The 2.5.x set of kernels is the development branch (the key being the odd minor number). It's where major feature changes are taking place, and new ideas are tried out. As you'd expect, things don't always work at the first (or fifth) go, so not every 2.5.x kernel is going to be 'good'.
'Good' probably depends a whole lot on how well the bits you need for your exact machine configuration are currently working, so your good kernel may be someone elses nightmare.
The lesson to all this is 'don't use a development kernel if your not ready for breakage'. That means back up all your file systems and don't even think of putting one on a production machine. But if you have some new widget that isn't supported in the stable kernel series (2.4.x currently), you might want to see how the development series is shaping up and even offer some feedback so that the next stable series really is.
One of the wonders of Free software is that you can deal with the actual authors of the software you're using. Not everyone will be likely to help you out, but you might get some good suggestions on who *can* help you. Of course, physical proximity is helpful for setting some things up on your machine, but many packages can be installed and configured remotely, and email takes the pain of asynchronous communication away nicely.
This is a list from a website mirror a couple months old, so you might have a few broken links. But here are some locations where you can get wf code and media without going through the bogged down main page.
The primary worldforge ftp site is at this location:
ftp://victor.worldforge.org/pub/worldforge
Mirror sites are also available at the following locations:
ftp://two.woovis.com/pub/worldforge thanks to James Nugen
http://grimicus.dyndns.org/pub/worldforge/ thanks to Dan Tomalesky
http://kafka.i-site.com/~novalis/mirrors/wf/downlo ads Pennsylvania, USA thanks to Dave Turner
http://kafka.i-site.com/~novalis/mirrors/wf-debian / Pennsylvania, USA thanks to Anders Petersson
http://purple.worldforge.org/wf/downloads/ Colorado, USA thanks to anubis
ftp://ftp.fr.gnome.org/pub/worldforge/ Paris, France thanks to Alexis de Lattre
If I were a PC builder, I would be worried about this. It's one thing for Microsoft to build mice, joysticks and other peripherals. Here, they are competing directly with the box builders. And for some reason, I expect Microsoft can afford to undercut others because they can give themselves a really good deal on the OS. I suppose they would account for it in a different fashion, though (We are losing $n/box on the hardware and paying $n for the OS. Honest.)
Just as a side note as we wander comfortably off topic, the real advantage of solar is that it generates energy at the site of its consumption. Its hard to make the economics work for your house that is already on the grid. However, for a location that is remote the costs associated with connecting to the existing infrastructure is substantial.
Another nice feature of solar is that its peak efficacy coincides with the peak load in some applications, such as energy for air conditioning. This allows you to target a lower peak demand with the entire rest of your energy generation system, which saves big money.
Actually, you are correct that I should have used non-proprietary. One of the reasons I support the GPL is that it explicity allows the selling of code for profit. But the term non-commercial also has some appropriate conotations for Debian development. It is, like the Linux kernel, ready when its ready. Choices about what and how things are done are independant of commercial (and proprietary) concerns.
Actually, I started using Linux because of it is Free. I had heard about the OS, and read a little about Linux. The more I looked at it, the more fascinated I was. When I started the process of picking a distro for my first install, I read up about the various offerings; the one I selected was Debian, because of its non-commercial and adamantly Free nature.
Debian also lets me gloat about wonderful features such as apt-get, so its not just philosophically better;)
Should they host non-free? Actually, as a first time Linux user, I had no trouble making the distinction in their current format. In part, this may be because I was attracted to Debian because of its philosophy; I understood the distinction and left non-free off of my system. I wouldn't complain if they decided to host the non-free repository on another server. But I would hope that there is still a source of.debs around for software that I might need for some reason or another. Hell, I use WinNT at work; I certainly can imagine grabbing a non-free package at some point.
Make the distinction clear. Make it an extra line to type in apt-sources. Host the stuff on another machine. But give maintainers somewhere to host the non-free.debs they work on.
I attended a talk on ocean circulation modelling, which in practice is quite similar to weather modelling. Essentially, you can partition the globe (or whatever subset you are concerned with) into 3 dimensional units. You can even used differently sized chunks depending on your data, modelling needs, etc. You initialize all the units, grind away for a given time slice, and then exchange boundary conditions w/ the adjacent units. Resolve the discrepencies, and grind away again. Obviously, the shorter the time slice, the greater the data-transfer needs so inter-CPU communication would probably set a lower bound on this parameter. Otherwise, the problem lends itself well to this type of hardware configuration.
