Sure, Linux has greater marketshare in some organizations. In the organization "PurpleFloyd's House" there are 3 linux boxen and one dualboot Win2K Pro/Linux box. Thus, Linux has a much greater marketshare -- in my house, anyway. However, on the 'net at large, Win2k/NT servers are more common. Perhaps this is because of the "point, drool, you've set up a server!" mentality that seems to infect Microsoft -- you can install IIS on Win2K Pro from the CD! One wonders what the hell a server program is doing on an OS supposedly designed even for workstations. To crackers, however, every home user who has cable/DSL and a completely unpatched IIS install is a potential DDOS zombie. Thus, the large numbers of Windows worms. If home users installed Red Hat (which configures all sorts of servers on its install) on a regular basis, the situation would be reversed: Windows, despite having terrible security problems, would go ignored and Linux would be the prime target.
If Linux had the marketshare of Windows, you can bet there would be lots and lots of scriptkiddies writing Code-Red style worms. Linux has had some pretty major security flaws in the past. Although they were fixed quickly, that doesn't mean that lazy or incompetent sysadmins will patch it right up. This leads to an opportunity for a Code-Red style worm, and if Linux had high marketshare, you can bet that it would have spread rather quickly as well.
You don't understand what happens when a processor core is "failed". That 95% success rate is not per-wafer, with each wafer either passing or failing. It means each CORE on the wafer gets passed or failed -- it is extremely odd to find a single completely dead wafer. This means that on average, a single wafer has about 95 good cores out of every 100 on it. Now, think about what happens when you do one-core-per-wafer. The odds of 19/20 drop drastically. To be fair, you do address this. However, you seem to think that you can "just put a bit of extra work into purifying the silicon and then let it cool a bit slower. It's not that hard to grow crystals". Newsflash: the methods used today to grow silicon crystals are pretty much the best available outside of unproven experimental designs. Bottom line, you COULD get a CPU like this, but you'd pay so much extra for it that Bill Gates would scream and run away at sight of the price. Plus, you have to think about a cooling solution that will keep the processor from turning into various gases. Might I suggest continious immersion in liquid helium? Bottom line, if you want massive SMP, use a system designed to do it with multiple processors. You will get results nearly as good as what you dream of, at a price that scales more or less linearly for each chip, rather than exponentially.
So what we do is kill off all the inner-city black kids who were "seen" killing someone by a little old racist bitch with 20/5000 vision who thinks that all blacks look alike and that "they're all criminals anyway". Meanwhile, an affluent white boy kills someone, gets expensive lawyers, and gets off with voluntary manslaughter, 10 years with possible parole and time off for good behavior. Liberty and justice for all... who can afford it. There is no possible reason to ever kill another human being. You give "revenge" as an excuse. What happens when one of the people you classify as "barely more than animals" turns out to be innocent? Can you raise him (or her) from the dead? Thought not. At least someone in prison whose innocence has been proven can be freed, perhaps with a decent sum of money (say $30,000 for each year imprisioned, no taxes) and live out the rest of their life in relative comfort.
(note: I am a middle-class white male. I simply am fucking pissed at the gap in justice between rich and poor.)
Here's a sobering stat: more people fall off cliffs with fences than cliffs without fences. Why? Because when you leave people to their own devices, they have to think and respect the power of the tools they are using or the situations they are in. When you put the blinders on them, you're only making sure that shit will get fucked once you slip up and accidentally allow them access to the tools and technologies that you were so adament to lock everybody out of.
Ever think that happens because just maybe all the cliffs that recieve any traffic at all are fenced off? You need to go out of your way in a more or less intentional manner to find a cliff without a fence. More likely, your statistic exists because drunken morons at a campground near a cliff start daring each other to walk along the top of the fence or something.
