RC airplanes can use glow fuel engines or electric engines. Electric is cleaner and cheaper, but fuel engines can be recharged on the spot and are much more powerful.
I believe the smartest companies will offer a battery replacement, that can be switched with electric batteries rather than building the whole fuel cell system in.
Cant wait to see whole lanparties running without wires, and a lemonade-type alcohol stand nearby serving power. I wonder if the fuel can be SPIKED for exciting sessions of counterstrike!
The whole view of the Internet for the average person is through search engines, yahoo or google. This makes things dangerous.
Perhaps the US defence department gets involved and links searches to WAR and IRAQ to cnn sites but none of Al Jazeera. They could even build a catalog of IP address that have searched for things a govt wouldnt want its people to know.
This is why there must be diversity and competition between search engines. Search engines should also be local to countries to reduce bandwidth, and decrease centralized control as much as possible. If this, and DNS can be localized in countries, power can be removed where it doesnt belong. Unfortunately, even I couldnt switch away from google, even for this principle, because theres no equivalent technology with the same clarity elsewhere.
I wonder if this inflicts a performance hit, or more memory is required as a result. I know more disk space is needed, but with the smallest IDEs these days being 40GB, I'm not worried there.
If theres really no performance hit, I wonder if all daemons can be run in seperate chroots, indeed could an inetd be developed that chroots all its daemons. Necessary readonly stuff like libc might be hard-linked rather than copied to save space, unless that would be too much of a security breach.
My very-lazily setup FreeBSD server never gave me problems, and I wouldnt be implementing this in my production server yet, but its nice to HAVE DONE stuff like this to: (1) boast (2) print on resume (3) profit!
The article DOES seem to imply the quantum spin is similar to the physical. It was also light on the tehnical description of the phenomenon.
I suspect this is one of the regular release articles, just like nVidia being forced to put out new versions of cards every 6 months no matter what the developments. To keep funds secured, scientists have to do these things, on regular intervals produce press reports about things they SUSPECT might be revolutionary, followed by possible applications in medical, military etc, that justify the investments of the fundgivers. (read Thomas Kuhn: structure of scientific revolutions)
Slashdot moderators should not pass science news of this sort. They should look for reviews of such reports by other scientists before posting them, preferrably through the journals.
Hmm. I wonder if google can be used to parse the journals and count the favorable links to each of these reports.
Maybe this guy will build a wire structure that connects 10 floppies and handle. Then hold the structure and insert all floppies into properly aligned drives... Keep adding floppies to hopefully beat the speed of the IDE, then sell it.
Microsoft is known for going after bad ideas. Take the Windows.NET, now Windows 2003. More useless than the tablet I think is the Media PC. PCs already have all the media they need, why specifically a media PC?
OK so theyre going after a household gadget, maybe something like TiVO. It better have all the major buttons on it; play rewind etc, as well as on its remote. The rest of the system should be made bullet-proof, i.e. the OS shouldnt need input at awkward moments like a bad cd or apps crashing, shouldnt need a keyboard at all.
But if theyre going after a PC-cum-household appliance, its a wild goose chase. Everyone would rather do media on their PCs. Many PCs have things like the ATI all-in-wonder and sound blaster extigy and still dont call themselves media. They tried cheap, well everyones rushing for the ECS motherboards.. 1.4GHz AMD for $90. Beat that.
I fought with the M4 format of sendmail.cfg for a while in setting up a complex system before switching to qmail. Ive tried postfix too, but I still see diehard sendmailers around.
For one, sendmail is really not intuitive. If youre given a server youve never seen before and have to alter some fancy configs in it, could you do it faster than if it were say qmail? Maybe if I stare at M4 pinfo I could begin to get it, I gave up early there.
Secondly these security problems.
So beside the fact that sendmail is the standard, quite mature and very flexible if you know how to config it, does it have any big edge over postfix or qmail that everyone should know about?
And can the sendmail developers be brave trailblazers and finally change the config file syntax to just text words like httpd.conf?
I suppose you could put them to any use, good or otherwise. Sun has too much money and the Indians will accept any paycheck. Great, put several dozen on the desktop backburner, because you NEVER know...
