I know Linux will definitely be opposed to such an action by Red Hat.
Wrong. Linus is fine with it. Andy Grove announced on the kernel mailing list that this would be happening back in November, and Linus was fine with it then. The article mentions this too, maybe you'd like to read it next time?:3
Remember, Linus is the pragmatist of the community, the one that doesn't believe in software to further some philosophy.
Well, first of all, I use Scroll Lock pretty often, thanks:3 Although much of the time I use ^S/^Q, since I'm on a KVM and Scroll Lock does something special. You know, to momentarily pause text that's scrolling on a terminal. (Yes. I still use terminals. A lot.) And backquote. (I see you don't do shell programming, or use TeX. ^^; )
Besides, standardizing what to add, and how, would be a huge pain, and probably nobody would really be pleased... and no matter what you take away, somebody's going to be very unhappy about it.
The problem with legacy apps isn't assuming layouts, so much. (Any program that reads scancodes direct is broken, and assuming layouts isn't the best idea either, at least if you can't rebind keys.) It's more like, there just isn't much you can safely remove.
Actually, yes. I've been using Dvorak for about a year after having a couple random RSI flareups, and did a bit of kernel hacking for school last semester. Not to mention other classes and my own programming projects. I got used to it. My braces/brackets keys are the two to the right of zero. I like the underscore placement (on the key marked: ' " on qwerty keyboards) since I use lots of underscores in variable names.
(imagine the arguments if AIM is the only one supported by a school, but a large percentage of kids use MSN...)
That's why we have wonderful clients like Gaim that understand all major (and some minor) IM systems in one client. The Windows port is in good shape, aside from some minor GTK weirdness. Although I realize it's not the major issue for your setup, "supporting one environment" and letting everyone eat their cake aren't mutually exclusive these days...
HP would be much more likely to support their own processor (the Alpha) than to jump in with AMD in the event that the Itanic sinks.
You think so? Kind of like they've stuck with PA-RISC? IA-64 is just as much HP's baby as Intel's; they've done a lot of work on the architecture. Since Alpha's already been EOLed, and from the sound of it everyone's trying to push everyone but the people who already use Alphas (and even them eventually) to IA-64, not to mention all the people that made the AXP architecture so great in the first place don't even work for HP anymore, it would be a massive about-face for HP to jump back with the Alpha and do much more than trivially, incrementally improve it. As much as I'd love to see that happen... well, I'm not holding my breath.:3
Is it me, or was anyone else really confused by the response by the Microsoft guy? They're there to "talk about Unix services"? Well, it makes more sense in terms
of their Services for Unix. Incidentally,
reading the page for SFU, it's good to see
real Unixy stuff in Windows. (No, I don't
think it will "take away" market from existing
Unix products. (Windows + Korn shell) != FreeBSD. I admit to being a little leary about
the prospect, but I don't see it happening.)
Anyone have any experience with this Services For Unix thing? I don't have access to Windows machines to run the trials on.
I'm still confused as to why they're at LWCE, when the webpage bills it as "the #1 place for companies that sell, market or promote Linux based products, services, applications and solutions," and they claim to have no plans whatsoever to sell, market, or promote Linux-based anything. I guess that leaves reasons for coming sowhere around building mindshare in the Linux world:3 Although the fact that they seem to be
using GPLed utilities in their SFU is very
interesting. (And perhaps their foot in the door.)
Disclaimer: this is not a Microsoft flame. I am not an anti-Microsoft junkie. Do please refrain from flaming if you want to reply.
My bad; you're right. It's been so long since I'd touched Wine I doubted. And I only ever dealt with the program loader, so it was easy to totally forget about the library... ^^;
Despite what he says, "
Even today, you can still get to a C: prompt under Windows XP, which means a disk operating system is hiding there no matter what Microsoft wants us to believe,"
He said that? Errrm. I should hope a "disk operating system" is hiding under Windows somewhere. I rather like reading things off disks...
It would be interesting to see an Explorer WM. Since they more or less have the interface separated from the kernel anyway, they'd just have to port Explorer. Or port Win32 to POSIX, which would be... interesting. But then you could run "Windows programs" on any Unix Win32 is ported to with just a recompile (barring portability issues due to "all the world's an x86" syndrome).
Of course, Windows being one of their top two revenue streams, Microsoft would never do this:) Although I wonder why nobody else made a library that implements the Win32 API as a library. *remembers his Win32 days* Err, nevermind.
