Oh, shut up. Not more of you people again! Did endless social problems ever stand in the way of world exploration? Just think about how many things come from the technological research required for space travel. Besides, what makes more sense? Throwing more money at the unfixable social problems of Earth, or extending the grasp of the human race into the stars? One day there may be no Earth. Should that really be the end of humanity?
Another beauty of Linux (or xBSD) is that while computers keep getting faster, the OS isn't getting any slower. In the M$ dominated world, one has to constantly upgrade one's hardware to keep the software running at the same speed. Since old computers don't really get slower with time, they are still useful to people like us. I've got a P-100 doing just fine as a remote access / web server, and a P2-266 running really well as a desktop. If I used Windows, I would be screaming for upgrades by now.
Patch Windows bugs and holes in few days? Who do you think will be looking at this code? It will take at least 5 years for hackers to comprehend it, followed by a several emergency cases of severe vomiting. Eventually, they "might" start fixing it with medical permission. :)
Solaris: Because you don't need to reboot to add hardware
Windows: Because rebooting is for adding hardware, adding software, regularly scheduled downtime, and should also be done on a daily basis to keep the machine running.
Here, at RPI, they have started a "laptop program", requiring all incoming freshman to purchase laptops. This program has the added side effect of turning most of the freshman class into "Windows junkies". You only see upperclassmen in the public UNIX labs (SGI O2's, SGI Indy's, RS/6000's, etc.).
I'm in our ACM/SIG-Linux, and we're seriously considering putting together a Linux distro for next year's laptops. The plan is to be handing out CDs when the freshman are getting their machines. It will hopefully be a painless install, since the laptops this year come with a partition structure that lets us use a 1.5GB space with no loss of data.
Speaking on the subject of a generalized "University Distribution", I think to some degree it's a wonderful idea. We use AFS and Kerberos just like many other schools. While there are differences, of course, there are lots of similarities. Maybe the best option would be if someone created a University "reference distro", that individual LUGs would take and tweak to their specific requirements. It would make it a lot easier for everyone to "jump on the bandwagon".
P.S. VA Linux, if your out there, please donate a Linux lab! The reason NT is spreading to fast, is because it's being given in donations from everywhere.
In the future, everyone should be able to go down to their basement and see nothing but big blue, wall to wall. Houses should feel alive, and power bills should be enourmous. Of course, every room in the house needs an EBSDIC-compatable terminal in the corner.
Here at RPI, us in the Electronics Club "rescued" a VAX 8530 mainframe that was being dumped. It would be nice if we could boot NetBSD on it, but it's one of those weird models that NetBSD doesn't seem to do. I guess we're gonna dig up a copy of VMS somewhere when we wire up the 3-phase outlet to power it up. Does anyone have any information otherwise?
Actually, with 7.0, I get the feeling that Mandrake is drifting away from RedHat. In the long run, I get the feeling that Mandrake may become a totally independent RPM-based distro. Honestly, that may be a good thing. RedHat seems to be pulled in all directions. In fact, I didn't switch from Slackware to RedHat until RH 5.1, and then I only switched because everything worked "out of the box" with RedHat.
Before 5.1, RedHat was so horribly broken that it would barely even startup. Making it useful required a week of rewriting all the config files. Heck, I even think the local-loopback network device wasn't active by default! This meant that half of the X stuff wouldn't run.
Once we have XFree86 4.0, KDE 2, and the 2.4.x kernel, Linux will really have something impressive to show for the desktop.
I remember reading some of the readme files included with MS-DOS 6 way back when. Would you believe that they give you instructions on "upgrading" from OS/2? What kind of idiot would EVER want to trash OS/2 for DOS/Win31? Back then, I used OS/2 as my primary OS. It ran all the DOS/Win stuff perfectly (better than Linux could ever hope to), and had all the features common in Win95 without crashing all the time. (years before)
Hehe... I use System Commander myself. However, the Windows 2000 install program doesn't like System Commander. It pisses at you if it sees it, after a half hour of "initializing":)
You've got all your facts backwards. WW2 was ended by the A-Bomb (fission). Developing the H-Bomb (fussion) took many years after that. Most modern warheads are thermonuclear (fusion), because they are far more destructive and can be made smaller.
We already know how to do fusion, just only in "bomb form". The challenge is making a powerplant that can to the reaction in a "controlled form".
Yes, LeoCAD. It's not a normal CAD program. It's a program for modeling Legos on your PC. I once used the Windows version. It's very sluggish, but easy to use and has a nice interface.
Here at RPI, all the IPs in the DHCP system are dished out with Pokemon aliases, I believe. Here's some I just pulled from people on my ICQ list: farfetchd-26.dynamic.rpi.edu goldbat-17.dynamic.rpi.edu machop-04.dynamic.rpi.edu squirtle-22.dynamic.rpi.edu
As far as my own equipment, I originally named everything with greek letters. Main machine was "omega", laptop was "epsilon", etc. But now I've begun to change. Partly because the greek letters aren't original enough, partly because greek_letter-->frat.
Now I use subatomic particles for naming. My desktop is still "omega", but my server is "photon" and my new laptop is "electron".
This reminds me of when I first tried Linux. It was a long time ago, and I just had my first taste of UNIX on a terminal connected to a 386 running SCO. I asked someone if there was a variant of UNIX that I could run on my computer. He mentioned Linux. I did some digging later, and found myself a distro called SLS (precursor of Slackware, of course.)
Back then, all the fun of Linux was installing it, and tweaking the settings. After those few weeks, it didn't seem that useful on a home single-user machine. Times have changed...:)
Now I really only need Windows for that 10% of things that aren't in Linux. There's so much more to do besides tweaking.fvwmrc:)
Who ever designed the embedded control system for this thing was obviously a novice. I couldn't believe my eyes when I looked at "Rev. 1" and saw them actually using a BASIC Stamp 2! The BS2 is a toy. It's designed to interpret a language called PBASIC (even worse than real Basic), and it's very slow. The BS2 doesn't even have interrupts or support for negative numbers. Thank goodness someone with some knowledge got to them and put a 68HC11 microcontroller in "Rev. 2"! That's a real controller, with real features. (Yes, you can even get C compilers for it.)
A comment for the "Does it run Linux?" people: Many embedded controllers do not run any operating system at all. On reset, they just jump to the program people load into their memory. You don't need an operating system for most embedded devices. If you need multitasking, you can use timer-based interrupt vectors yourself to run routines, or you can use a "realtime executive" (very small multitasker) on them. This is why I sometimes laugh when I hear CompSci-types designing an embedded device to run Linux. Why do you need it? Build a standalone program, and save money on memory and processing power.
I'm also at RPI, and you would have bought it too if you knew the details of the program:)
Basically, we all paid $2500 for it (or a lease option if chosen). The machine (according to IBM's web page) retails for around $4000. (we have a 366MHz processor, 6GB hard drive, 128MB RAM, etc.)
While this hybrid motor may be a new thing for NASA, it's been around in hobby rocketry for years. People have played with it because it's functionality is closer to liquid engines without the danger or enormous cost. (almost all hobby rocketry uses solid-fuel engines.)
This link shows just how simple they can be: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/rene/ws h.htm
In my senior year of high school, I had to fill a dual-enrollment block at the local community college. (great way to drop high-school periods.) Since there wasn't much to take, I took "Programming in VB" for the heck of it. I thought it would be easy and potentially useful to learn. I entered the class with an open mind.
I now hate VB. Coming from a background in real languages (Pascal, C, C++, etc.) I found VB frustrating. I always knew exactly what I wanted to do and how to do it. But getting VB to do it is another story. VB makes the really easy stuff easier, and makes everything else a pain in the ass.
Back in my day, we used AppleSoft Basic. It had line numbers, and "?SYNTAX ERROR" messages on perfect code! It didn't even have an editor. Any we liked it!!!! You go on about your fancy shmancy "structured programming". Back in my day, we had so many GOTO's we could hardly figure out what we wrote!
Basic is a wonderful language for teaching little kids how to program. It should never have progressed further than maybe QBASIC. VB was an attempt to take an old language that isn't good enough for real programming, wrap it in point 'n crash garbage, and get people to use it. Once you learn a real language, you'll never touch VB.
Re:I think they are going in the wrong direction h
on
The Future of KDE
·
· Score: 1
Actually, what most annoying me about the Mac isn't the single mouse button. That's like #2 on my list.
Things that most annoying me about the Mac: 1) The shared menubar! (I CAN'T STAND IT) 2) The one-button mouse. (It's like using a computer after being in a disfiguring accident) 3) Everything else. (When using a Mac, I feel like I want to smash it in raging fury. It won't actually let me just get stuff done.)
Re:I think they are going in the wrong direction h
on
The Future of KDE
·
· Score: 1
Hehe... Doing that is the easiet thing of all in Linux. In Linux, just click the middle mouse button on a link, and presto! You have it open in another window:)
I thought there were many non-Intel PC chipsets out there. VIA is the biggest, but there are several. Last week when I was installing a computer I just built, I poped in the motherboard's driver CD. Since the CD was made for all that company's board, there were drivers for maybe 5-10 chipsets. It was a K6 machine, however. But I know other companies make chipsets for Intel processors.
Companies who run WinNT networks usually need a whole IS department to keep their computers running. These people carry beepers that go off at 2:00 in the morning because the servers crash.
Companies who run Linux/UNIX networks will have an outside consulting firm to set it up, and sometimes a sysadmin person to check on it once in a while. He never loses sleep because the servers don't crash.
This is where the true savings lie. It's not just the fact that Linux is free and WinNT costs a lot. It's that you don't have to hire an entire department to keep the servers online and reboot them at 2:00 in the morning.
Actually, they've already found anti-pasta. Ever look at the menu in an Italian restaurant Of course they call it "antipasto", but it's just a spelling mistake.:)
Apparently, you don't know your Star Trek technobabble.:)
A warp core has a matter injector on one end (deuterium isotope) and an anti-matter injector on the other end (anti-hydrogen, same isotope). In the middle is the reaction chamber where the two streams meet. The dilithium crystal is at the point of the reaction, where a stream of plasma is sent out along conduits. It's not the power source, but rather something that directs the reaction.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, shut up. Not more of you people again!
Did endless social problems ever stand in the way of world exploration? Just think about how many things come from the technological research required for space travel. Besides, what makes more sense? Throwing more money at the unfixable social problems of Earth, or extending the grasp of the human race into the stars? One day there may be no Earth. Should that really be the end of humanity?
Another beauty of Linux (or xBSD) is that while computers keep getting faster, the OS isn't getting any slower. In the M$ dominated world, one has to constantly upgrade one's hardware to keep the software running at the same speed. Since old computers don't really get slower with time, they are still useful to people like us. I've got a P-100 doing just fine as a remote access / web server, and a P2-266 running really well as a desktop. If I used Windows, I would be screaming for upgrades by now.
Patch Windows bugs and holes in few days? Who do you think will be looking at this code? It will take at least 5 years for hackers to comprehend it, followed by a several emergency cases of severe vomiting. Eventually, they "might" start fixing it with medical permission.
:)
Linux: Because rebooting is for adding hardware
Solaris: Because you don't need to reboot to add hardware
Windows: Because rebooting is for adding hardware, adding software, regularly scheduled downtime, and should also be done on a daily basis to keep the machine running.
Hotmail runs on BSD, I believe. Not Solaris. Of course, BSD is also rock solid.
Here, at RPI, they have started a "laptop program", requiring all incoming freshman to purchase laptops. This program has the added side effect of turning most of the freshman class into "Windows junkies". You only see upperclassmen in the public UNIX labs (SGI O2's, SGI Indy's, RS/6000's, etc.).
I'm in our ACM/SIG-Linux, and we're seriously considering putting together a Linux distro for next year's laptops. The plan is to be handing out CDs when the freshman are getting their machines. It will hopefully be a painless install, since the laptops this year come with a partition structure that lets us use a 1.5GB space with no loss of data.
Speaking on the subject of a generalized "University Distribution", I think to some degree it's a wonderful idea. We use AFS and Kerberos just like many other schools. While there are differences, of course, there are lots of similarities. Maybe the best option would be if someone created a University "reference distro", that individual LUGs would take and tweak to their specific requirements. It would make it a lot easier for everyone to "jump on the bandwagon".