Personally, I am interested in a more general question regarding the application of the great new data this beast will churn out. Currently, NOAA forcasts are excellent. Even long-term flood and climate forcasting is getting quite reliable. However, the data isn't being well presented. For example, the weather forcaster says it will be cloudy on the nightly news, yet the next day it pours. The models, however, showed a deep low pressure just a pixel or two away. I don't think its necessarily a case of the model being wrong; rather, we need to tell people that the resolution of the data is x and within that distance there is a good chance for heavy rain.
How can we inform the public in such a manner that they understand the data we are generating? What extra steps does NOAA need to take to help people deal with the inherent uncertainty of predicting the future?
__________________________ a NOAA employee who will get back to work now
There are two levels above a Federal Court. The first is the Federal Appeals Court and subsequently the Supreme Court of the US. Because Judge Jackson had a ruling overturned in the Appeals Court (in another anti-trust case, if I recall) there has been speculation that he will attempt to push the case immediately up to the Supreme Court. I don't know the name for this particular mechanism, but then again, I'm no lawyer.
So while we can be assured of a year or two of appeals, there isn't an endless sequence of courts left.
There seems to be direct competion in most application space between commercial software and Open Source alternatives (e.g. office suites, web servers, operating systems, etc.), except in particular niche markets. I've seen numerous comments, however, that games are different. They don't have the shelf-life of other applications. This viewpoint seems to stem from the idea that most games depend on cutting-edge technology which are best developed quickly in small groups. This is quite distinct from most Open Source development which often proceeds at a more deliberate pace;) However, this may the ideal environment to develop different types of games such as MUDs, MUSHs, etc.
Do you forsee any conflict between commercial game software and Free alternatives? Or are these complementary models that can work together, or at least coexist?
I'd love to see a game done like this, w/ a totally client-server based protocol underneath and an open specification for the client. It would be cool to run the 'big asskicker 3D rendered client' or the curses-based text-mode client-- whichever I felt like at the time. Also, being client-server would open the door wide for implementing robots-- very cool.
Your prayers are/will be answered;). Take a look at Worldforge (www.worldforge.org). The protocol you are wishing for is called Atlas and is a library you can plug into a client or server today. I could go on and on about the cool stuff that has been developed or will be, but there's a whole website for that. Stop on by.
BTW, all the art, text and code are Open Source. And the security it through not trusting the clients. We know they will be hacked...in fact, we encourage it.
I really support this IPO system. By having everyone bid up the shares *before* they go to market, the offering company gets the benefits of all the speculation (or the lack of funds for a poorly timed or low value IPO). It will be interesting to watch this offering, since it doesn't present the same opportunity for ridiculous first-few-day gains that RedHat did.
We can argue endlessly how the G4 stacks up price/performance wise with Intel or AMD chips. One area where the G4 will dominate is in laptop computers. The drastically lower power requirements of the PPC chips vs any of the x86 chips, and the associated decreased demand for heat dissipation, will lead to longer battery life and smaller hardware packages for the same performance.
When can we expect these in either the PowerBooks or any other portable system?
I remember reading about work being done to get Altivec support into gcc. Here is one link discussing it, but I don't know how athoritative this source is. I would love to get some more informed comments regarding the state of gcc wrt Altivec.
Ok, so maybe the wording was a bit vague regarding the extent of the security breech, but Microsoft admitted they door was open. So I'm gonna demand a *Full Refund*. Maybe I should gather together with a group of like-minded folks and storm the offices in Redmond:)
I'd certainly agree that there are other code bases out there with some great features. What we can hope for is to see them incoporated into Linux or some other open-source OS so everyone can benefit from them. That is why we should root for Linux over proprietary Unices. As more and more companies turn to Linux, I expect a bit of the zealotry to subside; we just need to stand fast and demand to see the source.
Online multi-player Open role-playing game? World Forge
It seems to me, since the filtering system was implemented, that the responses to Katz' articles have cooled enormously.
I agree with this completely.
