So in other words, since its not specifically good for Linux it shouldnt be done?
That's an inaccurate paraphrase. The concern, and a valid one, IMHO, is that MS will attempt to use this to lock out competition. IOW, the question is whether this is going to be designed to be specifically bad for Linux.
Well... lots of schedulers at least look at each process when context switches occur (e.g. to keep them sorted in priority order)--that's O(n).
The article appears to say that 2.6 divides processes into a fixed number of priority levels, rather than having what could in theory be a large number of possible priorities--and that's what lets you use constant time methods.
Once you set that fixed number, you can do things like keep an array of lists subscripted by priority level and then a single value whose bits correspond to whether each list is empty or not. Then the least significant bit tells you which list to grab a process from, and it's easy to quickly find the LSB, since lsb(x) = x ^ (x & (x - 1)).
Of course, I haven't touched a Linux kernel, so the preceding paragraph is just handwaving on my part. The thing to do is to "Use the Source, Luke."
Ok, maybe "Right wing, agressive, control freak, war-loving nutcase" might have summed it up in a more PC way?
Perhaps...if you can explain to me how a "right wing control freak" can have the opinions on the Drug War that the Cato Institute has, or how a "war-loving nutcase" can have the opinions of the war in Iraq that the Cato Institute has. (I can't say that I expect to see such an explanation soon.)
I used to think that as a rational utilitarian hedonist it made sense to buy a lottery ticket when the expected value became positive...but then I realized I was overlooking opportunity costs.
Could you tell me what graphics card you use, then? I'd like to go buy one of them, and send the vendor email telling them why I'm doing it as positive reinforcement.
Mplayer on Linux supports all of them out of the box, thanks to whoever wrote the ebuild.
Well...I'm using Fedora Core 1, "rpm -q mplayer" shows mplayer-1.0-0.lvn.0.2.pre2.1, and in the past week or so I've started seeing.wmv files that make mplayer barf immediately.
I'm interested in not having to screw around with the init level and recompile the srizonified graphics card driver every time up2date tells me I should get a new kernel or when I decide to go the Fedora Core 1 route.
Letting hardware companies get away with this kind of crap just feeds the "See, Linux is too hard to install--why should I have to remember to install the kernel sources and compile the graphics driver?" chorus.
Or are you too afraid that Microsoft can beat Linux after all?
If you mean "beat" in the sense of "prevail in fair competition," no. If you omit the "in fair competition" part, which seems reasonable in view of the worthless wristslap that resulted even when the DOJ finally found Microsoft guilty, yes.
About the review: having choices is a good thing; just because one person can't see why one would want to do something doesn't mean it shouldn't be possible.
But what I would like to know is: has the KDE screensaver done the nifty thing that has been in the Gnome screensaver for some time, namely letting you specify a random screensaver and then choosing the particular screensavers from which the random selections are made. There's lots of pretty eye candy in the various screensavers, so I'd like to have my wife's computer (she uses KDE) make a random choice, so that they all get seen eventually--save that there are some that she just can't stand (greynetic, she says, gives her a headache). The only way to avoid the sucko screensavers under KDE is to stick with a single one that you like. (Unless there's a way to selectively uninstall the obnoxious ones...)
This just in: Ziff-Davis magazine columnist MS shill. In other news, sun comes up in east.
Seriously: on one hand, we have a default Mac configuration that can allow a malicious DHCP server in your local network to improperly gain root access. On the other, we have the endless ongoing stream of gaping security holes in MS software. From this, Mr. Ulanoff infers some kind of equivalence between Mac OS and Windows, and takes a large number of column inches to tediously say "neener neener neener." Is that what passes for reasoned discussion at PC Magazine?
...asking "Have you ever heard of the Tandy Sensation?" Goodness knows I never had, until I saw this fellow's first article, and as a CoCo user, I was fairly attentive to what Radio Shack sold up until early 1991 when they finally stopped selling the CoCo3 and went totally over to the Dark Side. Sounds like it was just another (insert favorite expletive) PClone.