P.S. VA Linux, if your out there, please donate a Linux lab! The reason NT is spreading to fast, is because it's being given in donations from everywhere.
In the future, everyone should be able to go down to their basement and see nothing but big blue, wall to wall. Houses should feel alive, and power bills should be enourmous. Of course, every room in the house needs an EBSDIC-compatable terminal in the corner.
Speaking of VAX ports...
Here at RPI, us in the Electronics Club "rescued" a VAX 8530 mainframe that was being dumped. It would be nice if we could boot NetBSD on it, but it's one of those weird models that NetBSD doesn't seem to do. I guess we're gonna dig up a copy of VMS somewhere when we wire up the 3-phase outlet to power it up. Does anyone have any information otherwise?
Actually, with 7.0, I get the feeling that Mandrake is drifting away from RedHat. In the long run, I get the feeling that Mandrake may become a totally independent RPM-based distro. Honestly, that may be a good thing. RedHat seems to be pulled in all directions. In fact, I didn't switch from Slackware to RedHat until RH 5.1, and then I only switched because everything worked "out of the box" with RedHat.
Before 5.1, RedHat was so horribly broken that it would barely even startup. Making it useful required a week of rewriting all the config files. Heck, I even think the local-loopback network device wasn't active by default! This meant that half of the X stuff wouldn't run.
Once we have XFree86 4.0, KDE 2, and the 2.4.x kernel, Linux will really have something impressive to show for the desktop.
I remember reading some of the readme files included with MS-DOS 6 way back when. Would you believe that they give you instructions on "upgrading" from OS/2? What kind of idiot would EVER want to trash OS/2 for DOS/Win31? Back then, I used OS/2 as my primary OS. It ran all the DOS/Win stuff perfectly (better than Linux could ever hope to), and had all the features common in Win95 without crashing all the time. (years before)
Hehe... I use System Commander myself. However, the Windows 2000 install program doesn't like System Commander. It pisses at you if it sees it, after a half hour of "initializing" :)
You've got all your facts backwards.
WW2 was ended by the A-Bomb (fission). Developing the H-Bomb (fussion) took many years after that. Most modern warheads are thermonuclear (fusion), because they are far more destructive and can be made smaller.
We already know how to do fusion, just only in "bomb form". The challenge is making a powerplant that can to the reaction in a "controlled form".
Yes, LeoCAD. It's not a normal CAD program. It's a program for modeling Legos on your PC. I once used the Windows version. It's very sluggish, but easy to use and has a nice interface.
Here at RPI, all the IPs in the DHCP system are dished out with Pokemon aliases, I believe.
Here's some I just pulled from people on my ICQ list:
farfetchd-26.dynamic.rpi.edu
goldbat-17.dynamic.rpi.edu
machop-04.dynamic.rpi.edu
squirtle-22.dynamic.rpi.edu
As far as my own equipment, I originally named everything with greek letters. Main machine was "omega", laptop was "epsilon", etc.
But now I've begun to change. Partly because the greek letters aren't original enough, partly because greek_letter-->frat.
Now I use subatomic particles for naming. My desktop is still "omega", but my server is "photon" and my new laptop is "electron".
This reminds me of when I first tried Linux. It was a long time ago, and I just had my first taste of UNIX on a terminal connected to a 386 running SCO. I asked someone if there was a variant of UNIX that I could run on my computer. He mentioned Linux. I did some digging later, and found myself a distro called SLS (precursor of Slackware, of course.)
:)
.fvwmrc :)
Back then, all the fun of Linux was installing it, and tweaking the settings. After those few weeks, it didn't seem that useful on a home single-user machine. Times have changed...
Now I really only need Windows for that 10% of things that aren't in Linux. There's so much more to do besides tweaking
Who ever designed the embedded control system for this thing was obviously a novice. I couldn't believe my eyes when I looked at "Rev. 1" and saw them actually using a BASIC Stamp 2! The BS2 is a toy. It's designed to interpret a language called PBASIC (even worse than real Basic), and it's very slow. The BS2 doesn't even have interrupts or support for negative numbers.
