Anyone who thinks this could ever be used for DNA sampling to see who had entered the building or locate where you had been can relax now. Even though the technology to pull in bits of skin and do DNA testing on the results exists today, it is an amazingly sensitive tests. So sensitive that it really can't sensibly be used in a non-clean environment - the augmentation of the original DNA material is extremely vulnerable to contamination. So the skin from the person who sat on the same bus seat as you might get picked up. Or the last person you shook hands with. Or just someone you brushed against in the street.
At the end of the day, this technology is possible but not practical for DNA testing.
Like so many announcements, this one is short on details. But music has lots of interesting features which suggest that fractal analysis is a useful start.
Anyone who has browsed through the various Fractal books which actually give you some of the maths, such as the Science of Fractal Images (pub Springer-Verlag) will have noticed the revelation that almost all music has a 1/f^(1-\beta) power spectrum, which is the what fractal approximations to Fractal Brownian Motion tend to head for.
While fractals are supposed to have self similar detail at all levels, and music, digitised or otherwise clearly cannot have 'detail' at all levels for physical or sampling constraint reasons, this doesn't necessarily invalidate the analysis either. The question therefore is what sorts of characteristics are they using as musical indicators. Distinguishing classical from pop is relatively easy even without fractal analysis - the frequency range visited by classical music can be several octaves greater given some reasonable threshold value. The value of \beta may give some insight between styles - estimates for \beta can be as simple as 'distance' travelled by the actual line divided by time, with appropriate normalisation. Anyone care to suggest others? No reason why we shouldn't try and get something working for say CDDB as someone suggested.
'Moral guidance' (and those that tried to counter it) brought us such heavenly moments as the Crusades, forced conversion of Christians to Islam in Spain and south France, the Salem witchhunt, the house-arrest of Galileo, the decimation of American Indian culture, and our current little squabble in the Mideast.
The house arrest of Galileo. An interesting tale. Just in case you have no history of science knowledge at all, Galileo's observations of the planets and his subsequent conclusions arguing for the Copernican view of the world over Ptolemic thinking in his discourse "Dialogues of the Two Chief Systems of the World" lead to his trial by the Catholic Inquisition in 1633.
Galileo was persecuted even after his death - he was buried without rites, epitaph or marker. But he did eventually have his revenge as I discovered in Florence.
Galileo was eventually re-buried in a decent memorial. But not all of him. His middle finger bones from one hand were placed vertically in Catholic relic, which can be seen in the Science Museum in Florence, forever raised in salute...
Since this particularly gifted society created its social revolution quite apart from politics, education, even most adults, it has no sense of history and little memory, which creates another point of vulnerability; to be ignorant of the past is to be defenseless against the future.
This rather assumes that those of us who are part of this 'elite' society (even that sounds patronising and loaded with superiority complex - yuck) live life without ever taking note of what happens outside the walls of our cubicles. In fact much of this review seems to think that just because we can 'grok' Unix and 'frob' things left and right we never see any other part of life. Which seems to be continuing the Jon Katz theme of the alienated tech society. Well, yes, technically able kids at school get picked on, probably for precisely the same reasons that the science swat gets picked on or the math prodigy gets picked on - they have something which causes envy and resentment. However, most of us escape school still alive and kicking and get on with our lives in society, at which point we don't suddenly become outcasts who only communicate through wireless LANs to our neighbours or use our Palm Pilots to beam infrared requests to the milkman.
From the Greeks to the the Enlightenment philosophers to Thomas Jefferson to Albert Einstein, some of the world's greatest thinkers have argued that to have knowledge is to struggle to understand the relationship between what you know and what you do. If they're right, we're in trouble. We have no common agenda. We stand for nothing.
Speak for yourself. There is great danger in assuming that just because we work and play in the tech culture, that is all we ever see. With the exception of cults, and I would not describe the tech culture as a cult by any means, people may belong to many schools of interest and interaction. We do not live life in a vacuum and we cut ourselves off from the rest of society at our own individual peril.
I wonder if IBM needs beta testers (-: I'd re-wire my house if they sent me a demo unit.
You'd probably hae to get rid of that closet in the corner to fit it into your bedroom. This is not the type of machine to fit under your desk (unless you like your desk 8ft off the ground that is:-) ).
That said, you're probably a little too late. IBM has been helping companies set up Linux (Suse 6.4 I believe) on their S/390's during July so I think that the boat has sailed. Still they'll be playing with the apps for a while yet - I know DB2 is about to be used on that platform, which will be interesting. I'm certain there will be more news sooner or later as well.
Yet more FUD from the rumour mill and yet more misinformation from those who really haven't got a clue. Myth killing time.
Mozilla is dead, or it might as well be.
This must be why I'm using it. In fact this must be why I'm using a build labelled 25th July 2000. This must be the reason why it has replaced Netscape on my machine. And there still appears to be very active signs of life on the mailing lists, on the status pages and the steady reduction in '+' bugs.
Re-writes, feature bloat and a profound and unsettling misunderstanding of what the consumer market wants have all hobbled Mozilla, almost from the beginning.
This is a more interesting comment. Yes - the original code released from Netscape was hobbled, and eventually a near-complete restart was opted for. Often when a project gets too big for it's boots (i.e. Netscape 4.x) a rewrite is the only clean way to continue. It hurts, it takes time and there is a long period of absence while the core functionality gets moving but it does result in a better codebase in almost all cases - you learn from the mistakes of the previous generation of code.
The second part of this comment on the "unsettling misunderstanding of what the consumer market wants" is also intriguing. As far as I can see, the basic consumer wants a browser which works on all the pages in existence. Beyond that they want it to be stable, easy to use and reasonably straightforward to configure and integrate into their setup. I don't see any fundamental problems in the Mozilla approach - it aims for full standards compliance, it has a configurable interface so that it can be wrapped in as simple or as complex an interface as wished, and its configuration uses the same UI approach as most other programs out there. Yes - it would be nice to have had it two years ago to butress against MS IE 5.5 (Windows version - the Mac version is pretty standards compliant) with its foibles and 'reworking' of the HTML and CSS renderings, but sometimes life is like that.
Late, fat and ugly, Mozilla is hopelessly moribund, deeply mired in its own filth, with no end in sight
Late? Possibly, although I never saw a timeline laid down for the completion of the project.
Fat? Certainly there is a lot of code, and it's memory requirements up until recently have been large, partly due to memory leaks. Things seem to have been getting better - the memory usage on this browser is at 33MB after several days of uptime, so I think there is still some way to go. But I am running the memory cache in there as well.
Ugly? You make not like the default appearance, but it is changeable. In fact it is a lot more than simply skinable - most of the GUI can be stripped, reimplemented and changed according to your whim. And there are signs of sanity on the GUI front too - the skins on Mozillazine are looking good, and there are drop in replacements to coax the GUI back towards the OS standard you might be used to (Classic -> Windows Netscape, Sullivan -> MacOS style UI).
No end in sight? Obviously someone not familiar with the Milestones for Mozilla. We're approaching Milestone 17. 19 is performance tuning, and 20 is, if I remember correctly, the first full v1.0 release. We may be quite a few months away from that (9+) but it's not quite the long unending tunnel...
Instead, it set off on a quest to re-engineer the way Internet applications are built, to construct not just a program, but a "platform," a be-all, end-all, goes-ping monster.
