learn bricklaying and plastering, plumbing, carpentry, welding
That's actually good advice. Skilled trades may not carry any significant prestige, but they pay pretty well, and there is going to be a shortage when the baby boomers retire.
Sarge is great. When it becomes the new Stable, I may just switch from Testing to Stable.
...and shortly after that, switch to the new Testing. They call it "Debian Stale" for a reason. You know cool stuff is going to show up in Testing that'll take many months to make its way into Stable. Are you really willing to wait that long?
Sure, you could maintain a massive sources.list with a bunch of third party repositories. Or you could just upgrade to Testing.
Stable is good for servers, but on desktops testing/unstable is practically compulsory.
Thanks for reminding me... Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown", the chapter "$79,499". Though it's not NASA, it might (or might not) also be the incident you're thinking of.
Did anyone else's bullshit detector get pegged by this?...
Within minutes of appearing on Anathema, Half-Life 2 spread. One file became 30 files became 3,000 files became 300,000 files as Valve stood helplessly by watching its big Christmas blockbuster turn into a lump of coal. The damage was irreversible - the horse was out of the barn, the county, and the state. The original Half-Life has sold more than 10 million games and expansion packs since its late 1998 release. Half-Life 2's official release finally happened in November, after almost a year of reprogramming.
...Specificly, the "almost a year of reprogramming" part.
It seems that when people hear that the HL2 code was "stolen", they interpret that in the literal sense. It was "taken" from Valve so they had to "reprogram" it because they didn't have it anymore. This bogon seems to appear even among people who should know better (like Wired reporters).
I guess Orwell was right: Control language, control thought.
Imagine how productive OSS developers would be if they didn't "give away" all of their source code with every new version.
One thing I noticed a year or two ago when I was in the market for an LCD, was that 19" was not very much more expensive than 17", as long as they were the same resolution. Buying a higher resolution, even at the same size screen, increased the price a lot.
This seems to be the opposite of CRTs, where you pay mainly for size rather than resolution. Which makes sense I guess... I assume that with CRTs, the size of the tube is the main factor in price. With LCDs on the other hand, each pixel is a group of transistors so (I assume) the count matters more than the size.
What crappy info at gametunnel... I was disappointed going through the list and seeing "System requirements:" with four or five versions of Windows listed, and nothing about Mac or Linux.
Just downloaded Gish (for Linux) and will try it out. I wonder what other games on that list are also cross-platform.
Sort of like how every major Internet virus disaster, spyware infestation, and countless other sorts of electronic calamity occurs as a direct result of using Microsoft software. You can't spin that.
Yes I can.:P Most of the world uses Microsoft software, and therefore most calamitous attacks are directed at it. The same will occur if/when Linux rises to sizeable popularity, but that's a debate for another day.
So you agree that Linux is more secure for the foreseeable future... Or are you making the bold prediction that Linux is on the verge of displacing Windows as the dominant OS?
Myself, I predict that by the time Linux is "targeted more because it's so popular" like Windows supposedly is now, we'll all have flying cars, and they'll run Linux, and they'll get hacked and start falling out of the sky. It'll be quite horrible. But then we'll just send a cyborg back in time to kill Linus Torvalds before he creates Linux and it'll all work out in the end because after the change in the timeline we'll all be running OpenBSD.
I have a good Samsung LCD. It has one dead subpixel. It was days before I even noticed it. If I go looking for it, I can find it on white backgrounds (/.), where it appears light blue. But I have to clean the screen off first, because it looks the same as a fleck of dust.
If the pixel were always red, then it would be a problem. As is, it's fine. And the display is far easier on the eyes than any CRT can be: zero flicker, no matter what the refresh rate. That's worth a few dead subpixels to me (and I'm happy that there's only one).
Another example is FireFox, many claimed it's flawless, but the realistic others know that no software is bugless, but its OPEN status allows things to be fixed relatively quickly. So it would be unwise to claim that FireFox has fewer bugs and more secure because it hasn't been exploited yet.
I take issue with this. You're (unintentionally I assume) implying that because Firefox is not flawless, it doesn't have fewer bugs than IE. This is the fallacy of the excluded middle.
Nobody with a clue claims that Firefox is flawless. Just that it's more secure than IE. Which, when you think about it, is not a very strong assertion at all.