Thank goodness someone with some knowledge got to them and put a 68HC11 microcontroller in "Rev. 2"! That's a real controller, with real features. (Yes, you can even get C compilers for it.)
A comment for the "Does it run Linux?" people:
Many embedded controllers do not run any operating system at all. On reset, they just jump to the program people load into their memory. You don't need an operating system for most embedded devices. If you need multitasking, you can use timer-based interrupt vectors yourself to run routines, or you can use a "realtime executive" (very small multitasker) on them. This is why I sometimes laugh when I hear CompSci-types designing an embedded device to run Linux. Why do you need it? Build a standalone program, and save money on memory and processing power.
I'm also at RPI, and you would have bought it too if you knew the details of the program :)
Basically, we all paid $2500 for it (or a lease option if chosen).
The machine (according to IBM's web page) retails for around $4000.
(we have a 366MHz processor, 6GB hard drive, 128MB RAM, etc.)
While this hybrid motor may be a new thing for NASA, it's been around in hobby rocketry for years. People have played with it because it's functionality is closer to liquid engines without the danger or enormous cost. (almost all hobby rocketry uses solid-fuel engines.)
s h.htm
This link shows just how simple they can be:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/rene/w
In my senior year of high school, I had to fill a dual-enrollment block at the local community college. (great way to drop high-school periods.) Since there wasn't much to take, I took "Programming in VB" for the heck of it. I thought it would be easy and potentially useful to learn. I entered the class with an open mind.
I now hate VB. Coming from a background in real languages (Pascal, C, C++, etc.) I found VB frustrating. I always knew exactly what I wanted to do and how to do it. But getting VB to do it is another story. VB makes the really easy stuff easier, and makes everything else a pain in the ass.
Back in my day, we used AppleSoft Basic. It had line numbers, and "?SYNTAX ERROR" messages on perfect code! It didn't even have an editor. Any we liked it!!!!
You go on about your fancy shmancy "structured programming". Back in my day, we had so many GOTO's we could hardly figure out what we wrote!
Basic is a wonderful language for teaching little kids how to program. It should never have progressed further than maybe QBASIC. VB was an attempt to take an old language that isn't good enough for real programming, wrap it in point 'n crash garbage, and get people to use it. Once you learn a real language, you'll never touch VB.
Actually, what most annoying me about the Mac isn't the single mouse button. That's like #2 on my list.
Things that most annoying me about the Mac:
1) The shared menubar! (I CAN'T STAND IT)
2) The one-button mouse. (It's like using a computer after being in a disfiguring accident)
3) Everything else. (When using a Mac, I feel like I want to smash it in raging fury. It won't actually let me just get stuff done.)
Hehe... Doing that is the easiet thing of all in Linux. In Linux, just click the middle mouse button on a link, and presto! You have it open in another window :)
I thought there were many non-Intel PC chipsets out there. VIA is the biggest, but there are several. Last week when I was installing a computer I just built, I poped in the motherboard's driver CD. Since the CD was made for all that company's board, there were drivers for maybe 5-10 chipsets. It was a K6 machine, however. But I know other companies make chipsets for Intel processors.
Companies who run WinNT networks usually need a whole IS department to keep their computers running. These people carry beepers that go off at 2:00 in the morning because the servers crash.
Companies who run Linux/UNIX networks will have an outside consulting firm to set it up, and sometimes a sysadmin person to check on it once in a while. He never loses sleep because the servers don't crash.
This is where the true savings lie. It's not just the fact that Linux is free and WinNT costs a lot. It's that you don't have to hire an entire department to keep the servers online and reboot them at 2:00 in the morning.
Actually, they've already found anti-pasta. Ever look at the menu in an Italian restaurant Of course they call it "antipasto", but it's just a spelling mistake. :)
Apparently, you don't know your Star Trek technobabble. :)
A warp core has a matter injector on one end (deuterium isotope) and an anti-matter injector on the other end (anti-hydrogen, same isotope). In the middle is the reaction chamber where the two streams meet. The dilithium crystal is at the point of the reaction, where a stream of plasma is sent out along conduits. It's not the power source, but rather something that directs the reaction.