I tried installing a full version of AIX 5.1L on my RS6000, configured the network till I could ping yahoo.com. Then what?
To download anything I needed a browser, and I didnt have a browser to download a browser. Netscape 4.71 comes with the companion AIX CD that I dont have. I tried ftp-ing places and it didnt work. I had to download firefox on a windows machine, ftp-share it, download it onto the AIX and then there were a hoard of dependancy problems.
So folks, you need SOME interface to the Internet. What do people use after a fresh install of WindowsXP to get firefox????
Sure some will argue Microsoft should package firefox with it, but shouldnt they just GPL Windows and pour billions into free software? During the early days of the Internet... 1995.. I remember people 'bought' netscape 2.0 or 3.0 to get online, just before IE 1.0, because they had nothing. Accept IE as a tool to get firefox with and appreciate it.
Of course its integration into the standard explorer, and the fact that its always sitting in the memory is what buggers me. I'd rather also have WMP installed, with no hooks into the explorer shell and no parts in RAM, so I can run it whenever I absolutely need to.
About the whole X Window server
on
X.Org 6.8.2 is Out
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I've used Windows, MacOSX, various commercial unices, linux and bsd, and have come to a conclusion, that the X server's client-server design compromises the latency of usage.
I thought this was a driver issue, for example, on the same machine, opening, moving and resizing windows is very snappy on any window system beside X, be it MSWindows (yeah I know crappy, insecure, bloaty etc, but snappy), BeOS or OSX. Even the X11 on Darwin isnt quite as snappy as it should be being a GUI system.
In the case of BeOS, the graphic system is highly simplified, compared to client-server X, with a window manager on top. In the case of MSWindows, all graphics card manufacturers have designed their cards and their drivers to be optimum for windows, each little function on any chip, of rage, TNT, Matrox is used in the best way to blit, display and alter windows. I dont know much about cocoa, which came from the NeXT design...
Apart from the latency, I think the process priority of X and its child processes should also be rethought, under heavy load X and its WM becomes very unresponsive.
Linux/BSD have far superior OS designs and c libraries compared to MSWindows, its sad to see something simple holding them back from the Desktop market. Sure the lack of opensource graphics drivers are also holding it back, and so is the lack of standardization (gnome vs QT, menu system and location in the filesystem, even package standards... rpm?), but this one hurts in that it affects the image of opensourced OSes to commandline-shy users. gl-enabled apps even within windows run beautifully, but superior hardware is required to let the window system run as smoothly as other OSes. Some people think part of the culprit is the GUI system sitting outside of the kernel space, and all GUI-related processes being in a tree, rather than being children of init.
I wonder if X can be compiled as X-lite, bypassing the client-server overhead, possibly compiling WITH a simple WM rather than running it on top, and being run at a higher priority, should make things smooth. Any thoughts?
(1) Find a country that disagrees with you. (2) Economically and politically sideline them, till it becomes a tough place to live for the citizens, and blame the govt (3) Call them terrorists for owning ANY weapons (OMG! they have knives!!!) (4) Lie to link them with some bomb that went off somewhere in USA regardless of why (5) Invade regardless of the lives lost (6) Give the govt to ANY group of people but sideline the other groups, so the imbalance keeps the country divided and makes it a timebomb rather than some economic power (6) Put in a puppet govt by holding elections with only the possible puppets as candidates and siphon off any possible natural resources (7) Profit!!!!!
This works well for Afghanistan and Iraq, and seems to be working on Iran and N Korea currently.
But what I find quite funny is the extraordinary lack of symmetry. The US has nuclear weapons. Why? Because of rogue countries like N Korea which might use them. N Korea has Nuclear weapons, why? Because rogue nations like USA might attack. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Why? Because India might attack.
Whats worse is that the use of Biological and Chemical weapons by the Americans on civilians anywhere has been more extensive than by Saddam on Kurds. USA has been the only country in history to drop nuclear weapons on civilian cities. Now it is attacking another country for owning nuclear weapons, which it does in case the USA attacks.
So the big bully in the playground first beats up the kid. Then the bully says dont defend yourself at all, or I'll beat you up. Then he tries to get support from his friends saying the kid is trying to defend himself, therefore he must be beaten up.
N Korea is a shithole. So was Afghanistan, so was Iraq. Thats because of the economic sidelining of Uncle Sam, which has full control over the global economy. N Korea in many ways is trying to kick start their economy with a free economy zone, attract tourists etc. Sure theyre not doing a good job of it, but thats because they also have to defend themselves of American infiltration. But economy is in their sights, and the people are still dying of hunger. Is it because they are completely incapable of manufacturing exportable goods? China is not a democracy, but they are exporting goods and a far smaller percentage is dying of starvation.
Interesting is also the case of Zimbabwe's president Mugabe. He was elected in an election. But since he disagrees with Britain, has the guts to flip em the bird, suddenly Zimbabwe is a terrorist country, with a dictator, and if their natural resources were sufficient, it would warrant an invasion by the white knights of the west. Rule: Never EVER disagree with the USA.
I think the USA turning into such a bully is a very natural part of any empire in history. As soon as they become the undisputed global leader, they use excessive political and military forces for their personal benefits, until they become the global villain enough to be toppled by another global regeime. Think of the Chinese empires, the Roman empire, Greek empire, Mongolian empire etc. Couple that with the fact that you cannot suppress any people for too long, the future does not bode well for the Americans
GCC should be able to compile binaries for the cell cpu in 1 year of the cell's release, meaning someone should be able to compile netbsd and/or linux for it, both the kernel and userland. I would imagine it would not be optimised much first, but threading will suddenly be important on both platforms, and we can expect much more attention on libpthreads, as well as the SMP scheduler of the linux kernel. It should be able to recognise different-strength CPUs and assign tasks, even reserve a cpu for graphics functions, reserve another for running certain drivers etc. (I dont know if its currently capable of all that).
