The trick is to get to the data without anyone noticing, while you're in a foreign (possibly hostile) nation. I'd think someone would notice if a cell phone was constantly 'phoning home'.
My (Japanese) CDMA phone didn't pick up any signal in China, so yeah, I guess it was always trying to connect to a cell tower.
That said, most people in Second Life like looking good, where what is "good" depends on the person. If you wanted to look like a night elf, you could. Looking like a humanoid cat, executive in a suit, or a dragon are also possible. Most people would be upset if one day they logged in and found themselves to look bizarrely wrong.
That's exactly what I meant. Thanks for the explanation and now I understand. It was a dumb and rotten "joke".
For heaven's sake, it's 2009, why the hell do I have to friggin compile every damn piece of software that isn't in a repository? Windows figured this out decades ago, if you're compiling it into a binary, why do you need to compile it in the first place?
Granted, that last statement shows a little ignorance of the way Linux works, but seriously, why hasn't the Linux community come up with a simple install script/storage container that packs all the dirty stuff into one neat little package for easy distribution?
There's one born every minute and I'm not referring to you, I'm referring to the person who modded this drivel up.
Writing as someone who used to work for a Linux distributor (Turbolinux), we spent all kinds of time adding new programs to the downloadable, non-core repository. The likelihood that if you encounter a program that isn't available in a precompiled RPM (and whatever it is in the Debian world) means that it more than likely needs a bit of TLC to make work.
That's not Linux' fault.
If you have a binary RPM that doesn't work it isn't any different than a source package that doesn't compile and as important, it isn't any different than the "DLL hell" that many Microsoft Windows users experience.
When I got my shiny new AT&T Unix PC, EOLed as it was, the first two major apps I put on it were Emacs 18 and Icon. Emacs 18 was some Assembly required and needed some assembly language patching of the startup code. Didn't take me very long despite being largely clueless about m68k assembly and Unix System V/R2 calling conventions when I started. Icon (the functional programming language designed by Dr. Griswold, RIP) which I purchased as source code on 5 1/4 FAT floppy disks, compiled and installed without a hitch.
I mention this only to illustrate that the good folks who manage Linux distros have typical background experience.
If a generally available in source software package isn't available on your distro, a note to the distro maintainers would more than likely have it available in short order. The exception being when it's junk code and can't be compiled without non-trivial fixes, in which case it's hopeless without serious technical skill anyway.
There was one screen shot with a bunch of sticks on the screen (nothing like I would consider a stick figure ala xkcd) and nothing remotely resembling an avatar. Was that what happened?
I haven't ever done Second Life or OpenSims, so I'm just trying to understand the issue. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but is one of the key goals of the game to change/improve/customize your avatar's appearance? If that is the case, I retract my previous statement regarding "nerd rage".
If I logged into World of Warcraft on April 1st and found myself wearing greys instead of my (hard earned) purples I suppose I would be angry too.
It seems like a strange joke. Part of the fun of April fools is to make a joke that has a _slight_ ring of truth, but that is easily detected. Then everyone laughs and gets on with their lives. If they fooled around with a basic game goal in a non-obvious manner, I can very much understand people's anger.
Something like 90% of Windows blue screens post-Windows 98 are because of third-party hardware drivers. XP onwards stopped applications from being able to crash Windows, but there's not a damn thing it can do about shitty drivers.
Maybe so, but there certainly is something they can do - the drivers for Microsoft Windows should be written by Microsoft employees not the hardware vendors.
The Linux way is: The chip manufacturer's (hopefully) provides specs. Kernel supports the chip, supporting at once both the Logitech and the Creative webcams using the same hardware, possibly covering 10 different webcams with the same driver. This means that the users of all of those get unified, and if Logitech contributes a bug fix, Creative users get it too. The kernel provides the same interface for all webcams, so that so long it works, the software doesn't care what you have.
That's a decent summary. The main point is that the hardware vendor supplies the specs, we write the drivers. Which also implies that we maintain and support the drivers.
There's as much reason that hardware vendors should be supplying device drivers they have written as companies like Dell supplying computers with O/Ses they have written - none at all. That was settled almost three decades ago.
Moreover, most major hardware vendors aren't willing and don't want to distribute drivers as open source.
Linux kernel driver developers have never requested that. They've only requested hardware specs so that reasonable drivers can be written. Is it so hard to release specs on the hardware you produce?
Btw, all this reflects extremely negatively on the Linux kernel and strongly discourages hardware vendors from trying to support it.
No. All of this reflects badly on hardware vendors who hide *their* interface. It's as broken as in the 70's and 80's when computer makers brought out proprietary (and unique) operating systems for their new computers. We broke them.