I don't have a listing of any of my (or anyone else's) BIOS sitting around anywhere, but I learned the xor trick back when I was learning graphics programming via x86 assembly. It got mentioned a few times if you read the right docs. (It was stuff geared towards demo writers, but I never got that good, nor that aware of the demo scene... such a dork I was. ^^; ) I also want to say the professor of my machine architectures class in uni mentioned it. Don't remember. But yes, it seems pretty widely known among people who "wanted to program games" between, oh, the mid eighties and nineties.
Remember, Intel is run by businessmen, for businessmen. Technology to them is only a means to generate cash.
Sigh. I suspect that's exactly it. And that's what pisses me off.
Because, as a paying customer, technology to me is a whole hell of a lot more than a way to generate cash. It's a way to do interesting things, and also an end of its own, in a way - exploring the technology is really fun. Anyone remember sitting down with 16/32-bit assemblers and triple-faulting your processor until you got "protected mode" down?
I haven't had that much fun directly with a CPU in years. When I get time to play with my EV56 machine, I'll have some of it again; it'll be my first architecture after IA-32 (I haven't done that much interesting low-level on IA-64 besides performance counters).
And... waxing philosophical here, so feel free to ignore the rest of this comment. But someone in a different thread recently (don't remember which... ) commented on the mishandling of the Alpha IP by Compaq, then HP, then its more or less non-use by Intel. And basically said "these people are keeping the market down with their competition, and limiting our future technological growth as a society." I'm not sure how accurate or fair that is (I suspect I'm just getting bitchy now)... but it's really fscking creepy to think about.
Although really, this is partially because DEC couldn't market the Alpha to save its life. In fact, it didn't.
I'm not sure why, but it makes me happy to see that:)
I just got my first Alpha about a month ago, used on Ebay. A 533 MHz EV56 that'll take up to a gig of RAM. It now runs Debian 3. SRM, I love it. The EFI+ELILO on Itanium is finally at the same stage. I'm determined not to make this my last EV* machine. It must've been a great ride, working for DEC with Alpha...
I'm still convinced that someone should start a movement to bring back the Alpha, and make it huge and unignorable. Sigh.;_;
I recall reading something about the Alpha architecture that made it difficult to extend it past 1 GHz at the time. I'll see if i can dig it up again and post it.
Yeah. Servers mostly run Unix. "Tru 64" is still out there somewhere. The Linux 2.5 kernel just got a bunch of patches fixing up stuff on Titan/Marnel architectures. (I wanna know who was the lucky bastard who got to work on that:3 ) Applications recompile on compatible platforms. What's your point?
Not to sound too militant, but come on. It's not like the past decade of development for these machines has just suddenly disappeared. Unlike the machines themselves on the market, sadly.
And the vaunted EV8 tech we've been guessing would be infused into later IA-64 products gets pushed farther away into the distance...
It's good to see at least they're on the road to 65-nm fabrication. But it'd be nice if they breathed some more life into their current architectures. IA-64 docs are interesting reads, but the hardware just isn't terribly impressive in practice yet. (At least, kernel compiles felt like they took forever on my professor's dual IA-64 research boxes compared to... my P3 866 at home.) And. New Pentiums? Watch, as I leap for joy. Or don't, in fact, leap.
I'd like to see Intel do something New[tm] and Exciting[tm] on the home market. IA-64 is that, I'm guessing they just need to tweak existing setups or something. I love the feeling of having a processor architecture before me to dig into. (That's why I picked up an old EV56 machine for... hehe... testing.) But are we non-server folk ever going to see something that's drastically different from the CPU in the computer we got a decade ago?
Actually, GnuWIN includes Cygwin, as well as several packages that aren't in Cygwin. For example, LiteStep, which only makes sense on Windows (since it's an alternative Windows shell - that is, litestep.exe runs instead of explorer.exe). Not all of the stuff in GnuWIN is actually GNU. It's just a convenient collection of free/gratis (are all these free/libre?) apps for Windows.
Anyone else think that an SDK API that only provides for hardware plugins is a bit silly? I can understand it, I guess just wouldn't do it to my software.
See? This is why people need to read liscenses for software or libraries they use. From the webpage, it looks like he had no clue there was anything like that in the liscense... sigh
Nah, it reinitializes the filesystem info (the FAT for, well, FAT, block groups for most Unix-style fses). Usually it doesn't touch the MBR, that would be repartitioning or something like "fdisk/mbr". Which would make getting data back less trivial but still pretty easy.
for N in 1 2 3 4 5 ; do dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 ; done
That's assuming the partition in question is/dev/hda1. Yours probably isn't, but you can find out what it is by using the 'mount' command. Also, this will do it five times, which is theoretically more secure.
Variations on this include using 'if=/dev/urandom' instead, which overwrites the partition with random data instead of zeroes. Also, if your shell doesn't like the above (not sure if it works under tcsh, but bash will accept it), just use 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1'.