I see this one bandied around a lot. "They should have written just a browser". What often happens when you go for a code re-write (see above) is that the code gets a lot more modular. And so the Gecko engine (the rendering engine) is separable from the rest and yes, someone has already made a cut down browser-only version. It's called Galeon.
The other thing that bothers me is that the competition (i.e. MS) has built a platform too on Internet explorer. Quite frankly, if Mozilla had just been a browser we'd have had a bunch of whining suckers moaning about how Mozilla can't compete with IE because it is wasn't a platform. The idea of a portable broswer-integrated platform has not been missed by MS - they recognise the importance of it for building web applications and services. Having Mozilla available for most OS's under the Sun might go some way towards providing a base for a similar hegemony of applications on an open source base.
3) Incompatibilies between versions. Version 2 is incompatible with version 3 (currently used in 6.x series), and the next version 4 is incompatible with 3. And I can't upgrade rpm, because the rpm package itself is in rpm version 4. Which means I can't upgrade the packages at rawhide, because they're all in 4.0 rpm packages.
Tech tip: Install rpm-3.0.5*.rpm - it understands both version 3 and version 4 packages, and should allow you to get going on those Rawhide packages. That said, I've had some funnies with 3.0.5 seg-faulting on me, so it's not exactly bullet proof. Exact diagnosis of the problem has escaped me... I run a heavily rawhide patched RedHat 6.1 with HelixCode installed over the top, and the problems arrived when I stripped out XFree86 3.3.5 in preparation for 4.0.1.
Lotus has apparently never been particularly interested in making their crappy software interoperate with anything.
I'd normally agree with that whole-heartedly. But intriugingly the main proponent of the RFC's mentioned is from the Lotus Development corporation. So I'd guess that Lotus Notes will almost certainly speak this RFC. Which makes the hopes for a client to communicate with the Lotus Notes servers that much more likely.
If you were an internal UNIX user, your only choice was Notes 4 for AIX, which has an even worse interface than the Windows and OS/2 versions.
Don't get me started on Notes AIX...
Also I'd like to see a native linux program speak to Lotus Notes servers in order to send a metaphorical rocket in response to the lack of a native Lotus Notes client for Linux.
Out of all the current applications in development, Evolution is probably the one which I'm most eagerly awaiting. In day-to-day usage, I'm stuck with Lotus Notes, which increasingly is a)chewing up my memory (40MB+ at startup) and b) keeping me tied to Windows NT, although I have plans to investigate running it under Wine - I have seen it done successfully so there is hope there.
But that doesn't remove my major gripe with Lotus Notes - that of its rather painful UI. While it manages to provide better functionality under the V5 client, an option to move my calendaring and email off that platform onto something like Evolution would be a godsend. Having played with Unix for the last 10 years or so, and having gravitated from a platform where small was beautiful (RiscOS) before that, the idea of large monolithic everything-in-one packages (like Lotus Notes - database interogator, mail, calendaring and web browser) really doesn't make any sense to me. In my opinion, these large packages are more an excuse to lock the user onto one platform whereas most experienced users simply want their applications to be able to work happily alongside each other and exchange data.
So seeing Evolution supporting RFC 2445,2446 and 2447 looks like being a good start for interoperability. If this can interface seemlessly with MS Exchange and Lotus Notes servers, it will free legions of users to choose the platform they want to use.
Firstly, this sounds like an extremely positive step. It's about time that source code was given the legal protection of being self-expression - almost everything else creative is given this distinction so this sounds like it will finally give source code the recognition it deserves.
But while it sounds like the courts may be getting it sorted, it looks like we still have a long way to go in educating the Media at large about technical issues. First, this NYT article constantly babbles about how DeCSS allows people to copy DVDs. AAARGGGGHH. How do we get the Media to realize that you can copy DVDs anyway, without the DeCSS code? And more importantly, how do we get the Media to spot the distinction between Access control (i.e. CSS) and Copy control (such as special disks, watermarking, etc.). This seems to be an issue that just isn't getting explained in the general press.
Look - 30GB database? Lets just look at the necessities first and then we'll get down to a choice of vendor (because you are going to want a reasonably heavy weight database server for this).
30GB of data. Okay - so you aren't mission critical. Even so, with that amount of data, you probably want a hot-swappable redundant system such as RAID if availability means anything to you. But these days you have lots of choices for RAID, including software RAID under Linux. I'd probably still go for a hardware solution for RAID, but that is because I'm not clued up on how robust and failure-proof the Linux RAID is when one of the disks dies. If you don't care about redundancy, 40GB drives are easily found. For performance reasons you might want to find four drives of say 15GB each so that random access to the drives can be done in near parallel, especially if you stripe the drives, but that is yet another option.
Accessing 30GB of RAM is going to require some reasonable memory space - think 512MB minimum and work up from there. Of course, you could run it on far far less (say 80MB) but you will pay a performance penalty - the database products I know about have plenty of tricks up their sleeves if they have spare memory to play with, and resort to paging out to disk when things get tight.
The choice of software is important too. I'll declare my biases up front and say go for DB2 Universal Database, partly because I work on it and I like it. Your other choices are Oracle, obviously, and there are a host of other database vendors out there for Unix systems across the board. DB2 UDB is easier to administrate and looks to be faster than Oracle, as well as generally being cheaper to deploy. As far as functionality goes, everybody nowadays assures SQL92 conformance. SQL99 core conformance isn't too much to hoot about, as it's basically SQL92. The SQL99 spec is far more modular than the SQL92 spec, so it's easier to match the base functionality and then add on SQL99 conformance for, say, the multimedia extentions, later.
So the answer to your question is yes - it is possible to deploy a 30GB on Unix. And it is definitely possible to deploy the same database on Linux - both IBM and Oracle have versions of their databases on Linux.
As much as I'm not a fan of organisations like the RIAA and the MPAA, not with the crap they promote and the decent stuff they stifle, I still can't help thinking that the DeCSS defendents should lose this case, for two reasons.
Firstly the fact is that whether or not their actions were moral, their actions were most definitely not legal and refusing to comply with the law is still a crime whether it is keeping DeCSS on your website or murdering small children.
You assert that the actions involved in the creation of DeCSS are illegal, but you do not explain why. I would disagree that the reverse engineering of that CSS encoding scheme is illegal - rather I would assert that if the action of reverse engineering is to be declared illegal, it should be done so explicitly, in a public declaration, so those of us who don't like can move country to somewhere where it is allowed and encouraged. Like Norway for example, where reverse engineering is, I believe, protected by the constitution.
Anyway, I'll let you continue.
The other point is that by rushing out and making such a big point of keeping DeCSS available they make the more reasonable pro-freedom groups look tainted by association. Now it looks like the same thing is going to happen as soon as legal action is started, making it harder for organisations like the EFF and ACLU to fight for good causes.
Again, you assume that the act of reverse engineering the CSS scheme is illegal and base your following arguments on this premise. The whole thrust of this issue has been that long established guidelines set out in law do NOT map well to the latest technologies, and that access control systems are not currently well legally described and that the actions of the companies who are writing these access agreements may not be in the best interests of the general public or of society. Because this issue is demanding from both a legal and a technical standpoint, the number of people who really grasp these issues in full (and I'm not certain I count myself as one of them - more interested and concerned viewer than legal and technical expert) is very small, but the effect of these licenses certainly does have an impact.
