It's not Maya, but it's on par with anything in the low-mid range for windows, and it's getting better by leaps and bounds.
Completely agree. Blender is a real workhorse now. It's stable, fast, and I can do a lot of things very quickly. In one demo I created an airplane complete with rivets, rusty tail section and bullet holes in under 15 minutes. It can easily replace many of the $15,000 setups used in news stations or even some low end studios.
Even without offloading functions to separate cards you can still get a huge increase by optimizing, which I think is what the OP was getting at. I remember the Amiga -- absolutely amazing machine at the time. One of its competitors besides the PC and Mac was the Atari ST series. The STs didn't have near the graphic capabilities of the Amiga but they were about half the price and clocked slightly faster. Unfortunately, the then impressive 8MhZ 68000 processor was crippled by some sub-optimal graphics drivers.
For example, there was a software based Macintosh emulator available for the ST. Macintosh apps would actually run faster than native TOS/GEM applications. Most obvious was the difference in scroll speed. If you tried to scroll a window under GEM you could see the graphics being updated. It could take 5 minutes to scroll a large file. Under the Mac emulation it just zipped by and that same file could scroll by in a few seconds at most.
One company did release a native ST editor called Tempus that showed how fast the ST could be with optimization. All in software too. They did this by hand optimizing assembler and using many tricks of the 68000.
I don't know if the same thing is possible today. I've read that today's chips are so much more complex that hand-optimizing is not really possible. I dunno. I believe that the optimization can still be moved to the higher level language by choosing more efficient algorithms or even just better exploitation of the compiler technology (contrast Intel compilers vs gcc).
You have scores of machines that you're managing through the free service? RHN allowed you to manage these for free (maybe the cost of a demo subscription or a single $60/year fee that you bounced from machine to machine). It put a load on their servers for both the rhn-applet, the up2date, and the package information that's stored there. There's a $20 update service now until EOL that you can buy.
You have many other options -- you can use yum, apt, synaptic to upgrade your machines. If you have all these scores of machines in a single facility you can create your own yum/apt repository and have the machines check each day via cron. If you want a centralized view of the state of your machines then maintain a database of each machines packages. Periodically check the repository against the package database and send an alert if any are out of date.
For example:
rpm -qa --query-format "%{name}\t%{version}\n"
For each machine store this information in a mySQL table. Then as new packages enter the repository, store that information inside another table. You can then select packages based on name between tables then inform the user that a package needs to be updated. Or count the packages that need to be updated. This will give you 90% of the RHN functionality. Won't be as pretty but it works.
...the amount of waste produced by any chemical reactor ( gas, coal, oil) could fill a stadium the amount of nuclear waste that is created by a fusion reactor could fill the back of a Toyota truck.
What you're forgetting is that the small *volume* of waste produced by any nuclear plant takes much more space to dispose off properly. Contrary to commercial-driven panics about the lack of landfill space, there's actually plenty of places to dump our trash. There's not so many that are suitable for nuclear waste. I.e., you generally need mountains, places far removed from the water table, lots of rock, etc.. You can't get that along the Eastern seaboard where most of the power will be needed. Want to transport nuclear waste cross country to the Nevada mountains? Think about the number of oil tankers that have crashed or spilled... With nuclear waste it's potentially a lot worse because those levels of radiation are deadly,
Now I'm not against nuclear power. I wrote several papers about Turkey Point reactor (mostly concerning the beneficial and deleterious effects of thermal effluent on local fish and wildlife populations, but also about increased background radiation , or lack thereof, in any modern reactor) and they convinced me that the technology itself is relatively safe. However, I was not convinced that the disposal of this waste is so easy. I am not convinced that they are better than conventional or even exploration of alternative energy sources that would have less waste. I am also not convinced that the requirements for more energy would not be significantly offset by regulations requiring better energy efficiency.
Let's talk, for example, about cars/trucks/SUVs. They are the bulk of our gasoline usage. The 80/20 rule says that if we can improve the efficiency of 80% we stand to gain the most. This in mind, why have regulations been castrated to allow car manufacturers to build needlessly gas guzzling vehicles? And I'm not saying that we get rid of SUVs and full size trucks or even give up horsepower or top-end, only that the engines be made more fuel efficient. When these laws were put into effect, car manufacturers did very quickly improve efficiency. Since they were repealed or castrated the efficiency has lost gains made in a decade. Why are there laws give heavy tax breaks for people who buy the largest vehicles?
But you've already made up your mind so this won't convince you.
It could be one of those ideas whose time has finally arrived. My experience with Java hasn't been all that great. There are several competing Java VMs and each had idiosyncracies and problems that precluded the "write once, run anywhere" philosophy from actually working. Getting Java to work under Linux is not quite as simple as under Windows or MacOS, and messages on news groups, the Fedora Core lists, and in local LUGs attest to this.
