What I don't understand is how four of you people have TOTALLY MISSED THE POINT. The point isn't the GNU people are going to change the license, it if the fact the original comment I replied to implied that Linux was somehow a notorious badass on its own. The Linux kernel means squat without userland programs to run on top of it. Even if your idiotic reply situation came to fruition and the BSD toolset was ported to run on the Linux kernel, the kernel which is Linux would still depend on someone else's userland code.
The FSF has a say in Linux standards because they have provided the userland tools that Linux currently relies on. Until Linus whips out a Unix-like toolset to run on top of his kernel and tells the FSF to go suck a lemon they ought to have a say in the direction Linux is headed. If YOU were writing the userland code for a kernel wouldn't you want a say in where exactly the kernel was going? Do you want to have to rewrite your entire codebase to support changes in the kernel's API or to handle some sort of new operating paradigm the kernel programmers decided to hammer out? If you're involved in the system's development and operation as the FSF is you need to have at least some say in whats happening with the system as a whole. Learn to grok better buddy.
Whether RMS WOULD isn't the point. The point is without the GNU toolset Linux amounts to a hill of beans. Do you miss the point often or was this just a special case?
You've got to be joking. The FSF wants to call it GNU/Linux because without the GNU toolset there'd be no Linux. Just about ever base system tool in any Linux distro was written by the GNU folks. Linux is just the kernel, everything else has been written by other people. If the GNU people suddenly decided that their software was no longer open source and changed their licensing Linux as an OS would be up a creek without a canoe. The Linux kernel would sit around idling while all the GNU stuff can be ported to run on [insert kernel here].
With regards to the kernel itself Linus is the monkey at the top of the pole, everywhere else he's just a normal monkey with a Finnish accent. He has no control over the direction of any of the GNU tools and the FSF doesn't have control over the kernel. At the system level where the twain meet the FSF has as much say asanyone else. They are the ones maintaining the tools every other Linux developer is using.
Hopefully any JPL commercialization doesn't work out the same way as the space shuttle. When someone pays beaucoup cash to send something up on the shuttle the money goes not back to NASA but instead goes back into the general fund. When someone pays to use the space shuttle Congress uses that cash to give themselves a raise or do whatever else they want. So not only is NASA given an insultingly tight budget but any money they make gets taken away from them.
Hopefully the federal part of JPL's charter won't suck all the cash out of commercialization. JPL has a ton of cool things they could license out to commercial ventures. It'd be a shame if NASA and CalTech don't get to see any of the returns.
Sigh. I already do this, my complaint is with having to go through the trouble of running two processes in order to utilize two processors. It is a design flaw in my opinion. I've been using the command line client pretty much since I started using S@H.
Fundamentally S@H needs to be able to load multiple work units all at once and then farm them out to a worker thread for every processor on the system. Having to go through the hassle of launching separate tasks from separate directories is tedious. I'm doing them a favor by running the client, at the least it should be as little hassle as possible for me devote every extra clock cycle to it. If they added such features it would only benefit them as they are more easily going to get more extra clock cycles chugging away at work units.
What I want is the ability to run the process as a low priority deamon. Even that shell needs to have setiathome attached to a terminal. That doesn't do me much good with a headless system that acts as only a fileserver, unless I maintain an active connection to it.
Please SETI@Home developers, if you chance my reading this please consider what I have to say.
Graphicless client. Yes I'm aware there is a command line client, it is a main in the ass to get running and have STAY running for many people. I'd like a client I can load up as a service in WinNT or a deamon in Unix that will run without my futzing with it or having to do anything but have the damn thing load from init. I think there's a slew of other SETI@Home users who'd appriciate this as well.
Worker threads. Oh please oh please oh please in your next revision add worker threads. I really don't need the graphics run in one thread and work units processed in another. I've got a dual P3 system that is on 24/7. Half of its processing capacity is sitting idle since I don't run the S@H screen saver. The monitor is off whenever the system isn't in use so the screen saver isn't much use.
Those two are the most important for me really. I run a couple distributed computing clients at different times but I started with S@H and have a special place for it in my widdle heart. I'm in it for the search itself, not to just have a cool screen saver. I think there's plenty of others who wouldn't mind a built for speed version of your client.
As an aside, does anyone know if any of the S@H work units are recycled and fed into other projects like studying pulsars or radio emitting variable stars? I'm not too up on the format of S@H work units but I thought it'd be cool if astronomers studying any sort of celestial phenomenae in radio bands could recycle WUs for their own purposes, even if they don't have a big distributed cluster working on them.
Your arguement makes perfect sense and I have to say I agree. However I think the problem on the developer side doesn't lie with the fact supporting Macs would only get you.1% of 5% of the market but instead with the fact Hughes/EchoStar/everyone else screwed up originally in their implementation. The soon to be released DW4020 (maybe it is released already) is how the sat providers SHOULD have originally rolled out their connection equipment.
