The whole idea is that the initial cat happens during startup. think:
nice -n15 find/opt/OpenOffice -type f | xargs cat >/dev/null &
(i'm somewhat new to scripting, but you get the idea)
the & at the end will let your other startup scripts run concurrently, i believe (depending on how you call this command). When you launch OpenOffice it's already in the cache, so the only files it has to read are the dependencies/shared libraries.
I'm running on a hotrod 1466Mhz athlon / 768MB/ 10GB running gentoo. First load takes about 11 seconds (that's a long time) but subsequent loads are pretty zippy. I suggest you either prelink the app (which I don't do) or put a script in your init.d directory to recursively cat the/opt/OpenOffice directory to/dev/null, that would effectively 'precache' the application.
Also, try building from source if you can, you'll be able to set the optimization and several options that you don't see with a binary-only install.
I have cron.daily (the *nix 'task scheduler') do an 'emerge -u world' on one machine, I also have a script in cron.hourly that searches the config directories for changed or new files and reminds me by echoing them from.login file.
Basically every time I log in in the morning I get a message like:
# Current files on iceage.doughtyhouse.net that need a looksie: # #/etc/._cfg0000_fstab #/etc/conf.d/._cfg0000_hdparm
It's not windowsupdate, but it gets the job done even when I'm on vacation, and I've never had trouble with config files that get TOO out-of-date to still work.
Um, average users don't usually mind jotting their login and password down and leaving it on their desk so I can fix thier PCs while they're at lunch either.
Average Users have their passwords POSTED in their cubes, or taped to the back of thier calculators, or under the ridge of their lockable storage next to their lockable storage's key.
I just booted my 500MHz laptop in 20 seconds in Linux, that's from GRUB to login. Booting Windows 2000 on it takes about 80 seconds from 'press F8' to 'Login'
Also, when the linux box says I'm good to login, it is, everything is already loaded. The windows box sits there for a while AFTER I login to sort itself out and let me to the desktop. I think it's because *nix INIT process wants to load services first and let users in later, Windows is the other way around.
Wow, I live in RI, pay 3.75% income tax to the state, 7 or 8 in sales, and I think I pay about 15 - 20% federal income tax. Adds up to about 30%. There's extra taxes on gas, booze, and smokes, but I think that doesn't really add up too much in my life (work mileage is reimbursed tax-free).
That's good to hear. I pay about 23% of my income total on taxes because I only make 24K/year. I'm glad the system works.
My question is:
If the federal tax rate tops off at about 43% and sales tax is usually between zero and 10%, how much loot do YOU make to pay half in taxes? Or are you just another American on a rant calling "30%" "50%" for good measure?
OS X has been getting faster and faster with each version. The reasoning is that the entire system is built with GCC, which has been getting better PowerPC optimization since Apple began contributing. Panther is built with gcc-3.3 (right now), which includes improved support for the PowerPC line, and DFA support for defining pipelines (better optimization/register usage).
Also, the core of the OS was native to x86, so I'm sure they keep finding bits and pieces that are optimized for that architecture and rewriting them.
Not to mention that the libraries are all very 'young' and Apple is dealing with a LOT of uncharted territory (for Apple, at least) with prelinking and UNIX in general.
I'd expect the trend to continue for quite a while, GCC-3.4 should bring us even more optimization, and I'm sure Apple engineers have a LOT of stones left to turn over.
AFAIK, you can pull the -current darwin kernel from CVS. Most of the underlying UNIX core is free and CVS versions are available (from Apple or elsewhere).
Apple obviously can't be showcasing projects they're cooking up that aren't announced yet.
Maybe not for a notebook. I had an EPIA and I kept it in the trunk of my car. When I needed to fix totally borked client's machines I just hooked them up to the EPIA.
The small form factor makes these things easy enough to carry around in a totebag or in your car. I know I travel to different sites every day, often several times each day. These things let me set up 'camp' in an empty cube and still do all my freakish technical work.
I feel VERY different about my home country since 9/11|PATRIOT|FCC-deregulation.