I've probably got it somewhere with one of my video cards too, however since I don't run Windows, Descent 3 is certainly new to me, that's why I ordered my copy straight away. Don't assume everyone uses Windows for games and Linux for the rest - I've never had my own WindowsPC in my life.
While I still have Windows 98SE on my hard drive, games like Descent 3 for Linux continue to erode the reason for having it there. So as soon as I get that Xfree86 4.0 install done and the NVidia drivers up and running, I shall be posting a cheque in the direction of Loki. Along with the Quake series, the Doom series, SimCity 3000, there is less and less reason to waste 11GB of hard drive space on Windows. What I need now is a decent driving game for Linux with force feedback support:-)
Wow. Software which blocks innuendo is going to be tricky. It's not as though it's just a case of
if (/innuendo/) { block };
I mean, even the word innuendo has innuendo (think about it...). Last time I looked the grammar checkers in MS Word had enough trouble with repeated words in a sentence, let alone being able to spot that someone had stuck something dubious in (ooeerr). Innuendo blocking will really suck. Even the most innocent comment will be ripe for misinterpretation if someone takes it the wrong way.
And how is it going to handle this blocking? Would it be selective? Would it be a text version of the annoying beep they put over swear words. We'd end up with stuff like this:
Typical usage is as follows. You want to ####### or ####### to ####### in your #######. You will probably ####### (i.e., #######) or ####### to begin ####### the #######. In response, the ####### will ####### a ####### and ####### the outgoing ####### appropriately.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
P.S. The censored text is from the Supercite manual for Emacs.
While nVidia doesn't really support Linux(bad drivers, trust me, I know from experience), they DO produce good hardware, and at reasonable prices.
And your experience with NVidia drivers is with which version...? Xfree86 3.3.6? Xfree86 4.0.1? Everything I've seen and read from people who have installed Xfree86 4.0.1 and the NVidia drivers has been pretty positive, with slight demerits on SMP and a few more exotic configs. Enough to get me to the point where if all goes well, I'll have a working Xfree86 4.0.1 installation going tonight with the drivers. At that point, I'll finally be in a position to work out whether these reports of near-or-better-than-Windows performance is true, and I may be an awful lot closer to punting Win98 off my machine. Win98 is only used for games on my system and decet 3D performance is 90% of the battle to go MS-free.
Anyway - if you are going to spout this sort of comment, give us some juicy details.
Astronomical objects are by nature very far away and uncontrolled. Anything could be happening that you don't see.
It's certainly true that Astronomers have no control over the processes they watch - however, there is choice over what you watch. Part of the art of astronomy is learning how to pick up the threads of other observations to determine what to look at next.
Also, there is no opportunity to see very high energy phenomena.
I blinked a bit when I saw this. Or maybe your definition of high energy phenomena is a little higher than mine. I'd put intracluster (i.e. clusters of galaxies) gas at 10^9K as being a high energy plasma, along side supernovae, neutron stars, quasars, molecular outflows (from stars), black holes and gamma ray bursts as all belonging to the high energy phenomena bracket. There are plenty of others - without high energy phenomena the astronomers would be out of a job.
The latest colliders can make a quark-gluon plasma. When's the last time you heard of an astronomer seeing that?
What are it's macro properties? [Ed - glib comment alert!] If you can tell me that, I can probably find some astronomers who'll look for it.
These exotic particles and matter like this are short-lived, so their properties are almost impossible to infer from astronomical observations, which take many years to reach us.
Well - true up to a point. Astronomical observations do take a long time to reach us. But because space is not a particularly dispersive media the signal received still maintains much of its time resolution without distortion. Even fast changing properties can be observed - take for example millisecond pulsars. However, if you are talking about low energy events which occur in localised regions or which are easily masked by surrounding gas/dust, then you won't see these.
Comparing Astronomical observations and Particle Physics observations is useful up to a point. Astronomy relies on many parts of modern physics to interpret the data received, and if you cut off funding to one part of physics, you are almost certainly imparing the understanding of other parts of physics as well. Part of the problem that Particle Physics has is that it has a limited store of pretty pictures that can be trotted out to the general public. Astronomy has never has this problem - as telescope technologies have pushed ever on, we've discovered that the multitude of phenomena out there make extremely good posters as well as providing us with a deeper understanding of the universe. So I suspect that Particle Physics is almost certainly giving us bang-for-the-buck - the problem is that much of that information is too technical for most people to understand and that there are only limited opportunities for news-worthy items for the general public. So you tend to miss out on it.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
New section for slashdot - Rampant Speculation
on
MAPS vs. ORBS
·
· Score: 3
I love how, if we post cutting-edge information that hasn't totally been verified, we get flamed for being "just a rumor site." But if we wait a few days to try to see if the truth congeals from the flood of questionable facts, we get flamed for being, as you say, "a lot less timely... News breaks elsewhere now, and/. picks up the pieces."
I used to get upset at getting flamed on Usenet. I don't anymore. Why? Any time you put something vaguely controvertial up in a public forum with a reasonable amount of readers someone will disagree with it. Out of those with disagreements, there is a fair chance someone will fire off a response without their brain in gear. Or even post a reasoned rebuttal - scary but it does happen. Slashdot is about as public as it gets - I note the number of UserIDs appears to have run passed 200,000 now so I'm not surprised in the slightest that thoughtless stupid flames get received by/.
I'm guessing both, in the case of this story (it's starting to look like MAPS wasn't blacklisting ORBS, as ORBS' accusation and rampant speculation on a lot of other forums would have it). We'll get flamed both for running this stupid story at all, and for not running it sooner. Grrrrrrr.
Have a Ramapant Speculation section then for unverified information. Make everyone happy. Give it a extra icon that can be added to show once a story is verified or refuted.
Just my 2c. And ignore ignorant flames - they can go in the bit bucket. Just make sure whatever filter you use recognises real constructive critism as well!:-)
On the surface, this looks like the perfect backup tool - lots of storage space, and nice and easy to access and store, unlike tapes which have done nasty things to me in the past.
But are there nasties about using this for backup? Any projected lifespans for these tools? Are there content encryption restrictions as well - could we encrypt our own movies to be played in a normal DVD player? Make a movie of that Quake FragFest for exmple?
The problem with a lot of the software I see around today is that in the desire to make software more open and friendly, it has got a lot more distracting to use. It's difficult to Zen-out when using a piece of software when every minor adjustment triggers an animated effect, be it a spinning hour glass, back illuminated button or piece of paper flying across the screen. In an attempt to give the user more feedback about what is active and what is not, software designers have taken away the "quiet" interface and have jazzed it up.
And this has not been restricted to just the application itself. The applications often demand attention like some spoilt brat - the "HELLO? YOU HAVE MAIL!!!" syndrome. While in some cases, such as Lotus Notes, the default is to rise to the top of the window stack and bang a modal window up to get your input everytime there is new mail, you can tone this down to an audible bell only. Or ICQ clients which reappear on the top at a new message coming in. And there are others - visual alarms on calendaring tools and probably more that I have forgotten.
When I have the option, these programs are pushed into the bit bucket as fast as possible. Using them is a dire waste of productivity. Where there is no choice about using that software, I try and tone down the alarms to be just audible effects which I can acknowledge without having to press a key, move the mouse or otherwise stir from whatever I'm doing.
