Since it's inception, I have used DSL frequently as a recovery tool. And it's gotten quite a bit better since the early days (a lot more GUI stuff, and such). For those who argue the "Damn Small" name isn't appropriate for a 50M distribution, don't forget that most distributions these days take multiple 650MB CD's and/or a lot of downloads after installing. At, say 5% of a two-CD Linux install, it is indeed "Damn Small."
Not quite as elegantly small as the QNX Demo Diskette of olden days, which, on one 1.44MB diskette, had an OS, networking stack, GUI, window manager, and Web browser. It was truly amazing. I'm not sure why they have withdrawn this incredible demonstration of their elegant technology. (Has QNX itself become the subject of a bit of bloat, perhaps?) It was limited to one make of network card or serial modem for the networking, which was the main shortcoming of it; but regardless, it was truly unique.
Re:Nostalgia for the Sounds of the Early Computer
on
2.5" Drives On the Desktop
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Reminds me of the first hard drive I ever used, on a Z-80 system. It was about the size of two PC's laying down, side-by-side. You flipped the big switch, and heard, rrr, rrrrr, rrrrrrr, rrrrrrr, as it ever-so-slowly started spinning up it's huge platters. Took a good few minutes to come up to speed. And I think it's capacity was around 5 Megabytes.
If I don't transfer 5 megabytes in a fraction of a second now, there's something wrong with the configuration of my system! Even my first PC-based hard drive was 20mb; incredible to note that 30-50mb per *second* are standard transfer rates.
Even with all the nostalgia, I use my pc's so much for personal and media purposes, that silence would definitely be a step in the right direction, though.
It is a bit misleading using an MPG rating, in such an unrealistic situation; as well as a bit senational to say "Vancouver to Halifax". I somewhat doubt these specialized units would have the ability to climb the grades to, say, cross the rockies, much less an average hill in Nova Scotia. (They'd probably do well on the prairies, though.)
Impressive technology, nonetheless. I would like to see a similar competition where certain torque requirements were met, to carry a certain weight up a certain grade, during parts of the competition. As the mileage differences between small cars and trucks/SUV's attests, potential power comes at a great cost in mileage, even when that power isn't being utilized.
This is why hybrids can do well; they switch to a mode with less power (batteries/electric) for casual driving, and flip to a more expensive means (gas), when more power is required. The UBC unit sounds a bit similar but on a much less powerful scale; the gas engine comes on now and then when a bit of power is required, and then it flips to its other mode, inertia, for as long as it can.
Any offworld presence we could establish would be so infinitescimally small (did I spell that right), that we might as well just jar a bunch of our DNA with some instructions, secure them well in a five foot thick lead time capsule, with a "reconstitute when your alien technology allows."
(Okay, okay, my ex-wife has me in a bit of a cynical mood today, I'll admit.)
Could not this have been done similar to that dude who recreated the world series game in an emulator (back up, continue if something goes wrong)? Or slowed down the emulator to make it easier?
(Apologies for not reading how Twin Galaxies "confirmed" it, they seem to be/.'d.)
The only way to use PayPal with AllOfMp3 is with an xrost iCard. It seems that xroast is not current accepting new funds, while they find a new "payment provider." Doing a quick Google Groups search, it appears it's been in this state for at least a couple of months. And it seems that the only business using xroast's service, is AllOfMp3.
It perhaps sounds like the US may have put pressure on PayPal to pull support for xroast, as an attempt to get at AllOfMp3?
I'd like to check out of AllOfMp3, but am a bit hesitatant to use a credit card there (although a friend of mine did so a year or so ago, and was quite happy with the service).
The games that are pirated are stand alone entities, that don't require going through a central trusted source for authentication.
Email goes through an ISP, an ISP can start to enforce email policies with a new or hybrid system. In fact, this is similar to the online-only games that require an online account to work. Those ones aren't pirated if it's implemented correctly.
If I remember my Discovery Channel property, that airport was designed to be on a sinking island. Underneath the airport, is a complex system of hydraulics and such, where they can compensate for the sinking, and keep things level. Very bizarre, but I don't think it was ever an engineering mistake, just an informed choice.