Much obliged for the Japanese term. It's easier to see when it's written out in kana rather than romaji or kanji; kana are a syllabary, so there's essentially one kana per syllable (OK, aside from some diphthongs like "kya"); e.g. "ran" is broken down as ra + n.
Mr. Veit was the original editor of Computer Shopper, which in the age before the Web was widespread was a moderately thick newsprint tabloid which covered a wonderful variety of computer hardware and software. By the time it was sucked up into the infamous Ziff-Davis machine, the PClone had largely won, but the Shopper still had several columnists in a "Classic Computers" section. Z-D put an end to that, making it a PClone-only rag that, while it was still useful for finding good deals and even, for a while, ran columns by Mr. Veit, had lost its soul.
CS grew fat--I think I've saved one of the astonishingly heavy issues from the era of its maximum thickness--but the Web is finally killing it off, as it is now a vastly better and more up-to-date source of deals and prices than a dead-tree magazine can possibly be. The stray pontificators that write for it suffer from the same lag problems, and one is better off reading hardware sites, tech-related blogs, and sites like Slashdot. (Goodness knows that "The Hard Edge" suffers from the terminal self-indulgence that Strunk and White decry and that crowds out space that the column should devote to useful information.) CS is now a pale shadow of its former deforesting self, and I wonder how much time it has left as a dead-tree magazine.
If you miss it, you should come hang out with folks who still use it...next year is either the thirteenth annual "Last" Chicago CoCoFest. Hardware and software is still being made for the beast; check out Cloud-9. I use a Cloud-9 SCSI cartridge, and have moved from the 30 Mbyte RLL hard drive that seemed so wonderful when I first got it to a SCSI Zip drive. Cloud-9 has CoCo 3s still in the box for sale, and of course there are CoCo emulators out there. Take a look at the Tandy Color Computer Resource Site for more links and info.
Of course, that will happen--just as celebrities control the use of their images.
This just means that people will have their voices sampled periodically through their careers as well as having their images digitized.
The other day Disney aired Eloise at the Plaza. It was a pleasant movie, but hearing Julie Andrews as the nanny singing was a sad reminder of what she has lost. Why not have singers at the height of their powers make "voice fonts"?
Good point. Back when I took an intro to meteorology course as a freshman in college, the instructor said that you'd be right 90% of the time if you ran a weather forecast that tomorrow would be pretty much like today--but it's the 10% that people care about.
Would these folks have predicted the rise of punk, which revolted against overblown "progressive rock" and psychedelia just as Classicism punctured the overblown Rococo and Neoclassicism took the wind out of the sails of the Romantic era? Sure, now that they've already been and gone, they have their clusters in song space...but what's going to be the next thing, as people get sick of cookie cutter boy bands and teenaged sluts, and the self-aggrandizing rappers have rung all the changes they can on rhythmic speech and the dregs of urban culture? Once they can figure that out, then they'll really have something.
The Firebird DBMS has been running for years before the Mozilla group decided to claim the name. The only difference is that they didn't fight back...
Yes, they did; they encouraged people to flood Mozilla with email to generate publicity, under the "there's no such thing as bad publicity" theory. (I wonder whether they're pleased with the results.)
OK. You sound knowledgeable in this area--care to volunteer your time to improve things? Make a theme for your window manager of choice, perhaps? The "they" you refer to is us, as Walt Kelly would say.
As a matter of fact, I think I count three or four boxed sets of RedHat in the room here, so in my case, yes, I did. (I even bought a year's access to RHN--a couple of months ago. Sigh.)
If RedHat realized that giving stuff away is not a way to do business, the Fedora Project (which I just upgraded my RH9 system to, and will do my wife's this evening--it's pretty darned nice, OSNews notwithstanding) is an awfully funny way to show it.
Slashdot Mirror
So in other words, since its not specifically good for Linux it shouldnt be done?
That's an inaccurate paraphrase. The concern, and a valid one, IMHO, is that MS will attempt to use this to lock out competition. IOW, the question is whether this is going to be designed to be specifically bad for Linux.