On another note, I think the format information is presented in makes a huge difference. With nested comments and a mouse-wheel, I don't mind scrolling by endless useless/uninteresting comments on/. to find the signal, whether an opinion I agree with or disagree with. I contrast this with the way ZDNet arranges their comments, forcing me to load each one individually. Such a system means I have alot more invested (10s vs.01s) in each comment; this is where I see user-defined filtering as useful. Usenet falls into this latter category, as do most other public forums, unfortunately.
Well, this is the whole point of the licensing debate. Some licenses, such as the BSD (if I recall correctly) allow the use in proprietary products. Others, such as the GPL, expressly forbid this. In other words, once something is GPL, it can never be anything but.
This is a huge win for a graphics shop, or someone wanting to go from web design to web hosting. In a couple of hours (probably alot less), you can configure apache, set up security, and start pumping out the pages.
I would suggest you take a look at Debian. They have developed a wonderful utility apt-get (soon to get a nice gui front end). Whenever I wish to get the latest changes I type two commands: apt-get update apt-get upgrade Everything else takes care of itself, dependencies are checked and updated, old programs are removed, and the system works as a Debian distribution should (which is very stably). It is possible to add these commands to cron, and your system will remain up-to-date without any routine intervention.
I was hoping someone would be working on something like this. Hook it up to GRASS 5.0 and things are lookging good.
We can't do it here for political reasons, but this is something I am personally very interested in. If you want the assistance of a GIS programmer (but not much else yet), drop me an email. marcus.cole@nospam.noaa.gov
I am happy not to have to try and get into the locked up site and add my name to Oracles list. A coworker handed me a nice shrink-wrapped 8i CD.
Unfortunately, if we want to test their Spatial Cartridge, we need 8 seats of Enterprise Oracle, and 8 seats of SC....now if they were giving _that_ away, I'd spend the rest of the day hitting their site to sign up.
Can't I have absolutely everything for free? *blink*
Slashdot Mirror
I got one of those keychain LED flashlights at work a year ago and loved it to death. I recently had to buy myself a replacement.
That was a perfect office gift; cheap, slightly geeky and useful.
The 2.5.x set of kernels is the development branch (the key being the odd minor number). It's where major feature changes are taking place, and new ideas are tried out. As you'd expect, things don't always work at the first (or fifth) go, so not every 2.5.x kernel is going to be 'good'.
'Good' probably depends a whole lot on how well the bits you need for your exact machine configuration are currently working, so your good kernel may be someone elses nightmare.
The lesson to all this is 'don't use a development kernel if your not ready for breakage'. That means back up all your file systems and don't even think of putting one on a production machine. But if you have some new widget that isn't supported in the stable kernel series (2.4.x currently), you might want to see how the development series is shaping up and even offer some feedback so that the next stable series really is.
How about a quick look at the AUTHORS file?
One of the wonders of Free software is that you can deal with the actual authors of the software you're using. Not everyone will be likely to help you out, but you might get some good suggestions on who *can* help you. Of course, physical proximity is helpful for setting some things up on your machine, but many packages can be installed and configured remotely, and email takes the pain of asynchronous communication away nicely.
This is a list from a website mirror a couple months old, so you might have a few broken links. But here are some locations where you can get wf code and media without going through the bogged down main page.
o ads Pennsylvania, USA thanks to Dave Turner
n / Pennsylvania, USA thanks to Anders Petersson
Enjoy
_____________________________________________
Main Download Site
The primary worldforge ftp site is at this location:
ftp://victor.worldforge.org/pub/worldforge
Mirror sites are also available at the following locations:
ftp://two.woovis.com/pub/worldforge thanks to James Nugen
http://grimicus.dyndns.org/pub/worldforge/ thanks to Dan Tomalesky
http://kafka.i-site.com/~novalis/mirrors/wf/downl
http://kafka.i-site.com/~novalis/mirrors/wf-debia
http://purple.worldforge.org/wf/downloads/ Colorado, USA thanks to anubis
ftp://ftp.fr.gnome.org/pub/worldforge/ Paris, France thanks to Alexis de Lattre
If I were a PC builder, I would be worried about this. It's one thing for Microsoft to build mice, joysticks and other peripherals. Here, they are competing directly with the box builders. And for some reason, I expect Microsoft can afford to undercut others because they can give themselves a really good deal on the OS. I suppose they would account for it in a different fashion, though (We are losing $n/box on the hardware and paying $n for the OS. Honest.)
