MacRumour's Buyers Guide. It tries to predict new releases of existing products based upon age and rumours. It's not always right but it does seem better than randomly guessing...
If you run Windows PE you can run it from a CD. Also there's the chance they are using a USB flash drive/USB hard disk and running Windows from that...
You're on your own with respect to the fingerprints though. Can't even being to explain that...
Point. Plus there is a time problem writing big posts with lots of links in them (I bet no one will even see it). Next time I'll think twice before writing such a post...
SSDs (or anything that does rotating writes) may defeat some software file shredders.
The whole residual magnetic domain thing is up for debate with today's disks... In recent years there is apparently so little space and densities are so high very few bits can be recovered. The reasoning for this is that there have been cases where drives have been blanked and vast sums of money have been at stake but the data was not recovered (old Slashdot thread about data recovery questioning if it's possible after one pass). If you have a reliable link saying that this is to the contrary (for modern (post 2003) spinning hard disks) I would really like to see it though.
There seem to be a few BSD tools with the aim of building smaller collections of binaries in a similar fashion to BusyBox.
You've mentioned crunchgen but there is also embutils (which can be smaller than busy box but requires dietlibc) and there also seems to be something called beastiebox (which allows different amounts of linking). Finally there is Cauldron which seems to be a collection of tools for creating embedded BSD environments.
It may be useful for you to read LWN's embedded nightmare prologue along with the original Embedded Nightmare article. If you have written extra drivers and can get them into the mainline kernel them the benefits of going with a new 2.6 could be big...
Your question feels a bit of strange question to ask as surely anyone who has looked would notice a huge difference between the latest 2.6 (2.6.28) and the latest 2.4 (2.4.37).
I hate it when people don't bother to state exactly the points they object to. What other changes (not listed above) do you think the question poster wouldn't benefit from? Follow the links to the full lists (don't just use the ones off the top of your head)...
Bizarre but true. Red Alert 1 will actually run fine under Vista 64 but won't install (installer is 16 bit). The machine I was using had VMWare on it so I installed it in the VM then moved the unpacked directories outside.
With the addition of uvcvideo and gpsca usb webcam drivers most webcams should be supported in Linux distros released in the past 4 or so months. Assuming you tried an extremely new distro which webcam was not working?
I'm not sure what you would get back (aside from remapped sectors). Years ago it was definitely possible to get significant data back from zeroed (as in dd if=/dev/zero rather than a "format") drives. However in recent years there is apparently so little space and densities are so high very few bits can be recovered. The reasoning for this is that there have been cases where drives have been blanked and vast sums of money have been at stake but the data was not recovered (old Slashdot thread about data recovery questioning if it's possible after one pass).
If you have a reliable link saying that this is to the contrary I would really like to see it though. Solid state disks are a whole 'nother kettle of fish though.
My own cautionary tale (unrelated to the GP) is don't delete directories you think are completely empty by using rm -rf. Use rmdir - it's safer.
Oh and don't use -r if you aren't actually deleting directories. And watch out for GNUisms on GNU userlands - that * might mean more than you think it does on Linux...
Perhaps the only folks who still get away using it are those who hate money or those making some sort of political statement. Some even say using M$ cheapens an argument...
I'm starting to wonder whether you spoke to the same Alan I know : ). Alan would have surely mentioned that he prefers using joe as his editor because it supports WordStar key bindings...
Don't worry, Alan knows the value of programming. One can see the motives behind his obtaining an MBA as an example of learning more about the business environment (and do you know what the topic for his MBA thesis was?)
Hey some of us young 'uns in SUCS would like to hear more about the old days of the 90s. If you've got a moment hop on by to the SUCS@20 site or drop by Milliways...
Personally I really liked the Mythical Man Month (one of the few library books I borrowed as an undergraduate and I've recently reread it and still like it) and Peopleware (very funny) but both of these are more about software engineering (and how it goes wrong) rather than practical hands on programming. However they are both short and entertaining. Code Complete is very authoritative (but big). These aren't books you are going to gravitate towards if you are just starting to program for the first time though so I'll just mention I found Java in Nutshell useful (but others are not so keen on it).