The latest releases are *much* easier, however. I downloaded and installed the latest Sun Java SDK on a Fedora Core 1 machine. The graphical installer put everything in/opt (not exactly LSB, but I can live with it) and exited. It didn't set JAVA_HOME or adjust any user PATH variables, but hunting through the instructions I was able to find the correct chapter (I knew this before reading, just wanted to confirm that they did say so).
Now Java has always had this (perhaps undeserved) reputation for being slow. Not the case with Java/Fedora. Whether it's the NPTL that's part of Fedora or optimizations in the Java VM itself, the jar files I tried opened as quickly as natively compiled applications. Responsiveness was just as good. For the record I tried Jedit, Arachnophilia, Mindterm, WeirdX and a bunch of math/science applications for fractals, mapping, function graphing, etc.. Yes, a lot of the applications are already available natively under Linux, but the idea that I can move my desktop environment to anywhere without setting up automatic NFS mounts, playing with VNC servers, or fussing with roaming profiles is pretty cool.
Now I'm not as big a Sun fan as I was five years ago, but I think this technology is pretty cool.
There was a Windows virus a few years ago that spoofed the sender addy from an infected host's address book. I recall that many people started receiving messages from folks long dead, employees long gone, etc.. The emails included some random documents from the hard drive and occasionally they were combined in coincidentally ominous ways (dead person sends I Love You to living).
Well, do you believe there will be Hell to pay if you do sin?
Imagine if God truly didn't exist and you are just another random bit of carbon floating the Universe. There is no fate, just happenstance. No God, just the cold, quiet Void. Make peace with your God or with the Void, it's up to you. My thought? Live every day as if it were your last. Do it now. Whether that means you talk to that girl in phys ed or you complete that doctorate or paint that novel, just do it now.
I read one of Frank Herbert's books a *LONG* time ago.. The title was something like The White Plague and told about how a (IIRC) benign virus mutated and caused world destruction. Hmm. Life imitating art? Now, I'm all in favor of pushing the bounds of science and doing genetic modification, but even so we do need caution if these things are ever deployed.
Somewhat OT, but the idea of a toned down but still functional Linux appeals to me. I had a similar idea of doing this to a distro not well known for being slim -- RedHat 9. For partially philosophical reasons, and partly because I was not getting any work done with all the gizmos cluttering my desktop, I decided to remove the clutter but not lose any functionality. (In my defense, I'm comfortable with Debian and some embedded, minimal distros and have built a Linux from the kernel sources to X).
The hardware for this ongoing project is a 333MhZ PII laptop, 192M. I started by getting rid of the Gnome and KDE environments (well, most of it -- I kept the libraries and some select applications around). In their place I put in Fluxbox, choosing./configure options carefully to minimize memory usage.
Next, because I spend the majority of my time in the shell, I looked at some of the different xterms around. I was surprised that the native xterm, though much smaller than konsole or gnome-terminal, was still somewhat bloated in comparison with others such as aterm or rxvt. They didn't support transparent terminals but that's no biggie. The important thing was that they could do green-on-black terminals; also no biggie, but I was thinking about this because I made an assumption that a black background would use less battery than a white one. Of course, you could also ditch X entirely and run from a console but browsing the web in elinks or links, though great for documentation, kinda sucks for looking at Dolphin cheerleaders.
Next, I exchanged the stock RedHat kernel with a 2.6.0-test kernel (test9 at this writing). It does seem a lot faster, but I am still working out some module loading issues so there is some functional loss until I get these working. This is important because the goal is not to lose functionality for performance.
I've been testing different journaling modes for the ext3 filesystem. No benchmarks yet, but I understand that there's a decent performance boost to be had from using a different writeback mode.
These are all in addition to the standard tweaks such as using a lower bit depth on the X session, replacing apps with slimmer alternatives (Firebird for Mozilla, etc.). There are also dubious claims of speedups by just recompiling but in my case these gains weren't perceptible.
I'm about to replace syslog with one that batches writes. This will allow the drives to spin down. Since power management is otherwise functional it might gain some performance.
Things to watch: Build your root fs models statically into the kernel.
Your/etc/modules.conf file will likely need to be updated because of differences in the module names.
Some init scripts will need to be modified.
None of these are fatal errors but will cause some failure messages as the system comes up. This can be a little disconcerting but shouldn't do any harm.
If you're running things like NVidia binary drives, VMWare, or any applications that build kernel modules specific to the running kernel you will need to rebuild those hooks.
Some USB devices may magically start working!
Your/dev layout may look different, possibly breaking some scripts.
Some parts of/proc may not be the same, so things that rely on cat'ing files in/proc might break. For these use applications like lspci instead of reading proc directly.
I don't have time, that's why I'm using Linux. Whether or not Linux or Windows is easier to use for first time computer users is irrelevant; I know that I can get things done much faster in front of a Linux box than anything from Microsoft. Practical, always.
But then there's the philosophy. I really love the idea of sharing knowledge, sharing information. Luckily, the free (speech) software movement, the community, the openness doesn't impede the practicality.
