I would guess that you're from the US. I hope so, otherwise this post will look daft:)
I'm a Brit and in my experience British people tend to leave out less words than Americans in numbers. Personally I'd say "Three hundred and forty undecillion two hundred and eighty two decillion..." . The lack of the "and" pains my ears.
Also, I would be much more likely to take "two to the hundred twenty eighth" (with or without an "and":) as meaning 2^(1/128). I would say "two to the power of a hundred and twenty eight" if I felt like being very clear and "two to the hundred and twenty eight" or "two to the one two eight" if I felt lazy.
I mention this only because you described your expression as ideal which it isn't really to me. One man's medicine, another man's poison. Certainly, I am more likely to understand it (and be able to comprehend it) than the expanded versions.
stable/unstable isn't supposed to refer to how likely the kernel is to die, more that it is in a state of flux with new features being added, internals being changed. As a consequence of this the kernels tend to be less reliable. Stable means (should mean!) that no new major changes are taking place and that the emphasis is on increasing reliability.
Oil on Mars would be a fantastic discovery as it implies life on Mars. Some sort of confirmation for scientists and a good excuse to send more probes there.
I posted this in reply to an AC, but decided it probably wouldn't get seen so have posted it again directly...
Ok, with USB1.1 you could have two modes:
Low Speed (1.5Mb/s) Full Speed (12Mb/s)
What mode is used depends on the device.
If you have a USB2 controller (i.e. the bit at the computer) and you plug in a USB1.1 device, the bus will be downgraded to USB1.1 speeds - this means that a USB2 device also connected at the same time wouldn't be able to use the 480Mb/s of USB2.
With USB2, there are three modes available:
Low Speed (1.5Mb/s) Full Speed (12Mb/s) High Speed (480Mb/s)
All USB2 devices must support Low and Full speed (so they can be connected to USB1.1 controllers) but they don't have to use High speed. This means that you can connect a USB2 keyboard to a USB2 controller and not degrade the performance of your USB2 DVD-RW for instance.
So, in conclusion, a device that is advertised as "USB2 compatible" or "USB2 Full speed" is a device that will only go at 12Mb/s at most but will play nicely with High speed USB2 devices. It is in effect a USB1.1 device that is compatible with USB2. I presume that this is where the confusion comes in - it looks as though the device has simply been repackaged as USB2 even though there are no speed improvements.
A device advertised as "USB2 compliant" or "USB2 High speed" should run at up to 480Mb/s.
I see no way in which it is reasonable to call a USB controller "USB2 compatible" because by definition all USB1.1 controllers are compatible with USB2 devices, the devices just won't run at High speed.
It is possible that this has been ignored in marketing though to shift the old USB1.1 motherboards/IO cards. This is my only gripe other than the fact that the whole situation is damned confusing.
If you have a USB2 controller (i.e. the bit at the computer) and you plug in a USB1.1 device, the bus will be downgraded to USB1.1 speeds - this means that a USB2 device also connected at the same time wouldn't be able to use the 480Mb/s of USB2.
With USB2, there are three modes available:
Low Speed (1.5Mb/s) Full Speed (12Mb/s) High Speed (480Mb/s)
All USB2 devices must support Low and Full speed (so they can be connected to USB1.1 controllers) but they don't have to use High speed. This means that you can connect a USB2 keyboard to a USB2 controller and not degrade the performance of your USB2 DVD-RW for instance.
Your mini-disk player is a USB2 device which only supports Full speed rather than High speed but will play nicely with other High speed USB2 devices.
Basically, you are correct. However, it is possible for a low speed device (keyboard, mouse) that would usually only need USB1.1 to implement USB2 but without using "high speed".
So yes, if your printer is "full speed" (12Mb/s) but supports USB2 then you should be ok.
Being able to vote someone out of power a few years down the line is not good enough. I can see my interests being ignored - the large number of votes against an id card cast online, mine included, being ignored, going to war and other things. I don't agree with these actions! I'm fed up and want the government to change, or at the very least for a few key players to change.
You make an secure guess on which day you think a certain person (politician, natch), will die. If the said person does die on that day, you collect all of the money currently bet.
All set up to be anonymous and secure and it might work. You're effectively putting a price on someone's head and when the price is high enough another someone will try and collect by ensuring the death occurs on the date they specified.