Since the only thing that's going to retain data is the hard drive... what a waste. Come on, companies should sell the rest of the computer! Where do you think poor college students are going to get their "used to be high end hardware half a decade a go" supplies, huh?;_;
I mean, I agree, don't let the drive itself slip out, but...
Well, at least you Europeans don't need to worry about your artistic heritage vanishing into the past because something ceased to exist (think nitrate film) because it became unprofitable before its copyright expired.
Actually, in the Supreme Court decision, it says that one of the stated concerns about extending copyright via the CTEA was that Europe's term was longer than ours, so if we passed the CTEA we'd all be on the same footing, so to speak. So the EU is already there; we've just caught up and had that catching up not declared unconstitutional, is all. Maybe you'd better ask the Japanese instead...:3
A lot of standards cost nothing to implement or look at. Not all do. A lot of telecommunications standards (err... in the sense of telephony and such, not networking) cost money to look at, but then you can implement them without liscensing (assuming you're patent-free). (For example, you'd have to pay the ITU money to find out how to encode mu-law audio, if you couldn't find that info on the web. I bet it's been easy to do that for years though.)
And yes, that means you do have to go purchase a copy of the ANSI C standard to look at it, if you don't know someone who already has a copy. Point out to me where ANSI has a section on their page that says "standards available for free download". There might be such a thing, but you'll find the button that says "Standards store" much sooner. Just because there are free implementations of the standard does not imply that the standard itself costs no money to look at! It doesn't cost to implement, though. This is better (IMO) than the situation with MPEG, where the details are free but it costs money to implement, if you want to sell it.
Uh? I dunno, an awful lot of standards do cost money to look at. "Standard" implies "something that everyone [should] follow because it was agreed on"... and it sure is a lot closer to the dictionary definition of 'standard' than "something that's free":)
Or are you implying that H.261 and H.263 aren't standards for video telecommunication? How about PCI? (Which I guess technically you don't have to pay for if you can search the Internet nowadays.) I think you'd find a lot of people would disagree with you. It's unfortunate that these standards aren't monetarily free. But that doesn't mean people don't follow them.
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Wrong. Linus is fine with it. Andy Grove announced on the kernel mailing list that this would be happening back in November, and Linus was fine with it then. The article mentions this too, maybe you'd like to read it next time? :3
Remember, Linus is the pragmatist of the community, the one that doesn't believe in software to further some philosophy.
How about a Linux program that's not an interface clone and picks up toolkit themes?
Well, first of all, I use Scroll Lock pretty often, thanks :3 Although much of the time I use ^S/^Q, since I'm on a KVM and Scroll Lock does something special. You know, to momentarily pause text that's scrolling on a terminal. (Yes. I still use terminals. A lot.) And backquote. (I see you don't do shell programming, or use TeX. ^^; )
... and no matter what you take away, somebody's going to be very unhappy about it.
Besides, standardizing what to add, and how, would be a huge pain, and probably nobody would really be pleased
The problem with legacy apps isn't assuming layouts, so much. (Any program that reads scancodes direct is broken, and assuming layouts isn't the best idea either, at least if you can't rebind keys.) It's more like, there just isn't much you can safely remove.
Actually, yes. I've been using Dvorak for about a year after having a couple random RSI flareups, and did a bit of kernel hacking for school last semester. Not to mention other classes and my own programming projects. I got used to it. My braces/brackets keys are the two to the right of zero. I like the underscore placement (on the key marked: ' " on qwerty keyboards) since I use lots of underscores in variable names.
Random fact: Rik van Riel uses Dvorak.
(imagine the arguments if AIM is the only one supported by a school, but a large percentage of kids use MSN...)
That's why we have wonderful clients like Gaim that understand all major (and some minor) IM systems in one client. The Windows port is in good shape, aside from some minor GTK weirdness. Although I realize it's not the major issue for your setup, "supporting one environment" and letting everyone eat their cake aren't mutually exclusive these days ...
HP would be much more likely to support their own processor (the Alpha) than to jump in with AMD in the event that the Itanic sinks.
You think so? Kind of like they've stuck with PA-RISC? IA-64 is just as much HP's baby as Intel's; they've done a lot of work on the architecture. Since Alpha's already been EOLed, and from the sound of it everyone's trying to push everyone but the people who already use Alphas (and even them eventually) to IA-64, not to mention all the people that made the AXP architecture so great in the first place don't even work for HP anymore, it would be a massive about-face for HP to jump back with the Alpha and do much more than trivially, incrementally improve it. As much as I'd love to see that happen ... well, I'm not holding my breath. :3
Is it me, or was anyone else really confused by the response by the Microsoft guy? They're there to "talk about Unix services"? Well, it makes more sense in terms of their Services for Unix. Incidentally, reading the page for SFU, it's good to see real Unixy stuff in Windows. (No, I don't think it will "take away" market from existing Unix products. (Windows + Korn shell) != FreeBSD. I admit to being a little leary about the prospect, but I don't see it happening.)