I remember the early days of the Net. There were a bunch of folks who complained, like you are doing now about the growth of Linux, that all these newbies and aolusers and top-posters and suchlike folks would be the death of the Community. It would become another social club or some sort of virtual mall. Yup. They were right. But without the Internet, without the influx of millions of users, Linux itself would have remained a curious (but cool) little experiment, perhaps useful to a few thousand users at most. You can debate this if you want, but I'll stand by it.
But I really wanted to talk about practicality. For all my writings about Free Software being a revolution for the people, I'm still a practical guy. If I don't have to explain Linux to a co-worker and can just pull up his OpenOffice spreadsheet it makes things easier for me. If I can hop over to CompUSA to pick up TurboTax for Linux and install it without messing with Wine or VMWare or a dual boot then it's easier for me. If I pick up another laptop and don't have to go through the trouble of deleting Windows then installing Linux it's easier for me.
And yes, I enjoy this feeling of being a holder of some arcane knowledge about this rogue operating system. It feels good to tell others that, yes, I've been using Linux since the.99 kernel days and that I remember downloading floppies to install Linux. But I'd look pretty foolish if it was more work to use Linux. It would be an ecentricity, like the fountain pen that I carry around on occasion, that's just not practical in the real world.
Very interesting question. Five years ago I would have said that certifications were about as useful a predictor of knowledge as swirling tea leaves in a cup. I've seen some really good MCSEs with a thorough knowledge of networking and their specialties and just as many who can't properly subnet a network. Five years ago, anyone who was seriously into Linux was *usually* a competent sysadmin in their own right and didn't need a piece of paper to prove it.
I think this has changed. There are a lot more people getting into Linux for the money than there has ever been before. This has upsides and downsides. Upside -- Linux is growing. Downside, it's no longer an arcane science. I can live with the downside though.
Alas, we peddle our skills to non-technical types who don't understand that a cram session and the ability to prepare for a test does not predict the knowledge of a consultant or future employee. They, for good or bad, use keyword filters or head hunter resume databases to choose candidates. Those who have magical letters on their resume get noticed. The rest, regardless of knowledge, get filtered out before ever being seen by a human.
So are Linux certifications a good thing? Maybe. If done right and don't end up as a certification mill as happened with the MCSE, then sure. They can help show a certain level of competency and could ensure that the certificate holder has the broad level of knowledge required to pass the test. In the next five years I'd expect that more executives will start asking for some certification anyway.
This will only work if the certification process in itself does not become an industry. The cost of taking the test should be low (under $150) but it must be difficult. Ideally it would include a practical, hands-on section instead of a bunch of multiple choice questions. The course work should be openly available and reflect not only real-world knowledge but some theoretical and philosophical aspects of using Linux.
This makes a lot of sense... Enough so that I did a google for "open source mathematics textbook" and found a bunch. Cool idea, I think. They need some editing but I really think that this could revolutionize how some classes are taught. As you say, a math text is standard fare -- the differences between textbooks (not to mention between versions of textbooks) is scant.
Then you'd be guilty of linking the Druid *priesthood* and people to Stonehenge. This is speculation only, as no evidence exists (outside of some new-age pseudo-histories) that the Druids had anything to do with the Henge. It is very likely meant to mark the solstice and served some practical purpose. This still doesn't change my supposition that a technological marvel could be used by an elite priesthood to keep the populace under some measure of control. Alas, there's not much archeological evidence about the druids at all, much less anything about the philosophical leanings of their religion, and anecdotal evidence isn't evidence so I'll ignore that.
This priestly control in itself is not a bad thing, mind you. But I tend to distrust closed institutions as a matter of course and the priesthood falls under that banner.
Are you an art major? Don't mean to be facetious, but I got a lot of this during the dozen or so art courses I took in college. I can talk neo/psuedo-druidic philosophy with the best of them, but other courses in anthropology, religion, and world history sort of banished those ideas from my head. There's a strong, strong tendency to attribute noble and enlightened ideas to cultures that we only hear about from folktale or conjecture. We do this when we long for the pre-industrial, bucolic farmlands of our stories or when we discuss pre-Colombian Native American society as some Garden of Eden. In reality, life was rough. People died young from disease and war, lots of war. People worked all day and didn't have a lot of time for leisure.
So what about "shamanism" -- a word itself that's been so new-ageified and bandied about that it has lost its true meaning? Since there are no pre-Roman folks around laying claim to that mantle, we can only make guesses (informed, but still guesses) from contemporary spiritual heads, curers, or shamans to use your term. So take a look at the canonical examples from New Guinea tribes... Hmmm, no sense of individual freedoms there.. Not a whole bunch at least, since they're generally busy looking for food and on the move. And if you place any stock in your Joseph Campbell (I don't, truthfully), then there's not really any sense of "individual" in any of the tribal religions (and I mean tribal strictly in the anthropological sense). Why? The group is more important. It's only with the Industrial Revolution and in those societies that had one, that leisure time could be spent to develop the individual.
To distinguish priests from "shaman" is thus not really possible. The shaman/healer was the religious head and the doctor.
