Yes, specifically that it's the poster child of open software. If you want a complex project done right (and that includes everything, including Linux), then you're better off using conventional means.
Be it for backdoors, security or updates, nothing beats OSS.
In this instance (and many others) I beg to differ. I have had no less than two security emails from Microsoft Product Security in the last 48 hours when this "exploit" first broke. I received the first April 14th, and the second today. Both gave explicit instructions for removing the vulnerability:
Remediation =========== To eliminate this vulnerability, customers who are hosting web sites using any of the affected products should delete all copies of the file Dvwssr.dll from their servers. The FAQ provides step-by-step instructions for doing this. The only functionality lost by deleting the file is the ability to generate link views using Visual Interdev 1.0.
Yes, the programmers who put this in were assholes. Kinda like a few Linux programmers who might be tempted to add code saying that "Microsoft engineers are weenies". No, this does not mean that Microsoft was trying to pull anything.
And especially: It does NOT "prove" by any stretch of the imagination that Open Source is superior to closed or proprietary source. There are far too many naive OSS/Linux advocates who seem to think that backdoors and deliberate exploits somehow have "Back Door Here" comments liberally sprinkled around the offending code. It takes considerable time, effort, intelligence, and dumb luck to audit code, and to look not only for the single point of entry, but the even more difficult to spot exploits with possible multiple applications.
ESR and the zelots who take up his arguments without careful consideration of the facts are rapidly making themselves a royal PITA. In case you haven't noticed, over one million copies of Windows 2000 have shipped since its introduction (real copies generating real revenue) and from my own experience, as well as that of others, it's pretty damn good. Good enough to make it easy to ignore Linux and all the stupid political baggage that it's acquired.
If writing a bar-code driver is all that easy, then why don't you show us by example? Pick a bar-code reader (the more the merrier), write the code, carefully test it, document everything, put it out under GPL, and then support it? And just out of curiosity, have you every written a bar-code reader?
In Orlando, there were a number of public Unix systems around 1985. Two that I remember were bilver (run by Bill Vermillion) and robstoy (run by Rob Talley). bilver was a Tandy model 16 (68000) system running Unix, while robstoy was a Microvax running Ultrix. We had login accounts, mail, newsgroups, and the ability to upload/download files via XModem and Kermit as well as ftp. There were no fees on these two systems, although they would quickly cancel accounts that abused the systems.
robstoy was interesting in that Rob ran (or lived, actually) inside of emacs at the console, while allowing dialup access; this on a machine with only 4MB of RAM. The only other system name I remember was tarpit, a mail server run by Rob Thrush at Automation Intelligence. It was an IBM 286 running SCO Xenix 286, and it handled all mail (personal and newsgroups) for everybody in the central Floriday area at the time.
Except for today's eye-candy and ultra-hype, we had all the essentials and lacked for nothing. The only useful function the web has that we didn't have are search engines. And if I needed to find something out, I could ask on a newsgroup and find out within a few hours. I'm sure that someout would point out streaming content (audio and video) that you can get over the net, but today's offerings still can't match cable, and the net, for those types of services, is very constrained.
I have been very concerned about the merger of Inprise and Corel ever since the announcement. Inprise is by far the more valuable of the two companies, and has many valuable products that I have used; specifically, Visibroker and JBuilder. I have used other Borland/Inprise tools in the past, particularly Delphi and Borland C++.
Corel, on the other hand, has a long history of purchasing the industry's leftovers (such as WordPerfect) and essentially doing nothing with them. I am well aware of Corel Linux, but after purchasing a copy, I found it did not install on any of the current machines I had access to (specifically problems with the video drivers) that other distributions (Red Hat, SuSE) had no problems with. I have never been impressed with Corel quality, and I fear for the negative technical impact the merger will have on Inprise.
I want to use Borland/Inprise tools, and I'm willing and happy to purchase them for both Windows and Unix/Linux platforms. But if the merger is completed, I will have to seriously consider other vendors. I will not stay with the combined companies.
I'm not so concerned about 1GHz CPUs anymore. I want to see supporting subsystems match the processor's performance, specifically video and memory. It would be very interesting to have a 500MHz memory subsystem and a 1GHz 256bit 3D video subsystem. By way of example, I have recently been able to extend the gaming life of a number of older P/PII systems by giving them Voodoo3 3000 PCI cards. How much more performance could we all get from a bleeding-edge CPU if everything else is running just as fast?
The Jaguar has five processors which are contained in three chips. Two of the chips are proprietary designs, nicknamed "Tom" and "Jerry". The third chip is a standard Motorola 68000, and used as a coprocessor. Tom and Jerry are built using an 0.5 micron silicon process. With proper programming, all five processors can run in parallel.
