booting diskless is built-in, it makes a ramdisk for/var
and you can gzip the kernel (as you probably can with Linux)
I hardly know anything about Linux so I can't really help there.
My Plan9 terminal also boots diskless but stand alone won't get you very far as it works better with access to a network, though for the picture frame project it would be ideal.
Imagine using a machine where you had no virutal memory, and running out of memory becuase you opened and closed programs in a certain order.
no need to imagine. I remember vividly Windows 64k of resource memory where even if you had a squillion terabytes of memory and hard disk space you still got 'out of memory' errors if you opened too many windows or used too many fonts.
Both platforms (and all the others) have their faults by the ream.
If I could choose a single winning point it would be Windows unified driver architecture.
aye, and if other rumour is believed Bill's mom worked in IBM and used her influence to push them in Bill's direction (well, to be fair : you would, wouldn't you)
You should at least boot if from a Compact Flash card
silent, no heat, droppable (kinda)
I've got no references for Linux but FreeBSD has a sectionin the Handbook
And my fellow 9fan Matthias showed me a handy reference guide and bunch of scripts for the binaries you want. Well that's for non-X, my next stage of my project is trying to get my EPIA working in SVGA mode or, if I get a big enough CF card (I think a 256Mb should work and they are about $50 on ebay). I'm trying for an in car system. I already got it playing mp3s from the CD Rom 35 seconds from power.
opening the case and removing / inserting cards is considered harder than plugging in a scsi cable
> put the jumpers in the right places
ah, you seem to have missed the irq conflicting fun and the 'this board is hardwired to use address 0x300' when 0x300 was the reserved 'development' address manufacturers were supposed to leave free but often did quite the opposite.
I'm basing my story on working in b2b computer retail from 1990ish onwards in the time before Windows when Dos 3.3 was the operating system that shipped with PCs.
Back in the day, both IBM PCs and Apple Macs were closed systems, their internel workings were undocumented to the outside world. There was, however, one crucial difference. PCs set up the hardware with the BIOS and then went to disk for the OS whereas MACs booted from an internal ROM. Compaq succeeded in cloning the IBM BIOS which meant you could put an IBM floppy in a Compaq machine and it would boot. Some companies tried to clone the Mac but were slapped with lawsuits because you couldn't copy the Apple ROM. The company that supplied IBM with the stuff on their floppies was a Washington startup called Microsoft who had cunningly retained the right to ship MS-DOS seperate from a computer.
Consequently the PC Clone market flourished and IBM lost their control over the PC Platform driving down price while driving up incompatibility. Meanwhile Apple continued to develop their platform. It was a technically superior platform with a unified graphical user interface, used Postscript for printing and SCSI for devices. This made MACs expensive when you did CPU Cycles / $. You could walk into an Apple dealer, choose the bits, go home, plug it all together and it worked whereas you would go to a PC dealer tell him what you want and he's spend a few days building it and battling to get the bits talking to each other but when you got it home it worked.
Because it was difficult to build and maintain PCs, their builders and maintainers looked down on the MAC, it wasn't as fast for the same $, was too easy to use, you didn't have to take the case to pieces to add a peripheral and the only people you knew who had them were too rich to deserve them.
As the builders and maintainers of the PCs of everyone in their social circle, the non-techies trusted the techies opinion, parroting the same lame arguments in PCs vs MACs arguments the world over.
"There must be a way we can make $ out of the internet without directly selling stuff. Let's get people to write content for free, archive it and when people search it show them ads relevant to their terms / the page's terms"
The unix way (which Gnome and KDE and probably the kernel (200+syscalls!) are losing sight of) is small components with tightly defined operating parameters.
Awk hasn't changed much in the 30 years or so it has been around. Same for sed, same for grep and a host of "still used every day" tools.
Badly designed bloatware with featuritis is hugely complexa nd complexity is a vector for failure.
Well designed software is hugely simple.
Plan9 (30 syscalls) can stil run *binaries* compiled in 1994.
A gang of country thugs train greyhounds and wolfhounds & beagles to run after hares (not rabbits) for fun.
A gang of city thugs train each other to try and prevent the country thugs attacking the poor hares with the poor dogs.
When the dogs catch the hare they kill it. When the dogs stop catching the hares, they are killed off.
The city thugs would like nothing more than to not have to go.
The country thugs hire off duty army thugs to keep the city thugs away from them.
see also "fox hunting
In my time I have been one of the city thugs (who also comprise non-thugs and country folk). Although non-violence is the favoured method of sabbing, turning the other cheek when violently attacked got a bit tedious.
If you've ever been invovled in hare coursing (hopefully as a sab) then you'll know that hares run in spirals to escape the snarling teeth of the hounds.
Slashdot Mirror
dude, don't be embarrsed
add a diuretic
you are allowed as many as you like
hehe
Vrees niet de spelling nazi
but my floppy disk went duff
oh yes, please be as good
it seems to be the trend at MS currently to announce new software and then postponing it due to "problems"
That trend started long ago in a galaxy quite close.
The filesystems as database feature has been touted for NT, Xp and now Longhorn.
Software companies are in a dilemma, dammned if you pre-announce, dammned if you don't.
Following their roadmap is the road to hell.
and grrrr lose not loose, fool
same with Compaq (though now HP)
The whole business was started by people reverse engineering and making stuff work with other people's stuff.
Now we've got HP & MS pushing Palladium and TCPA to lock the whole scene down with signed binaries.
oh well, they'll always be a niche for the hobbyists, even when our hobby is illegal!
FreeBSD, see my parent posts for links
/var
booting diskless is built-in, it makes a ramdisk for
and you can gzip the kernel (as you probably can with Linux)
I hardly know anything about Linux so I can't really help there.
