Has it ever occured to you that these "rafts of links to mailing list archives, HOWTOs, message board posts, etc" are a side effect of insufficient documentation? What would you prefer, some gossip on the mailing list, some step by step guide that may or may not work in your case or precise authoritative documentation to help you understand how to do whatever it is you want to do and warn you of any possible consequences? I'd take the latter any day of the week.
It seems to me that many Linux users, especially those that have been using it for a long time like you did, picked up this nasty habbit of hitting the search engines first instead of reading the proper documentation, probably because documentation on most linux distributions is rather poor. In the case of the FreeBSD you have the excelent manual pages documenting nearly anything you can imagine (including drivers, configuration files and misc information like ports(7) for example) and on top of that the handbook and the FAQ. If you still can't find an answer, you can search the questions mailing list, if you find nothing, you can ASK a question.
How do you use VESA modes with the console? read the manual page of the console driver of course, syscons(4), which points you to the direction of vidcontrol(1) among other things, that explains what you have to do.
How do you optimize your UDMA drive performance? Well, first of all you don't have to - I never found an disk/controller combination that was set incorrectly by FreeBSD. While the kernel boots up the transfer mode of all drives is clearly indicated, ie:
ad0: 42934MB <WDC WD450AA> [87233/16/63] at ata0-master UDMA33
If you want to change it, you check on the manual page of the respective driver, in this case ata(4) where you will find that there is a sysctl knob to tweak them should you really have to. Which you won't.
As for newbies being frustrated, I rather doubt it. The handbook explains rather well how to go about looking for answers in the (excellent) manual pages, and after a couple of times one gets used to it. What IS really frustrating is having to rely on mailing list archive gossip that might offer information that is old or does not apply.
Suppose this, suppose that - that's a lot of assumptions no? In fact your argument has so many holes I could drain spaghetti in it!
Come on, if 90% of Linux users choose to use something with a license that is not apropriate, or even Microsoft-like as you said, they might as well have chosen to use Windows 2000, right? It's not the LICENSE that would have screwed them, but their CHOICE. Which brings me back to what I've said, if you don't like the license of something, don't use it! You don't like the license of the Czech localisation? DON'T USE IT. Sure, if StarOffice was GPLd they probably wouldn't be able to do this, but they're not forcing anyone to use their non-free stuff. You don't need a license like the GPL to 'protect' you - all it takes is common sense. The same common sense you use when you chose not to go for a proprietary operating system to begin with.
Bollocks... nothing will break apart because of non GPL licensing. Nobody FORCES anyone to use the Czech localization as stupidly licensed by SuSE Czech, a Czech LUG could very well write one from scratch and put it under a more liberal license if there's a demand for something like this.
I *really* do not understand this phobia. No, Linux will not 'break down if someone sneaks a major subsystem into proprietary land', it will only break down for those that choose to use it, and nobody can force anyone to use anything.
Re:Volcano Report: FreeBSD JDK is world's slowest
on
FreeBSD 4.2 Is Out
·
· Score: 2
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. I guess we should also add 'benchmarks' and their interpretations to this list.
First of all, what you decided to ignore is the fact that according to those benchmarks, the slowest of the bunch is not FreeBSD's JDK, but Transvirtual Kaffe 1.0 for Linux. How convenient, but does it matter? No. Why?
TowerJ is a NATIVE COMPILER, and IBM's, as well as all the other VMs tested APPART from FreeBSDs used a JIT compiler - and we're talking about FreeBSD 2.2.8 for crying out loud. I'm surprised it actually HAD a JDK.
Needless to say, things changed:
http://www.freebsd.org/java/
> It strikes me that all the stuff
> you list above as things you like
> are to do with the FreeBSD distribution
> as opposed to it's kernel.
A distinction between the "kernel" and
a "distribution" in FreeBSD does not
exist, and doesn't make sense either.
There's one CVS repository with the kernel,
the userland, the ports and documentation,
and jkh calls for a freeze on the release
engineering branch every now and then
and rolls a release, much like 4.2 now.