- "Tom" - 750,000 transistors, 208 pins - Graphics Processing Unit (processor #1) - 32-bit RISC architecture (32/64 processor) - 64 registers of 32 bits wide - Has access to all 64 bits of the system bus - Can read 64 bits of data in one instruction - Rated at 26.591 MIPS (million instructions per second) - Runs at 26.591 MHz - 4K bytes of zero wait-state internal SRAM - Performs a wide range of high-speed graphic effects - Programmable - Object processor (processor #2) - 64-bit RISC architecture - 64-bit wide registers - Programmable processor that can act as a variety of different video architectures, such as a sprite engine, a pixel-mapped display, a character-mapped system, and others. - Blitter (processor #3) - 64-bit RISC architecture - 64-bit wide registers - Performs high-speed logical operations - Hardware support for Z-buffering and Gouraud shading - DRAM memory controller - 64 bits - Accesses the DRAM directly
- "Jerry" - 600,000 transistors, 144 pins - Digital Signal Processor (processor #4) - 32 bits (32-bit registers) - Rated at 26.6 MIPS (million instructions per second) - Runs at 26.6 MHz - Same RISC core as the Graphics Processing Unit - Not limited to sound generation - 8K bytes of zero wait-state internal SRAM - CD-quality sound (16-bit stereo) - Number of sound channels limited by software - Two DACs (stereo) convert digital data to analog sound signals - Full stereo capabilities - Wavetable synthesis, FM synthesis, FM Sample synthesis, and AM synthesis - A clock control block, incorporating timers, and a UART - Joystick control
- Motorola 68000 (processor #5) - Runs at 13.295MHz - General purpose control processor
Communication is performed with a high speed 64-bit data bus, rated at 106.364 megabytes/second. The 68000 is only able to access 16 bits of this bus at a time.
The Jaguar contains two megabytes (16 megabits) of fast page-mode DRAM, in four chips with 512 K each. Game cartridges can support up to six megabytes (48 megabits) of information, and can contain an EEPROM (electrically erasable/programmable read-only memory) chip to save game information and settings. Up to 100,000 writes can be performed with the EEPROM; after that, future writes may not be saved (performance varies widely, but 100,000 is a guaranteed minimum). Depending on use, this limit should take from 10 to 50 years to reach.
The Jaguar uses 24-bit addressing, and is reportedly capable of accessing data as follows:
Six megabytes cartridge ROM Eight megabytes DRAM Two megabytes miscellaneous/expansion
All of the processors can access the main DRAM memory area directly. The Digital Signal Processor and the Graphics Processor can execute code out of either their internal caches, or out of main memory. The only limitations are that
It's a shame that something as trivial as Microsoft's accidental ownership of Corel/Inprise could generate news. Microsoft's payoff to Inprise is very old news indeed, for some of the same reasons that Microsoft paid off Apple. Who cares if Microsoft owns 4% of Corel? Nobody except the truly paranoid. Will it amount to much of anything? Absolutely not. And to the little poster who said that the DoJ would point to this as another instance of Microsoft trying to buy and suppress, get a life.
As far as the rant is concerned, it is equally pointless.
I agree with your opinion about the Ultra5/10. We had a whole slew of Ultra 1s that were purchased a good year before, and although they may not have been as spiffy as the 5's, they were rock solid. The only problem is they were slower than the 5's. But they never locked up, and they never crashed.
"InfoWorld's Bob Metcalfe asks why, if Linus Torvalds is truly a believer in Open Source, Transmeta Corp. has seen fit to make Crusoe, or at least its VLIW "code morphing", proprietary. The column goes on to say that, since the processor will run Windows code, there must be some thing wrong with Linux. Sad when a computer pundit appears not understand what x86 code is."
I think that Bob Metcalfe has a strong grasp of x86 code. Code morphing, in and of itself, is nothing new and is a part of both Intel's and AMD's advanced processors. If I'm not mistaken I believe AMD refers to the product of converting x86 opcodes as RISCops, in which the internal machine is very RISCy. This code morphing is hardware based, and is limited to one instruction set (x86) being morphed to the internal RISC opcodes. Transmeta's value added is that they exposed and optimized the hardware layer hidden in the Intel and AMD processors in such a way that it become possible to emulate nearly any current processor instruction set.
No, I support Metcalfe's pointing out the strong smell of hypocrisy surrounding certain actions by some in the Open Source community. Let's go over some of Metcalf's points:
"So what I want to know is, if open-source software is so cool, and if Torvalds "gets it," why isn't Crusoe open source? For a start, why aren't the Crusoe chip's mask sources published for modification and manufacture by anyone?"