I thought these were generally considered to use One Time Pad's, so cracking really isn't an option. From Wiki:
In cryptography, the one-time pad (OTP) is an encryption algorithm where the plaintext is combined with a random key or "pad" that is as long as the plaintext and used only once. It was invented in 1917. If the key is truly random, never reused, and, of course, kept secret, the one-time pad can be proven to be unbreakable."
Reminds me of a story about my office mate's PC. He wanted to turn off some feature in XP (I seem to recall it had something to do with auto-update, but my memory is a bit hazy). Anyhow, he found the appropriate place, turned off the feature. He noticed the updates were still occurring (or whatever feature it was, was still on). Upon further research, he found on MS's site, an article explaining as to why turning off that option was a bad idea, and that when you turned it off, it wasn't really being turned off!
We were incredulous. Even coming from Microsoft, this was a bit much; give a mechanism to turn off a feature, but don't listen to the user, because Microsoft really knows what's best for you.
Amazing.
(Does this sound familiar to anyone? Anyone have a link or details on it?)
Odd that the Wired article (and no/. comments so far), have commented on Bob Lazar's colourful history.
He's the dude that claimed to have reverse engineered UFO's at Area 51, and claimed to have advanced degrees from MIT and CIT (which no one can substantiate). He's on all the UFO conspiracy shows.
A colourful character for sure, and a go-getter, but anything coming form him seems that it might be taken with a grain of salt (errr, sodium chloride).
209 pounds? Isn't that like $400 dollars? Can't you get a full fledge PC for this (probably with a monitor)? And with more choice of OS rather than the limited CE?
While I agree with most points in the summary (in fact, I thought they were pretty much self-evident to anyone who uses email, or at least who has gotten into a misunderstanding with it), there is one point of which I'm somewhat doubtful.
Second, the prospect of instantaneous communication creates an urgency that pressures e-mailers to think and write quickly, which can lead to carelessness.
As compared to a phone call or instant messaging, composing an email allows me to collect and organize my thoughts *far* better. A lot of the time while composing a note, I will change it substantially, improving upon the original idea. Writing stuff down is a *great* way to develop your idea and present it better (if you have a baseline of writing skills).
And I don't know how many times, that upon reflection, I decided not to hit that send button, avoiding a lot of grief. (Is it really worth starting a conflict over this issue? Nah, DELETE.) If I had picked up the phone, I would have been committed before walking through all my thoughts on a given issue.
(Of course, that last skill is developed through many experiences of "why, oh, why, oh, why did I hit that send button. Wah!")
1. Why would he omit any information about *who* sent him the email? That would seem highly relevant. Unless it's from the FSF, the threat is kind of meaningless, is it not?
2. If it truly is a problem, could he not do a bit of compile-the-driver-at-boot-time magic? He would not be distributing anything linked against the kernel headers, the compilation/linking would occur on the user's PC after the fact (slightly Gentoo-like, but for a live CD boot, not for an installation).
I guess what I'm curious about, is how animals (birds come to mind first) will deal with their reliance on magnetic fields. Has anyone done any studies on whether or not migratory bird can evolve quiclky enough to adapt to the modified magnetic fields. Is their "compass synchronization" that seens innate, a matter of what they cue into when they're born and growing up, or an evoluationary thing. It's hard to imagine evolution (which takes millions of years to adapt) keeping up with such a short term magnetic reversal.
I'm guessing, and hoping, that the birds innately can handle chanes in the magenetic field, as long as it doesn't change within their relatively short lifetimes.
I think a better analogy than the "left your door unlocked", is that of a place "in public." Our homes are not generally intended for public access. Things put on a world wide network, generally are. If I see a playground with a fence around it (equivalent of a password), it is clear to a reasonable person that it is not for public access. If I see a playground with no fence around it, it's fair game to use.
I think the parallel for anything on the 'net should apply. If there's *no* passwords, it should be considered publicly viewable.
Now consider a microkernel. The filesystem driver is a separate server process. Executing a system call means sending a message to that server and waiting for an answer. Now, what happens if the server is already executing another call ? The calling process blocks, possibly for a long time if there's lots of other requests queued up.
Well maybe that's how *you* would design *your* Microkernel. And yes, it would suck.
