As a UK citezan (sorry, "subject"), I agree with the original poster. This country is more of a shithole with less freedoms than America. I'd happily swap our high taxes, low wages, and controlled lives for their bill of rights and occasions lunatic with gun incidents.
Then why do I get constantly overtaken by buses and trucks if I travel at 65? Why are they _always_ blocking up the outside lanes?
I'll tell you why - little Mr Policeman is too busy extorting money from poor old Joe Bloggs for going 5mph over the limit in the middle of the night on a deserted motorway.
Yet another example of this latest UK government trying to control _everything_, and what's worse, we just accept it. The British public is so used to be told what to do, and so used to not being listened to, that we are in a demoralized condition, and just go with the flow.
I did actually write to my MP about the RIP bill to complain (before it was passed). Some months later, I got a reply from the MP, which also included the reply he had received from Jack Straw (principle pusher of the RIP bill, this speeding bill, and someone who truly deserves a bullet in the head). In his reply, he cited the 'dangerous criminals' and 'terrorists' who as we all know, comprise 99% of the online populace. He also cleverly avoided answering ANY of the points I had made - and that was that. Waste of time.
I'm pretty pissed off because I actually voted for this government, since the Conservative party had at the time sent the country to hell.
I was put in charge of locating something good for bug handling / call handling for one of my ex employers networks. I started first of all by looking at the system we had (DDTS aka ClearDDTS, I think a product made by Rational) and looking at all the open source solutions.
Sadly I didn't find anything that was really up to the job. Lots of solutions that concentrated on software bugs, some better than others, but none that I thought were really good. Maybe that's a project for somebody? I know I don't have time unfortunately.
In case you're wondering, I then looked at commercial solutions, and found them to be severely lacking, or total mass overkill, all Windows based - so eventually we stuck with DDTS.
you mean the people who drive the Honda Insight, right? that car shuts off its engine whenever it can, and I hear the fuel economy is terrible - something like 70mpg.
Yes, but the Insight is actually a gas/electric hybrid, so in traffic jams won't actually start the engine up at all - just the electric motor. It's also got a sub 1000cc engine. I was talking about your average car with petrol engine.
Spinning up and down drives will (depending obviously on your load and spindown configuration) actually end up using more electricity, in worst case scenario. It's like people who turn their engine off in only light traffic jams - starting it up costs a lot more fuel than just leaving it running at idle. With desktop PCs it makes sense, since they tend to honestly do nothing at all unless people are sat using them (lets discount seti@homers;-) ) for long periods of time, so you can make a big power saving.
The other thing here is that as various people have pointed out, the most common failure point on drives is during spinup - the time at which most stress is being exerted on the drive. If you've got a big ultrareliable server, you'll want it to stay that way, and the best way to do this is by keeping everything the same. The car analogy fits here too. A car that does 100,000 miles in its life with lots of stopping and starting and small journeys, will be considerably worse off than one that just ran for long distances.
In case anyone was wondering - the adverse wear+tear of power up/down also affects PCs (cpu/PSU/drives), and even monitors. I've seen it happen often enough, and it would be interesting to know how much money the PC hardware industry makes out of components failing early due to "power saving" measures (be they system controlled or little Johnny turning his PC off at night).
If we move over to better renewable resources, like vast farms of hamsterwheels - this won't be a problem:-)
Yeah well - I just mailed him because that's what t says to do if there isn't anyone appropriate listed in the MAINTAINERS file;-)
Which is the appropriate mailing list for this? I had wanted to just report it without having to subscribe to something and being spammed to hell and back. It's a really easy fix, just use a nonbroken version.
Oh - this is the fun part. Someone has had some fun with that kernel module between 2.4.0-test9 and 2.4.0. If you look at the driver version, it hasn't actually changed - but the code _has_. This isn't AMIs fault at all, unless they sent the totally broken and nonworking version to the kernel maintainers. Unlikely. The fix seems to be either a) copy in megaraid.c from a test kernel, or b) download the latest megaraid.c from AMI, and just copy the file over the top.
Maybe I'm laying the blame in the wrong direction, but it really looks like someone tinkered with an already working driver, and didn't bother to mention it in the comments at the top of the file.