So in a few years time its possible the development of at least one of the unixen, will be focused on highly threaded distributed applications, new scheduler and libc designs to help in that, and better levels of performance than a linear monolithic kernel with none or bad threading and the simple scheduler that linux had a while ago.
Would it kill Palm to release opensource BeOS at a time like this, when a BeOS compiled for the cell CPU will be the killer desktop OS?
I wonder what class of DB will be released by sun. On the lowest end, something like minisql, sqlite, sleepycat, middle level mysql, higher level postgresql, ingres, sybase, or highest level, oracle.
Theyre not competing with oracle if the database is for webservers, or to keep email aliases for sendmail.
I called IBM a while ago and checked their minimum price for an openpower server. 30 grand.
To make it worthwhile, they should really bring the costs down to something like the xSeries 206 ($500) for PPC servers to compete using Linux. An openpower server running SuSE with SCSI disks and POWER3 or POWER4 processor and a gig of ram for around $1000 will sell and overtake both x86 and sparc platforms. But 30grand will not sell. Thats more expensive than the minimum pSeries server with AIX 5.3
I agree on this one, it is a catch-22 thing, with microsoft riding the tsunami wave that has no end.
But I must disagree with Microsoft being absolutely and completely crap. You give credit where its due, even if its an arm-twisting IP-stealing company. For example the MSSQL server does a good job, WindowsXP is finally close to being a usable desktop OS despite being insecure, and Microsoft's Active Directory, despite being incompatible with standard LDAP, simply works for most companies. I used to actually like Microsoft during the MASM days, which was better in syntax than TASM, and when Windows 3.1 was made available, it did its job well. Microsoft made the transition from 16-bit DOS on 8086 to Windows95 on a Pentium very smooth, heck I can still play wolfenstein3d on Windows2000. Last I heard, OS9 emulation on OSX was crappy and heavy on the system, and so was m68k emulation on the PPC...
The fact that we dont have to buy a completely new machine and lose all our apps, is the genius of Microsoft. Gotta admit they have a grip on the desktop for a good reason, and better OSes cant infiltrate this monopoly despite spending big $$$ for 2 decades now. Its a different matter that Linux/BSD is much more secure and efficient now, Linux never ran on 8086, and Linux + KDE/GNOME + X still havent reached the GUI sweet-spot that OSX and XP have (and BeOS did).
I'll use Linux for most anything that I can, partially to support the OSS movement and get better used to a free and superior-designed OS, and partly because it works where it works well. I'll also use Windows where Linux doesnt cut it, WineX cant do DirectX well, cant play WoW or CS:Source on Linux, cant play Giants or Tiberian Sun on Linux, cant run our company ERP software on Linux, cant run Lotus Notes on Linux (yeah yeah tried iNotes doesnt cut it), and the GUI is never as snappy as windows can be. Keymappings also suffer, I can use windows with a keyboard alone, windowmanagers and X are usually not configured with enough keystrokes, or theyre too obscure. Your default Linux/BSD distro is designed as a general OS and not a Desktop one, bringing in the kind of bloat (why are we still using X?) desktop users really could live without.
Since you own all the pieces, and the traffic isnt high unless you plan to stream videos from your plants, go wireless mesh. Properly setup, this would actually be a more robust setup.
I wonder if you could also do a whole bunch of p2p connections and run BGPv4 over it. Will look great over your resume.
Search returns with almost equal weights should be shuffled.. so the top few sites do not appear in order, unless one site has overwhelming weight over the others.. like searching for "CNN". Even the lower-weight items should be randomized, with a lower probability for them to rise, such that the 100th item will in 0.001% or less of the returns appear as item # 1. The domain name should be given a great deal of weight.
Apart from these, we can just let the commercial entities pay for their rating, so the highly-advertised site appears first. We fought long and hard against Communism, for Capitalism, lets see it in action.
I just visited the site and tried on a few of the PDFs. It seems to be aimed at higher markets, and maybe they wont rent out single processors. I was hoping I could use this as a webserver on a single CPU if cheap, but $700 a month isnt.
I was compiling kernels for an embedded project a while ago, and many flags of the linux kernel makes it crash, especially with the -tiny patches. I have a PIII at home, so recompiling after each crash was a royal pain.
So the idea was I'll rent a grid of CPUs, and iterate through all possible flag combinations (gcc flags, config options, patches even) and download a large number of small compiled kernels, and try the successful ones out for size, to find the smallest kernel I can compile for the project. Unfortunately it gets way too expensive, and I'd much rather replace my motherboard and cpu with an Athlon64, or two, and leave the thing running for a week. Or a year.
The grid isnt for everyone. Its for people who know exactly what they want, know about the parallelism of their problems and how to make highly threaded apps, or distribute the execution across CPUs. Its not for you and I.
PowerPC is a CPU. The liveCD no doubt will run only on one architecture, namely the mac-ppc. I have been looking for a livecd for my RS6000 7043-140, and cant find one. I jump at such mentions only to read 'mac' in the text.
x86 is a chip and an architecture, I havent heard of any major system using the x86 chip but not architecture, except the PIX 501. The only reason anyone would use the damned x86 CPU is binary compatibility which also relies on the chipset, therefore the architecture. But this is certainly not true of PPC, MIPS, ARM, 68000 and others.
Rants aside, is it possible to have a single kernel and bootloader boot on the prep/chrp platform (whichever had both rs6000 and mac, i forgot)?? Would be cool to have say a bootable livecd boot and run quakeII on both apple macs and rs6000 machines, containing graphics card drivers for both systems in the kernel. Is it easier to do all this in NetBSD?