Your analogy, too, is false. If someone new to computers, someone without the "respect" for the technology you mentioned, tries something dangerous that could delete all his or her files, don't you think that there should be at least one little modal dialog that pops up asking "Do you REALLY want to do that?" What you are suggesting is nothing more than classic Slashdot eliteism: "The user shouldn't touch anything they don't understand." Where's the problem in that statement? Think about how you learned to use a computer. Did you ask someone "So, can I really double-click here? You're sure about that?" I doubt it very much. Users should be able to mess around a bit with there computer, and have a "safety net" underneath them to catch any mistakes before they do serious damage. You should realize that restricting the access of users to their computers is a bad idea. Make the interface usable without an extensive knowledge of C, Perl, asm, and Forth, but if someone wants to mess around, let them. How would you feel if every time you tried to access your BIOS the computer said "Sorry, can't access that, you're just a moronic user who probably will wipe out his entire HDD with one misplaced command. No way you're getting in here, dumbass!" instead of letting you actually change settings? Perhaps it's time you started examining the roots of your elitism.
10M HCl? Dear lord, you must have some serious pitting in the plastic parts of your monitor! I might suggest Windex or a similar ammonia-based glass cleaner.
The case has a built-in temperature failsafe system: if the CPU gets above a certain critical core temp, it kills power to the MB. It may not save all your data, but it should save a $2000+ computer from losing some major components (CPU, M/b, etc.)
Progeny Debian, although based on many Debian core ideas (the APT suite, etc.), was really designed to make things much easier for the first-time user. It provided things like an X-based installation system, a graphical package manager, and hand-holding throughout the entire install and setup process. While Progeny Debian was based on Debian, it still required a lot of work: keeping a separate set of.deb packages (it sort of sat in between the stable and testing releases, incorporating more new packages without Debian's extensive testing process), developing an easy-to-understand install process (no easy task!), keeping a trained support staff, and maintaining documentation. While it may not have been as challenging as building a sucessful distro from scratch, it certainly had its share of challenges.
"Science is like sex. Sometimes something useful comes out, but that's not why we're doing it."
--Richard Feynman
We never know exactly what good will come of some obscure avenue of research. It may not produce anything truly significant or profitable. Still, curiosity about the world around us is a core element of our humanity. Would you take that away from us?
Um, I just installed WXP Home upgrade on a test box at home. During the install, it requested a Win98/98SE/WinME/Win2K CD for it to work as an upgrade. Worked just fine with my Windows 2000 Pro CD.
Damn, what an incredible troll. At first glance, it looked like a legitamate post, but after reading it more deeply, its true nature became obvious. Sir or madam, I salute you!
Lithium/H20 creates a bigger explosion than an equivalent mass of gunpowder (lithium is even more reactive with water than sodium). I don't think you need worry about ever lighting the fuel -- the reaction will take care of that little problem for you.
Why have error numbers alone? Why not include a terse description of the error ("Could not open file x. Please try again) instead? I would imagine that this would also save time compared to writing the error database.
This sort of thing is really not applicable here. Why?
Commodity hardware is designed from the ground up to be a general-purpose machine: it can word process, serve files, or act as a router. This kind of hardware really shines in the home/small biz market -- it's CHEAP! Still, that lack of focus means something else: lack of speed. Someone using a Cisco 12000-series router (takes up an entire friggin' rack, weighs ~175 lbs IIRC) simply couldn't use a 486 running *nix. The big-iron routers are built from the ground level (hardware design) up to do only one thing: route packets. Put a PC with a heavy-traffic gigabit fiber LAN backbone link on one end and an OC-3 on the other, watch it burst into flames. A big-iron router could handle that without breaking a sweat. The router OSes, too, are built to handle high-speed links and nothing else. When you need to handle 10Gb/sec across a 'net backbone, a *nix box just won't cut it.
Um, I do volunteer work for a blood center. Part of our training is to give you an alternate number (which you may specify if it is not already in our database) on your request. I believe that this is a federal law that we must provide this service (no one not associated with taxes/social security can get your SSN from you if you don't want to give it to them). In short, the attendant at the blood center was an ass. Please, that doesn't mean you have to be.