After all, from the commercials we know that Batman uses OnStar...
Well... lots of schedulers at least look at each process when context switches occur (e.g. to keep them sorted in priority order)--that's O(n).
The article appears to say that 2.6 divides processes into a fixed number of priority levels, rather than having what could in theory be a large number of possible priorities--and that's what lets you use constant time methods.
Once you set that fixed number, you can do things like keep an array of lists subscripted by priority level and then a single value whose bits correspond to whether each list is empty or not. Then the least significant bit tells you which list to grab a process from, and it's easy to quickly find the LSB, since lsb(x) = x ^ (x & (x - 1)).
Of course, I haven't touched a Linux kernel, so the preceding paragraph is just handwaving on my part. The thing to do is to "Use the Source, Luke."
Ok, maybe "Right wing, agressive, control freak, war-loving nutcase" might have summed it up in a more PC way?
Perhaps...if you can explain to me how a "right wing control freak" can have the opinions on the Drug War that the Cato Institute has, or how a "war-loving nutcase" can have the opinions of the war in Iraq that the Cato Institute has. (I can't say that I expect to see such an explanation soon.)
I used to think that as a rational utilitarian hedonist it made sense to buy a lottery ticket when the expected value became positive...but then I realized I was overlooking opportunity costs.
Looks like the link should be http://www.sans.org/rr/papers/index.php?id=1298 as nearly as I can tell. Note that it will take you to a PDF file.
Could you tell me what graphics card you use, then? I'd like to go buy one of them, and send the vendor email telling them why I'm doing it as positive reinforcement.
Mplayer on Linux supports all of them out of the box, thanks to whoever wrote the ebuild.
.wmv files that make mplayer barf immediately.
Well...I'm using Fedora Core 1, "rpm -q mplayer" shows mplayer-1.0-0.lvn.0.2.pre2.1, and in the past week or so I've started seeing
I'm interested in not having to screw around with the init level and recompile the srizonified graphics card driver every time up2date tells me I should get a new kernel or when I decide to go the Fedora Core 1 route.
Letting hardware companies get away with this kind of crap just feeds the "See, Linux is too hard to install--why should I have to remember to install the kernel sources and compile the graphics driver?" chorus.
Or are you too afraid that Microsoft can beat Linux after all?
If you mean "beat" in the sense of "prevail in fair competition," no. If you omit the "in fair competition" part, which seems reasonable in view of the worthless wristslap that resulted even when the DOJ finally found Microsoft guilty, yes.
About the review: having choices is a good thing; just because one person can't see why one would want to do something doesn't mean it shouldn't be possible.
But what I would like to know is: has the KDE screensaver done the nifty thing that has been in the Gnome screensaver for some time, namely letting you specify a random screensaver and then choosing the particular screensavers from which the random selections are made. There's lots of pretty eye candy in the various screensavers, so I'd like to have my wife's computer (she uses KDE) make a random choice, so that they all get seen eventually--save that there are some that she just can't stand (greynetic, she says, gives her a headache). The only way to avoid the sucko screensavers under KDE is to stick with a single one that you like. (Unless there's a way to selectively uninstall the obnoxious ones...)
This just in: Ziff-Davis magazine columnist MS shill. In other news, sun comes up in east.
Seriously: on one hand, we have a default Mac configuration that can allow a malicious DHCP server in your local network to improperly gain root access. On the other, we have the endless ongoing stream of gaping security holes in MS software. From this, Mr. Ulanoff infers some kind of equivalence between Mac OS and Windows, and takes a large number of column inches to tediously say "neener neener neener." Is that what passes for reasoned discussion at PC Magazine?
...in the remake, do they spell COBOL right?
No, but I remember looking at the rz/sz source and afterwards vowing to always write intelligible code.
...asking "Have you ever heard of the Tandy Sensation?" Goodness knows I never had, until I saw this fellow's first article, and as a CoCo user, I was fairly attentive to what Radio Shack sold up until early 1991 when they finally stopped selling the CoCo3 and went totally over to the Dark Side. Sounds like it was just another (insert favorite expletive) PClone.