SUN Microsystem's own website (http://www.sun.com/microelectronics/communitysour ce) contains links to open Community Source Licensing to its picoJava and SPARC V8 processor cores. If SUN can do it "imperfectly" under SCSL, then why can't Transmeta show how it should be done with a hardware-centric version of the GPL?
"And yes, Mobile Linux is open source, but not the "code morphing" software Torvalds helped write. Transmeta has taken the phrase Code Morphing as its proprietary trademark. And what the code does, according to Transmeta, has been... patented."
Yep, there's that ugly serpent in the Open Source Garden, software patents. How many articles have been published, and how many flames delivered, to the "clueless" individuals who would dare to tie up innovation and hamstring the inevitable march to victory of the Open Source Movement?
"Worse, Crusoe is touted for running Intel X86 software, and in particular, Microsoft Windows. Doesn't the open-source community say Windows is beneath contempt?"
What more can I say? Intel comes out and shows Linux ported and running, first on Itanium emulation, and later on Itanium silicon. Further, the Trillium group, to great fanfare, releases the kernel source. Notice that Windows NT wasn't anywhere around, because Windows NT, being "beneath contempt", wasn't worth the effort to port and show running at the various Itanium showings.
Linux Torvalds may not have intended this, but he has taken situational ethics to new ground with his employment at, and tacit support of, Transmeta. It's all very good to want a return on investment, especially in the hideously expensive task of designing microprocessors, but if you're going to hold a belief, then you need to live that belief, regardless of the consequences. If the Open Source movement and philosophy are strong enough that companies such as Red Hat, SuSe, TurboLinux, VA Linux, and others are willing to build a business around it, then Transmeta, with Open Source's icon as an employee, should be out in front of everbody else. Instead, they cynically use Linus to garner interest and at the same time to shield themselves from criticisms of the company's behaviors.
If a journaling filesystem is part of Solaris, then I have yet to see it kick in, at least on the Ultra 5's. Every Ultra 5 that has gone down for catastrophic reasons (i.e. power outage) has always run through fsck, and on several occasions has stopped at the boot prompt in order to have the sysadmin perform a manual fsck. As for ancient hardware, the last of the 5's rolled in in August 1999, and the E450 came in in November of 1999. I know that Internet time is fast, but it's not that fast.
The E450 that we recieved has two 400MHz processors, 2GB ram, and 120GB RAID drive in the box. It was running as a build machine and ClearCase server. We recieved it brand new from Sun, and two weeks after first setting it up we had SUN come back in and eventually replace the motherboard because the machine was shutting itself down. Total downtime was nearly a week, and this during a critical build-and-release phase. I was not a happy camper, and neither was my boss.
I agree with parts of the story. Over the past 12 months a DoD project, JSIMS, invested in a large number of SUN systems (Ultra 5s and an E450). Turns out the Ultra 5's were locking up on the desktop, requiring in some cases a hard power down (and resultant fsck), while the brand-new E450 had its motherboard replaced. We've also had problems with RAID controller cards on older SUNs in the lab. My solution (which was never implemented) was Compaq or Dell servers running Linux. In fact, my positive experience with Dell, Compaq, and HP server hardware will always lead me to recommend those vendors over SUN.
The problem with SUN is its hardware and its high cost relative to other solutions on the market. So I can see Compaq getting into Quote.com and selling not only a better hardware solution, but the Windows operating system along with the hardware. But what drove the switch to Windows was not the OS, but the poor quality of the SUN hardware platform.
SUN has a serious QA hardware problem that will kill them if they don't get it cleaned up. At this point of the game, I have even less use for SUN than I do for Microsoft, and that's pretty damn low to begin with.
What disturbs me the most about Northwest's action is that they were able to get away with it. As the article states "most such searches usually have been limited to cases involving workers who've been accused of stealing company files, passing on trade secrets to competitors or using insider information to profit on the trading of company stock." What Northwest is attempting is nothing less than intimidation of union activity, and it appears that Northwest will use any means to crack down on union activity, rightful or otherwise.
But the more frightening aspect of this story is how Northwest was able to get a court order allowing them to seize information on home systems in a period of discovery. In spite of what I've read in some Slashdot comments, Northwest did not supply those systems. Stretching to the limit the court's willingness to stop "cybersmearing", Northwest was given legal permission to essentially trample over the right to assembly and free speech.
In this age, assembly can be physical (as in a rally downtown), or electronic, as in a chat room or a on web site such as Slashdot. The same First Amendment rights that allow physical assembly and free speech can and should apply equally to their virtual equivalents. We've got to push this issue and make people understand there is no difference between the two.
