... you can hear the sound of furniture being thrown around in Seattle, WA.
I don't think that anyone is going to report it this way, but this just has to be a major black eye to Microsoft. Here we have an operating system that's open for public use, even in a sort-of-a-beta fashion...
Anyone seen a 64 bit of Windows, anywhere? I think I remember reading something in CNET, or somewhere else, about someone stumbling across some alleged 64 bit version of Windows being demoed at some demo show somewhere out there. That's about it. A production-quality Win-64 is NOT going to ship simultaneously with Itanium, no matter what anyone says otherwise.
Despite Microsoft's promise to deliver Win64 when Itanium ships, it's nowhere to be seen on horizon. All MS OS builds go through two or three public beta cycles, doesn't anyone remember that? For Win64 to ship with Itanium, we'd have to be on at least the second beta cycle by now.
My memory's a bit cloudy on this one, but I'm pretty sure that Win95 came out only two or three years after the first 32-bit Intel CPU, so it must be pretty clear to Intel now that they cannot rely on Microsoft software to drive their high-end chips. When Itanium ships, the only production-quality native 64-bit operating systems will be Linux and Monterey. Maybe Solaris, if Sun stops throwing their temper tantrums.
I can't wait to see how MS is going to react on this one. By the end of the day the story should be picked up by most mainstream 'zines. It should get interesting from that point on.
While this is all in one physical address space, access time will vary depending on whether you're accessing a local or non-local bank.
Hey, sounds like just the Amiga! Anyone remember all that jazz in the Amiga boxes about "Fast" RAM and "Chip" RAM? The ol' Amiga boxes had two types of memory. The "Fast" section of memory was on a dedicated bus to the CPU, and can only be accessed by the CPU. If you needed something to push to any I/O chip in the system, that had to go into the "Chip" RAM region, where the CPU had contention with all the I/O chips in the system.
The actual format for Amiga's binary executable files specified where each section of the program had to go. Amiga programs were loaded in segments, and the operating system loader read from the file whether an individual section must be loaded into fast ram, chip ram, or any available ram space. Typically the code segment would go into fast ram, and most data segments went into chip ram.
Man, that brings some good memories. The old Amiga was WAY ahead of its time... What a shame...
Chips are getting real fsat these days. Could someone tell me some justifiable reasons for home users to have this much speed?
Why, do build the Linux kernel, of course! Have you recently looked at the size of that beast? Even with a dual-Pentium mo-bo, 256 MB RAM, and kick-ass SCSI disk, I still have plenty of time to have a cup of coffee (sipping it VERY SLOWLY, of course), before the kernel build is complete.
And, of course, you never know when you'll get the urge to rebuild the kernel, so you better come prepared for that eventuality, that's what I say...
Right. Just the other day I was mulling over perhaps getting a medium to a low-range Alpha. And I reached a conclusion that the high price is the real problem with Alphas.
I think it's mostly has to do with the fact that Compaq, it seems, doesn't really want to market this hardware to consumers. Here I was, seriously considering one, but...
For starters, there doesn't appear to be a lot of places selling those things out there. I've tried searching the 'Net, I didn't find anything. I couldn't believe it when I searched shop.yahoo.com, which basically aggregates hundreds (if not thousands) of merchants' e-commerce shops under one roof, and came up dry.
After I went to Ground Zero -- Compaq -- I came away with a discreet impression that they really don't want to talk to a mere peon like me. Their web site, apparently, is really put together more like a business-to-business (or government) type of a deal.
That's really a shame. I think that I'm not the only one who might be interested in looking into alternatives to the x86 platforms. If Compaq only invested a small portion of that R&D that went into this newfangled chip into, instead, investing in marketing the Alpha to consumers, they might find themselves a nice niche amongst consumers too.
I don't see why the Recording Industry A$$holes Association would object to this device. It states in the specs that it is designed to not copy content from CSS'ed source discs.
I'm confident that's going to change rather quickly.
... well, I guess the real answer is that you need to look carefully at whatever you have to sign before you accept employment anywhere. IANAL, but there's no doubt in my mind that nothing of this kind will ever stand up in court.
But that doesn't mean that you won't get hauled into court, of course, and that's the whole point.