I think this idea sucks as a replacement for genuine media game releases. I don't want to have to have a broadband connection to play games, I just want to stick the cart/disc in and hit the power button. Consoles are toys (very fun ones), and should be quick n easy to plug in, play, and put away again.
It seems to me that game companies in general are trying _really_ hard to push the concept on online gaming, with some bizarre assumption that the holy grail of inexpensive broadband in every home is going to become a reality. It isn't. Until there is some commercial incentive for companies to offer broadband services cheaply in remote areas (and I don't see that happening) they're just restricting their own market.
Even if it does become a reality, it won't be within the product lifetime of any current or in development consoles. Many countries don't have any broadband services for the home at all, and in others what's there is too expensive, or people aren't that interested.
Added to that, the number of casual/console gamers I know who care about online gaming is pretty small, all the O/L game addicts I know are just geeky Quake players, who aren't going to want to ditch their PC gaming in favour of a console.
This is _all_ about trying to move consoles to pay-per-view or limited ownership of software, and I sincerely hope any company trying to push it as the way forward gets burned. They're trying to get more money out of the consumer, and destroy the thriving used videogame market. There's probably an anti piracy thing here too - but someone will just crack whatever system they use - they always do. Media people cannot create (carts, wierd CD types, etc) was always the most secure way.
Well - to be perfectly honest - opennap currently has a far better selection of music tastes (generally speaking from casual observation) - so I'm more than happy for Joe and Jill Schmoe to peddle their Britney and N-Sync tracks and have to pay for it.
That Maestro thing is pretty scary then. I imagine SuSE won't be shipping with 2.4.0 (at least I hope not). Megaraid card owners really suffer - since somsone introduced a typo in megaraid.c that causes them to not initialise - and I'm sure there are countless other bugs.
Of course - if they are going to start shipping it they become responsible for some level of support - so maybe they'll have to fix the Maestro drivers when the problem is reported to them, and funnel the fixes back to the author?:-)
Go on then - explain that one before I beat you over the head with Redhats hideous/etc/rc.d and/etc/sysconfig setups, their experimental (broken) compiler, and bizarre homegrown daemons that crash machines every 3 weeks;-)
SuSEs config bears more of a relation to Solaris, Tru64, HP-UX and *BSD setups than many linux dists. It may not like rpms made for redhat systems, but at least their config setup makes sense to people from non redhatland.
As an aside - maybe your Maestro card is faulty? That doesn't sound healthy at all!
Did he cover the 2.4.0 driver bugs?
on
2.2 vs 2.4
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· Score: 1
For example - the new ami megaraid driver in there contains a typo, a missing ! symbol which causes it to claim it can't register the IO range, if it can.
That caused me a _serious_ headache, and I'm surprised something like that slipped through (go to the AMI site and you can grab the latest, unbugged drivers)
After almost an entire working day spent trying to fix a Redhat based firewall/vpn machine, I can hand on heart say:
Anything that causes people not to use Redhat, and Redhat to go bust, is fine by me. I've never worked with such a stupidly configured OS before in my LIFE, and having great userhelping automatic programs destroy config files is _not clever_.
And it's not even the one with the experimental (broken) compiler and 3 week reboot bug!
The modern pitfall of opensource: Tool #3421 to achieve the same task.
To my mind, the best mailtool for Linux is without a doubt Sylpheed (search on freshmeat.net for it). Multiple accounts and filtering all handled flawlessly - all wrapped up in a sensible gtk wrapper so your themes apply to it.
It would be nice to see something big like the Gnome project select Sylpheed as their 'official' mail client, but it looks like everyone is hell bent on something that not only looks like Outlook, but chews memory, screenspace and CPU just like it too (hi Evolution.)
The sort of people who buy consoles, like consoles because they work. They traditionally do not crash, or give problems. X-Box is perhaps going to be hampered in the console market because everyone knows Microsoft stuff crashes. Looks like it will be running PC games generally speaking, too - and all the PC gamers I _personally_ know would actually be the sort who want to play them on their computer, not a console attached to a TV.
... patents working for the good of mankind. I sincerely hope that the company with the patent sues ALL other companies who open f*****g popup windows all over the place.
Hopefully, someone else has patented 'resizing your browser to be unusefully large' and will start litigation soon.
I'm sorry, but in real life (tm) it's not feasable for companies to risk threats from recording bodies, just for the sake of a users mp3 collection, legal or not.