Your borrowers are probably going to want those "Learn in 24 hours..." or "...for Dummies" though. It would be nice to know what the most loaned books turned out to be in year's time (might make a good Slashdot article : )
Is it a University library or a public library? What your public will want will vary dramatically depending on who your primary audience is.
Back (not so long ago) when I was a kid I spent ages reading reading a book about programming in BASIC on the BBC and it was packed full illustrations (I can't remember much more about it other than it hard a part talking about how you needed to type """ if you wanted to get a quote).
When I look at the stuff being returned to the library at the University I am at it seems to mostly be course texts and fellow students are always complaining about how they can't get hold of XYZ course texts because there aren't enough copies of it in the library.
When I look at local book stores the stuff that always seems to have taken are the "Learn XYZ in 24 hours" or the Dummies series books.
I know what I like to read (books that have a good reputation and are under 300 pages long) but goodness knows whether this is anything like your borrowers...
One of the consultants who taught at my University said that the Mythical Man Month and Peopleware were good. I've read these too and can also recommended them (although they are more about managing programmers rather than programming per se). The consultant also recommended Design Patterns (although he said not to read the book cover to cover but rather to just be aware of them so you could refer to them later).
Basically the current kernel memory allocator does not typically stop long idle memory being swapped out to make room for pagecache in the updatedb case (you can see the the Linux swap problem being discussed back in 2004 when the allocator had already been set). The classic "OpenOffice left overnight is swapped out by early morning updatedb run" problem is still here (because OOo memory has been idle for so long).
If you have caches of a size smaller than your real RAM, the order in which you try to access memory really CAN make a difference because cache is many times faster than regular RAM and will try and do things like speculative readahead. If what you are working with is already in the cache by the time you request it then you won't stall for as long.
If you are forever causing the cache to become flushed and forcing the cache to be refilled with a different contents (perhaps because you are causing a large number of random memory access and the cache's readahead is getting your future access wrong so it has to be turned off) then performance will by comparison be slower than a sequential memory access workload.
Slashdot Mirror
MacRumour's Buyers Guide. It tries to predict new releases of existing products based upon age and rumours. It's not always right but it does seem better than randomly guessing...
Blackberry Linux kernel charging driver by Greg Kroah-Hartman (February 16th 2007 so it would have turned up in 2.6.21, eeepc kernel is a patched 2.6.21.4). Greg likes see open source kernel things to go upstream quickly and is a USB maintainer.
If you run Windows PE you can run it from a CD. Also there's the chance they are using a USB flash drive/USB hard disk and running Windows from that...
You're on your own with respect to the fingerprints though. Can't even being to explain that...
Point. Plus there is a time problem writing big posts with lots of links in them (I bet no one will even see it). Next time I'll think twice before writing such a post...
SSDs (or anything that does rotating writes) may defeat some software file shredders.
The whole residual magnetic domain thing is up for debate with today's disks... In recent years there is apparently so little space and densities are so high very few bits can be recovered. The reasoning for this is that there have been cases where drives have been blanked and vast sums of money have been at stake but the data was not recovered (old Slashdot thread about data recovery questioning if it's possible after one pass). If you have a reliable link saying that this is to the contrary (for modern (post 2003) spinning hard disks) I would really like to see it though.
There seem to be a few BSD tools with the aim of building smaller collections of binaries in a similar fashion to BusyBox.
You've mentioned crunchgen but there is also embutils (which can be smaller than busy box but requires dietlibc) and there also seems to be something called beastiebox (which allows different amounts of linking). Finally there is Cauldron which seems to be a collection of tools for creating embedded BSD environments.
It may be useful for you to read LWN's embedded nightmare prologue along with the original Embedded Nightmare article. If you have written extra drivers and can get them into the mainline kernel them the benefits of going with a new 2.6 could be big...
kernel hacker guide to git, git tutorial git bisect manpage, git bisect example.