Having said that, frankly, given the current market conditions, if you walk up to your boss and tell him that you need a small waiver letting you retain ownership of anything you develop outside your working hours, or you'll walk, you'll get the waiver. If you don't, walk, and make sure that the job that you'll start the next day will let you retain ownership of your independent work.
Companies currently are unable to find skilled developers no matter how much money they're prepared to pay. Don't get cowed -- you have far more leverage than you think.
Well, technically stuff that you do on your own time is yours, and you own the copyright to it. This would be no different than if you happened to look at some other GPL software that you have installed at work, liked how some of the things are implemented, and proceeded to build something equivalent in your program.
Having said that, the reality of the situation is that the you're vastly overmatched by the company's lawyers, so even though you're technically right, that won't stop them from suing you, if that's what they wanted to do.
Maintain a low profile at work, and continue to do some hacking in your spare time. Make sure that you have a good working relationship with the people in your company. Things don't last forever, and eventually you'll move on to bigger and better things, at which time you'll be free to release a new version. As long as there's no record of you working on the new code at work, you should be ok.
Unless people complain then nothing changes and is SourceForge doesn't satisfy their customers they will go elsewhere.
Well, yes and no. Bitching about a free service is not something that I'm comfortable with. Your other point is valid, though -- if people are not happy, they should simply leave. Right now, I'm mildly pissed because it's taking them more than a day to upload my CVS tarball, so I'm basically spinning my wheels waiting for that to happen. I've been monitoring their support queue, and basically nobody has done anything for any tech support request in almost two days now. That doesn't look so good. Still, if I get sufficiently pissed, I'll just give up on them and do something else, instead of sending anonymous flames to/. Oh, well...
SSH at least should be optional. I con understand from a server maintainer aspect this level of security makes life easier, but for people who just want someplace to go and help with projects this level of security makes it too much of a pain
Listen, next time some script kiddy sniffs your password, and blows away your CVS archive, you'll change your mind pretty fast on that one.
Let's get real. No matter how much of a precedent this is, it simply won't stop a huge electronics company from legally harassing a smaller, nimble company whose only crime is to deliver a technically superior compatible product.
More often than not, in situations like these the purpose of the lawsuit is to bury the defendant with legal fees. Do you think that the DVD CCA is suing all these people just because they think that the law is on their side? Well, that may be true to some extent, but you bet your bippy that the overwhelming motivation is to simply legally harass the defendant, on the premise that the defendants simply do not have the funds for legal fees.
So, even though Sony was bitch-slapped in the Connectix case, that doesn't stop them in any way from filing an identical lawsuit, even word-for-word, against someone else.
By my calculation, you're showing a 10% overhead, which I think might be too much, for this application. It might due to the nature of your app -- lots of stuff being copied around, etc... --
You must explicitly tell the telemarketer to put you on a "do-not-call list". Do not use any other language, like asking not to be called again. The magic words are "do-not-call list".
Telemarketers are prohibited from calling you before 9 AM and 10 PM local time.
Telemarketers must identify themselves by name and telephone number.
Prerecorded telemarketing pitches are banned outright. If you get a prerecorded call, stop right there. They're in a violation of the TCPA, and you can sue them for $500.
The strategy that I find that works best is that as soon as I realize that it's a sales call, I politely ask who's calling, and write down the name and the telephone number of the caller. I always keep a pad of paper near the telephone. Then, I just tell the person to put me on a do-not-call list, and that's the end of story.
When I started doing that, my telemarketing calls dropped measurably. There aren't that many large telemarketing firms out there. There's quite a few, but not really that many. By using explicit straight language, and acting mature (no screaming or yelling), it sends a signal to them that you don't like getting called for anything, so even if the same telemarketing firm is used again by some other company (companies don't generally telemarket themselves, they contract the job out to a telemarketing firm), they just don't bother calling you any more. --
Elsewhere I posted last week that I've been quietly boycotting the DVD industry due to the whole DeCSS issue, and not buying any DVD hardware. I mentioned that not having SW on DVD made it much easier, it's pretty much the only thing I'd care to see on DVD.