Yes... He's talking to your senators and congressmen/women. They didn't get into high office by being particularly smart, they did it with charisma. Look at the President of the United States, for god's sake!
Did you bother to read the post properly? If you would realize, there is no multiprocessor support for the P4, and probably will not be for quite a while (they have to redesign a lot of the chip's architecture). He is a fscking troll. You believed him, get over it.
There's a big difference. "If" allows for the possibility that the eventual result could be accomplished even if the test fails -- that is, if it was stated that "You may x if you do y" it might also be possible to do x if you do not do y. "Provided" is closer to "if and only if" -- "You may do x if and only if you do y"
Turing and von Neumann created the basic theory behind all computers and programming languages in existence today. It is true that he didn't hack away at a keyboard; what he did was make it possible for you to hack away at a keyboard. The difference between Turing and your garden-variety hacker is that while Turing was an artist and a visionary, most hackers are tradespeople - both important positions, to be sure, but one exists at a much higher level than the other.
I have installed Debian and Turbolinux on 486s with as little as 8 MB of RAM. In fact, one is running right now as my cable modem's router/NAT box.
It is Red Hat that is giving you grief, but then RH is designed for general desktop use, rather than the more specialized, trimmed down systems such as those for a network box. I can't think of anyone masochistic enough to run X on a 486 with less than 32 megs of RAM - that would be just painfully slow. (Hell, it's slow on my Pentium 266 with 64 megs!)
Talk to your local computer parts retailer; most will assemble for a small fee. Where I live (near Seattle, WA), a retailer named Infotech Systems lets you pick components and assembles them for you for a few bucks. I'm sure that where you live, you can find a fairly similar service. All you have to watch out for is tech support, because while small/medium stores might offer a warranty, they won't give you free tech support. But then, if you really want someone to hold your hand, you could just go to someplace like CompUSA (blech!).
When you factor in the cost of a second phone line (about $20-25/mo where I live), plus the cost of a decent ISP (another 15-20 bucks), @home and dsl are very competitively priced. In fact, for our family, broadband was cheaper than a second phone line + 'net access. Unfortunately, many people don't know their options or are turned off by a $45/mo price upfront.
I believe that there are methods for retrieving a bit after it has been overwritten... something to do with residual magnetism? A poster below says that the "magic number" to eliminate all possibility of retrevial is 7 times, but I have heard anything from 5 to 12 times. Oh well, I don't have anything incriminating on my hard drive anyway; you might ask someone who is a little more into this stuff than I.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, Linux has greater marketshare in some organizations. In the organization "PurpleFloyd's House" there are 3 linux boxen and one dualboot Win2K Pro/Linux box. Thus, Linux has a much greater marketshare -- in my house, anyway. However, on the 'net at large, Win2k/NT servers are more common. Perhaps this is because of the "point, drool, you've set up a server!" mentality that seems to infect Microsoft -- you can install IIS on Win2K Pro from the CD! One wonders what the hell a server program is doing on an OS supposedly designed even for workstations. To crackers, however, every home user who has cable/DSL and a completely unpatched IIS install is a potential DDOS zombie. Thus, the large numbers of Windows worms. If home users installed Red Hat (which configures all sorts of servers on its install) on a regular basis, the situation would be reversed: Windows, despite having terrible security problems, would go ignored and Linux would be the prime target.
If Linux had the marketshare of Windows, you can bet there would be lots and lots of scriptkiddies writing Code-Red style worms. Linux has had some pretty major security flaws in the past. Although they were fixed quickly, that doesn't mean that lazy or incompetent sysadmins will patch it right up. This leads to an opportunity for a Code-Red style worm, and if Linux had high marketshare, you can bet that it would have spread rather quickly as well.