Much obliged for the Japanese term. It's easier to see when it's written out in kana rather than romaji or kanji; kana are a syllabary, so there's essentially one kana per syllable (OK, aside from some diphthongs like "kya"); e.g. "ran" is broken down as ra + n.
Mr. Veit was the original editor of Computer Shopper, which in the age before the Web was widespread was a moderately thick newsprint tabloid which covered a wonderful variety of computer hardware and software. By the time it was sucked up into the infamous Ziff-Davis machine, the PClone had largely won, but the Shopper still had several columnists in a "Classic Computers" section. Z-D put an end to that, making it a PClone-only rag that, while it was still useful for finding good deals and even, for a while, ran columns by Mr. Veit, had lost its soul.
CS grew fat--I think I've saved one of the astonishingly heavy issues from the era of its maximum thickness--but the Web is finally killing it off, as it is now a vastly better and more up-to-date source of deals and prices than a dead-tree magazine can possibly be. The stray pontificators that write for it suffer from the same lag problems, and one is better off reading hardware sites, tech-related blogs, and sites like Slashdot. (Goodness knows that "The Hard Edge" suffers from the terminal self-indulgence that Strunk and White decry and that crowds out space that the column should devote to useful information.) CS is now a pale shadow of its former deforesting self, and I wonder how much time it has left as a dead-tree magazine.
If you miss it, you should come hang out with folks who still use it...next year is either the thirteenth annual "Last" Chicago CoCoFest. Hardware and software is still being made for the beast; check out Cloud-9. I use a Cloud-9 SCSI cartridge, and have moved from the 30 Mbyte RLL hard drive that seemed so wonderful when I first got it to a SCSI Zip drive. Cloud-9 has CoCo 3s still in the box for sale, and of course there are CoCo emulators out there. Take a look at the Tandy Color Computer Resource Site for more links and info.
Of course, that will happen--just as celebrities control the use of their images.
This just means that people will have their voices sampled periodically through their careers as well as having their images digitized.
The other day Disney aired Eloise at the Plaza. It was a pleasant movie, but hearing Julie Andrews as the nanny singing was a sad reminder of what she has lost. Why not have singers at the height of their powers make "voice fonts"?
Good point. Back when I took an intro to meteorology course as a freshman in college, the instructor said that you'd be right 90% of the time if you ran a weather forecast that tomorrow would be pretty much like today--but it's the 10% that people care about.
Would these folks have predicted the rise of punk, which revolted against overblown "progressive rock" and psychedelia just as Classicism punctured the overblown Rococo and Neoclassicism took the wind out of the sails of the Romantic era? Sure, now that they've already been and gone, they have their clusters in song space...but what's going to be the next thing, as people get sick of cookie cutter boy bands and teenaged sluts, and the self-aggrandizing rappers have rung all the changes they can on rhythmic speech and the dregs of urban culture? Once they can figure that out, then they'll really have something.
The Firebird DBMS has been running for years before the Mozilla group decided to claim the name. The only difference is that they didn't fight back...
Yes, they did; they encouraged people to flood Mozilla with email to generate publicity, under the "there's no such thing as bad publicity" theory. (I wonder whether they're pleased with the results.)
True. Maybe it's time for Castle Anthrax Linux?
OK. You sound knowledgeable in this area--care to volunteer your time to improve things? Make a theme for your window manager of choice, perhaps? The "they" you refer to is us, as Walt Kelly would say.
"Got to see the whole net
From Yahoo on down to eBay--
In just one day!"
As a matter of fact, I think I count three or four boxed sets of RedHat in the room here, so in my case, yes, I did. (I even bought a year's access to RHN--a couple of months ago. Sigh.)
If RedHat realized that giving stuff away is not a way to do business, the Fedora Project (which I just upgraded my RH9 system to, and will do my wife's this evening--it's pretty darned nice, OSNews notwithstanding) is an awfully funny way to show it.