I have a UDMA/66 motherboard at home, and AFAIK I can only plug 8 devices on it. But that's because it has 4 IDE channels (2 for ATA33, standard in Intel BX chipsets, and 2 for the HPT366 ATA66 controller).
And this is what I have always seen in reviews around.
Putting default passwords is common practice... I've seen it in many softwares.
<P>For example, why not try to exploit sites running Oracle databases whith the "system" user (default pw: "manager")?</P>
<P>Of course, the MSSQL administrator may have considerably higher power on a NT system than the Oracle admin, but, it's not MS's fault. (Well, they could put a message at the end of the installation, just as Oracle does.)</P>
<P>But actually I think this is not the point of the article (this being the way the press covers this things). And, about that, sorry, but while Linux don't get the backup of some billion-dollar company that is willing to make big PR's, this will continue to happen. Not that I care, though...</P> --
Marcelo Vanzin
Lots and lots of people have been saying "cool, GTK themes!" and such. Note that, as some have already pointed out, KDE will support GTK *Pixmap* Themes.
This means that those nifty GTK Engines won't work, because they rely on how the GTK library implements themeing, and it is most surely different from the way KDE and Qt implement themeing.
Another misleading link from the article is the kde.themes.org link. kde.t.o only carries KDE 1.x themes, and KDE 1.x has *no* mechanism for widget themeing, aside from window decorations using pixmaps.
This thing that KDE is doing can probably also be done for GTK: build and engine to understand the KDE 2 pixmap themes (I read somewhere that there is an engine for pixmaps themes on KDE 2... maybe a look at http://www.mosfet.org/themeapi/ would help.)
As for perfomance, I can't say much because I'm not a developer for any of them, but the KDE team has been talking much about this "really cool pixmap cache" that is supposed to be really fast...
Hey, I do agree with many of the WaSP's statements, and I really would like Mozilla to be in an usable state for the common user, but please, let's get our facts straight before whining...
I cannot believe the people who claim they use Mozilla daily.
I do. I grab the nightlies every day, and they're my main web browser / e-mail client / news reader. I usually keep 3 installs: Netscape PR1, the last working nightly ("working" means "renders all my pages ok"), and the freshest nightly, from the day before.
Of course there are many bugs I would like to get rid of, like the transitional DTD bug that makes pages look like crap, and sometimes the slowness of the mail/news reader gets on my nerves... but it's very usable, and more stable than IE5 in my machine (yeah, you read that right).
Any site with a little bit of Javascript looks like crap. window.open() is not implemented, for example.
Simply not true. First, because JavaScript in Mozilla works like a charm. Second, because window.open() has been working for ages.
I use lots of JavaScript in the pages around here, and they all work well with Mozilla.
As for alcohol based cars....you can make your own ethanol and use it to power your car...many engines will run without modification (tho not well...much better to use a gas/alcohol mix).
Here in Brazil alcohol based cars have been in use for almost 3 decades AFAIK. There are pros and cons to using it (more pros than cons in my view).
The alcohol used here is a mix of about 20% gas and the rest if ethanol, made from sugar cane. Gas-only cars shoundn't use this because it shortens the engine's parts life... and this mix is more corrosive than plain gasoline.
As for price, the liter costs about 60 to 70% the price of a liter of gas, and it could be even less, if the process used to ditill the alcohol was optimized for the sugar cane we use (AFAIK, they use a method from Europe, where they get alcohol from another source).
As for some pros and cons, alcohol does pollute less than gas, and the cars generally have a slightly better performance. But, however, they tend to have a shorter life. And, before we had electronic injections, starting up an alcohol car in cold weather was an exercise for anyone's patience...
Some time ago the brazilian government sold their telecommunications company (was a monopoly) to several private companies, and also permitted that new companies were formed to compete.
MCI bought the majority of the state company (Embratel) and Sprint owned shares of their (only as of now) competitor. When the merger was announced, there were many discussions about legality of this situation and if, being Sprint not the owner but just a (not major) shareholder, competition would be compromised.