The way I would design the filesystem driver, would be to accept a request, add it to a queue of pending requests to serve. If there are no initiated requests, find the request that can most efficiently be served based upon your preferred policy (closest seek time, for example, or first come first serve, your choice), and initiate that request. Add some smarts for multiple devices, so multiple requests can be initiated at the same time to different devices. When data comes back, answer the requesting process with their data. Rather than sitting around blocking on a request, go grab more requests from other processes and queue them up. No need to block. When an initiated request comes back, send back the data to the requesting process, and everyone's happy. Just because things are separated out into different processes, doesn't mean that they can't do some asynchronous juggling to be efficient. Add multi-threading, and the coding becomes a bit easier; but multi-threading isn't necessary to rely upon to have this work well.
I'm pretty sure the monolithic kernels do things somewhat similarly; build a request queue, service that queue. They could also block until they're done other requests, but that would be bad design. Don't assume a Microkernel Filesystem server has to suffer from similarly bad design.
Pffft! North Dakota weather is positively TEMPERATE compared to the place that has a sign that reads:
US Forest Service
STOP
THE AREA AHEAD HAS THE WORST WEATHER IN AMERICA. MANY HAVE DIED THERE FROM EXPOSURE, EVEN IN THE SUMMER. TURN BACK NOW IF THE WEATHER IS BAD.
While your point is well taken, and it is nasty weather, the number of deaths isn't as bad as you point out. Look at the causes; very few are from exposure (hypothermia), most are from other causes not directly related to the weather (but no doubt made worse by it): falls, train crash, plane crash, heart attack, slideboard accident, skiing accident, murder(!), and so forth. Mountaineering is dangerous to start with, it seems.
But the idea of rectal feeding has been pretty much removed with the advent of modern intravenous methods. I've heard that unless your going to be doing some physical work, you can actually get all your required nutrients through an IV.
One place where it actually works quite well, is when IV is not an option. A great example is the family who was lost at sea in a lifeboat for months, and would have otherwise died of dehydration, if the mother, a nurse, hadn't given them seawater in this manner. Quite unpleasant, obviously, but kept them alive; I guess you can absorb water this way, without absorbing the salt. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find an online reference to this story; I do remember watching a show about it, though.
Good Lord, combining all three of these frustrating technologies together. VOIP, which in my experience, is choppy and unreliable; cellular service, which is generally poor, and getting worse as they cram more calls into the same bandwidth; and wireless, which never lives up to it's speed/distance claims. The cell phone companies can't seem to pull off not dropping calls between freaking cell towers, how can they promise calls won't be dropped with this technology.
I'm pretty skeptical as to how well this will work.
Re:Did some looking up on our fragile teeth
on
Stone Age Dentists
·
· Score: 1
I was wondering why we evolves such apparently wretchedly fragile teeth
It probably also has something to do with the fact that throughout most of human evolution, the average life span is *far* shorter than that of today. People just needed to survive to child bearing age and raise the child to self-suficiency, to be evolutionarily successful. That can be done by your teens. Even our fragile teeth, with poor hygiene, would likely last that long no problem. No that we're living well past our 30's, 40's, and into our 70's or so, we're far exceeding the "design specifications" of our teeth (and many other parts of our bodies).
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Since it's inception, I have used DSL frequently as a recovery tool. And it's gotten quite a bit better since the early days (a lot more GUI stuff, and such). For those who argue the "Damn Small" name isn't appropriate for a 50M distribution, don't forget that most distributions these days take multiple 650MB CD's and/or a lot of downloads after installing. At, say 5% of a two-CD Linux install, it is indeed "Damn Small."
Not quite as elegantly small as the QNX Demo Diskette of olden days, which, on one 1.44MB diskette, had an OS, networking stack, GUI, window manager, and Web browser. It was truly amazing. I'm not sure why they have withdrawn this incredible demonstration of their elegant technology. (Has QNX itself become the subject of a bit of bloat, perhaps?) It was limited to one make of network card or serial modem for the networking, which was the main shortcoming of it; but regardless, it was truly unique.
Reminds me of the first hard drive I ever used, on a Z-80 system. It was about the size of two PC's laying down, side-by-side. You flipped the big switch, and heard, rrr, rrrrr, rrrrrrr, rrrrrrr, as it ever-so-slowly started spinning up it's huge platters. Took a good few minutes to come up to speed. And I think it's capacity was around 5 Megabytes.
If I don't transfer 5 megabytes in a fraction of a second now, there's something wrong with the configuration of my system! Even my first PC-based hard drive was 20mb; incredible to note that 30-50mb per *second* are standard transfer rates.
