Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
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E ~ mc^2
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With light waves, what's moving up and down?
Errm. Light also behaves as a particle though.:) That's why CCDs work so well. Someone else will hopefully come explain this better. (Me saying this now should encourage that due to akpm's Theory of Incorrect Patches -_^ ) But...
Light can best be thought on simple terms as being comprised of particles with wavelike nature. It's often most convenient to think of actual light particles. (For example, the photoelectric effect is best explained by particles of light.) However, these "particles" interact with each other in ways that are more suggestive of classical wave theory. (Hence interference and Moire patterns in diffraction gratings.) Both of these happen on a fairly fundamental level.
One of the best (mathematically cleanest, most handily explains observed effects) solutions as to what exactly is happening with light is QED, quantum electrodynamics. I don't have a real solid grasp on this yet, but I understand it basically explains photons and electrons as energy perturbations in a ubiquitous quantum field. I guess this would mean that the behaviours we observe as photons are kind of like wave packets. The particles are really just bunched-up waves. What's waving is the universal quantum field.
This is fairly complex stuff, graduate-level physics. I'm told that Feynmann's "QED, the Strange Theory of Light and Matter" is a good relatively elementary introduction to what QED actually is and means, and how it explains light and electricity. (Richard Feynmann being one of the co-developers of the QED theory and the single name most often associated with it.)
So yes. I'm not sure that calling light a "transvers wave" is 100% accurate, as far as the theories go, but it's a good way to explain observed behaviour. (Kind of like Newtonian mechanics isn't accurate for all cases, but it's "good enough" for most things everyone will ever deal with.)
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
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E ~ mc^2
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No. As far as we know, all four "fundamental" forces (counting electric and weak separately) take time to take effect. This time depends basically on the qualities of the force carriers for this force.
(Note, turning simplification "on" because I have a simplistic view of a complex theory here:) Also, this is mostly correct, though I'm probably explaining some things poorly due to poor recollection and lack of sleep.)
The strong force happens on an order of 10e-22 seconds for an interaction. It's the quickest of the forces because it happens over short distances (atomic nuclei) and its force carriers (gluons) are massless, though they have strong charge.
The weak force is still relatively fast, but is between nine and fourteen orders of magnitude slower than the strong force. It happens over shorter distances (three orders of magnitude shorter than the strong), but its force carriers (positive/negative W and neutral Z bosons) are very massive, 80 or 90 times more massive than a proton. (ie, about as massive as a strontium atom) The high-massed particles limit the force's range, and high-massed particles don't tend to move. So, the weak interaction is slow.
The electromagnetic force is faster: its force carrier is the familiar massless proton, which doesn't decay (IIRC!). So, the electromagnetic force has higher range and basically happens at the speed of light (since "light" is its carrier).
Finally, gravity. We don't know much about gravity except that it's weaker and slower than any of the other forces. (Well, we know some of what the characteristics of its force carrier "have to" be from theory, for example, that "gravitons" have to have spin 2 for lots of other things to work out right. But coming up with a good quantum gravity theory, like we have quantum theories for the other three forces, has been *hard*, and a good one hasn't been decided on.) Gravity is basically 40 orders of magnitude weaker than the strong force and works slowest.
Of course, we like to think that there's some underlying interaction that these forces come out of. We haven't found it yet. That's what grand unified theories of everything are about. However, since none of these forces act *instantly*, and would take noticeable times to travel over large distances (if they could at all! W/Z bosons would probably decay), no, there probably isn't a way to exploit fundamental forces to communicate instantaneously, at least assuming that gravity follows a nice, clean quantum theory (which probably most people hope it does).
Probably. I have heard interesting things about communicating via pairs of particles with almost identical quantum states that basically mimic each other's state no matter what, but I don't remember much about this and it's actually quite different than communicating via "gravitational or magnetic fluctuations". There are many strange and rather counterintuitive bits about QM...
However, from a practical point of view, I can't imagine any reason to run Linux on a box that comes with a very tightly (and well) designed BSD Unix OS.
You mean like, say, a Dell?:) They make iPods designed for Windows now, too. But think for a moment and you should see that there are other reasons to want iPods to talk to Linux than "I installed YHL over my copy of Jag".
As for running Linux instead of OS X, I'm trying this now. I do like OS X. It's managed to annoy me much less than Windows has in the past. But it's not terribly snappy on a 700 MHz G3. Even with over half a gig of RAM. Debian feels faster, in general. (Maybe it's just because I don't see a wait cursor as often as I do in Jag.) But stuff crashes more under it... Debian testing feels less stable on non-x86 archs:/
Are there any KVM switch solutions that incorporate DVI natively?