Anyone have any experience with this Services For Unix thing? I don't have access to Windows machines to run the trials on.
I'm still confused as to why they're at LWCE, when the webpage bills it as "the #1 place for companies that sell, market or promote Linux based products, services, applications and solutions," and they claim to have no plans whatsoever to sell, market, or promote Linux-based anything. I guess that leaves reasons for coming sowhere around building mindshare in the Linux world :3 Although the fact that they seem to be
using GPLed utilities in their SFU is very
interesting. (And perhaps their foot in the door.)
Disclaimer: this is not a Microsoft flame. I am not an anti-Microsoft junkie. Do please refrain from flaming if you want to reply.
My bad; you're right. It's been so long since I'd touched Wine I doubted. And I only ever dealt with the program loader, so it was easy to totally forget about the library ... ^^;
He said that? Errrm. I should hope a "disk operating system" is hiding under Windows somewhere. I rather like reading things off disks ...
It would be interesting to see an Explorer WM. Since they more or less have the interface separated from the kernel anyway, they'd just have to port Explorer. Or port Win32 to POSIX, which would be ... interesting. But then you could run "Windows programs" on any Unix Win32 is ported to with just a recompile (barring portability issues due to "all the world's an x86" syndrome).
Of course, Windows being one of their top two revenue streams, Microsoft would never do this :) Although I wonder why nobody else made a library that implements the Win32 API as a library. *remembers his Win32 days* Err, nevermind.
Then they should have asked that. They asked "why should I buy Ami", and they got an Ami marketing pitch, more or less. Is this unusual?
I don't have a listing of any of my (or anyone else's) BIOS sitting around anywhere, but I learned the xor trick back when I was learning graphics programming via x86 assembly. It got mentioned a few times if you read the right docs. (It was stuff geared towards demo writers, but I never got that good, nor that aware of the demo scene ... such a dork I was. ^^; ) I also want to say the professor of my machine architectures class in uni mentioned it. Don't remember. But yes, it seems pretty widely known among people who "wanted to program games" between, oh, the mid eighties and nineties.
Remember, Intel is run by businessmen, for businessmen. Technology to them is only a means to generate cash.
... waxing philosophical here, so feel free to ignore the rest of this comment. But someone in a different thread recently (don't remember which ... ) commented on the mishandling of the Alpha IP by Compaq, then HP, then its more or less non-use by Intel. And basically said "these people are keeping the market down with their competition, and limiting our future technological growth as a society." I'm not sure how accurate or fair that is (I suspect I'm just getting bitchy now) ... but it's really fscking creepy to think about.
Sigh. I suspect that's exactly it. And that's what pisses me off.
Because, as a paying customer, technology to me is a whole hell of a lot more than a way to generate cash. It's a way to do interesting things, and also an end of its own, in a way - exploring the technology is really fun. Anyone remember sitting down with 16/32-bit assemblers and triple-faulting your processor until you got "protected mode" down?
I haven't had that much fun directly with a CPU in years. When I get time to play with my EV56 machine, I'll have some of it again; it'll be my first architecture after IA-32 (I haven't done that much interesting low-level on IA-64 besides performance counters).
And
Although really, this is partially because DEC couldn't market the Alpha to save its life. In fact, it didn't.
I'm not sure why, but it makes me happy to see that :)
...
;_;
I just got my first Alpha about a month ago, used on Ebay. A 533 MHz EV56 that'll take up to a gig of RAM. It now runs Debian 3. SRM, I love it. The EFI+ELILO on Itanium is finally at the same stage. I'm determined not to make this my last EV* machine. It must've been a great ride, working for DEC with Alpha
I'm still convinced that someone should start a movement to bring back the Alpha, and make it huge and unignorable. Sigh.
Heh, the mod trolled you again.
I recall reading something about the Alpha architecture that made it difficult to extend it past 1 GHz at the time. I'll see if i can dig it up again and post it.
Yeah. Servers mostly run Unix. "Tru 64" is still out there somewhere. The Linux 2.5 kernel just got a bunch of patches fixing up stuff on Titan/Marnel architectures. (I wanna know who was the lucky bastard who got to work on that :3 ) Applications recompile on compatible platforms. What's your point?