Kim does not strike me as a particularly mentally stable. If, say, an invasion of South Korea failed, I could easily see him launching missiles on the rest of the world.
Kim Jung-Il may not be very stable, but keep in mind that North Korea is a very insular country, and most of what we hear about it gets passed through the propaganda mill. Crazy leaders with nukes sell more newspapers.
Also, the United States has a history of hyping up the threats posed by other nations. The Soviet threat was exaggerated right up until their fall. And more recently, Iraq.
North Korea might have a crazy leader, but I'd say U.S. paranoia combined with it's stated "policy of pre-emption" is the greater threat to world peace.
No, you're not "done period". You'll lose a lot of data, but may still be able to recover some. Likewise when losing one disk in a RAID-0 setup.
Any file that resides entirely outside of the gap in the array can be recovered. How likely that is depends on the details of the filesystem, the striping, and the size of the file (the larger the file, the more likely that a part of it fell into the bit bucket).
Also, not all drive failures are total. You may have a RAID-5 array with one drive that completely failed, and another drive that just has some bad sectors. In that case you should be able to recover most of your data. Or you may have two disks with just a few bad sectors, which is even less bad.
This all depends on being able to force the array to allow access to the device, so that you can mount the filesystem (in read-only mode) and sift through the remains. Some (many? most?) RAID implementations may just give up if two disks in a RAID-5 array (or one disk in a RAID-0 array) are flagged as bad, in which case you really are screwed, even though your data is still there. From what people have been posting here I would guess that Linux SW RAID will let you force it, though I've never needed to try it myself.
Another advantage is that software RAID allows you to use any kind of disk as a RAID element.
Also, it's partition based, not disk based (under Linux, at least). This means that with just two drives you can create one two-disk RAID-1 array (for safety) and one two-disk RAID-0 array (for performance). Just create two partitions on each drive, pair the first partition on each drive in a RAID-0 config and the second partitions as RAID-1.
You can't do a single RAID-1/0 array with only two disks though. You could try, but you wouldn't gain anything (in fact, you'd lose).
Ace's Hardware is a pretty good (though low-volume) cross-architecture news site. Still covers x86 mostly, but does go into other architectures from time to time, and the people there seem to really know their stuff.
It might be wise for Bash and other script interpreters to refuse to execute scripts that are in any way writable by other users. You almost never want to do that; it's a security problem by its very nature. This would incur some additional overhead of having to stat the file and its parent directories up to/, but those inodes probably have to be read anyway as part of the normal unix permissions system.
A similar check could be added to the kernel, for regular executables (binaries and #! scripts).
Of course, it should be possible to selectively turn this off for those special cases when you really do trust the other user.
The "hackers just haven't targeted the alternatives yet" claim is a common refrain from MS apologists.
It's possible that hackers will begin to target Firefox and find it just as exploitable as IE. It's also possible they will begin to target Firefox, and find it to be more secure than IE.
I think "more secure than IE" is not a very hard thing to accomplish. IE is badly designed; this was touched upon in the article. It's true that all software has holes, but I'm convinced that IE is over all a lot worse than Firefox.
I hate to say it, but this algorithm is exactly the kind of thing that should be patentable. It's innovative (as far as I know; I'm not an optics guy) and I think it's reasonable to say that the inventors deserve a temporary monopoly so that they can profit from their invention. Unfortunately, in this case that means a software patent.
I'm pretty strongly against software being patentable (as most/.ers seem to be), but it's still worth noting that in some cases it might be reasonable.
so turn down swappiness a bit to avoid Mozilla/Firefox from being paged out when you leave for 15 minutes.
I think there is a common misconception about how virtual memory works in modern OSs. That is that if the VM writes a page to swap space, you have to wait for it to read it off the disk before you can use it again. That is not necessarily so.
VMs may write pages to swap and still leave the page in RAM. The swapping is a pre-emptive measure, so that if it really does need to free that memory for other purposes later on it doesn't have to to swap it out to disk, because it is already done. Modern VMs will write pages to swap during idle periods for exactly this reason. If you really do have enough physical RAM, then the VM will never need to repurpose that page of RAM, and it can use the page from RAM without reading back from swap.
In your hypothetical example the VM may write pages from your browser's process to swap, but when you get back to your desk you shouldn't notice, because the pages will still be in RAM.
