By the way, would you like to buy our newest version? It features
Active Menus (tm) and SQL X (tm). And you can animate the cursor if you want to... lots of customers have been asking for that, yes.
> So essentially they're argument is that this was operator error. How exactly would the operator have done things differently so as to get their information out of the database correctly all 1000 out of 1000 times?
> Does this at all fix the problems when using the K7/Athlon optimziations on VIA boards like the IWILL?
No.
Here is the situation as best I understand it right now:
The specific problem is with the VIA *686B southbridge. [* = wildcard; I'm not sure what's out there.]
That southbridge is part of the KT133A chipset, but on some boards is used with a mixed chipset (i.e., a northbridge from another company).
Alan Cox firmly believes that the problem is a bug in the chipset rather than a bug in the kernel.
Alan reported within the last week that he now has contacts inside VIA, so he is now showing optimism that they will tell him what needs to be done to program around the bug.
Many people report that with various 2.4.* kernels they get a bootable system if they compile for i686 optimizations rather than with Athlon optimizations.
Some people get a bootable system that way, but still get random oopses after they have been running for a while.
caveat lector: IANAExpertOnThis; it's just what I've derived from playing with a 686B-based board, following the LKML, and exchanging e-messages with several other individuals who have played with the board as well.
Notice that Alan had a VIA-specific patch in 2.4.6-ac4, but that was for a different problem; he reports that he did not expect it to fix the Athlon-optimization problems, but will try to address those when he can find the time.
Meanwhile, I have to agree with another replier who says buying a board with the VIA *686B southbridge is a bad risk right now. I hate to scare business away from VIA if they are in fact actually working with Alan on this, but I also hate to see people drop $US100++ on motherboards that they can't use.
BTW, some of these boards are quite nice, so you might consider postponing a new purchase rather than shopping elsewhere, if that fits your needs.
> NYT News: Hackers use virus to attack whitehouse computers.
No, that will be
NYT News:
Chinese Hackers use virus to attack whitehouse computers.
At any rate, you should expect all the headlines to include Chinese, hackers, cyberwar, and White House, plus however many other words will fit in the column.
Any editor who doesn't catch all of that should be put out to pasture.
> I believe that they'll be CHARGING $250 a head, making a nice profit on the dinner for their legal funds. I can't imagine a dinner that actually COSTS $250 a head unless they're serving baked gold...
> Apparently, the Internet can deliver un-Islamic, immoral, or lewd material. Who can believe that a country that has such an open attitude towards women, minorities, religions, and the press would object to the Internet?"
And then there's the USA, where lots of politicians would also be happy to censor the internet if they could get away with it.
Just wanted to say that I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who always gets an "r" on the end of "serve", whether it's needed or not. I swear, my brain thinks the word is spelled s-e-r-v-e-r-backspace.
> There were a few AMD CPUs that *should* have been recalled.
IIRC the original runs of the K6, or maybe the K6-2, had a bad problem, and though there wasn't a recall, they would give you an exchange for it if you asked.
There may have been others, though I don't recall hearing about them. Intel, on the other hand...
> You'd better stick to the price argument.
Not at all, though the price would be argument enough by itself.
Actually, it is iff the language spec defines it to be.
I'll bet the first language without line numbers raised a lot of eyebrows too.
Truth is, I came up with the "semantic whitespace" idea independently of Python, and quite a few years ago: When observing the flame wars about whether the { should go on the same line or on a new line, it occured to me that any marker that raised that kind of question probably wasn't needed at all. And the obvious solution was to simply rely on the indentation, since most people using {} languages also use indentation to show the intended semantics at a glance (as well they should).
I'm still thinking about writing preprocessors for my favorite languages, so I can show my semantic scoping by indentation and let the preprocessor translate it into bracketized syntax.
> As for Ada, I suppose you could, but I don't know of any such applications
Granted, there aren't many in the OSS world right now. One gnotable exception is the GNU Visual Debugger, which may well become a "standard" application once word about it gets out a bit more.
> I respect your opinion, but it doesn't really matter whether or not you like C++ if its is one of only two options for Linux desktop programming.