I can't believe this crap. AMD comes up with admittedly good x86 implementations, but has historically failed to execute; i.e. it has failed to deliver enough of any processor family in the quantities required on everything up to the Athlon. The Athlon has been the exception so far, but we're only talking about three quarters. Intel's failure to deliver on processors, on the other hand, is measured in one or two quarters and then the supply matches the market demand.
Then there's the talk about Transmeta. I agree with the general thrust of the article concerning the Transmeta chips, but I have an even dimmer opinion of the company and its products. There are too many other low-powered advanced architecture chips for mobile system use, in particular the ARM series of microprocessors. Why go with a questionable unknown from Transmeta when I can pick a variant of the ARM from a number of vendors, and there's even a port of Linux to the ARM, along with a Java port at Blackdown. Linus Torvalds' may have the magic touch with software, but it's not carrying over too well with hardware. If I were he, or one of the Transmeta investors, I'd seriously question what Transmeta delivered for all that money and time.
Maybe not a revolution so much as retaliation. Remember Pirates With Attitude (PWA)? They got raided February 4th, and the story was covered at ABCNEWS.com, amoung other places. I would imagine that those that didn't get swept up, along with PWA sympathizers, took exception to law enforcement's feeling of success and decided to give as well as they got. Of course, that's just my opinion...
To Andover and Slashdot, as an African-American it is troubling to read threats of lynching on this board, but if that's how VA Linux Systems and Slashdot choose to handle its business competitors, so be it.
No one is going to lynch you. If anything, we'll just ignore you by refusing to purchase any LinuxOne goods and servers and make sure that the truth about the organization you represent is clearly and correctly presented to as broad an audience as possible.
And pardon me for asking, but since when did racism get injected into this discussion? Is that how you view this debate, as racist-inspired? We might be angry (I'm very angry), but this comment from you about lynching is just one more clue to the rest of the world as to how clueless you and LinuxOne really are. You're viewed strictly on your technical merits, of which all of you without exception have absolutely none.
The site is inflamatory to say the least. After looking at the list of questions, it appears to my paranoid mind that the whole thing was meant to subtley fan the fears of 'guvment meddlin' in our affairs. As a consequence, all 1124 respondents were played like a fine violin, and so will a lot more people who read this 'report'. Unfortunately, the questions don't touch on the real issues, which are the brutal methods that Microsoft used to attain market dominance and thus get itself into this pickle in the first place. But them that controls the questions control the outcome to their own ends, not to the ends of truth.
Not to detract from the effort to port to Itanium (it had to have been non-trivial), but I'm curious how much prior effort from the various ports to SPARC, Alpha, and MIPS R4000 (all 64-bit processors) helped pave the way for the port to Itanium. I'm also curious just who will get the coveted Itanium development systems (the thousands and then the tens of thousands) promised to Linux developers, and what the fine print will say about how those systems will be used.
Oh my. My feelings are hurt. Lets see, go to Netcraft and look at what www.macosrumors.com is running, and I see:
www.macosrumors.com is running Apache/1.3.11 (Unix) PHP/3.0.14 on FreeBSD
Gosh. And I thought FreeBSDers were so much better, so much more knowledgable, so much cooler, than us lowlife Linux fucks. I guess what amazes me is why a site devoted to the MacOS isn't hosted on MacOS with a MacOS server...
Re:So a poorly administered site = poor content!?
on
Darwin on Crusoe?
·
· Score: 2
...but if you're going to judge a site's content, READ THE CONTENT...
That's my whole point. How can I read content on a site to judge that site when that site can't deliver the content I'm supposed to judge? And as for how well it "loads up", yes, I'm sorry if my standards are so high that I expect it to load a page on request, not barf all over the page with raw error messages. Most sites that even attempt some degree of cluefullness will present a page saying, in plain english (or whatever native language you understand) that an error has occurred. More enlightened sites will provide a link back to the front page, and even a helpful link to send a message about the error to the web admin. But then I guess that's too much to expect from high-church geeks.
I can hear it now:
"Error recovery? ERROR RECOVERY??? We don't need no stinkin' error recovery!"
You don't need to move libraries to/usr/lib or/lib. You can set up the environmental variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to non-standard libraries. For example,
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/bcast2k/lib
This allows B2K to find its libraries when it runs.
*laughing out loud* This reminds me of what Java/Sun went through to get Java back into embedded systems. Original Java was way to big to fit in the proverbial doornob (or JavaRing, in their case), so they backed up and gave us several leaner versions targeted for small machines.
As far as DirectX and RealAudio/Video, what open standards-based technology exists that has equivalent serious capabilities of those two that could be incorporated into eCos and/or Linux?
I've glanced at eCos but never had the time to give it much review. Think I'll dig a little deeper. Thanks for the insites.