Just as a side note as we wander comfortably off topic, the real advantage of solar is that it generates energy at the site of its consumption. Its hard to make the economics work for your house that is already on the grid. However, for a location that is remote the costs associated with connecting to the existing infrastructure is substantial.
Another nice feature of solar is that its peak efficacy coincides with the peak load in some applications, such as energy for air conditioning. This allows you to target a lower peak demand with the entire rest of your energy generation system, which saves big money.
Have a nice day.
How can you sleep at night with all the blood on your hands??? ;)
Actually, you are correct that I should have used non-proprietary. One of the reasons I support the GPL is that it explicity allows the selling of code for profit. But the term non-commercial also has some appropriate conotations for Debian development. It is, like the Linux kernel, ready when its ready. Choices about what and how things are done are independant of commercial (and proprietary) concerns.
Actually, I started using Linux because of it is Free. I had heard about the OS, and read a little about Linux. The more I looked at it, the more fascinated I was. When I started the process of picking a distro for my first install, I read up about the various offerings; the one I selected was Debian, because of its non-commercial and adamantly Free nature.
;)
.debs around for software that I might need for some reason or another. Hell, I use WinNT at work; I certainly can imagine grabbing a non-free package at some point.
.debs they work on.
Debian also lets me gloat about wonderful features such as apt-get, so its not just philosophically better
Should they host non-free? Actually, as a first time Linux user, I had no trouble making the distinction in their current format. In part, this may be because I was attracted to Debian because of its philosophy; I understood the distinction and left non-free off of my system. I wouldn't complain if they decided to host the non-free repository on another server. But I would hope that there is still a source of
Make the distinction clear. Make it an extra line to type in apt-sources. Host the stuff on another machine. But give maintainers somewhere to host the non-free
I attended a talk on ocean circulation modelling, which in practice is quite similar to weather modelling. Essentially, you can partition the globe (or whatever subset you are concerned with) into 3 dimensional units. You can even used differently sized chunks depending on your data, modelling needs, etc. You initialize all the units, grind away for a given time slice, and then exchange boundary conditions w/ the adjacent units. Resolve the discrepencies, and grind away again. Obviously, the shorter the time slice, the greater the data-transfer needs so inter-CPU communication would probably set a lower bound on this parameter. Otherwise, the problem lends itself well to this type of hardware configuration.
Personally, I am interested in a more general question regarding the application of the great new data this beast will churn out. Currently, NOAA forcasts are excellent. Even long-term flood and climate forcasting is getting quite reliable. However, the data isn't being well presented. For example, the weather forcaster says it will be cloudy on the nightly news, yet the next day it pours. The models, however, showed a deep low pressure just a pixel or two away. I don't think its necessarily a case of the model being wrong; rather, we need to tell people that the resolution of the data is x and within that distance there is a good chance for heavy rain.
How can we inform the public in such a manner that they understand the data we are generating? What extra steps does NOAA need to take to help people deal with the inherent uncertainty of predicting the future?
__________________________
a NOAA employee who will get back to work now
There are two levels above a Federal Court. The first is the Federal Appeals Court and subsequently the Supreme Court of the US. Because Judge Jackson had a ruling overturned in the Appeals Court (in another anti-trust case, if I recall) there has been speculation that he will attempt to push the case immediately up to the Supreme Court. I don't know the name for this particular mechanism, but then again, I'm no lawyer.
So while we can be assured of a year or two of appeals, there isn't an endless sequence of courts left.
I can't say how happy I am to see a quality troll on Slashdot. Its well written, its controversial, and it just *demands* a reply.
I think its a shame that we have so much spamming that passes itself off as trolling. Copy and paste does not a troll make!
So please, take the parent post to this to heart. Learn the art of trolling.
There seems to be direct competion in most application space between commercial software and Open Source alternatives (e.g. office suites, web servers, operating systems, etc.), except in particular niche markets. I've seen numerous comments, however, that games are different. They don't have the shelf-life of other applications. This viewpoint seems to stem from the idea that most games depend on cutting-edge technology which are best developed quickly in small groups. This is quite distinct from most Open Source development which often proceeds at a more deliberate pace ;) However, this may the ideal environment to develop different types of games such as MUDs, MUSHs, etc.