Part of opensource developer psychology is exclusivity. Belonging to for instance the FreeBSD or Debian linux camp, and not developing something that contributes to the other camps especially the commercial OSes like Solaris. I think this would hinder the unified drivers. And like you said its a very different environment, its also an added layer, and what attracts developers to system/kernel/driver programming in the first place is the low level.
But I think theres a threshold beyond which people will contribute more. Project UDI will take effort to get there, including remaking previous-ly made drivers in UDI. Since Opensource OSes have much to gain from this, they should rally around this idea, especially the underdog OSes like NetBSD. I wouldnt expect Linux developers coming wholeheartedly.
>QT unifies the different window systems? What are >you smoking?
Drink tea. Black.
> There's a standard desktop and graphics toolkit >for UNIX already. They're called CDE and Motif. >Ever heard of them? I didn't think so.
Sure, but theyre not standard across to Win32 and OSX. There might be emulators that run on TOP, but that defeats my analogy. QT wraps the windowing system functions, from Win32 OSX and X11, presenting a unified and simple bunch of tools. I'm not asking you to love it, just take the analogy and apply it to whats possible for drivers.
> Sorry for the tone; This isn't flaming *you*, >but the various people who think everything >demands a brand new, throughly incompatible >toolkit, object model, sound server and window >manager.
Well in that case you are flaming me. I think the drivers across unix clones can be unified.
OK. I need to use my token ring LAN with my DSL ethernet. Such functionality is flaky or broken with everything but Solaris. If someone could port solaris drivers to Linux I'm happy, but I have a friend who is also using tokenring and needs BSD drivers. Will you port them for us? No? I didnt think so.
Since the works already been done, doesnt need to be repeated for EVERY OS.
> Admittantly, Motif was non-free for a long time, >but so was QT.
Well getting into licensing is different. The driver tree could include licensing info, so you could download a tarball of drivers with BSD and MIT licenses but no GPL for instance. Unzip it in the Linux sources and compile it all, smooth. Do the same for FreeBSD. I think its possible and I think it will boost OpenSource OSes greatly, ones like NetBSD.
... of LCDs ARE better than those of CRTs, at least for new LCDs. Only people would rather spend that dough for the latest geforce or radeon, AND get a bigger-sized monitor. Most people really do have the space for a CRT on their desks...
But mass production will bring LCD prices down, possibly lower than CRTs since much lesser glass is used, and outside of manufacturing costs, intellectual property etc, the raw materials are cheaper than that for CRTs. When they get closer to the price of the CRT, they should really finish off CRTs for good.
Imagine the number of people heading to their physicians to pull out the buds.
And the lazy teens who NEVER pull em out. You could bug them with a linux-programmed PDA that emits shrill sounds.. great tool for examiners making sure students arent cheating.. just turn the PDA on and stare at the faces, see which one twitches first.
Or more seriously have satellite power companies beaming power down to subscribers all the time.. hmm
Now wireless parks and cafes could offer tables on which you could put your laptop and use it PLUGGED. If airlines take the idea too, and car manufacturers, we wouldnt need batterly lives of over 4 hours.
To make it worth it, cafes for instance could make their tables coin-op to start powering for say 30 minutes, while you place your laptop and coffe cup over it. I wonder what the effecs of electrolysis are on coffee.
I'm too skeptical of the inductive effects on foodstuff and the human body though.
Just like QT unifies the different window systems and opengl unifies various graphic systems, I think we seriously need a unified system of drivers for all *nix including Linux, BSD, Solaris if Sun sees the potential, AIX ditto, Beos and darwin. Newer OSes like Plan9 would use the infrastructure and gain support of ALL the hardware.
I'm not too sure how we could cope with not adding additional code layers slowing things down.. perhaps an M4-based system that changes the right functions in the driver code, and removes or replaces OS-specific functionality depending on the output of uname. Such a unified system would attract hardware designers who would release their driver code according to this structure to support multiple OSes, and Free Software would be the big winner here.
Ive had to move from FreeBSD to Linux to Solaris now, due to the inherent lack of tokenring drivers, or its stability. FreeBSD had only one TR supported, in alpha, and it crashed. I wish I had the option of using NetBSD. Linux has a slew of TR supposedly supported but there are some bugs in receive buffers of TR code when using it with ethernet and ipfilter. I tried tuning many things, even tried to implement my own receive buffer with additional checks. It was a bit complicated for me.