Using USB based equipment in my ever so humble opinion was a major screwup on their part. Besides the obscene price tag of the equipment and installation (far more than my DirecTV system cost me) the USB satellite modem was a huge turn off. It is far more inefficient to fsck with the Windows networking set up than to do it in your own little box in a self contained manner. A satellite modem with an ethernet port is a much better idea, yet again in my opinion. For starters support is rather trivial, instead of needing to rely on Windows to work properly which is a lot to ask, they only need to really maintain their own software. All the network stack customizations and proxying tricks to let the network run on a high latency connection would be relatively simple to maintain on something like VxWorks or some other embedded system. All the end user would need is an ethernet port which in available on a huge percentage of systems, including every Mac made since the iMac.
At the time I was looking at DirectWay about when I was looking for boradband and was picking up a DirecTV system anyways the only satellite modem options were USB. Had I been able to plug it into my Ethernet hub I probably would have bought the service. For a long time I lived out of reach of both cable and DSL and my telephone line choked data down at a staggering 24kbit/s. Now I have a cable modem plugged into my router which is plugged into my hub. I think there's plenty of Linux/Mac/Whatever users who also would have signed up for their service a long time ago and thus been locked into satellite instead of opting for cable or DSL. I think Hughes dropped the ball with DirectWay, it had a major opening even in metropolitan areas before the massive cable internet rollouts of the past two years. Not only could they have likely increased their customer base but they could have also lowered their costs by not relying on Windows hacks in order to get their systems to work right.
Luck be a crossdresser tonight
on
Slashdot Turns 5
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· Score: 5, Funny
Funny how this appeared just above the "what is the net doing to you" article. That is some perverse synchronicity.
I don't even remember my first post or when exactly it was I first registered. I used to think having a UID above 10,000 made me a Jonny come lately. Now I'm like the girzzled old man that shoos little kids off his front lawn. Maybe from now on I'll use a hose instead of my cane.
Windows still sucks, Linux is still in beta, AMD makes chips worth buying, 3Dfx is no more, AOL is spelled EVIL, Apple is cool again, Be is no longer cool (sorry OpenBeOS guys), Netscape is abbriviated EVIL, Internet Explorer still sucks, Lord of the Rings was finally made into a movie, The Phantom Menace blew goats, Natalie Portman is still hot despite her lack of petrification, apparently all my base are belong to someone, the internet is now aplace where evil cool people hang out, being a geek still gets you beat up, slashdot has advertisements, Rob STILL doesn't acknowlege story submitters and user comments as being important in the slightest to the popularity of slashdot, Stephen King has died several times at various ages, and even I have imagined a Beowulf cluster of naked and petrified Natalie Portmans pouring hot grits down my pants.
It's been a strange five years. If I didn't like the ride can I get a refund?
You're wrong about my comment. Learn to live with it. There's good defenses of P2P sharing but I've yet to see them presented by the typical slashbot poster. You don't need to be Lawrence Lessig to come up with a good defense of P2P sharing.
Reading that was like watching an ape stick a blade of grass into an termite mound. You want to truly believe said ape is cognisant but deep down you have to accept the bitter reality.
What exactly was the point of that? Seriously what were your motivations? I wanted an argument defended or attacking the trade of music files on P2P networks, something juicy that makes sense and can be retold to some retard off the street in a manner they can easily understand. All you did was assume I think all slashdot posters want to steal music. Did I suggest that? I didn't think I did.
Why not some discussion about the legalities and practicalities of P2P music trading rather than an attempted rimshot on your part based on an erroneous assumption? Try not to iron a hole in the back of your shirt.
My goal is to get people to think logically about their arguments. I'm not going to sit back and tell anyone what to do or what is right, right and wrong are entirely subjective to your frame of reference. What I think is "right" might not be. Objectively however a good argument with strong positive points backing up your claim is going to make a lot more sense than a quiet mumbling saying you are owed by the world some sort of ability to get music for free.
P2P isn't necessarily stealing, I'd posit that the RIAA's stranglehold on the recording industry and music distribution channels is stealing. Buying CDs doesn't support Pearl Jam, Weezer, Snoop Dogg, or Cletus the Slack Jawed Yokel. Buying CDs puts money in Mike Geffen, Robert Morgado, and Tommy Mattola's wallets. Pirating those bands albums however takes money out of their pockets however. Why? Because record companies are in the business for the money. They take from their bands' bottom line to make up for lost sales.
I don't want ARGUMENTS I find acceptable, I want strong arguments no matter what side of the coin they are on. The discussion will steer itself from there. Whining because Napster died or claiming Freenet is the answer does not change the fact that the RIAA is screwing bands, screwing consumers and screwing you. P2P is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to media companies. They want DRM microchips in your skull and bottled air for you to buy and breath while you sing along to whatever POS band you're listening to. P2P increases awareness of good music beyond the tripe overplayed on the radio. Internet radio is often times free of the useless banter of inane DJs trying to fill up a minute and a half their corporate masters requested them to. These are both under attack from the RIAA because it threatens their revenue model. Come up with good ideas to defend these things and the defense will build. If you can present a logical and understandable argument to a heavy headed hipster walking down the street you can make a big difference. Explaining the intricacies of Gnutella's node discovery system will do crap.