I think our illustrious moderators have finally learned what a troll message is. However, it may have been dumb luck. We'll need more samples to determine if they've actually developed the ability.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, specifically that it's the poster child of open software. If you want a complex project done right (and that includes everything, including Linux), then you're better off using conventional means.
Be it for backdoors, security or updates, nothing beats OSS.
In this instance (and many others) I beg to differ. I have had no less than two security emails from Microsoft Product Security in the last 48 hours when this "exploit" first broke. I received the first April 14th, and the second today. Both gave explicit instructions for removing the vulnerability:
Remediation
===========
To eliminate this vulnerability, customers who are hosting web sites
using any of the affected products should delete all copies of the
file Dvwssr.dll from their servers. The FAQ provides step-by-step
instructions for doing this. The only functionality lost by deleting
the file is the ability to generate link views using Visual Interdev
1.0.
Yes, the programmers who put this in were assholes. Kinda like a few Linux programmers who might be tempted to add code saying that "Microsoft engineers are weenies". No, this does not mean that Microsoft was trying to pull anything.
And especially: It does NOT "prove" by any stretch of the imagination that Open Source is superior to closed or proprietary source. There are far too many naive OSS/Linux advocates who seem to think that backdoors and deliberate exploits somehow have "Back Door Here" comments liberally sprinkled around the offending code. It takes considerable time, effort, intelligence, and dumb luck to audit code, and to look not only for the single point of entry, but the even more difficult to spot exploits with possible multiple applications.
ESR and the zelots who take up his arguments without careful consideration of the facts are rapidly making themselves a royal PITA. In case you haven't noticed, over one million copies of Windows 2000 have shipped since its introduction (real copies generating real revenue) and from my own experience, as well as that of others, it's pretty damn good. Good enough to make it easy to ignore Linux and all the stupid political baggage that it's acquired.
If writing a bar-code driver is all that easy, then why don't you show us by example? Pick a bar-code reader (the more the merrier), write the code, carefully test it, document everything, put it out under GPL, and then support it? And just out of curiosity, have you every written a bar-code reader?
In Orlando, there were a number of public Unix systems around 1985. Two that I remember were bilver (run by Bill Vermillion) and robstoy (run by Rob Talley). bilver was a Tandy model 16 (68000) system running Unix, while robstoy was a Microvax running Ultrix. We had login accounts, mail, newsgroups, and the ability to upload/download files via XModem and Kermit as well as ftp. There were no fees on these two systems, although they would quickly cancel accounts that abused the systems.
robstoy was interesting in that Rob ran (or lived, actually) inside of emacs at the console, while allowing dialup access; this on a machine with only 4MB of RAM. The only other system name I remember was tarpit, a mail server run by Rob Thrush at Automation Intelligence. It was an IBM 286 running SCO Xenix 286, and it handled all mail (personal and newsgroups) for everybody in the central Floriday area at the time.
Except for today's eye-candy and ultra-hype, we had all the essentials and lacked for nothing. The only useful function the web has that we didn't have are search engines. And if I needed to find something out, I could ask on a newsgroup and find out within a few hours. I'm sure that someout would point out streaming content (audio and video) that you can get over the net, but today's offerings still can't match cable, and the net, for those types of services, is very constrained.
I have been very concerned about the merger of Inprise and Corel ever since the announcement. Inprise is by far the more valuable of the two companies, and has many valuable products that I have used; specifically, Visibroker and JBuilder. I have used other Borland/Inprise tools in the past, particularly Delphi and Borland C++.
Corel, on the other hand, has a long history of purchasing the industry's leftovers (such as WordPerfect) and essentially doing nothing with them. I am well aware of Corel Linux, but after purchasing a copy, I found it did not install on any of the current machines I had access to (specifically problems with the video drivers) that other distributions (Red Hat, SuSE) had no problems with. I have never been impressed with Corel quality, and I fear for the negative technical impact the merger will have on Inprise.
I want to use Borland/Inprise tools, and I'm willing and happy to purchase them for both Windows and Unix/Linux platforms. But if the merger is completed, I will have to seriously consider other vendors. I will not stay with the combined companies.
I'm not so concerned about 1GHz CPUs anymore. I want to see supporting subsystems match the processor's performance, specifically video and memory. It would be very interesting to have a 500MHz memory subsystem and a 1GHz 256bit 3D video subsystem. By way of example, I have recently been able to extend the gaming life of a number of older P/PII systems by giving them Voodoo3 3000 PCI cards. How much more performance could we all get from a bleeding-edge CPU if everything else is running just as fast?