The only reason to turn down swappiness is if you are a victim of that misconception, or if you want to avoid disk activity during idle periods (like, on a laptop where the hard disk is set to spin down after inactivity).
Many of the ext2 filesystem errors are "easily fixable" by losing the affected file. I remember losing several system files due to unclean shutdown, and once even had a system that was rendered unbootable because/sbin/init was lost. I was very annoyed, having used FreeBSD before on really crappy hardware and never lost files unless they were open for write at or very near the time of the crash.
Nowadays I _always_ use journaling filesystems. In my experience, ext2 is an unreliable piece of crap unless your hardware, software, power source, and operator are all 100% reliable.
I've been using ReiserFS on my home box for several years now with no problems at all, though I've heard of serious problems with it so I've been reluctant to use it for servers. I've used ext3 on servers and my laptop and seen unclean shutdowns (mostly on servers not yet in production) with no problems either. I'll probably try XFS in the near future.
Which is fine, if you never need your code to work with any other database. It's not strictly correct (it's in quotes so it's a string, and putting it into an integer field should be considered a type mismatch) but mysql lets you get away with it.
There are LOTS of things that MySQL lets you get away with that other DBs don't. This can lead to some very unportable code if your first target is MySQL.
Requiring full source code only makes certain hardware harder to get working, and does not contribute to the adoption of Linux.
I spent over a day this week wrestling with a RAID controller to discover that the closed-source binary-only driver only works with an outdated version of RedHat.
If they had released the source with a GPL-compatible licence it would have been incorporated into the kernel. Then I could've used any recent distribution and the controller would have Just Worked with no driver disk version incompatibility messiness.
In this case, not releasing the source made the hardware much harder to get working.
This is not a problem specific to Linux. There are quite a few winmodems out there that people bought in the Win98 days that don't work with W2K/XP. The driver is not compatible and the vendor doesn't want to support chipsets they aren't even selling anymore.
Just a little reminder that Free (as in speech) can have real practical benefits too. That's how the ideological aspect was spawned in the first place.
You can go back earlier than Drexler in 1986... The first references to nanotechnology (though not under that name) seems to be in this talk by Richard Feynman in 1959.
Unless you get a very hot, brand new PC with motherboard integrated gigE, your PCI bus can't push the bandwidth.
Being integrated with the motherboard doesn't make a performance difference on any board I've ever seen. It still goes over the PCI bus, it's just not using a slot. Creating a separate bus just for the ethernet port would be too expensive.
You'll be doing good to get 400 mbps out of a cheap gig switch.
I'd be interested to know where you came up with that. Some switches may have an underpowered backplane that limits your aggregate bandwidth (such that you can't pump a full 1Gbps on all ports simultaneously) but it shouldn't prevent you pushing 1Gbps between two ports when all else is idle. If it's advertised as a gigabit switch but is only capable of 400 Mbps, wouldn't the manufacturer be open to claims of false advertising?
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That's actually good advice. Skilled trades may not carry any significant prestige, but they pay pretty well, and there is going to be a shortage when the baby boomers retire.
...and shortly after that, switch to the new Testing. They call it "Debian Stale" for a reason. You know cool stuff is going to show up in Testing that'll take many months to make its way into Stable. Are you really willing to wait that long?
Sure, you could maintain a massive sources.list with a bunch of third party repositories. Or you could just upgrade to Testing.
Stable is good for servers, but on desktops testing/unstable is practically compulsory.
And then there's Ubuntu...
Thanks for reminding me... Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown", the chapter "$79,499". Though it's not NASA, it might (or might not) also be the incident you're thinking of.
Did anyone else's bullshit detector get pegged by this?...
...Specificly, the "almost a year of reprogramming" part.
It seems that when people hear that the HL2 code was "stolen", they interpret that in the literal sense. It was "taken" from Valve so they had to "reprogram" it because they didn't have it anymore. This bogon seems to appear even among people who should know better (like Wired reporters).
I guess Orwell was right: Control language, control thought.
Imagine how productive OSS developers would be if they didn't "give away" all of their source code with every new version.
You forgot Earth. :)
One thing I noticed a year or two ago when I was in the market for an LCD, was that 19" was not very much more expensive than 17", as long as they were the same resolution. Buying a higher resolution, even at the same size screen, increased the price a lot.
