thus, if half the change is still in the cache when the power supply dies, no part of the change actually occured. Many journaling filesystems also keep preset numbers of revisions in the history of a file, making it very easy to back yourself out of a mistake.
There is a performance hit, 7 to 14 percent depending on what you're doing if i remember the specs on adding JFS to WarpServer 5. But journalling filesystems are a must for many data wearhousing applications where you simply can't afford the possibility of corruption.
All in all, this article doesn't look anti-linux. It's not particularly useful, and doesn't go out of it's way to encourage anybody to use linux, but honestly, look at what it's actually saying.
There's no hard data regarding the performance scaling of SMP linux systems. Well, there isn't. Whaddaya want? publishable results are more expensive than you think. If they had done their own research in-house you would have jumped all over them for it, no matter what they said. It would have been a serious issue of credibility for them.
There's no hard data on long-term reliability of linux. There isn't. See above.
Then there's the issue of "high availability" with linux. This was an "ask/." just the other day. There's tons of different ways to do it, but right now, it takes a dedicated geek to set it up. RedHat saw fit to create and release ExtremeLinux for Beowulf clustering, why not a High Availability Linux distribution as well? Since I'm not terribly fond of RedHat lately, it may as well come from Caldera, PHT, or SuSE. (Yeah, Debian could do it too, but since they've got no financial interests, they've got no financial interest in doing it).
All the tools and parts are there. Somebody just has to expend the resources to build the things this report is missing.
If you watch closely, RedHat Software seems to have two very clear policies that controll everything they do.
1: Increase the recognition of the RedHat brand
2: Decrease the work load on the support team
This is a publicity stunt that is definately supposed to increase their brand recognition, which will also appeal almost entirely to wannabees, who are, paridoxically, a lower support liability than the semi-experienced user, who is more likely than the wannabe to have a real problem.
Anybody who's worked in upper level technical support knows exactly what i mean about users who know just enough to get themselves into trouble.
Experienced users are right out. RedHat doesn't gain much of anything by pandering to people who just get their CD's from cheapbytes, or download ISO images over their DSL connections for nothing.
This is why the RedHat installer actually hinders the use of nonstandard installation hacks by lacking most/dev devices, and by having a linear design that makes it easy to render unusable if you start screwing around with it. Nobody likes to keep starting over from the beginning, but "reboot" is a very simple instruction for the tech support goon to remember.
Increasingly, RedHat's policies leave experienced users out in the cold. This is why many people don't like them much anymore. Me, I'm using SuSE right now.
Yes, but you do have to let NYT spam you
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This assumes a few things.
1: That you gave them your actual snail address 2: That you gave them your actual email address 3: That you gave them a real phone number
And anybody who's afraid of cookies should really be worrying about what the black helicopters are picking up from their phone lines.
I know, that i personally would never be able to show my face again on/. if my NYTimes password were ever to be known. Really.
The only difference, ONLY difference at all when meeting someone from the net vs. someone from, say, a bar, is that you are more at ease from having conversed with them on several occasions.
I used to be the road-warrior service technician for a company, I made 44 flights in one year. I knew atleast one person to meet in every region they sent me to. I met literally dozens of net friends. I'm a 290lb 6'3 male, so I don't figure on getting raped by anyone, but they were all more or less what they were like online. Go figure.
With some of them, we got along better in real life. Others, we didn't relate quite as well in real life.
It's a simple rule of thumb. You meet just as many psychopaths online as you do in real life. Some of them are more obvious online, and some of them are more obvious in real life. Having known someone both online and in real life gives you a lot of insight into what makes them tick, but you should still be cautious.
I think people definately should meet people in real life after knowing them online. Take for instance the issue of romance. Eventually it has to come to a head. The two of you will either not hit it off in real life, or find that you work even better in real life, or just call the whole thing off. It's better to figure out exactly what your relationship with someone is, than to just let it fester on endlessly. But just like picking someone up from a bar, or from work, or the gym, don't take 'em upstairs until you're sure you know them.
Slashdot Mirror
*sigh* ok, I can't say that I know one way or the other whether AltiVec is a Motorola or IBM addition to the design. But here's what I can tell you.
IBM is already using AltiVec in it's embedded PPC setups - mostly routing equipment. Has been for close to a year.
Having already been familiar with AltiVec as the brain inside a piece of networking equipment, I thought it somewhat odd when it started getting hyped as an MMX-beater.
Furthermore, IBM and Motorola have reversed their decision to go separate ways with PPC design.