I suppose the "year of the Linux desktop" will be when we finally get hardware vendors to realize that it is in their best interest to open up their specs. They'll even save money by cost shifting - make everyone, including Microsoft write drivers for their hardware.
There is a huge rat here and it's not the "unstable Linux kernel driver ABI".
Did you read the link you posted? The prank was in the SVN branch only, only the developers should be using it. Certainly no one should show it to clients/investors.
Yeah. However, there are several problems with that.
I saw a lot of nerd rage, but nothing that described what the prank actually did. What did it do? Give everyone foot long penises coming out of their foreheads? (If that's what it was, I can understand the anger).
You might want to look up how he treated Alan Cox in relation to the tty code in the kernel, as well.
I followed that. Linus wasn't wrong about anything and Alan was acting a tad obtuse. 2.6.32 has been delayed another week to pick another louse out of the pty code.
There was more going on than was posted on lkml. Alan has always called Linus "pinhead" and gotten away with it.
Although he has an abrasive personality with developers at times, Linus is pretty good with testers. He was very patient with me in the 1.3 cycle (including sending me patches to test) as I was debugging what would ultimately prove to be a bad cache chip.
If that makes me a Linus fan boy, whatever. I'm amazed at what he's managed to accomplish. And for all of his "snapping and snarling" I've faced far worse from managers at work with no proven technical skills whatsoever.
If Cons new scheduler is as good as he tries to paint it, build kernel and use it in thousands.
Ingo did some benchmarking. The following landed in my lkml mailbox about an hour ago:
hi Con,
I've read your BFS announcement/FAQ with great interest:...
As can be seen in the graph BFS performed very poorly in this test: at 8 pairs of tasks it had a runtime of 45.42 seconds - while sched-devel finished them in 3.8 seconds.
I saw really bad interactivity in the BFS test here - the system was starved for as long as the test ran. I stopped the tests at 8 loops - the system was unusable and i was getting IO timeouts due to the scheduling lag:
$ time ssh aldebaran/bin/true
real 2m17.968s
user 0m0.009s
sys 0m0.003s
A single command took more than 2 minutes....
(Lots of text elided) Apparently he did a lot of benchmarking and BFS didn't fare very well. Ah well.
I hope this time Con takes him on. Competition Is Good and concentration on desktop interactivity is certainly high on my wishlist of desired optimizations.
I read some on the lkml when this first happened, although not extensively. From my reading it seems to me that there was enough blame to go around. Linus, as is his norm, wasn't exactly Mr. Nice Guy in this situation either.
I was closely following lkml around this time. There was plenty going on behind the scenes that never got posted. The point at which Con's scheduler got removed from Andrew Morton's -mm tree was an unexplained IDE stall, that was initially blamed on Con's scheduler but was later triaged to a driver or block layer bug.
On report of the IDE regression, Andrew posted cryptically about it being the end of the line for Con's scheduler and announced it was being stripped from his tree.
I have utmost respect for Andrew Morton and his judgment, but usually he is a lot more outspoken in his rejection of code. The fact that on this one occasion he said basically nothing, and then never retracted an erroneous call speaks volumes to me. Something was going on behind the scenes that was never made public on lkml.
After all, he continued to carry Reiser4 even after Hans got sentenced to prison for murdering his wife. Why the rush to get rid of Con's scheduler?
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The trick is to get to the data without anyone noticing, while you're in a foreign (possibly hostile) nation. I'd think someone would notice if a cell phone was constantly 'phoning home'.
My (Japanese) CDMA phone didn't pick up any signal in China, so yeah, I guess it was always trying to connect to a cell tower.
Also 3" versus 3.2" versus 3.5" floppies.
Bzzzt. Wrong. In the 1970s the war was between 8" and 5 1/4" floppies. The smaller formats didn't come out until the 80s. But thanks for playing.
Now, get off my lawn!
The DC-10, by being an incredibly robust and versatile airframe
The truth hurts sometimes. The DC-10 was a heck of a lot safer (and more pleasant to fly in) than the Airbus.
That scares me.
Hmm. I have a different opinion.
a technical institute that does provide a BA in web design.
That scares me.
Congratulations getting a pure troll moderated up to +5 insightful. The only one of the things you mention that existed in the 1970's were LPs.
Now where is all of the magic dust that all the other moderators are smoking? I want my fair share.
lets have 1000000 people call up the cops and claim someone is making a nuke in the back yard.
I'm building a nuke in my back yard, you insensitive clod!
sadly the AK-47 is not very accurrate
"If you absolutely, positively have to kill every mother fucker in the room ... AK-47. Accept no substitutes." - Samuel Jackson in "Jackie Brown"
"Jackie Brown" has some great moments and the machine gun ad on TV scene is only one of them.