And yes I did check the literature. Since this subject has been a favorite pasttime of mine since high school fifteen years ago, I've amassed quite a bit of reference material.
I imagine stonehenge was more the equivalent of a present day water works project such as a dam or sewer treatment plant, except that it was likely controlled by priests who, throughout history, have a major goal of perpetuating the priesthood. This is assuming that Stonehenge could have been used for practical purposes such as forecasting the proper crop planting time rather than just some gee-whiz gadgetry to keep the general populace in awe and in bondage.
I once sysadmined at (now defunct) USA Floral Enterprises. They had a bunch of Sun machines -- E6500s, 450s, Ultra Sparcs. I was running a Linux machine because it made sense to administer Unix boxes from something that could run an X server. When the Sun guys came to sell more hardware they always disparaged the Linux machines, telling our CTO things like, "It's free. What do you expect for free?" Our CTO at one point made the statement, "We're not running *free* software on our network!" The way she said it made "free" sound like something evil and criminal.
Rather than dropping in a cheap $500 Linux machine to pre-process orders, they chose instead to spend close to $30,000 for some E250 solution with some really bad perl software. It wasn't as if it was running some proprietary sparc only app; it was perl for goodness sake.
Anyway, Sun has never liked Linux because Linux pretty much stole all their money making ISP and dot com customers after the crash. But that wasn't the only thing. They stopped caring about what people were doing in the NOCs, choosing to push pet-project technologies that made little sense in the real world. Solaris on Intel was pretty good despite some shortcomings. But they tried to kill it because they believed it took away Sparc sales. Nope. People experimenting with PCs aren't likely to drop $4,000 on a Sparc. So they pretty much conceded that market to Linux when Linux was still unknown at the executive levels. Instead they pushed remote framebuffer devices that cost as much as a decent PC and required significant network bandwidth. They tried to push Java in the wrong places. etc. etc.
You're out of your mind. Starbucks coffee is to coffee as American beer is to beer. Sure there are acquired tastes and taste is too damned subjective to be anything but troll fodder, but if Starbucks is not drowning their coffee in sugar and milk and every other flavor but coffee, they're sticking poofs of whipped cream on top and making it into some sort of performance art piece. I drink coffee for caffeine or for the coffee taste, not for some little brat faced little twerp to snicker when I pronounce macchiato different from how he heard it from his Warhol-wannabe schoolmates, not for little artsy branches sticking out of the cup, not for some trendy goat milk or absinthe falvoring.
I like my women the way I like my coffee. Hot, bitter, and able to keep me up all night long.
(Laugh. I'm just joking. Well, the first part anyway.)
There are several other ways around some of this software. One of my favorites is to convert the IP address of the server into the decimal equivalent (use something like Octave or Mathematica because your typical scientific calculator will change the number to exponential form). This won't work with virtual hosted sites but works on many, many proxy servers.
Some of the weaker filters will also not block pages that are framed on another URL. If you have access to a webserver you could just create an html form that does nothing but open the webpage into a frameset. I'm not certain why this is not blocked when directly accessing the page is, but it was interesting to see.
I've heard also that using legitimate sites such as Babelfish or even the google cache will allow access to many.
I still have the Reference Manual from a TI99/4A hanging around somewhere. One of the example programs showed how to redefine character sets to create graphics. It was a single character animation of a jumping man and took maybe ten or so lines of BASIC. There was also a Pong-like bouncing ball demo; you couldn't actually play it, but you could watch the square "ball" bounce around the screen for hours on end.
I remember spending hours typing in programs from Compute! magazine. On some machines the code was in BASIC. On the C64 it was often in HEX code. That's right. Someone would create assembly language games then publish then as HEX in the magazine. You'd spend hours typing and verifying long strings of HEX that was entered via a BASIC converter. At one point the magazine developed a checksumming feature to verify that your lines were entered properly, but before that it was a pain.
The C64 was one of the first machines I'd ever used to go online. The Atari/C=64 wars were pretty amusing (I had both though!). There were also hundreds of little demos that you could load. Almost all of them took advantage of quirks of the hardware -- songs, digitized voices, animations. One of my favorites was a graphing application that drew 3D functions on the screen. They took sometimes hours to draw stuff that would be real-time today, but I'd spend hours just waiting for them to finish.
Tell you what -- why don't you provide the URL of a Windows XP box then I'll race you to see if you can patch it sooner than it can be cracked when the next exploit comes along. No box is completely secure - not Linux, not BSD, and not WindowsXP, no matter what people think otherwise. Send the URL privately if you want and authorize me to test the security of your unbreakable WindowsXP system.
Man, you don't realize what you're asking. My memories of Windows include going up to a "Password Protected" Windows box and pressing Escape... I didn't mean to get past their security, it just happened. Imagine some pseudo-cracker doing something simple -- I dunno, forwarding a virus email on purpose -- and then accidentally gaining access.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not Maya, but it's on par with anything in the low-mid range for windows, and it's getting better by leaps and bounds.