Readline support on my remote controll? Sheesh, I'd rather walk over to my computer and type in a playlist from there. Trust me, I've used ir remotes that let the user punch in alphanumerics, it's an exceptionally crude way of entering data.
However, given a flexible music librarian system, it would be great to be able to select category groups by remote controll. Say you could select what genere of music, and then what era, and hit play. Wouldn't that be a lot easier than manually selecting a dozen tracks?
What he fails to realize is that there's an awful lot of lone-horse open source programming going on.
This happens for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with money.
First, and most common, is the back yard doghouse effect.
The community model has every one of us keeping our dogs in a big kennel in the park. This is what's most sociable, right? If you're a dog owner, I can tell you're probably shaking your head violently. Especially if yours is of the female persuasion.
Most people would prefer to keep their dog in their own back yard, separate from other peoples dogs. For the same reasons (purity, ownership, etc) many people prefer to write their own pet programs.
Second, ignorance. A lot of people falling into the "annoyed" model have no clue what anybody else is doing to solve the problem. I know this isn't often the case, but there are some apps for which there is no other conclusion.
My Completely Biased OpenSource Fragmentation Quotient (CBOSFQ) currently stands at 11. Checking FreshMeat's appindex today, there are 11 individually packaged ident servers. This does not include one program written to test ident servers, nor does it include a transparent irc proxy.
All of these ident servers have one or two of about 3 features (with the exception of pidentd) - they allow masqueraded ident (poorly), or they allow a specific false ident response (unwise), or they allow a random ident response (will get you kicked off a server)
The existance of eleven ident servers is inexcusable. This is a very simple service we're talking about.
The worst part is, all of the "advanced" ident servers with special features seem to be about half baked. Instead of one really good alternative ident server, we have 10 of them that are almost but not quite.
Anybody who thinks the open source movement represents some kind of utopian marxist society is smoking something. Nine out of ten open source users and programmers would settle for free beer.
I agree that the bounty method of encouraging open source development comes from a flawed concept, but the end result is no worse than what most people are churning out already. Probably better, because the guy signing the check probably wants a finished product.
My assertian is not that they would obviously be more advanced.
My assertion is that technology builds upon itself.
Having started from a different point, how can you assume that another culture would reach the same conclusions?
Leaps in technological complexity occur when a culture learns to do something it previously didn't know it was ignorant of.
Human science has suffered various huge setbacks.
Hydrolic technology was cut off at the knees when it was decided that it was far better to employ hundreds of manual laborers to open the temple doors than to build an experimental device using sand.
The library at Alexandria was burned. We don't know what we lost.
It took spanish missionaries 14 years to destroy all the collected writings of the maya. We don't know what we lost. Their religion, their science, their literature, their poetry. All gone. Just because they weren't christians. (OK, they say they were performing human sacrifice too, but that's still no reason to erase their history)
Alchemists were so feared and loathed that they obscured their writings so much we're not sure what most of them were doing. A lot of them thought they could spontaniously generate mice by leaving a box with a sweatty shirt and some wheat in a field, but they can't all be wrong.
Millions of people in third world countries die of gastric disorders because they still believe the popular teachings of an early medic who said the best way to deal with a leaky bottom is to avoid liquids.
Furthermore, many of the important technological advancements of the last few hundreds of years have been purely accidental.
If you don't believe me, research the history of polymer plastics. Read about how the search for artificial crop fertilization revolutionized explosives. Read about the discovery of the diode.
A lot of important things came to be because of someone who was looking for one thing and stumbled on another.
A few years ago a japanese college student who was bad at math used 1000 times as much catalyst as he was supposed to and stumbled upon a polymer that conducts electricity and can hold a charge. How often does this kind of thing happen?
Who would have figured that an inordinately difficult method of printing (lithography) would allow the miniturization of transistors?
Why would you assume that a completely foreign history would advance the same technologies?
Maybe when they find us, they'll be utterly enthralled by jello.
Given the fact that human technology has advanced more in the last 100 years than all previous recorded history, it's assumed mathematically that an alien culture is more likely to be well ahead or well behind of us. We spent thousands of years dicking around and then lept into this era with a vengance.
What if Babbages machine was built and functioned within his lifetime? the british government poured millions of pounds into trying to build it, but the metalurgical technology wasn't up to it. We might have entered the information age much earlier.
How can you assume that human understanding of physics encompasses all of reality? We don't make the rules you know, we just try to understand them.
I'm not calling possible alien technology obviously more advanced. I'm saying it's most likely, well, alien.