> The above could all be achieved
> with a linux distribution.
In theory yes, anything can be achieved.
In practice I've seen no linux distribution
even coming close to such a degree of elegance,
although I do agree that this is subjective,
and other people might prefer Debians scheme
of organizing things.
You really have to try managing a few dozen
boxes and try to keep them up to date with
local customizations (at the source level)
both with FreeBSD and with ANY other system
to realise just how simple and elegant the
FreeBSD way is *engineered*...
-W
PS - Yes, I've tried debian and wasn't
particularly impressed.
Not a reply really, merely adding some thoughts/facts.
Of course its perfectly legal to photocopy stuff from books at a library - it's fair use.
At least here in Greece, and in the UK where I studied for a few years, copying for personal use and research was specifically excempted from copyright restrictions. As a matter of fact, its the ONLY way to access journals at the library here, because you cannot loan them. You're supposed to photocopy what you want and return them within an hour - you cannot check them out under any circumstances.
These exceptions are in place because frankly, they make sense. How on earth would one be supposed to study or do research otherwise? There's a reason library subscriptions or academic institution subscriptions are overpriced.
Besides, these are extensions for SIMD and perhaps even vector stuff. Even if it was a RISC design they'd have to add instructions for such radically new features.
You've tried to find a gui for unix equivalent to Windows, which last time I checked doesn't exist, and when you failed you started ranting. If you want to keep using the Windows gui, stick to Windows. Really lots of people use it for businss and leisure, it certainly isn't that bad.
But let's look closer at your beef with unix, and why in my opinion it is totally irrelevant. Has it ever occured to you that the majority of people actually using unix on the desktop are happy with it, or they wouldn't be using it, and they'd probably hate being forced to use Windows, or anything else for that matter, because it would be totally unfamiliar to them just like unix was to you?
Has it ever occured to you that these users couldn't care less if there's a gui & set of apps functionaly & visually equivalent to Windows, since they don't *need/want* that functionality?
And before you step in and say that if more people are to start using unix on the desktop, such a gui must be created, has it ever occured to you that such people minght not give a damn if more people start using it or not?
Why should they care what other people use on their home box. I'm using someting that I know, like and am familiar with. If you don't like it, I honestly couldn't care less. I don't care what my users are using on our network either. They should be and are free to shoot their feet any way they please.
Lately I've been using windowmaker + wterms + gtk (gtkstep rocks!) w/ some gtk apps (gimp, gtksee, xchat...) and netscape etc. During the last year or so I seem to have stabilized on a consistent setup on my laptop, workstation at home & work etc., before that I would experiment often, try new things etc. Thing is, it's been almost a year since i last did a dramatic change on the setup appart from the odd upgrade here and there, the occasional tweak here and the odd background image change =P
I can say that I finally found the ideal gui for myself - i'm very productive, everything is in the right place, it's readable (contrary to 99% of the themes on theme.org). Granted this path to nirvana wasn't painless, but hey, there's no way an out of the box gui can please all people. Accepting anything prepackaged is bound to be a compromise, including windows.
Chances are, you're probably not gonna like my setup. My point is though, that I'm not gonna like your windows setup either. You miss some windows apps on unix, I'd miss some unix apps on windows.
Oh, and for the curious, here are some shots of my gui nirvana:
XFree86 4.0.1 introduced that neat binary module thingy, and here comes nvidia releasing part of their driver as a linux kernel module!
I noticed this AFTER I ordered a TNT2... I was like, hey, it works with XFree86 4.0.1, I'll buy the thing... I'm running FreeBSD... is there any hope? Grrr.
Heh.. I recall reading on New Scientist about using really small pins dragged around a wax disk or cylinder or something. You could heat it up to make a pit, and if it hit a pit it would heat up slightly due to friction while getting out of it and you could detect that. Those pits could be really damn small.
I tried a search on their website, but couldn't come up with a link, could be its only in their print version (and I'm not searching THAT!) or I just wasn't lucky.