The various unixen have a collection of kernel hooks that could be used in drivers. A simple large table could be made for hooks that are similar, showing differences in naming, arguments and limitations of buffers etc. Other pointer hooks then could be made to represent and encapsulate these hooks, also encapsulating additional procedures that need to be run before/after each hook on specific systems.
Non-equivalent hooks are more difficult to use, some might need additional programming on some systems while other systems would have part of that functionality built in. For this, we gotta build trees of functionality of each driver type, say networking, graphic, input etc, for each system making a 3d graph of the functionality and working with the weaknesses of some systems making it similar to the strengths of others, makin it easy to create encapsulating hooks.
The encapsulating hooks themselves could be either C functions, pointers, or M4 macros, which would be replaced with the code of the right system just before compile time. I would go with c pointers if theres NO resulting performance hit after being compiled with gcc -O2. If theres a resulting performance hit on ANY system, I'd say we're pretty much stuck with M4 which on some systems could become too complicated to be worth it.
Pulling out all drivers from the Linux code, and FreeBSD and sticking it all into the tree, and demonstrating its working would be the end of the first phase. Establishing a proper standards group, quite possibly with posix/ansi/someotherbody would complete the second phase. After that its all sit back and wait, and just like WDM in windows, hardware makers should re-release driver codes for a more unified platform.
Apart from a major boost to Net/OpenBSD, Plan9 and others, the Linux kernel might be lightened much from todays 30MB+. Yet another issue would be driver signing and security unless the whole driver structure is downloaded with the kernel sources of each OS.
I cut MY first teeth on Slacky. From Infomagic, we ordered a Linux pack back in 1995 that had RedHat, Slackware 3.2 and Debian. We were three friends and by chance slackware got to me.
Ive used so many distros and OSes including OpenBSD Plan9 and Darwin.
Right now for some internet servers, the two big ones I'm using are RedHat and Solaris8, but I'm just gathering experience for both since I'll certify myself for both of those. Markets like that. For server installations at companies I would go with RedHat, Debian or SuSE, but at home, by myself, with no constraints, its Slackware! (or if its outdated like it sometimes is, knoppix!)
So hear me Volkerding! Slackware fans are out there using and recommending other distros but they remain slackware fans. The current useage of slackware is no barometer to how many techies WANT to use it. I might be helping prepare a tech school in Quetta, Pakistan, border with Afghanistan, and I'll be getting everyone started on Slackware before preparing them for certifications of RedHat, Solaris and AIX.
BTW, is there a HAZARAGI language version planned for slackware yet?
>I like my window manager seperate thank you very >much. The fact that I can select which wm to use >at any given moment is very appealing. I'd have a
To you and many other people, others like me would prefer simple small fast in the extreme. Thats why a fork should occur along that line. I'll use my branch, you'll use yours. Better still such functionality could be added optional to the sources.. optionally removing WM support and adding a simple WM compile time. Same for its networking code, keyboard and mouse, and other 'flexibilities' that the average doom-player and opera user couldnt care much about.
>seizure if I had to install multiple versions of >X to be able to switch between WMs or if X had to >have every WM rolled into it. Plus there are many >occasions where i don't run a WM at all, playing >movies, games, etc. Who needs a WM for a fragfest >or a fullscreen DVD
What is this a post by the FBI to gather a list of unpatriotic geeks??
If not, well Ive found the Observer, the UK Independent, russian interfax, Pakistans dawn.com to be nice and unbiased. Ever BBC is pretty objective with not overflowing opinions like the CNN or NYTimes.
A smart person would gather objective data from these and form his own opinion rather than sucking up the world's opinion.
I'm not too sure why hes wanting to fork but there are definitely issues needing to get addressed in X, to push Linux on the desktop.
Firstly, X is bloated for a single desktop computer. I even would want the windowmanager code unified with the X code to make it quicker with fewer jumps and memory size. While a lot of people will disagree with me because their X + KDE runs smooth on their Athlon 2000, MS Windows still has a smaller and faster footprint, win95 runs on a 386 with 8mb ram if you push it. Smaller size also makes it more snappy.
Is that why youre not watching CNN and on Slashdot? Hey news for nerds! Shit that matters!
I'll alt-tab to cnn.com in a while but wont expect material belonging there in slashdot. And then a company rolling out Linux against their own UNIX is news for nerds.