The final decision was to force Sprint to sell their shares, as I believe has alreaqdy been done... but I am not quite sure of that.
Just because it's not a Milestone release as it has been pointed out, there's no reason not to try a nightly build. They're getting more stable each day, and since some days ago a nice addition has been made: a "classic" skin.
It has the look and feel of Communicator 4, native widgets and such. (Can't tell if they're really native, or just a XPToolkit skin to mimic native widgets. Anyway, it looks good.) It even uses your system colors!!!
And more, Mozilla seems slicker, faster and more stable when using this skin... although it needs a little work still. So, check it out!
I grab a new nightly build every morning when I get to work (I use Mozilla as my main browser/email reader), so I have been following development quite closely...
Can anyone point out on what nighlty the M16 release is based??? From some time now, the builds have been quirky (pretty stable for me on both Win32 and Linux, but full of rendering problems on pages, awful slowness in mail and mainly news, and scaring memory leaks, the Linux version almost filling my 256 MB of RAM at home).
The most "light" (as in memory usage/speed) I've used up to now is Netscape's PR1, and I tend to use it when the nightlies are too shaky. But, they're cathing up, and I have really good hopes for PR2.
Anyway, if they can fix the table rendering (which is very broken from last week), and work on huge speed improvements for Mail/News, then it'll be very close to a release.
No, I use it primarily to work with servlets (and other classes I've built around them), so, a GUI builder would have no use there. jEdit works great for it, and it also helps with all other kinds of files I have to use (JavaScript, HTML, XML and so on). And its plugins are just great.
If you wanna get some serious Java Swing/GUI work done you should be using a real IDE like Visual Age or JBuilder or even Forte.
I usually start making GUI's with a "normal" editor, not a GUI Builder (exception made here for Delphi), so that I learn more about the API I'm using. I did that with Qt, and am doing it eventually (and very slowly, as the GUI applications I make at work are still in Delphi) with Swing/AWT.
The help of a GUI Builder is really welcome sometimes, although I tend to think that it sometimes ties my hands too much, and I lose some flexibility (not necessarily in the GUI part of the application). Anyway, GUI's aren't really my area of work right now.
It's a pretty cool idea to have a cross-platform X server written in Java... but last time I tried WeirdX it was unusably slow, even on a P3 500 w/ 64 MB of RAM.
Hope they worked also on that front. I know Java is not the best language when talking about GUI applications (OK, programming with Swing is cool, but it's kinda slow, even with JDK 1.3), but with jEdit at least I can get some work done.
-- Marcelo Vanzin
Re:IBM Native Threads implementation inefficient
on
IBM JDK 1.3 For Linux
·
· Score: 2
You may find this article interesting. IBM's run some tests on the Linux scheduler using their 1.1.8 JVM, and proposed some patches to the kernel so that performance under heavy loads would raise.
First, you don't need to worry about compatibility. Gentus is a bit by bit copy of RedHat 6.1, except for some new programs, a modified kernel, and all mentions of "RedHat Linux" changed to "Abit Gentus Linux", and "6.2" changed to "2.0". I have RH 6.1 installed on my system, but only have a Gentus CD, and I use the rpm's without problem.
Second, you do have to worry about compatibility if you have a Quantum ATA66 drive on the ATA66 controller. The system just locks up when the kernel boots, if the kernel has built-in support for ATA66. So, you won't be able to install Gentus. I've heard people with Maxtor drives with this problem also. Maybe it's the firmware on the drives or something... anyway, using a kernel without ATA66 support will work, although you won't have DMA (so performance will be poor).
To install a distro into the drive, you may use the method of changing the controller where the drive is sitting temporarily as suggested, but it is not needed. If the distro you're installing can copy files to/dev/hde or up (where the drives in the ATA66 controller are), you can install directly to it. I've done that with RedHat 6.1, and it worked like a charm. Debian 2.1 (which I prefer) only sees up to/dev/hdd when installing, so, I was out of luck. Potato probably has fixed this, but, it's not out yet.