FYI, if you ease on over to gtk.org and look at their bindings page, you'll see that in addition to C there are 4 other languages with bindings described as "complete", plus a number of others that don't merit that flag yet.
> From what I've read, they had a disk controller failure, and the secondary (ie. backup) controller also had some kind of fault which lead them "further down the disaster recovery plan." Which means now they go to tape backups, probably.
Sounds like they're just making excuses. No matter how they spin it, there's no excuse for a disk controller to put them out of service for a week. Lose data since the last backup, sure, but not a week long shutdown.
Recall also that Hotmail suffered 10+ days outage for a subset of their users last summer, and some of those users permanently lost their data and had to just start new accounts.
I agree with Pinball Wizard: there's no excuse for this kind of thing. (Frankly, I think it's because Microsoft still doesn't 'get' anything beyond a single-user system.)
FWIW, they've been saying the same thing over at c.o.l.a. for a few days, and even one of the tenured trolls is agreeing that it's inexcusable.
And how are they going to sell.net with this kind of high-profile outage on everyone's minds? If you're the CIO of a big company and you move your company to.net, do you just send all your employees home for a week when something like this happens?
Slashdot Mirror
Russian General: Someone SQL us up the bomb!
Database: 404, Fissionable Material Not Found. All your bomb are belong to USA.
--
MS Rep to Russian General:Rule #1: Never miss a sale.
--
> So essentially they're argument is that this was operator error. How exactly would the operator have done things differently so as to get their information out of the database correctly all 1000 out of 1000 times?
Pose the query to a different brand of database?
--
> *cough* That's what I'm paying you for. Dammit. *cough*
I decided I could MAKE MONEY FASTer by stealing from you, too.
--
> Technically it doesn't drop the transaction per se. It just deposits it into my bank account.
Yeah, well it's still a bug, because I had intended the deposit to to into my bank account.
--
> I'm astonished that Russians trust software made by a US company to look after state secrets of this nature...
I'm astonished that the Russians didn't h@x0r it and fix all the bugs before using it...
--
> If it's not in the database, it doesn't exist, and will thus not need to be disposed of.
Wonder if MS uses something more robust to keep track of licenses...
--
> > Simple solution - the virus should scan Wired for its name every hour. When it finds a match, the fun begins.
> Good idea... but who assigns virus names?
This one would surely be called The Slashdot Virus, since all the probes would leave everyone thinking that Wired had been slashdotted.
--
> What is so bad about openssh that it is a wise decision to move to a commercial version with security leaks?
OSS deprives users of the opportunity to pay for their software.
--
No.
Here is the situation as best I understand it right now:
- The specific problem is with the VIA *686B southbridge. [* = wildcard; I'm not sure what's out there.]
- That southbridge is part of the KT133A chipset, but on some boards is used with a mixed chipset (i.e., a northbridge from another company).
- Alan Cox firmly believes that the problem is a bug in the chipset rather than a bug in the kernel.
- Alan reported within the last week that he now has contacts inside VIA, so he is now showing optimism that they will tell him what needs to be done to program around the bug.
- Many people report that with various 2.4.* kernels they get a bootable system if they compile for i686 optimizations rather than with Athlon optimizations.
- Some people get a bootable system that way, but still get random oopses after they have been running for a while.
caveat lector: IANAExpertOnThis; it's just what I've derived from playing with a 686B-based board, following the LKML, and exchanging e-messages with several other individuals who have played with the board as well.Notice that Alan had a VIA-specific patch in 2.4.6-ac4, but that was for a different problem; he reports that he did not expect it to fix the Athlon-optimization problems, but will try to address those when he can find the time.
Meanwhile, I have to agree with another replier who says buying a board with the VIA *686B southbridge is a bad risk right now. I hate to scare business away from VIA if they are in fact actually working with Alan on this, but I also hate to see people drop $US100++ on motherboards that they can't use.
BTW, some of these boards are quite nice, so you might consider postponing a new purchase rather than shopping elsewhere, if that fits your needs.