You don't understand what happens when a processor core is "failed". That 95% success rate is not per-wafer, with each wafer either passing or failing. It means each CORE on the wafer gets passed or failed -- it is extremely odd to find a single completely dead wafer. This means that on average, a single wafer has about 95 good cores out of every 100 on it. Now, think about what happens when you do one-core-per-wafer. The odds of 19/20 drop drastically. To be fair, you do address this. However, you seem to think that you can "just put a bit of extra work into purifying the silicon and then let it cool a bit slower. It's not that hard to grow crystals". Newsflash: the methods used today to grow silicon crystals are pretty much the best available outside of unproven experimental designs. Bottom line, you COULD get a CPU like this, but you'd pay so much extra for it that Bill Gates would scream and run away at sight of the price. Plus, you have to think about a cooling solution that will keep the processor from turning into various gases. Might I suggest continious immersion in liquid helium? Bottom line, if you want massive SMP, use a system designed to do it with multiple processors. You will get results nearly as good as what you dream of, at a price that scales more or less linearly for each chip, rather than exponentially.
(note: I am a middle-class white male. I simply am fucking pissed at the gap in justice between rich and poor.)
Your analogy, too, is false. If someone new to computers, someone without the "respect" for the technology you mentioned, tries something dangerous that could delete all his or her files, don't you think that there should be at least one little modal dialog that pops up asking "Do you REALLY want to do that?" What you are suggesting is nothing more than classic Slashdot eliteism: "The user shouldn't touch anything they don't understand." Where's the problem in that statement? Think about how you learned to use a computer. Did you ask someone "So, can I really double-click here? You're sure about that?" I doubt it very much. Users should be able to mess around a bit with there computer, and have a "safety net" underneath them to catch any mistakes before they do serious damage. You should realize that restricting the access of users to their computers is a bad idea. Make the interface usable without an extensive knowledge of C, Perl, asm, and Forth, but if someone wants to mess around, let them. How would you feel if every time you tried to access your BIOS the computer said "Sorry, can't access that, you're just a moronic user who probably will wipe out his entire HDD with one misplaced command. No way you're getting in here, dumbass!" instead of letting you actually change settings? Perhaps it's time you started examining the roots of your elitism.
10M HCl? Dear lord, you must have some serious pitting in the plastic parts of your monitor! I might suggest Windex or a similar ammonia-based glass cleaner.
I should hope that an iPod would get its power from some sort of battery - otherwise its usefulness as a "portable" device is rather limited.
The case has a built-in temperature failsafe system: if the CPU gets above a certain critical core temp, it kills power to the MB. It may not save all your data, but it should save a $2000+ computer from losing some major components (CPU, M/b, etc.)
Progeny Debian, although based on many Debian core ideas (the APT suite, etc.), was really designed to make things much easier for the first-time user. It provided things like an X-based installation system, a graphical package manager, and hand-holding throughout the entire install and setup process. While Progeny Debian was based on Debian, it still required a lot of work: keeping a separate set of .deb packages (it sort of sat in between the stable and testing releases, incorporating more new packages without Debian's extensive testing process), developing an easy-to-understand install process (no easy task!), keeping a trained support staff, and maintaining documentation. While it may not have been as challenging as building a sucessful distro from scratch, it certainly had its share of challenges.
A quote for you:
"Science is like sex. Sometimes something useful comes out, but that's not why we're doing it."
--Richard Feynman
We never know exactly what good will come of some obscure avenue of research. It may not produce anything truly significant or profitable. Still, curiosity about the world around us is a core element of our humanity. Would you take that away from us?
Um, I just installed WXP Home upgrade on a test box at home. During the install, it requested a Win98/98SE/WinME/Win2K CD for it to work as an upgrade. Worked just fine with my Windows 2000 Pro CD.
Damn, what an incredible troll. At first glance, it looked like a legitamate post, but after reading it more deeply, its true nature became obvious. Sir or madam, I salute you!
Lithium/H20 creates a bigger explosion than an equivalent mass of gunpowder (lithium is even more reactive with water than sodium). I don't think you need worry about ever lighting the fuel -- the reaction will take care of that little problem for you.