Completely agree. Blender is a real workhorse now. It's stable, fast, and I can do a lot of things very quickly. In one demo I created an airplane complete with rivets, rusty tail section and bullet holes in under 15 minutes. It can easily replace many of the $15,000 setups used in news stations or even some low end studios.
Even without offloading functions to separate cards you can still get a huge increase by optimizing, which I think is what the OP was getting at. I remember the Amiga -- absolutely amazing machine at the time. One of its competitors besides the PC and Mac was the Atari ST series. The STs didn't have near the graphic capabilities of the Amiga but they were about half the price and clocked slightly faster. Unfortunately, the then impressive 8MhZ 68000 processor was crippled by some sub-optimal graphics drivers.
For example, there was a software based Macintosh emulator available for the ST. Macintosh apps would actually run faster than native TOS/GEM applications. Most obvious was the difference in scroll speed. If you tried to scroll a window under GEM you could see the graphics being updated. It could take 5 minutes to scroll a large file. Under the Mac emulation it just zipped by and that same file could scroll by in a few seconds at most.
One company did release a native ST editor called Tempus that showed how fast the ST could be with optimization. All in software too. They did this by hand optimizing assembler and using many tricks of the 68000.
I don't know if the same thing is possible today. I've read that today's chips are so much more complex that hand-optimizing is not really possible. I dunno. I believe that the optimization can still be moved to the higher level language by choosing more efficient algorithms or even just better exploitation of the compiler technology (contrast Intel compilers vs gcc).
You have scores of machines that you're managing through the free service? RHN allowed you to manage these for free (maybe the cost of a demo subscription or a single $60/year fee that you bounced from machine to machine). It put a load on their servers for both the rhn-applet, the up2date, and the package information that's stored there. There's a $20 update service now until EOL that you can buy.
You have many other options -- you can use yum, apt, synaptic to upgrade your machines. If you have all these scores of machines in a single facility you can create your own yum/apt repository and have the machines check each day via cron. If you want a centralized view of the state of your machines then maintain a database of each machines packages. Periodically check the repository against the package database and send an alert if any are out of date.
For example:
rpm -qa --query-format "%{name}\t%{version}\n"
For each machine store this information in a mySQL table. Then as new packages enter the repository, store that information inside another table. You can then select packages based on name between tables then inform the user that a package needs to be updated. Or count the packages that need to be updated. This will give you 90% of the RHN functionality. Won't be as pretty but it works.
Or you can pay RedHat for this service.
...the amount of waste produced by any chemical reactor ( gas, coal, oil) could fill a stadium the amount of nuclear waste that is created by a fusion reactor could fill the back of a Toyota truck.
What you're forgetting is that the small *volume* of waste produced by any nuclear plant takes much more space to dispose off properly. Contrary to commercial-driven panics about the lack of landfill space, there's actually plenty of places to dump our trash. There's not so many that are suitable for nuclear waste. I.e., you generally need mountains, places far removed from the water table, lots of rock, etc.. You can't get that along the Eastern seaboard where most of the power will be needed. Want to transport nuclear waste cross country to the Nevada mountains? Think about the number of oil tankers that have crashed or spilled... With nuclear waste it's potentially a lot worse because those levels of radiation are deadly,
Now I'm not against nuclear power. I wrote several papers about Turkey Point reactor (mostly concerning the beneficial and deleterious effects of thermal effluent on local fish and wildlife populations, but also about increased background radiation , or lack thereof, in any modern reactor) and they convinced me that the technology itself is relatively safe. However, I was not convinced that the disposal of this waste is so easy. I am not convinced that they are better than conventional or even exploration of alternative energy sources that would have less waste. I am also not convinced that the requirements for more energy would not be significantly offset by regulations requiring better energy efficiency.
Let's talk, for example, about cars/trucks/SUVs. They are the bulk of our gasoline usage. The 80/20 rule says that if we can improve the efficiency of 80% we stand to gain the most. This in mind, why have regulations been castrated to allow car manufacturers to build needlessly gas guzzling vehicles? And I'm not saying that we get rid of SUVs and full size trucks or even give up horsepower or top-end, only that the engines be made more fuel efficient. When these laws were put into effect, car manufacturers did very quickly improve efficiency. Since they were repealed or castrated the efficiency has lost gains made in a decade. Why are there laws give heavy tax breaks for people who buy the largest vehicles?
But you've already made up your mind so this won't convince you.
It could be one of those ideas whose time has finally arrived. My experience with Java hasn't been all that great. There are several competing Java VMs and each had idiosyncracies and problems that precluded the "write once, run anywhere" philosophy from actually working. Getting Java to work under Linux is not quite as simple as under Windows or MacOS, and messages on news groups, the Fedora Core lists, and in local LUGs attest to this.
/opt (not exactly LSB, but I can live with it) and exited. It didn't set JAVA_HOME or adjust any user PATH variables, but hunting through the instructions I was able to find the correct chapter (I knew this before reading, just wanted to confirm that they did say so).