If toy guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have toy guns. Wouldn't that be a good thing?
That said, most people in Second Life like looking good, where what is "good" depends on the person. If you wanted to look like a night elf, you could. Looking like a humanoid cat, executive in a suit, or a dragon are also possible. Most people would be upset if one day they logged in and found themselves to look bizarrely wrong.
That's exactly what I meant. Thanks for the explanation and now I understand. It was a dumb and rotten "joke".
What I'm talking about is something like DMG files for Macs
Um, you can do one-click installation of binary RPMs if that's what you really want to do.
I prefer RPM as being more convenient compared to the Apple installer, but maybe that's just me.
For heaven's sake, it's 2009, why the hell do I have to friggin compile every damn piece of software that isn't in a repository? Windows figured this out decades ago, if you're compiling it into a binary, why do you need to compile it in the first place?
Granted, that last statement shows a little ignorance of the way Linux works, but seriously, why hasn't the Linux community come up with a simple install script/storage container that packs all the dirty stuff into one neat little package for easy distribution?
There's one born every minute and I'm not referring to you, I'm referring to the person who modded this drivel up.
Writing as someone who used to work for a Linux distributor (Turbolinux), we spent all kinds of time adding new programs to the downloadable, non-core repository. The likelihood that if you encounter a program that isn't available in a precompiled RPM (and whatever it is in the Debian world) means that it more than likely needs a bit of TLC to make work.
That's not Linux' fault.
If you have a binary RPM that doesn't work it isn't any different than a source package that doesn't compile and as important, it isn't any different than the "DLL hell" that many Microsoft Windows users experience.
When I got my shiny new AT&T Unix PC, EOLed as it was, the first two major apps I put on it were Emacs 18 and Icon. Emacs 18 was some Assembly required and needed some assembly language patching of the startup code. Didn't take me very long despite being largely clueless about m68k assembly and Unix System V/R2 calling conventions when I started. Icon (the functional programming language designed by Dr. Griswold, RIP) which I purchased as source code on 5 1/4 FAT floppy disks, compiled and installed without a hitch.
I mention this only to illustrate that the good folks who manage Linux distros have typical background experience.
If a generally available in source software package isn't available on your distro, a note to the distro maintainers would more than likely have it available in short order. The exception being when it's junk code and can't be compiled without non-trivial fixes, in which case it's hopeless without serious technical skill anyway.
Begone Troll.
There was one screen shot with a bunch of sticks on the screen (nothing like I would consider a stick figure ala xkcd) and nothing remotely resembling an avatar. Was that what happened?
I haven't ever done Second Life or OpenSims, so I'm just trying to understand the issue. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but is one of the key goals of the game to change/improve/customize your avatar's appearance? If that is the case, I retract my previous statement regarding "nerd rage".
If I logged into World of Warcraft on April 1st and found myself wearing greys instead of my (hard earned) purples I suppose I would be angry too.
It seems like a strange joke. Part of the fun of April fools is to make a joke that has a _slight_ ring of truth, but that is easily detected. Then everyone laughs and gets on with their lives. If they fooled around with a basic game goal in a non-obvious manner, I can very much understand people's anger.
Something like 90% of Windows blue screens post-Windows 98 are because of third-party hardware drivers. XP onwards stopped applications from being able to crash Windows, but there's not a damn thing it can do about shitty drivers.
Maybe so, but there certainly is something they can do - the drivers for Microsoft Windows should be written by Microsoft employees not the hardware vendors.
Webcam drivers and the like DO NOT BELONG IN THE KERNEL.
Sigh. Let's fight the eternal micro -vs- monolithic kernel debate again.
Hardware specs need to be in the hands of developers and then it doesn't matter where the driver code resides.
The Linux way is: The chip manufacturer's (hopefully) provides specs. Kernel supports the chip, supporting at once both the Logitech and the Creative webcams using the same hardware, possibly covering 10 different webcams with the same driver. This means that the users of all of those get unified, and if Logitech contributes a bug fix, Creative users get it too. The kernel provides the same interface for all webcams, so that so long it works, the software doesn't care what you have.
That's a decent summary. The main point is that the hardware vendor supplies the specs, we write the drivers. Which also implies that we maintain and support the drivers.
There's as much reason that hardware vendors should be supplying device drivers they have written as companies like Dell supplying computers with O/Ses they have written - none at all. That was settled almost three decades ago.
Moreover, most major hardware vendors aren't willing and don't want to distribute drivers as open source.
Linux kernel driver developers have never requested that. They've only requested hardware specs so that reasonable drivers can be written. Is it so hard to release specs on the hardware you produce?