I see all these people waving flags for a country that we've let slip through our fingers. I see Democrats and Republicans fighting so hard for corporate money that the've become a single entity. I see schools filled to the brim with kids who have no future, kids who won't even be able to work at McDonalds because they can't formulate sentences. I see HUGE numbers of autistic crack-babies growing up into homogenized learning environments where they suck the money from schools. I see the same picture on all three broadcast TV channels on my set, and they're all chanting for their owner's interests. I see the gap between rich and poor growing. I see real wages dropping so I'll never get to provide enough for a full-time mother for my [future] children. I see gas prices that do not reflect actual supplies. I see 401K programs instead of traditional but very effective and safe pension programs. I see that there's no way to afford healthcare, auto insurance, rent, food, and heat unless I and my roommate work 60 hours apiece each week. I see police officers in strip clubs instead of speed traps (really). I see a people so willing to BELIEVE in dirty politicians because 'they all are, it's politics'.
I don't hate America. America is gone. I hate the demented empire of pseudo-freedom that lies between Mexico and Canada.
Get an old 8MHz Mac Plus with 20MB hard drive, put HyperCard and a simple stack to handle the timesheet on it. It'll never die, it won't give you any shit, and it's damn cute sitting there useful after almost 20 years of service.
Have HyperCard dump activity to a textfile on a floppy every 15 minutes. The obscurity of the system (and the lack of eject button on the floppy) means you can have a somewhat secure setup.
If you change the name of HyperCard to 'Finder' and put it into the system 6 system folder it will auto-load at boot time, and you can name the timesheet stack to 'Home' and it will load first too. Using system 6 WITHOUT multifinder would let you 'lock in' users to the stack and prevent them from doing anything else.
My dad still runs his freelance biz off a Mac Classic with a 40MB hard drive. It's a beautiful thing. Of course, he has a 'real' workstation to do the graphics and web stuff, but the classic does all the recordkeeping and back-end work.
The LAST vulnerabilities were for 3.6 and 3.7 as well, but 3.4 COULD be vulnerable as it's now 'off the beaten path' and these vulnerabilities seem to have been discovered in a code audit triggered by the recent attention given to OpenSSH. Apple had to patch their 3.4 version, and I'd expect another minor software update package from Apple in the next few days to address this.
Anybody out there know if it's easy to build current versions (3.7.1p2, etc.) of OpenSSH on OS X with the developer tools installed, or is there some very compelling reason Apple is sticking to 3.4 and just adding to it?
I had a cool idea for this sort of thing. Gnutella clients usually connect to any of a number of 'master servers' for a list of 'ultrapeer' index servers. If my ISP intercepted those requests and responded with nodes INSIDE their networks (preferably in ascending order of 'internet distance') the gnutella clients would be much more effective AND the bandwidth costs on the ISP would be much lower.
If I'm on Cox.net and I hit up a gnutella master for a list of index servers, I'd like to have it give me the index server on my subnet or network FIRST, then move out from there. 'Internal' traffic (that which doesn't traverse another company's lines) costs next-to-nothing for an ISP, they only really pay for the traffic that passes their routers.
This would also keep the RIAA at least a little bit farther out of the picture, as the P2P networks would be a little bit harder to plumb from outside the ISP.
Oh really? I was at a school last week and several teachers back from sabbatical all over the world had brought back DVDs to show the students examples of foreign filmmaking and culture. I had to break them the bad news that the reason their DVDs won't play here isn't broken DVD players, it's the region encoding. I told them I could circumvent it, but the tools to do it were illegal to use and I wasn't going to take the risk.
My girlfriend wanted me to rip a few songs and whip up a CD of MP3s so she could listen at work. No deal, the CD just wouldn't rip. I asked to look at the packaging, the 'Compact Disc - Digital Audio' logo was missing. I had to tell her that her CD was unrippable, and she'd have to tote the original to work, which she won't do because it cost her $20 and she won't risk having a coworker scratch it.
This stuff DOES affect lots of people, but most folks chalk up the failures to broken hardware, or damaged media, not DRM. The EFF needs to buy some commercial time on prime-time to teach people about this, because the problem is too technical to garner support without real-world stories getting people to call their representing officials.
That's what life generally does, it replicates, and the 'errors' are where evolution takes place. Asexual species generally are less adaptable because they don't get to 'mix' genes while 'replicating'.