The latest releases are *much* easier, however. I downloaded and installed the latest Sun Java SDK on a Fedora Core 1 machine. The graphical installer put everything in
Now Java has always had this (perhaps undeserved) reputation for being slow. Not the case with Java/Fedora. Whether it's the NPTL that's part of Fedora or optimizations in the Java VM itself, the jar files I tried opened as quickly as natively compiled applications. Responsiveness was just as good. For the record I tried Jedit, Arachnophilia, Mindterm, WeirdX and a bunch of math/science applications for fractals, mapping, function graphing, etc.. Yes, a lot of the applications are already available natively under Linux, but the idea that I can move my desktop environment to anywhere without setting up automatic NFS mounts, playing with VNC servers, or fussing with roaming profiles is pretty cool.
Now I'm not as big a Sun fan as I was five years ago, but I think this technology is pretty cool.
There was a Windows virus a few years ago that spoofed the sender addy from an infected host's address book. I recall that many people started receiving messages from folks long dead, employees long gone, etc.. The emails included some random documents from the hard drive and occasionally they were combined in coincidentally ominous ways (dead person sends I Love You to living).
Guess I'm misremembering it. It has been close to twenty years since I read it last.
Well, do you believe there will be Hell to pay if you do sin?
Imagine if God truly didn't exist and you are just another random bit of carbon floating the Universe. There is no fate, just happenstance. No God, just the cold, quiet Void. Make peace with your God or with the Void, it's up to you. My thought? Live every day as if it were your last. Do it now. Whether that means you talk to that girl in phys ed or you complete that doctorate or paint that novel, just do it now.
I read one of Frank Herbert's books a *LONG* time ago.. The title was something like The White Plague and told about how a (IIRC) benign virus mutated and caused world destruction. Hmm. Life imitating art? Now, I'm all in favor of pushing the bounds of science and doing genetic modification, but even so we do need caution if these things are ever deployed.
Somewhat OT, but the idea of a toned down but still functional Linux appeals to me. I had a similar idea of doing this to a distro not well known for being slim -- RedHat 9. For partially philosophical reasons, and partly because I was not getting any work done with all the gizmos cluttering my desktop, I decided to remove the clutter but not lose any functionality. (In my defense, I'm comfortable with Debian and some embedded, minimal distros and have built a Linux from the kernel sources to X).
./configure options carefully to minimize memory usage.
The hardware for this ongoing project is a 333MhZ PII laptop, 192M. I started by getting rid of the Gnome and KDE environments (well, most of it -- I kept the libraries and some select applications around). In their place I put in Fluxbox, choosing
Next, because I spend the majority of my time in the shell, I looked at some of the different xterms around. I was surprised that the native xterm, though much smaller than konsole or gnome-terminal, was still somewhat bloated in comparison with others such as aterm or rxvt. They didn't support transparent terminals but that's no biggie. The important thing was that they could do green-on-black terminals; also no biggie, but I was thinking about this because I made an assumption that a black background would use less battery than a white one. Of course, you could also ditch X entirely and run from a console but browsing the web in elinks or links, though great for documentation, kinda sucks for looking at Dolphin cheerleaders.
Next, I exchanged the stock RedHat kernel with a 2.6.0-test kernel (test9 at this writing). It does seem a lot faster, but I am still working out some module loading issues so there is some functional loss until I get these working. This is important because the goal is not to lose functionality for performance.
I've been testing different journaling modes for the ext3 filesystem. No benchmarks yet, but I understand that there's a decent performance boost to be had from using a different writeback mode.
These are all in addition to the standard tweaks such as using a lower bit depth on the X session, replacing apps with slimmer alternatives (Firebird for Mozilla, etc.). There are also dubious claims of speedups by just recompiling but in my case these gains weren't perceptible.
I'm about to replace syslog with one that batches writes. This will allow the drives to spin down. Since power management is otherwise functional it might gain some performance.
Things to watch:
/etc/modules.conf file will likely need to be updated because of differences in the module names.
/dev layout may look different, possibly breaking some scripts.
/proc may not be the same, so things that rely on cat'ing files in /proc might break. For these use applications like lspci instead of reading proc directly.
Build your root fs models statically into the kernel.
Your
Some init scripts will need to be modified.
None of these are fatal errors but will cause some failure messages as the system comes up. This can be a little disconcerting but shouldn't do any harm.
If you're running things like NVidia binary drives, VMWare, or any applications that build kernel modules specific to the running kernel you will need to rebuild those hooks.
Some USB devices may magically start working!
Your
Some parts of
I don't have time, that's why I'm using Linux. Whether or not Linux or Windows is easier to use for first time computer users is irrelevant; I know that I can get things done much faster in front of a Linux box than anything from Microsoft. Practical, always.
.99 kernel days and that I remember downloading floppies to install Linux. But I'd look pretty foolish if it was more work to use Linux. It would be an ecentricity, like the fountain pen that I carry around on occasion, that's just not practical in the real world.
But then there's the philosophy. I really love the idea of sharing knowledge, sharing information. Luckily, the free (speech) software movement, the community, the openness doesn't impede the practicality.