So really, this research sounds like a patch for the problem, rather than a cure. The problem is with the UI design - programs are increasingly "rude" in their attempts to get attention. At least if I hold the source, annoying habits in essential software can be trimmed to a minimum. But rarely in the Unix side of the world do I have to worry about annoying software - 95% of the stuff which irks me is Windows-ware. Maybe the art of Zen is dead on the MS platform...
Caveat:Linux can be vastly more secure than Windows. Spend some time on any security mailing list, newsgroup or web page, and you'll discover that security is always a moving target. You'll also discover that any unmaintained system, be it Windows, Linux, any commercial Unix or even BSD can be vulnerable. A barebones Redhat 6.0 system without a firewall is probably vulnerable to script kiddies through several methods, especially given that there is a tendency to leave too many services enabled in inetd in the distros.
Now that MS has, for the moment at least, gained the vast majority of the market for browsers (the last role call looked something around 80-85%) it quickly poses major problems for the existing standards. Web designers are currently faced with a bad mess of broken or degraded HTML implementations from both sides of the fence - Netscape and IE 5.5 offer different renditions of the same HTML code to the point where the page is no longer anywhere near the original intention in some cases.
Why is this bad? For all the other browser developers on the market, such as Opera, Mozilla and others, compliance with the existing standards is an important part of acheiving good page renderings and thereby gaining users. Compliance with an unpublished metamorphed standard as evidenced by MS IE 5.5 on Windows is difficult and if this were a level playing field, unnecessary. This is not to say that MS does not know what they are doing. I have it good authority that MS IE 5.5 on MacOS is almost completely compliant with the CSS standard level 1, so the differences between the two IE browsers can only be through design.
Of course, once you acheive 80% of the market, you have a degree of control of the standards implicitly. Web designers who wish to quickly develop pages will gravitate to the most popular browser and support that, rather than working towards the open standards and fighting to make the pages work on Win' IE 5.5. The result is often that a large proportion of web pages adhere to the defacto Win IE standard and we're all the poorer for that.
I don't understand what Noel was thinking. The first thing to do when you are cracked is _not_ to leave your system open! He should have disconnected from the net (perhaps leaving a secured mail box running), and immediately backed up the home directories. He should have _verified_ the backups. Since the only irreplaceable data on a well-maintained unix system is in the home directories, it should be trivial to back it up properly.
I can only assume that you haven't read the whole series. The system Noel works on is a heavily used collection of machines needed round the clock. While attempts to assess the damage were done early, the major cleanup (and securing) of the machines was done during a relocation, including backups - sometimes even though you have been cracked, you have to sit on your hands a little while you work out how to fix it. In an environment where lots of people need those machines for real work, pulling the plug on everybody is not going to make you friends and may leave you with a Cracker who knows that he/she/it has been spotted. That might (as Noel feared) bring about damaging action sooner rather than later.
This brings up several interesting problems though for a network sysadm. Just when is the situation so serious that you have to disconnect and stop everyone else working? In a software company, losing the servers is a massively expensive problem - you effectively stop 90% of the possible work straight away, and you are going to have a large workforce twiddling their thumbs while the system is off-line. If this downtime is repeated or extended, the sheer number of working hours lost for a workforce of 1000 people can get very pricey very quickly.
Assuming that your back ups are up to date, you can to a certain extent run the risk of 'rm -rf/' and only lose at worst a days work. From the system admins perspective, things only get really bad when you are being used as the launch platform for the next attack. At that point, even finding a sniffer could be sufficient reason to pull the plug, and finding a Trinoo or TFN master server or client would definitely be time to consider that disconnection.
This just went up on the TPC website Monday, there is a monster leader in transaction processing price/performance and that is:
IBM Netfinity with Intel Xeon processors
IBM DB2
and Windows 2000.
You will not believe this unless you see it!
Yes - but check out the hardware. 32 four-way pentium Xeon's, and over a terabyte of disc space, and an obscene amount of RAM. That is not a standard setup, although it was built with standard parts (trust me - I know the team which built it). That is not to say that the DB2 team isn't extremely pleased with this result:-)
Just because it's running on Windows 2000 does not automatically mean that there might not be better choices for an OS to support this benchmark. It's not even entirely clear to me that Windows NT might not have been faster here, given the benchmarks which MS put out on their own website showing that Windows 2000 does better in limited memory, but is worse than NT above 128MB (and these machines had a lot more than that). Remember that DB2 UDB has a shared-nothing architecture which that it scales extremely well and is additionally capable of using raw devices so the OS in question may not have a big impact on performance. And DB2 runs on most platforms out there, from OS/2, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, Windows 9x/NT/2000, SGI, SCO, Dynix and various 64 bit platforms as well.
Of course, it would be nice to have some side-by-side benchmarks of DB2 UDB on Windows NT/2000 and DB2 UDB on Linux. There will almost certainly be some benchmarks on Linux sooner or later - since IBM has made Linux available for all its machines, it makes sense to publicise the performance of its flagship DB product on Linux as well.
of course, what a nightmare that would be to configure for benchmarking.. i guess you'd have to use oracle on NT and on Linux, but it's a DOG on NT, and, as much as i hate windows, it just wouldn't be fair.
Use a better database program then. DB2 UDB is available for both platforms (bias alert: I work on DB2) and from what I see, DB2 runs pretty well on both platforms. That should even the playing field as far as database servers are concerned. There is no point in having one database vendor on one platform and a different database vendor product on another. DB2 is faster than SQL Server on NT anyway, so you'd be biasing the results before you started.
In case you haven't noticed, tons of people start big ambititous software products in Linux, but nobody follows through. I frequent linuxgames.com and happypenguin.com but I'm sick and tired of reading about this or that new project when 90% of them go unfinished. I just wish someone would do a -mildy- ambitious game and finish it, something along the lines of dragonwarrior 1 for the nes or something...
Frustrating? Definitely. Surprising? No.
I've been on the other side of the fence, involved in trying to produce a multi-scrolling beat-em-up as a collaboration over the web. And the one thing that kills off more projects than anything else is RealLife(TM). A lot of projects are started by students who have long summers to stir projects into life and get something going. And then they get jobs (in the case of my cohorts, that included jobs with Psygnosis) and any release of that software is suddenly off the cards. Sometimes that can be due to contractual obligations - most software companies require their employees to NOT work on projects similar to their actual employment. Some companies even go as far as 'Intellectual Carte Blanc' and say any software written by the employess is owned by the software company, regardless of the fact that it was written in the employee's weekends...
Contractual obligations aside, I see signs that projects which reach a critical momentum do not fall by the wayside. Good examples of open-source games which have reached fruition are Xpilot, Angband and it's many offspring and FreeCiv. There are many other 'small' games, such as the ones distributed with Gnome, and quite a lot of really pretty good card games.