It's a pretty safe bet that your Powerbook won't be able to uplink with the mothership.
Worthy science? You're kidding.
This is a guy, with no ties to SETI, with a prerecorded chunk of data, that most astronomers believe is of dubious value. It comes from a very slim section of the radio spectrum. just a handfull of Khz wide, if i remember right.
You're not searching for a needle in a haystack. You're searching for a quark in a haystack.
Furthermore, recent advances in RF technology have made it clear that it's positively idiotic to believe that alien life forms would be using the same modes of radio transmission we do.
Take for instance ultra-wide-band transmissions. They broadcast across the entire spectrum with exceptionally high power, but they do so in picosecond pulses, and the FCC says they can't discern them from background radiation. They don't know how to classify UWB because, while it does interfere with important things like air traffic controll, you never know you're being interefered with.
So lets say aliens use ultra wide band transmissions. is the granularity of SETI data finer than picosecond? Doubtful.
As humans we seem to have an understanding of amplitude modulation, frequency modulation, and phase modulation. phase modulation is still experimental and of questionable value. We're just starting to understand pulse modulation. How many more kinds of modulation are there?
The man who discovered frequency modulation was branded a mad scientist and fired from RCA for wasting precious corporate resources on his hair brained ideas. How many people are quietly researching modes of transmission that don't currently fall into recognizable catagories of reasonable physics?
We're not going to pick up interstellar cell phone calls and listen in on greys discussing family matters. At best we're likely to hear the RFI generated by their equipment. And that's assuming their technologies are vaguely similar to ours. An optical processor doesn't emit RFI. Maybe they use an energy form that doesn't fit into our concept of physical law.
The neat thing about history is, we build upon the past. Having started from an entirely different point, why would a completely foreign culture do things anything like we do?
It looks like MTRR support may or may not be really hairy.
I mean, you're installing two CPU's on a motherboard that's designed for one. Obviously there's no SMP support in the bios.
Even some SMP bioses make the error of only configuring the MTRR registers on the 1st cpu. I'd be surprised if a uniprocessor bios tried to configure the MTRR registers on a second cpu.
I can vouch for the fact that Linux SMP's just fine on Celerons. I'm using a pair of modified MSI MS-6905's and a pair of Celeron 366's in a dual slot 1 LX based motherboard.
However, I can also tell you that MTRR problems can be ugly. My dual celeron refused to load X until i replaced the PCI video card with an AGP video card. For some reason the PCI video card wasn't being set up correctly. I could have fought with it, but i didn't think a 2 meg #9 Motion 771 was worth all that much trouble, and got a G200.
This isn't to say it probably couldn't be worked around. They also may have figured out some way of tieing the MTRR's together. What I'm saying is, if there isn't a workaround in the hardware, or some kind of a bios update (unlikely), it probably won't work out of the box until the kernel is updated to match it.
Yes, they do use NT for a thing or two. They also use FreeBSD for a few things, and Linux for a few other things. I have met their CTO and toured their datacenter. Likening them to MindCraft is uncalledfor.
Out in utah there's an outfit called AirSwitch that's been experimentally running 10mbit ethernet across neighborhoods. They are testing 100mbit networks recently, and shouldn't have any trouble running that.
Their equipment is Not Normal - their hardware is somewhat modified off the shelf equipment, and their cabling is a proprietery design custom manufactured for them. But all you need inside your house is a regular ethernet interface.
See http://www.airswitch.net for more info.
That is why i don't use WindowMaker. A lot of things they have done are good, and elegant, and useful.
But if you want me to use a window manager that only wraps the top and bottom of a window, and won't let me resize unless i grab the bottom, you have GOT to be kidding yourself.
and WHY is that the way it does it? because it's "more correct". Correct my hiney, it's counter-intuitive.
Not too long ago, a member of the WindowMaker dev team wrote an article wherein he pointed out that instead of having menu bars with a list of menus and then sub menus with tearoffs, that we should have just one menu, with several tearoffs, as that would be "More correct". He admitted it would make a lot of people angry, but insisted that that's the way it should be done.
Personally, I gauge the quality of a software product according to two rules. It has to basically work, and it can't piss me off.
This is why i use icewm. Because FEEL is more important than LOOK.
You haven't figured it out yet, have you.
The Debian distribution panders to developers, and that's about it. The design reflects it. The documentation reflects it.
I'm not an idiot but I don't have the time to ferret out every last little fact. I don't appriciate when the docs for something assume I'm already in the know, and contain a lot of references to things that "ought to just work" and things that "should" happen.