Yes, there do seem to be, as Google would tell you. The prices I'm seeing are something like ten times what I paid for my Trendnet two-computer switch though. On top of that, they're not terribly common at all... I only see two or three companies with one or two models each.
1) It was not secure, and never could be. Any program could read from/write to anywhere in memory, so a malicious TSR could have lots of fun. (This is more an x86 architectural problem, but DOS could never get better than that because somebody made the design decision that DOS would ALWAYS use "real mode", and only real mode.) I've heard of DOS TCP stacks, also...:) 2) See #1. Crashing DOS is actually really easy. Just write a random value to address 0 and watch the fun begin! Want something worse? Just write random values to boot sectors through the BIOS. 3) I actually kind of like this. I learned the PC architecture through DOS because it let you get close to the hardware. You could program anything you wanted to directly, so if you had a 16-bit assembler that was capable of generating 32-bit code (Turbo C++ 3.1!) you could have lots of fun. I learned protected mode and VBE that way. 4) Yes. As long as your boot sector is intact. But restoring that is easy. 5) Wheeee!
Who said the developers are going to prefer the mailing lists? A lot of people have expressed interest about this on lkml. And a lot of people seem to have already signed up for accounts on the thing.
Oh and by the way, the original message said not to submit to slashdot, paskie, you insensitive clod:P That was the only thing holding back my kerneltrap article...
As much of a waste of time it is to reply to an AC, this showed up at threshold 1, so why not:3
While linux folks have been busy hacking, reverse engineering, updating, and complaining about mainstream products, Microsoft has been quietly busy plunking away (in their own scary, plodding, increasingly buggy way) to get into the minds of consumers.
I see. So they make slow, god-playing programs that crash but manage to get into the hearts of the people. Maybe it's not so much their design or good work that's commendable here so much as their marketing? Is that what you're trying to say? Or are you going somewhere else with this? I'm confused.
If the collective horsepower of the linux community had concentrated on an equivilant of XP media center... and a tablet based solution
It must be pretty impressive indeed if it's become such a big hit without me having heard of it despite being surrounded by people who use XP. (Then again, I've been busy with school and coding lately, so who knows.)
By the way, hacking software is a lot easier (and less costly) than hardware design. I'm not saying that an open source hardware movement isn't possible, but it's generally something that's kinda hard to do if you don't have a lot of money to sink into research, design, and fabrication. Maybe if RMS gets another few "genius grants", or I become wildly famous as a musician and make a lot of money.
Every time I see 'how long will it be until someone gets linux ported to xxxx' I cringe.
Do something for me. Go count the number of people working on (say) the Dreamcast and X-box linux ports. Now go count the number of people working on (say) KDE. Which one is bigger? Surely I need say no more.
Don't put down MS for trying something new, ask yourself why such a large collection of big brain linux developers can't beat microsoft to the punch for once instead of playing a chasing game.
Who's chasing? Linux is software. Tablet PC is hardware. Apples and oranges. If anyone's playing a "chasing game", it's Microsoft. Or haven't you heard of the Newton, or got the impression that this is kind of a $PDA on steroids? Well whatever, I have work to do:3
Well, uncompressed source for 2.4.19 is about 160 megs. Having the source for the entire 2.4 series this way would be in the area of 3 gigs. Since people still use 2.2 and 2.0, we should also allow for configuring these. Disk space considerations, for one, would be a pain. (I'm leaving out 2.5 since I think anyone would accept tha argument that if you can't compile it, you shouldn't be running it:3 )
Also, someone would have to write some sort of script that could parse all the kernel config files in the source tree, which wouldn't necessarily be difficult, but it would be a pain to do unless you really wanted this feature. Other than that, I think hpa would have a fit if you suggested that a lot of users should be running a bunch of CML1 parsers, tar, and gzip processes on master.kernel.org, since it's been a somewhat problematic machine in previous incarnations... and since the mirrors likely wouldn't pick up on it, everyone would end up doing it on the main site. ^^;
Interesting idea. You'd have to remember to set ARCH depending on the URL you used (eg,/cgi-bin/menuconfig?ARCH=sparc64 or something) and to have the 16 gcc installations you'd need to cross-compile for anything the user wanted. ("Why does my new kernel keep crashing at boot with an 'Invalid Instruction' fault??")
And of course, this would be much easier if we just made a linux kernel conf frontend for this.:)
Maybe instead of bloating the featureset, they should be working on getting the I/O working?
Well, they have. It's been an interesting period. First, Andre Hedrick stopped being the 2.5 IDE maintainer. (There were apparently "interface concerns" with him an Linus, but I haven't seen this so sorry if I'm wrong ^^; ) Martin Dalecki sent in over 100 "clean-up" IDE patches, most of which got merged at the time. Unfortunately, a lot of people didn't like the way they were going and eventually he kind of got chased off. By this time it's July or so. Since then the situation has been a general throwing up of hands followed by forward-porting the improvements made in the -ac tree by Andre Hedrick. There are also other issues, like the fact that ATA (protocol) tends to be ugly and have odd (mis)implementations in hardware. Consequently, people who *really* grok IDE are at a premium.