Especially when its a 'free' ISP - the users didn't pay for anything.
I think if I was running an ISP, I'd probably just disallow mp3s in the terms and conditions, in bloody big lettering, on the signup page. If you've ever had to deal with one of these recording bodies, it just isn't worth fighting them when a lost customer just means a tiny loss in call revenue (and a smaller hit on your bandwidth).
People who don't like this, should go elsewhere for a provider.
Beats me why they should want you to remove the MP3s once you've got them there. After all, from an ISP's point of view, what they really want you to do is not even get them there in the first place.
People downloading the mp3s costs them bandwidth. The extra disk space is quite an issue (these aren't 100 quid cheapy IDE disks you'd put in a PC, decent SCSI raid shelf units cost quite a bit) since often you'll find the userspace is mirrored - if we want 30G more (maybe enough for 60 greedy users), we need to buy 60g of space. Another problem is backups - if you've ever worked in an environment with a lot of disk space, you'll know the pain of backup cycles, tape run times, network hit during backup cycles, etc - it's not trivial at all!
Setting aside the fact that the ISP in question disallowed mp3 content in its terms and conditions...
I work(ed) at an ISP, and you could tie up a single staff member all the time, dealing with requests from the British Phonograph Association (bit like the RIAA) asking us to remove illegal mp3s that had been put into customer webspace.
As a business, do you a) employ someone to spend all their time looking at mp3 complaints, testing said files to see if they are actually illegal, mailing the RIAA type body in question, etc - or b) simply have a cronjob that deletes.mp3 files?
I use the HP-UX version sometimes. I'd be more than happy to use it under Linux if it was ported.
It does of course suffer bugs. Since M$ aren't exactly Unix-clued, they forgot that a remote display might not be 8 or 24 bit, so if you remote to a 16bit display, it crashes.
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As a UK citezan (sorry, "subject"), I agree with the original poster. This country is more of a shithole with less freedoms than America. I'd happily swap our high taxes, low wages, and controlled lives for their bill of rights and occasions lunatic with gun incidents.
Then why do I get constantly overtaken by buses and trucks if I travel at 65? Why are they _always_ blocking up the outside lanes?
I'll tell you why - little Mr Policeman is too busy extorting money from poor old Joe Bloggs for going 5mph over the limit in the middle of the night on a deserted motorway.
Yet another example of this latest UK government trying to control _everything_, and what's worse, we just accept it. The British public is so used to be told what to do, and so used to not being listened to, that we are in a demoralized condition, and just go with the flow.
I did actually write to my MP about the RIP bill to complain (before it was passed). Some months later, I got a reply from the MP, which also included the reply he had received from Jack Straw (principle pusher of the RIP bill, this speeding bill, and someone who truly deserves a bullet in the head). In his reply, he cited the 'dangerous criminals' and 'terrorists' who as we all know, comprise 99% of the online populace. He also cleverly avoided answering ANY of the points I had made - and that was that. Waste of time.
I'm pretty pissed off because I actually voted for this government, since the Conservative party had at the time sent the country to hell.
What a STUPID STUPID mistake.
I was put in charge of locating something good for bug handling / call handling for one of my ex employers networks. I started first of all by looking at the system we had (DDTS aka ClearDDTS, I think a product made by Rational) and looking at all the open source solutions.
Sadly I didn't find anything that was really up to the job. Lots of solutions that concentrated on software bugs, some better than others, but none that I thought were really good. Maybe that's a project for somebody? I know I don't have time unfortunately.
In case you're wondering, I then looked at commercial solutions, and found them to be severely lacking, or total mass overkill, all Windows based - so eventually we stuck with DDTS.
you mean the people who drive the Honda Insight, right? that car shuts off its engine whenever it can, and I hear the fuel economy is terrible - something like 70mpg.
Yes, but the Insight is actually a gas/electric hybrid, so in traffic jams won't actually start the engine up at all - just the electric motor. It's also got a sub 1000cc engine. I was talking about your average car with petrol engine.
Spinning up and down drives will (depending obviously on your load and spindown configuration) actually end up using more electricity, in worst case scenario. It's like people who turn their engine off in only light traffic jams - starting it up costs a lot more fuel than just leaving it running at idle. With desktop PCs it makes sense, since they tend to honestly do nothing at all unless people are sat using them (lets discount seti@homers ;-) ) for long periods of time, so you can make a big power saving.