Not to sound too militant, but come on. It's not like the past decade of development for these machines has just suddenly disappeared. Unlike the machines themselves on the market, sadly.
And the vaunted EV8 tech we've been guessing would be infused into later IA-64 products gets pushed farther away into the distance ...
... my P3 866 at home.) And. New Pentiums? Watch, as I leap for joy. Or don't, in fact, leap.
... hehe ... testing.) But are we non-server folk ever going to see something that's drastically different from the CPU in the computer we got a decade ago?
It's good to see at least they're on the road to 65-nm fabrication. But it'd be nice if they breathed some more life into their current architectures. IA-64 docs are interesting reads, but the hardware just isn't terribly impressive in practice yet. (At least, kernel compiles felt like they took forever on my professor's dual IA-64 research boxes compared to
I'd like to see Intel do something New[tm] and Exciting[tm] on the home market. IA-64 is that, I'm guessing they just need to tweak existing setups or something. I love the feeling of having a processor architecture before me to dig into. (That's why I picked up an old EV56 machine for
Actually, GnuWIN includes Cygwin, as well as several packages that aren't in Cygwin. For example, LiteStep, which only makes sense on Windows (since it's an alternative Windows shell - that is, litestep.exe runs instead of explorer.exe). Not all of the stuff in GnuWIN is actually GNU. It's just a convenient collection of free/gratis (are all these free/libre?) apps for Windows.
Anyone else think that an SDK API that only provides for hardware plugins is a bit silly? I can understand it, I guess just wouldn't do it to my software.
... sigh
See? This is why people need to read liscenses for software or libraries they use. From the webpage, it looks like he had no clue there was anything like that in the liscense
formatting just wipes out the MBR
Nah, it reinitializes the filesystem info (the FAT for, well, FAT, block groups for most Unix-style fses). Usually it doesn't touch the MBR, that would be repartitioning or something like "fdisk /mbr". Which would make getting data back less trivial but still pretty easy.
for N in 1 2 3 4 5 ; do dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 ; done
/dev/hda1. Yours probably isn't, but you can find out what it is by using the 'mount' command. Also, this will do it five times, which is theoretically more secure.
That's assuming the partition in question is
Variations on this include using 'if=/dev/urandom' instead, which overwrites the partition with random data instead of zeroes. Also, if your shell doesn't like the above (not sure if it works under tcsh, but bash will accept it), just use 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1'.
Since the only thing that's going to retain data is the hard drive ... what a waste. Come on, companies should sell the rest of the computer! Where do you think poor college students are going to get their "used to be high end hardware half a decade a go" supplies, huh? ;_;
...
I mean, I agree, don't let the drive itself slip out, but
Well, at least you Europeans don't need to worry about your artistic heritage vanishing into the past because something ceased to exist (think nitrate film) because it became unprofitable before its copyright expired.
Actually, in the Supreme Court decision, it says that one of the stated concerns about extending copyright via the CTEA was that Europe's term was longer than ours, so if we passed the CTEA we'd all be on the same footing, so to speak. So the EU is already there; we've just caught up and had that catching up not declared unconstitutional, is all. Maybe you'd better ask the Japanese instead ... :3
I think Pump it Up or DDR would be more fun. Depending on the game ...
:3 )
But yeah, I think he's right. People with interesting ideas should mix video games with exercise more often. I'd go for it. (I do already
A lot of standards cost nothing to implement or look at. Not all do. A lot of telecommunications standards (err ... in the sense of telephony and such, not networking) cost money to look at, but then you can implement them without liscensing (assuming you're patent-free). (For example, you'd have to pay the ITU money to find out how to encode mu-law audio, if you couldn't find that info on the web. I bet it's been easy to do that for years though.)
And yes, that means you do have to go purchase a copy of the ANSI C standard to look at it, if you don't know someone who already has a copy. Point out to me where ANSI has a section on their page that says "standards available for free download". There might be such a thing, but you'll find the button that says "Standards store" much sooner. Just because there are free implementations of the standard does not imply that the standard itself costs no money to look at! It doesn't cost to implement, though. This is better (IMO) than the situation with MPEG, where the details are free but it costs money to implement, if you want to sell it.
Uh? I dunno, an awful lot of standards do cost money to look at. "Standard" implies "something that everyone [should] follow because it was agreed on" ... and it sure is a lot closer to the dictionary definition of 'standard' than "something that's free" :)
Or are you implying that H.261 and H.263 aren't standards for video telecommunication? How about PCI? (Which I guess technically you don't have to pay for if you can search the Internet nowadays.) I think you'd find a lot of people would disagree with you. It's unfortunate that these standards aren't monetarily free. But that doesn't mean people don't follow them.