Hey, there have been other issues to take care of in 2.5 as well, so I don't find this particularly surprising.
In any case, there's no real point in complaining about "feature bloat". That's what make menuconfig is for;)
Um, Linux has had a somewhat-native pthreads library for more than a week. (Just a little more:3 ) The announcement you saw last week about Linux was the fact that thread creation and destruction in 2.5 is now so fast that you can do it 100,000 times in about two seconds on certain developer's machines. So you'll have to enlighten me on the nature of this coincidence, I don't see it. ^_^;
This is a userspace library implementing Posix threads. Linux, I might point out, doesn't natively implement pthreads in the kernel. You might also consider that Hurd's design isn't monolithic, so of course there's not going to be much in the kernel. Please go read up on things before you flame them. This may be/., but it doesn't give you full rein to be clueless ~_^
(By the way, sorry to burst your bubble, but MORE PEOPLE THAN LINUS WORK ON LINUX. Most of the really fun threading stuff has been in Ingo's domain, of late. I really need an old, cheap computer to run 2.5 on and hack around...;_; )
That statement makes absolutely no sense - its like comparing Linux to Microsoft Word. Apt is nott a package manager, never was, and never will be. Its just a front end that indexes dependencies.
Ick. Well, that's true. My bad. And I'm usually saying rpm wasn't originally meant to do anything but work with single packages.
Yes, it has, a while ago. But like most people who knock RPM, I'm sure that doesn't matter, and you'll continue to form your opinions based on that fact that You Like Debian And Can't Be Bothered Hearing About Anything Else or Bothering To Understand Why Standards Are Good.
Well, that's not fair. I stopped using Debian and started using LFS because the little things in Debian got in the way from time to time ^^; And yes, I've used Red Hat. And yes, I like standards. To the point that I'm wary of anything that's blatantly noncomformant of major standards in its field. (Usually I'm the one that is harping on others on this point, so this is amusingly ironic.) Although given the usual audience on/., I can't say I particularly blame your cynicism, but it's misplaced, much as my post was not only misinformed, but outdated.
If I came off anti-rpm, my apologies. Mostly because I've had annoying experiences in the past, and having foregone most distributions long ago, I honestly don't know what kind of progress has been made, and projected some stupid assumptions and misremberances. (I was aware of apt-rpm though, but it seems characterized as a "nice option"... do most modern rpm-based have some sort of package indexer installed -by default- that their installers plug into? I think that would be a great step towards "making Linux useable", whatever that means to you. It would also make me happy ^_^ )
It is certainly arguable that the best way to describe gaim in one sentence is as an "AIM clone".
Well, one of the reasons I like gaim so much is because it works with several IM services and it has features AIM doesn't. (Including the little things, like automatic logging.) If we were to nitpick, maybe "Trillian forerunner" would be more accurate -_^
But... I do see your point, and I hadn't looked at it that way. A little addendum saying "... that also works with Yahoo... " would be nice, but maybe we just can't see that in the screencap...
Apparently two minutes isn't long enough sometimes... I need to go eat something >.>
But yeah, I can see how that would be of concern... and a potential nightmare for support. Then again, vendors have been doing this with the kernel forever, and we can find out exactly what the differences are by looking at the source. RH could take responsibility by having users direct bugs to them, and then send the official-version KDE bugs to the K team. Nevermind that politically, this would probably be a nightmare for RH. ^^;
So we have here another gcc-2.96. Interesting. Well... if the changes are really that good, they'll make it into the trees upstream. (Well, maybe not the fontconfig stuff, is that RH-specific?) Anyway, I still think RH is basically within their rights here, but then it should be their responsibility to maintain their version of it, and to try to make it clear that RH should be contacted first for support. Doing this while getting all the credits right could be interesting... but that's Red Hat's problem.
Well, what was the change? I honestly don't know ^^;
(My complaint with this article is that it gives no background, just the RH announcement, so those of us who don't follow the Big Two in Linux desktop development are kind of left clueless... )
A state law exempting record labels from maximum contract lengths? Ewww.
Heh. Tom Petty making an album slamming the industry. I think I may have to keep an eye out for this one. XD I bet he'll stand his ground... won't be turned around!:3 Didn't hear about Michael Jackson.