This seems to be the opposite of CRTs, where you pay mainly for size rather than resolution. Which makes sense I guess... I assume that with CRTs, the size of the tube is the main factor in price. With LCDs on the other hand, each pixel is a group of transistors so (I assume) the count matters more than the size.
Just downloaded Gish (for Linux) and will try it out. I wonder what other games on that list are also cross-platform.
So you agree that Linux is more secure for the foreseeable future... Or are you making the bold prediction that Linux is on the verge of displacing Windows as the dominant OS?
Myself, I predict that by the time Linux is "targeted more because it's so popular" like Windows supposedly is now, we'll all have flying cars, and they'll run Linux, and they'll get hacked and start falling out of the sky. It'll be quite horrible. But then we'll just send a cyborg back in time to kill Linus Torvalds before he creates Linux and it'll all work out in the end because after the change in the timeline we'll all be running OpenBSD.
LSD may have been used at the Univeristy of Saskatchewan, but it certainly wasn't invented there.
LSD was invented by Albert Hoffman while he was working at Sandoz laboratories in Switzerland. It's quite an interesting story.
Some small number of defects is acceptable.
I have a good Samsung LCD. It has one dead subpixel. It was days before I even noticed it. If I go looking for it, I can find it on white backgrounds (/.), where it appears light blue. But I have to clean the screen off first, because it looks the same as a fleck of dust.
If the pixel were always red, then it would be a problem. As is, it's fine. And the display is far easier on the eyes than any CRT can be: zero flicker, no matter what the refresh rate. That's worth a few dead subpixels to me (and I'm happy that there's only one).
I take issue with this. You're (unintentionally I assume) implying that because Firefox is not flawless, it doesn't have fewer bugs than IE. This is the fallacy of the excluded middle.
Nobody with a clue claims that Firefox is flawless. Just that it's more secure than IE. Which, when you think about it, is not a very strong assertion at all.
Kim Jung-Il may not be very stable, but keep in mind that North Korea is a very insular country, and most of what we hear about it gets passed through the propaganda mill. Crazy leaders with nukes sell more newspapers.
Also, the United States has a history of hyping up the threats posed by other nations. The Soviet threat was exaggerated right up until their fall. And more recently, Iraq.
North Korea might have a crazy leader, but I'd say U.S. paranoia combined with it's stated "policy of pre-emption" is the greater threat to world peace.
No, you're not "done period". You'll lose a lot of data, but may still be able to recover some. Likewise when losing one disk in a RAID-0 setup.
Any file that resides entirely outside of the gap in the array can be recovered. How likely that is depends on the details of the filesystem, the striping, and the size of the file (the larger the file, the more likely that a part of it fell into the bit bucket).
Also, not all drive failures are total. You may have a RAID-5 array with one drive that completely failed, and another drive that just has some bad sectors. In that case you should be able to recover most of your data. Or you may have two disks with just a few bad sectors, which is even less bad.
This all depends on being able to force the array to allow access to the device, so that you can mount the filesystem (in read-only mode) and sift through the remains. Some (many? most?) RAID implementations may just give up if two disks in a RAID-5 array (or one disk in a RAID-0 array) are flagged as bad, in which case you really are screwed, even though your data is still there. From what people have been posting here I would guess that Linux SW RAID will let you force it, though I've never needed to try it myself.
Also, it's partition based, not disk based (under Linux, at least). This means that with just two drives you can create one two-disk RAID-1 array (for safety) and one two-disk RAID-0 array (for performance). Just create two partitions on each drive, pair the first partition on each drive in a RAID-0 config and the second partitions as RAID-1.
You can't do a single RAID-1/0 array with only two disks though. You could try, but you wouldn't gain anything (in fact, you'd lose).
Ace's Hardware is a pretty good (though low-volume) cross-architecture news site. Still covers x86 mostly, but does go into other architectures from time to time, and the people there seem to really know their stuff.
It might be wise for Bash and other script interpreters to refuse to execute scripts that are in any way writable by other users. You almost never want to do that; it's a security problem by its very nature. This would incur some additional overhead of having to stat the file and its parent directories up to /, but those inodes probably have to be read anyway as part of the normal unix permissions system.
A similar check could be added to the kernel, for regular executables (binaries and #! scripts).
Of course, it should be possible to selectively turn this off for those special cases when you really do trust the other user.