Microsoft invented the GUI, they never stole it from Apple.
Linux is the biggest UNIX out there, who cares about the open groups definition which is pretty much bought, and currently everything but AIX 5.x is not UNIX. If you look closely, UNIX is also defined as an architecture of operating systems, which Linux has been following as a loyal 'unix clone'. I, like many on slashdot refuse to swallow the open groups paid-for definitions, of unix.
Theres no minix code in linux. sure. but the first linux versions were developed on minix, and used the minix fs. the architecture was close to minix initially, and both Linus and Tannenbaum claim that Linux was 'inspired' by Minix. My point exactly was Linux itself isnt such an original idea, since a free 'unix' of that architecture existed as minix, but for different reasons. Can we give ALL the design credits to Linus alone if minix had the linux's early kernel design?
This is not the newyork times, expect some cynicism.
Microsoft invented the GUI so give them the award. Andrew made Samba, who cares, that hardly qualifies as a smart product.
Or someone forks out YaBSD as an OS.. Yet Another BSD, while the guy who ported the ATM drivers from Solaris to this BSD only ported drivers so who cares?
So between Erik Raymond, Linus Trovalds and Andrew Tannenbaum, who would you give an award to?
Linus because his name is on the biggest UNIX out there??? Shouldnt Alan Cox rather take THAT award?
And why not Tannenbaum's Minix, from which Linux was created?
Someone puts up a great idea, another builds a structure and an alpha version of that idea. A third person works years debugging and improving it for prime time. The first two people will be most visible, the third will be the apparently hard working guy, how do you measure things here?
With such pressure to be 'seen' as working and contributing, Google might be turning itself into a Microsoft. The real trick is, how do you get the employee's sincerity for the whole company instead of his next bonus, the way opensource projects work?
By not paying them or yourself at all!
Re:Openvms is downloadable too. Most reliable OS.
on
Solaris 10 Released
·
· Score: 1
If you do find a UNIX for older machiens, namely a minivax, lemme know. I have a minivax here gathering dust (minivax 2100), to which I'd REALLY like to port DOOM.
Or at least rip out the board, squeeze it into a 1U chassis to host my sites offsite, and have some serious bragging rights.
Re:Openvms is downloadable too. Most reliable OS.
on
Solaris 10 Released
·
· Score: 1
Ive been trying to get OpenVMS for a while. Apparently I have to sign up as an HP member or something that costs $$$$.. even for the hobbyist license. Where can I get the latest OpenVMS for free?
I'd also have to get a good scsi card for my lx533 Alpha system.. the last qlogic 1040 I got wasnt KZBCA or whatever the DEC code is.... it was a generic one. I have nothing to boot the lx533 with.
Am also looking for an ethernet card that works with it. I had a pile of ISA DIGITAL ethernet cards none of which worked with SRM... so I'm counting them not to work with OpenVMS.
Firefox was exactly what I wanted. A while ago, the options were limited to 3 bloated browsers (mozilla taking the extreme end of the spectrum), and a fast commercial one... Opera. I'd have issues installing or compiling Opera on AIX or Solaris on x86 etc, and wished there was a free Opera sourcecode somewhere.
What kills me is how in the world did companies like Netscape miss what the public wants? They made netscape communicator, a monolith for people who only wanted yahoo.com to come up faster. Next they made netscape 6, then 7, never slower or smaller. IE was competing with Opera easily since you have to purchase opera, and IE is free for the most part.
Mozilla was a joke. Period. I always thought mozilla was an org of programmers with itchy fingers who just wanted to make an OS-in-a-browser.
Some comments here mention $50 per month hosting services.
Do yourself a major favor, and get a complete real server from serverpronto.com. Thats $30 per month for 200GB transfers, a whole $40 gigs of disk space including OS.. and unlimited mailboxes, domains etc.
It completely escapes me why people pay so much more for so much less. Before these guys I was with a jvds or something like that, which sells virtual servers for $5 a month even. You get maybe 10gigs of disk space.. and performance is reasonable enough to allow emails, apache and the likes.
Serverpronto went down for a day several times last year, but bandwidth has been good, and I'm not running critical-uptime applications anyway.
This idea comes from practicality. You cant run DOOM. You cant run Commander Keen or Zeliard or civilization or Monkey Island. You cant run All the specialized apps that depend on DOS, unless you emulate x86... and there are pleny of those, for serial access devices, manufacturing machine interfaces, apps to configure routers even.
I really prefer the ARM for lower end machines, its the optimum choice... or MIPS for higher bandwidths and media intensive apps. But face it, most of the real-world apps, were made for the x86, and opensource in many places is catching up.
But from my Commodore 64 days, I remember the resolution to be pretty bad. For reading text its unbearable, unless the size is really big, in which case a lot of scrolling is required. All websites are designed at least for the 800x600 resolution, about twice what PAL or NTSC provides...
But for most other things like games, video, TV is a great option..
Ideally this should be an ARM based linux running machine, with maybe monochrome LCD with it, and minimum mechanical parts, meaning running off flash rather than harddrives.
It should have a power cable, not requiring a power adapter since that adds to the costs... a power-down IC with a power regulator IC should do the trick along with a fat capacitor. A modem or ethernet will certainly be a requirement, and will add to the costs. I wonder if in mass production 802.11b will be cheaper.
The GUI itself should be minimalistic, and I dont know if adding sound to it will be important. Remember this should be profitable at $99.
ARM SoC= $10 DRAM at 128MB = $20 flash at 128MB = $30 LCD = $30 everything else = $10
Last time I was checking the prices for such a computer, the LCD was the most expensive part, even in monochrome at 640x480. If they intend to bring that down to 320x200, the LCD cost wont drop significantly unless the size is also reduced. They could also reduce the flash, but thats removing alot, even though the kernel will be 2MB, glibc and busybox for a non-MMU machine will be 10mb. X, browsers etc will only take it to a maximum of 32MB, unless the browser has flash, real, quicktime etc. in which case its 64mb. Still having 128mb is reasonable for flash.
RAM is also very critical in running the system. 128mb is plenty of space but they can also live with 64mb. anything below that is choking the machine.
So with 64mb ram and 64mb flash, and 320x200 LCD, its still approaching $99 in BOM alone, which means the volume of production must be very high to make profits at $99...
To make it x86, add $30 extra, add more voltage, but that gives us much more applications, and the computer will sell in much greater numbers everywhere, and you dont have to lose money on hardware like the XBox.
Many parts of the Matrix and other action movies didnt need a real plot. Think True Lies or Speed or Die Hard.
So what parts not a movie... some terrorists kidnap some scientists somewhere, they send a swat team and the action starts. Why do you need a longish story, since most of the audience will be hungry for nothing but action? The game is just about run and shoot, but movies have more flexibility, think of die hard again, when one terrorist remains, and draws an army of counter terrorists to an alley then guns them down, or when their ammo runs out and they resort to knives...
Or when someone loses their mind and runs around with a machine gun. The sniper scenes can be like the one on Saving Prive Ryan. Teamplay should be on since that adds drama.
And in the end the hero somehow gets the girl... the usual stuff..
I entered the address of a website, it wasnt a particularly nasty site, just something resulting from a google search.
And it automatically installed a spyware application. No YES/NO dialogues just installed it. After that I saw attempts at outbound port 6667 to various external servers.
Now I do manage servers that hold financial data, and servers with ERP software that run the company.
I ask you, Microsoft, can you be held accountable if our company melts down should malicious spyware enter the system with their authors intending to corrupt our backups and bring everything down?
Will you pay us the millions that we lose as we lose our customers?
Will you as a result of such a catastrophe give us an OS that does NOT allow such breaches of security?
I understand IE in Windows 2003 is more secured, and we should never browse for anything on the server itself... etc. However Windows2003 has not been matured enough to bring out the bugs while Windows2000 has issues even after SP4, and after Microsoft will cease to provide bugfixes for it.
We replaced our firewall with OpenBSD. We simple cannot find a reason to upgrade it from the 3.4 version, since the older version is so secure. Hell yeah we've had attacks of all kinds, to almost all ports, syn cookies even ddos type attacks that slowed the Internet connection, but we're still up, and without ever having an issue for over two years of OpenBSD operation.
Coming back to Linux, which is also a UNIX clone, and which has more eyeballs on it, and more companies taking responsibility for it, tell me, should I pay for a crappy OS with someone behind it you can point fingers to, or a nice OS with no person behind it simply because youll never have to point fingers?
I used to imagine a telescope of a pan filled with mercury, spinning, and attached to the lens assembly via rods on top, and the whole device turning to create gravity for the mercury so it stays in the pan, while the whole telescope like a lighthouse scans the skies.
The moon will allow greater sized assemblies, and gravity doesnt have to be induced. The problem is the lack of control, which can be offset by building multiple telescopes at various lattitudes.
So whats difficult? A large container which can carry mercury, even a large plastic bag in a satellite dish mesh can do. The structure will sit on a motor that spins. The motor will not induce any vibrations into the mercury pan, for the former telescope I had a magnetic levitation rotation device, or at least a string that dangles the pan while magnets rotate it. The magnets cannot be in two D structures like regular motors since thats vibration there, so a uniform magnetic field is applied while current is passed between the center of the pan and its sides to allow for a continuous DC motor. If the current can be passed with no contacts, we can achieve real smooth rotations and no frictions or vibrations... again magnetic levitation would be a great idea here since the moon can be cold enough for ceramic superconductors, and clear enough for solar panels to power the thing.
The smaller we make the mercury pan, the more vibration prone it gets as we increase the resolution, so we can expect moon earthquakes to be a problem whenever something hits the surface. Shouldnt be frequent enough to cause a problem...
Unlike Hubble, the structure should be radiation-hardened, low-maintenance, no mechanical parts, no chemical reserves object, except for the mercury container. If spun fast enough, the container can reflect light from greated angles removing the problem of lack of control.
How fast is the connection from the CO to other major backbones? How much of the 8mbit is committed bit rate? How much is guaranteed if say all possible users start downloading at the same time?
Is that ISP's network multihomed?
And even more importantly what is the latency to yahoo.com, Torontos 151 Front St, backbones in NYC, and the Silicon Valley Sprint networks? How much is the delay to alter.net routers?
In short, will you see 80ms or 30ms playing counterstrike on your average server in the US, Canada or Korea?
All this is assuming their internal switches are all non-blocking preferably gigabit switches with either gigabit or 10gigabit uplinks, not 10mbit ethernet hubs. Also assuming their modem and CO equipment are both nonblocking doing the pppoe and breaking up 1500-sized packets to fit because most people dont enter 1492 in their MTU settings.
If their networks are in such good shape, more uplinks will be appreciated more than higher speec downlinks, maybe 4mbit/1mbit or even 4mbit/4mbit SDSL, especially if they provide static non-pppoe IPs. These things simply allow other possibilities even for the consumer market which wants to share pictures, stream out videos to relatives, and run game servers.
With all ISPs inching up their technologies, upgrading their equipment in each iteration, it escapes me why dont they quite simply lay down fiber optic ethernet lines in the streets running at 100mbit both ways, and just be done with it. Their operating costs will absolutely plummett, and fiber optics do exceed the ADSL distance. What is cheaper, a new cisco or juniper DSLAM, with countless ADSL DMT/DOCSIS modems, or piles of made-in-taiwan switches and fiber cables??
Slashdot Mirror
I tried installing a full version of AIX 5.1L on my RS6000, configured the network till I could ping yahoo.com. Then what?
To download anything I needed a browser, and I didnt have a browser to download a browser. Netscape 4.71 comes with the companion AIX CD that I dont have. I tried ftp-ing places and it didnt work. I had to download firefox on a windows machine, ftp-share it, download it onto the AIX and then there were a hoard of dependancy problems.
So folks, you need SOME interface to the Internet. What do people use after a fresh install of WindowsXP to get firefox????
Sure some will argue Microsoft should package firefox with it, but shouldnt they just GPL Windows and pour billions into free software? During the early days of the Internet... 1995.. I remember people 'bought' netscape 2.0 or 3.0 to get online, just before IE 1.0, because they had nothing. Accept IE as a tool to get firefox with and appreciate it.
Of course its integration into the standard explorer, and the fact that its always sitting in the memory is what buggers me. I'd rather also have WMP installed, with no hooks into the explorer shell and no parts in RAM, so I can run it whenever I absolutely need to.
I've used Windows, MacOSX, various commercial unices, linux and bsd, and have come to a conclusion, that the X server's client-server design compromises the latency of usage.
I thought this was a driver issue, for example, on the same machine, opening, moving and resizing windows is very snappy on any window system beside X, be it MSWindows (yeah I know crappy, insecure, bloaty etc, but snappy), BeOS or OSX. Even the X11 on Darwin isnt quite as snappy as it should be being a GUI system.
In the case of BeOS, the graphic system is highly simplified, compared to client-server X, with a window manager on top. In the case of MSWindows, all graphics card manufacturers have designed their cards and their drivers to be optimum for windows, each little function on any chip, of rage, TNT, Matrox is used in the best way to blit, display and alter windows. I dont know much about cocoa, which came from the NeXT design...
Apart from the latency, I think the process priority of X and its child processes should also be rethought, under heavy load X and its WM becomes very unresponsive.
Linux/BSD have far superior OS designs and c libraries compared to MSWindows, its sad to see something simple holding them back from the Desktop market. Sure the lack of opensource graphics drivers are also holding it back, and so is the lack of standardization (gnome vs QT, menu system and location in the filesystem, even package standards... rpm?), but this one hurts in that it affects the image of opensourced OSes to commandline-shy users. gl-enabled apps even within windows run beautifully, but superior hardware is required to let the window system run as smoothly as other OSes. Some people think part of the culprit is the GUI system sitting outside of the kernel space, and all GUI-related processes being in a tree, rather than being children of init.
I wonder if X can be compiled as X-lite, bypassing the client-server overhead, possibly compiling WITH a simple WM rather than running it on top, and being run at a higher priority, should make things smooth. Any thoughts?
Bushy plan:
(1) Find a country that disagrees with you.
(2) Economically and politically sideline them, till it becomes a tough place to live for the citizens, and blame the govt
(3) Call them terrorists for owning ANY weapons (OMG! they have knives!!!)
(4) Lie to link them with some bomb that went off somewhere in USA regardless of why
(5) Invade regardless of the lives lost
(6) Give the govt to ANY group of people but sideline the other groups, so the imbalance keeps the country divided and makes it a timebomb rather than some economic power
(6) Put in a puppet govt by holding elections with only the possible puppets as candidates and siphon off any possible natural resources
(7) Profit!!!!!
This works well for Afghanistan and Iraq, and seems to be working on Iran and N Korea currently.
But what I find quite funny is the extraordinary lack of symmetry. The US has nuclear weapons. Why? Because of rogue countries like N Korea which might use them. N Korea has Nuclear weapons, why? Because rogue nations like USA might attack. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Why? Because India might attack.
Whats worse is that the use of Biological and Chemical weapons by the Americans on civilians anywhere has been more extensive than by Saddam on Kurds. USA has been the only country in history to drop nuclear weapons on civilian cities. Now it is attacking another country for owning nuclear weapons, which it does in case the USA attacks.
So the big bully in the playground first beats up the kid. Then the bully says dont defend yourself at all, or I'll beat you up. Then he tries to get support from his friends saying the kid is trying to defend himself, therefore he must be beaten up.
N Korea is a shithole. So was Afghanistan, so was Iraq. Thats because of the economic sidelining of Uncle Sam, which has full control over the global economy. N Korea in many ways is trying to kick start their economy with a free economy zone, attract tourists etc. Sure theyre not doing a good job of it, but thats because they also have to defend themselves of American infiltration. But economy is in their sights, and the people are still dying of hunger. Is it because they are completely incapable of manufacturing exportable goods? China is not a democracy, but they are exporting goods and a far smaller percentage is dying of starvation.
Interesting is also the case of Zimbabwe's president Mugabe. He was elected in an election. But since he disagrees with Britain, has the guts to flip em the bird, suddenly Zimbabwe is a terrorist country, with a dictator, and if their natural resources were sufficient, it would warrant an invasion by the white knights of the west. Rule: Never EVER disagree with the USA.
I think the USA turning into such a bully is a very natural part of any empire in history. As soon as they become the undisputed global leader, they use excessive political and military forces for their personal benefits, until they become the global villain enough to be toppled by another global regeime. Think of the Chinese empires, the Roman empire, Greek empire, Mongolian empire etc. Couple that with the fact that you cannot suppress any people for too long, the future does not bode well for the Americans
GCC should be able to compile binaries for the cell cpu in 1 year of the cell's release, meaning someone should be able to compile netbsd and/or linux for it, both the kernel and userland. I would imagine it would not be optimised much first, but threading will suddenly be important on both platforms, and we can expect much more attention on libpthreads, as well as the SMP scheduler of the linux kernel. It should be able to recognise different-strength CPUs and assign tasks, even reserve a cpu for graphics functions, reserve another for running certain drivers etc. (I dont know if its currently capable of all that).
So in a few years time its possible the development of at least one of the unixen, will be focused on highly threaded distributed applications, new scheduler and libc designs to help in that, and better levels of performance than a linear monolithic kernel with none or bad threading and the simple scheduler that linux had a while ago.
Would it kill Palm to release opensource BeOS at a time like this, when a BeOS compiled for the cell CPU will be the killer desktop OS?
I wonder what class of DB will be released by sun. On the lowest end, something like minisql, sqlite, sleepycat, middle level mysql, higher level postgresql, ingres, sybase, or highest level, oracle.
Theyre not competing with oracle if the database is for webservers, or to keep email aliases for sendmail.
I called IBM a while ago and checked their minimum price for an openpower server. 30 grand.
To make it worthwhile, they should really bring the costs down to something like the xSeries 206 ($500) for PPC servers to compete using Linux. An openpower server running SuSE with SCSI disks and POWER3 or POWER4 processor and a gig of ram for around $1000 will sell and overtake both x86 and sparc platforms. But 30grand will not sell. Thats more expensive than the minimum pSeries server with AIX 5.3
I agree on this one, it is a catch-22 thing, with microsoft riding the tsunami wave that has no end.
But I must disagree with Microsoft being absolutely and completely crap. You give credit where its due, even if its an arm-twisting IP-stealing company. For example the MSSQL server does a good job, WindowsXP is finally close to being a usable desktop OS despite being insecure, and Microsoft's Active Directory, despite being incompatible with standard LDAP, simply works for most companies. I used to actually like Microsoft during the MASM days, which was better in syntax than TASM, and when Windows 3.1 was made available, it did its job well. Microsoft made the transition from 16-bit DOS on 8086 to Windows95 on a Pentium very smooth, heck I can still play wolfenstein3d on Windows2000. Last I heard, OS9 emulation on OSX was crappy and heavy on the system, and so was m68k emulation on the PPC...
The fact that we dont have to buy a completely new machine and lose all our apps, is the genius of Microsoft. Gotta admit they have a grip on the desktop for a good reason, and better OSes cant infiltrate this monopoly despite spending big $$$ for 2 decades now. Its a different matter that Linux/BSD is much more secure and efficient now, Linux never ran on 8086, and Linux + KDE/GNOME + X still havent reached the GUI sweet-spot that OSX and XP have (and BeOS did).
I'll use Linux for most anything that I can, partially to support the OSS movement and get better used to a free and superior-designed OS, and partly because it works where it works well. I'll also use Windows where Linux doesnt cut it, WineX cant do DirectX well, cant play WoW or CS:Source on Linux, cant play Giants or Tiberian Sun on Linux, cant run our company ERP software on Linux, cant run Lotus Notes on Linux (yeah yeah tried iNotes doesnt cut it), and the GUI is never as snappy as windows can be. Keymappings also suffer, I can use windows with a keyboard alone, windowmanagers and X are usually not configured with enough keystrokes, or theyre too obscure. Your default Linux/BSD distro is designed as a general OS and not a Desktop one, bringing in the kind of bloat (why are we still using X?) desktop users really could live without.
I agree.
Since you own all the pieces, and the traffic isnt high unless you plan to stream videos from your plants, go wireless mesh. Properly setup, this would actually be a more robust setup.
I wonder if you could also do a whole bunch of p2p connections and run BGPv4 over it. Will look great over your resume.
Search returns with almost equal weights should be shuffled.. so the top few sites do not appear in order, unless one site has overwhelming weight over the others.. like searching for "CNN". Even the lower-weight items should be randomized, with a lower probability for them to rise, such that the 100th item will in 0.001% or less of the returns appear as item # 1. The domain name should be given a great deal of weight.
Apart from these, we can just let the commercial entities pay for their rating, so the highly-advertised site appears first. We fought long and hard against Communism, for Capitalism, lets see it in action.
I just visited the site and tried on a few of the PDFs. It seems to be aimed at higher markets, and maybe they wont rent out single processors. I was hoping I could use this as a webserver on a single CPU if cheap, but $700 a month isnt.
I was compiling kernels for an embedded project a while ago, and many flags of the linux kernel makes it crash, especially with the -tiny patches. I have a PIII at home, so recompiling after each crash was a royal pain.
So the idea was I'll rent a grid of CPUs, and iterate through all possible flag combinations (gcc flags, config options, patches even) and download a large number of small compiled kernels, and try the successful ones out for size, to find the smallest kernel I can compile for the project. Unfortunately it gets way too expensive, and I'd much rather replace my motherboard and cpu with an Athlon64, or two, and leave the thing running for a week. Or a year.
The grid isnt for everyone. Its for people who know exactly what they want, know about the parallelism of their problems and how to make highly threaded apps, or distribute the execution across CPUs. Its not for you and I.
PowerPC is a CPU. The liveCD no doubt will run only on one architecture, namely the mac-ppc. I have been looking for a livecd for my RS6000 7043-140, and cant find one. I jump at such mentions only to read 'mac' in the text.
x86 is a chip and an architecture, I havent heard of any major system using the x86 chip but not architecture, except the PIX 501. The only reason anyone would use the damned x86 CPU is binary compatibility which also relies on the chipset, therefore the architecture. But this is certainly not true of PPC, MIPS, ARM, 68000 and others.
Rants aside, is it possible to have a single kernel and bootloader boot on the prep/chrp platform (whichever had both rs6000 and mac, i forgot)?? Would be cool to have say a bootable livecd boot and run quakeII on both apple macs and rs6000 machines, containing graphics card drivers for both systems in the kernel. Is it easier to do all this in NetBSD?
You dont catch sarcasm easily do you?