Talking about liveice/icecast... I got stuck setting them up the other day on a FreeBSD 4.0-R box with an AWE-64 Gold (I got icecast off ports btw). Apparently it is broadcasting great er... silence. While it could be something as stupid as merely a wrong recording source mixer setting, it could be a real gotcha that I should know about but nobody bothered to document somewhere, so here I am asking:)
I'm gonna give it another try tomorrow if I find an hour or two to spare, and I'd love to hear from anyone that has sucesfully set something like this up. I get the impression that liveice *really likes* OSS, and I wouldn't want to setup a dedicated linux box just for encoding a live audio stream due to a shortage of PCs here.
I wish I could use one of the sgi o2's here for this. Any pointers?
These things would make extremely cool and cost effective X terminals... if only they had ethernet:(
It should be a sufficiently fast X terminal over PLIP though, although it's not nearly as flexible this way. I could sure use an X terminal on the kitchen table though, I find myself eating on my desk most of the times, which kinda sucks;)
Distance (well, not really, but lag) is allready calculated for GSM/PCS/PCN AFAIK.
The deal is that with TDMA there are several 'slots' in a given 'channel' for handsets to communicate. What is happening is that there are (IIRC) 4 slots of about 20ms, and each handset grabs one and transmits during this window only. Now for the signals from potentially four handsets on a given 'channel' speaking with a base station from different distances to arrive at the correct time (with no overlap) the protocol *has* to take into account the speed of light which is not infinite, compute the lag, and ensure that the handsets broadcast that little bit earlier for everything to work.
What this means is that the base station allready knows with great accuracy the distance of a handset from it. The rest is trivial I guess. They allready track cellphones that are switched on from cell to cell (so that they know how to route the calls), and while you are actually making a call they know your exact location - I wouldn't be surprised if there was a way for the base station to initiate a 'trace' without you having to make a call. That would simplify matters greatly for the powers that be:)
The last NT Admin is no longer employed in the CC of the university, but he's still around, since he is a postgraduate student. He was wondering why he couldn't login and dropped in.
I'll remember to post a full description of the organization I work for and a staff list next along with a short list of recent changes next time I post. Not.
Er... that was the only NT box in the computer room, and we no longer employ an NT Administrator (NT Administrator? isn't that an oxymoron?) - hence that box was noone's responsibility. I took the responsibility, and replaced it with something manageable that actually works without the need for a trained monkey to go around rebooting the damn thing every now and then. As an added bonus, I used an old vt420 (we have shitloads of them gathering dust downstairs) to replace a perfectly good 17" monitor that was wasted on a goddamn server.
OK, a few weeks ago I noticed there was an NT box crashing along in our computer room, mostly emmiting SMB traffic and broadcasting some radio station via realaudio. I felt pitty for the poor thing (dual PII-233, 256MB ECC RAM, pair of nice UW drives etc) and decided to install a real OS on it.
Upon openning the case I realized it had an on-board graphics card, albeit a sucky one, so I discarded the ati rage pro that the nt admin added. I then proceeded to install freebsd on it from scratch. While I was tweaking the BIOS settings (intel mobo, phoenix bios) I found an option to redirect the console to a serial port:)
You should have seen the face of that NT admin when he saw the box he setup a few months ago attached to a vt420 doing what the NT box did and outperforming it while at it.
I wonder why this is not more common - is it so bloody hard for the BIOS to redirect the console to a serial port? I don't think so. I really don't like the idea of an add in board doing that for you, it is a major kludge. Perhaps we should make some noise to motherboard manufacturers until they understand that serial console support is a good thing, and it can be a selling point.
Hang on, isn't that a 256 color GIF they used for the comparison?
Anyway... it sure looks promising, but I'm not really impressed by that 158:1 result on this particular image, most of it comprises of a gradient that should compress rather well with their scheme. I'd like to see results with images containing more detail.
Should have been clearer - article said "Most large, critical systems run on GMT. Air Traffic Control and most military systems certainly do."