I really hope this makes a difference. It's disgusting to have really neat artists like Tori and Björk that I feel guilty buying albums from because they're on major labels. A world where entertainment is tainted because of its distributor is a world gone wrong. (Well, aside from all the other, more screwed up stuff ^^;)
Because everybody's like P.Diddy. UGH!:P
Seriously, go listen to some Einstürzende Neubaten, or KMFDM, or Björk, or Pig, or Kate Bush. You'll feel better. ^_^;
That's reasonably pretty for an all-grey theme. <rant>Although they might do good to have the rpm description of Gaim match the SF project page description, especially since it's not really an AIM clone anymore.:) And bare panels are ugly IMO.</rant> But on the whole, not bad. Of course, I'd just go install something like BlueHeart anyway;) but that's not too shabby for a default look-and-feel.
11 comments, and most of them are people grumbling about how Red Hat is squeezing choice out of the hands of the user. But really, is this true? What RH has done (from what I hear, I don't chase bleeding-edge distros, usually) is just change the way things look. They've provided a different default appearance. How is this worse from the default appearances provided by the GNOME and KDE teams? (RH's arguments for why it's better are in the article, you should read it:3 )
It's not like Red Hat is releasing modified versions of GNOME and KDE that don't let you customize the appearance; then, only then, would the complaints about choice be founded. The people who really care about the difference between GNOME and KDE probably do so on reasons deeper than 'the default theme looks cool'. (Personally, I don't really like either of the default appearances that much ^^; ) So, when nagora asks "If RH doesn't like this, why don't they drop the one they don't want people to use?" the answer is: they don't care what you use, but they want the defaults to look reasonably similar, because they know that people who really don't *want* their default theme either know how to change it or probably have settings that they'll import anyway.
Remember who Red Hat's intended market share is: the corporate environment. A lot of people I've talked to recently agree that RH's biggest 'ins' are (or should be) for office workstations. Lots of places implement a baseline standard that they want to look the same, but that people can customize if they want to (as long as they don't spend hours tweaking it). This is the mentality that RH seems to target. Yes, this isn't for everyone, but that's the point... there are plentyofgood distributions out there, and manymorechoices out there if you really really don't like it. But no-one said you have to use Red Hat. (Although I could understand concerns about RH-isms creeping into LSB, but nobody's brought that up.)
Remember, RH == vendor for corporate enviroments. Corporate environments like standard desktops, so this move makes sense in Red Hat's perspective.
Once I see a Linux user running Debian installing glibc from an RPM, I'll believe them:).
Once I see widespread support for apt with rpms, I'll believe that rpm is a credible package management system. -_^
Admittedly it's been a while since I've used an rpm-based system... but there are REASONS for that. Can one, now, do the equivalent of "apt-get install task-kde3" and have it not die with a billion and one "cannot install: libxxx required but not found" errors? If so, then rpm has finally matured to the point where apt was a few years ago.
Otherwise, in my mind, rpm is a nice convenient way to install single packages, but it doesn't meet my requirements for a package management system. The only problem I have with rpm is that (at least the last time I used it) it was stupid about dependencies. Has that changed?
Ain't gonna happen. Last time I checked lynx wasn't going to show images anytime soon, and neither would my cellphone. Some things just won't work for everyone. Unless of course, you want to convert your "picture gallery" to ASCII.
Four words: 3G cellphones in Japan. I think wireless PDAs are getting feasible nowadays too.
neither Mosaic (the first visual browser) nor Netscape 1.0 support HTML table-based layouts
So lets all just use HTML 0.1 with only <br> tags and <a> tags. Whine whine whine...!
Well, I think you missed the point of that bit. That's not what he was saying, in fact he seemed to be advocating the exact opposite of what you say: throw away all the non-standard proprietary cruft that's gotten into our markup and use things that are nice, standard, and well-defined.
I do agree that this 'article' is little more than a nice shill for a book though ^^; Besides, standards and tutorials are available for free online. Buying a book to learn how to write markup right is nice only if you want to take it somewhere other than where your computer is. (Note that I'm writing this on an iBook though... )
What a horrible, horrible thing to miss. And I missed it. Oh well, these things happen when you're in a hurry... My bad. Kourino--
So it looks like they DON'T have that nice safe-harbour clause in this case. Good catch.
Read the thing. (EVERYONE HERE needs to have the copy of it in PDF format.)
Title II, sec. 202, subsect. (a):
"A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief... for infringement of copyright by reason of the provider's transmitting, routing, or providing connections for, material through a system or network controlld or operated by or for the service provider, or by reason of the intermediate and transient storage of that material in the course of such transmitting, routing, or providing connections, if--
the transmission of the material was initiated by or at the direction of a person other than the service provider;
the transmission, routing, provision of connections, or storage is carried out through an automatic technical process without selection of the material by the service provider;
the service provider does not select the recipintes of the material except as an automatic response to the request of another person;
no copy of the material is made by the service provider in the course of such intermediate or transient storage is maintained on the system or network in a manner ordinarily accessible to such anticipated recipients for a longer period than is reasonably necessary for the transmission, routing, or provision of connections; and
the material is transmitted through the system or network without modification of its content.
so, IANAL, but it looks like this suit isn't legally valid, under the DMCA of all things. (Not that we're surprised... ^^; ) Now's the time to get serious with your boycotts if you haven't been already.