The idea is that it would suddenly breed a race of super nice politicians (in all countries!), as after all would you risk being a slimeball if this would hang over your head?
I'm not saying that I condone it, just thought you might be interested. It is a long read, but certainly thought provoking.
I don't follow Syllable development. I have looked at AtheOS before, but wasn't aware that it had been abandoned. I had similar feelings to you - AtheOS was worth watching as it offered a lot more potential that other homebrew OSs seen on slashdot.
The key point in my mind that it was under the control of a single developer. Since it was his creation he had ultimate control. Even though a fork could be created it would be unlikely as the fork would be competing against the official code.
With the official codebase abandoned, everyone feels that they have the right to be part of the fork (which I am not disputing) but this could lead to mixed ideas about direction and also a general change of attitude.
AtheOS/Syllable is kind of cool - its always had a good reception on slashdot as I remember. It is relatively new (Syllable being approximately a year old) so it would be a lot easier to make your name developing for it than for Linux, for instance. This might attract people interested in becoming famous geeks rather than those interested in writing a nice OS. Maybe.
The last paragraph of the interview is quite telling though. The statement that 0.4.5 is a "fix things" release tends to indicate to me that normally fixing doesn't happen as much as it could (which was already alluded to when Kristian mentioned that they don't do much testing). This gives some indication of the developers' attitudes (especially the "spend a few hours" fixing part).
Also, despite being a "fix things" release, 0.4.5 appears to be accepting more "nice new features" from people outside the main developers. Perhaps I'm wrong, but surely a nice new features (implying reasonable complexity) and fixing don't mix well.
The idea that new features will just be accepted (which I am just guessing, I have no idea of the process by which code can be contributed), certainly ties in with your accusation of featuritis and lack of design clarity - if there is no strong overall leader who can reject contributions then poor code will creep in at some point and Syllable will suffer.
That would be my suggestion for keeping things in check - Kristian should follow the benevolant dictator route, providing of course he doesn't already!
I would certainly be interested to see what happened if Kurt Skauen (the original AtheOS author) restarted development on AtheOS or even just contributed to Syllable.
Cheers and apologies for the discontinuity of my thoughts,
This is from a comment dhovis wrote further up (#6208243):
MacOS X doesn't use a Mach kernel. It uses Mach code in its kernel, especially for the back end. The front end of the kernel has a bunch of BSD stuff in the same memory space as the Mach stuff. It is really a hybrid kernel.
I have a machine that is a P166 with 80 odd MB of ram, all iirc. Although most of the time it is sat hidden away with only power and network cables for company, I have had X and KDE running. I would say it is just about usable. Being used to better it is a grind, but for giving out to beginners it would probably be fine.
Use a slightly lighter weight window manager and it might even be reasonably pleasant.
Maybe it is a bargaining chip, but in the case of Nottingham council, they have already made a foray into Linux by changing their mail system from a proprietry system to Linux (it's mostly a webmail type interface so the end users don't see Linux as such). I would guess that it is partially off the back of the large success they had with the mail migration that the change to Linux on the desktop is being considered - certainly it will be a large feather in the cap for Linux.
Richard Heggs, the Nottingham council IT guy who oversaw the mail migration gave a talk on it to Nottingham LUG and iirc mentioned that they may well consider changing desktops to Linux. So there does appear to be some intent to change even if management just want to use the whole thing as a bargaining chip.
Personally I hope they do go ahead with the change as then we can ask Richard to do another talk for us:)
I have lived north of London all of my nearly 24 years with the exception of eight months and can say quite certainly that I have never heard anybody talk about travelling "up" to London.
That aside, I was really just looking for an excuse to post a useless comment on the lines of:
Wahoo! This is the closest slashdot story to me ever. I walk past the University of Nottingham IESSG building every day to get my lunch.
Yeah, I'm sad. Please don't mod me down for it though:)
Cheers,
Roger
Re:Some problems that I see
on
PeltierBeer
·
· Score: 1
I like these lines from The Register's take on it:
Is Zalewski surprised to see unpatched SSH servers running in the year AD 2199? "It's not that uncommon for people to run the old distribution," he says. "I know we had a bunch of boxes that were unpatched for two years."