So, if you are fed up of seeing games projects fall apart, the most useful thing you can do is locate a project which you think looks promising, and help it. This can be graphics, sound, music, suggestions, gameplay ideas, UI improvements. It's not just coding that makes a good game, so even if you don't want to offer programming skills, there is plenty that can be done in the way of support. To be honest, it's often a great help to the author to know that someone likes the project - feedback is often infrequent and patchy. If the author gets feedback, then the author usually feels that it is worth continuing. Maybe that is all that stands between some finished projects and the rest.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who thinks this could ever be used for DNA sampling to see who had entered the building or locate where you had been can relax now. Even though the technology to pull in bits of skin and do DNA testing on the results exists today, it is an amazingly sensitive tests. So sensitive that it really can't sensibly be used in a non-clean environment - the augmentation of the original DNA material is extremely vulnerable to contamination. So the skin from the person who sat on the same bus seat as you might get picked up. Or the last person you shook hands with. Or just someone you brushed against in the street.
At the end of the day, this technology is possible but not practical for DNA testing.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Like so many announcements, this one is short on details. But music has lots of interesting features which suggest that fractal analysis is a useful start.
Anyone who has browsed through the various Fractal books which actually give you some of the maths, such as the Science of Fractal Images (pub Springer-Verlag) will have noticed the revelation that almost all music has a 1/f^(1-\beta) power spectrum, which is the what fractal approximations to Fractal Brownian Motion tend to head for.
While fractals are supposed to have self similar detail at all levels, and music, digitised or otherwise clearly cannot have 'detail' at all levels for physical or sampling constraint reasons, this doesn't necessarily invalidate the analysis either. The question therefore is what sorts of characteristics are they using as musical indicators. Distinguishing classical from pop is relatively easy even without fractal analysis - the frequency range visited by classical music can be several octaves greater given some reasonable threshold value. The value of \beta may give some insight between styles - estimates for \beta can be as simple as 'distance' travelled by the actual line divided by time, with appropriate normalisation. Anyone care to suggest others? No reason why we shouldn't try and get something working for say CDDB as someone suggested.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
'Moral guidance' (and those that tried to counter it) brought us such heavenly moments as the Crusades, forced conversion of Christians to Islam in Spain and south France, the Salem witchhunt, the house-arrest of Galileo, the decimation of American Indian culture, and our current little squabble in the Mideast.
The house arrest of Galileo. An interesting tale. Just in case you have no history of science knowledge at all, Galileo's observations of the planets and his subsequent conclusions arguing for the Copernican view of the world over Ptolemic thinking in his discourse "Dialogues of the Two Chief Systems of the World" lead to his trial by the Catholic Inquisition in 1633.
Galileo was persecuted even after his death - he was buried without rites, epitaph or marker. But he did eventually have his revenge as I discovered in Florence.
Galileo was eventually re-buried in a decent memorial. But not all of him. His middle finger bones from one hand were placed vertically in Catholic relic, which can be seen in the Science Museum in Florence, forever raised in salute ...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Since this particularly gifted society created its social revolution quite apart from politics, education, even most adults, it has no sense of history and little memory, which creates another point of vulnerability; to be ignorant of the past is to be defenseless against the future.
This rather assumes that those of us who are part of this 'elite' society (even that sounds patronising and loaded with superiority complex - yuck) live life without ever taking note of what happens outside the walls of our cubicles. In fact much of this review seems to think that just because we can 'grok' Unix and 'frob' things left and right we never see any other part of life. Which seems to be continuing the Jon Katz theme of the alienated tech society. Well, yes, technically able kids at school get picked on, probably for precisely the same reasons that the science swat gets picked on or the math prodigy gets picked on - they have something which causes envy and resentment. However, most of us escape school still alive and kicking and get on with our lives in society, at which point we don't suddenly become outcasts who only communicate through wireless LANs to our neighbours or use our Palm Pilots to beam infrared requests to the milkman.
From the Greeks to the the Enlightenment philosophers to Thomas Jefferson to Albert Einstein, some of the world's greatest thinkers have argued that to have knowledge is to struggle to understand the relationship between what you know and what you do. If they're right, we're in trouble. We have no common agenda. We stand for nothing.
Speak for yourself. There is great danger in assuming that just because we work and play in the tech culture, that is all we ever see. With the exception of cults, and I would not describe the tech culture as a cult by any means, people may belong to many schools of interest and interaction. We do not live life in a vacuum and we cut ourselves off from the rest of society at our own individual peril.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I wonder if IBM needs beta testers (-: I'd re-wire my house if they sent me a demo unit.
You'd probably hae to get rid of that closet in the corner to fit it into your bedroom. This is not the type of machine to fit under your desk (unless you like your desk 8ft off the ground that is :-) ).
That said, you're probably a little too late. IBM has been helping companies set up Linux (Suse 6.4 I believe) on their S/390's during July so I think that the boat has sailed. Still they'll be playing with the apps for a while yet - I know DB2 is about to be used on that platform, which will be interesting. I'm certain there will be more news sooner or later as well.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes.
Yet more FUD from the rumour mill and yet more misinformation from those who really haven't got a clue. Myth killing time.
Mozilla is dead, or it might as well be.
This must be why I'm using it. In fact this must be why I'm using a build labelled 25th July 2000. This must be the reason why it has replaced Netscape on my machine. And there still appears to be very active signs of life on the mailing lists, on the status pages and the steady reduction in '+' bugs.
Re-writes, feature bloat and a profound and unsettling misunderstanding of what the consumer market wants have all hobbled Mozilla, almost from the beginning.
This is a more interesting comment. Yes - the original code released from Netscape was hobbled, and eventually a near-complete restart was opted for. Often when a project gets too big for it's boots (i.e. Netscape 4.x) a rewrite is the only clean way to continue. It hurts, it takes time and there is a long period of absence while the core functionality gets moving but it does result in a better codebase in almost all cases - you learn from the mistakes of the previous generation of code.
The second part of this comment on the "unsettling misunderstanding of what the consumer market wants" is also intriguing. As far as I can see, the basic consumer wants a browser which works on all the pages in existence. Beyond that they want it to be stable, easy to use and reasonably straightforward to configure and integrate into their setup. I don't see any fundamental problems in the Mozilla approach - it aims for full standards compliance, it has a configurable interface so that it can be wrapped in as simple or as complex an interface as wished, and its configuration uses the same UI approach as most other programs out there. Yes - it would be nice to have had it two years ago to butress against MS IE 5.5 (Windows version - the Mac version is pretty standards compliant) with its foibles and 'reworking' of the HTML and CSS renderings, but sometimes life is like that.
Late, fat and ugly, Mozilla is hopelessly moribund, deeply mired in its own filth, with no end in sight
Late? Possibly, although I never saw a timeline laid down for the completion of the project.
Fat? Certainly there is a lot of code, and it's memory requirements up until recently have been large, partly due to memory leaks. Things seem to have been getting better - the memory usage on this browser is at 33MB after several days of uptime, so I think there is still some way to go. But I am running the memory cache in there as well.
Ugly? You make not like the default appearance, but it is changeable. In fact it is a lot more than simply skinable - most of the GUI can be stripped, reimplemented and changed according to your whim. And there are signs of sanity on the GUI front too - the skins on Mozillazine are looking good, and there are drop in replacements to coax the GUI back towards the OS standard you might be used to (Classic -> Windows Netscape, Sullivan -> MacOS style UI).
No end in sight? Obviously someone not familiar with the Milestones for Mozilla. We're approaching Milestone 17. 19 is performance tuning, and 20 is, if I remember correctly, the first full v1.0 release. We may be quite a few months away from that (9+) but it's not quite the long unending tunnel...
Instead, it set off on a quest to re-engineer the way Internet applications are built, to construct not just a program, but a "platform," a be-all, end-all, goes-ping monster.