What happens when your friend never buys the record you gave him the MP3s of but continues to listen to? Do people have 40GB hard drives stuffed with "samples" of music they build playlists out of, just to turn themselves onto a band? Is it that or are people being cheap and deciding they don't need to pay for music that was ripped off a CD?
This is constructive, I want you to further argue your point.
Damn. Every time one of these articles gets posted all it turns out to be is whining about the RIAA shutting down P2P sharing and someone's right to steal music. Unless you wrote and performed the music yourself that you're trading, what right do you have to trade it? Please someone intelligently defend the right to trade music you don't own the rights to. There's some good reasons and legitimate reasons to do it but I'm wondering if any slashdrones are capable enough of rational thought to come up with any.
Wow, Lindows in bundling Netscape 7. Timothy can you even read? Jesus dude, it says in the TITLE OF THE ARTICLE "Lindows, Netscape team up". Linux finally gets AIM and AOL Mail. Is that what you consider an AOL client? So, GAIM and Opera both able to access such systems are AOL clients? Color me frickin suprised.
This isn't some genius marketing move that will sway the unwashed masses to Linux either. It is Netscape, not AOL 7.0, AOLites who were born and raised on AOL know AOL for being AOL they care little about some program called Netscape "does that have the internet on it? AOL comes with the internet so I use it". This is news for people who don't read good or at all, not geeks...wait this is slashdot. Nevermind.
A short haul? The longest part of the trip is the first couple minutes during take-off and the last couple before landing. By the time you're in a Lunar insertion orbit you're still in orbit around the Earth and used up most of your fuel, the trip to the moon is a couples days of coasting before being caught by its gravity.
The ISS is expensive as hell because the Shuttle is launching it with its $10,000 per pound launch cost. Expendible rockets could launch systems for a much lower price tag per pound. According to NASA a person consumes 2.2 pounds of oxygen, 1.3 pounds of food, and nearly 6 pounds of water each day. Water and oxygen are relatively easy to stick in a closed loop system, on Salyut 6 water was extracted from cosmonauts exhalations and reclaimed. The system boasted about a 50% return rate and dropped the weight of stored water on the station from 10.2 to tons to only 2 tons. Mir had a closed loop air filtration system and there is an abundance of sunlight on the Moon for two weeks, that is plenty of time to generate a slew of oxygen. That isn't even to mention all the oxygen stored in the ilmenite in Lunar basalt ejectae.
A Lunar research station would cost little more if any than the in my opinion failed ISS. Observatories on the moon don't need to be reboosted after a period of time because their orbits have degraded. Systems mostly buried under lunar soil are also going to last longer than equipment exposed to space. Small robots with little more capability than the Mars Pathfinder rover can set up telescopes and antenna dishes. Hell a lander for a human group could double as a housing or mounting for a telescope. After you've left and gone the telescope pops out of its housing and gets to work. Some optical cable laid between telescopes could net you an interferometer with of decent gathering power because there isn't a hundred miles of radiation absorbing atmosphere above it.
The ISS is expensive and is not as useful as it was originally envisioned to be. Nor is it any cheaper than it is envisioned to be. For all the PR attached to the damn thing it is really taking money away from much more worthwhile NASA projects. The Freedom project should have never been turned into the ISS. The US is footed most of the tab and not getting much in return for it. NASA shouldn't be wasting billions of dollars out of its miniscule and insulting budget to merely maintain people in space. Have them do something cool besides float around.
It's about freaking time. The moon is a great place to do all sorts of stuff and it is just sitting there a few days trip from us. For thirty years no one has done anything about it. There's been no refining of technologies to get us there, the Saturn project was pretty much scrapped and the last rockets were used to send Skylab up.
If we'd kept with the game plan we could have had at least a semi-permenent base on the Moon which I think is a bit more useful than the craptacular ISS we've been wasting money on. If anything a large radio interferometer array on the far side would have a pretty damn clear view of the entire microwave spectrum, and not the relatively small window available in the New Mexico desert. H2 is a good SETI frequency by all guesses but there's plenty of other frequencies that ought to be searched as well. It makes sense a spacefaring culture would send signal on a frequency that proves they've managed to get off their Earth-like world (outside the H2 band).
The same goes for optical telescopes, you don't have the problem of atmospheric drag or ionizing influence on your imaging system. The Hubble is a great system but a couple smaller systems on the Lunar surface wouldn't be too shabby of a setup. They could be a combination stellar/solar observatories. They spend two weeks observing the stars while they're shaded and two weeks watching the Sun.
Human habitation isn't needed to use the Moon for reseach, a couple of automated systems would do nicely. That's my opinion. So nyeh.
There's tons of different solutions that have been outlined here, it seems from your comments you dismiss them because they "encumber" your students and make them feel bad and icky. It is not their network nor are the computers theirs, they don't have rights to them. Lab computers belong to whoever owns them and not whatever student sits down in front of them. If you're worried about them feeling encumbered by your security you're not doing your job properly.