I doubt heat generation would be a problem - I can't really see such a train ever being built.
Consider the Channel Tunnel between the UK and France. It descends to a depth of less than 200m below sea level ( see this page or this picture from the same page).
Now consider the atlantic ocean. A cross section is shown on this page.
Firstly, the depth at the maximum is around 5000m below sea level (a cool 25 times deeper than the channel tunnel). A brief search on google for submarine maximum depth tends to suggest that maximum submarine depths (other than for specialised submarines) are typically less than 1000m. See 1, 2 and 3. I can therefore hardly see a commercial train operating at 5000m.
Also, the incline at the continental shelves is a significant factor - trains aren't noted for coping well with steep gradients so a long rise would be needed at either side. I can't comment on whether this is a problem because there is no X axis scale on the referenced atlantic ocean picture.
These are just my opinions and observations of course.
Damn right. I'm not sure that the lean-mean idea holds true either. On Windows, my Mozilla directory weighs in at 10.4MB. The Phoenix directory I just downloaded is 11.6MB.
I don't follow the development of either except to download a new Mozilla every once in a while, but it seems as though Phoenix has just cut out the unnecessary files from the chrome directory (chatzilla.jar etc.) and the components directory and then moved lots from the component directory into the Phoenix executable and still managed to make a larger overall install than Mozilla.
Mozilla executable is 137KB, Phoenix is 6.08MB. The load time on Phoenix is acceptable, having said that, even without a pre-load.
Maybe I'm thick, but the modular non-modular arguments seem mixed up.
Slashdot Mirror
WTF are we ever going to do with more than 640K of ram?
Are you saying that you'd prefer to have just one publically addressable ip address?
Cheers,
Roger
I would guess that you're from the US. I hope so, otherwise this post will look daft :)
:) as meaning 2^(1/128). I would say "two to the power of a hundred and twenty eight" if I felt like being very clear and "two to the hundred and twenty eight" or "two to the one two eight" if I felt lazy.
I'm a Brit and in my experience British people tend to leave out less words than Americans in numbers. Personally I'd say "Three hundred and forty undecillion two hundred and eighty two decillion..." . The lack of the "and" pains my ears.
Also, I would be much more likely to take "two to the hundred twenty eighth" (with or without an "and"
I mention this only because you described your expression as ideal which it isn't really to me. One man's medicine, another man's poison. Certainly, I am more likely to understand it (and be able to comprehend it) than the expanded versions.
Aren't languages fun!
Cheers,
Roger
stable/unstable isn't supposed to refer to how likely the kernel is to die, more that it is in a state of flux with new features being added, internals being changed. As a consequence of this the kernels tend to be less reliable. Stable means (should mean!) that no new major changes are taking place and that the emphasis is on increasing reliability.
Cheers,
Roger
Oil on Mars would be a fantastic discovery as it implies life on Mars. Some sort of confirmation for scientists and a good excuse to send more probes there.
Roger
I posted this in reply to an AC, but decided it probably wouldn't get seen so have posted it again directly...
Ok, with USB1.1 you could have two modes:
Low Speed (1.5Mb/s)
Full Speed (12Mb/s)
What mode is used depends on the device.
If you have a USB2 controller (i.e. the bit at the computer) and you plug in a USB1.1 device, the bus will be downgraded to USB1.1 speeds - this means that a USB2 device also connected at the same time wouldn't be able to use the 480Mb/s of USB2.
With USB2, there are three modes available:
Low Speed (1.5Mb/s)
Full Speed (12Mb/s)
High Speed (480Mb/s)
All USB2 devices must support Low and Full speed (so they can be connected to USB1.1 controllers) but they don't have to use High speed. This means that you can connect a USB2 keyboard to a USB2 controller and not degrade the performance of your USB2 DVD-RW for instance.
So, in conclusion, a device that is advertised as "USB2 compatible" or "USB2 Full speed" is a device that will only go at 12Mb/s at most but will play nicely with High speed USB2 devices. It is in effect a USB1.1 device that is compatible with USB2. I presume that this is where the confusion comes in - it looks as though the device has simply been repackaged as USB2 even though there are no speed improvements.
A device advertised as "USB2 compliant" or "USB2 High speed" should run at up to 480Mb/s.