I recently attempted to install Debian 2.1 on a DEC Multia. Was a complete bust. The docs are just the Intel docs with the header changed to reflect Alpha systems. They didn't even change the part about bootable CDs, and ElTorito is only supported by intel systems.
What's more, the few fleeting installation notes in the README are false. And nobody on the mailing list felt like responding to an installation problem experienced by every single person who attempts to follow those instructions.
Let me be perfectly clear on this - if you use the MILO commandline in the Debian 2.1/Alpha installation README, you are guaranteed failure.
And why didn't anybody give a rat's posterior about my problem? I'm just a user.
I'm no fan of RedHat, but, the RedHat/Sparc community was far more helpful when i was messing around with old sparcstations.
Personally, i'm a SuSE fan.
I loaded up USWorst's ordering page (still the poorest excuse for a business in the west), filled in my vital info, clicked submit.
USWorst rep called me the next day, verified my info, told me 10 days.
Cisco 675 DSL Router/Bridge arrives on my doorstep free of charge the next week. Cisco lists these at $399 on their ordering page. I'm not renting or leasing it, I own it. Far be it from me not to accept a loss leader.
I check with my isp (XMission, best in the state of Utah), make sure everything's hunky-dory. They give me my static IP, no extra charge, no bothering around with DHCP.
My installation target date arrives. I haul out the little thinkpad that could and hook it up to the ethernet and serial ports on the Cisco. Plug the Cisco into the phone jack. Plug the phone into the jack on the back of the Cisco.
I talk to the Cisco through the serial port, follow the configuration instructions in the booklet USWorst sent me, reconfigure the tcpip on the thinkpad, and I'm able to ping the world.
In all the excitement, the fresh (not frozen) pizza I had baking in the oven burned to a big carbon slab. Didn't even notice the smoke pouring out of the kitchen until well after I'd installed my 2nd nic in my server, made the requisite changes to my firewall configuration, and started ooing and ahhing at the download speeds and ping times.
All in all the roughest part of my DSL experience was related to installing the filtered phone jack on the wall of my appartment. I figured I'd pull the plate off and find a nice little up-to-code connection box. I discovered that that wall was constructed of 3/4 inch plywood, and that they'd installed the jack apparantly by chizzling a hole in the plywood with a screwdriver or something until they could pull the phone cord through it. Used one of those cheezy flat wall jacks with the punch-down blocks.
The filtered jack is surprisingly overengineered. Printed circuit board with a few capacitors on it and two sets of screw-down terminals, jumper wires leading to a set of screw-down terminals next to the actual jack. Another set of jumper wires leading to a set of screw-down terminals on the backside of the plate. Another set of screw-down terminals attached to those.
Had to get a shallow connection box from Eagle. That was sorta hard to find. You'd figure it'd be with the electrical stuff, but you have to go past electrical and past lighting and into plumbing to get to the conduit supplies. Go figure.
"If it weren't for reverse engineering, all of our PCs would say 'IBM' on them... "
This is completely untrue. The IBM PC was based on designs readily available to the public. The entire idea was to replace the DataMaster with a system based on the 8088 (big upgrade from the 8080) without re-inventing the wheel.
Almost every single component and design in the original PC was based on published schematics available in periodicals for anyone to use. This includes the ISA bus, the CGA graphics card, the way they used the keyboard controller as a half-baked MMU, just about everything.
On the other hand, Phoenix corporation *did* have to reverse-engineer the system BIOS. This was one of the first big cases of reverse-engineering. Phoenix BIOS was so good (for the times) that eventually IBM started using it.
But the Nintendo emulators are slightly different. They emulate both proprietary firmware and proprietary hardware. This isn't to say that they aren't perfectly legal, but Phoenix corp carefully documented their clean-room engineering procedure as they did it.
It's simple. You hire two teams of engineers. One team is fairly familiar with the product, the other needs to be able to truthfully make the statement that they've never messed with it.
The first team takes the product appart piece by piece, examines how it functions, and writes a specification for how the device should function according to their observations.
This specification is given to the second team of engineers, who, like i said, have never seen the inner workings of the product. They, in turn, design a product to match the specification they have been given.
Thus, the engineers responsible for the design of the product have never had the opportunity to examine the inner workings of the original, but are still capable of creating a fully functional equivalent. No laws broken, several toes stepped on, fairly expensive, but air tight in court.
The problem is that it's getting harder and harder to find engineers who haven't been under the hood already.