I see this one bandied around a lot. "They should have written just a browser". What often happens when you go for a code re-write (see above) is that the code gets a lot more modular. And so the Gecko engine (the rendering engine) is separable from the rest and yes, someone has already made a cut down browser-only version. It's called Galeon.
The other thing that bothers me is that the competition (i.e. MS) has built a platform too on Internet explorer. Quite frankly, if Mozilla had just been a browser we'd have had a bunch of whining suckers moaning about how Mozilla can't compete with IE because it is wasn't a platform. The idea of a portable broswer-integrated platform has not been missed by MS - they recognise the importance of it for building web applications and services. Having Mozilla available for most OS's under the Sun might go some way towards providing a base for a similar hegemony of applications on an open source base.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
3) Incompatibilies between versions. Version 2 is incompatible with version 3 (currently used in 6.x series), and the next version 4 is incompatible with 3. And I can't upgrade rpm, because the rpm package itself is in rpm version 4. Which means I can't upgrade the packages at rawhide, because they're all in 4.0 rpm packages.
Tech tip: Install rpm-3.0.5*.rpm - it understands both version 3 and version 4 packages, and should allow you to get going on those Rawhide packages. That said, I've had some funnies with 3.0.5 seg-faulting on me, so it's not exactly bullet proof. Exact diagnosis of the problem has escaped me... I run a heavily rawhide patched RedHat 6.1 with HelixCode installed over the top, and the problems arrived when I stripped out XFree86 3.3.5 in preparation for 4.0.1.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Lotus has apparently never been particularly interested in making their crappy software interoperate with anything.
I'd normally agree with that whole-heartedly. But intriugingly the main proponent of the RFC's mentioned is from the Lotus Development corporation. So I'd guess that Lotus Notes will almost certainly speak this RFC. Which makes the hopes for a client to communicate with the Lotus Notes servers that much more likely.
If you were an internal UNIX user, your only choice was Notes 4 for AIX, which has an even worse interface than the Windows and OS/2 versions.
Don't get me started on Notes AIX ...
Also I'd like to see a native linux program speak to Lotus Notes servers in order to send a metaphorical rocket in response to the lack of a native Lotus Notes client for Linux.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Out of all the current applications in development, Evolution is probably the one which I'm most eagerly awaiting. In day-to-day usage, I'm stuck with Lotus Notes, which increasingly is a)chewing up my memory (40MB+ at startup) and b) keeping me tied to Windows NT, although I have plans to investigate running it under Wine - I have seen it done successfully so there is hope there.
But that doesn't remove my major gripe with Lotus Notes - that of its rather painful UI. While it manages to provide better functionality under the V5 client, an option to move my calendaring and email off that platform onto something like Evolution would be a godsend. Having played with Unix for the last 10 years or so, and having gravitated from a platform where small was beautiful (RiscOS) before that, the idea of large monolithic everything-in-one packages (like Lotus Notes - database interogator, mail, calendaring and web browser) really doesn't make any sense to me. In my opinion, these large packages are more an excuse to lock the user onto one platform whereas most experienced users simply want their applications to be able to work happily alongside each other and exchange data.
So seeing Evolution supporting RFC 2445,2446 and 2447 looks like being a good start for interoperability. If this can interface seemlessly with MS Exchange and Lotus Notes servers, it will free legions of users to choose the platform they want to use.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Firstly, this sounds like an extremely positive step. It's about time that source code was given the legal protection of being self-expression - almost everything else creative is given this distinction so this sounds like it will finally give source code the recognition it deserves.
But while it sounds like the courts may be getting it sorted, it looks like we still have a long way to go in educating the Media at large about technical issues. First, this NYT article constantly babbles about how DeCSS allows people to copy DVDs. AAARGGGGHH. How do we get the Media to realize that you can copy DVDs anyway, without the DeCSS code? And more importantly, how do we get the Media to spot the distinction between Access control (i.e. CSS) and Copy control (such as special disks, watermarking, etc.). This seems to be an issue that just isn't getting explained in the general press.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Look - 30GB database? Lets just look at the necessities first and then we'll get down to a choice of vendor (because you are going to want a reasonably heavy weight database server for this).
30GB of data. Okay - so you aren't mission critical. Even so, with that amount of data, you probably want a hot-swappable redundant system such as RAID if availability means anything to you. But these days you have lots of choices for RAID, including software RAID under Linux. I'd probably still go for a hardware solution for RAID, but that is because I'm not clued up on how robust and failure-proof the Linux RAID is when one of the disks dies. If you don't care about redundancy, 40GB drives are easily found. For performance reasons you might want to find four drives of say 15GB each so that random access to the drives can be done in near parallel, especially if you stripe the drives, but that is yet another option.
Accessing 30GB of RAM is going to require some reasonable memory space - think 512MB minimum and work up from there. Of course, you could run it on far far less (say 80MB) but you will pay a performance penalty - the database products I know about have plenty of tricks up their sleeves if they have spare memory to play with, and resort to paging out to disk when things get tight.
The choice of software is important too. I'll declare my biases up front and say go for DB2 Universal Database, partly because I work on it and I like it. Your other choices are Oracle, obviously, and there are a host of other database vendors out there for Unix systems across the board. DB2 UDB is easier to administrate and looks to be faster than Oracle, as well as generally being cheaper to deploy. As far as functionality goes, everybody nowadays assures SQL92 conformance. SQL99 core conformance isn't too much to hoot about, as it's basically SQL92. The SQL99 spec is far more modular than the SQL92 spec, so it's easier to match the base functionality and then add on SQL99 conformance for, say, the multimedia extentions, later.
So the answer to your question is yes - it is possible to deploy a 30GB on Unix. And it is definitely possible to deploy the same database on Linux - both IBM and Oracle have versions of their databases on Linux.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
As much as I'm not a fan of organisations like the RIAA and the MPAA, not with the crap they promote and the decent stuff they stifle, I still can't help thinking that the DeCSS defendents should lose this case, for two reasons.
Firstly the fact is that whether or not their actions were moral, their actions were most definitely not legal and refusing to comply with the law is still a crime whether it is keeping DeCSS on your website or murdering small children.
You assert that the actions involved in the creation of DeCSS are illegal, but you do not explain why. I would disagree that the reverse engineering of that CSS encoding scheme is illegal - rather I would assert that if the action of reverse engineering is to be declared illegal, it should be done so explicitly, in a public declaration, so those of us who don't like can move country to somewhere where it is allowed and encouraged. Like Norway for example, where reverse engineering is, I believe, protected by the constitution.
Anyway, I'll let you continue.
The other point is that by rushing out and making such a big point of keeping DeCSS available they make the more reasonable pro-freedom groups look tainted by association. Now it looks like the same thing is going to happen as soon as legal action is started, making it harder for organisations like the EFF and ACLU to fight for good causes.
Again, you assume that the act of reverse engineering the CSS scheme is illegal and base your following arguments on this premise. The whole thrust of this issue has been that long established guidelines set out in law do NOT map well to the latest technologies, and that access control systems are not currently well legally described and that the actions of the companies who are writing these access agreements may not be in the best interests of the general public or of society. Because this issue is demanding from both a legal and a technical standpoint, the number of people who really grasp these issues in full (and I'm not certain I count myself as one of them - more interested and concerned viewer than legal and technical expert) is very small, but the effect of these licenses certainly does have an impact.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I've probably got it somewhere with one of my video cards too, however since I don't run Windows, Descent 3 is certainly new to me, that's why I ordered my copy straight away. Don't assume everyone uses Windows for games and Linux for the rest - I've never had my own WindowsPC in my life.
