Yeah, I liked the keyboard + trackpoint + trackpad on my IBM T41 so much I went out and bought one of these for my regular desktop PC.
It is just like the T41 keyboard only a little bigger, with a numeric keypad added on. I tend to use the trackpoint most since it lets me keep my fingers near the home keys but it has a trackpad too. There is also a wee model without the numpad.
Yeah, I read something similar. The surge of emigration from earth in chemical rockets travelled out from the planet in an expanding sphere. Some time after the first wave was launched FTL travel was discovered and the universe pretty much colonised instantaneously. For centuries the more developed FTL colonists had to deal with this expanding wave of rocketeers. Over generations on the rockets the first colonists had maintained their old ass-backwards earth customs and the FTL bunch saw them as a bunch of stone age gypsies.
The name they gave them really stuck with me: 'anachronauts':-).flip.
The difference in RC2 was not to change back to using SCHED_BSD - this was done quite some time ago when the issues with SCHED_ULE became apparent.
The problem was that a lot of people were still using SCHED_ULE in their kernel configs and getting mysterious problems. Developers were spending a lot of time trying to figure out what the problem was before the user owned up to using ULE which was known to be broken.
The change for RC2 was to forcibly break ULE so that if a user attempts to compile a kernel with ULE as the scheduler it will error out. Less noise on the lists, fewer unhappy users.
So it is not like there is any last minute schedule shuffling going on here. The BSD scheduler is rock solid and has recently gained a lot of the features that ULE has too but it has fewer bugs and is actively maintained.
ULE will be great when someone steps forward with the time to finish it off.
No, the components on the board really do form part of the power supply.
Because of the way processors draw current - bursts of current when switching - the rate of change of current can be enormous, in the range of giga-amps per second. If high-speed digital circuits like motherboards did not have a heirachical power supply the inductance in the power supply network would completely eliminate the ability to deliver the AC current needed.
Motherboards will use a heirachy of power supply components starting at the PSU which supplys the base DC load (big caps, long thin leads with high inductance) and ending with capacitors right next to the processor to supply the fast instantaneous current necessary for switching.
So while people might think of the power supply as the big silver box in the corner of the case with the fans and the whirring and the whathaveyou, on a motherboard the power supply is a network including the PSU and the motherboard components. Sure there is voltage regulation, but power supply in a high speed multi-layer digital circuit is a lot more than that.
While in the real world I have used this in python a great deal, in my little hobbyist/pretend-academic world this is one of the things about python that really leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I'm all for meta-programming, I think it is a great tool to let you modify the language to create something more suited to your problem, but I just can't stand the way that python does it.
Instead of a well defined meta-protocol python just exposes a few pieces of its intenals, a few hooks that let you override the default behaviour. It all seems a bit ad-hoc to me. It seems to make optimisation difficult too. Ref. the creation of the += operator to bypass the (possibly mutating) hooks involved in a = a + b.
Languages like Smalltalk and Common Lisp (with CLOS) properly formalise this and make things more predictable and flexible. Of course, I have written a heap of useful python code but noone has ever paid me to write something useful in CLOS. It's fun to think about stuff like this but python get jobs done:-)
I have to chime in on this one - I work for Crumpler and have known the Crumpler gang since they started making bags in a little shop in Melbourne, Australia.
The bags are amazingly tough, very well designed and will last for years. They come with a lifetime warranty and are available worldwide or you can order them from Crumpler Australia's website (new look last week) at www.crumpler.com.au.
As a plus, they look nothing like a laptop bag to a thief, and you can get backpacks, sling bags and padded computer inserts.
Hmmm... I'm starting to sound like advertainment...
Either way works just fine. My main machine has a Ti4200 based agp card with two outputs and an old MGA Matrox Millenium card (expanded to 8Mb!) in a PCI slot. Three old Sony 15" LCD screens complete the picture, so to speak.
Both Windows XP and XFree86 on FreeBSD work with this flawlessly. XFree even picked everything up automatically with the graphical config tool (xf86cfg?), no config-file tweaking necessary.
I can't provide you with a reference, but I'm pretty sure that I have seen Linus quoted as saying that if he were to relsease Linux today he would not use the GPL.
I saw in a New Scientist recently a short article on a new type of armour plating for tanks.