Nintendo has been pushing their argument that all emulators are inherently illegal for at least a decade. I remember a big stink about this on FidoNet.
It's actually a pretty unwise argument for them to make. There are lots of perfectly legal uses for emulation. Stating that all emulators are illegal is going to make them look stupid in court.
The thing about Ballmer is that he's such a complete butthead that nobody takes anything he says seriously.
This is a tremendously advantageous sort of guy to have as your corporate figurehead during a period of persecution. It doesn't matter what the man says, people will just mutter "Moron . . " and get on with their day.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a guy in some backwater town nobody ever heard of in Utah, concieved of a word procesing system that would get the heck out of your way and let you edit your text without any fancy crap eating up screen realestate. And back then it was 80x25, folks.
And lo, as the years passed, he did improve it, and it was possible to mark text and copy it to another document with a half a dozen keystrokes.
And yay, it was possible to do anything you wanted without stopping what you were doing, as long as you were willing to memorize a few arcane combinations. And there were grandmasters who coded macros, and could do several things with the slightest wiggle of a finger.
And tho the program was fruitful and the people were able to create a great many clean documents with it, the people did bitch, and say that queer key combinations confounded their minds, and that it was far too hard to get ahold of a replacement template, and that the help system was "silly".
And the GUI and the Mouse did come to befriend the most Perfect of stream editors, and the people were happy.
But behold, the mouse had fleas, and was suspected of having parasites. And indeed, the situation was quite buggy, and an editor both small and without strength did make strides ahead of it.
And then there came Novell, who did confound the minds of it's users. And later came Corel, who had seen the competition, and decided to become like it. And they did do away with keystrokes, and it became impossible to do anything without holding a rodent in your hand.
And the features did creep, and the menus did grow like a fungus in a well dampened area, and the Readers Digest police set up shop, and it became impossible to type "GLibC" without having it replaced with "Glib", and there were marks of many colors underlining the words of many, mocking them, and making several ill suggestions.
And lo, it was beheld that it was a uniquely inept way of creating a document. And indeed did few buy it. And lo, Corel was frightened, and did finally start giving it away, so that someone, anyone would use it.
And indeed, did it suck.
- Eric
This is obviously paranoid ramblings. But that doesn't surprise me.
What surprises me here is that it doesn't seem to bother anyone that we've come to the point where nobody questions the assumption that our government isn't any more trustworthy than the latest despot-of-the-week.
It surprises me that our government accepts the fact that we've grown cynical of their sincerity, and isn't worried about it.
If you ever get to meet one of your favorite musicians, especially one of the less wealthy ones, ask them where they get their food money.
All except the extremely successful will tell you that the bulk of their income is from touring. They get a cut of the take at the door, and they make a killing on tshirts and posters and other merchandise at the show.
This is the way the recording industry has always been. the recording industry gives the bands a raw deal, giving them an average of 80 cents per cd. Their argument is that without the distribution channels the record industry provides, nobody would know about them, and they wouldn't be able to have profitable tours.
MP3 takes that paridigm and flushes it down the toilet. the RIAA is pretty worried that their argument for the 90 / 10 split they have with the artists is about to become harder to argue.
Some of my favorite musicians have been asked by fans what they think about MP3. Their worry seems to be that MP3's dilute the artistic product of an album - a box with artwork and the layout of tracks in a particular way. Someone downloading just one track, doesn't experience the same effect as someone having the whole album to hold in their hands and examine while listening to the music. When an album gets converted to MP3's, it's no longer a "thing", it's just files on a disk.
Of course, all this could be solved with a downloadable album format. It'd be pretty easy to tarball a bunch of MP3 files with some jpegs and some playlist information. Build in a theme that automagically takes over your mp3 player when you open that album. Good idea, no?
This distributed project is mostly hype. Here's why.
First, because SETI@home is in no way affiliated with SETI. That's right. it's Just Some Guy.
Second, because the data being tested represents a relatively brief recording from an extremely narrow slice of the spectrum which most astronomers believe to be of dubious value.
This is the introduction to the "general performance tips" section of the apache manual.
------------------------------
Apache Performance Notes
Author: Dean Gaudet
Introduction
Apache is a general webserver, which is designed to be correct first, and fast second. Even so, it's performance is quite satisfactory. Most sites have less than 10Mbits of outgoing bandwidth, which Apache can fill using only a low end Pentium-based webserver. In practice sites with more bandwidth require more than one machine to fill the bandwidth due to other constraints (such as CGI or database transaction overhead). For these reasons the development focus has been mostly on correctness and configurability.