Wrong. It was 64 bit. From Atari Jaguar Frequently Asked Questions:
The Jaguar has five processors which are contained in three chips. Two of
the chips are proprietary designs, nicknamed "Tom" and "Jerry". The third
chip is a standard Motorola 68000, and used as a coprocessor. Tom and
Jerry are built using an 0.5 micron silicon process. With proper
programming, all five processors can run in parallel.
- "Tom"
- 750,000 transistors, 208 pins
- Graphics Processing Unit (processor #1)
- 32-bit RISC architecture (32/64 processor)
- 64 registers of 32 bits wide
- Has access to all 64 bits of the system bus
- Can read 64 bits of data in one instruction
- Rated at 26.591 MIPS (million instructions per second)
- Runs at 26.591 MHz
- 4K bytes of zero wait-state internal SRAM
- Performs a wide range of high-speed graphic effects
- Programmable
- Object processor (processor #2)
- 64-bit RISC architecture
- 64-bit wide registers
- Programmable processor that can act as a variety of different video
architectures, such as a sprite engine, a pixel-mapped display, a
character-mapped system, and others.
- Blitter (processor #3)
- 64-bit RISC architecture
- 64-bit wide registers
- Performs high-speed logical operations
- Hardware support for Z-buffering and Gouraud shading
- DRAM memory controller
- 64 bits
- Accesses the DRAM directly
- "Jerry"
- 600,000 transistors, 144 pins
- Digital Signal Processor (processor #4)
- 32 bits (32-bit registers)
- Rated at 26.6 MIPS (million instructions per second)
- Runs at 26.6 MHz
- Same RISC core as the Graphics Processing Unit
- Not limited to sound generation
- 8K bytes of zero wait-state internal SRAM
- CD-quality sound (16-bit stereo)
- Number of sound channels limited by software
- Two DACs (stereo) convert digital data to analog sound signals
- Full stereo capabilities
- Wavetable synthesis, FM synthesis, FM Sample synthesis, and AM
synthesis
- A clock control block, incorporating timers, and a UART
- Joystick control
- Motorola 68000 (processor #5)
- Runs at 13.295MHz
- General purpose control processor
Communication is performed with a high speed 64-bit data bus, rated at
106.364 megabytes/second. The 68000 is only able to access 16 bits of this
bus at a time.
The Jaguar contains two megabytes (16 megabits) of fast page-mode DRAM,
in four chips with 512 K each. Game cartridges can support up to six
megabytes (48 megabits) of information, and can contain an EEPROM
(electrically erasable/programmable read-only memory) chip to save game
information and settings. Up to 100,000 writes can be performed with the
EEPROM; after that, future writes may not be saved (performance varies
widely, but 100,000 is a guaranteed minimum). Depending on use, this limit
should take from 10 to 50 years to reach.
The Jaguar uses 24-bit addressing, and is reportedly capable of accessing
data as follows:
Six megabytes cartridge ROM
Eight megabytes DRAM
Two megabytes miscellaneous/expansion
All of the processors can access the main DRAM memory area directly. The
Digital Signal Processor and the Graphics Processor can execute code out of
either their internal caches, or out of main memory. The only limitations
are that
It's a shame that something as trivial as Microsoft's accidental ownership of Corel/Inprise could generate news. Microsoft's payoff to Inprise is very old news indeed, for some of the same reasons that Microsoft paid off Apple. Who cares if Microsoft owns 4% of Corel? Nobody except the truly paranoid. Will it amount to much of anything? Absolutely not. And to the little poster who said that the DoJ would point to this as another instance of Microsoft trying to buy and suppress, get a life.
As far as the rant is concerned, it is equally pointless.
I agree with your opinion about the Ultra5/10. We had a whole slew of Ultra 1s that were purchased a good year before, and although they may not have been as spiffy as the 5's, they were rock solid. The only problem is they were slower than the 5's. But they never locked up, and they never crashed.
I think that Bob Metcalfe has a strong grasp of x86 code. Code morphing, in and of itself, is nothing new and is a part of both Intel's and AMD's advanced processors. If I'm not mistaken I believe AMD refers to the product of converting x86 opcodes as RISCops, in which the internal machine is very RISCy. This code morphing is hardware based, and is limited to one instruction set (x86) being morphed to the internal RISC opcodes. Transmeta's value added is that they exposed and optimized the hardware layer hidden in the Intel and AMD processors in such a way that it become possible to emulate nearly any current processor instruction set.
No, I support Metcalfe's pointing out the strong smell of hypocrisy surrounding certain actions by some in the Open Source community. Let's go over some of Metcalf's points:
SUN Microsystem's own website (http://www.sun.com/microelectronics/communitysou
Yep, there's that ugly serpent in the Open Source Garden, software patents. How many articles have been published, and how many flames delivered, to the "clueless" individuals who would dare to tie up innovation and hamstring the inevitable march to victory of the Open Source Movement?