I see no way in which it is reasonable to call a USB controller "USB2 compatible" because by definition all USB1.1 controllers are compatible with USB2 devices, the devices just won't run at High speed.
It is possible that this has been ignored in marketing though to shift the old USB1.1 motherboards/IO cards. This is my only gripe other than the fact that the whole situation is damned confusing.
Cheers,
Roger
Ok, with USB1.1 you could have two modes:
Low Speed (1.5Mb/s)
Full Speed (12Mb/s)
What mode is used depends on the device.
If you have a USB2 controller (i.e. the bit at the computer) and you plug in a USB1.1 device, the bus will be downgraded to USB1.1 speeds - this means that a USB2 device also connected at the same time wouldn't be able to use the 480Mb/s of USB2.
With USB2, there are three modes available:
Low Speed (1.5Mb/s)
Full Speed (12Mb/s)
High Speed (480Mb/s)
All USB2 devices must support Low and Full speed (so they can be connected to USB1.1 controllers) but they don't have to use High speed. This means that you can connect a USB2 keyboard to a USB2 controller and not degrade the performance of your USB2 DVD-RW for instance.
Your mini-disk player is a USB2 device which only supports Full speed rather than High speed but will play nicely with other High speed USB2 devices.
All clear?
Cheers,
Roger
For a good overview see this comment.
Basically, you are correct. However, it is possible for a low speed device (keyboard, mouse) that would usually only need USB1.1 to implement USB2 but without using "high speed".
So yes, if your printer is "full speed" (12Mb/s) but supports USB2 then you should be ok.
Cheers,
Roger
Nice summary, especially with regards to USB 2.0 keyboards.
Cheers,
Roger
I quite agree (I'm in the UK).
Being able to vote someone out of power a few years down the line is not good enough. I can see my interests being ignored - the large number of votes against an id card cast online, mine included, being ignored, going to war and other things. I don't agree with these actions! I'm fed up and want the government to change, or at the very least for a few key players to change.
Cheers,
Roger
Ever heard of Assassination Politics?
You make an secure guess on which day you think a certain person (politician, natch), will die. If the said person does die on that day, you collect all of the money currently bet.
All set up to be anonymous and secure and it might work. You're effectively putting a price on someone's head and when the price is high enough another someone will try and collect by ensuring the death occurs on the date they specified.
The idea is that it would suddenly breed a race of super nice politicians (in all countries!), as after all would you risk being a slimeball if this would hang over your head?
I'm not saying that I condone it, just thought you might be interested. It is a long read, but certainly thought provoking.
Cheers,
Roger
I don't follow Syllable development. I have looked at AtheOS before, but wasn't aware that it had been abandoned. I had similar feelings to you - AtheOS was worth watching as it offered a lot more potential that other homebrew OSs seen on slashdot.
The key point in my mind that it was under the control of a single developer. Since it was his creation he had ultimate control. Even though a fork could be created it would be unlikely as the fork would be competing against the official code.
With the official codebase abandoned, everyone feels that they have the right to be part of the fork (which I am not disputing) but this could lead to mixed ideas about direction and also a general change of attitude.
AtheOS/Syllable is kind of cool - its always had a good reception on slashdot as I remember. It is relatively new (Syllable being approximately a year old) so it would be a lot easier to make your name developing for it than for Linux, for instance. This might attract people interested in becoming famous geeks rather than those interested in writing a nice OS. Maybe.
The last paragraph of the interview is quite telling though. The statement that 0.4.5 is a "fix things" release tends to indicate to me that normally fixing doesn't happen as much as it could (which was already alluded to when Kristian mentioned that they don't do much testing). This gives some indication of the developers' attitudes (especially the "spend a few hours" fixing part).
Also, despite being a "fix things" release, 0.4.5 appears to be accepting more "nice new features" from people outside the main developers. Perhaps I'm wrong, but surely a nice new features (implying reasonable complexity) and fixing don't mix well.
The idea that new features will just be accepted (which I am just guessing, I have no idea of the process by which code can be contributed), certainly ties in with your accusation of featuritis and lack of design clarity - if there is no strong overall leader who can reject contributions then poor code will creep in at some point and Syllable will suffer.
That would be my suggestion for keeping things in check - Kristian should follow the benevolant dictator route, providing of course he doesn't already!