--
No, that will be
At any rate, you should expect all the headlines to include Chinese, hackers, cyberwar, and White House, plus however many other words will fit in the column.
Any editor who doesn't catch all of that should be put out to pasture.
--
> I believe that they'll be CHARGING $250 a head, making a nice profit on the dinner for their legal funds. I can't imagine a dinner that actually COSTS $250 a head unless they're serving baked gold...
Except maybe bite-sized chunks of the RIAA's @ss.
--
> Quite many seem to be coming Taiwanian or other Far-East countries such as Thailand.
Makes it kinda hard to distinguish it from the usual flood of spam, eh?
--
--
> Apparently, the Internet can deliver un-Islamic, immoral, or lewd material. Who can believe that a country that has such an open attitude towards women, minorities, religions, and the press would object to the Internet?"
And then there's the USA, where lots of politicians would also be happy to censor the internet if they could get away with it.
--
> The police are here to server us.
Just wanted to say that I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who always gets an "r" on the end of "serve", whether it's needed or not. I swear, my brain thinks the word is spelled s-e-r-v-e-r-backspace.
--
And then there are the illiterates. I saw an accident report with the ever-helpful:
--
> There were a few AMD CPUs that *should* have been recalled.
IIRC the original runs of the K6, or maybe the K6-2, had a bad problem, and though there wasn't a recall, they would give you an exchange for it if you asked.
There may have been others, though I don't recall hearing about them. Intel, on the other hand...
> You'd better stick to the price argument.
Not at all, though the price would be argument enough by itself.
--
> As much as the Athlon people tout their shit as superior, and it took them HOW long to do SMP ?
What's the ratio of AMD processor recalls : Intel processor recalls ?
--
> Whitespace is not syntax.
Actually, it is iff the language spec defines it to be.
I'll bet the first language without line numbers raised a lot of eyebrows too.
Truth is, I came up with the "semantic whitespace" idea independently of Python, and quite a few years ago: When observing the flame wars about whether the { should go on the same line or on a new line, it occured to me that any marker that raised that kind of question probably wasn't needed at all. And the obvious solution was to simply rely on the indentation, since most people using {} languages also use indentation to show the intended semantics at a glance (as well they should).
I'm still thinking about writing preprocessors for my favorite languages, so I can show my semantic scoping by indentation and let the preprocessor translate it into bracketized syntax.
--
> As for Ada, I suppose you could, but I don't know of any such applications
Granted, there aren't many in the OSS world right now. One gnotable exception is the GNU Visual Debugger, which may well become a "standard" application once word about it gets out a bit more.
FWIW, it supposedly runs under Windows too.
--
> I respect your opinion, but it doesn't really matter whether or not you like C++ if its is one of only two options for Linux desktop programming.
FYI, if you ease on over to gtk.org and look at their bindings page, you'll see that in addition to C there are 4 other languages with bindings described as "complete", plus a number of others that don't merit that flag yet.
--
> The editorial says "Microsoft software," but it almost certainly isn't.
What they meant was, it's Microsoft software in spirit, if not in the flesh.
--
We've got Bruce Willis on standby to go blow it up.
--
> From what I've read, they had a disk controller failure, and the secondary (ie. backup) controller also had some kind of fault which lead them "further down the disaster recovery plan." Which means now they go to tape backups, probably.
.net with this kind of high-profile outage on everyone's minds? If you're the CIO of a big company and you move your company to .net, do you just send all your employees home for a week when something like this happens?
Sounds like they're just making excuses. No matter how they spin it, there's no excuse for a disk controller to put them out of service for a week. Lose data since the last backup, sure, but not a week long shutdown.
Recall also that Hotmail suffered 10+ days outage for a subset of their users last summer, and some of those users permanently lost their data and had to just start new accounts.
I agree with Pinball Wizard: there's no excuse for this kind of thing. (Frankly, I think it's because Microsoft still doesn't 'get' anything beyond a single-user system.)
FWIW, they've been saying the same thing over at c.o.l.a. for a few days, and even one of the tenured trolls is agreeing that it's inexcusable.
And how are they going to sell
--