There are a bunch of Compaq keyboards with a built-in trackball, they're not to practical for serious use, but they work great for controlling that 'second machine' lying around.
Bullshit, what we all hold dear as our loved tech jobs are a total drag on the companies we work for. Moving overpaid jobs to India will free up our companies to maximize profit to fold over into lower consumer costs and greater benefits for the OTHER employees. Nobody who knows business WANTS an IT department raping the rest of the company for money, they just HAVE to have one to be able to use computers.
Trust me, it will suck for us personally, but it's just a part of business evolution. Trying to artificially stop companies from finding ways to lower costs would end up turning this country into a fiefdom of the house and senate, as parties vie for special treatment in light of 'the foreign threat'.
Granted, the CEOs will take a disproportionate share, and that should be stopped, but they're not the source of the problem, capitalism is. Every time you buy something from a company wiith overpriced executives you vote for that way of life.
I'm sorry, but I get a strong feeling that you're way out in dreamland.
Let's get some things straight first, no hard drive or ram can be 'as fast' as a processor, because that's like saying my coffee cup is as fast as my bicycle, it's meaningless.
A solid-state hard drive has to get all that data addressed, and it has to pump it over some sort of pipe at least several inches long, the addressing will put a buttload of latency in there, and that pipe would bring the bandwidth WAY down.
Now I wouldn't fuck with a solid-state drive at the end of a Ultra320-SCSI pipe, but that's STILL 1/10th the memory bandwidth of a modern DDR400 system. BTW, those have been around for AGES, I used to have a solid-state SCSI drive on my old 25MHz Mac, it was pretty fast, but nowhere near the internal ramdisk's speed.
RAM now works 'at the speed of the processor' if you think about it. My Athlon can chew about 2100MB/sec which is EXACTLY output of the memory I'm running (that's the 'sync' in SDRAM). The only way to change that would be to 'widen up' the CPU FSB. You could put single, dual, or quad-channel memory on your Athlon and it wouldn't make a dime's worth of difference in any benchmarks, the back of the chip is the limit, and current RAM meeets that need.
It's general knowledge that the more storage you can arrange for, the more complex your addressing system has to be to keep it tamed. Here's an example:
When your CPU asks for something it needs from RAM it asks for the contents of a block of memory, whose address is held in a pointer that is dynamic, but readily available. The CPU just 'gets' it. It's even better if that block is already in the cache, as the cache buffers will satisfy the request before the memory controller even bothers to retrieve the block from RAM.
When your app needs something from DISK it has to send a request through the OS (in RAM) to do a lookup in the filesystem and give an address, which is shuttled over to the disk driver to fetch from the drive and back to a generic filesystem driver to present to the app. Should the filesystem not have that data cached it has to perform a complex lookup of where the hell that file actually is on the disk, often traversing several directory files. It's very complex.
What you're saying will eventually happen, but not for at least a decade. Someday we WILL drop the two-tiered approach to personal computing, and ther'll be 'unified storage' for running apps and storing files (like the palm pilot, but better) and it will be good. Until then we've not yet miniaturized the electronics enough to move over to that paradigm. I think nanotech/biotech will play a HUGE role in making the memory, cpu, and IO processor components small enough to run cool and unplugged.
I think Microsoft should have a 'rolling' security pack going, every update would be added to one big cumulative package that was kept current on windowsupdate. Imagine how great it would be to only have to apply ONE big patch after a clean install, instead of install, update IE, service pack, critical updates, repeat until clean.
Also, products like IE6, DirectX, and WindowsMedia could be rolled into another 'rolling upgrades' patch that would be similar in nature.
I'm getting REALLY sick of supporting Windows 98 and 2000 machines, it's beginning to take several hours to manually apply all the updates. XP isn't any better.
I understand that a lot of sysadmins would want to take things 'piecemeal', and the current methods should be kept as well for them.
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The whole idea is that the initial cat happens during startup. think:
/opt/OpenOffice -type f | xargs cat > /dev/null &
nice -n15 find
(i'm somewhat new to scripting, but you get the idea)
the & at the end will let your other startup scripts run concurrently, i believe (depending on how you call this command). When you launch OpenOffice it's already in the cache, so the only files it has to read are the dependencies/shared libraries.