Well, so much for that... Someone else suggested that a better way to protest the DVD industry would be to get a player that does not use region locking, and buying used DVDs on secondary markets.
Ok, so where can I find a list of players on sale in the US that can officially, or unofficially, be unlocked? --
That was Lucas's original story. The skeptics then said that Lucas simply wants to milk everyone for all they're worth.
I don't know what the real reason is, but I don't care because I'm actually glad that the DVD version isn't going to come out for a long time (whatever the reason may be). I am boycotting the DVD industry, until the DVD CCA is dismantled, all the pending CSS lawsuits are dropped, and an OSS DVD player is available. Not having Star Wars on DVD makes the boycott a lot easier.
Last year I was *that* close to purchasing my first DVD player. After some soul searching I decided against doing that. If Star Wars came out on DVD, it would probably be a much more difficult decision than it already is. I'm hoping that the entire CSS mess gets settled before I have to make some hard choices here. --
Well, here are my credentials: I have all 79 TOS episodes on videotape, and I could probably hold my own in any trek trivia contest. Having said that, I am completely confident that any new trek series will suck just as much as the current one.
The only way that this new series could possibly not suck would be if all the writers suddenly got a reality check. The key difference between TOS episodes and all the rest of the bunch comes down simply to this concept called "writing", and I have very little hope that any one of the current crop of screenwriters can come any close to cranking out the same quality of stories that Gene Roddenberry, and the rest of the original gang, did back in the 60s.
Now, taping those 79 original episodes, when they ran on the sci-fi channel, was quite an educational experience. I've seen all of them before, of course, but not recently. Before trek had its sci-fi run, the original episodes haven't been seen in years, and it was quite a perspective to see them again, after a decade, or more, of assorted trek spinoffs.
The conclusion that I came away with, after seeing the TOS 79 again, was as following. The acting sucked, yes, and I don't think I need to go extrapolate any further. But the reason why TOS became the hit that it was was simply because it was one of the best damn-written TV shows that ever was. Sure, there were occasional fuckups, like "Spock's Brain", but on average, the story lines, the concepts, and the ideas behind each episode were fresh, unique, insightful, and after seeing the credits roll at the end you can't help but ponder, for a few moments, of the message behind each episode.
Having said that, I've pretty much given up on Hollywood these days. I have very little hope that there's anyone left back there who can come up with anything on the same level again. Look at your average Voyager episode. Voyager is directly the opposite of TOS, in this case. Some episodes are pretty good and insightful, but, on average, the episodes are a complete waste, 40-some odd minutes of technobabble and gobbledygook, with gratuitous close-ups of whatsherface's ample curves. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but frankly I prefer doing the real thing with my g/f. --
Face it, protests like rarely accomplish anything substantive. People have to look at things objectively. A combination of clueless judges and corporation with large legal budgets stack the odds heavily in their favor.
Barring some unexpected stroke of luck for the ACLU and EFF, I think that they will lose. So, what can a nerd do?
Let's come to grips with the fact that in the courtroom, the decks are stacked against us. The only reasonable chance of defeating DMCA and UCITA is by repealing them.
Legislation is enacted and repealed for only two reasons: either an overwhelming majority of the American population want it, or a selected few American businesses lobby heavily for it (enactment or repealment, either way).
Expecting a groundswell of public opposition to DMCA and UCITA is a bit naive. 95% of the people have no idea what it is, despite the press coverage, or what it's all about.
So, that leaves big business. Big business has to realize that the DMCA and UCITA will hurt them. So, how to tell big business that?
Well, I only know of one way. Big business needs as many nerds as they can find, to run their big honking server boxes, where they keep the company jewels. And there aren't enough nerds to go around.
Personally, I will refuse employment or consulting work for any company that's headquartered in any state that so far has passed UCITA, or any company that actively supported or prosecuted under the DMCA. That may seem to be silly, but I'm a silly guy. I'll do that as long as I possibly can. Thankfully, so far, there isn't exactly much of a shortage of nerd jobs. And I'm still sufficiently naive to believe that if enough people did that, something might happen. --
This is, perhaps, one of those situations where you are rather unlikely to find an OSS solution. An enterprise-level RDBMS is not exactly an overnight hack. It would take an enormous kind of time and effort to put an enterprise-level RDBMS.