I think even SGI did this, roll out Linux along their own OS for servers. No complaints from us but, I wonder why dont they offer BSD as well, just for more diversity in their offerings? They shouldnt make much money from Linux as an OS, so they could do that.
You have an important point...
on
Gzip on a PCI card
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
When the PCI bus is taken, other stuff that the CPU needs to do will also be halted. And then the PCI bus is much slower than the FSB.
I think what we need to push distributed computing more is altering the RAM and DMA channels. There should be many physical channels to the RAM capable of simultaneously reading/writing different parts of it. As in if the ram can output 200 MB per sec, 16 devices could attach themselves to the RAM via maybe EDMA (enhanced DMA?) and simultaneously be able to read at 200MB each. This might be done by:
(1) Altering the addressing logic in the memory ICs, maybe put 16 different addressing systems and multiply their pins x16. Then have an external matrix, more advanced than the 802x DMA chip to allow simultaniety.
(2) Seperate the addressing schemes of each chip, so an OS kernel could smartly put data of important processes in the right chip to be worked on by external devices.. again also having an external matrix for the address multiplexing.
This way such a PCI gzip device could have its PCI address space, IRQ as well as (EDMA?) address which it would use to access the data to gzip and put back into the RAM, at full speed, not taking up RAM bandwidth, PCI bandwidth, IRQs or the CPU at all.
The AGP as achieved this by seperating the AGP channel from PCI, but still using dedicated memory rather than smartly-shared memory. I understand multiprocessor systems technically do the same thing, but in this case we are treating the external devices like complete slaves, like the GPU, for only dedicated purposes, and I'm emphasizing the smart sharing of memory that doesnt exist in multiprocessor systems either. In this scheme, one could add CPU cards, maybe hot-plugged, and have insta-multiprocessor system or use it to offload kernel compilation, zipping, 3d transformations, or even take user tasks while the main CPU just works in supervisor mode.
Umm, I use 2.5 myself and I dont know if the 50MB file brings it down. Its a pentium200 with 64MB ram, 256mb swap, and all backups occur at 4am. I remember testing it some time ago I think it finished the job clean while on the same lousy system I was running X and reading hotmail email using opera and twm. Maybe because its 2.5...
Slashdot Mirror
RC airplanes can use glow fuel engines or electric engines. Electric is cleaner and cheaper, but fuel engines can be recharged on the spot and are much more powerful.
I believe the smartest companies will offer a battery replacement, that can be switched with electric batteries rather than building the whole fuel cell system in.
Cant wait to see whole lanparties running without wires, and a lemonade-type alcohol stand nearby serving power. I wonder if the fuel can be SPIKED for exciting sessions of counterstrike!
The whole view of the Internet for the average person is through search engines, yahoo or google. This makes things dangerous.
Perhaps the US defence department gets involved and links searches to WAR and IRAQ to cnn sites but none of Al Jazeera. They could even build a catalog of IP address that have searched for things a govt wouldnt want its people to know.
This is why there must be diversity and competition between search engines. Search engines should also be local to countries to reduce bandwidth, and decrease centralized control as much as possible. If this, and DNS can be localized in countries, power can be removed where it doesnt belong. Unfortunately, even I couldnt switch away from google, even for this principle, because theres no equivalent technology with the same clarity elsewhere.
I wonder if this inflicts a performance hit, or more memory is required as a result. I know more disk space is needed, but with the smallest IDEs these days being 40GB, I'm not worried there.
If theres really no performance hit, I wonder if all daemons can be run in seperate chroots, indeed could an inetd be developed that chroots all its daemons. Necessary readonly stuff like libc might be hard-linked rather than copied to save space, unless that would be too much of a security breach.
My very-lazily setup FreeBSD server never gave me problems, and I wouldnt be implementing this in my production server yet, but its nice to HAVE DONE stuff like this to:
(1) boast
(2) print on resume
(3) profit!
The article DOES seem to imply the quantum spin is similar to the physical. It was also light on the tehnical description of the phenomenon.
I suspect this is one of the regular release articles, just like nVidia being forced to put out new versions of cards every 6 months no matter what the developments. To keep funds secured, scientists have to do these things, on regular intervals produce press reports about things they SUSPECT might be revolutionary, followed by possible applications in medical, military etc, that justify the investments of the fundgivers. (read Thomas Kuhn: structure of scientific revolutions)
Slashdot moderators should not pass science news of this sort. They should look for reviews of such reports by other scientists before posting them, preferrably through the journals.