I would certainly be interested to see what happened if Kurt Skauen (the original AtheOS author) restarted development on AtheOS or even just contributed to Syllable.
Cheers and apologies for the discontinuity of my thoughts,
Roger
Only 64MB of ram? Ick, no wonder it thrashed :)
Forgot to say, this was with Mandrake 7.x
I have a machine that is a P166 with 80 odd MB of ram, all iirc. Although most of the time it is sat hidden away with only power and network cables for company, I have had X and KDE running. I would say it is just about usable. Being used to better it is a grind, but for giving out to beginners it would probably be fine.
Use a slightly lighter weight window manager and it might even be reasonably pleasant.
Cheers,
Roger
There was an httpd kernel module in 2.4:
m l
http://www.linux-mag.com/2000-01/linux2-4_04.ht
I *think* that I heard it was being removed for 2.5, but I could well be wrong.
Cheers,
Roger
Maybe it is a bargaining chip, but in the case of Nottingham council, they have already made a foray into Linux by changing their mail system from a proprietry system to Linux (it's mostly a webmail type interface so the end users don't see Linux as such). I would guess that it is partially off the back of the large success they had with the mail migration that the change to Linux on the desktop is being considered - certainly it will be a large feather in the cap for Linux.
:)
Richard Heggs, the Nottingham council IT guy who oversaw the mail migration gave a talk on it to Nottingham LUG and iirc mentioned that they may well consider changing desktops to Linux. So there does appear to be some intent to change even if management just want to use the whole thing as a bargaining chip.
Personally I hope they do go ahead with the change as then we can ask Richard to do another talk for us
Cheers,
Roger
And the big disadvantage with it is compiling OpenOffice...
(Yes, I know you don't have to)
Roger
I have lived north of London all of my nearly 24 years with the exception of eight months and can say quite certainly that I have never heard anybody talk about travelling "up" to London.
:)
That aside, I was really just looking for an excuse to post a useless comment on the lines of:
Wahoo! This is the closest slashdot story to me ever. I walk past the University of Nottingham IESSG building every day to get my lunch.
Yeah, I'm sad. Please don't mod me down for it though
Cheers,
Roger
Perhaps you mean Silicone?
I like these lines from The Register's take on it:
Is Zalewski surprised to see unpatched SSH servers running in the year AD 2199? "It's not that uncommon for people to run the old distribution," he says. "I know we had a bunch of boxes that were unpatched for two years."
From http://theregister.co.uk/content/55/30747.html
Roger
I doubt heat generation would be a problem - I can't really see such a train ever being built.
Consider the Channel Tunnel between the UK and France. It descends to a depth of less than 200m below sea level ( see this page or this picture from the same page).
Now consider the atlantic ocean. A cross section is shown on this page.
Firstly, the depth at the maximum is around 5000m below sea level (a cool 25 times deeper than the channel tunnel). A brief search on google for submarine maximum depth tends to suggest that maximum submarine depths (other than for specialised submarines) are typically less than 1000m. See 1, 2 and 3. I can therefore hardly see a commercial train operating at 5000m.
Also, the incline at the continental shelves is a significant factor - trains aren't noted for coping well with steep gradients so a long rise would be needed at either side. I can't comment on whether this is a problem because there is no X axis scale on the referenced atlantic ocean picture.
These are just my opinions and observations of course.
Cheers,
Roger
Not all of us have icons don't forget. I browse slashdot in simple mode, it's much nicer.
I did realise it was a story about the kernel nontheless.
Cheers,
Roger
Is a 6MB executable bloated for a browser in your opinion?
Damn right. I'm not sure that the lean-mean idea holds true either. On Windows, my Mozilla directory weighs in at 10.4MB. The Phoenix directory I just downloaded is 11.6MB.
I don't follow the development of either except to download a new Mozilla every once in a while, but it seems as though Phoenix has just cut out the unnecessary files from the chrome directory (chatzilla.jar etc.) and the components directory and then moved lots from the component directory into the Phoenix executable and still managed to make a larger overall install than Mozilla.
Mozilla executable is 137KB, Phoenix is 6.08MB. The load time on Phoenix is acceptable, having said that, even without a pre-load.
Maybe I'm thick, but the modular non-modular arguments seem mixed up.
Cheers,
Roger