You make the systems secure so no one can easily screw them up preventing other students from using them. There's a lot of jackasses that love to break systems or "customize" them preventing anyone else from getting any use out of them at all. There's also the people who feel that because a school has a particular amount of bandwidth, they ought to be able to monopolize it to download ripped DVDs and MP3s. You secure your systems and your network so everyone can use it because it is a shared resource. You aren't supposed to leave systems wide open for them to be abused.
Let people do what they need to do with as little hassle as possible. Don't allow people to abuse your systems though. I've managed a Mac lab before and the previous admin decided not to lock down any of the systems. The computers crashed constantly and hardly anyone could get on the web. I spent weeks getting Carracho servers, SETI@Home clients, and copies of Starcraft off all the systems. After the systems were locked down we didn't have any problems. If people want to play Starcraft or run a Carracho server (which was probably used to ship off copies of software we had) they can do it at home. They don't need to use your lab for it unless you specifically allow them to.
Your caveat is a "good".conf file. Run through/etc real quick for me and tell me how many "good".conf files there are in there. If you come up with more than a small handful, which will likely include httpd.conf, I'll be truly suprised. Open Source documentation is typically worth crap,.h files are waiting for you to get confused about particular functions, and man pages have nothing even close to trouble shooting.
A CLI doesn't necessarily make you any smarter than a GUI does. The information you get back is eitherj ust a raw dump to the terminal or a log file. How many log files in/var can you fully understand or even explain to someone? I've been using Unix systems for years and I have a hard time pinpointing exactly what a problem is. A badly designed CLI app is just as bad as a badly designed GUI. It all comes back to the programmer.
If I write a GUI that tells you exactly what went wrong and how to fix it or tells you exactly what the system is doing it is a good GUI. The same if I write a good.conf, and have contextual data written to the log file or terminal for a CLI app. Error checking and reporting is typically the most bothersome thing to do when writing an app and also the most tedious, who wants to write an error reporting system, there's no geeky challenge to it like there is solving the main problem your application tackles. Don't bash GUIs, bash lazy developers.
The four way Xeons IIRC had two buses with point to point links to the memory controller. A pair of chips was on a bus but there were two busses for the chips to sit on. Even at the relatively low speeds of the Xeons four processors on a single bus is far too much overhead. There are a few systems kicking around with up to 32 Xeon chips all linked together with custom hack crossbar switches and other engineerery.
You've never worked with print quality media in Photoshop have you? Never rendered a movie with any amount of special effects in FCP or After Effects? Apply a filter to an image meant to be stuck on an 8 foot tall poster. The G4 even at its fastest (previously the fastest) is not going to finish this process very quickly. Very few filters take advantage of AltiVec so you're basically stuck with the G4s single FP pipeline. Next time use the apps in a real environment before saying the G4 is the fastest chip ever made.
While I'd rather get stuff done on a Mac as I like the environment ten times better than Windows, if you were going on a raw speed comparison a Athlon MP Windows system is going to mop the floor with even the fastest G4. A lot of software on MacOS is really great in my opinion, the systems running said software have a lot of room for improvement.
It's called the Osborne effect. Look up the history of Osborne computer corporation. Apple is onhe of the two companies that completely ate up their market. Coincidentally IBM is the other.
There's little to worry about with porting of apps. Unless you've got some seriously processor dependent assembly in your PPC binary there's little that will stop it from running on a POWER chip. The PowerPC instruction set is a subset of the POWER one meaning POWER ostensibily has more instructions besides the ones PowerPC has. It is trivial to compile an app for generic PPC code that will run on every PPC chip you can find.
I don't get what you mean by the G4 "showing its age", it isn't some ancient chip pulled out of a tar pit. It's performance problems come from the low clock speed and the lack of multiple floating point pipelines. That is more of an implementation issue than an overall design issue. The Athlon has 3 FP pipelines, the G4 has one. AltiVec is fine if you can fine the parallelism it is good at in your code. Most people for go that effort and stick to simple floating point operations. Hence the Athlon's high floating point performance.
Please people, 64-bits does not equal performance, instructions per second is the important factor. With 8 way superscalar goodness the POWER4 design gets stuff done not with its 64-bit GPRs but the fact it can suck down multiple integer and floating point operations at once and out of order. You've got the potential of 4 FLOPs per cycle in the POWER4, at just 1.25GHz that's 5 GFLOPS of plain old floating point performance. That is twice the Athlon's performance at the same clock speed. A second core would effectively double that rate since the cores on a POWER4 share their L2 cache making them look like a single chip.
What are you smoking? The Darwin kernel can scale up to 32 processors. The 2 processor limit is definitely not in the kernel itself. It is actually a probably with the design of the G4. Instead of a point to point link to the memory controller the G4s are on a shared bus. Stick more than two processors on a shared bus topology like that and your overhead is going to eat any extra performance you can manage to get.