I'm running on a hotrod 1466Mhz athlon / 768MB/ 10GB running gentoo. First load takes about 11 seconds (that's a long time) but subsequent loads are pretty zippy. I suggest you either prelink the app (which I don't do) or put a script in your init.d directory to recursively cat the /opt/OpenOffice directory to /dev/null, that would effectively 'precache' the application.
Also, try building from source if you can, you'll be able to set the optimization and several options that you don't see with a binary-only install.
For a production machine I would output the results from an 'emerge -upv world' to a file and have it mailed to myself. Good thinking.
Every morning I'll have a list of what should be updated waiting in my email box.
I have cron.daily (the *nix 'task scheduler') do an 'emerge -u world' on one machine, I also have a script in cron.hourly that searches the config directories for changed or new files and reminds me by echoing them from .login file.
/etc/._cfg0000_fstab /etc/conf.d/._cfg0000_hdparm
Basically every time I log in in the morning I get a message like:
# Current files on iceage.doughtyhouse.net that need a looksie:
#
#
#
It's not windowsupdate, but it gets the job done even when I'm on vacation, and I've never had trouble with config files that get TOO out-of-date to still work.
Um, average users don't usually mind jotting their login and password down and leaving it on their desk so I can fix thier PCs while they're at lunch either.
Average Users have their passwords POSTED in their cubes, or taped to the back of thier calculators, or under the ridge of their lockable storage next to their lockable storage's key.
I just booted my 500MHz laptop in 20 seconds in Linux, that's from GRUB to login. Booting Windows 2000 on it takes about 80 seconds from 'press F8' to 'Login'
Also, when the linux box says I'm good to login, it is, everything is already loaded. The windows box sits there for a while AFTER I login to sort itself out and let me to the desktop. I think it's because *nix INIT process wants to load services first and let users in later, Windows is the other way around.
Wow, I live in RI, pay 3.75% income tax to the state, 7 or 8 in sales, and I think I pay about 15 - 20% federal income tax. Adds up to about 30%. There's extra taxes on gas, booze, and smokes, but I think that doesn't really add up too much in my life (work mileage is reimbursed tax-free).
That's good to hear. I pay about 23% of my income total on taxes because I only make 24K/year. I'm glad the system works.
My question is:
If the federal tax rate tops off at about 43% and sales tax is usually between zero and 10%, how much loot do YOU make to pay half in taxes? Or are you just another American on a rant calling "30%" "50%" for good measure?
OS X has been getting faster and faster with each version. The reasoning is that the entire system is built with GCC, which has been getting better PowerPC optimization since Apple began contributing. Panther is built with gcc-3.3 (right now), which includes improved support for the PowerPC line, and DFA support for defining pipelines (better optimization/register usage).
Also, the core of the OS was native to x86, so I'm sure they keep finding bits and pieces that are optimized for that architecture and rewriting them.
Not to mention that the libraries are all very 'young' and Apple is dealing with a LOT of uncharted territory (for Apple, at least) with prelinking and UNIX in general.
I'd expect the trend to continue for quite a while, GCC-3.4 should bring us even more optimization, and I'm sure Apple engineers have a LOT of stones left to turn over.
AFAIK, you can pull the -current darwin kernel from CVS. Most of the underlying UNIX core is free and CVS versions are available (from Apple or elsewhere).
Apple obviously can't be showcasing projects they're cooking up that aren't announced yet.
Maybe not for a notebook. I had an EPIA and I kept it in the trunk of my car. When I needed to fix totally borked client's machines I just hooked them up to the EPIA.
The small form factor makes these things easy enough to carry around in a totebag or in your car. I know I travel to different sites every day, often several times each day. These things let me set up 'camp' in an empty cube and still do all my freakish technical work.
I feel VERY different about my home country since 9/11|PATRIOT|FCC-deregulation.
I see all these people waving flags for a country that we've let slip through our fingers. I see Democrats and Republicans fighting so hard for corporate money that the've become a single entity. I see schools filled to the brim with kids who have no future, kids who won't even be able to work at McDonalds because they can't formulate sentences. I see HUGE numbers of autistic crack-babies growing up into homogenized learning environments where they suck the money from schools. I see the same picture on all three broadcast TV channels on my set, and they're all chanting for their owner's interests. I see the gap between rich and poor growing. I see real wages dropping so I'll never get to provide enough for a full-time mother for my [future] children. I see gas prices that do not reflect actual supplies. I see 401K programs instead of traditional but very effective and safe pension programs. I see that there's no way to afford healthcare, auto insurance, rent, food, and heat unless I and my roommate work 60 hours apiece each week. I see police officers in strip clubs instead of speed traps (really). I see a people so willing to BELIEVE in dirty politicians because 'they all are, it's politics'.
I don't hate America. America is gone. I hate the demented empire of pseudo-freedom that lies between Mexico and Canada.
Seriously,
Get an old 8MHz Mac Plus with 20MB hard drive, put HyperCard and a simple stack to handle the timesheet on it. It'll never die, it won't give you any shit, and it's damn cute sitting there useful after almost 20 years of service.
Have HyperCard dump activity to a textfile on a floppy every 15 minutes. The obscurity of the system (and the lack of eject button on the floppy) means you can have a somewhat secure setup.
If you change the name of HyperCard to 'Finder' and put it into the system 6 system folder it will auto-load at boot time, and you can name the timesheet stack to 'Home' and it will load first too. Using system 6 WITHOUT multifinder would let you 'lock in' users to the stack and prevent them from doing anything else.
My dad still runs his freelance biz off a Mac Classic with a 40MB hard drive. It's a beautiful thing. Of course, he has a 'real' workstation to do the graphics and web stuff, but the classic does all the recordkeeping and back-end work.
AFAIK, commented code shows the defaults, PAM is PROBABLY ON in your case. Most of us use PAM for authentication, so I wouldn't shrug this off.
Not so fast!
The LAST vulnerabilities were for 3.6 and 3.7 as well, but 3.4 COULD be vulnerable as it's now 'off the beaten path' and these vulnerabilities seem to have been discovered in a code audit triggered by the recent attention given to OpenSSH. Apple had to patch their 3.4 version, and I'd expect another minor software update package from Apple in the next few days to address this.
Anybody out there know if it's easy to build current versions (3.7.1p2, etc.) of OpenSSH on OS X with the developer tools installed, or is there some very compelling reason Apple is sticking to 3.4 and just adding to it?
I had a cool idea for this sort of thing. Gnutella clients usually connect to any of a number of 'master servers' for a list of 'ultrapeer' index servers. If my ISP intercepted those requests and responded with nodes INSIDE their networks (preferably in ascending order of 'internet distance') the gnutella clients would be much more effective AND the bandwidth costs on the ISP would be much lower.
If I'm on Cox.net and I hit up a gnutella master for a list of index servers, I'd like to have it give me the index server on my subnet or network FIRST, then move out from there. 'Internal' traffic (that which doesn't traverse another company's lines) costs next-to-nothing for an ISP, they only really pay for the traffic that passes their routers.
This would also keep the RIAA at least a little bit farther out of the picture, as the P2P networks would be a little bit harder to plumb from outside the ISP.
Oh really? I was at a school last week and several teachers back from sabbatical all over the world had brought back DVDs to show the students examples of foreign filmmaking and culture. I had to break them the bad news that the reason their DVDs won't play here isn't broken DVD players, it's the region encoding. I told them I could circumvent it, but the tools to do it were illegal to use and I wasn't going to take the risk.
My girlfriend wanted me to rip a few songs and whip up a CD of MP3s so she could listen at work. No deal, the CD just wouldn't rip. I asked to look at the packaging, the 'Compact Disc - Digital Audio' logo was missing. I had to tell her that her CD was unrippable, and she'd have to tote the original to work, which she won't do because it cost her $20 and she won't risk having a coworker scratch it.
This stuff DOES affect lots of people, but most folks chalk up the failures to broken hardware, or damaged media, not DRM. The EFF needs to buy some commercial time on prime-time to teach people about this, because the problem is too technical to garner support without real-world stories getting people to call their representing officials.
That's what life generally does, it replicates, and the 'errors' are where evolution takes place. Asexual species generally are less adaptable because they don't get to 'mix' genes while 'replicating'.
'replicate' is if I re-type something you wrote.
'duplicate' is if I put it on a photocopier.
There's not much difference, but it's philosophical.
There are a bunch of Compaq keyboards with a built-in trackball, they're not to practical for serious use, but they work great for controlling that 'second machine' lying around.
Bullshit, what we all hold dear as our loved tech jobs are a total drag on the companies we work for. Moving overpaid jobs to India will free up our companies to maximize profit to fold over into lower consumer costs and greater benefits for the OTHER employees. Nobody who knows business WANTS an IT department raping the rest of the company for money, they just HAVE to have one to be able to use computers.
Trust me, it will suck for us personally, but it's just a part of business evolution. Trying to artificially stop companies from finding ways to lower costs would end up turning this country into a fiefdom of the house and senate, as parties vie for special treatment in light of 'the foreign threat'.
Granted, the CEOs will take a disproportionate share, and that should be stopped, but they're not the source of the problem, capitalism is. Every time you buy something from a company wiith overpriced executives you vote for that way of life.
I'm sorry, but I get a strong feeling that you're way out in dreamland.
Let's get some things straight first, no hard drive or ram can be 'as fast' as a processor, because that's like saying my coffee cup is as fast as my bicycle, it's meaningless.
A solid-state hard drive has to get all that data addressed, and it has to pump it over some sort of pipe at least several inches long, the addressing will put a buttload of latency in there, and that pipe would bring the bandwidth WAY down.
Now I wouldn't fuck with a solid-state drive at the end of a Ultra320-SCSI pipe, but that's STILL 1/10th the memory bandwidth of a modern DDR400 system. BTW, those have been around for AGES, I used to have a solid-state SCSI drive on my old 25MHz Mac, it was pretty fast, but nowhere near the internal ramdisk's speed.
RAM now works 'at the speed of the processor' if you think about it. My Athlon can chew about 2100MB/sec which is EXACTLY output of the memory I'm running (that's the 'sync' in SDRAM). The only way to change that would be to 'widen up' the CPU FSB. You could put single, dual, or quad-channel memory on your Athlon and it wouldn't make a dime's worth of difference in any benchmarks, the back of the chip is the limit, and current RAM meeets that need.
It's general knowledge that the more storage you can arrange for, the more complex your addressing system has to be to keep it tamed. Here's an example:
When your CPU asks for something it needs from RAM it asks for the contents of a block of memory, whose address is held in a pointer that is dynamic, but readily available. The CPU just 'gets' it. It's even better if that block is already in the cache, as the cache buffers will satisfy the request before the memory controller even bothers to retrieve the block from RAM.
When your app needs something from DISK it has to send a request through the OS (in RAM) to do a lookup in the filesystem and give an address, which is shuttled over to the disk driver to fetch from the drive and back to a generic filesystem driver to present to the app. Should the filesystem not have that data cached it has to perform a complex lookup of where the hell that file actually is on the disk, often traversing several directory files. It's very complex.
What you're saying will eventually happen, but not for at least a decade. Someday we WILL drop the two-tiered approach to personal computing, and ther'll be 'unified storage' for running apps and storing files (like the palm pilot, but better) and it will be good. Until then we've not yet miniaturized the electronics enough to move over to that paradigm. I think nanotech/biotech will play a HUGE role in making the memory, cpu, and IO processor components small enough to run cool and unplugged.
I think Microsoft should have a 'rolling' security pack going, every update would be added to one big cumulative package that was kept current on windowsupdate. Imagine how great it would be to only have to apply ONE big patch after a clean install, instead of install, update IE, service pack, critical updates, repeat until clean.
Also, products like IE6, DirectX, and WindowsMedia could be rolled into another 'rolling upgrades' patch that would be similar in nature.
I'm getting REALLY sick of supporting Windows 98 and 2000 machines, it's beginning to take several hours to manually apply all the updates. XP isn't any better.
I understand that a lot of sysadmins would want to take things 'piecemeal', and the current methods should be kept as well for them.
I stand corrected.
At least the Chinese guy gets free housing, food, healthcare, and education...
:-)
in theory.