I remember the early days of the Net. There were a bunch of folks who complained, like you are doing now about the growth of Linux, that all these newbies and aolusers and top-posters and suchlike folks would be the death of the Community. It would become another social club or some sort of virtual mall. Yup. They were right. But without the Internet, without the influx of millions of users, Linux itself would have remained a curious (but cool) little experiment, perhaps useful to a few thousand users at most. You can debate this if you want, but I'll stand by it.
But I really wanted to talk about practicality. For all my writings about Free Software being a revolution for the people, I'm still a practical guy. If I don't have to explain Linux to a co-worker and can just pull up his OpenOffice spreadsheet it makes things easier for me. If I can hop over to CompUSA to pick up TurboTax for Linux and install it without messing with Wine or VMWare or a dual boot then it's easier for me. If I pick up another laptop and don't have to go through the trouble of deleting Windows then installing Linux it's easier for me.
And yes, I enjoy this feeling of being a holder of some arcane knowledge about this rogue operating system. It feels good to tell others that, yes, I've been using Linux since the
That's my rant.
Very interesting question. Five years ago I would have said that certifications were about as useful a predictor of knowledge as swirling tea leaves in a cup. I've seen some really good MCSEs with a thorough knowledge of networking and their specialties and just as many who can't properly subnet a network. Five years ago, anyone who was seriously into Linux was *usually* a competent sysadmin in their own right and didn't need a piece of paper to prove it.
I think this has changed. There are a lot more people getting into Linux for the money than there has ever been before. This has upsides and downsides. Upside -- Linux is growing. Downside, it's no longer an arcane science. I can live with the downside though.
Alas, we peddle our skills to non-technical types who don't understand that a cram session and the ability to prepare for a test does not predict the knowledge of a consultant or future employee. They, for good or bad, use keyword filters or head hunter resume databases to choose candidates. Those who have magical letters on their resume get noticed. The rest, regardless of knowledge, get filtered out before ever being seen by a human.
So are Linux certifications a good thing? Maybe. If done right and don't end up as a certification mill as happened with the MCSE, then sure. They can help show a certain level of competency and could ensure that the certificate holder has the broad level of knowledge required to pass the test. In the next five years I'd expect that more executives will start asking for some certification anyway.
This will only work if the certification process in itself does not become an industry. The cost of taking the test should be low (under $150) but it must be difficult. Ideally it would include a practical, hands-on section instead of a bunch of multiple choice questions. The course work should be openly available and reflect not only real-world knowledge but some theoretical and philosophical aspects of using Linux.
This makes a lot of sense... Enough so that I did a google for "open source mathematics textbook" and found a bunch. Cool idea, I think. They need some editing but I really think that this could revolutionize how some classes are taught. As you say, a math text is standard fare -- the differences between textbooks (not to mention between versions of textbooks) is scant.
http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/
Then you'd be guilty of linking the Druid *priesthood* and people to Stonehenge. This is speculation only, as no evidence exists (outside of some new-age pseudo-histories) that the Druids had anything to do with the Henge. It is very likely meant to mark the solstice and served some practical purpose. This still doesn't change my supposition that a technological marvel could be used by an elite priesthood to keep the populace under some measure of control. Alas, there's not much archeological evidence about the druids at all, much less anything about the philosophical leanings of their religion, and anecdotal evidence isn't evidence so I'll ignore that.
This priestly control in itself is not a bad thing, mind you. But I tend to distrust closed institutions as a matter of course and the priesthood falls under that banner.
Are you an art major? Don't mean to be facetious, but I got a lot of this during the dozen or so art courses I took in college. I can talk neo/psuedo-druidic philosophy with the best of them, but other courses in anthropology, religion, and world history sort of banished those ideas from my head. There's a strong, strong tendency to attribute noble and enlightened ideas to cultures that we only hear about from folktale or conjecture. We do this when we long for the pre-industrial, bucolic farmlands of our stories or when we discuss pre-Colombian Native American society as some Garden of Eden. In reality, life was rough. People died young from disease and war, lots of war. People worked all day and didn't have a lot of time for leisure.
So what about "shamanism" -- a word itself that's been so new-ageified and bandied about that it has lost its true meaning? Since there are no pre-Roman folks around laying claim to that mantle, we can only make guesses (informed, but still guesses) from contemporary spiritual heads, curers, or shamans to use your term. So take a look at the canonical examples from New Guinea tribes... Hmmm, no sense of individual freedoms there.. Not a whole bunch at least, since they're generally busy looking for food and on the move. And if you place any stock in your Joseph Campbell (I don't, truthfully), then there's not really any sense of "individual" in any of the tribal religions (and I mean tribal strictly in the anthropological sense). Why? The group is more important. It's only with the Industrial Revolution and in those societies that had one, that leisure time could be spent to develop the individual.
To distinguish priests from "shaman" is thus not really possible. The shaman/healer was the religious head and the doctor.
And yes I did check the literature. Since this subject has been a favorite pasttime of mine since high school fifteen years ago, I've amassed quite a bit of reference material.