Armour piercing anti-tank shells work by using the kinetic energy released in the impact to compress and liquefy the copper core of the shell, which then ends up getting squirted through the point of the shell, through the armour and into the tank. I guess getting bathed in supersonic liquid copper can really put a kink in your day.
The newer armour was covered by a mat of optic fibres. When the shell hit the armour systems detected the distortion of the fibres and released a heap stored charge into coils in the armour. This creates an electromagnetic field that retards the copper. Sounds like a long shot but the article said it worked in trials.
So, there you have it, armour plating that has to be 'switched-on' and can go offline =)
Nope, Microsoft developed a fully 64bit version of Windows NT to run on Alpha, but it was canned before being released.
They actually demonstrated it running a 64bit port of MS SQL Server at one of their 'scalability days' where it blew the x86 intel boxes away. I think the advantage was mostly that the machine had an enormous amount of addressable RAM and the 64 WinNT running on Alpha could actually take full advantage of this as disk cache.
Of course, this was back in the days when the Alpha was the fastest general purpose CPU on the planet, before DEC and then the Q let axp fall behind and MS dropped NT. At the time rumour had it that MS kept the alpha port and the 64 bit alpha port alive internally in preparation for "Merced"
*sigh*
First amiga bought it, then Alpha/NT, then Be - I just can't seem to jump onto a winning bandwagon. I hope I'm not jinxing FreeBSD by using it on all my machines...
Umm, sorry dude, but Kirk McKusick recently added FFS snapshots to FreeBSD. I believe that -CURRENT is now able to do fsck-less boots, followed by a background fsck, but don't quote me on that 'coz I'm not sure how it could be possible.
But if anyone can some up with something like that it has gotta be McKusick =)
As an Australian it is against Australian law for me to use my passport as any kind of bond or guarantee. I could be prosecuted upon my return to Australia, but most likely they would just give me a hard time when I saked for a new one because the car rental company never gave it back =)
You follow a link to Shannon's 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication' posted previously in this article you will see that on the front page Shannon writes:
The choice of a logarithmic base corresponds to the choice of a unit for measuring information. If the base 2 is used the resulting unit may be called binary digits, or more briefly
bits, a word suggested by J. W. Tukey.
I was interested to see this, since I read the book only yesterday!
Although I liked it in general to my mind it has one huge problem that I just could not see past - the artificial gravity.
ACC seemed to think that spinning things create their own magic gravitational aura. For example, when the pilot (Jimmy?) was flying along the axis of rotation towards the spike at the southern end he has to be very careful not to get too low or he would be caught in the down force and not be able to get back up to the axis.
Was ACC smoking crack or is it just me? Jimmy could have flown down until he was a fag-paper above the surface and still not been attracted to it unless he was in contact with it and in circular motion (being accelerated toward the axis of rotation). He would have been able to see it go whizzing past his nose rather quickly though...
Bruce Sterling recently included this in his Viridian mailing list http://www.bespoke.org/viridian/. Viridian is a great read, although I the archives seem to be lagging a bit behind the mailing list at the moment.
You could start by reading the viridian manifesto outlined with gobs of beautiful green.
I always keep a single source and ports tree on one machine and NFS export this to all others on the network.
Want to upgrade the entire LAN from 4.1 to RELENG_4 (4-STABLE)? Easy, cvsup the one source tree, buildworld, then on each machine on the lan installworld. You can do the same things with the ports if you want, or you can actually make binary packages from the ports tree (this is how they are done for a release) and share them across the network for each of your thousands of servers to install.
I think everyone agrees that the package management needs to be improved tho'. Daemonnews covered a mail written by Jordan that covers things very well.
It would be great to see the entire distribution become more modular - if parts of the base distribution were added as packages it would be sooo easy to chop and change things for custom installs.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I liked the keyboard + trackpoint + trackpad on my IBM T41 so much I went out and bought one of these for my regular desktop PC.
It is just like the T41 keyboard only a little bigger, with a numeric keypad added on. I tend to use the trackpoint most since it lets me keep my fingers near the home keys but it has a trackpad too. There is also a wee model without the numpad.
- flip
Yeah, I read something similar. The surge of emigration from earth in chemical rockets travelled out from the planet in an expanding sphere. Some time after the first wave was launched FTL travel was discovered and the universe pretty much colonised instantaneously. For centuries the more developed FTL colonists had to deal with this expanding wave of rocketeers. Over generations on the rockets the first colonists had maintained their old ass-backwards earth customs and the FTL bunch saw them as a bunch of stone age gypsies.