What more can I say? Intel comes out and shows Linux ported and running, first on Itanium emulation, and later on Itanium silicon. Further, the Trillium group, to great fanfare, releases the kernel source. Notice that Windows NT wasn't anywhere around, because Windows NT, being "beneath contempt", wasn't worth the effort to port and show running at the various Itanium showings.
Linux Torvalds may not have intended this, but he has taken situational ethics to new ground with his employment at, and tacit support of, Transmeta. It's all very good to want a return on investment, especially in the hideously expensive task of designing microprocessors, but if you're going to hold a belief, then you need to live that belief, regardless of the consequences. If the Open Source movement and philosophy are strong enough that companies such as Red Hat, SuSe, TurboLinux, VA Linux, and others are willing to build a business around it, then Transmeta, with Open Source's icon as an employee, should be out in front of everbody else. Instead, they cynically use Linus to garner interest and at the same time to shield themselves from criticisms of the company's behaviors.
If a journaling filesystem is part of Solaris, then I have yet to see it kick in, at least on the Ultra 5's. Every Ultra 5 that has gone down for catastrophic reasons (i.e. power outage) has always run through fsck, and on several occasions has stopped at the boot prompt in order to have the sysadmin perform a manual fsck. As for ancient hardware, the last of the 5's rolled in in August 1999, and the E450 came in in November of 1999. I know that Internet time is fast, but it's not that fast.
The E450 that we recieved has two 400MHz processors, 2GB ram, and 120GB RAID drive in the box. It was running as a build machine and ClearCase server. We recieved it brand new from Sun, and two weeks after first setting it up we had SUN come back in and eventually replace the motherboard because the machine was shutting itself down. Total downtime was nearly a week, and this during a critical build-and-release phase. I was not a happy camper, and neither was my boss.
I agree with parts of the story. Over the past 12 months a DoD project, JSIMS, invested in a large number of SUN systems (Ultra 5s and an E450). Turns out the Ultra 5's were locking up on the desktop, requiring in some cases a hard power down (and resultant fsck), while the brand-new E450 had its motherboard replaced. We've also had problems with RAID controller cards on older SUNs in the lab. My solution (which was never implemented) was Compaq or Dell servers running Linux. In fact, my positive experience with Dell, Compaq, and HP server hardware will always lead me to recommend those vendors over SUN.
The problem with SUN is its hardware and its high cost relative to other solutions on the market. So I can see Compaq getting into Quote.com and selling not only a better hardware solution, but the Windows operating system along with the hardware. But what drove the switch to Windows was not the OS, but the poor quality of the SUN hardware platform.
SUN has a serious QA hardware problem that will kill them if they don't get it cleaned up. At this point of the game, I have even less use for SUN than I do for Microsoft, and that's pretty damn low to begin with.
What disturbs me the most about Northwest's action is that they were able to get away with it. As the article states "most such searches usually have been limited to cases involving workers who've been accused of stealing company files, passing on trade secrets to competitors or using insider information to profit on the trading of company stock." What Northwest is attempting is nothing less than intimidation of union activity, and it appears that Northwest will use any means to crack down on union activity, rightful or otherwise.
But the more frightening aspect of this story is how Northwest was able to get a court order allowing them to seize information on home systems in a period of discovery. In spite of what I've read in some Slashdot comments, Northwest did not supply those systems. Stretching to the limit the court's willingness to stop "cybersmearing", Northwest was given legal permission to essentially trample over the right to assembly and free speech.
In this age, assembly can be physical (as in a rally downtown), or electronic, as in a chat room or a on web site such as Slashdot. The same First Amendment rights that allow physical assembly and free speech can and should apply equally to their virtual equivalents. We've got to push this issue and make people understand there is no difference between the two.
I can't believe this crap. AMD comes up with admittedly good x86 implementations, but has historically failed to execute; i.e. it has failed to deliver enough of any processor family in the quantities required on everything up to the Athlon. The Athlon has been the exception so far, but we're only talking about three quarters. Intel's failure to deliver on processors, on the other hand, is measured in one or two quarters and then the supply matches the market demand.
Then there's the talk about Transmeta. I agree with the general thrust of the article concerning the Transmeta chips, but I have an even dimmer opinion of the company and its products. There are too many other low-powered advanced architecture chips for mobile system use, in particular the ARM series of microprocessors. Why go with a questionable unknown from Transmeta when I can pick a variant of the ARM from a number of vendors, and there's even a port of Linux to the ARM, along with a Java port at Blackdown. Linus Torvalds' may have the magic touch with software, but it's not carrying over too well with hardware. If I were he, or one of the Transmeta investors, I'd seriously question what Transmeta delivered for all that money and time.