I'm not even sure that an enterprise-level OSS RDBMS makes sense. If you're talking about an enterprise-level product, you probably have the resources to afford to purchase a commercial RDBMS. Both Sybase and Oracle have decades of experience building robust, rock hard, RDBMSes that you can bet your company jewels on, and both companies have Linux versions of their RDBMSes. I'm not sure about Informix, they may have a Linux version of their database engine too.
Right now, attempting to deliver an OSS RDBMS that can beat time-tested RDBMSes from Sybase and Oracle would be quite a challenge, to say the least. People will just have to accept the fact that OSS can't solve every problem in the world. It's certainly feasible that one day Sybase or Oracle might decide to release their respective RDBMS engines under an OSS license (which should certainly be quite a shock to many people), that's probably the most likely scenario. --
When people say "UNIX", in this context, they really mean "POSIX", which is an IEEE standard that, supposedly, defines the function call interface between a program and an operating system. That's the general idea.
Well, if you do write a strictly POSIX program, it should compile and run just fine on any one of those unixes. The problem is that POSIX does not really cover everything what you can do, on a typical box. Still, you can come pretty close. If you use GNU's autoconf and automake tools, your package can have a good shot at compiling and running on anything that claims to have POSIX compliance. --
The actual performance difference between a 500 Mhz pentium and a 700 Mhz pentium is much less than you think, in most situations. Having something that gets you 85% of the performance, at half the power consumption and heat dissipation is a BIG win for a laptop. --
There's nothing wrong with copying the best features of commercial software into a free (beer/speech) product. If you've actually bothered to read the story on ibm's site, it only quotes Miguel de Icaza saying that he simply copied Excel's best features, when he wrote gnumeric.
Microsoft itself has commented (in the aforementioned halloween docs) how open source projects tend to copy the best features of commercial products. This is not news. --
According to the stats page of Election.com, 35,765 people cast votes remotely
Yabut... How many of them were actually alive and breathing? I don't know about Arizona, but in Illinois -- Chicago specifically -- dead people routinely cast election votes.
This kinda gives a new meaning to the word "killfile"... --
"Qmail still rips the guts out of sendmail as performance."
Only in low/medium bandwidth situation. A properly tuned sendmail will beat the pants off Qmail in high volume mailings, mostly because of sendmail's ability to batch recipients to the same domain, and ability to recycle SMTP sessions.
"it would seem that qmail has gotten the upper hand as far as features were concerned."
You have to be kidding, right?
At least as of a couple of weeks ago (haven't checked recently), Qmail hasn't been updated in three years. Here are some features in sendmail that are nowhere to be found in Qmail:
ESMTP AUTHentication/some kind of SASL support
RFC 1894 Delivery Status Notifications
Any kind of spam filtering
LDAP support
UUCP support
Qmail is still incapable of batching recipients for the same domain into one transaction
And there's more where that's came from. I suppose DJB has been a bit occupied, the last couple of years, fighting the US Commerce Dept on the crypto issue, so Qmail has gotten a bit moldy. --
Relax. I've been running a dual-headed machine for over a year now. I do not believe that this claim is true.
I'm a developer, and until someone comes up with a technical explanation how a thread-safe application is not SMP safe, I will consider this to be a bunch of bunk.
The most likely explanation is that poorly written software that uses threads, but is not thread-safe, is far more likely to exhibit faults when you have multiple CPUs running multiple threads of execution. When you have an atomic operation that is not properly locked down by a mutex, it will fail in a threaded environment only when a context switch happens to occur when BOTH threads are executing the atomic operation, which is far more likely, comparatively-wise, when you've got multiple CPUs banging at it.
So, what you're really seeing is crappy going croaking on a dual-headed machine more often than on a single-headed machine, and falsely concluding that the app is not "SMP-safe", which makes absolutely no sense because there's no such thing, the app is really not thread-safe. --
I would welcome a technical explanation for that. It simply does not make sense from a technical standpoint. Whether you have a single CPU doing context switches between threads, or whether you actually have multiple CPUs executing different threads simultaneously, the net effect is the same. --
I don't think so. Only if Mozilla is explicitly written to use threads, but is not thread safe, will you experience any problems. And you will experience problems whether or not you have an SMP box.