:-) .flip.
The name they gave them really stuck with me: 'anachronauts'
The difference in RC2 was not to change back to using SCHED_BSD - this was done quite some time ago when the issues with SCHED_ULE became apparent.
The problem was that a lot of people were still using SCHED_ULE in their kernel configs and getting mysterious problems. Developers were spending a lot of time trying to figure out what the problem was before the user owned up to using ULE which was known to be broken.
The change for RC2 was to forcibly break ULE so that if a user attempts to compile a kernel with ULE as the scheduler it will error out. Less noise on the lists, fewer unhappy users.
So it is not like there is any last minute schedule shuffling going on here. The BSD scheduler is rock solid and has recently gained a lot of the features that ULE has too but it has fewer bugs and is actively maintained.
ULE will be great when someone steps forward with the time to finish it off.
- flip
Because of the way processors draw current - bursts of current when switching - the rate of change of current can be enormous, in the range of giga-amps per second. If high-speed digital circuits like motherboards did not have a heirachical power supply the inductance in the power supply network would completely eliminate the ability to deliver the AC current needed.
Motherboards will use a heirachy of power supply components starting at the PSU which supplys the base DC load (big caps, long thin leads with high inductance) and ending with capacitors right next to the processor to supply the fast instantaneous current necessary for switching.
So while people might think of the power supply as the big silver box in the corner of the case with the fans and the whirring and the whathaveyou, on a motherboard the power supply is a network including the PSU and the motherboard components. Sure there is voltage regulation, but power supply in a high speed multi-layer digital circuit is a lot more than that.
Of course I have never built something like this, but I took this subject last semester: http://www.unimelb.edu.au/HB/subjects/431-467.html
- flip -
While in the real world I have used this in python a great deal, in my little hobbyist/pretend-academic world this is one of the things about python that really leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I'm all for meta-programming, I think it is a great tool to let you modify the language to create something more suited to your problem, but I just can't stand the way that python does it.
:-)
Instead of a well defined meta-protocol python just exposes a few pieces of its intenals, a few hooks that let you override the default behaviour. It all seems a bit ad-hoc to me. It seems to make optimisation difficult too. Ref. the creation of the += operator to bypass the (possibly mutating) hooks involved in a = a + b.
Languages like Smalltalk and Common Lisp (with CLOS) properly formalise this and make things more predictable and flexible. Of course, I have written a heap of useful python code but noone has ever paid me to write something useful in CLOS. It's fun to think about stuff like this but python get jobs done
I have to chime in on this one - I work for Crumpler and have known the Crumpler gang since they started making bags in a little shop in Melbourne, Australia.
The bags are amazingly tough, very well designed and will last for years. They come with a lifetime warranty and are available worldwide or you can order them from Crumpler Australia's website (new look last week) at www.crumpler.com.au.
As a plus, they look nothing like a laptop bag to a thief, and you can get backpacks, sling bags and padded computer inserts.
Hmmm... I'm starting to sound like advertainment...
Just out of curiosity, can you show us the line 8-)
- flip
Either way works just fine. My main machine has a Ti4200 based agp card with two outputs and an old MGA Matrox Millenium card (expanded to 8Mb!) in a PCI slot. Three old Sony 15" LCD screens complete the picture, so to speak.
Both Windows XP and XFree86 on FreeBSD work with this flawlessly. XFree even picked everything up automatically with the graphical config tool (xf86cfg?), no config-file tweaking necessary.
- flip
Actually, John Howard is notable for being the first Prime Minister to not actually live in our national capital.
:-)
He lives with his family in the Sydney's historic Kirribili House, not in the traditional Prime Ministerial residence, the Lodge in Canberra.
dickhead
Some of the newer 'out-of-tree' development that is going on in FreeBSD at the moment is being done using Perforce.
I think some of the SMPng and KSE work is in p4, for example.
mmm... lathe of heaven. Could somebody convince me to dream myself up a new TiBook G4?
.
I can't provide you with a reference, but I'm pretty sure that I have seen Linus quoted as saying that if he were to relsease Linux today he would not use the GPL.
.flip.
I see Michael Jordan is one of the resigning editors.
I guess he needs to free up some time for his NBA comeback =)
.