... on what you view the point of college being in the first place. If it's just a place where you go to learn to work to put food on the table to get the strength to work to put food on the table to get the strength to...... then yes, college needs only to have a straight, career-based knowledge track. That's all you need, after all... right?
On the other hand, what about this? Say you work successfully as a programmer for five years, then get promoted to the position of software analyst and work as such for ten. After a while, you hear about some pressing issue that's very important, so much so that you feel your life could be affected negatively if it's mishandled. You do what a few do (ofter for the wrong reasons) and decide to run for political office. You are elected, and while in office you are confronted with many diverse issues that you need a lot of diverse knowledge to handle.
Can't happen to you, or won't? Well, it's nice that you believe that. I never though, four years ago, that I would even consider semi-retiring in a decade and a half or so and starting a band. Right now I'm in a position to consider doing just that some years down the read. My point, of course, is that it's really not such a great idea to plan your life with narrow views. Not only could you land yourself in a nice, steaming pile of shit, but you could miss out on a lot of nice opportunites.
Which brings me to my real point, it never hurts to know something that doesn't appear immediately useful. What if you land a job designing a software control on exercise equipment? Life is a complex system, so have a complex base of knowledge is one of your best bets!
After all, it's your life dealing with your laws in your country in your world, so don't you think you might be benefited by knowing more than how to make a radix tree?
Slashdot Mirror
Errm. Light also behaves as a particle though. :) That's why CCDs work so well. Someone else will hopefully come explain this better. (Me saying this now should encourage that due to akpm's Theory of Incorrect Patches -_^ ) But ...
Light can best be thought on simple terms as being comprised of particles with wavelike nature. It's often most convenient to think of actual light particles. (For example, the photoelectric effect is best explained by particles of light.) However, these "particles" interact with each other in ways that are more suggestive of classical wave theory. (Hence interference and Moire patterns in diffraction gratings.) Both of these happen on a fairly fundamental level.
One of the best (mathematically cleanest, most handily explains observed effects) solutions as to what exactly is happening with light is QED, quantum electrodynamics. I don't have a real solid grasp on this yet, but I understand it basically explains photons and electrons as energy perturbations in a ubiquitous quantum field. I guess this would mean that the behaviours we observe as photons are kind of like wave packets. The particles are really just bunched-up waves. What's waving is the universal quantum field.
This is fairly complex stuff, graduate-level physics. I'm told that Feynmann's "QED, the Strange Theory of Light and Matter" is a good relatively elementary introduction to what QED actually is and means, and how it explains light and electricity. (Richard Feynmann being one of the co-developers of the QED theory and the single name most often associated with it.)
So yes. I'm not sure that calling light a "transvers wave" is 100% accurate, as far as the theories go, but it's a good way to explain observed behaviour. (Kind of like Newtonian mechanics isn't accurate for all cases, but it's "good enough" for most things everyone will ever deal with.)
No. As far as we know, all four "fundamental" forces (counting electric and weak separately) take time to take effect. This time depends basically on the qualities of the force carriers for this force.
:) Also, this is mostly correct, though I'm probably explaining some things poorly due to poor recollection and lack of sleep.)
...
(Note, turning simplification "on" because I have a simplistic view of a complex theory here
The strong force happens on an order of 10e-22 seconds for an interaction. It's the quickest of the forces because it happens over short distances (atomic nuclei) and its force carriers (gluons) are massless, though they have strong charge.
The weak force is still relatively fast, but is between nine and fourteen orders of magnitude slower than the strong force. It happens over shorter distances (three orders of magnitude shorter than the strong), but its force carriers (positive/negative W and neutral Z bosons) are very massive, 80 or 90 times more massive than a proton. (ie, about as massive as a strontium atom) The high-massed particles limit the force's range, and high-massed particles don't tend to move. So, the weak interaction is slow.
The electromagnetic force is faster: its force carrier is the familiar massless proton, which doesn't decay (IIRC!). So, the electromagnetic force has higher range and basically happens at the speed of light (since "light" is its carrier).
Finally, gravity. We don't know much about gravity except that it's weaker and slower than any of the other forces. (Well, we know some of what the characteristics of its force carrier "have to" be from theory, for example, that "gravitons" have to have spin 2 for lots of other things to work out right. But coming up with a good quantum gravity theory, like we have quantum theories for the other three forces, has been *hard*, and a good one hasn't been decided on.) Gravity is basically 40 orders of magnitude weaker than the strong force and works slowest.
Of course, we like to think that there's some underlying interaction that these forces come out of. We haven't found it yet. That's what grand unified theories of everything are about. However, since none of these forces act *instantly*, and would take noticeable times to travel over large distances (if they could at all! W/Z bosons would probably decay), no, there probably isn't a way to exploit fundamental forces to communicate instantaneously, at least assuming that gravity follows a nice, clean quantum theory (which probably most people hope it does).
Probably. I have heard interesting things about communicating via pairs of particles with almost identical quantum states that basically mimic each other's state no matter what, but I don't remember much about this and it's actually quite different than communicating via "gravitational or magnetic fluctuations". There are many strange and rather counterintuitive bits about QM
However, from a practical point of view, I can't imagine any reason to run Linux on a box that comes with a very tightly (and well) designed BSD Unix OS.
:) They make iPods designed for Windows now, too. But think for a moment and you should see that there are other reasons to want iPods to talk to Linux than "I installed YHL over my copy of Jag".
... Debian testing feels less stable on non-x86 archs :/
You mean like, say, a Dell?
As for running Linux instead of OS X, I'm trying this now. I do like OS X. It's managed to annoy me much less than Windows has in the past. But it's not terribly snappy on a 700 MHz G3. Even with over half a gig of RAM. Debian feels faster, in general. (Maybe it's just because I don't see a wait cursor as often as I do in Jag.) But stuff crashes more under it
Are there any KVM switch solutions that incorporate DVI natively?
... I only see two or three companies with one or two models each.
Yes, there do seem to be, as Google would tell you. The prices I'm seeing are something like ten times what I paid for my Trendnet two-computer switch though. On top of that, they're not terribly common at all
Hehehe ... as much as I "enjoyed" MS-DOS ... no.
... :)
1) It was not secure, and never could be. Any program could read from/write to anywhere in memory, so a malicious TSR could have lots of fun. (This is more an x86 architectural problem, but DOS could never get better than that because somebody made the design decision that DOS would ALWAYS use "real mode", and only real mode.) I've heard of DOS TCP stacks, also
2) See #1. Crashing DOS is actually really easy. Just write a random value to address 0 and watch the fun begin! Want something worse? Just write random values to boot sectors through the BIOS.
3) I actually kind of like this. I learned the PC architecture through DOS because it let you get close to the hardware. You could program anything you wanted to directly, so if you had a 16-bit assembler that was capable of generating 32-bit code (Turbo C++ 3.1!) you could have lots of fun. I learned protected mode and VBE that way.
4) Yes. As long as your boot sector is intact. But restoring that is easy.
5) Wheeee!
Who said the developers are going to prefer the mailing lists? A lot of people have expressed interest about this on lkml. And a lot of people seem to have already signed up for accounts on the thing.
:P That was the only thing holding back my kerneltrap article ...
Oh and by the way, the original message said not to submit to slashdot, paskie, you insensitive clod
As much of a waste of time it is to reply to an AC, this showed up at threshold 1, so why not :3
While linux folks have been busy hacking, reverse engineering, updating, and complaining about mainstream products, Microsoft has been quietly busy plunking away (in their own scary, plodding, increasingly buggy way) to get into the minds of consumers.
I see. So they make slow, god-playing programs that crash but manage to get into the hearts of the people. Maybe it's not so much their design or good work that's commendable here so much as their marketing? Is that what you're trying to say? Or are you going somewhere else with this? I'm confused.
If the collective horsepower of the linux community had concentrated on an equivilant of XP media center ... and a tablet based solution
It must be pretty impressive indeed if it's become such a big hit without me having heard of it despite being surrounded by people who use XP. (Then again, I've been busy with school and coding lately, so who knows.)By the way, hacking software is a lot easier (and less costly) than hardware design. I'm not saying that an open source hardware movement isn't possible, but it's generally something that's kinda hard to do if you don't have a lot of money to sink into research, design, and fabrication. Maybe if RMS gets another few "genius grants", or I become wildly famous as a musician and make a lot of money.
Every time I see 'how long will it be until someone gets linux ported to xxxx' I cringe.
Do something for me. Go count the number of people working on (say) the Dreamcast and X-box linux ports. Now go count the number of people working on (say) KDE. Which one is bigger? Surely I need say no more.
Don't put down MS for trying something new, ask yourself why such a large collection of big brain linux developers can't beat microsoft to the punch for once instead of playing a chasing game.