Why have error numbers alone? Why not include a terse description of the error ("Could not open file x. Please try again) instead? I would imagine that this would also save time compared to writing the error database.
Commodity hardware is designed from the ground up to be a general-purpose machine: it can word process, serve files, or act as a router. This kind of hardware really shines in the home/small biz market -- it's CHEAP! Still, that lack of focus means something else: lack of speed. Someone using a Cisco 12000-series router (takes up an entire friggin' rack, weighs ~175 lbs IIRC) simply couldn't use a 486 running *nix. The big-iron routers are built from the ground level (hardware design) up to do only one thing: route packets. Put a PC with a heavy-traffic gigabit fiber LAN backbone link on one end and an OC-3 on the other, watch it burst into flames. A big-iron router could handle that without breaking a sweat. The router OSes, too, are built to handle high-speed links and nothing else. When you need to handle 10Gb/sec across a 'net backbone, a *nix box just won't cut it.
Um, I do volunteer work for a blood center. Part of our training is to give you an alternate number (which you may specify if it is not already in our database) on your request. I believe that this is a federal law that we must provide this service (no one not associated with taxes/social security can get your SSN from you if you don't want to give it to them). In short, the attendant at the blood center was an ass. Please, that doesn't mean you have to be.
One only wonders where they came up with the name QT: "Hey, man, that Natalie Portman is one QT!"
Yes... He's talking to your senators and congressmen/women. They didn't get into high office by being particularly smart, they did it with charisma. Look at the President of the United States, for god's sake!
Did you bother to read the post properly? If you would realize, there is no multiprocessor support for the P4, and probably will not be for quite a while (they have to redesign a lot of the chip's architecture). He is a fscking troll. You believed him, get over it.
There's a big difference. "If" allows for the possibility that the eventual result could be accomplished even if the test fails -- that is, if it was stated that "You may x if you do y" it might also be possible to do x if you do not do y. "Provided" is closer to "if and only if" -- "You may do x if and only if you do y"
Turing and von Neumann created the basic theory behind all computers and programming languages in existence today. It is true that he didn't hack away at a keyboard; what he did was make it possible for you to hack away at a keyboard. The difference between Turing and your garden-variety hacker is that while Turing was an artist and a visionary, most hackers are tradespeople - both important positions, to be sure, but one exists at a much higher level than the other.
I have installed Debian and Turbolinux on 486s with as little as 8 MB of RAM. In fact, one is running right now as my cable modem's router/NAT box.
It is Red Hat that is giving you grief, but then RH is designed for general desktop use, rather than the more specialized, trimmed down systems such as those for a network box. I can't think of anyone masochistic enough to run X on a 486 with less than 32 megs of RAM - that would be just painfully slow. (Hell, it's slow on my Pentium 266 with 64 megs!)
Talk to your local computer parts retailer; most will assemble for a small fee. Where I live (near Seattle, WA), a retailer named Infotech Systems lets you pick components and assembles them for you for a few bucks. I'm sure that where you live, you can find a fairly similar service. All you have to watch out for is tech support, because while small/medium stores might offer a warranty, they won't give you free tech support. But then, if you really want someone to hold your hand, you could just go to someplace like CompUSA (blech!).
When you factor in the cost of a second phone line (about $20-25/mo where I live), plus the cost of a decent ISP (another 15-20 bucks), @home and dsl are very competitively priced. In fact, for our family, broadband was cheaper than a second phone line + 'net access. Unfortunately, many people don't know their options or are turned off by a $45/mo price upfront.
I believe that there are methods for retrieving a bit after it has been overwritten... something to do with residual magnetism? A poster below says that the "magic number" to eliminate all possibility of retrevial is 7 times, but I have heard anything from 5 to 12 times. Oh well, I don't have anything incriminating on my hard drive anyway; you might ask someone who is a little more into this stuff than I.