Well, they don't. Because variable length seconds suck, and that's precisely what you get with GMT that is based on the solar day. As for my computer, frankly I don't give a damn - must be at least a couple of minutes off now:)
Checked the ZDNet story, and proceeded to check the website for that new GeT thing - I allready knew about Swatch Internet Time (good idea; terrible implementation IMHO). Anyway... here's a bit from the notes to the editors accompanying the press release regarding GeT:
Greenwich Mean Time and Coordinated Universal Time Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was established as the first global time standard at the Washington Meridian Conference in 1884. Since then GMT has evolved with new advances in science and technology, and its modern day equivalent is Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). UTC is based on some 260 atomic clocks maintained by forty time laboratories around the world and coordinated by the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM). The UTC standard has been used since 1972 because it is much more stable than previous time-keeping standards which were based solely on the earth's rotation. While providing greater stability, UTC is currently adjusted with leap seconds as and when required to keep it in agreement with GMT to the nearest 0.9 seconds. Note that GMT and UTC are used synonymously here, but that UTC is the underpinning standard today.
The fact that the press release mentions GMT three times and completely ignores UTC, even though it admits that it really means UTC when it says GMT at the note, is not at all surprising to me - it is an announcement by the prime minister of the UK after all, and UTC is coordinated by BIPM in Paris;)
That aside, its a common mistake to call UTC GMT but its a mistake nonetheless, even though GMT = UTC to within a second.
Oh, and no, I'm not really that sad, I have a life - its just that I've spent some time reading stuff while setting up a GPS NTP server lately.
Article said "Most large, critical systems run on GMT. Air Traffic Control and most military systems certainly do."
I, rather pedanticaly, merely mentioned what deficiencies GMT has, why UTC was introduced, and that time critical installations use UTC.
Why would the average Internet User need split-second accurate time synched to UTC beats me. If you really want, just pick an apropriate NTP server to synch with. Many NTP servers for example get current time via GPS, that is UTC.
GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) is inadequately defined by the erratic motion of the Earth whose rate fluctuates by a few thousandths of a second a day as it wobbles along its axis and around the sun. This leads to the undesirable side effect of having variable length seconds, since all days are defined to have 24 hours of 60 minutes with 60 seconds each, but the length of the day varies.
UTC (Universal Time Coordinated) was devised and became effective on 1972/01/01 to remedy exactly this problem. UTC normally runs at the rate of cesium-beam atomic clocks, and when the difference between UTC and GMT approaches one second, a leap second is introduced to maintain synchronization.
Dunno what's planned about 4.0, but 3.9.16 merely grabbed the data and displayed it upon bootup - they were not used to compute (even optionally) modelines, which is a shame. It did use the gamma and v/h size stuff to adjust the DPI and gamma correction though.
Both the documentation and the inf file is redundant if the X server can talk to the monitor and get those details automatically... and most recent hardware (as in last 3-4 years) do that.
Basically states max resolution, horizontal/vertical freq range and v/h polarization.
I am quite sure that you can get this information easily from all PNP monitors (all recent ones, ie less than 3 year old should support this) simply by talking to them, if your graphics card supports the protocol (again, if you bought it within the last 3-4 years it will).
I think that is what windows does with most monitors anyway, it talks to them, grabs the "name" string (ie Nokia Multigraph 447Xpro) and the relevant stuff (like horizontal/vertical size in mm, polarization, freq ranges etc) and computes the rest automagically. All my monitors seem to work perfectly at the PNP mode, so the.inf files seem redundant, and such a database a waste of time if this can be implemented.
The problem, as you point out, really boils down to the majority of people in $COUNTRY falling for that "trust us, for we screw you for your own good" line. Its sad, but it happens as people stop caring for liberty having taken it for granted after a couple of generations of being "free".
We, the rest that know better, constantly remind them that liberty that is not guarded will be eventually lost, but then we're labeled paranoid or something.