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What I don't understand is how four of you people have TOTALLY MISSED THE POINT. The point isn't the GNU people are going to change the license, it if the fact the original comment I replied to implied that Linux was somehow a notorious badass on its own. The Linux kernel means squat without userland programs to run on top of it. Even if your idiotic reply situation came to fruition and the BSD toolset was ported to run on the Linux kernel, the kernel which is Linux would still depend on someone else's userland code.
The FSF has a say in Linux standards because they have provided the userland tools that Linux currently relies on. Until Linus whips out a Unix-like toolset to run on top of his kernel and tells the FSF to go suck a lemon they ought to have a say in the direction Linux is headed. If YOU were writing the userland code for a kernel wouldn't you want a say in where exactly the kernel was going? Do you want to have to rewrite your entire codebase to support changes in the kernel's API or to handle some sort of new operating paradigm the kernel programmers decided to hammer out? If you're involved in the system's development and operation as the FSF is you need to have at least some say in whats happening with the system as a whole. Learn to grok better buddy.
Whether RMS WOULD isn't the point. The point is without the GNU toolset Linux amounts to a hill of beans. Do you miss the point often or was this just a special case?
You've got to be joking. The FSF wants to call it GNU/Linux because without the GNU toolset there'd be no Linux. Just about ever base system tool in any Linux distro was written by the GNU folks. Linux is just the kernel, everything else has been written by other people. If the GNU people suddenly decided that their software was no longer open source and changed their licensing Linux as an OS would be up a creek without a canoe. The Linux kernel would sit around idling while all the GNU stuff can be ported to run on [insert kernel here].
With regards to the kernel itself Linus is the monkey at the top of the pole, everywhere else he's just a normal monkey with a Finnish accent. He has no control over the direction of any of the GNU tools and the FSF doesn't have control over the kernel. At the system level where the twain meet the FSF has as much say asanyone else. They are the ones maintaining the tools every other Linux developer is using.
Hopefully any JPL commercialization doesn't work out the same way as the space shuttle. When someone pays beaucoup cash to send something up on the shuttle the money goes not back to NASA but instead goes back into the general fund. When someone pays to use the space shuttle Congress uses that cash to give themselves a raise or do whatever else they want. So not only is NASA given an insultingly tight budget but any money they make gets taken away from them.
Hopefully the federal part of JPL's charter won't suck all the cash out of commercialization. JPL has a ton of cool things they could license out to commercial ventures. It'd be a shame if NASA and CalTech don't get to see any of the returns.
Sigh. I already do this, my complaint is with having to go through the trouble of running two processes in order to utilize two processors. It is a design flaw in my opinion. I've been using the command line client pretty much since I started using S@H.
Fundamentally S@H needs to be able to load multiple work units all at once and then farm them out to a worker thread for every processor on the system. Having to go through the hassle of launching separate tasks from separate directories is tedious. I'm doing them a favor by running the client, at the least it should be as little hassle as possible for me devote every extra clock cycle to it. If they added such features it would only benefit them as they are more easily going to get more extra clock cycles chugging away at work units.
Don't makestupid assumptions about people.
ASS.
What I want is the ability to run the process as a low priority deamon. Even that shell needs to have setiathome attached to a terminal. That doesn't do me much good with a headless system that acts as only a fileserver, unless I maintain an active connection to it.
Please SETI@Home developers, if you chance my reading this please consider what I have to say.
Graphicless client. Yes I'm aware there is a command line client, it is a main in the ass to get running and have STAY running for many people. I'd like a client I can load up as a service in WinNT or a deamon in Unix that will run without my futzing with it or having to do anything but have the damn thing load from init. I think there's a slew of other SETI@Home users who'd appriciate this as well.
Worker threads. Oh please oh please oh please in your next revision add worker threads. I really don't need the graphics run in one thread and work units processed in another. I've got a dual P3 system that is on 24/7. Half of its processing capacity is sitting idle since I don't run the S@H screen saver. The monitor is off whenever the system isn't in use so the screen saver isn't much use.
Those two are the most important for me really. I run a couple distributed computing clients at different times but I started with S@H and have a special place for it in my widdle heart. I'm in it for the search itself, not to just have a cool screen saver. I think there's plenty of others who wouldn't mind a built for speed version of your client.
As an aside, does anyone know if any of the S@H work units are recycled and fed into other projects like studying pulsars or radio emitting variable stars? I'm not too up on the format of S@H work units but I thought it'd be cool if astronomers studying any sort of celestial phenomenae in radio bands could recycle WUs for their own purposes, even if they don't have a big distributed cluster working on them.
Your arguement makes perfect sense and I have to say I agree. However I think the problem on the developer side doesn't lie with the fact supporting Macs would only get you .1% of 5% of the market but instead with the fact Hughes/EchoStar/everyone else screwed up originally in their implementation. The soon to be released DW4020 (maybe it is released already) is how the sat providers SHOULD have originally rolled out their connection equipment.