I imagine stonehenge was more the equivalent of a present day water works project such as a dam or sewer treatment plant, except that it was likely controlled by priests who, throughout history, have a major goal of perpetuating the priesthood. This is assuming that Stonehenge could have been used for practical purposes such as forecasting the proper crop planting time rather than just some gee-whiz gadgetry to keep the general populace in awe and in bondage.
I once sysadmined at (now defunct) USA Floral Enterprises. They had a bunch of Sun machines -- E6500s, 450s, Ultra Sparcs. I was running a Linux machine because it made sense to administer Unix boxes from something that could run an X server. When the Sun guys came to sell more hardware they always disparaged the Linux machines, telling our CTO things like, "It's free. What do you expect for free?" Our CTO at one point made the statement, "We're not running *free* software on our network!" The way she said it made "free" sound like something evil and criminal.
Rather than dropping in a cheap $500 Linux machine to pre-process orders, they chose instead to spend close to $30,000 for some E250 solution with some really bad perl software. It wasn't as if it was running some proprietary sparc only app; it was perl for goodness sake.
Anyway, Sun has never liked Linux because Linux pretty much stole all their money making ISP and dot com customers after the crash. But that wasn't the only thing. They stopped caring about what people were doing in the NOCs, choosing to push pet-project technologies that made little sense in the real world. Solaris on Intel was pretty good despite some shortcomings. But they tried to kill it because they believed it took away Sparc sales. Nope. People experimenting with PCs aren't likely to drop $4,000 on a Sparc. So they pretty much conceded that market to Linux when Linux was still unknown at the executive levels. Instead they pushed remote framebuffer devices that cost as much as a decent PC and required significant network bandwidth. They tried to push Java in the wrong places. etc. etc.
No one to blame but themselves.
You're out of your mind. Starbucks coffee is to coffee as American beer is to beer. Sure there are acquired tastes and taste is too damned subjective to be anything but troll fodder, but if Starbucks is not drowning their coffee in sugar and milk and every other flavor but coffee, they're sticking poofs of whipped cream on top and making it into some sort of performance art piece. I drink coffee for caffeine or for the coffee taste, not for some little brat faced little twerp to snicker when I pronounce macchiato different from how he heard it from his Warhol-wannabe schoolmates, not for little artsy branches sticking out of the cup, not for some trendy goat milk or absinthe falvoring.
I like my women the way I like my coffee. Hot, bitter, and able to keep me up all night long.
(Laugh. I'm just joking. Well, the first part anyway.)
I had a similar problem with an All-in-Wonder 128. Here's a link that shows how to rebuild that RPM:
2 /m sg02648.php
http://archives.mandrakelinux.com/expert/2003-0
There are several other ways around some of this software. One of my favorites is to convert the IP address of the server into the decimal equivalent (use something like Octave or Mathematica because your typical scientific calculator will change the number to exponential form). This won't work with virtual hosted sites but works on many, many proxy servers.
Some of the weaker filters will also not block pages that are framed on another URL. If you have access to a webserver you could just create an html form that does nothing but open the webpage into a frameset. I'm not certain why this is not blocked when directly accessing the page is, but it was interesting to see.
I've heard also that using legitimate sites such as Babelfish or even the google cache will allow access to many.
I still have the Reference Manual from a TI99/4A hanging around somewhere. One of the example programs showed how to redefine character sets to create graphics. It was a single character animation of a jumping man and took maybe ten or so lines of BASIC. There was also a Pong-like bouncing ball demo; you couldn't actually play it, but you could watch the square "ball" bounce around the screen for hours on end.
I remember spending hours typing in programs from Compute! magazine. On some machines the code was in BASIC. On the C64 it was often in HEX code. That's right. Someone would create assembly language games then publish then as HEX in the magazine. You'd spend hours typing and verifying long strings of HEX that was entered via a BASIC converter. At one point the magazine developed a checksumming feature to verify that your lines were entered properly, but before that it was a pain.
The C64 was one of the first machines I'd ever used to go online. The Atari/C=64 wars were pretty amusing (I had both though!). There were also hundreds of little demos that you could load. Almost all of them took advantage of quirks of the hardware -- songs, digitized voices, animations. One of my favorites was a graphing application that drew 3D functions on the screen. They took sometimes hours to draw stuff that would be real-time today, but I'd spend hours just waiting for them to finish.
Tell you what -- why don't you provide the URL of a Windows XP box then I'll race you to see if you can patch it sooner than it can be cracked when the next exploit comes along. No box is completely secure - not Linux, not BSD, and not WindowsXP, no matter what people think otherwise. Send the URL privately if you want and authorize me to test the security of your unbreakable WindowsXP system.
Man, you don't realize what you're asking. My memories of Windows include going up to a "Password Protected" Windows box and pressing Escape... I didn't mean to get past their security, it just happened. Imagine some pseudo-cracker doing something simple -- I dunno, forwarding a virus email on purpose -- and then accidentally gaining access.