Here are some quotes from fellow paranoid people then:
The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do. --Eric Hoffer
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. --Benjamin Franklin
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. --Louis D. Brandeis
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility--I welcome it. --John Fitzgerald Kennedy
I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty. --Woodrow Wilson
Slashdot Mirror
Has it ever occured to you that these "rafts of links to mailing list archives, HOWTOs, message board posts, etc" are a side effect of insufficient documentation? What would you prefer, some gossip on the mailing list, some step by step guide that may or may not work in your case or precise authoritative documentation to help you understand how to do whatever it is you want to do and warn you of any possible consequences? I'd take the latter any day of the week.
It seems to me that many Linux users, especially those that have been using it for a long time like you did, picked up this nasty habbit of hitting the search engines first instead of reading the proper documentation, probably because documentation on most linux distributions is rather poor. In the case of the FreeBSD you have the excelent manual pages documenting nearly anything you can imagine (including drivers, configuration files and misc information like ports(7) for example) and on top of that the handbook and the FAQ. If you still can't find an answer, you can search the questions mailing list, if you find nothing, you can ASK a question.
How do you use VESA modes with the console? read the manual page of the console driver of course, syscons(4), which points you to the direction of vidcontrol(1) among other things, that explains what you have to do.
How do you optimize your UDMA drive performance? Well, first of all you don't have to - I never found an disk/controller combination that was set incorrectly by FreeBSD. While the kernel boots up the transfer mode of all drives is clearly indicated, ie:
ad0: 42934MB <WDC WD450AA> [87233/16/63] at ata0-master UDMA33
If you want to change it, you check on the manual page of the respective driver, in this case ata(4) where you will find that there is a sysctl knob to tweak them should you really have to. Which you won't.
As for newbies being frustrated, I rather doubt it. The handbook explains rather well how to go about looking for answers in the (excellent) manual pages, and after a couple of times one gets used to it. What IS really frustrating is having to rely on mailing list archive gossip that might offer information that is old or does not apply.
Suppose this, suppose that - that's a lot of assumptions no? In fact your argument has so many holes I could drain spaghetti in it!
Come on, if 90% of Linux users choose to use something with a license that is not apropriate, or even Microsoft-like as you said, they might as well have chosen to use Windows 2000, right? It's not the LICENSE that would have screwed them, but their CHOICE. Which brings me back to what I've said, if you don't like the license of something, don't use it! You don't like the license of the Czech localisation? DON'T USE IT. Sure, if StarOffice was GPLd they probably wouldn't be able to do this, but they're not forcing anyone to use their non-free stuff. You don't need a license like the GPL to 'protect' you - all it takes is common sense. The same common sense you use when you chose not to go for a proprietary operating system to begin with.
Bollocks... nothing will break apart because of non GPL licensing. Nobody FORCES anyone to use the Czech localization as stupidly licensed by SuSE Czech, a Czech LUG could very well write one from scratch and put it under a more liberal license if there's a demand for something like this.
I *really* do not understand this phobia. No, Linux will not 'break down if someone sneaks a major subsystem into proprietary land', it will only break down for those that choose to use it, and nobody can force anyone to use anything.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. I guess we should also add 'benchmarks' and their interpretations to this list.
First of all, what you decided to ignore is the fact that according to those benchmarks, the slowest of the bunch is not FreeBSD's JDK, but Transvirtual Kaffe 1.0 for Linux. How convenient, but does it matter? No. Why?
TowerJ is a NATIVE COMPILER, and IBM's, as well as all the other VMs tested APPART from FreeBSDs used a JIT compiler - and we're talking about FreeBSD 2.2.8 for crying out loud. I'm surprised it actually HAD a JDK.
Needless to say, things changed:
http://www.freebsd.org/java/
-W
> It strikes me that all the stuff
> you list above as things you like
> are to do with the FreeBSD distribution
> as opposed to it's kernel.
A distinction between the "kernel" and
a "distribution" in FreeBSD does not
exist, and doesn't make sense either.
There's one CVS repository with the kernel,
the userland, the ports and documentation,
and jkh calls for a freeze on the release
engineering branch every now and then
and rolls a release, much like 4.2 now.