:-)
The other thing here is that as various people have pointed out, the most common failure point on drives is during spinup - the time at which most stress is being exerted on the drive. If you've got a big ultrareliable server, you'll want it to stay that way, and the best way to do this is by keeping everything the same. The car analogy fits here too. A car that does 100,000 miles in its life with lots of stopping and starting and small journeys, will be considerably worse off than one that just ran for long distances.
In case anyone was wondering - the adverse wear+tear of power up/down also affects PCs (cpu/PSU/drives), and even monitors. I've seen it happen often enough, and it would be interesting to know how much money the PC hardware industry makes out of components failing early due to "power saving" measures (be they system controlled or little Johnny turning his PC off at night).
If we move over to better renewable resources, like vast farms of hamsterwheels - this won't be a problem
Yeah well - I just mailed him because that's what t says to do if there isn't anyone appropriate listed in the MAINTAINERS file ;-)
Which is the appropriate mailing list for this? I had wanted to just report it without having to subscribe to something and being spammed to hell and back. It's a really easy fix, just use a nonbroken version.
It affects modular or kernel build, since they both use the same .c file, and hence contain the same bug ;-)
Yes, I did test this before I went delving into the code.
Oh - this is the fun part. Someone has had some fun with that kernel module between 2.4.0-test9 and 2.4.0. If you look at the driver version, it hasn't actually changed - but the code _has_. This isn't AMIs fault at all, unless they sent the totally broken and nonworking version to the kernel maintainers. Unlikely. The fix seems to be either a) copy in megaraid.c from a test kernel, or b) download the latest megaraid.c from AMI, and just copy the file over the top.
Maybe I'm laying the blame in the wrong direction, but it really looks like someone tinkered with an already working driver, and didn't bother to mention it in the comments at the top of the file.
Which was nice.
I actually thought it was one of the worst site redesigns I've ever seen - making it actually uncomfortable to read.
The old FM was perfect, IMHO.
Are there any other sites that offer a similar service?
2.4.0-test9: works
2.4.0: broken.
2.4.1: still broken.
Just a little bit of a problem for people who sensibly are using a megaraid card for their root filesystem.
I just mailed Linus...
I think this idea sucks as a replacement for genuine media game releases. I don't want to have to have a broadband connection to play games, I just want to stick the cart/disc in and hit the power button. Consoles are toys (very fun ones), and should be quick n easy to plug in, play, and put away again.
It seems to me that game companies in general are trying _really_ hard to push the concept on online gaming, with some bizarre assumption that the holy grail of inexpensive broadband in every home is going to become a reality. It isn't. Until there is some commercial incentive for companies to offer broadband services cheaply in remote areas (and I don't see that happening) they're just restricting their own market.
Even if it does become a reality, it won't be within the product lifetime of any current or in development consoles. Many countries don't have any broadband services for the home at all, and in others what's there is too expensive, or people aren't that interested.
Added to that, the number of casual/console gamers I know who care about online gaming is pretty small, all the O/L game addicts I know are just geeky Quake players, who aren't going to want to ditch their PC gaming in favour of a console.
This is _all_ about trying to move consoles to pay-per-view or limited ownership of software, and I sincerely hope any company trying to push it as the way forward gets burned. They're trying to get more money out of the consumer, and destroy the thriving used videogame market. There's probably an anti piracy thing here too - but someone will just crack whatever system they use - they always do. Media people cannot create (carts, wierd CD types, etc) was always the most secure way.
james
Well - to be perfectly honest - opennap currently has a far better selection of music tastes (generally speaking from casual observation) - so I'm more than happy for Joe and Jill Schmoe to peddle their Britney and N-Sync tracks and have to pay for it.
That Maestro thing is pretty scary then. I imagine SuSE won't be shipping with 2.4.0 (at least I hope not). Megaraid card owners really suffer - since somsone introduced a typo in megaraid.c that causes them to not initialise - and I'm sure there are countless other bugs.
:-)
Of course - if they are going to start shipping it they become responsible for some level of support - so maybe they'll have to fix the Maestro drivers when the problem is reported to them, and funnel the fixes back to the author?
"Not standard"?