Do you forsee any conflict between commercial game software and Free alternatives? Or are these complementary models that can work together, or at least coexist?
I'd love to see a game done like this, w/ a totally client-server based protocol underneath and an open specification for the client. It would be cool to run the 'big asskicker 3D rendered client' or the curses-based text-mode client-- whichever I felt like at the time. Also, being client-server would open the door wide for
;). Take a look at Worldforge (www.worldforge.org). The protocol you are wishing for is called Atlas and is a library you can plug into a client or server today. I could go on and on about the cool stuff that has been developed or will be, but there's a whole website for that. Stop on by.
implementing robots-- very cool.
Your prayers are/will be answered
BTW, all the art, text and code are Open Source. And the security it through not trusting the clients. We know they will be hacked...in fact, we encourage it.
I really support this IPO system. By having everyone bid up the shares *before* they go to market, the offering company gets the benefits of all the speculation (or the lack of funds for a poorly timed or low value IPO). It will be interesting to watch this offering, since it doesn't present the same opportunity for ridiculous first-few-day gains that RedHat did.
Good luck.
We can argue endlessly how the G4 stacks up price/performance wise with Intel or AMD chips. One area where the G4 will dominate is in laptop computers. The drastically lower power requirements of the PPC chips vs any of the x86 chips, and the associated decreased demand for heat dissipation, will lead to longer battery life and smaller hardware packages for the same performance.
When can we expect these in either the PowerBooks or any other portable system?
Excuse me while I wipe the drool off of my shirt.
I remember reading about work being done to get Altivec support into gcc. Here is one link discussing it, but I don't know how athoritative this source is. I would love to get some more informed comments regarding the state of gcc wrt Altivec.
Ok, so maybe the wording was a bit vague regarding the extent of the security breech, but Microsoft admitted they door was open. So I'm gonna demand a *Full Refund*. Maybe I should gather together with a group of like-minded folks and storm the offices in Redmond :)
I'd certainly agree that there are other code bases out there with some great features. What we can hope for is to see them incoporated into Linux or some other open-source OS so everyone can benefit from them. That is why we should root for Linux over proprietary Unices. As more and more companies turn to Linux, I expect a bit of the zealotry to subside; we just need to stand fast and demand to see the source.
Online multi-player Open role-playing game? World Forge
It seems to me, since the filtering system was implemented, that the responses to Katz' articles have cooled enormously.
/. to find the signal, whether an opinion I agree with or disagree with. I contrast this with the way ZDNet arranges their comments, forcing me to load each one individually. Such a system means I have alot more invested (10s vs .01s) in each comment; this is where I see user-defined filtering as useful. Usenet falls into this latter category, as do most other public forums, unfortunately.
I agree with this completely.
On another note, I think the format information is presented in makes a huge difference. With nested comments and a mouse-wheel, I don't mind scrolling by endless useless/uninteresting comments on
Well, this is the whole point of the licensing debate. Some licenses, such as the BSD (if I recall correctly) allow the use in proprietary products. Others, such as the GPL, expressly forbid this. In other words, once something is GPL, it can never be anything but.
This is a huge win for a graphics shop, or someone wanting to go from web design to web hosting. In a couple of hours (probably alot less), you can configure apache, set up security, and start pumping out the pages.
I would suggest you take a look at Debian. They have developed a wonderful utility apt-get (soon to get a nice gui front end). Whenever I wish to get the latest changes I type two commands:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
Everything else takes care of itself, dependencies are checked and updated, old programs are removed, and the system works as a Debian distribution should (which is very stably). It is possible to add these commands to cron, and your system will remain up-to-date without any routine intervention.
Enjoy,
cartographer
Great News!
I was hoping someone would be working on something like this. Hook it up to GRASS 5.0 and things are lookging good.
We can't do it here for political reasons, but this is something I am personally very interested in. If you want the assistance of a GIS programmer (but not much else yet), drop me an email. marcus.cole@nospam.noaa.gov
I am happy not to have to try and get into the locked up site and add my name to Oracles list.
A coworker handed me a nice shrink-wrapped 8i CD.
Unfortunately, if we want to test their Spatial Cartridge, we need 8 seats of Enterprise Oracle, and 8 seats of SC....now if they were giving _that_ away, I'd spend the rest of the day hitting their site to sign up.
Can't I have absolutely everything for free? *blink*