While I still have Windows 98SE on my hard drive, games like Descent 3 for Linux continue to erode the reason for having it there. So as soon as I get that Xfree86 4.0 install done and the NVidia drivers up and running, I shall be posting a cheque in the direction of Loki. Along with the Quake series, the Doom series, SimCity 3000, there is less and less reason to waste 11GB of hard drive space on Windows. What I need now is a decent driving game for Linux with force feedback support :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Wow. Software which blocks innuendo is going to be tricky. It's not as though it's just a case of
if (/innuendo/) { block };
I mean, even the word innuendo has innuendo (think about it ...). Last time I looked the grammar checkers in MS Word had enough trouble with repeated words in a sentence, let alone being able to spot that someone had stuck something dubious in (ooeerr). Innuendo blocking will really suck. Even the most innocent comment will be ripe for misinterpretation if someone takes it the wrong way.
And how is it going to handle this blocking? Would it be selective? Would it be a text version of the annoying beep they put over swear words. We'd end up with stuff like this:
Typical usage is as follows. You want to ####### or ####### to ####### in your ####### . You will probably ####### (i.e., ####### ) or ####### to begin ####### the ####### . In response, the ####### will ####### a ####### and ####### the outgoing ####### appropriately.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
P.S. The censored text is from the Supercite manual for Emacs.
While nVidia doesn't really support Linux(bad drivers, trust me, I know from experience), they DO produce good hardware, and at reasonable prices.
And your experience with NVidia drivers is with which version...? Xfree86 3.3.6? Xfree86 4.0.1? Everything I've seen and read from people who have installed Xfree86 4.0.1 and the NVidia drivers has been pretty positive, with slight demerits on SMP and a few more exotic configs. Enough to get me to the point where if all goes well, I'll have a working Xfree86 4.0.1 installation going tonight with the drivers. At that point, I'll finally be in a position to work out whether these reports of near-or-better-than-Windows performance is true, and I may be an awful lot closer to punting Win98 off my machine. Win98 is only used for games on my system and decet 3D performance is 90% of the battle to go MS-free.
Anyway - if you are going to spout this sort of comment, give us some juicy details.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Astronomical objects are by nature very far away and uncontrolled. Anything could be happening that you don't see.
It's certainly true that Astronomers have no control over the processes they watch - however, there is choice over what you watch. Part of the art of astronomy is learning how to pick up the threads of other observations to determine what to look at next.
Also, there is no opportunity to see very high energy phenomena.
I blinked a bit when I saw this. Or maybe your definition of high energy phenomena is a little higher than mine. I'd put intracluster (i.e. clusters of galaxies) gas at 10^9K as being a high energy plasma, along side supernovae, neutron stars, quasars, molecular outflows (from stars), black holes and gamma ray bursts as all belonging to the high energy phenomena bracket. There are plenty of others - without high energy phenomena the astronomers would be out of a job.
The latest colliders can make a quark-gluon plasma. When's the last time you heard of an astronomer seeing that?
What are it's macro properties? [Ed - glib comment alert!] If you can tell me that, I can probably find some astronomers who'll look for it.
These exotic particles and matter like this are short-lived, so their properties are almost impossible to infer from astronomical observations, which take many years to reach us.
Well - true up to a point. Astronomical observations do take a long time to reach us. But because space is not a particularly dispersive media the signal received still maintains much of its time resolution without distortion. Even fast changing properties can be observed - take for example millisecond pulsars. However, if you are talking about low energy events which occur in localised regions or which are easily masked by surrounding gas/dust, then you won't see these.
Comparing Astronomical observations and Particle Physics observations is useful up to a point. Astronomy relies on many parts of modern physics to interpret the data received, and if you cut off funding to one part of physics, you are almost certainly imparing the understanding of other parts of physics as well. Part of the problem that Particle Physics has is that it has a limited store of pretty pictures that can be trotted out to the general public. Astronomy has never has this problem - as telescope technologies have pushed ever on, we've discovered that the multitude of phenomena out there make extremely good posters as well as providing us with a deeper understanding of the universe. So I suspect that Particle Physics is almost certainly giving us bang-for-the-buck - the problem is that much of that information is too technical for most people to understand and that there are only limited opportunities for news-worthy items for the general public. So you tend to miss out on it.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I love how, if we post cutting-edge information that hasn't totally been verified, we get flamed for being "just a rumor site." But if we wait a few days to try to see if the truth congeals from the flood of questionable facts, we get flamed for being, as you say, "a lot less timely ... News breaks elsewhere now, and /. picks up the pieces."
I used to get upset at getting flamed on Usenet. I don't anymore. Why? Any time you put something vaguely controvertial up in a public forum with a reasonable amount of readers someone will disagree with it. Out of those with disagreements, there is a fair chance someone will fire off a response without their brain in gear. Or even post a reasoned rebuttal - scary but it does happen. Slashdot is about as public as it gets - I note the number of UserIDs appears to have run passed 200,000 now so I'm not surprised in the slightest that thoughtless stupid flames get received by /.
I'm guessing both, in the case of this story (it's starting to look like MAPS wasn't blacklisting ORBS, as ORBS' accusation and rampant speculation on a lot of other forums would have it). We'll get flamed both for running this stupid story at all, and for not running it sooner. Grrrrrrr.
Have a Ramapant Speculation section then for unverified information. Make everyone happy. Give it a extra icon that can be added to show once a story is verified or refuted.
Just my 2c. And ignore ignorant flames - they can go in the bit bucket. Just make sure whatever filter you use recognises real constructive critism as well! :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
On the surface, this looks like the perfect backup tool - lots of storage space, and nice and easy to access and store, unlike tapes which have done nasty things to me in the past.
But are there nasties about using this for backup? Any projected lifespans for these tools? Are there content encryption restrictions as well - could we encrypt our own movies to be played in a normal DVD player? Make a movie of that Quake FragFest for exmple?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
The problem with a lot of the software I see around today is that in the desire to make software more open and friendly, it has got a lot more distracting to use. It's difficult to Zen-out when using a piece of software when every minor adjustment triggers an animated effect, be it a spinning hour glass, back illuminated button or piece of paper flying across the screen. In an attempt to give the user more feedback about what is active and what is not, software designers have taken away the "quiet" interface and have jazzed it up.
And this has not been restricted to just the application itself. The applications often demand attention like some spoilt brat - the "HELLO? YOU HAVE MAIL!!!" syndrome. While in some cases, such as Lotus Notes, the default is to rise to the top of the window stack and bang a modal window up to get your input everytime there is new mail, you can tone this down to an audible bell only. Or ICQ clients which reappear on the top at a new message coming in. And there are others - visual alarms on calendaring tools and probably more that I have forgotten.
When I have the option, these programs are pushed into the bit bucket as fast as possible. Using them is a dire waste of productivity. Where there is no choice about using that software, I try and tone down the alarms to be just audible effects which I can acknowledge without having to press a key, move the mouse or otherwise stir from whatever I'm doing.