Hmm. I wonder if google can be used to parse the journals and count the favorable links to each of these reports.
The catch is that it does NOT play GBA games.
Maybe this guy will build a wire structure that connects 10 floppies and handle. Then hold the structure and insert all floppies into properly aligned drives... Keep adding floppies to hopefully beat the speed of the IDE, then sell it.
Or even CD writers.. All those mass produced without copy protection.. need to be gotten rid of somehow.
Microsoft is known for going after bad ideas. Take the Windows
OK so theyre going after a household gadget, maybe something like TiVO. It better have all the major buttons on it; play rewind etc, as well as on its remote. The rest of the system should be made bullet-proof, i.e. the OS shouldnt need input at awkward moments like a bad cd or apps crashing, shouldnt need a keyboard at all.
But if theyre going after a PC-cum-household appliance, its a wild goose chase. Everyone would rather do media on their PCs. Many PCs have things like the ATI all-in-wonder and sound blaster extigy and still dont call themselves media. They tried cheap, well everyones rushing for the ECS motherboards.. 1.4GHz AMD for $90. Beat that.
I fought with the M4 format of sendmail.cfg for a while in setting up a complex system before switching to qmail. Ive tried postfix too, but I still see diehard sendmailers around.
For one, sendmail is really not intuitive. If youre given a server youve never seen before and have to alter some fancy configs in it, could you do it faster than if it were say qmail? Maybe if I stare at M4 pinfo I could begin to get it, I gave up early there.
Secondly these security problems.
So beside the fact that sendmail is the standard, quite mature and very flexible if you know how to config it, does it have any big edge over postfix or qmail that everyone should know about?
And can the sendmail developers be brave trailblazers and finally change the config file syntax to just text words like httpd.conf?
I suppose you could put them to any use, good or otherwise. Sun has too much money and the Indians will accept any paycheck. Great, put several dozen on the desktop backburner, because you NEVER know...
Interesting stuff.
Part of opensource developer psychology is exclusivity. Belonging to for instance the FreeBSD or Debian linux camp, and not developing something that contributes to the other camps especially the commercial OSes like Solaris. I think this would hinder the unified drivers. And like you said its a very different environment, its also an added layer, and what attracts developers to system/kernel/driver programming in the first place is the low level.
But I think theres a threshold beyond which people will contribute more. Project UDI will take effort to get there, including remaking previous-ly made drivers in UDI. Since Opensource OSes have much to gain from this, they should rally around this idea, especially the underdog OSes like NetBSD. I wouldnt expect Linux developers coming wholeheartedly.
>QT unifies the different window systems? What are >you smoking?
Drink tea. Black.
> There's a standard desktop and graphics toolkit >for UNIX already. They're called CDE and Motif. >Ever heard of them? I didn't think so.
Sure, but theyre not standard across to Win32 and OSX. There might be emulators that run on TOP, but that defeats my analogy.
QT wraps the windowing system functions, from Win32 OSX and X11, presenting a unified and simple bunch of tools. I'm not asking you to love it, just take the analogy and apply it to whats possible for drivers.
> Sorry for the tone; This isn't flaming *you*, >but the various people who think everything >demands a brand new, throughly incompatible >toolkit, object model, sound server and window >manager.
Well in that case you are flaming me. I think the drivers across unix clones can be unified.
OK. I need to use my token ring LAN with my DSL ethernet. Such functionality is flaky or broken with everything but Solaris. If someone could port solaris drivers to Linux I'm happy, but I have a friend who is also using tokenring and needs BSD drivers. Will you port them for us? No? I didnt think so.
Since the works already been done, doesnt need to be repeated for EVERY OS.
> Admittantly, Motif was non-free for a long time, >but so was QT.
Well getting into licensing is different. The driver tree could include licensing info, so you could download a tarball of drivers with BSD and MIT licenses but no GPL for instance. Unzip it in the Linux sources and compile it all, smooth. Do the same for FreeBSD. I think its possible and I think it will boost OpenSource OSes greatly, ones like NetBSD.
But mass production will bring LCD prices down, possibly lower than CRTs since much lesser glass is used, and outside of manufacturing costs, intellectual property etc, the raw materials are cheaper than that for CRTs. When they get closer to the price of the CRT, they should really finish off CRTs for good.