Using USB based equipment in my ever so humble opinion was a major screwup on their part. Besides the obscene price tag of the equipment and installation (far more than my DirecTV system cost me) the USB satellite modem was a huge turn off. It is far more inefficient to fsck with the Windows networking set up than to do it in your own little box in a self contained manner. A satellite modem with an ethernet port is a much better idea, yet again in my opinion. For starters support is rather trivial, instead of needing to rely on Windows to work properly which is a lot to ask, they only need to really maintain their own software. All the network stack customizations and proxying tricks to let the network run on a high latency connection would be relatively simple to maintain on something like VxWorks or some other embedded system. All the end user would need is an ethernet port which in available on a huge percentage of systems, including every Mac made since the iMac.
At the time I was looking at DirectWay about when I was looking for boradband and was picking up a DirecTV system anyways the only satellite modem options were USB. Had I been able to plug it into my Ethernet hub I probably would have bought the service. For a long time I lived out of reach of both cable and DSL and my telephone line choked data down at a staggering 24kbit/s. Now I have a cable modem plugged into my router which is plugged into my hub. I think there's plenty of Linux/Mac/Whatever users who also would have signed up for their service a long time ago and thus been locked into satellite instead of opting for cable or DSL. I think Hughes dropped the ball with DirectWay, it had a major opening even in metropolitan areas before the massive cable internet rollouts of the past two years. Not only could they have likely increased their customer base but they could have also lowered their costs by not relying on Windows hacks in order to get their systems to work right.
Funny how this appeared just above the "what is the net doing to you" article. That is some perverse synchronicity.
I don't even remember my first post or when exactly it was I first registered. I used to think having a UID above 10,000 made me a Jonny come lately. Now I'm like the girzzled old man that shoos little kids off his front lawn. Maybe from now on I'll use a hose instead of my cane.
Windows still sucks, Linux is still in beta, AMD makes chips worth buying, 3Dfx is no more, AOL is spelled EVIL, Apple is cool again, Be is no longer cool (sorry OpenBeOS guys), Netscape is abbriviated EVIL, Internet Explorer still sucks, Lord of the Rings was finally made into a movie, The Phantom Menace blew goats, Natalie Portman is still hot despite her lack of petrification, apparently all my base are belong to someone, the internet is now aplace where evil cool people hang out, being a geek still gets you beat up, slashdot has advertisements, Rob STILL doesn't acknowlege story submitters and user comments as being important in the slightest to the popularity of slashdot, Stephen King has died several times at various ages, and even I have imagined a Beowulf cluster of naked and petrified Natalie Portmans pouring hot grits down my pants.
It's been a strange five years. If I didn't like the ride can I get a refund?
You're wrong about my comment. Learn to live with it. There's good defenses of P2P sharing but I've yet to see them presented by the typical slashbot poster. You don't need to be Lawrence Lessig to come up with a good defense of P2P sharing.
Reading that was like watching an ape stick a blade of grass into an termite mound. You want to truly believe said ape is cognisant but deep down you have to accept the bitter reality.
What exactly was the point of that? Seriously what were your motivations? I wanted an argument defended or attacking the trade of music files on P2P networks, something juicy that makes sense and can be retold to some retard off the street in a manner they can easily understand. All you did was assume I think all slashdot posters want to steal music. Did I suggest that? I didn't think I did.
Why not some discussion about the legalities and practicalities of P2P music trading rather than an attempted rimshot on your part based on an erroneous assumption? Try not to iron a hole in the back of your shirt.
My goal is to get people to think logically about their arguments. I'm not going to sit back and tell anyone what to do or what is right, right and wrong are entirely subjective to your frame of reference. What I think is "right" might not be. Objectively however a good argument with strong positive points backing up your claim is going to make a lot more sense than a quiet mumbling saying you are owed by the world some sort of ability to get music for free.
P2P isn't necessarily stealing, I'd posit that the RIAA's stranglehold on the recording industry and music distribution channels is stealing. Buying CDs doesn't support Pearl Jam, Weezer, Snoop Dogg, or Cletus the Slack Jawed Yokel. Buying CDs puts money in Mike Geffen, Robert Morgado, and Tommy Mattola's wallets. Pirating those bands albums however takes money out of their pockets however. Why? Because record companies are in the business for the money. They take from their bands' bottom line to make up for lost sales.
I don't want ARGUMENTS I find acceptable, I want strong arguments no matter what side of the coin they are on. The discussion will steer itself from there. Whining because Napster died or claiming Freenet is the answer does not change the fact that the RIAA is screwing bands, screwing consumers and screwing you. P2P is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to media companies. They want DRM microchips in your skull and bottled air for you to buy and breath while you sing along to whatever POS band you're listening to. P2P increases awareness of good music beyond the tripe overplayed on the radio. Internet radio is often times free of the useless banter of inane DJs trying to fill up a minute and a half their corporate masters requested them to. These are both under attack from the RIAA because it threatens their revenue model. Come up with good ideas to defend these things and the defense will build. If you can present a logical and understandable argument to a heavy headed hipster walking down the street you can make a big difference. Explaining the intricacies of Gnutella's node discovery system will do crap.