Microsoft invented the GUI, they never stole it from Apple.
Linux is the biggest UNIX out there, who cares about the open groups definition which is pretty much bought, and currently everything but AIX 5.x is not UNIX. If you look closely, UNIX is also defined as an architecture of operating systems, which Linux has been following as a loyal 'unix clone'. I, like many on slashdot refuse to swallow the open groups paid-for definitions, of unix.
Theres no minix code in linux. sure. but the first linux versions were developed on minix, and used the minix fs. the architecture was close to minix initially, and both Linus and Tannenbaum claim that Linux was 'inspired' by Minix. My point exactly was Linux itself isnt such an original idea, since a free 'unix' of that architecture existed as minix, but for different reasons. Can we give ALL the design credits to Linus alone if minix had the linux's early kernel design?
This is not the newyork times, expect some cynicism.
Microsoft invented the GUI so give them the award. Andrew made Samba, who cares, that hardly qualifies as a smart product.
Or someone forks out YaBSD as an OS.. Yet Another BSD, while the guy who ported the ATM drivers from Solaris to this BSD only ported drivers so who cares?
So between Erik Raymond, Linus Trovalds and Andrew Tannenbaum, who would you give an award to?
Linus because his name is on the biggest UNIX out there??? Shouldnt Alan Cox rather take THAT award?
And why not Tannenbaum's Minix, from which Linux was created?
Someone puts up a great idea, another builds a structure and an alpha version of that idea. A third person works years debugging and improving it for prime time. The first two people will be most visible, the third will be the apparently hard working guy, how do you measure things here?
With such pressure to be 'seen' as working and contributing, Google might be turning itself into a Microsoft. The real trick is, how do you get the employee's sincerity for the whole company instead of his next bonus, the way opensource projects work?
By not paying them or yourself at all!
If you do find a UNIX for older machiens, namely a minivax, lemme know. I have a minivax here gathering dust (minivax 2100), to which I'd REALLY like to port DOOM.
Or at least rip out the board, squeeze it into a 1U chassis to host my sites offsite, and have some serious bragging rights.
Ive been trying to get OpenVMS for a while. Apparently I have to sign up as an HP member or something that costs $$$$.. even for the hobbyist license. Where can I get the latest OpenVMS for free?
I'd also have to get a good scsi card for my lx533 Alpha system.. the last qlogic 1040 I got wasnt KZBCA or whatever the DEC code is.... it was a generic one. I have nothing to boot the lx533 with.
Am also looking for an ethernet card that works with it. I had a pile of ISA DIGITAL ethernet cards none of which worked with SRM... so I'm counting them not to work with OpenVMS.
Firefox was exactly what I wanted. A while ago, the options were limited to 3 bloated browsers (mozilla taking the extreme end of the spectrum), and a fast commercial one... Opera. I'd have issues installing or compiling Opera on AIX or Solaris on x86 etc, and wished there was a free Opera sourcecode somewhere.
What kills me is how in the world did companies like Netscape miss what the public wants? They made netscape communicator, a monolith for people who only wanted yahoo.com to come up faster. Next they made netscape 6, then 7, never slower or smaller. IE was competing with Opera easily since you have to purchase opera, and IE is free for the most part.
Mozilla was a joke. Period. I always thought mozilla was an org of programmers with itchy fingers who just wanted to make an OS-in-a-browser.
Someone grew brains there.
You could also put the sail between a rod and the spacecraft if its not rigid like so:
/
\
)
----|--SC
}
such that the sail will be wired to the tip of the rod.
Some comments here mention $50 per month hosting services.
Do yourself a major favor, and get a complete real server from serverpronto.com. Thats $30 per month for 200GB transfers, a whole $40 gigs of disk space including OS.. and unlimited mailboxes, domains etc.
It completely escapes me why people pay so much more for so much less. Before these guys I was with a jvds or something like that, which sells virtual servers for $5 a month even. You get maybe 10gigs of disk space.. and performance is reasonable enough to allow emails, apache and the likes.
Serverpronto went down for a day several times last year, but bandwidth has been good, and I'm not running critical-uptime applications anyway.
What else out there beats this?
This idea comes from practicality. You cant run DOOM. You cant run Commander Keen or Zeliard or civilization or Monkey Island. You cant run All the specialized apps that depend on DOS, unless you emulate x86... and there are pleny of those, for serial access devices, manufacturing machine interfaces, apps to configure routers even.
I really prefer the ARM for lower end machines, its the optimum choice... or MIPS for higher bandwidths and media intensive apps. But face it, most of the real-world apps, were made for the x86, and opensource in many places is catching up.
Nice point.
But from my Commodore 64 days, I remember the resolution to be pretty bad. For reading text its unbearable, unless the size is really big, in which case a lot of scrolling is required. All websites are designed at least for the 800x600 resolution, about twice what PAL or NTSC provides...
But for most other things like games, video, TV is a great option..
Ideally this should be an ARM based linux running machine, with maybe monochrome LCD with it, and minimum mechanical parts, meaning running off flash rather than harddrives.
It should have a power cable, not requiring a power adapter since that adds to the costs... a power-down IC with a power regulator IC should do the trick along with a fat capacitor. A modem or ethernet will certainly be a requirement, and will add to the costs. I wonder if in mass production 802.11b will be cheaper.
The GUI itself should be minimalistic, and I dont know if adding sound to it will be important. Remember this should be profitable at $99.
ARM SoC= $10
DRAM at 128MB = $20
flash at 128MB = $30
LCD = $30
everything else = $10
Last time I was checking the prices for such a computer, the LCD was the most expensive part, even in monochrome at 640x480. If they intend to bring that down to 320x200, the LCD cost wont drop significantly unless the size is also reduced. They could also reduce the flash, but thats removing alot, even though the kernel will be 2MB, glibc and busybox for a non-MMU machine will be 10mb. X, browsers etc will only take it to a maximum of 32MB, unless the browser has flash, real, quicktime etc. in which case its 64mb. Still having 128mb is reasonable for flash.