> The above could all be achieved
> with a linux distribution.
In theory yes, anything can be achieved.
In practice I've seen no linux distribution
even coming close to such a degree of elegance,
although I do agree that this is subjective,
and other people might prefer Debians scheme
of organizing things.
You really have to try managing a few dozen
boxes and try to keep them up to date with
local customizations (at the source level)
both with FreeBSD and with ANY other system
to realise just how simple and elegant the
FreeBSD way is *engineered*...
-W
PS - Yes, I've tried debian and wasn't
particularly impressed.
Not a reply really, merely adding some thoughts/facts.
Of course its perfectly legal to photocopy stuff from books at a library - it's fair use.
At least here in Greece, and in the UK where I studied for a few years, copying for personal use and research was specifically excempted from copyright restrictions. As a matter of fact, its the ONLY way to access journals at the library here, because you cannot loan them. You're supposed to photocopy what you want and return them within an hour - you cannot check them out under any circumstances.
These exceptions are in place because frankly, they make sense. How on earth would one be supposed to study or do research otherwise? There's a reason library subscriptions or academic institution subscriptions are overpriced.
-W
The x86 IA was, is and will remain a CISC design.
Besides, these are extensions for SIMD and perhaps even vector stuff. Even if it was a RISC design they'd have to add instructions for such radically new features.
Er... no.
You've tried to find a gui for unix equivalent to Windows, which last time I checked doesn't exist, and when you failed you started ranting. If you want to keep using the Windows gui, stick to Windows. Really lots of people use it for businss and leisure, it certainly isn't that bad.
But let's look closer at your beef with unix, and why in my opinion it is totally irrelevant. Has it ever occured to you that the majority of people actually using unix on the desktop are happy with it, or they wouldn't be using it, and they'd probably hate being forced to use Windows, or anything else for that matter, because it would be totally unfamiliar to them just like unix was to you?
Has it ever occured to you that these users couldn't care less if there's a gui & set of apps functionaly & visually equivalent to Windows, since they don't *need/want* that functionality?
And before you step in and say that if more people are to start using unix on the desktop, such a gui must be created, has it ever occured to you that such people minght not give a damn if more people start using it or not?
Why should they care what other people use on their home box. I'm using someting that I know, like and am familiar with. If you don't like it, I honestly couldn't care less. I don't care what my users are using on our network either. They should be and are free to shoot their feet any way they please.
Lately I've been using windowmaker + wterms + gtk (gtkstep rocks!) w/ some gtk apps (gimp, gtksee, xchat...) and netscape etc. During the last year or so I seem to have stabilized on a consistent setup on my laptop, workstation at home & work etc., before that I would experiment often, try new things etc. Thing is, it's been almost a year since i last did a dramatic change on the setup appart from the odd upgrade here and there, the occasional tweak here and the odd background image change =P
I can say that I finally found the ideal gui for myself - i'm very productive, everything is in the right place, it's readable (contrary to 99% of the themes on theme.org). Granted this path to nirvana wasn't painless, but hey, there's no way an out of the box gui can please all people. Accepting anything prepackaged is bound to be a compromise, including windows.
Chances are, you're probably not gonna like my setup. My point is though, that I'm not gonna like your windows setup either. You miss some windows apps on unix, I'd miss some unix apps on windows.
Oh, and for the curious, here are some shots of my gui nirvana:
shot 1
shot 2
But what about us non-linux users?
XFree86 4.0.1 introduced that neat binary module
thingy, and here comes nvidia releasing part of
their driver as a linux kernel module!
I noticed this AFTER I ordered a TNT2... I was
like, hey, it works with XFree86 4.0.1, I'll
buy the thing... I'm running FreeBSD... is
there any hope? Grrr.
Heh.. I recall reading on New Scientist about using really small pins dragged around a wax disk or cylinder or something. You could heat it up to make a pit, and if it hit a pit it would heat up slightly due to friction while getting out of it and you could detect that. Those pits could be really damn small.