Unfortunately many folks overlook these facts and cite raw performance numbers as if they are some indication of the quality of a web server product. There is a bare minimum performance that is acceptable, beyond that extra speed only caters to a much smaller segment of the market. But in order to avoid this hurdle to the acceptance of Apache in some markets, effort was put into Apache 1.3 to bring performance up to a point where the difference with other high-end webservers is minimal.
In many states they could sue the devil for his evil influence, and get summary judgement when he fails to show, too. Might be more effective. (Though you'd have a hard time collecting, unless you sold the judgement to a collection firm)
Wouldn't it be nice to never fsck again? Or, atleast, to be virtually guaranteed that foregoing extreme funkyness, data will never be needlessly corrupted.
In a journaling filesystem, changes to files are not activated until they have been cleanly completed. Thus, if half the change is still in the cache when the power supply dies, no part of the change actually occured. Many journaling filesystems also keep preset numbers of revisions in the history of a file, making it very easy to back yourself out of a mistake.
There is a performance hit, 7 to 14 percent depending on what you're doing if i remember the specs on adding JFS to WarpServer 5. But journalling filesystems are a must for many data wearhousing applications where you simply can't afford the possibility of corruption.
All in all, this article doesn't look anti-linux. It's not particularly useful, and doesn't go out of it's way to encourage anybody to use linux, but honestly, look at what it's actually saying.
There's no hard data regarding the performance scaling of SMP linux systems. Well, there isn't. Whaddaya want? publishable results are more expensive than you think. If they had done their own research in-house you would have jumped all over them for it, no matter what they said. It would have been a serious issue of credibility for them.
There's no hard data on long-term reliability of linux. There isn't. See above.
Then there's the issue of "high availability" with linux. This was an "ask
All the tools and parts are there. Somebody just has to expend the resources to build the things this report is missing.
If you watch closely, RedHat Software seems to have two very clear policies that controll everything they do.
/dev devices, and by having a linear design that makes it easy to render unusable if you start screwing around with it. Nobody likes to keep starting over from the beginning, but "reboot" is a very simple instruction for the tech support goon to remember.
1: Increase the recognition of the RedHat brand
2: Decrease the work load on the support team
This is a publicity stunt that is definately supposed to increase their brand recognition, which will also appeal almost entirely to wannabees, who are, paridoxically, a lower support liability than the semi-experienced user, who is more likely than the wannabe to have a real problem.
Anybody who's worked in upper level technical support knows exactly what i mean about users who know just enough to get themselves into trouble.
Experienced users are right out. RedHat doesn't gain much of anything by pandering to people who just get their CD's from cheapbytes, or download ISO images over their DSL connections for nothing.
This is why the RedHat installer actually hinders the use of nonstandard installation hacks by lacking most
Increasingly, RedHat's policies leave experienced users out in the cold. This is why many people don't like them much anymore. Me, I'm using SuSE right now.
This assumes a few things.
/. if my NYTimes password were ever to be known. Really.
1: That you gave them your actual snail address
2: That you gave them your actual email address
3: That you gave them a real phone number
And anybody who's afraid of cookies should really be worrying about what the black helicopters are picking up from their phone lines.
I know, that i personally would never be able to show my face again on
If you sign yourself up with NY Times OnLine, which is free, you can read Dilbert in sync with the dead trees.
You can get a raw AP news feed too. I recommend it.
Interesting typo in the topic.
The only difference, ONLY difference at all when meeting someone from the net vs. someone from, say, a bar, is that you are more at ease from having conversed with them on several occasions.
I used to be the road-warrior service technician for a company, I made 44 flights in one year. I knew atleast one person to meet in every region they sent me to. I met literally dozens of net friends. I'm a 290lb 6'3 male, so I don't figure on getting raped by anyone, but they were all more or less what they were like online. Go figure.
With some of them, we got along better in real life. Others, we didn't relate quite as well in real life.
It's a simple rule of thumb. You meet just as many psychopaths online as you do in real life. Some of them are more obvious online, and some of them are more obvious in real life. Having known someone both online and in real life gives you a lot of insight into what makes them tick, but you should still be cautious.
I think people definately should meet people in real life after knowing them online. Take for instance the issue of romance. Eventually it has to come to a head. The two of you will either not hit it off in real life, or find that you work even better in real life, or just call the whole thing off. It's better to figure out exactly what your relationship with someone is, than to just let it fester on endlessly. But just like picking someone up from a bar, or from work, or the gym, don't take 'em upstairs until you're sure you know them.