What happens when your friend never buys the record you gave him the MP3s of but continues to listen to? Do people have 40GB hard drives stuffed with "samples" of music they build playlists out of, just to turn themselves onto a band? Is it that or are people being cheap and deciding they don't need to pay for music that was ripped off a CD?
This is constructive, I want you to further argue your point.
Damn. Every time one of these articles gets posted all it turns out to be is whining about the RIAA shutting down P2P sharing and someone's right to steal music. Unless you wrote and performed the music yourself that you're trading, what right do you have to trade it? Please someone intelligently defend the right to trade music you don't own the rights to. There's some good reasons and legitimate reasons to do it but I'm wondering if any slashdrones are capable enough of rational thought to come up with any.
Wow, Lindows in bundling Netscape 7. Timothy can you even read? Jesus dude, it says in the TITLE OF THE ARTICLE "Lindows, Netscape team up". Linux finally gets AIM and AOL Mail. Is that what you consider an AOL client? So, GAIM and Opera both able to access such systems are AOL clients? Color me frickin suprised.
This isn't some genius marketing move that will sway the unwashed masses to Linux either. It is Netscape, not AOL 7.0, AOLites who were born and raised on AOL know AOL for being AOL they care little about some program called Netscape "does that have the internet on it? AOL comes with the internet so I use it". This is news for people who don't read good or at all, not geeks...wait this is slashdot. Nevermind.
A short haul? The longest part of the trip is the first couple minutes during take-off and the last couple before landing. By the time you're in a Lunar insertion orbit you're still in orbit around the Earth and used up most of your fuel, the trip to the moon is a couples days of coasting before being caught by its gravity.
The ISS is expensive as hell because the Shuttle is launching it with its $10,000 per pound launch cost. Expendible rockets could launch systems for a much lower price tag per pound. According to NASA a person consumes 2.2 pounds of oxygen, 1.3 pounds of food, and nearly 6 pounds of water each day. Water and oxygen are relatively easy to stick in a closed loop system, on Salyut 6 water was extracted from cosmonauts exhalations and reclaimed. The system boasted about a 50% return rate and dropped the weight of stored water on the station from 10.2 to tons to only 2 tons. Mir had a closed loop air filtration system and there is an abundance of sunlight on the Moon for two weeks, that is plenty of time to generate a slew of oxygen. That isn't even to mention all the oxygen stored in the ilmenite in Lunar basalt ejectae.
A Lunar research station would cost little more if any than the in my opinion failed ISS. Observatories on the moon don't need to be reboosted after a period of time because their orbits have degraded. Systems mostly buried under lunar soil are also going to last longer than equipment exposed to space. Small robots with little more capability than the Mars Pathfinder rover can set up telescopes and antenna dishes. Hell a lander for a human group could double as a housing or mounting for a telescope. After you've left and gone the telescope pops out of its housing and gets to work. Some optical cable laid between telescopes could net you an interferometer with of decent gathering power because there isn't a hundred miles of radiation absorbing atmosphere above it.
The ISS is expensive and is not as useful as it was originally envisioned to be. Nor is it any cheaper than it is envisioned to be. For all the PR attached to the damn thing it is really taking money away from much more worthwhile NASA projects. The Freedom project should have never been turned into the ISS. The US is footed most of the tab and not getting much in return for it. NASA shouldn't be wasting billions of dollars out of its miniscule and insulting budget to merely maintain people in space. Have them do something cool besides float around.
It's about freaking time. The moon is a great place to do all sorts of stuff and it is just sitting there a few days trip from us. For thirty years no one has done anything about it. There's been no refining of technologies to get us there, the Saturn project was pretty much scrapped and the last rockets were used to send Skylab up.
If we'd kept with the game plan we could have had at least a semi-permenent base on the Moon which I think is a bit more useful than the craptacular ISS we've been wasting money on. If anything a large radio interferometer array on the far side would have a pretty damn clear view of the entire microwave spectrum, and not the relatively small window available in the New Mexico desert. H2 is a good SETI frequency by all guesses but there's plenty of other frequencies that ought to be searched as well. It makes sense a spacefaring culture would send signal on a frequency that proves they've managed to get off their Earth-like world (outside the H2 band).
The same goes for optical telescopes, you don't have the problem of atmospheric drag or ionizing influence on your imaging system. The Hubble is a great system but a couple smaller systems on the Lunar surface wouldn't be too shabby of a setup. They could be a combination stellar/solar observatories. They spend two weeks observing the stars while they're shaded and two weeks watching the Sun.
Human habitation isn't needed to use the Moon for reseach, a couple of automated systems would do nicely. That's my opinion. So nyeh.
There's tons of different solutions that have been outlined here, it seems from your comments you dismiss them because they "encumber" your students and make them feel bad and icky. It is not their network nor are the computers theirs, they don't have rights to them. Lab computers belong to whoever owns them and not whatever student sits down in front of them. If you're worried about them feeling encumbered by your security you're not doing your job properly.