RAM is also very critical in running the system. 128mb is plenty of space but they can also live with 64mb. anything below that is choking the machine.
So with 64mb ram and 64mb flash, and 320x200 LCD, its still approaching $99 in BOM alone, which means the volume of production must be very high to make profits at $99...
To make it x86, add $30 extra, add more voltage, but that gives us much more applications, and the computer will sell in much greater numbers everywhere, and you dont have to lose money on hardware like the XBox.
Many parts of the Matrix and other action movies didnt need a real plot. Think True Lies or Speed or Die Hard.
So what parts not a movie... some terrorists kidnap some scientists somewhere, they send a swat team and the action starts. Why do you need a longish story, since most of the audience will be hungry for nothing but action? The game is just about run and shoot, but movies have more flexibility, think of die hard again, when one terrorist remains, and draws an army of counter terrorists to an alley then guns them down, or when their ammo runs out and they resort to knives...
Or when someone loses their mind and runs around with a machine gun. The sniper scenes can be like the one on Saving Prive Ryan. Teamplay should be on since that adds drama.
And in the end the hero somehow gets the girl... the usual stuff..
I entered the address of a website, it wasnt a particularly nasty site, just something resulting from a google search.
And it automatically installed a spyware application. No YES/NO dialogues just installed it. After that I saw attempts at outbound port 6667 to various external servers.
Now I do manage servers that hold financial data, and servers with ERP software that run the company.
I ask you, Microsoft, can you be held accountable if our company melts down should malicious spyware enter the system with their authors intending to corrupt our backups and bring everything down?
Will you pay us the millions that we lose as we lose our customers?
Will you as a result of such a catastrophe give us an OS that does NOT allow such breaches of security?
I understand IE in Windows 2003 is more secured, and we should never browse for anything on the server itself... etc. However Windows2003 has not been matured enough to bring out the bugs while Windows2000 has issues even after SP4, and after Microsoft will cease to provide bugfixes for it.
We replaced our firewall with OpenBSD. We simple cannot find a reason to upgrade it from the 3.4 version, since the older version is so secure. Hell yeah we've had attacks of all kinds, to almost all ports, syn cookies even ddos type attacks that slowed the Internet connection, but we're still up, and without ever having an issue for over two years of OpenBSD operation.
Coming back to Linux, which is also a UNIX clone, and which has more eyeballs on it, and more companies taking responsibility for it, tell me, should I pay for a crappy OS with someone behind it you can point fingers to, or a nice OS with no person behind it simply because youll never have to point fingers?
I used to imagine a telescope of a pan filled with mercury, spinning, and attached to the lens assembly via rods on top, and the whole device turning to create gravity for the mercury so it stays in the pan, while the whole telescope like a lighthouse scans the skies.
The moon will allow greater sized assemblies, and gravity doesnt have to be induced. The problem is the lack of control, which can be offset by building multiple telescopes at various lattitudes.
So whats difficult? A large container which can carry mercury, even a large plastic bag in a satellite dish mesh can do. The structure will sit on a motor that spins. The motor will not induce any vibrations into the mercury pan, for the former telescope I had a magnetic levitation rotation device, or at least a string that dangles the pan while magnets rotate it. The magnets cannot be in two D structures like regular motors since thats vibration there, so a uniform magnetic field is applied while current is passed between the center of the pan and its sides to allow for a continuous DC motor. If the current can be passed with no contacts, we can achieve real smooth rotations and no frictions or vibrations... again magnetic levitation would be a great idea here since the moon can be cold enough for ceramic superconductors, and clear enough for solar panels to power the thing.
The smaller we make the mercury pan, the more vibration prone it gets as we increase the resolution, so we can expect moon earthquakes to be a problem whenever something hits the surface. Shouldnt be frequent enough to cause a problem...
Unlike Hubble, the structure should be radiation-hardened, low-maintenance, no mechanical parts, no chemical reserves object, except for the mercury container. If spun fast enough, the container can reflect light from greated angles removing the problem of lack of control.
How fast is the connection from the CO to other major backbones? How much of the 8mbit is committed bit rate? How much is guaranteed if say all possible users start downloading at the same time?
Is that ISP's network multihomed?
And even more importantly what is the latency to yahoo.com, Torontos 151 Front St, backbones in NYC, and the Silicon Valley Sprint networks? How much is the delay to alter.net routers?
In short, will you see 80ms or 30ms playing counterstrike on your average server in the US, Canada or Korea?
All this is assuming their internal switches are all non-blocking preferably gigabit switches with either gigabit or 10gigabit uplinks, not 10mbit ethernet hubs. Also assuming their modem and CO equipment are both nonblocking doing the pppoe and breaking up 1500-sized packets to fit because most people dont enter 1492 in their MTU settings.
If their networks are in such good shape, more uplinks will be appreciated more than higher speec downlinks, maybe 4mbit/1mbit or even 4mbit/4mbit SDSL, especially if they provide static non-pppoe IPs. These things simply allow other possibilities even for the consumer market which wants to share pictures, stream out videos to relatives, and run game servers.
With all ISPs inching up their technologies, upgrading their equipment in each iteration, it escapes me why dont they quite simply lay down fiber optic ethernet lines in the streets running at 100mbit both ways, and just be done with it. Their operating costs will absolutely plummett, and fiber optics do exceed the ADSL distance. What is cheaper, a new cisco or juniper DSLAM, with countless ADSL DMT/DOCSIS modems, or piles of made-in-taiwan switches and fiber cables??