To make the kernel find the controller, take a look at this part of the Ultra-DMA Mini-HOWTO. It works the same way for the HPT366 controller on the BP6 (or BE6 in my case). However, you may need to specify the IRQ to kernel also (I had), or lockups may occur. Just add the IRQ to the end of the line (in the example, it would read "ide2=a,b+2,IRQ"). Actually, it may not work for IDE3, but it works for IDE2. There's a specific Mini-HOWTO for this controller, but I do not have the URL right here with me.
If someone has some fix for this Quantum drive problem, let me know. Performance is really bad without DMA.
-- Marcelo Vanzin
Re:I wonder if Mettalica will sue netscape?
on
Pay Lars
·
· Score: 1
When there's an article on/. about games, everybody rolls out the idea of a "gaming distribution": you put the CD in the drive, the computers boots from the CD and starts the game. No configuring, no user interaction until the opening game screen. Wouldn't this be that comimng true?
On another side... they're making pretty high claims for a box based on Linux. All right, Linux is cool, but for a gaming machine there are obvious points that need to be polished: 3D audio (OpenAL is still beginning, AFAIK), 3D Hardware support (they talk about a GPU, and NVIDIA's GeForce - the only GPU supported on Linux - drivers for Linux are one of the worst out there)... or these guys are the kings of vaporware, or they have a pretty solid relationship with many hardware and software vendors out there (which is pretty strange for a company that I think not many people knew before now).
I won't be comparing this to the X-Box and other gaming consoles, there's been a lot of talk about that lately, it's getting kind boring. =)
If they can really put out this product, it's gonna be very interesting to see how it goes.
Now one has to wonder if the UC at Berkeley is the new player in the Slashdot effect game, or if the use of Napster in university campi really can use all that bandwidth... =)
AFAIK, GTK+ is LGPL, not GPL, so they should be able to use it.
As for Qt, they would have to use the professional edition, which shouldn't be a problem at all for Microsoft to spend some money... or they could use winelib (yeah, right, like they'd help to improve wine).
As for the Solaris/HP-UX IE, when it was released sometime ago, I remeber reading in a Microsoft site that they used Motif for it.
Even though you guys tried to convince me it wouldn't work <g>, I tried to install RH 6.1 on my UDMA/66 drive, and everything was a breeze, following the instructions (now I have the link! here).
Only thing I'm yet to install is LILO. Meanwhile, the boot floppy is working great.
So, if you have a system with one drive and you want to use the faster controller, you have to install it with the drive on the DMA/33 controller,and then move it to the DMA/66 controller after installing and tweaking.
Not true, as far as I know. You can install directly into the UDMA/66 controller, even without the kernel patches (explained in the HPT66 Mini-HOWTO, sorry, don't have the link here right now).
I have been able to fdisk and copy files normally to a partition on a drive sitting in that controller. I just couldn't install Linux because the only distro I have at home (Debian 2.1) won't let me install in a drive higher than/dev/hdd (even if you create/dev/hde by hand using mknod). Too bad. Maybe I'll have a better luck with RedHat 6.1. I tried the Potato floppy disks, but, as I do not have a permanent net connection, I was out of luck (and Debian install is still a nightmare, btw, although it is my favorite distribution).
The controller will be working in PIO mode, so performance will be lousy until you patch the kernel, but, what matters is that this whole switching between controllers is not necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure on this?
I have a UDMA/66 motherboard at home, and AFAIK I can only plug 8 devices on it. But that's because it has 4 IDE channels (2 for ATA33, standard in Intel BX chipsets, and 2 for the HPT366 ATA66 controller).
And this is what I have always seen in reviews around.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Putting default passwords is common practice... I've seen it in many softwares.