Maybe not a revolution so much as retaliation. Remember Pirates With Attitude (PWA)? They got raided February 4th, and the story was covered at ABCNEWS.com , amoung other places. I would imagine that those that didn't get swept up, along with PWA sympathizers, took exception to law enforcement's feeling of success and decided to give as well as they got. Of course, that's just my opinion...
To Andover and Slashdot, as an African-American it is troubling to read threats of lynching on this board, but if that's how VA Linux Systems and Slashdot choose to handle its business competitors, so be it.
No one is going to lynch you. If anything, we'll just ignore you by refusing to purchase any LinuxOne goods and servers and make sure that the truth about the organization you represent is clearly and correctly presented to as broad an audience as possible.
And pardon me for asking, but since when did racism get injected into this discussion? Is that how you view this debate, as racist-inspired? We might be angry (I'm very angry), but this comment from you about lynching is just one more clue to the rest of the world as to how clueless you and LinuxOne really are. You're viewed strictly on your technical merits, of which all of you without exception have absolutely none.
The site is inflamatory to say the least. After looking at the list of questions, it appears to my paranoid mind that the whole thing was meant to subtley fan the fears of 'guvment meddlin' in our affairs. As a consequence, all 1124 respondents were played like a fine violin, and so will a lot more people who read this 'report'. Unfortunately, the questions don't touch on the real issues, which are the brutal methods that Microsoft used to attain market dominance and thus get itself into this pickle in the first place. But them that controls the questions control the outcome to their own ends, not to the ends of truth.
Not to detract from the effort to port to Itanium (it had to have been non-trivial), but I'm curious how much prior effort from the various ports to SPARC, Alpha, and MIPS R4000 (all 64-bit processors) helped pave the way for the port to Itanium. I'm also curious just who will get the coveted Itanium development systems (the thousands and then the tens of thousands) promised to Linux developers, and what the fine print will say about how those systems will be used.
Oh my. My feelings are hurt. Lets see, go to Netcraft and look at what www.macosrumors.com is running, and I see:
www.macosrumors.com is running Apache/1.3.11 (Unix) PHP/3.0.14 on FreeBSD
Gosh. And I thought FreeBSDers were so much better, so much more knowledgable, so much cooler, than us lowlife Linux fucks. I guess what amazes me is why a site devoted to the MacOS isn't hosted on MacOS with a MacOS server...
That's my whole point. How can I read content on a site to judge that site when that site can't deliver the content I'm supposed to judge? And as for how well it "loads up", yes, I'm sorry if my standards are so high that I expect it to load a page on request, not barf all over the page with raw error messages. Most sites that even attempt some degree of cluefullness will present a page saying, in plain english (or whatever native language you understand) that an error has occurred. More enlightened sites will provide a link back to the front page, and even a helpful link to send a message about the error to the web admin. But then I guess that's too much to expect from high-church geeks.
I can hear it now:
"Error recovery? ERROR RECOVERY??? We don't need no stinkin' error recovery!"
Went to the web site pointed out in the opening article, and this is what I got:
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Can't connect to MySQL server on 'localhost' (61) in PHP/adfunc.php3 on line 3
Warning: 0 is not a MySQL link index in PHP/adfunc.php3 on line 4
Warning: 0 is not a MySQL link index in PHP/adfunc.php3 on line 38
Warning: 0 is not a MySQL result index in PHP/adfunc.php3 on line 39
Fatal error: Call to unsupported or undefined function error() in PHP/adfunc.php3 on line 40
Seems to me we've got a bunch of clueless rookies running the site, which makes any information they have to spill extremely suspect.
You don't need to move libraries to /usr/lib or /lib. You can set up the environmental variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to non-standard libraries. For example,
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/bcast2k/lib
This allows B2K to find its libraries when it runs.
*laughing out loud*
This reminds me of what Java/Sun went through to get Java back into embedded systems. Original Java was way to big to fit in the proverbial doornob (or JavaRing, in their case), so they backed up and gave us several leaner versions targeted for small machines.
As far as DirectX and RealAudio/Video, what open standards-based technology exists that has equivalent serious capabilities of those two that could be incorporated into eCos and/or Linux?
I've glanced at eCos but never had the time to give it much review. Think I'll dig a little deeper. Thanks for the insites.
I think our illustrious moderators have finally learned what a troll message is. However, it may have been dumb luck. We'll need more samples to determine if they've actually developed the ability.
Yeah, that other Dan Quayle.
I think I'll just go away now...
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