Even with all the nostalgia, I use my pc's so much for personal and media purposes, that silence would definitely be a step in the right direction, though.
Yes, I always arrange documents on my real desk by dragging them around with my pen. It's the most intuitive way.
It is a bit misleading using an MPG rating, in such an unrealistic situation; as well as a bit senational to say "Vancouver to Halifax". I somewhat doubt these specialized units would have the ability to climb the grades to, say, cross the rockies, much less an average hill in Nova Scotia. (They'd probably do well on the prairies, though.)
Impressive technology, nonetheless. I would like to see a similar competition where certain torque requirements were met, to carry a certain weight up a certain grade, during parts of the competition. As the mileage differences between small cars and trucks/SUV's attests, potential power comes at a great cost in mileage, even when that power isn't being utilized.
This is why hybrids can do well; they switch to a mode with less power (batteries/electric) for casual driving, and flip to a more expensive means (gas), when more power is required. The UBC unit sounds a bit similar but on a much less powerful scale; the gas engine comes on now and then when a bit of power is required, and then it flips to its other mode, inertia, for as long as it can.
Any offworld presence we could establish would be so infinitescimally small (did I spell that right), that we might as well just jar a bunch of our DNA with some instructions, secure them well in a five foot thick lead time capsule, with a "reconstitute when your alien technology allows."
(Okay, okay, my ex-wife has me in a bit of a cynical mood today, I'll admit.)
Yeah, let's call a truce. As a peace offering, please take these blankets. Then we smokum peace pipe.
Could not this have been done similar to that dude who recreated the world series game in an emulator (back up, continue if something goes wrong)? Or slowed down the emulator to make it easier?
/.'d.)
(Apologies for not reading how Twin Galaxies "confirmed" it, they seem to be
The only way to use PayPal with AllOfMp3 is with an xrost iCard. It seems that xroast is not current accepting new funds, while they find a new "payment provider." Doing a quick Google Groups search, it appears it's been in this state for at least a couple of months. And it seems that the only business using xroast's service, is AllOfMp3.
It perhaps sounds like the US may have put pressure on PayPal to pull support for xroast, as an attempt to get at AllOfMp3?
I'd like to check out of AllOfMp3, but am a bit hesitatant to use a credit card there (although a friend of mine did so a year or so ago, and was quite happy with the service).
I don't think that's a fair analogy.
The games that are pirated are stand alone entities, that don't require going through a central trusted source for authentication.
Email goes through an ISP, an ISP can start to enforce email policies with a new or hybrid system. In fact, this is similar to the online-only games that require an online account to work. Those ones aren't pirated if it's implemented correctly.
If I remember my Discovery Channel property, that airport was designed to be on a sinking island. Underneath the airport, is a complex system of hydraulics and such, where they can compensate for the sinking, and keep things level. Very bizarre, but I don't think it was ever an engineering mistake, just an informed choice.
I thought these were generally considered to use One Time Pad's, so cracking really isn't an option. From Wiki:
In cryptography, the one-time pad (OTP) is an encryption algorithm where the plaintext is combined with a random key or "pad" that is as long as the plaintext and used only once. It was invented in 1917. If the key is truly random, never reused, and, of course, kept secret, the one-time pad can be proven to be unbreakable."
Reminds me of a story about my office mate's PC. He wanted to turn off some feature in XP (I seem to recall it had something to do with auto-update, but my memory is a bit hazy). Anyhow, he found the appropriate place, turned off the feature. He noticed the updates were still occurring (or whatever feature it was, was still on). Upon further research, he found on MS's site, an article explaining as to why turning off that option was a bad idea, and that when you turned it off, it wasn't really being turned off!
We were incredulous. Even coming from Microsoft, this was a bit much; give a mechanism to turn off a feature, but don't listen to the user, because Microsoft really knows what's best for you.
Amazing.
(Does this sound familiar to anyone? Anyone have a link or details on it?)
Odd that the Wired article (and no /. comments so far), have commented on Bob Lazar's colourful history.
He's the dude that claimed to have reverse engineered UFO's at Area 51, and claimed to have advanced degrees from MIT and CIT (which no one can substantiate). He's on all the UFO conspiracy shows.
A colourful character for sure, and a go-getter, but anything coming form him seems that it might be taken with a grain of salt (errr, sodium chloride).
