If nVidia provided specifications for their cards then they wouldn't need to write drivers. ATI and Matrox don't need to port their drivers to DirectFB because they provided these specs, so others can write them for them.
I'd suggest discussing this on a non-OSDN sponsored forum. Whilst I trust editorial integrity here, any positive appraisal of Sourceforge will (quite rightly) come under suspicion, with this being the major money-maker for those bank-rolling this site.
As the parent to your post pointed out, there is a bootable CD-Rom ISO you can use for Tomsrtbt.
Whilst Knoppix is certainly a nice toy, for a sysadmin with a downed server Tomsrtboot is far preferable - it boots a hell of a lot quicker apart from anything else.
For those out there looking to replace sendmail, I suggest Exim. It's extremely stable (we've been running it on our mail cluster for 326 days now with 0 seconds of downtime) and unlike sendmail it doesn't have a config file that looks like line noise.
I used to use SuSE on a number of machines some time ago (started with SuSE 6, last version I used was SuSE 6.2).
What really used to annoy me was the propensity it had for just editing config files I had altered, without any warnings. ISTR there was a change you could make in a rc file somewhere that would stop YAST from doing this, but then that meant newly installed packages didn't configure themselves correctly.
Have SuSE since fixed this? I now run Debian on my machines at home, whilst at work we use Redhat (management's choice, but not one I'm massively upset with). I haven't seen a good reason yet why I might want to switch, but perhaps some other Slashdotters can come up with some?
As a 'Brit' I too find this very odd. Consider this small chunk of text:
When creative people work on making something new, they often enter a mental state where things just flow. This is a highly desirable state, both for the programmer herself and for the organization that profits by her labors.
If written by someone from the UK (and probably AU or NZ) this would be written like this:
When creative people work on making something new, they often enter a mental state where things just flow. This is a highly desirable state, both for the programmer themself and for the organisation that profits by their labors.
No use of gender, and perfectly correct English too.
The vulnerability uses kmod, so it shouldn't work on a system without module support (which made me breath a sigh of release, out of the fifty or so servers I admin there is only one with a modular kernel).
Note that with or without module support, the Linux kernel is still technically monolithic, as I believe someone else has already pointed out.
Yeah, those crazy Aussies with their 'barbies' (not anti-feminist dolls) and their 'tinnies' (not canned food).
How dare they violate the colourful English language in such a way, an honourable language which for centuries has been at the centre of trade and commerce? Their pathetic Australian dialogue, in my judgement at least, can never claim to match up to that of those in dear old blighty! If only there was a licence for the use of English, it would surely be revoked!
2 sysadmins, userbase of ~ 50 000 (we're an ISP), ~ 30 staff, approx 50 servers. When I started here six months ago there were four sysadmins and two juniors. I thought it was just my company's directorial incompetence (and I'm not dissuaded from the view that they're incompetent), in a way it's comforting to see that others are in the same boat, not that I would wish redundancy on anyone of course.
Why should I have to pay for software to enable me to use the card I already paid for?
They need to make money if they give away the source they give there compition an edge because they can see what they are doing.
That's funny, the last two graphics cards I've had all had drivers will full sources (my current card is an ATI Radeon, previous was a Matrox G400). Matrox not only give away their drivers, they also give away their Powerdesk software under the GPL too..
That very much depends on your definition of 'supported Linux'. Their drivers are non-free, so whilst they do work under Linux, saying they 'support Linux' is a questionable statement, and saying they support open source is clearly false. Personally I've never bought an nVidia graphics card, and whilst they produce non-free drivers I never will.
For the license. If this product were to be released under a Free-software license I'd definately consider it on our network. As it is I (and probably many others) will use something else like syslong-ng or metalog, despite the fact that SDSC-syslog seems to be far more technically competent.
It's the one problem with the open-source community - there's no-one to pay me to pay my staff for the lost man-hours caused by this.
I couldn't agree more, if those cheap-arsed hippies who write Linux would only pay up when there's a problem with their software like reputable commercial companies like Micros.. err, Oracl.. err actually, forget it.
People aren't going to want a closed-source product because they've realised that Free software is inherently better. The cost really doesn't enter into it - as you rightly point out, cost-effectivness is a much bigger issue.
So my question to the Slashdot community is when is Linux going to be prevalent enough on the desktop that people will pay for applications and not always assume they are free?
Hopefully never - when people use GNU/Linux they will realise that Free software is better for a whole host of reasons. Once they've had their eyes opened to this, then using closed-source proprietary software becomes a much less appealing proposition.
Suddenly, global warming (the artificially-induced kind) doesn't seem like that big of a long-term threat.
Except that the magnetic pole shift is likely to happen sometime in the next 1000 years or so. Global warming has the potential to wipe out humans prior to this time.
Another option is using a filesystem that handles large numbers of files in a directory.
I agree, I've speculated on the potential performance increase something like ReiserFS might bring. At present we use a NetApp filer for all our storage, with is extremely robust (it's never ever failed in the three or so years we've had it), great for features like snapshots, but not blazingly fast. Realistically, the performance at ersent is 'good enough', and I'd rather mediocre performance and excellent uptimes than mediocre uptimes and excellent performance.
Actually, maildir *can* be just as bad, if not worse.
I work for an ISP where we have ~ 50 000 email users. Maildir's great when you have a few messages, and if one of these messages happens to be big then it doesn't matter. However, if a user has tens of thousands of emails of whatever size in their mailbox (happens far, far more often than you might think) then just getting a list of files in the directory can take an age. In the scenario where a user has masses of small messages (sub 2k) then mbox would probably be faster. Whilst I'd certainly recommend using Maildir over mbox, it's certainly not going to solve all the problems.