I have an SMP box here, and I have plenty of software that is not thread safe, yet they have absolutely no problems whatsoever. The SMP-ishiness of your box is only a factor that the kernel needs to consider.
P.S. You can check if Mozilla uses threads in Linux by feeding it to ldd, to see if it loads the libpthread.so library. --
Slashdot Mirror
... you can hear the sound of furniture being thrown around in Seattle, WA.
I don't think that anyone is going to report it this way, but this just has to be a major black eye to Microsoft. Here we have an operating system that's open for public use, even in a sort-of-a-beta fashion...
Anyone seen a 64 bit of Windows, anywhere? I think I remember reading something in CNET, or somewhere else, about someone stumbling across some alleged 64 bit version of Windows being demoed at some demo show somewhere out there. That's about it. A production-quality Win-64 is NOT going to ship simultaneously with Itanium, no matter what anyone says otherwise.
Despite Microsoft's promise to deliver Win64 when Itanium ships, it's nowhere to be seen on horizon. All MS OS builds go through two or three public beta cycles, doesn't anyone remember that? For Win64 to ship with Itanium, we'd have to be on at least the second beta cycle by now.
My memory's a bit cloudy on this one, but I'm pretty sure that Win95 came out only two or three years after the first 32-bit Intel CPU, so it must be pretty clear to Intel now that they cannot rely on Microsoft software to drive their high-end chips. When Itanium ships, the only production-quality native 64-bit operating systems will be Linux and Monterey. Maybe Solaris, if Sun stops throwing their temper tantrums.
I can't wait to see how MS is going to react on this one. By the end of the day the story should be picked up by most mainstream 'zines. It should get interesting from that point on.
Hey, sounds like just the Amiga! Anyone remember all that jazz in the Amiga boxes about "Fast" RAM and "Chip" RAM? The ol' Amiga boxes had two types of memory. The "Fast" section of memory was on a dedicated bus to the CPU, and can only be accessed by the CPU. If you needed something to push to any I/O chip in the system, that had to go into the "Chip" RAM region, where the CPU had contention with all the I/O chips in the system.
The actual format for Amiga's binary executable files specified where each section of the program had to go. Amiga programs were loaded in segments, and the operating system loader read from the file whether an individual section must be loaded into fast ram, chip ram, or any available ram space. Typically the code segment would go into fast ram, and most data segments went into chip ram.
Man, that brings some good memories. The old Amiga was WAY ahead of its time... What a shame...
Why, do build the Linux kernel, of course! Have you recently looked at the size of that beast? Even with a dual-Pentium mo-bo, 256 MB RAM, and kick-ass SCSI disk, I still have plenty of time to have a cup of coffee (sipping it VERY SLOWLY, of course), before the kernel build is complete.
And, of course, you never know when you'll get the urge to rebuild the kernel, so you better come prepared for that eventuality, that's what I say...
Right. Just the other day I was mulling over perhaps getting a medium to a low-range Alpha. And I reached a conclusion that the high price is the real problem with Alphas.
I think it's mostly has to do with the fact that Compaq, it seems, doesn't really want to market this hardware to consumers. Here I was, seriously considering one, but...
For starters, there doesn't appear to be a lot of places selling those things out there. I've tried searching the 'Net, I didn't find anything. I couldn't believe it when I searched shop.yahoo.com, which basically aggregates hundreds (if not thousands) of merchants' e-commerce shops under one roof, and came up dry.
After I went to Ground Zero -- Compaq -- I came away with a discreet impression that they really don't want to talk to a mere peon like me. Their web site, apparently, is really put together more like a business-to-business (or government) type of a deal.
That's really a shame. I think that I'm not the only one who might be interested in looking into alternatives to the x86 platforms. If Compaq only invested a small portion of that R&D that went into this newfangled chip into, instead, investing in marketing the Alpha to consumers, they might find themselves a nice niche amongst consumers too.
I'm confident that's going to change rather quickly.