I saw in a New Scientist recently a short article on a new type of armour plating for tanks.
Armour piercing anti-tank shells work by using the kinetic energy released in the impact to compress and liquefy the copper core of the shell, which then ends up getting squirted through the point of the shell, through the armour and into the tank. I guess getting bathed in supersonic liquid copper can really put a kink in your day.
The newer armour was covered by a mat of optic fibres. When the shell hit the armour systems detected the distortion of the fibres and released a heap stored charge into coils in the armour. This creates an electromagnetic field that retards the copper. Sounds like a long shot but the article said it worked in trials.
So, there you have it, armour plating that has to be 'switched-on' and can go offline =)
.flip.
Perhaps you could explain why you think Australia or Austria should adhere to some document published by a department of a foreign government?
.au anyway?
As far as i know Austrians call their country Österreich, so why would they want to use
.
Nope, Microsoft developed a fully 64bit version of Windows NT to run on Alpha, but it was canned before being released.
They actually demonstrated it running a 64bit port of MS SQL Server at one of their 'scalability days' where it blew the x86 intel boxes away. I think the advantage was mostly that the machine had an enormous amount of addressable RAM and the 64 WinNT running on Alpha could actually take full advantage of this as disk cache.
Of course, this was back in the days when the Alpha was the fastest general purpose CPU on the planet, before DEC and then the Q let axp fall behind and MS dropped NT. At the time rumour had it that MS kept the alpha port and the 64 bit alpha port alive internally in preparation for "Merced"
*sigh*
First amiga bought it, then Alpha/NT, then Be - I just can't seem to jump onto a winning bandwagon. I hope I'm not jinxing FreeBSD by using it on all my machines...
`KVector'
Say it like a nordic duck would - kvack!
Umm, sorry dude, but Kirk McKusick recently added FFS snapshots to FreeBSD. I believe that -CURRENT is now able to do fsck-less boots, followed by a background fsck, but don't quote me on that 'coz I'm not sure how it could be possible.
But if anyone can some up with something like that it has gotta be McKusick =)
.flip.
As an Australian it is against Australian law for me to use my passport as any kind of bond or guarantee. I could be prosecuted upon my return to Australia, but most likely they would just give me a hard time when I saked for a new one because the car rental company never gave it back =)
.flip.
However, I think that an ASP port for UNIX should be completely free, opensource and so on.
So write it. This 'I think' stuff get none of us anywhere.
ps: Huzzah for Zope! ;)
You follow a link to Shannon's 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication' posted previously in this article you will see that on the front page Shannon writes:
Dunno who the hell he was tho'....flip.
Wikis are huge in the Zope community.
Try http://www.zope.org/
.
I was interested to see this, since I read the book only yesterday!
Although I liked it in general to my mind it has one huge problem that I just could not see past - the artificial gravity.
ACC seemed to think that spinning things create their own magic gravitational aura. For example, when the pilot (Jimmy?) was flying along the axis of rotation towards the spike at the southern end he has to be very careful not to get too low or he would be caught in the down force and not be able to get back up to the axis.
Was ACC smoking crack or is it just me? Jimmy could have flown down until he was a fag-paper above the surface and still not been attracted to it unless he was in contact with it and in circular motion (being accelerated toward the axis of rotation). He would have been able to see it go whizzing past his nose rather quickly though...
I can't be right, can I?
Bruce Sterling recently included this in his Viridian mailing list http://www.bespoke.org/viridian/. Viridian is a great read, although I the archives seem to be lagging a bit behind the mailing list at the moment.
You could start by reading the viridian manifesto outlined with gobs of beautiful green.
I always keep a single source and ports tree on one machine and NFS export this to all others on the network.
Want to upgrade the entire LAN from 4.1 to RELENG_4 (4-STABLE)? Easy, cvsup the one source tree, buildworld, then on each machine on the lan installworld. You can do the same things with the ports if you want, or you can actually make binary packages from the ports tree (this is how they are done for a release) and share them across the network for each of your thousands of servers to install.
I think everyone agrees that the package management needs to be improved tho'. Daemonnews covered a mail written by Jordan that covers things very well.
http://daily.daemonnew s.o rg/view_story.php3?story_id=1185
It would be great to see the entire distribution become more modular - if parts of the base distribution were added as packages it would be sooo easy to chop and change things for custom installs.
.flip.