So really, this research sounds like a patch for the problem, rather than a cure. The problem is with the UI design - programs are increasingly "rude" in their attempts to get attention. At least if I hold the source, annoying habits in essential software can be trimmed to a minimum. But rarely in the Unix side of the world do I have to worry about annoying software - 95% of the stuff which irks me is Windows-ware. Maybe the art of Zen is dead on the MS platform...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Linux is vastly more secure than Windows: true
Caveat:Linux can be vastly more secure than Windows. Spend some time on any security mailing list, newsgroup or web page, and you'll discover that security is always a moving target. You'll also discover that any unmaintained system, be it Windows, Linux, any commercial Unix or even BSD can be vulnerable. A barebones Redhat 6.0 system without a firewall is probably vulnerable to script kiddies through several methods, especially given that there is a tendency to leave too many services enabled in inetd in the distros.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Now that MS has, for the moment at least, gained the vast majority of the market for browsers (the last role call looked something around 80-85%) it quickly poses major problems for the existing standards. Web designers are currently faced with a bad mess of broken or degraded HTML implementations from both sides of the fence - Netscape and IE 5.5 offer different renditions of the same HTML code to the point where the page is no longer anywhere near the original intention in some cases.
Why is this bad? For all the other browser developers on the market, such as Opera, Mozilla and others, compliance with the existing standards is an important part of acheiving good page renderings and thereby gaining users. Compliance with an unpublished metamorphed standard as evidenced by MS IE 5.5 on Windows is difficult and if this were a level playing field, unnecessary. This is not to say that MS does not know what they are doing. I have it good authority that MS IE 5.5 on MacOS is almost completely compliant with the CSS standard level 1, so the differences between the two IE browsers can only be through design.
Of course, once you acheive 80% of the market, you have a degree of control of the standards implicitly. Web designers who wish to quickly develop pages will gravitate to the most popular browser and support that, rather than working towards the open standards and fighting to make the pages work on Win' IE 5.5. The result is often that a large proportion of web pages adhere to the defacto Win IE standard and we're all the poorer for that.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I don't understand what Noel was thinking. The first thing to do when you are cracked is _not_ to leave your system open! He should have disconnected from the net (perhaps leaving a secured mail box running), and immediately backed up the home directories. He should have _verified_ the backups. Since the only irreplaceable data on a well-maintained unix system is in the home directories, it should be trivial to back it up properly.
I can only assume that you haven't read the whole series. The system Noel works on is a heavily used collection of machines needed round the clock. While attempts to assess the damage were done early, the major cleanup (and securing) of the machines was done during a relocation, including backups - sometimes even though you have been cracked, you have to sit on your hands a little while you work out how to fix it. In an environment where lots of people need those machines for real work, pulling the plug on everybody is not going to make you friends and may leave you with a Cracker who knows that he/she/it has been spotted. That might (as Noel feared) bring about damaging action sooner rather than later.
This brings up several interesting problems though for a network sysadm. Just when is the situation so serious that you have to disconnect and stop everyone else working? In a software company, losing the servers is a massively expensive problem - you effectively stop 90% of the possible work straight away, and you are going to have a large workforce twiddling their thumbs while the system is off-line. If this downtime is repeated or extended, the sheer number of working hours lost for a workforce of 1000 people can get very pricey very quickly.
Assuming that your back ups are up to date, you can to a certain extent run the risk of 'rm -rf /' and only lose at worst a days work. From the system admins perspective, things only get really bad when you are being used as the launch platform for the next attack. At that point, even finding a sniffer could be sufficient reason to pull the plug, and finding a Trinoo or TFN master server or client would definitely be time to consider that disconnection.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
This just went up on the TPC website Monday, there is a monster leader in transaction processing price/performance and that is:
You will not believe this unless you see it!
Yes - but check out the hardware. 32 four-way pentium Xeon's, and over a terabyte of disc space, and an obscene amount of RAM. That is not a standard setup, although it was built with standard parts (trust me - I know the team which built it). That is not to say that the DB2 team isn't extremely pleased with this result :-)
Just because it's running on Windows 2000 does not automatically mean that there might not be better choices for an OS to support this benchmark. It's not even entirely clear to me that Windows NT might not have been faster here, given the benchmarks which MS put out on their own website showing that Windows 2000 does better in limited memory, but is worse than NT above 128MB (and these machines had a lot more than that). Remember that DB2 UDB has a shared-nothing architecture which that it scales extremely well and is additionally capable of using raw devices so the OS in question may not have a big impact on performance. And DB2 runs on most platforms out there, from OS/2, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, Windows 9x/NT/2000, SGI, SCO, Dynix and various 64 bit platforms as well.
Of course, it would be nice to have some side-by-side benchmarks of DB2 UDB on Windows NT/2000 and DB2 UDB on Linux. There will almost certainly be some benchmarks on Linux sooner or later - since IBM has made Linux available for all its machines, it makes sense to publicise the performance of its flagship DB product on Linux as well.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
P.S. I work on DB2 UDB development.
of course, what a nightmare that would be to configure for benchmarking.. i guess you'd have to use oracle on NT and on Linux, but it's a DOG on NT, and, as much as i hate windows, it just wouldn't be fair.
Use a better database program then. DB2 UDB is available for both platforms (bias alert: I work on DB2) and from what I see, DB2 runs pretty well on both platforms. That should even the playing field as far as database servers are concerned. There is no point in having one database vendor on one platform and a different database vendor product on another. DB2 is faster than SQL Server on NT anyway, so you'd be biasing the results before you started.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
In case you haven't noticed, tons of people start big ambititous software products in Linux, but nobody follows through. I frequent linuxgames.com and happypenguin.com but I'm sick and tired of reading about this or that new project when 90% of them go unfinished. I just wish someone would do a -mildy- ambitious game and finish it, something along the lines of dragonwarrior 1 for the nes or something...
Frustrating? Definitely. Surprising? No.
I've been on the other side of the fence, involved in trying to produce a multi-scrolling beat-em-up as a collaboration over the web. And the one thing that kills off more projects than anything else is RealLife(TM). A lot of projects are started by students who have long summers to stir projects into life and get something going. And then they get jobs (in the case of my cohorts, that included jobs with Psygnosis) and any release of that software is suddenly off the cards. Sometimes that can be due to contractual obligations - most software companies require their employees to NOT work on projects similar to their actual employment. Some companies even go as far as 'Intellectual Carte Blanc' and say any software written by the employess is owned by the software company, regardless of the fact that it was written in the employee's weekends...
Contractual obligations aside, I see signs that projects which reach a critical momentum do not fall by the wayside. Good examples of open-source games which have reached fruition are Xpilot, Angband and it's many offspring and FreeCiv. There are many other 'small' games, such as the ones distributed with Gnome, and quite a lot of really pretty good card games.
So, if you are fed up of seeing games projects fall apart, the most useful thing you can do is locate a project which you think looks promising, and help it. This can be graphics, sound, music, suggestions, gameplay ideas, UI improvements. It's not just coding that makes a good game, so even if you don't want to offer programming skills, there is plenty that can be done in the way of support. To be honest, it's often a great help to the author to know that someone likes the project - feedback is often infrequent and patchy. If the author gets feedback, then the author usually feels that it is worth continuing. Maybe that is all that stands between some finished projects and the rest.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes