well, i wouldn't say i would develop an open-source project for solaris specifically, but sometimes you want or need to try to compile your program on another platform. i personally don't have access to a solaris machine, but now i can download and install it for free and test my software on it. if someone submits a bug on solaris, i can verify it, and if someone says that it doesn't work on sparc i can narrow it down from solaris bug to solaris-sparc bug if it works on my x86 install.
hell, i'd love to be able to do even that. my windows machine at work cannot be upgraded to SP2, since we have pretty conclusively determined that a piece of software/hardware that is critical to my job cannot be used with sp2 (Agilent LogicWave logic analyser + XP-SP2 = instant crash). so now mine (and most others in the office) windows machines are no longer able to keep up with windows patches and do our jobs at the same time, and the exploits keep coming out on schedule.
okay, enough of these printing scumbags. printers are getting worse, print quality is crap, ink cartridge prices are obscene while lasting for shorter durations (my gf's printer will not print in black when the color cartridge is empty), DMCA restrictions on refilling ink, spying on users...
bullshit. i will never buy one of these printers again (this means you lexmark, canon, hp, and your friends). when will a manufacturer stand up and sell good quality printers, refillable by the user using just an ink bottle? there is a market of people who are willing not to buy the cheapest piece of shit printer because they know how that turns out. who will fill it?
Re:It's insightful? Come on, guys!
on
NeXTSTEP To Mac OS X
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· Score: 3, Informative
The purchase of NeXT was far more a purchase of Jobs than it was of the actual technology. Amelio was pushing for the acquisition Be Inc's BeOS and turning that into the next MacOS. remember, at the time Apple had a 10 year streak of failures trying to modernize the OS, starting with Copland and ending with Rhapsody. System7 was supposed to be the last non-memory protected, cooperative multitasking MacOS, but then they released 8 and 9 while their new projects floundered. I think far more likely, the board of directors at Apple decided that they need someone who could steer the company and push out a modern OS, as well as reinvigorate the product line. I'm not a big fan of Jobs, but there is no doubt he saved Apple.
i don't know about you guys, but the first thing i look for in a supercomputer is an easy to use graphical user interface. who wants to spend all that time typing archaic commands into their supercomputer's commandline? i just put NumberCrunch.exe on my desktop, and doubleclick it when i'm ready to launch. and all of my computations are stored on my shared folder, so that the other nodes can see what i've done and add their results. and while my program is running in the background i can also browse the web or play a little doom 3 (you would not believe the frame rates i get). but remember, turn off your screensavers if you want your supercomputer to reach its full power, because that opengl flying windows thing takes up alot of cpu time.
"You'll note that other versions of Linux are languishing at version 6.3 or even 2.2 - only Be Dope Linux Version 27.1 with AVN (Advanced Version Numbering) brings you a version of Linux numbered at 27.1".
please. "push" technology is the next big thing. pretty soon you'll all be running thin clients, getting push content, and riding segways. and there will be xml, and set-top boxes, and portals, and aeron chairs, and it will all be written in java. just you wait!
sure it does. int main(void) is completely legitimate. there's no reason why your program needs to take in commandline arguments. the loader will probably pass them to you anyway, but you don't need to acknowledge their existance.
the openbsd team has branched off quite a few projects where they saw the security and/or license was insufficient and needed to be redone.
OpenSSH, who's box doesn't have this? OpenNTPD, a network time protocol daemon and server, recently released. OpenBGPD, the border gateway protocol daemon. They were pioneers in the use of stack protection software on the i386 platform (kernel and compiler), as well as privilage seperated daemons (it's in your sshd now), and randomized library linking locations. (i think i'm missing a few, anyone care to fill them in?)
they have implemented (a far better implementation over the old one that they didn't write) their i.p. filter, PF (which has now made it into netbsd, freebsd, and hopefully linux soon enough). this includes INSANE amounts of configurability options, with integrated routing and traffic shaping.
many people grumble about how the project is run and its priorities. but we all benefit from their efforts. i think i'm going to buy a cd even though i am not an openbsd user. these sales help keep these projects going.
What if I want to find files from male colleagues?
modded funny, but very much true. the method of generically referring to an individual in a gender neutral way is using the male form ("he", "his"). this is true for many other languages as well. in fact, in languages that are more particular about genders of objects, a group of a thousand females and one male is still referred to in the masculine form. using the feminine form implies the exclusion of males from discussion (as the parent suggested). the author merely shows his (or her, i haven't bothered to check, thus i can safely use "his") ignorance of the language by an assinine attempt at 'equality'. having used a female as the subject of an example would have been just fine and would have satisfied the author's pc boner. having the female form in a neutral sentence is just foolish.
p.s. no, you are not clever in pointing out that i did not properly capitalize anything in this post.
more accurately, Giampaolo was the guy that re-wrote the BeFS, after a filesystem based on a database proved to be too slow. his book (Practical Filesystem Design) is very enlightening for people interested in these types of things, and is now a free download pdf on his website.
for non-beos users, here's what you need to know about befs (note that it was pretty much complete by 1995): 1) FAST. super fast. seriously. 2) 64 bit, with support for giant volumes and files (10 years ago!) 3) journaled filesystem. no fsck, no corruption on crash (trust me, my daily use system had bad ram for a while and crashed hourly). 4) metadata built in and instantly accessed. change the name of a file or any other metadata, and all your "live queries" would reflect the changes.
how long must my linux desktop wait for what beos had 10 years ago?
As might efficient packet discarding algorithms, as per their listing the Discard Protocol as one of the protocols you can license from them.
you're saying there's no innovation to be had in the discard protocol? the lazy unix programmer would just take his echo protocol implementation and redirect output to/dev/null. of course, after a bit of optimizing (and probably an assembly implementation), he would discover that he could just throw away that buffer and be done with it. now, you're thinking, "sure, that's obvious."
microsoft doesn't do things like that. they planned ahead. what if you want to tunnel discard over an ipsec tunnel of ipv6? what if you wanted to implement discard via remote method invocation using xml with soap? what if you wanted every application you write to have access to the discard protocol as simply as instantiating an object?
that's why they created the microsoft abstract discard server (ms discard). the ms discard library provides you with an abstract implementation of a general discard server, as well as a fully functional discard client. the discard server is fully input-neutral, and can accept data from many common stream formats. have you ever wanted to run a discard server against a relational database query? probably not. but now you can! this is done easily by using the odbc discard data source bridge (or if you need speed over portability, oci). virtually any data source can be discarded in a clean, multithreaded, scalable fashion. discard is now available enterprise-wide over ldap. do your discard servers need load balancing and failover redundancy? with ms discard, you can take advantage of advanced clustering features and achieve five 9's of uptime from your discard server farm (*requires ms discard clustering server and windows 2003 advanced server pro champion edition).
in short, don't assume that just because the protocol in basic, the implementation can't be bloated and patented.
Re:The unfortunate side of the internet
on
Internet Turns 35 Today
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
those of you that are at UCLA can go to the engineering library (Boelter Hall, 4th? floor) and see the IMP (interface message processor). it's a green refrigerator-sized metal box with some switches on the front. it was the first node (along with the stanford machine) on what is now the internet.
Of course, I can also see the next assumption being that they're using that connection to transfer proprietary information from the company's network to their own computer.
you should already assume that any technically competent person (the kind who can set up a web proxy over an ssh tunnel) can already do this. whether it be over ssh, uploading over http, burning on cd, loading on their ipod, transferring it to their laptop, or setting up a super-secret backdoor way of passing it (tunnel over http, ping payload, whatever). you should also assume that if it were happening, you probably wouldn't know about it.
i would love to have had the chance to respond to this.
you could just download apache, edit the code and bump up the version number. but really, the right solution would have been to inform him that, in fact, there exists an "apachee 3.0". unfortunately, "apachee 3.0" is no longer free, and requires a 500$ yearly site license for under 10 installs (and reasonable fees for more). then you can bump up the version on apache 1.3 and install it on the company's computers. your friend (er, the "apachee foundation") can cash the yearly check for you.
while i generally agree with you, here is a special case:
the haiku os (formerly OpenBeOS) kernel is partially written in C++, especially the BFS filesystem implementation. but there's a catch! they don't use many of the features of c++ that make it bad for just these kinds of things. no exceptions, no virtual functions, no STL, none of that other nonesense that c++ does behind your back.
Re:Opterons and PowerPC together
on
Cray XT-3 Ships
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· Score: 2, Interesting
let's see what you're missing:
* first, sgi still makes and sells supercomputers, they are far from faded. they also own cray (or did). * tandem, bought by compaq, we all know what happened there. * hp sells a superdome once in a while. but nobody seems excited about their itanic systems. * sun, rotting with their out of date cpus. * fujitsu is doing well in the supercomputer market. * nec is also successful. * ibm, of course.
and you mentioned motorola? you're joking, i hope.
the largest purchasers of supercomputers in the world - national labs and the nsa, like to buy american hardware. they've always had a hand in keeping the industry afloat. notice that the big labs tend to round-robbin their supercomputer vendors so that they buy a machine from each vendor.
Re:You don't have to begin to imagine
on
Cray XT-3 Ships
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Power: 14.8 kVA (14.5 kW) per cabinet.
that's amazing. how did the cray guys get a kilovolt-ampere that is not equal to a kilowatt? just goes to show you the power of fast interconnects.
before in car networks, when you had to run a cable from the driver-side window switch to every window in the car, vehicles had somewhere near 20 miles (!) of cables inside. today, class two networks, such as CAN, MOST, and this firewire thing, have taken over alot of the functionality, replacing dumb control wires with protocol messages and microcontrollers. did you know that in a modern high end gm vehicle, and similarly in a mercedes, you can now control every non-critical component (windows, headlights, air conditioner, wipers, radio,...) from a single lan? MOST even carries audio data from your CD changer over the same network. we're talking literally hundreds of pounds saved, especially in large and feature-full vehicles.
the pmp-120 is already out at retail stores, go try it out. i looked at one at best buy the other day. the browsing interface is a big clunky, but it is the best portable media player i have seen thus far. compared to the rca lyra, the sony hmp (which i tried first-hand in japan), the achos jukebox, and few other junky players, it seems like the one with the best interface, and the widest supported format range. it is also pretty good about showing metadata.
it doesn't choke when you try to fast-forward like most of the others, but it does not show anything while fast-forwarding (which could be a nuisance when you're trying to watch *ahem* a certain class of movies).
possibilities: 1. the video decoding is done on a dsp on which an ogg implementation is not available. the audio/control cpu does not have enough cpu power to decode ogg files. 2. they ran out of room in the flash memory 3. they had a schedule to meet, and did not get the feature done in time. 4. they did not have the resources to put another codec through their q.a. process. 5. if it had ogg, you'd be whining about lack of a different feature.
Slashdot Mirror
if this is like Dos is Dead, which is what they were advertising when windown 95 came out, then i guess passwords are not going anywhere for a while.
well, i wouldn't say i would develop an open-source project for solaris specifically, but sometimes you want or need to try to compile your program on another platform. i personally don't have access to a solaris machine, but now i can download and install it for free and test my software on it. if someone submits a bug on solaris, i can verify it, and if someone says that it doesn't work on sparc i can narrow it down from solaris bug to solaris-sparc bug if it works on my x86 install.
download Solaris 10 for SPARC or x86.
the terminology on the site is a bit confusing, but what they label as the "Software Express" iso is the Solaris installer
is there a way on the live cd to download the stage-x tarballs via bittorrent? ie, is there a bittorrent client distributed on the live cd?
Just upgrade to Windows XP SP2.
hell, i'd love to be able to do even that.
my windows machine at work cannot be upgraded to SP2, since we have pretty conclusively determined that a piece of software/hardware that is critical to my job cannot be used with sp2 (Agilent LogicWave logic analyser + XP-SP2 = instant crash). so now mine (and most others in the office) windows machines are no longer able to keep up with windows patches and do our jobs at the same time, and the exploits keep coming out on schedule.
thanks, microsoft. thanks a fuckin lot.
okay, enough of these printing scumbags. printers are getting worse, print quality is crap, ink cartridge prices are obscene while lasting for shorter durations (my gf's printer will not print in black when the color cartridge is empty), DMCA restrictions on refilling ink, spying on users...
bullshit. i will never buy one of these printers again (this means you lexmark, canon, hp, and your friends). when will a manufacturer stand up and sell good quality printers, refillable by the user using just an ink bottle? there is a market of people who are willing not to buy the cheapest piece of shit printer because they know how that turns out. who will fill it?
The purchase of NeXT was far more a purchase of Jobs than it was of the actual technology. Amelio was pushing for the acquisition Be Inc's BeOS and turning that into the next MacOS. remember, at the time Apple had a 10 year streak of failures trying to modernize the OS, starting with Copland and ending with Rhapsody. System7 was supposed to be the last non-memory protected, cooperative multitasking MacOS, but then they released 8 and 9 while their new projects floundered. I think far more likely, the board of directors at Apple decided that they need someone who could steer the company and push out a modern OS, as well as reinvigorate the product line. I'm not a big fan of Jobs, but there is no doubt he saved Apple.
Does anyone want a Windows Supercomputer anyway?
i don't know about you guys, but the first thing i look for in a supercomputer is an easy to use graphical user interface. who wants to spend all that time typing archaic commands into their supercomputer's commandline? i just put NumberCrunch.exe on my desktop, and doubleclick it when i'm ready to launch. and all of my computations are stored on my shared folder, so that the other nodes can see what i've done and add their results. and while my program is running in the background i can also browse the web or play a little doom 3 (you would not believe the frame rates i get). but remember, turn off your screensavers if you want your supercomputer to reach its full power, because that opengl flying windows thing takes up alot of cpu time.
heh, bedope.com. i haven't seen that site since Be Inc went under. the were the site to introduce the most numerically advanced version of linux, ever!
"You'll note that other versions of Linux are languishing at version 6.3 or even 2.2 - only Be Dope Linux Version 27.1 with AVN (Advanced Version Numbering) brings you a version of Linux numbered at 27.1".
please. "push" technology is the next big thing. pretty soon you'll all be running thin clients, getting push content, and riding segways. and there will be xml, and set-top boxes, and portals, and aeron chairs, and it will all be written in java. just you wait!
sure it does. int main(void) is completely legitimate. there's no reason why your program needs to take in commandline arguments. the loader will probably pass them to you anyway, but you don't need to acknowledge their existance.
the openbsd team has branched off quite a few projects where they saw the security and/or license was insufficient and needed to be redone.
OpenSSH, who's box doesn't have this?
OpenNTPD, a network time protocol daemon and server, recently released.
OpenBGPD, the border gateway protocol daemon.
They were pioneers in the use of stack protection software on the i386 platform (kernel and compiler), as well as privilage seperated daemons (it's in your sshd now), and randomized library linking locations.
(i think i'm missing a few, anyone care to fill them in?)
they have implemented (a far better implementation over the old one that they didn't write) their i.p. filter, PF (which has now made it into netbsd, freebsd, and hopefully linux soon enough). this includes INSANE amounts of configurability options, with integrated routing and traffic shaping.
many people grumble about how the project is run and its priorities. but we all benefit from their efforts. i think i'm going to buy a cd even though i am not an openbsd user. these sales help keep these projects going.
What if I want to find files from male colleagues?
modded funny, but very much true. the method of generically referring to an individual in a gender neutral way is using the male form ("he", "his"). this is true for many other languages as well. in fact, in languages that are more particular about genders of objects, a group of a thousand females and one male is still referred to in the masculine form. using the feminine form implies the exclusion of males from discussion (as the parent suggested). the author merely shows his (or her, i haven't bothered to check, thus i can safely use "his") ignorance of the language by an assinine attempt at 'equality'. having used a female as the subject of an example would have been just fine and would have satisfied the author's pc boner. having the female form in a neutral sentence is just foolish.
p.s.
no, you are not clever in pointing out that i did not properly capitalize anything in this post.
more accurately, Giampaolo was the guy that re-wrote the BeFS, after a filesystem based on a database proved to be too slow. his book (Practical Filesystem Design) is very enlightening for people interested in these types of things, and is now a free download pdf on his website.
for non-beos users, here's what you need to know about befs (note that it was pretty much complete by 1995):
1) FAST. super fast. seriously.
2) 64 bit, with support for giant volumes and files (10 years ago!)
3) journaled filesystem. no fsck, no corruption on crash (trust me, my daily use system had bad ram for a while and crashed hourly).
4) metadata built in and instantly accessed. change the name of a file or any other metadata, and all your "live queries" would reflect the changes.
how long must my linux desktop wait for what beos had 10 years ago?
After the Ansari X-Prize, the next big prize to watch is the Ralph Kramden Prize.
One of these days, Alice... to the moon!
As might efficient packet discarding algorithms, as per their listing the Discard Protocol as one of the protocols you can license from them.
/dev/null. of course, after a bit of optimizing (and probably an assembly implementation), he would discover that he could just throw away that buffer and be done with it. now, you're thinking, "sure, that's obvious."
you're saying there's no innovation to be had in the discard protocol? the lazy unix programmer would just take his echo protocol implementation and redirect output to
microsoft doesn't do things like that. they planned ahead. what if you want to tunnel discard over an ipsec tunnel of ipv6? what if you wanted to implement discard via remote method invocation using xml with soap? what if you wanted every application you write to have access to the discard protocol as simply as instantiating an object?
that's why they created the microsoft abstract discard server (ms discard). the ms discard library provides you with an abstract implementation of a general discard server, as well as a fully functional discard client. the discard server is fully input-neutral, and can accept data from many common stream formats. have you ever wanted to run a discard server against a relational database query? probably not. but now you can! this is done easily by using the odbc discard data source bridge (or if you need speed over portability, oci). virtually any data source can be discarded in a clean, multithreaded, scalable fashion. discard is now available enterprise-wide over ldap. do your discard servers need load balancing and failover redundancy? with ms discard, you can take advantage of advanced clustering features and achieve five 9's of uptime from your discard server farm (*requires ms discard clustering server and windows 2003 advanced server pro champion edition).
in short, don't assume that just because the protocol in basic, the implementation can't be bloated and patented.
those of you that are at UCLA can go to the engineering library (Boelter Hall, 4th? floor) and see the IMP (interface message processor). it's a green refrigerator-sized metal box with some switches on the front. it was the first node (along with the stanford machine) on what is now the internet.
Of course, I can also see the next assumption being that they're using that connection to transfer proprietary information from the company's network to their own computer.
you should already assume that any technically competent person (the kind who can set up a web proxy over an ssh tunnel) can already do this. whether it be over ssh, uploading over http, burning on cd, loading on their ipod, transferring it to their laptop, or setting up a super-secret backdoor way of passing it (tunnel over http, ping payload, whatever). you should also assume that if it were happening, you probably wouldn't know about it.
i would love to have had the chance to respond to this.
you could just download apache, edit the code and bump up the version number. but really, the right solution would have been to inform him that, in fact, there exists an "apachee 3.0". unfortunately, "apachee 3.0" is no longer free, and requires a 500$ yearly site license for under 10 installs (and reasonable fees for more). then you can bump up the version on apache 1.3 and install it on the company's computers. your friend (er, the "apachee foundation") can cash the yearly check for you.
while i generally agree with you, here is a special case:
the haiku os (formerly OpenBeOS) kernel is partially written in C++, especially the BFS filesystem implementation. but there's a catch! they don't use many of the features of c++ that make it bad for just these kinds of things. no exceptions, no virtual functions, no STL, none of that other nonesense that c++ does behind your back.
let's see what you're missing:
* first, sgi still makes and sells supercomputers, they are far from faded. they also own cray (or did).
* tandem, bought by compaq, we all know what happened there.
* hp sells a superdome once in a while. but nobody seems excited about their itanic systems.
* sun, rotting with their out of date cpus.
* fujitsu is doing well in the supercomputer market.
* nec is also successful.
* ibm, of course.
and you mentioned motorola? you're joking, i hope.
the largest purchasers of supercomputers in the world - national labs and the nsa, like to buy american hardware. they've always had a hand in keeping the industry afloat. notice that the big labs tend to round-robbin their supercomputer vendors so that they buy a machine from each vendor.
Power: 14.8 kVA (14.5 kW) per cabinet.
that's amazing. how did the cray guys get a kilovolt-ampere that is not equal to a kilowatt? just goes to show you the power of fast interconnects.
before in car networks, when you had to run a cable from the driver-side window switch to every window in the car, vehicles had somewhere near 20 miles (!) of cables inside. today, class two networks, such as CAN, MOST, and this firewire thing, have taken over alot of the functionality, replacing dumb control wires with protocol messages and microcontrollers. did you know that in a modern high end gm vehicle, and similarly in a mercedes, you can now control every non-critical component (windows, headlights, air conditioner, wipers, radio, ...) from a single lan? MOST even carries audio data from your CD changer over the same network. we're talking literally hundreds of pounds saved, especially in large and feature-full vehicles.
the pmp-120 is already out at retail stores, go try it out. i looked at one at best buy the other day. the browsing interface is a big clunky, but it is the best portable media player i have seen thus far. compared to the rca lyra, the sony hmp (which i tried first-hand in japan), the achos jukebox, and few other junky players, it seems like the one with the best interface, and the widest supported format range. it is also pretty good about showing metadata.
it doesn't choke when you try to fast-forward like most of the others, but it does not show anything while fast-forwarding (which could be a nuisance when you're trying to watch *ahem* a certain class of movies).
whine whine ogg
possibilities:
1. the video decoding is done on a dsp on which an ogg implementation is not available. the audio/control cpu does not have enough cpu power to decode ogg files.
2. they ran out of room in the flash memory
3. they had a schedule to meet, and did not get the feature done in time.
4. they did not have the resources to put another codec through their q.a. process.
5. if it had ogg, you'd be whining about lack of a different feature.