Btw, all this reflects extremely negatively on the Linux kernel and strongly discourages hardware vendors from trying to support it.
No. All of this reflects badly on hardware vendors who hide *their* interface. It's as broken as in the 70's and 80's when computer makers brought out proprietary (and unique) operating systems for their new computers. We broke them.
I suppose the "year of the Linux desktop" will be when we finally get hardware vendors to realize that it is in their best interest to open up their specs. They'll even save money by cost shifting - make everyone, including Microsoft write drivers for their hardware.
There is a huge rat here and it's not the "unstable Linux kernel driver ABI".
Did you read the link you posted? The prank was in the SVN branch only, only the developers should be using it. Certainly no one should show it to clients/investors.
Yeah. However, there are several problems with that.
I saw a lot of nerd rage, but nothing that described what the prank actually did. What did it do? Give everyone foot long penises coming out of their foreheads? (If that's what it was, I can understand the anger).
ignorince ... video's ... trebucket ... how-too ... peaked my interest ...
Don't let this this list limit you. Use your imagination and create.
I guess spelling and grammar isn't in the curriculum.
If we could only extend this idea to fight all our wars on World of Warcraft PvP servers, that would solve a lot of problems.
I wonder how long it is before Ingo "Kudos Con" Molnar rips of the new design?
Ingo posted benchmarks on lkml about 2 1/2 hours ago. In his tests, BFS didn't fare too well.
Apparently not, though it seems more like an Adobe issue than a kernel scheduler issue.
You might want to look up how he treated Alan Cox in relation to the tty code in the kernel, as well.
I followed that. Linus wasn't wrong about anything and Alan was acting a tad obtuse. 2.6.32 has been delayed another week to pick another louse out of the pty code.
There was more going on than was posted on lkml. Alan has always called Linus "pinhead" and gotten away with it.
Although he has an abrasive personality with developers at times, Linus is pretty good with testers. He was very patient with me in the 1.3 cycle (including sending me patches to test) as I was debugging what would ultimately prove to be a bad cache chip.
If that makes me a Linus fan boy, whatever. I'm amazed at what he's managed to accomplish. And for all of his "snapping and snarling" I've faced far worse from managers at work with no proven technical skills whatsoever.
If Cons new scheduler is as good as he tries to paint it, build kernel and use it in thousands.
Ingo did some benchmarking. The following landed in my lkml mailbox about an hour ago:
hi Con,
I've read your BFS announcement/FAQ with great interest: ...
As can be seen in the graph BFS performed very poorly in this test:
at 8 pairs of tasks it had a runtime of 45.42 seconds - while
sched-devel finished them in 3.8 seconds.
I saw really bad interactivity in the BFS test here - the system
was starved for as long as the test ran. I stopped the tests at 8
loops - the system was unusable and i was getting IO timeouts due
to the scheduling lag:
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Unhandled error code
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_TIMEOUT
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 81949243
Aborting journal on device sda2.
ext3_abort called.
EXT3-fs error (device sda2): ext3_journal_start_sb: Detected aborted journal
Remounting filesystem read-only
I measured interactivity during this test:
$ time ssh aldebaran /bin/true
real 2m17.968s
user 0m0.009s
sys 0m0.003s
A single command took more than 2 minutes. ...
(Lots of text elided) Apparently he did a lot of benchmarking and BFS didn't fare very well. Ah well.
I hope this time Con takes him on. Competition Is Good and concentration on desktop interactivity is certainly high on my wishlist of desired optimizations.
I read some on the lkml when this first happened, although not extensively. From my reading it seems to me that there was enough blame to go around. Linus, as is his norm, wasn't exactly Mr. Nice Guy in this situation either.
I was closely following lkml around this time. There was plenty going on behind the scenes that never got posted. The point at which Con's scheduler got removed from Andrew Morton's -mm tree was an unexplained IDE stall, that was initially blamed on Con's scheduler but was later triaged to a driver or block layer bug.
On report of the IDE regression, Andrew posted cryptically about it being the end of the line for Con's scheduler and announced it was being stripped from his tree.
I have utmost respect for Andrew Morton and his judgment, but usually he is a lot more outspoken in his rejection of code. The fact that on this one occasion he said basically nothing, and then never retracted an erroneous call speaks volumes to me. Something was going on behind the scenes that was never made public on lkml.
After all, he continued to carry Reiser4 even after Hans got sentenced to prison for murdering his wife. Why the rush to get rid of Con's scheduler?
In fact, the whole rant sounds like a teenager with a chip on his shoulder.
Um, one could say the same thing about Linus when he was redoing Minix. Linus was right and all the microkernel whiners are wrong.
I think this is a most interesting development.