My Plan9 terminal also boots diskless but stand alone won't get you very far as it works better with access to a network, though for the picture frame project it would be ideal.
did you not try embedded linux?
Getting FreeBSD to work took about an 90 minutes, including installing it on a blank HD first.
all good and salient points
Imagine using a machine where you had no virutal memory, and running out of memory becuase you opened and closed programs in a certain order.
no need to imagine. I remember vividly Windows 64k of resource memory where even if you had a squillion terabytes of memory and hard disk space you still got 'out of memory' errors if you opened too many windows or used too many fonts.
Both platforms (and all the others) have their faults by the ream.
If I could choose a single winning point it would be Windows unified driver architecture.
Ah well, I've happily put all that behind me.
if you like
the ethernet will come from where ?
aye, and if other rumour is believed Bill's mom worked in IBM and used her influence to push them in Bill's direction (well, to be fair : you would, wouldn't you)
ah, yes they were pretty
That didn't help the one in our showroom. I think we binned it in the end.
OT, shucks, who gives a rats ass. That's why it's called a forum!
You should at least boot if from a Compact Flash card
silent, no heat, droppable (kinda)
I've got no references for Linux but FreeBSD has a sectionin the Handbook
And my fellow 9fan Matthias showed me a handy reference guide and bunch of scripts for the binaries you want. Well that's for non-X, my next stage of my project is trying to get my EPIA working in SVGA mode or, if I get a big enough CF card (I think a 256Mb should work and they are about $50 on ebay). I'm trying for an in car system. I already got it playing mp3s from the CD Rom 35 seconds from power.
Yes, I expect you are right, it is a while ago.
I do remember Apricot making a spectacular botch of building an 'IBM Compatible' so it can't have been so easy.
"hard to build"
is a relative term
opening the case and removing / inserting cards is considered harder than plugging in a scsi cable
> put the jumpers in the right places
ah, you seem to have missed the irq conflicting fun and the 'this board is hardwired to use address 0x300' when 0x300 was the reserved 'development' address manufacturers were supposed to leave free but often did quite the opposite.
I'm basing my story on working in b2b computer retail from 1990ish onwards in the time before Windows when Dos 3.3 was the operating system that shipped with PCs.
The time when you were a child.
Do you *really* think that hotmail servers are used to _send_ spam?
Why do people despise the Mac platform so much?
perceived levels of freedom
Back in the day, both IBM PCs and Apple Macs were closed systems, their internel workings were undocumented to the outside world. There was, however, one crucial difference. PCs set up the hardware with the BIOS and then went to disk for the OS whereas MACs booted from an internal ROM. Compaq succeeded in cloning the IBM BIOS which meant you could put an IBM floppy in a Compaq machine and it would boot. Some companies tried to clone the Mac but were slapped with lawsuits because you couldn't copy the Apple ROM. The company that supplied IBM with the stuff on their floppies was a Washington startup called Microsoft who had cunningly retained the right to ship MS-DOS seperate from a computer.
Consequently the PC Clone market flourished and IBM lost their control over the PC Platform driving down price while driving up incompatibility. Meanwhile Apple continued to develop their platform. It was a technically superior platform with a unified graphical user interface, used Postscript for printing and SCSI for devices. This made MACs expensive when you did CPU Cycles / $. You could walk into an Apple dealer, choose the bits, go home, plug it all together and it worked whereas you would go to a PC dealer tell him what you want and he's spend a few days building it and battling to get the bits talking to each other but when you got it home it worked.
Because it was difficult to build and maintain PCs, their builders and maintainers looked down on the MAC, it wasn't as fast for the same $, was too easy to use, you didn't have to take the case to pieces to add a peripheral and the only people you knew who had them were too rich to deserve them.
As the builders and maintainers of the PCs of everyone in their social circle, the non-techies trusted the techies opinion, parroting the same lame arguments in PCs vs MACs arguments the world over.
why go to all that illegal trouble, just use your own IP and anonymous proxies
"There must be a way we can make $ out of the internet without directly selling stuff. Let's get people to write content for free, archive it and when people search it show them ads relevant to their terms / the page's terms"
tick tock
fdisk (on a Windows machine - I dunno the Linux equivalent).
er, fdisk
Software is sadly a hugely complex product.
No it isn't.
Windows may be, but software par se isn't.
The unix way (which Gnome and KDE and probably the kernel (200+syscalls!) are losing sight of) is small components with tightly defined operating parameters.
Awk hasn't changed much in the 30 years or so it has been around.
Same for sed, same for grep and a host of "still used every day" tools.
Badly designed bloatware with featuritis is hugely complexa nd complexity is a vector for failure.
Well designed software is hugely simple.
Plan9 (30 syscalls) can stil run *binaries* compiled in 1994.
> If leave them alone, maybe nobody will get hurt here but the rabbits.
that, rather, is the point
A gang of country thugs train greyhounds and wolfhounds & beagles to run after hares (not rabbits) for fun.
A gang of city thugs train each other to try and prevent the country thugs attacking the poor hares with the poor dogs.
When the dogs catch the hare they kill it.
When the dogs stop catching the hares, they are killed off.
The city thugs would like nothing more than to not have to go.
The country thugs hire off duty army thugs to keep the city thugs away from them.
see also "fox hunting
In my time I have been one of the city thugs (who also comprise non-thugs and country folk). Although non-violence is the favoured method of sabbing, turning the other cheek when violently attacked got a bit tedious.
If you've ever been invovled in hare coursing (hopefully as a sab) then you'll know that hares run in spirals to escape the snarling teeth of the hounds.