<P>For example, why not try to exploit sites running Oracle databases whith the "system" user (default pw: "manager")?</P>
<P>Of course, the MSSQL administrator may have considerably higher power on a NT system than the Oracle admin, but, it's not MS's fault. (Well, they could put a message at the end of the installation, just as Oracle does.)</P>
<P>But actually I think this is not the point of the article (this being the way the press covers this things). And, about that, sorry, but while Linux don't get the backup of some billion-dollar company that is willing to make big PR's, this will continue to happen. Not that I care, though...</P>
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Lots and lots of people have been saying "cool, GTK themes!" and such. Note that, as some have already pointed out, KDE will support GTK *Pixmap* Themes.
This means that those nifty GTK Engines won't work, because they rely on how the GTK library implements themeing, and it is most surely different from the way KDE and Qt implement themeing.
Another misleading link from the article is the kde.themes.org link. kde.t.o only carries KDE 1.x themes, and KDE 1.x has *no* mechanism for widget themeing, aside from window decorations using pixmaps.
This thing that KDE is doing can probably also be done for GTK: build and engine to understand the KDE 2 pixmap themes (I read somewhere that there is an engine for pixmaps themes on KDE 2 ... maybe a look at http://www.mosfet.org/themeapi/ would help.)
As for perfomance, I can't say much because I'm not a developer for any of them, but the KDE team has been talking much about this "really cool pixmap cache" that is supposed to be really fast...
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Hey, I do agree with many of the WaSP's statements, and I really would like Mozilla to be in an usable state for the common user, but please, let's get our facts straight before whining...
I cannot believe the people who claim they use Mozilla daily.
I do. I grab the nightlies every day, and they're my main web browser / e-mail client / news reader. I usually keep 3 installs: Netscape PR1, the last working nightly ("working" means "renders all my pages ok"), and the freshest nightly, from the day before.
Of course there are many bugs I would like to get rid of, like the transitional DTD bug that makes pages look like crap, and sometimes the slowness of the mail/news reader gets on my nerves... but it's very usable, and more stable than IE5 in my machine (yeah, you read that right).
Any site with a little bit of Javascript looks like crap. window.open() is not implemented, for example.
Simply not true. First, because JavaScript in Mozilla works like a charm. Second, because window.open() has been working for ages.
I use lots of JavaScript in the pages around here, and they all work well with Mozilla.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
So did the KDE team, but most people can't even name a single person who worked on that project.
Of course not, they're all germans with complicated names full of consonants. :0)
(I can actually name a few... just don't ask for correct speeling. :-) )
--
Marcelo Vanzin
As for alcohol based cars....you can make your own ethanol and use it to power your car...many engines will run without modification (tho not well...much better to use a gas/alcohol mix).
Here in Brazil alcohol based cars have been in use for almost 3 decades AFAIK. There are pros and cons to using it (more pros than cons in my view).
The alcohol used here is a mix of about 20% gas and the rest if ethanol, made from sugar cane. Gas-only cars shoundn't use this because it shortens the engine's parts life... and this mix is more corrosive than plain gasoline.
As for price, the liter costs about 60 to 70% the price of a liter of gas, and it could be even less, if the process used to ditill the alcohol was optimized for the sugar cane we use (AFAIK, they use a method from Europe, where they get alcohol from another source).
As for some pros and cons, alcohol does pollute less than gas, and the cars generally have a slightly better performance. But, however, they tend to have a shorter life. And, before we had electronic injections, starting up an alcohol car in cold weather was an exercise for anyone's patience...
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Some time ago the brazilian government sold their telecommunications company (was a monopoly) to several private companies, and also permitted that new companies were formed to compete.
MCI bought the majority of the state company (Embratel) and Sprint owned shares of their (only as of now) competitor. When the merger was announced, there were many discussions about legality of this situation and if, being Sprint not the owner but just a (not major) shareholder, competition would be compromised.
The final decision was to force Sprint to sell their shares, as I believe has alreaqdy been done... but I am not quite sure of that.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Just because it's not a Milestone release as it has been pointed out, there's no reason not to try a nightly build. They're getting more stable each day, and since some days ago a nice addition has been made: a "classic" skin.