Your question feels a bit of strange question to ask as surely anyone who has looked would notice a huge difference between the latest 2.6 (2.6.28) and the latest 2.4 (2.4.37).
Preemptible kernel (so lower latencies are possible)
Far more devices supported (both in terms of architectures and additional add on devices e.g. SATA support)
Better scheduler (initially made O(1) scales better under load and then fairer with CFS)
Task Control Groups
Better support for threads (schedules them in a more intelligent fashion)
Strict overcommit
Massive VM changes
Tickless/dynticks support
Asynchronous I/O support
Introduction of different I/O schedulers (deadline, cfq
Network stack improvements (faster, better under load e.g. NAPI support)
epoll support
Improved ACPI support
Network filesystem improvements
Initramfs support
There is a huge list of Linux kernel changes that happened between 2.4 and 2.5. There is also a good Linux kernel 2.5 changes page on IBM's developerworks. Kernelnewbies has an excellent summary of changes for each of the 2.6 kernels and a 2.5 changes page. LWN is also excellent for kernel news.
I hate it when people don't bother to state exactly the points they object to. What other changes (not listed above) do you think the question poster wouldn't benefit from? Follow the links to the full lists (don't just use the ones off the top of your head)...
Bizarre but true. Red Alert 1 will actually run fine under Vista 64 but won't install (installer is 16 bit). The machine I was using had VMWare on it so I installed it in the VM then moved the unpacked directories outside.
With the addition of uvcvideo and gpsca usb webcam drivers most webcams should be supported in Linux distros released in the past 4 or so months. Assuming you tried an extremely new distro which webcam was not working?
I'm not sure what you would get back (aside from remapped sectors). Years ago it was definitely possible to get significant data back from zeroed (as in dd if=/dev/zero rather than a "format") drives. However in recent years there is apparently so little space and densities are so high very few bits can be recovered. The reasoning for this is that there have been cases where drives have been blanked and vast sums of money have been at stake but the data was not recovered (old Slashdot thread about data recovery questioning if it's possible after one pass).
If you have a reliable link saying that this is to the contrary I would really like to see it though. Solid state disks are a whole 'nother kettle of fish though.
...when you add -f on the command line. There's a warning about why trying to make commands safe automatically is not a good idea in the Unix Haters Handbook (Changing rm's Behavior Is Not an Option section). Better to have an entirely different command written by yourself that won't vary it's behaviour platform (and at worse will be missing)...
My own cautionary tale (unrelated to the GP) is don't delete directories you think are completely empty by using rm -rf. Use rmdir - it's safer.
Oh and don't use -r if you aren't actually deleting directories. And watch out for GNUisms on GNU userlands - that * might mean more than you think it does on Linux...
What's so wrong with expressing that opinion neatly in a single character change?
There is a strong risk that you wind up sending yourself up if write "M$". It became so cliched Penny Arcade did a comic about what people who write M$ might look like.
Perhaps the only folks who still get away using it are those who hate money or those making some sort of political statement. Some even say using M$ cheapens an argument...
I'm starting to wonder whether you spoke to the same Alan I know : ). Alan would have surely mentioned that he prefers using joe as his editor because it supports WordStar key bindings...
Don't worry, Alan knows the value of programming. One can see the motives behind his obtaining an MBA as an example of learning more about the business environment (and do you know what the topic for his MBA thesis was?)
Hey some of us young 'uns in SUCS would like to hear more about the old days of the 90s. If you've got a moment hop on by to the SUCS@20 site or drop by Milliways...
You might want to take a look at Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books, Ever (if you want to go by what is popular) or The Best Programming Books (which seems to be more diverse).
Personally I really liked the Mythical Man Month (one of the few library books I borrowed as an undergraduate and I've recently reread it and still like it) and Peopleware (very funny) but both of these are more about software engineering (and how it goes wrong) rather than practical hands on programming. However they are both short and entertaining. Code Complete is very authoritative (but big). These aren't books you are going to gravitate towards if you are just starting to program for the first time though so I'll just mention I found Java in Nutshell useful (but others are not so keen on it).