The "hackers just haven't targeted the alternatives yet" claim is a common refrain from MS apologists.
It's possible that hackers will begin to target Firefox and find it just as exploitable as IE. It's also possible they will begin to target Firefox, and find it to be more secure than IE.
I think "more secure than IE" is not a very hard thing to accomplish. IE is badly designed; this was touched upon in the article. It's true that all software has holes, but I'm convinced that IE is over all a lot worse than Firefox.
Accurate counting of votes is an empty gesture when people are wrongfully denied the right to vote.
I hate to say it, but this algorithm is exactly the kind of thing that should be patentable. It's innovative (as far as I know; I'm not an optics guy) and I think it's reasonable to say that the inventors deserve a temporary monopoly so that they can profit from their invention. Unfortunately, in this case that means a software patent.
I'm pretty strongly against software being patentable (as most /.ers seem to be), but it's still worth noting that in some cases it might be reasonable.
I think there is a common misconception about how virtual memory works in modern OSs. That is that if the VM writes a page to swap space, you have to wait for it to read it off the disk before you can use it again. That is not necessarily so.
VMs may write pages to swap and still leave the page in RAM. The swapping is a pre-emptive measure, so that if it really does need to free that memory for other purposes later on it doesn't have to to swap it out to disk, because it is already done. Modern VMs will write pages to swap during idle periods for exactly this reason. If you really do have enough physical RAM, then the VM will never need to repurpose that page of RAM, and it can use the page from RAM without reading back from swap.
In your hypothetical example the VM may write pages from your browser's process to swap, but when you get back to your desk you shouldn't notice, because the pages will still be in RAM.
The only reason to turn down swappiness is if you are a victim of that misconception, or if you want to avoid disk activity during idle periods (like, on a laptop where the hard disk is set to spin down after inactivity).
Many of the ext2 filesystem errors are "easily fixable" by losing the affected file. I remember losing several system files due to unclean shutdown, and once even had a system that was rendered unbootable because /sbin/init was lost. I was very annoyed, having used FreeBSD before on really crappy hardware and never lost files unless they were open for write at or very near the time of the crash.
Nowadays I _always_ use journaling filesystems. In my experience, ext2 is an unreliable piece of crap unless your hardware, software, power source, and operator are all 100% reliable.
I've been using ReiserFS on my home box for several years now with no problems at all, though I've heard of serious problems with it so I've been reluctant to use it for servers. I've used ext3 on servers and my laptop and seen unclean shutdowns (mostly on servers not yet in production) with no problems either. I'll probably try XFS in the near future.
Which is fine, if you never need your code to work with any other database. It's not strictly correct (it's in quotes so it's a string, and putting it into an integer field should be considered a type mismatch) but mysql lets you get away with it.
There are LOTS of things that MySQL lets you get away with that other DBs don't. This can lead to some very unportable code if your first target is MySQL.
I spent over a day this week wrestling with a RAID controller to discover that the closed-source binary-only driver only works with an outdated version of RedHat.
If they had released the source with a GPL-compatible licence it would have been incorporated into the kernel. Then I could've used any recent distribution and the controller would have Just Worked with no driver disk version incompatibility messiness.
In this case, not releasing the source made the hardware much harder to get working.
This is not a problem specific to Linux. There are quite a few winmodems out there that people bought in the Win98 days that don't work with W2K/XP. The driver is not compatible and the vendor doesn't want to support chipsets they aren't even selling anymore.
Just a little reminder that Free (as in speech) can have real practical benefits too. That's how the ideological aspect was spawned in the first place.
You can go back earlier than Drexler in 1986... The first references to nanotechnology (though not under that name) seems to be in this talk by Richard Feynman in 1959.
Being integrated with the motherboard doesn't make a performance difference on any board I've ever seen. It still goes over the PCI bus, it's just not using a slot. Creating a separate bus just for the ethernet port would be too expensive.
I'd be interested to know where you came up with that. Some switches may have an underpowered backplane that limits your aggregate bandwidth (such that you can't pump a full 1Gbps on all ports simultaneously) but it shouldn't prevent you pushing 1Gbps between two ports when all else is idle. If it's advertised as a gigabit switch but is only capable of 400 Mbps, wouldn't the manufacturer be open to claims of false advertising?