Who's chasing? Linux is software. Tablet PC is hardware. Apples and oranges. If anyone's playing a "chasing game", it's Microsoft. Or haven't you heard of the Newton, or got the impression that this is kind of a $PDA on steroids? Well whatever, I have work to do :3
Well, uncompressed source for 2.4.19 is about 160 megs. Having the source for the entire 2.4 series this way would be in the area of 3 gigs. Since people still use 2.2 and 2.0, we should also allow for configuring these. Disk space considerations, for one, would be a pain. (I'm leaving out 2.5 since I think anyone would accept tha argument that if you can't compile it, you shouldn't be running it :3 )
Also, someone would have to write some sort of script that could parse all the kernel config files in the source tree, which wouldn't necessarily be difficult, but it would be a pain to do unless you really wanted this feature. Other than that, I think hpa would have a fit if you suggested that a lot of users should be running a bunch of CML1 parsers, tar, and gzip processes on master.kernel.org, since it's been a somewhat problematic machine in previous incarnations ... and since the mirrors likely wouldn't pick up on it, everyone would end up doing it on the main site. ^^;
Interesting idea. You'd have to remember to set ARCH depending on the URL you used (eg, /cgi-bin/menuconfig?ARCH=sparc64 or something) and to have the 16 gcc installations you'd need to cross-compile for anything the user wanted. ("Why does my new kernel keep crashing at boot with an 'Invalid Instruction' fault??")
:)
And of course, this would be much easier if we just made a linux kernel conf frontend for this.
Maybe instead of bloating the featureset, they should be working on getting the I/O working?
Well, they have. It's been an interesting period. First, Andre Hedrick stopped being the 2.5 IDE maintainer. (There were apparently "interface concerns" with him an Linus, but I haven't seen this so sorry if I'm wrong ^^; ) Martin Dalecki sent in over 100 "clean-up" IDE patches, most of which got merged at the time. Unfortunately, a lot of people didn't like the way they were going and eventually he kind of got chased off. By this time it's July or so. Since then the situation has been a general throwing up of hands followed by forward-porting the improvements made in the -ac tree by Andre Hedrick. There are also other issues, like the fact that ATA (protocol) tends to be ugly and have odd (mis)implementations in hardware. Consequently, people who *really* grok IDE are at a premium.
Hey, there have been other issues to take care of in 2.5 as well, so I don't find this particularly surprising.
In any case, there's no real point in complaining about "feature bloat". That's what make menuconfig is for ;)
Um, Linux has had a somewhat-native pthreads library for more than a week. (Just a little more :3 ) The announcement you saw last week about Linux was the fact that thread creation and destruction in 2.5 is now so fast that you can do it 100,000 times in about two seconds on certain developer's machines. So you'll have to enlighten me on the nature of this coincidence, I don't see it. ^_^;
This is a userspace library implementing Posix threads. Linux, I might point out, doesn't natively implement pthreads in the kernel. You might also consider that Hurd's design isn't monolithic, so of course there's not going to be much in the kernel. Please go read up on things before you flame them. This may be /., but it doesn't give you full rein to be clueless ~_^
... ;_; )
(By the way, sorry to burst your bubble, but MORE PEOPLE THAN LINUS WORK ON LINUX. Most of the really fun threading stuff has been in Ingo's domain, of late. I really need an old, cheap computer to run 2.5 on and hack around
That statement makes absolutely no sense - its like comparing Linux to Microsoft Word. Apt is nott a package manager, never was, and never will be. Its just a front end that indexes dependencies.
Ick. Well, that's true. My bad. And I'm usually saying rpm wasn't originally meant to do anything but work with single packages.
Yes, it has, a while ago. But like most people who knock RPM, I'm sure that doesn't matter, and you'll continue to form your opinions based on that fact that You Like Debian And Can't Be Bothered Hearing About Anything Else or Bothering To Understand Why Standards Are Good.
Well, that's not fair. I stopped using Debian and started using LFS because the little things in Debian got in the way from time to time ^^; And yes, I've used Red Hat. And yes, I like standards. To the point that I'm wary of anything that's blatantly noncomformant of major standards in its field. (Usually I'm the one that is harping on others on this point, so this is amusingly ironic.) Although given the usual audience on /., I can't say I particularly blame your cynicism, but it's misplaced, much as my post was not only misinformed, but outdated.
If I came off anti-rpm, my apologies. Mostly because I've had annoying experiences in the past, and having foregone most distributions long ago, I honestly don't know what kind of progress has been made, and projected some stupid assumptions and misremberances. (I was aware of apt-rpm though, but it seems characterized as a "nice option" ... do most modern rpm-based have some sort of package indexer installed -by default- that their installers plug into? I think that would be a great step towards "making Linux useable", whatever that means to you. It would also make me happy ^_^ )
It is certainly arguable that the best way to describe gaim in one sentence is as an "AIM clone".