You need the wires to pull it out of your ears!
Imagine the number of people heading to their physicians to pull out the buds.
And the lazy teens who NEVER pull em out. You could bug them with a linux-programmed PDA that emits shrill sounds.. great tool for examiners making sure students arent cheating.. just turn the PDA on and stare at the faces, see which one twitches first.
Or more seriously have satellite power companies beaming power down to subscribers all the time.. hmm
Now wireless parks and cafes could offer tables on which you could put your laptop and use it PLUGGED. If airlines take the idea too, and car manufacturers, we wouldnt need batterly lives of over 4 hours.
To make it worth it, cafes for instance could make their tables coin-op to start powering for say 30 minutes, while you place your laptop and coffe cup over it. I wonder what the effecs of electrolysis are on coffee.
I'm too skeptical of the inductive effects on foodstuff and the human body though.
Just like QT unifies the different window systems and opengl unifies various graphic systems, I think we seriously need a unified system of drivers for all *nix including Linux, BSD, Solaris if Sun sees the potential, AIX ditto, Beos and darwin. Newer OSes like Plan9 would use the infrastructure and gain support of ALL the hardware.
I'm not too sure how we could cope with not adding additional code layers slowing things down.. perhaps an M4-based system that changes the right functions in the driver code, and removes or replaces OS-specific functionality depending on the output of uname. Such a unified system would attract hardware designers who would release their driver code according to this structure to support multiple OSes, and Free Software would be the big winner here.
Ive had to move from FreeBSD to Linux to Solaris now, due to the inherent lack of tokenring drivers, or its stability. FreeBSD had only one TR supported, in alpha, and it crashed. I wish I had the option of using NetBSD. Linux has a slew of TR supposedly supported but there are some bugs in receive buffers of TR code when using it with ethernet and ipfilter. I tried tuning many things, even tried to implement my own receive buffer with additional checks. It was a bit complicated for me.
The various unixen have a collection of kernel hooks that could be used in drivers. A simple large table could be made for hooks that are similar, showing differences in naming, arguments and limitations of buffers etc. Other pointer hooks then could be made to represent and encapsulate these hooks, also encapsulating additional procedures that need to be run before/after each hook on specific systems.
Non-equivalent hooks are more difficult to use, some might need additional programming on some systems while other systems would have part of that functionality built in. For this, we gotta build trees of functionality of each driver type, say networking, graphic, input etc, for each system making a 3d graph of the functionality and working with the weaknesses of some systems making it similar to the strengths of others, makin it easy to create encapsulating hooks.
The encapsulating hooks themselves could be either C functions, pointers, or M4 macros, which would be replaced with the code of the right system just before compile time. I would go with c pointers if theres NO resulting performance hit after being compiled with gcc -O2. If theres a resulting performance hit on ANY system, I'd say we're pretty much stuck with M4 which on some systems could become too complicated to be worth it.
Pulling out all drivers from the Linux code, and FreeBSD and sticking it all into the tree, and demonstrating its working would be the end of the first phase. Establishing a proper standards group, quite possibly with posix/ansi/someotherbody would complete the second phase. After that its all sit back and wait, and just like WDM in windows, hardware makers should re-release driver codes for a more unified platform.
Apart from a major boost to Net/OpenBSD, Plan9 and others, the Linux kernel might be lightened much from todays 30MB+. Yet another issue would be driver signing and security unless the whole driver structure is downloaded with the kernel sources of each OS.
I cut MY first teeth on Slacky. From Infomagic, we ordered a Linux pack back in 1995 that had RedHat, Slackware 3.2 and Debian. We were three friends and by chance slackware got to me.
Ive used so many distros and OSes including OpenBSD Plan9 and Darwin.
Right now for some internet servers, the two big ones I'm using are RedHat and Solaris8, but I'm just gathering experience for both since I'll certify myself for both of those. Markets like that. For server installations at companies I would go with RedHat, Debian or SuSE, but at home, by myself, with no constraints, its Slackware!
(or if its outdated like it sometimes is, knoppix!)
So hear me Volkerding! Slackware fans are out there using and recommending other distros but they remain slackware fans. The current useage of slackware is no barometer to how many techies WANT to use it. I might be helping prepare a tech school in Quetta, Pakistan, border with Afghanistan, and I'll be getting everyone started on Slackware before preparing them for certifications of RedHat, Solaris and AIX.