... well, I guess the real answer is that you need to look carefully at whatever you have to sign before you accept employment anywhere. IANAL, but there's no doubt in my mind that nothing of this kind will ever stand up in court.
But that doesn't mean that you won't get hauled into court, of course, and that's the whole point.
Having said that, frankly, given the current market conditions, if you walk up to your boss and tell him that you need a small waiver letting you retain ownership of anything you develop outside your working hours, or you'll walk, you'll get the waiver. If you don't, walk, and make sure that the job that you'll start the next day will let you retain ownership of your independent work.
Companies currently are unable to find skilled developers no matter how much money they're prepared to pay. Don't get cowed -- you have far more leverage than you think.
Well, technically stuff that you do on your own time is yours, and you own the copyright to it. This would be no different than if you happened to look at some other GPL software that you have installed at work, liked how some of the things are implemented, and proceeded to build something equivalent in your program.
Having said that, the reality of the situation is that the you're vastly overmatched by the company's lawyers, so even though you're technically right, that won't stop them from suing you, if that's what they wanted to do.
Maintain a low profile at work, and continue to do some hacking in your spare time. Make sure that you have a good working relationship with the people in your company. Things don't last forever, and eventually you'll move on to bigger and better things, at which time you'll be free to release a new version. As long as there's no record of you working on the new code at work, you should be ok.
Well, yes and no. Bitching about a free service is not something that I'm comfortable with. Your other point is valid, though -- if people are not happy, they should simply leave. Right now, I'm mildly pissed because it's taking them more than a day to upload my CVS tarball, so I'm basically spinning my wheels waiting for that to happen. I've been monitoring their support queue, and basically nobody has done anything for any tech support request in almost two days now. That doesn't look so good. Still, if I get sufficiently pissed, I'll just give up on them and do something else, instead of sending anonymous flames to /. Oh, well...
SSH at least should be optional. I con understand from a server maintainer aspect this level of security makes life easier, but for people who just want someplace to go and help with projects this level of security makes it too much of a pain
Listen, next time some script kiddy sniffs your password, and blows away your CVS archive, you'll change your mind pretty fast on that one.
Let's get real. No matter how much of a precedent this is, it simply won't stop a huge electronics company from legally harassing a smaller, nimble company whose only crime is to deliver a technically superior compatible product.
More often than not, in situations like these the purpose of the lawsuit is to bury the defendant with legal fees. Do you think that the DVD CCA is suing all these people just because they think that the law is on their side? Well, that may be true to some extent, but you bet your bippy that the overwhelming motivation is to simply legally harass the defendant, on the premise that the defendants simply do not have the funds for legal fees.
So, even though Sony was bitch-slapped in the Connectix case, that doesn't stop them in any way from filing an identical lawsuit, even word-for-word, against someone else.
By my calculation, you're showing a 10% overhead, which I think might be too much, for this application. It might due to the nature of your app -- lots of stuff being copied around, etc...
--
An excellent resource on this subject is http://www.junkbusters.com/ht/en/telemarketing.htm l.
The strategy that I find that works best is that as soon as I realize that it's a sales call, I politely ask who's calling, and write down the name and the telephone number of the caller. I always keep a pad of paper near the telephone. Then, I just tell the person to put me on a do-not-call list, and that's the end of story.
When I started doing that, my telemarketing calls dropped measurably. There aren't that many large telemarketing firms out there. There's quite a few, but not really that many. By using explicit straight language, and acting mature (no screaming or yelling), it sends a signal to them that you don't like getting called for anything, so even if the same telemarketing firm is used again by some other company (companies don't generally telemarket themselves, they contract the job out to a telemarketing firm), they just don't bother calling you any more.
--
Elsewhere I posted last week that I've been quietly boycotting the DVD industry due to the whole DeCSS issue, and not buying any DVD hardware. I mentioned that not having SW on DVD made it much easier, it's pretty much the only thing I'd care to see on DVD.
Well, so much for that... Someone else suggested that a better way to protest the DVD industry would be to get a player that does not use region locking, and buying used DVDs on secondary markets.
Ok, so where can I find a list of players on sale in the US that can officially, or unofficially, be unlocked?