I tried a search on their website, but couldn't come up with a link, could be its only in their print version (and I'm not searching THAT!) or I just wasn't lucky.
-W
Talking about liveice/icecast... I got stuck setting them up the other day on a FreeBSD 4.0-R box with an AWE-64 Gold (I got icecast off ports btw). Apparently it is broadcasting great er... silence. While it could be something as stupid as merely a wrong recording source mixer setting, it could be a real gotcha that I should know about but nobody bothered to document somewhere, so here I am asking :)
I'm gonna give it another try tomorrow if I find an hour or two to spare, and I'd love to hear from anyone that has sucesfully set something like this up. I get the impression that liveice *really likes* OSS, and I wouldn't want to setup a dedicated linux box just for encoding a live audio stream due to a shortage of PCs here.
I wish I could use one of the sgi o2's here for this. Any pointers?
-W
These things would make extremely cool and cost effective X terminals... if only they had ethernet :(
;)
It should be a sufficiently fast X terminal over PLIP though, although it's not nearly as flexible this way. I could sure use an X terminal on the kitchen table though, I find myself eating on my desk most of the times, which kinda sucks
-W
Distance (well, not really, but lag) is allready calculated for GSM/PCS/PCN AFAIK.
:)
The deal is that with TDMA there are several 'slots' in a given 'channel' for handsets to communicate. What is happening is that there are (IIRC) 4 slots of about 20ms, and each handset grabs one and transmits during this window only. Now for the signals from potentially four handsets on a given 'channel' speaking with a base station from different distances to arrive at the correct time (with no overlap) the protocol *has* to take into account the speed of light which is not infinite, compute the lag, and ensure that the handsets broadcast that little bit earlier for everything to work.
What this means is that the base station allready knows with great accuracy the distance of a handset from it. The rest is trivial I guess. They allready track cellphones that are switched on from cell to cell (so that they know how to route the calls), and while you are actually making a call they know your exact location - I wouldn't be surprised if there was a way for the base station to initiate a 'trace' without you having to make a call. That would simplify matters greatly for the powers that be
-W
Bah.
The last NT Admin is no longer employed in the CC
of the university, but he's still around, since
he is a postgraduate student. He was wondering
why he couldn't login and dropped in.
I'll remember to post a full description of the
organization I work for and a staff list next
along with a short list of recent changes next
time I post. Not.
-W
Er... that was the only NT box in the computer room, and we no longer employ an NT Administrator (NT Administrator? isn't that an oxymoron?) - hence that box was noone's responsibility. I took the responsibility, and replaced it with something manageable that actually works without the need for a trained monkey to go around rebooting the damn thing every now and then. As an added bonus, I used an old vt420 (we have shitloads of them gathering dust downstairs) to replace a perfectly good 17" monitor that was wasted on a goddamn server.
I guess it must suck to work for you.
-W
OK, a few weeks ago I noticed there was an NT
:)
box crashing along in our computer room, mostly
emmiting SMB traffic and broadcasting some radio
station via realaudio. I felt pitty for the poor
thing (dual PII-233, 256MB ECC RAM, pair of nice UW drives etc) and decided to install a real OS on
it.
Upon openning the case I realized it had an
on-board graphics card, albeit a sucky one,
so I discarded the ati rage pro that the nt
admin added. I then proceeded to install freebsd
on it from scratch. While I was tweaking the BIOS
settings (intel mobo, phoenix bios) I found an
option to redirect the console to a serial port
You should have seen the face of that NT admin
when he saw the box he setup a few months ago
attached to a vt420 doing what the NT box did and
outperforming it while at it.
I wonder why this is not more common - is it so
bloody hard for the BIOS to redirect the console
to a serial port? I don't think so. I really don't
like the idea of an add in board doing that for
you, it is a major kludge. Perhaps we should
make some noise to motherboard manufacturers
until they understand that serial console support
is a good thing, and it can be a selling point.
-W
Hang on, isn't that a 256 color GIF they used for the comparison?