You make the systems secure so no one can easily screw them up preventing other students from using them. There's a lot of jackasses that love to break systems or "customize" them preventing anyone else from getting any use out of them at all. There's also the people who feel that because a school has a particular amount of bandwidth, they ought to be able to monopolize it to download ripped DVDs and MP3s. You secure your systems and your network so everyone can use it because it is a shared resource. You aren't supposed to leave systems wide open for them to be abused.
Let people do what they need to do with as little hassle as possible. Don't allow people to abuse your systems though. I've managed a Mac lab before and the previous admin decided not to lock down any of the systems. The computers crashed constantly and hardly anyone could get on the web. I spent weeks getting Carracho servers, SETI@Home clients, and copies of Starcraft off all the systems. After the systems were locked down we didn't have any problems. If people want to play Starcraft or run a Carracho server (which was probably used to ship off copies of software we had) they can do it at home. They don't need to use your lab for it unless you specifically allow them to.
Your caveat is a "good" .conf file. Run through /etc real quick for me and tell me how many "good" .conf files there are in there. If you come up with more than a small handful, which will likely include httpd.conf, I'll be truly suprised. Open Source documentation is typically worth crap, .h files are waiting for you to get confused about particular functions, and man pages have nothing even close to trouble shooting.
/var can you fully understand or even explain to someone? I've been using Unix systems for years and I have a hard time pinpointing exactly what a problem is. A badly designed CLI app is just as bad as a badly designed GUI. It all comes back to the programmer.
.conf, and have contextual data written to the log file or terminal for a CLI app. Error checking and reporting is typically the most bothersome thing to do when writing an app and also the most tedious, who wants to write an error reporting system, there's no geeky challenge to it like there is solving the main problem your application tackles. Don't bash GUIs, bash lazy developers.
A CLI doesn't necessarily make you any smarter than a GUI does. The information you get back is eitherj ust a raw dump to the terminal or a log file. How many log files in
If I write a GUI that tells you exactly what went wrong and how to fix it or tells you exactly what the system is doing it is a good GUI. The same if I write a good
Don't you mean
My name is ingo Molnar.
You kill -15 my parent process - Prepare to die.
The four way Xeons IIRC had two buses with point to point links to the memory controller. A pair of chips was on a bus but there were two busses for the chips to sit on. Even at the relatively low speeds of the Xeons four processors on a single bus is far too much overhead. There are a few systems kicking around with up to 32 Xeon chips all linked together with custom hack crossbar switches and other engineerery.
You've never worked with print quality media in Photoshop have you? Never rendered a movie with any amount of special effects in FCP or After Effects? Apply a filter to an image meant to be stuck on an 8 foot tall poster. The G4 even at its fastest (previously the fastest) is not going to finish this process very quickly. Very few filters take advantage of AltiVec so you're basically stuck with the G4s single FP pipeline. Next time use the apps in a real environment before saying the G4 is the fastest chip ever made.
While I'd rather get stuff done on a Mac as I like the environment ten times better than Windows, if you were going on a raw speed comparison a Athlon MP Windows system is going to mop the floor with even the fastest G4. A lot of software on MacOS is really great in my opinion, the systems running said software have a lot of room for improvement.
It's called the Osborne effect. Look up the history of Osborne computer corporation. Apple is onhe of the two companies that completely ate up their market. Coincidentally IBM is the other.
There's little to worry about with porting of apps. Unless you've got some seriously processor dependent assembly in your PPC binary there's little that will stop it from running on a POWER chip. The PowerPC instruction set is a subset of the POWER one meaning POWER ostensibily has more instructions besides the ones PowerPC has. It is trivial to compile an app for generic PPC code that will run on every PPC chip you can find.
I don't get what you mean by the G4 "showing its age", it isn't some ancient chip pulled out of a tar pit. It's performance problems come from the low clock speed and the lack of multiple floating point pipelines. That is more of an implementation issue than an overall design issue. The Athlon has 3 FP pipelines, the G4 has one. AltiVec is fine if you can fine the parallelism it is good at in your code. Most people for go that effort and stick to simple floating point operations. Hence the Athlon's high floating point performance.
Please people, 64-bits does not equal performance, instructions per second is the important factor. With 8 way superscalar goodness the POWER4 design gets stuff done not with its 64-bit GPRs but the fact it can suck down multiple integer and floating point operations at once and out of order. You've got the potential of 4 FLOPs per cycle in the POWER4, at just 1.25GHz that's 5 GFLOPS of plain old floating point performance. That is twice the Athlon's performance at the same clock speed. A second core would effectively double that rate since the cores on a POWER4 share their L2 cache making them look like a single chip.
What are you smoking? The Darwin kernel can scale up to 32 processors. The 2 processor limit is definitely not in the kernel itself. It is actually a probably with the design of the G4. Instead of a point to point link to the memory controller the G4s are on a shared bus. Stick more than two processors on a shared bus topology like that and your overhead is going to eat any extra performance you can manage to get.