--
That was Lucas's original story. The skeptics then said that Lucas simply wants to milk everyone for all they're worth.
I don't know what the real reason is, but I don't care because I'm actually glad that the DVD version isn't going to come out for a long time (whatever the reason may be). I am boycotting the DVD industry, until the DVD CCA is dismantled, all the pending CSS lawsuits are dropped, and an OSS DVD player is available. Not having Star Wars on DVD makes the boycott a lot easier.
Last year I was *that* close to purchasing my first DVD player. After some soul searching I decided against doing that. If Star Wars came out on DVD, it would probably be a much more difficult decision than it already is. I'm hoping that the entire CSS mess gets settled before I have to make some hard choices here.
--
Well, here are my credentials: I have all 79 TOS episodes on videotape, and I could probably hold my own in any trek trivia contest. Having said that, I am completely confident that any new trek series will suck just as much as the current one.
The only way that this new series could possibly not suck would be if all the writers suddenly got a reality check. The key difference between TOS episodes and all the rest of the bunch comes down simply to this concept called "writing", and I have very little hope that any one of the current crop of screenwriters can come any close to cranking out the same quality of stories that Gene Roddenberry, and the rest of the original gang, did back in the 60s.
Now, taping those 79 original episodes, when they ran on the sci-fi channel, was quite an educational experience. I've seen all of them before, of course, but not recently. Before trek had its sci-fi run, the original episodes haven't been seen in years, and it was quite a perspective to see them again, after a decade, or more, of assorted trek spinoffs.
The conclusion that I came away with, after seeing the TOS 79 again, was as following. The acting sucked, yes, and I don't think I need to go extrapolate any further. But the reason why TOS became the hit that it was was simply because it was one of the best damn-written TV shows that ever was. Sure, there were occasional fuckups, like "Spock's Brain", but on average, the story lines, the concepts, and the ideas behind each episode were fresh, unique, insightful, and after seeing the credits roll at the end you can't help but ponder, for a few moments, of the message behind each episode.
Having said that, I've pretty much given up on Hollywood these days. I have very little hope that there's anyone left back there who can come up with anything on the same level again. Look at your average Voyager episode. Voyager is directly the opposite of TOS, in this case. Some episodes are pretty good and insightful, but, on average, the episodes are a complete waste, 40-some odd minutes of technobabble and gobbledygook, with gratuitous close-ups of whatsherface's ample curves. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but frankly I prefer doing the real thing with my g/f.
--
Face it, protests like rarely accomplish anything substantive. People have to look at things objectively. A combination of clueless judges and corporation with large legal budgets stack the odds heavily in their favor.
Barring some unexpected stroke of luck for the ACLU and EFF, I think that they will lose. So, what can a nerd do?
Let's come to grips with the fact that in the courtroom, the decks are stacked against us. The only reasonable chance of defeating DMCA and UCITA is by repealing them.
Legislation is enacted and repealed for only two reasons: either an overwhelming majority of the American population want it, or a selected few American businesses lobby heavily for it (enactment or repealment, either way).
Expecting a groundswell of public opposition to DMCA and UCITA is a bit naive. 95% of the people have no idea what it is, despite the press coverage, or what it's all about.
So, that leaves big business. Big business has to realize that the DMCA and UCITA will hurt them. So, how to tell big business that?
Well, I only know of one way. Big business needs as many nerds as they can find, to run their big honking server boxes, where they keep the company jewels. And there aren't enough nerds to go around.
Personally, I will refuse employment or consulting work for any company that's headquartered in any state that so far has passed UCITA, or any company that actively supported or prosecuted under the DMCA. That may seem to be silly, but I'm a silly guy. I'll do that as long as I possibly can. Thankfully, so far, there isn't exactly much of a shortage of nerd jobs. And I'm still sufficiently naive to believe that if enough people did that, something might happen.
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This is, perhaps, one of those situations where you are rather unlikely to find an OSS solution. An enterprise-level RDBMS is not exactly an overnight hack. It would take an enormous kind of time and effort to put an enterprise-level RDBMS.