Your borrowers are probably going to want those "Learn in 24 hours..." or "...for Dummies" though. It would be nice to know what the most loaned books turned out to be in year's time (might make a good Slashdot article : )
Take a look at ProgrammingBooks.org. It even has a handy Books Every Programmer Should Read section.
Alternative best book lists are linked to in one of my other posts in this question.
Is it a University library or a public library? What your public will want will vary dramatically depending on who your primary audience is.
Back (not so long ago) when I was a kid I spent ages reading reading a book about programming in BASIC on the BBC and it was packed full illustrations (I can't remember much more about it other than it hard a part talking about how you needed to type """ if you wanted to get a quote).
When I look at the stuff being returned to the library at the University I am at it seems to mostly be course texts and fellow students are always complaining about how they can't get hold of XYZ course texts because there aren't enough copies of it in the library.
When I look at local book stores the stuff that always seems to have taken are the "Learn XYZ in 24 hours" or the Dummies series books.
I know what I like to read (books that have a good reputation and are under 300 pages long) but goodness knows whether this is anything like your borrowers...
But programming book lists crop up all over the place. In this Stifflog interview with Yegge, Torvalds, Hansson, Norvig, Thomas, Van Rossum, Gosling, Stroustrup and Bray the interviewees mention their favourite books (of the most popular I think only K&R and Programming Pearls weren't on your list).
Many people have Knuth's Art of Programming on their shelves (but it's harder to find people who have read all of it).
One of the Kernel Hacker Bookshelf series on LWN recommends Unix Internals.
One of the consultants who taught at my University said that the Mythical Man Month and Peopleware were good. I've read these too and can also recommended them (although they are more about managing programmers rather than programming per se). The consultant also recommended Design Patterns (although he said not to read the book cover to cover but rather to just be aware of them so you could refer to them later).
Reddit has a Must Read Programming books thread.
I've heard the "Dragon Book" (Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools I think is the 2nd edition) being talked of favourably.
What is the single most influential book every programmer should read? thread on Stackoverflow.
Many people seem to recommend reading Godel, Escher, Bach...
Joel Spoolsky's list of books every programmer should read.
Maybe someone will collect the 20 most popular books into one easy to read post rather than the scattershot of links I've given you here...
Kernel developer Dave Jones reckons that using noop with SSD may not be the best because with other schedulers the ioscheduler will do "merging of adjacent read requests".
Linus studied at the University of Helsinki between 1988 to 1996 before graduating.
He might not have needed to go to University but it sounds like he thinks the experience helped him...
Basically the current kernel memory allocator does not typically stop long idle memory being swapped out to make room for pagecache in the updatedb case (you can see the the Linux swap problem being discussed back in 2004 when the allocator had already been set). The classic "OpenOffice left overnight is swapped out by early morning updatedb run" problem is still here (because OOo memory has been idle for so long).
While there is an madvise option to make mmaped memory dodge the page cache there is a need for more. As recently as 2007 there have been attempt to try and let userspace warn the kernel that what it is going to do shouldn't stay in the pagecache, but it's unclear how far it progressed. The current solution seems to be "don't run updatedb".
If you have caches of a size smaller than your real RAM, the order in which you try to access memory really CAN make a difference because cache is many times faster than regular RAM and will try and do things like speculative readahead. If what you are working with is already in the cache by the time you request it then you won't stall for as long.
If you are forever causing the cache to become flushed and forcing the cache to be refilled with a different contents (perhaps because you are causing a large number of random memory access and the cache's readahead is getting your future access wrong so it has to be turned off) then performance will by comparison be slower than a sequential memory access workload.
The above is of course a gross simplification (and doesn't apply if what you are reading fits entirely within cache and is already there). If you have the technical chops you can read more about how order of access can have an impact on speed in Ulrich Drepper's what every programmer should know about memory on LWN.