Anyway... it sure looks promising, but I'm not really impressed by that 158:1 result on this particular image, most of it comprises of a gradient that should compress rather well with their scheme. I'd like to see results with images containing more detail.
-W
Should have been clearer - article said "Most large, critical systems run on GMT. Air Traffic Control and most military systems certainly do."
:)
Well, they don't. Because variable length seconds suck, and that's precisely what you get with GMT that is based on the solar day. As for my computer, frankly I don't give a damn - must be at least a couple of minutes off now
-W
The fact that the press release mentions GMT three times and completely ignores UTC, even though it admits that it really means UTC when it says GMT at the note, is not at all surprising to me - it is an announcement by the prime minister of the UK after all, and UTC is coordinated by BIPM in Paris
That aside, its a common mistake to call UTC GMT but its a mistake nonetheless, even though GMT = UTC to within a second.
Oh, and no, I'm not really that sad, I have a life - its just that I've spent some time reading stuff while setting up a GPS NTP server lately.
-W
Article said "Most large, critical systems run on GMT. Air Traffic Control and most military systems certainly do."
I, rather pedanticaly, merely mentioned what deficiencies GMT has, why UTC was introduced, and that time critical installations use UTC.
Why would the average Internet User need split-second accurate time synched to UTC beats me. If you really want, just pick an apropriate NTP server to synch with. Many NTP servers for example get current time via GPS, that is UTC.
-W
GMT? Surely you mean UTC?
GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) is inadequately defined by the erratic motion of the Earth whose rate fluctuates by a few thousandths of a second a day as it wobbles along its axis and around the sun. This leads to the undesirable side effect of having variable length seconds, since all days are defined to have 24 hours of 60 minutes with 60 seconds each, but the length of the day varies.
UTC (Universal Time Coordinated) was devised and became effective on 1972/01/01 to remedy exactly this problem. UTC normally runs at the rate of cesium-beam atomic clocks, and when the difference between UTC and GMT approaches one second, a leap second is introduced to maintain synchronization.
Hence, nobody really uses GMT.
-W
Dunno what's planned about 4.0, but 3.9.16 merely grabbed the data and displayed it upon bootup - they were not used to compute (even optionally) modelines, which is a shame. It did use the gamma and v/h size stuff to adjust the DPI and gamma correction though.
-W
Both the documentation and the inf file is redundant if the X server can talk to the monitor and get those details automatically... and most recent hardware (as in last 3-4 years) do that.
-W
Inf files really don't contain much, here's the relevant bit from my monitor's .inf:
0 .0,+,+"
.inf files seem redundant, and such a database a waste of time if this can be implemented.
[NOKIA_447Xpro.AddReg]
HKR,"MODES\1600,1200",Mode1,,"30.0-96.0,50.0-15
HKR,,ICMProfile,0,"447XP93.icm"
Basically states max resolution, horizontal/vertical freq range and v/h polarization.
I am quite sure that you can get this information easily from all PNP monitors (all recent ones, ie less than 3 year old should support this) simply by talking to them, if your graphics card supports the protocol (again, if you bought it within the last 3-4 years it will).
I think that is what windows does with most monitors anyway, it talks to them, grabs the "name" string (ie Nokia Multigraph 447Xpro) and the relevant stuff (like horizontal/vertical size in mm, polarization, freq ranges etc) and computes the rest automagically. All my monitors seem to work perfectly at the PNP mode, so the
-W
The problem, as you point out, really boils down to the majority of people in $COUNTRY falling for that "trust us, for we screw you for your own good" line. Its sad, but it happens as people stop caring for liberty having taken it for granted after a couple of generations of being "free".
We, the rest that know better, constantly remind them that liberty that is not guarded will be eventually lost, but then we're labeled paranoid or something.
Here are some quotes from fellow paranoid people then:
The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
--Eric Hoffer
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
--Benjamin Franklin
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.
--Louis D. Brandeis
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility--I welcome it.
--John Fitzgerald Kennedy
I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty.
--Woodrow Wilson
-W (who lives in a poor European country)