I'm not even sure that an enterprise-level OSS RDBMS makes sense. If you're talking about an enterprise-level product, you probably have the resources to afford to purchase a commercial RDBMS. Both Sybase and Oracle have decades of experience building robust, rock hard, RDBMSes that you can bet your company jewels on, and both companies have Linux versions of their RDBMSes. I'm not sure about Informix, they may have a Linux version of their database engine too.
Right now, attempting to deliver an OSS RDBMS that can beat time-tested RDBMSes from Sybase and Oracle would be quite a challenge, to say the least. People will just have to accept the fact that OSS can't solve every problem in the world. It's certainly feasible that one day Sybase or Oracle might decide to release their respective RDBMS engines under an OSS license (which should certainly be quite a shock to many people), that's probably the most likely scenario.
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When people say "UNIX", in this context, they really mean "POSIX", which is an IEEE standard that, supposedly, defines the function call interface between a program and an operating system. That's the general idea.
Well, if you do write a strictly POSIX program, it should compile and run just fine on any one of those unixes. The problem is that POSIX does not really cover everything what you can do, on a typical box. Still, you can come pretty close. If you use GNU's autoconf and automake tools, your package can have a good shot at compiling and running on anything that claims to have POSIX compliance.
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The actual performance difference between a 500 Mhz pentium and a 700 Mhz pentium is much less than you think, in most situations. Having something that gets you 85% of the performance, at half the power consumption and heat dissipation is a BIG win for a laptop.
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This should NOT be a suprise to anyone who read the Halloween documents.
There's nothing wrong with copying the best features of commercial software into a free (beer/speech) product. If you've actually bothered to read the story on ibm's site, it only quotes Miguel de Icaza saying that he simply copied Excel's best features, when he wrote gnumeric.
Microsoft itself has commented (in the aforementioned halloween docs) how open source projects tend to copy the best features of commercial products. This is not news.
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Yabut... How many of them were actually alive and breathing? I don't know about Arizona, but in Illinois -- Chicago specifically -- dead people routinely cast election votes.
This kinda gives a new meaning to the word "killfile"...
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Only in low/medium bandwidth situation. A properly tuned sendmail will beat the pants off Qmail in high volume mailings, mostly because of sendmail's ability to batch recipients to the same domain, and ability to recycle SMTP sessions.
I agree on the remaining points.
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You have to be kidding, right?
At least as of a couple of weeks ago (haven't checked recently), Qmail hasn't been updated in three years. Here are some features in sendmail that are nowhere to be found in Qmail:
ESMTP AUTHentication/some kind of SASL support
RFC 1894 Delivery Status Notifications
Any kind of spam filtering
LDAP support
UUCP support
Qmail is still incapable of batching recipients for the same domain into one transaction
And there's more where that's came from. I suppose DJB has been a bit occupied, the last couple of years, fighting the US Commerce Dept on the crypto issue, so Qmail has gotten a bit moldy.
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Relax. I've been running a dual-headed machine for over a year now. I do not believe that this claim is true.
I'm a developer, and until someone comes up with a technical explanation how a thread-safe application is not SMP safe, I will consider this to be a bunch of bunk.
The most likely explanation is that poorly written software that uses threads, but is not thread-safe, is far more likely to exhibit faults when you have multiple CPUs running multiple threads of execution. When you have an atomic operation that is not properly locked down by a mutex, it will fail in a threaded environment only when a context switch happens to occur when BOTH threads are executing the atomic operation, which is far more likely, comparatively-wise, when you've got multiple CPUs banging at it.
So, what you're really seeing is crappy going croaking on a dual-headed machine more often than on a single-headed machine, and falsely concluding that the app is not "SMP-safe", which makes absolutely no sense because there's no such thing, the app is really not thread-safe.
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I would welcome a technical explanation for that. It simply does not make sense from a technical standpoint. Whether you have a single CPU doing context switches between threads, or whether you actually have multiple CPUs executing different threads simultaneously, the net effect is the same.
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I have an SMP box here, and I have plenty of software that is not thread safe, yet they have absolutely no problems whatsoever. The SMP-ishiness of your box is only a factor that the kernel needs to consider.
P.S. You can check if Mozilla uses threads in Linux by feeding it to ldd, to see if it loads the libpthread.so library.
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