It has the look and feel of Communicator 4, native widgets and such. (Can't tell if they're really native, or just a XPToolkit skin to mimic native widgets. Anyway, it looks good.) It even uses your system colors!!!
And more, Mozilla seems slicker, faster and more stable when using this skin... although it needs a little work still. So, check it out!
--
Marcelo Vanzin
I grab a new nightly build every morning when I get to work (I use Mozilla as my main browser/email reader), so I have been following development quite closely...
Can anyone point out on what nighlty the M16 release is based??? From some time now, the builds have been quirky (pretty stable for me on both Win32 and Linux, but full of rendering problems on pages, awful slowness in mail and mainly news, and scaring memory leaks, the Linux version almost filling my 256 MB of RAM at home).
The most "light" (as in memory usage/speed) I've used up to now is Netscape's PR1, and I tend to use it when the nightlies are too shaky. But, they're cathing up, and I have really good hopes for PR2.
Anyway, if they can fix the table rendering (which is very broken from last week), and work on huge speed improvements for Mail/News, then it'll be very close to a release.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Adobe, I mean... (fingers faster than brain.)
--
Marcelo Vanzin
(Why was the PlayStation abbreviated to PSX, instead of just PS?)
Because maybe Abode would get a little pissed at it?
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Are you using Jedit for a GUI application?
No, I use it primarily to work with servlets (and other classes I've built around them), so, a GUI builder would have no use there. jEdit works great for it, and it also helps with all other kinds of files I have to use (JavaScript, HTML, XML and so on). And its plugins are just great.
If you wanna get some serious Java Swing/GUI work done you should be using a real IDE like Visual Age or JBuilder or even Forte.
I usually start making GUI's with a "normal" editor, not a GUI Builder (exception made here for Delphi), so that I learn more about the API I'm using. I did that with Qt, and am doing it eventually (and very slowly, as the GUI applications I make at work are still in Delphi) with Swing/AWT.
The help of a GUI Builder is really welcome sometimes, although I tend to think that it sometimes ties my hands too much, and I lose some flexibility (not necessarily in the GUI part of the application). Anyway, GUI's aren't really my area of work right now.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
It's a pretty cool idea to have a cross-platform X server written in Java... but last time I tried WeirdX it was unusably slow, even on a P3 500 w/ 64 MB of RAM.
Hope they worked also on that front. I know Java is not the best language when talking about GUI applications (OK, programming with Swing is cool, but it's kinda slow, even with JDK 1.3), but with jEdit at least I can get some work done.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
You may find this article interesting. IBM's run some tests on the Linux scheduler using their 1.1.8 JVM, and proposed some patches to the kernel so that performance under heavy loads would raise.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
First, you don't need to worry about compatibility. Gentus is a bit by bit copy of RedHat 6.1, except for some new programs, a modified kernel, and all mentions of "RedHat Linux" changed to "Abit Gentus Linux", and "6.2" changed to "2.0". I have RH 6.1 installed on my system, but only have a Gentus CD, and I use the rpm's without problem.
Second, you do have to worry about compatibility if you have a Quantum ATA66 drive on the ATA66 controller. The system just locks up when the kernel boots, if the kernel has built-in support for ATA66. So, you won't be able to install Gentus. I've heard people with Maxtor drives with this problem also. Maybe it's the firmware on the drives or something... anyway, using a kernel without ATA66 support will work, although you won't have DMA (so performance will be poor).
To install a distro into the drive, you may use the method of changing the controller where the drive is sitting temporarily as suggested, but it is not needed. If the distro you're installing can copy files to /dev/hde or up (where the drives in the ATA66 controller are), you can install directly to it. I've done that with RedHat 6.1, and it worked like a charm. Debian 2.1 (which I prefer) only sees up to /dev/hdd when installing, so, I was out of luck. Potato probably has fixed this, but, it's not out yet.