BTW, is there a HAZARAGI language version planned for slackware yet?
>I like my window manager seperate thank you very >much. The fact that I can select which wm to use >at any given moment is very appealing. I'd have a
To you and many other people, others like me would prefer simple small fast in the extreme. Thats why a fork should occur along that line. I'll use my branch, you'll use yours. Better still such functionality could be added optional to the sources.. optionally removing WM support and adding a simple WM compile time. Same for its networking code, keyboard and mouse, and other 'flexibilities' that the average doom-player and opera user couldnt care much about.
>seizure if I had to install multiple versions of >X to be able to switch between WMs or if X had to >have every WM rolled into it. Plus there are many >occasions where i don't run a WM at all, playing >movies, games, etc. Who needs a WM for a fragfest >or a fullscreen DVD
What is this a post by the FBI to gather a list of unpatriotic geeks??
If not, well Ive found the Observer, the UK Independent, russian interfax, Pakistans dawn.com to be nice and unbiased. Ever BBC is pretty objective with not overflowing opinions like the CNN or NYTimes.
A smart person would gather objective data from these and form his own opinion rather than sucking up the world's opinion.
I'm not too sure why hes wanting to fork but there are definitely issues needing to get addressed in X, to push Linux on the desktop.
Firstly, X is bloated for a single desktop computer. I even would want the windowmanager code unified with the X code to make it quicker with fewer jumps and memory size. While a lot of people will disagree with me because their X + KDE runs smooth on their Athlon 2000, MS Windows still has a smaller and faster footprint, win95 runs on a 386 with 8mb ram if you push it. Smaller size also makes it more snappy.
Is that why youre not watching CNN and on Slashdot? Hey news for nerds! Shit that matters!
I'll alt-tab to cnn.com in a while but wont expect material belonging there in slashdot. And then a company rolling out Linux against their own UNIX is news for nerds.
I think even SGI did this, roll out Linux along their own OS for servers. No complaints from us but, I wonder why dont they offer BSD as well, just for more diversity in their offerings? They shouldnt make much money from Linux as an OS, so they could do that.
When the PCI bus is taken, other stuff that the CPU needs to do will also be halted. And then the PCI bus is much slower than the FSB.
I think what we need to push distributed computing more is altering the RAM and DMA channels. There should be many physical channels to the RAM capable of simultaneously reading/writing different parts of it. As in if the ram can output 200 MB per sec, 16 devices could attach themselves to the RAM via maybe EDMA (enhanced DMA?) and simultaneously be able to read at 200MB each. This might be done by:
(1) Altering the addressing logic in the memory ICs, maybe put 16 different addressing systems and multiply their pins x16. Then have an external matrix, more advanced than the 802x DMA chip to allow simultaniety.
(2) Seperate the addressing schemes of each chip, so an OS kernel could smartly put data of important processes in the right chip to be worked on by external devices.. again also having an external matrix for the address multiplexing.
This way such a PCI gzip device could have its PCI address space, IRQ as well as (EDMA?) address which it would use to access the data to gzip and put back into the RAM, at full speed, not taking up RAM bandwidth, PCI bandwidth, IRQs or the CPU at all.
The AGP as achieved this by seperating the AGP channel from PCI, but still using dedicated memory rather than smartly-shared memory. I understand multiprocessor systems technically do the same thing, but in this case we are treating the external devices like complete slaves, like the GPU, for only dedicated purposes, and I'm emphasizing the smart sharing of memory that doesnt exist in multiprocessor systems either. In this scheme, one could add CPU cards, maybe hot-plugged, and have insta-multiprocessor system or use it to offload kernel compilation, zipping, 3d transformations, or even take user tasks while the main CPU just works in supervisor mode.
Why not just use OpenBSD without any optional crypto crap? Or NetBSD?
With no perl etc, the minimal install should be small, although i havent tried.
Umm, I use 2.5 myself and I dont know if the 50MB file brings it down. Its a pentium200 with 64MB ram, 256mb swap, and all backups occur at 4am. I remember testing it some time ago I think it finished the job clean while on the same lousy system I was running X and reading hotmail email using opera and twm. Maybe because its 2.5...