/etc/rc.d and /etc/sysconfig setups, their experimental (broken) compiler, and bizarre homegrown daemons that crash machines every 3 weeks ;-)
Go on then - explain that one before I beat you over the head with Redhats hideous
SuSEs config bears more of a relation to Solaris, Tru64, HP-UX and *BSD setups than many linux dists. It may not like rpms made for redhat systems, but at least their config setup makes sense to people from non redhatland.
As an aside - maybe your Maestro card is faulty? That doesn't sound healthy at all!
For example - the new ami megaraid driver in there contains a typo, a missing ! symbol which causes it to claim it can't register the IO range, if it can.
That caused me a _serious_ headache, and I'm surprised something like that slipped through (go to the AMI site and you can grab the latest, unbugged drivers)
After almost an entire working day spent trying to fix a Redhat based firewall/vpn machine, I can hand on heart say:
Anything that causes people not to use Redhat, and Redhat to go bust, is fine by me. I've never worked with such a stupidly configured OS before in my LIFE, and having great userhelping automatic programs destroy config files is _not clever_.
And it's not even the one with the experimental (broken) compiler and 3 week reboot bug!
The modern pitfall of opensource: Tool #3421 to achieve the same task.
To my mind, the best mailtool for Linux is without a doubt Sylpheed (search on freshmeat.net for it). Multiple accounts and filtering all handled flawlessly - all wrapped up in a sensible gtk wrapper so your themes apply to it.
It would be nice to see something big like the Gnome project select Sylpheed as their 'official' mail client, but it looks like everyone is hell bent on something that not only looks like Outlook, but chews memory, screenspace and CPU just like it too (hi Evolution.)
james
God forbid you should _pay_ for software!!!
I don't like to break it to you, but the X-Box will probably not have any opensource software, and probably won't be running your warez.
Mixed feelings on that.
The sort of people who buy consoles, like consoles because they work. They traditionally do not crash, or give problems. X-Box is perhaps going to be hampered in the console market because everyone knows Microsoft stuff crashes. Looks like it will be running PC games generally speaking, too - and all the PC gamers I _personally_ know would actually be the sort who want to play them on their computer, not a console attached to a TV.
... patents working for the good of mankind. I sincerely hope that the company with the patent sues ALL other companies who open f*****g popup windows all over the place.
Hopefully, someone else has patented 'resizing your browser to be unusefully large' and will start litigation soon.
I'm sorry, but in real life (tm) it's not feasable for companies to risk threats from recording bodies, just for the sake of a users mp3 collection, legal or not.
Especially when its a 'free' ISP - the users didn't pay for anything.
I think if I was running an ISP, I'd probably just disallow mp3s in the terms and conditions, in bloody big lettering, on the signup page. If you've ever had to deal with one of these recording bodies, it just isn't worth fighting them when a lost customer just means a tiny loss in call revenue (and a smaller hit on your bandwidth).
People who don't like this, should go elsewhere for a provider.
Beats me why they should want you to remove the MP3s once you've got them there. After all, from an ISP's point of view, what they really want you to do is not even get them there in the first place.
People downloading the mp3s costs them bandwidth. The extra disk space is quite an issue (these aren't 100 quid cheapy IDE disks you'd put in a PC, decent SCSI raid shelf units cost quite a bit) since often you'll find the userspace is mirrored - if we want 30G more (maybe enough for 60 greedy users), we need to buy 60g of space. Another problem is backups - if you've ever worked in an environment with a lot of disk space, you'll know the pain of backup cycles, tape run times, network hit during backup cycles, etc - it's not trivial at all!
Setting aside the fact that the ISP in question disallowed mp3 content in its terms and conditions...
.mp3 files?
I work(ed) at an ISP, and you could tie up a single staff member all the time, dealing with requests from the British Phonograph Association (bit like the RIAA) asking us to remove illegal mp3s that had been put into customer webspace.
As a business, do you a) employ someone to spend all their time looking at mp3 complaints, testing said files to see if they are actually illegal, mailing the RIAA type body in question, etc - or b) simply have a cronjob that deletes
I use the HP-UX version sometimes. I'd be more than happy to use it under Linux if it was ported.
It does of course suffer bugs. Since M$ aren't exactly Unix-clued, they forgot that a remote display might not be 8 or 24 bit, so if you remote to a 16bit display, it crashes.