To make the kernel find the controller, take a look at this part of the Ultra-DMA Mini-HOWTO. It works the same way for the HPT366 controller on the BP6 (or BE6 in my case). However, you may need to specify the IRQ to kernel also (I had), or lockups may occur. Just add the IRQ to the end of the line (in the example, it would read "ide2=a,b+2,IRQ"). Actually, it may not work for IDE3, but it works for IDE2. There's a specific Mini-HOWTO for this controller, but I do not have the URL right here with me.
If someone has some fix for this Quantum drive problem, let me know. Performance is really bad without DMA.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Third button on the toolbar. =)
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Hey, try to go to a page that lists country names (as an example, take home.netscape.com, and look at the bottom left of the page).
You may find out which is the Nation of the Beast, as well as The Land Begotten of a Goat. =)
--
Marcelo Vanzin
The guys who wrote the article have come up with a nice way to make statistics... just notice, every percentage in the article reads like:
Company owns 80% of market.
And thinking that all I had to do in those statistics classes was putting 80% in every result and I would have made it the first time!
--
Marcelo Vanzin
When there's an article on /. about games, everybody rolls out the idea of a "gaming distribution": you put the CD in the drive, the computers boots from the CD and starts the game. No configuring, no user interaction until the opening game screen. Wouldn't this be that comimng true?
On another side... they're making pretty high claims for a box based on Linux. All right, Linux is cool, but for a gaming machine there are obvious points that need to be polished: 3D audio (OpenAL is still beginning, AFAIK), 3D Hardware support (they talk about a GPU, and NVIDIA's GeForce - the only GPU supported on Linux - drivers for Linux are one of the worst out there)... or these guys are the kings of vaporware, or they have a pretty solid relationship with many hardware and software vendors out there (which is pretty strange for a company that I think not many people knew before now).
I won't be comparing this to the X-Box and other gaming consoles, there's been a lot of talk about that lately, it's getting kind boring. =)
If they can really put out this product, it's gonna be very interesting to see how it goes.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Now one has to wonder if the UC at Berkeley is the new player in the Slashdot effect game, or if the use of Napster in university campi really can use all that bandwidth... =)
--
Marcelo Vanzin
I don't know you guys, but when I look the icon created for Caldera, it reminds me much more of Disney than Caldera...
Look, the blue part catches my attention immediately, and it looks so much like Mickey's ear. =)
(This must be the result of working saturday mornings... my brain does not work properly in this period.)
--
Marcelo Vanzin
AFAIK, GTK+ is LGPL, not GPL, so they should be able to use it.
As for Qt, they would have to use the professional edition, which shouldn't be a problem at all for Microsoft to spend some money... or they could use winelib (yeah, right, like they'd help to improve wine).
As for the Solaris/HP-UX IE, when it was released sometime ago, I remeber reading in a Microsoft site that they used Motif for it.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Even though you guys tried to convince me it wouldn't work <g>, I tried to install RH 6.1 on my UDMA/66 drive, and everything was a breeze, following the instructions (now I have the link! here).
Only thing I'm yet to install is LILO. Meanwhile, the boot floppy is working great.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
So, if you have a system with one drive and you want to use the faster controller, you have to install it with the drive on the DMA/33 controller,and then move it to the DMA/66 controller after installing and tweaking.
Not true, as far as I know. You can install directly into the UDMA/66 controller, even without the kernel patches (explained in the HPT66 Mini-HOWTO, sorry, don't have the link here right now).
I have been able to fdisk and copy files normally to a partition on a drive sitting in that controller. I just couldn't install Linux because the only distro I have at home (Debian 2.1) won't let me install in a drive higher than /dev/hdd (even if you create /dev/hde by hand using mknod). Too bad. Maybe I'll have a better luck with RedHat 6.1. I tried the Potato floppy disks, but, as I do not have a permanent net connection, I was out of luck (and Debian install is still a nightmare, btw, although it is my favorite distribution).
The controller will be working in PIO mode, so performance will be lousy until you patch the kernel, but, what matters is that this whole switching between controllers is not necessary.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Wouldn't that be: "Always changing the future is." ???
Sorry, couldn't resist. =)
--
Marcelo Vanzin