Slashdot Mirror
You're completely missing the point.
If nVidia provided specifications for their cards then they wouldn't need to write drivers. ATI and Matrox don't need to port their drivers to DirectFB because they provided these specs, so others can write them for them.
I'd suggest discussing this on a non-OSDN sponsored forum. Whilst I trust editorial integrity here, any positive appraisal of Sourceforge will (quite rightly) come under suspicion, with this being the major money-maker for those bank-rolling this site.
As the parent to your post pointed out, there is a bootable CD-Rom ISO you can use for Tomsrtbt.
Whilst Knoppix is certainly a nice toy, for a sysadmin with a downed server Tomsrtboot is far preferable - it boots a hell of a lot quicker apart from anything else.
For those out there looking to replace sendmail, I suggest Exim.
It's extremely stable (we've been running it on our mail cluster for 326 days now with 0 seconds of downtime) and unlike sendmail it doesn't have a config file that looks like line noise.
I used to use SuSE on a number of machines some time ago (started with SuSE 6, last version I used was SuSE 6.2).
What really used to annoy me was the propensity it had for just editing config files I had altered, without any warnings. ISTR there was a change you could make in a rc file somewhere that would stop YAST from doing this, but then that meant newly installed packages didn't configure themselves correctly.
Have SuSE since fixed this? I now run Debian on my machines at home, whilst at work we use Redhat (management's choice, but not one I'm massively upset with). I haven't seen a good reason yet why I might want to switch, but perhaps some other Slashdotters can come up with some?
As a 'Brit' I too find this very odd. Consider this small chunk of text:
If written by someone from the UK (and probably AU or NZ) this would be written like this:
No use of gender, and perfectly correct English too.
The vulnerability uses kmod, so it shouldn't work on a system without module support (which made me breath a sigh of release, out of the fifty or so servers I admin there is only one with a modular kernel).
Note that with or without module support, the Linux kernel is still technically monolithic, as I believe someone else has already pointed out.I have a father who is blind. His 'eyes' are made of glass and removeable.
How exactly is this system supposed to detect him?
Yeah, those crazy Aussies with their 'barbies' (not anti-feminist dolls) and their 'tinnies' (not canned food).
How dare they violate the colourful English language in such a way, an honourable language which for centuries has been at the centre of trade and commerce? Their pathetic Australian dialogue, in my judgement at least, can never claim to match up to that of those in dear old blighty! If only there was a licence for the use of English, it would surely be revoked!Why not install Apache and PHP instead?
Nice try, but I'm going to continue to call you Daniel Bernstein.
best.. post.. EVER! :)
2 sysadmins, userbase of ~ 50 000 (we're an ISP), ~ 30 staff, approx 50 servers.
When I started here six months ago there were four sysadmins and two juniors. I thought it was just my company's directorial incompetence (and I'm not dissuaded from the view that they're incompetent), in a way it's comforting to see that others are in the same boat, not that I would wish redundancy on anyone of course.
Why should I have to pay for software to enable me to use the card I already paid for?
That's funny, the last two graphics cards I've had all had drivers will full sources (my current card is an ATI Radeon, previous was a Matrox G400). Matrox not only give away their drivers, they also give away their Powerdesk software under the GPL too..
That very much depends on your definition of 'supported Linux'. Their drivers are non-free, so whilst they do work under Linux, saying they 'support Linux' is a questionable statement, and saying they support open source is clearly false.
Personally I've never bought an nVidia graphics card, and whilst they produce non-free drivers I never will.
For the license.
If this product were to be released under a Free-software license I'd definately consider it on our network. As it is I (and probably many others) will use something else like syslong-ng or metalog, despite the fact that SDSC-syslog seems to be far more technically competent.
http://www.samspade.org/d/firewalls.html I agree with pretty much everything the article says..
I just can't wait for 'Segway XXX' on the PS2, Gamecube and X-Box!
I couldn't agree more, if those cheap-arsed hippies who write Linux would only pay up when there's a problem with their software like reputable commercial companies like Micros.. err, Oracl.. err actually, forget it.
People aren't going to want a closed-source product because they've realised that Free software is inherently better. The cost really doesn't enter into it - as you rightly point out, cost-effectivness is a much bigger issue.
Hopefully never - when people use GNU/Linux they will realise that Free software is better for a whole host of reasons. Once they've had their eyes opened to this, then using closed-source proprietary software becomes a much less appealing proposition.
Except that the magnetic pole shift is likely to happen sometime in the next 1000 years or so. Global warming has the potential to wipe out humans prior to this time.
I agree, I've speculated on the potential performance increase something like ReiserFS might bring. At present we use a NetApp filer for all our storage, with is extremely robust (it's never ever failed in the three or so years we've had it), great for features like snapshots, but not blazingly fast. Realistically, the performance at ersent is 'good enough', and I'd rather mediocre performance and excellent uptimes than mediocre uptimes and excellent performance.
I work for an ISP where we have ~ 50 000 email users. Maildir's great when you have a few messages, and if one of these messages happens to be big then it doesn't matter. However, if a user has tens of thousands of emails of whatever size in their mailbox (happens far, far more often than you might think) then just getting a list of files in the directory can take an age. In the scenario where a user has masses of small messages (sub 2k) then mbox would probably be faster.
Whilst I'd certainly recommend using Maildir over mbox, it's certainly not going to solve all the problems.