209 pounds? Isn't that like $400 dollars? Can't you get a full fledge PC for this (probably with a monitor)? And with more choice of OS rather than the limited CE?
Sounds like it's kind of missing the mark.
I thought they finished shooting on this moving a couple of decades ago...
Second, the prospect of instantaneous communication creates an urgency that pressures e-mailers to think and write quickly, which can lead to carelessness.
As compared to a phone call or instant messaging, composing an email allows me to collect and organize my thoughts *far* better. A lot of the time while composing a note, I will change it substantially, improving upon the original idea. Writing stuff down is a *great* way to develop your idea and present it better (if you have a baseline of writing skills).
And I don't know how many times, that upon reflection, I decided not to hit that send button, avoiding a lot of grief. (Is it really worth starting a conflict over this issue? Nah, DELETE.) If I had picked up the phone, I would have been committed before walking through all my thoughts on a given issue.
(Of course, that last skill is developed through many experiences of "why, oh, why, oh, why did I hit that send button. Wah!")
1. Why would he omit any information about *who* sent him the email? That would seem highly relevant. Unless it's from the FSF, the threat is kind of meaningless, is it not?
2. If it truly is a problem, could he not do a bit of compile-the-driver-at-boot-time magic? He would not be distributing anything linked against the kernel headers, the compilation/linking would occur on the user's PC after the fact (slightly Gentoo-like, but for a live CD boot, not for an installation).
I'm guessing, and hoping, that the birds innately can handle chanes in the magenetic field, as long as it doesn't change within their relatively short lifetimes.
Anyone know?
I think the parallel for anything on the 'net should apply. If there's *no* passwords, it should be considered publicly viewable.
Well maybe that's how *you* would design *your* Microkernel. And yes, it would suck.
The way I would design the filesystem driver, would be to accept a request, add it to a queue of pending requests to serve. If there are no initiated requests, find the request that can most efficiently be served based upon your preferred policy (closest seek time, for example, or first come first serve, your choice), and initiate that request. Add some smarts for multiple devices, so multiple requests can be initiated at the same time to different devices. When data comes back, answer the requesting process with their data. Rather than sitting around blocking on a request, go grab more requests from other processes and queue them up. No need to block. When an initiated request comes back, send back the data to the requesting process, and everyone's happy. Just because things are separated out into different processes, doesn't mean that they can't do some asynchronous juggling to be efficient. Add multi-threading, and the coding becomes a bit easier; but multi-threading isn't necessary to rely upon to have this work well.
I'm pretty sure the monolithic kernels do things somewhat similarly; build a request queue, service that queue. They could also block until they're done other requests, but that would be bad design. Don't assume a Microkernel Filesystem server has to suffer from similarly bad design.
US Forest Service
STOP
THE AREA AHEAD HAS THE WORST WEATHER IN AMERICA. MANY HAVE DIED THERE FROM EXPOSURE, EVEN IN THE SUMMER. TURN BACK NOW IF THE WEATHER IS BAD.
While your point is well taken, and it is nasty weather, the number of deaths isn't as bad as you point out. Look at the causes; very few are from exposure (hypothermia), most are from other causes not directly related to the weather (but no doubt made worse by it): falls, train crash, plane crash, heart attack, slideboard accident, skiing accident, murder(!), and so forth. Mountaineering is dangerous to start with, it seems.
One place where it actually works quite well, is when IV is not an option. A great example is the family who was lost at sea in a lifeboat for months, and would have otherwise died of dehydration, if the mother, a nurse, hadn't given them seawater in this manner. Quite unpleasant, obviously, but kept them alive; I guess you can absorb water this way, without absorbing the salt. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find an online reference to this story; I do remember watching a show about it, though.
Your point was as insighful and relevant, as your grammar and puctuation (or lact thereof) was poor.
I'm pretty skeptical as to how well this will work.
It probably also has something to do with the fact that throughout most of human evolution, the average life span is *far* shorter than that of today. People just needed to survive to child bearing age and raise the child to self-suficiency, to be evolutionarily successful. That can be done by your teens. Even our fragile teeth, with poor hygiene, would likely last that long no problem. No that we're living well past our 30's, 40's, and into our 70's or so, we're far exceeding the "design specifications" of our teeth (and many other parts of our bodies).