Well, one of the reasons I like gaim so much is because it works with several IM services and it has features AIM doesn't. (Including the little things, like automatic logging.) If we were to nitpick, maybe "Trillian forerunner" would be more accurate -_^
But ... I do see your point, and I hadn't looked at it that way. A little addendum saying " ... that also works with Yahoo ... " would be nice, but maybe we just can't see that in the screencap...
Apparently two minutes isn't long enough sometimes ... I need to go eat something >.>
But yeah, I can see how that would be of concern ... and a potential nightmare for support. Then again, vendors have been doing this with the kernel forever, and we can find out exactly what the differences are by looking at the source. RH could take responsibility by having users direct bugs to them, and then send the official-version KDE bugs to the K team. Nevermind that politically, this would probably be a nightmare for RH. ^^;
So we have here another gcc-2.96. Interesting. Well ... if the changes are really that good, they'll make it into the trees upstream. (Well, maybe not the fontconfig stuff, is that RH-specific?) Anyway, I still think RH is basically within their rights here, but then it should be their responsibility to maintain their version of it, and to try to make it clear that RH should be contacted first for support. Doing this while getting all the credits right could be interesting ... but that's Red Hat's problem.
Well, what was the change? I honestly don't know ^^; (My complaint with this article is that it gives no background, just the RH announcement, so those of us who don't follow the Big Two in Linux desktop development are kind of left clueless ... )
A state law exempting record labels from maximum contract lengths? Ewww.
Heh. Tom Petty making an album slamming the industry. I think I may have to keep an eye out for this one. XD I bet he'll stand his ground ... won't be turned around! :3 Didn't hear about Michael Jackson.
I really hope this makes a difference. It's disgusting to have really neat artists like Tori and Björk that I feel guilty buying albums from because they're on major labels. A world where entertainment is tainted because of its distributor is a world gone wrong. (Well, aside from all the other, more screwed up stuff ^^;)
Because everybody's like P.Diddy. UGH! :P
Seriously, go listen to some Einstürzende Neubaten, or KMFDM, or Björk, or Pig, or Kate Bush. You'll feel better. ^_^;
Ooh.
That's reasonably pretty for an all-grey theme. <rant>Although they might do good to have the rpm description of Gaim match the SF project page description, especially since it's not really an AIM clone anymore. :) And bare panels are ugly IMO.</rant> But on the whole, not bad. Of course, I'd just go install something like BlueHeart anyway ;) but that's not too shabby for a default look-and-feel.
11 comments, and most of them are people grumbling about how Red Hat is squeezing choice out of the hands of the user. But really, is this true? What RH has done (from what I hear, I don't chase bleeding-edge distros, usually) is just change the way things look. They've provided a different default appearance. How is this worse from the default appearances provided by the GNOME and KDE teams? (RH's arguments for why it's better are in the article, you should read it :3 )
It's not like Red Hat is releasing modified versions of GNOME and KDE that don't let you customize the appearance; then, only then, would the complaints about choice be founded. The people who really care about the difference between GNOME and KDE probably do so on reasons deeper than 'the default theme looks cool'. (Personally, I don't really like either of the default appearances that much ^^; ) So, when nagora asks "If RH doesn't like this, why don't they drop the one they don't want people to use?" the answer is: they don't care what you use, but they want the defaults to look reasonably similar, because they know that people who really don't *want* their default theme either know how to change it or probably have settings that they'll import anyway.
Remember who Red Hat's intended market share is: the corporate environment. A lot of people I've talked to recently agree that RH's biggest 'ins' are (or should be) for office workstations. Lots of places implement a baseline standard that they want to look the same, but that people can customize if they want to (as long as they don't spend hours tweaking it). This is the mentality that RH seems to target. Yes, this isn't for everyone, but that's the point ... there are plenty of good distributions out there, and many more choices out there if you really really don't like it. But no-one said you have to use Red Hat. (Although I could understand concerns about RH-isms creeping into LSB, but nobody's brought that up.)
Remember, RH == vendor for corporate enviroments. Corporate environments like standard desktops, so this move makes sense in Red Hat's perspective.
Once I see a Linux user running Debian installing glibc from an RPM, I'll believe them :).
Once I see widespread support for apt with rpms, I'll believe that rpm is a credible package management system. -_^
Admittedly it's been a while since I've used an rpm-based system ... but there are REASONS for that. Can one, now, do the equivalent of "apt-get install task-kde3" and have it not die with a billion and one "cannot install: libxxx required but not found" errors? If so, then rpm has finally matured to the point where apt was a few years ago.
Otherwise, in my mind, rpm is a nice convenient way to install single packages, but it doesn't meet my requirements for a package management system. The only problem I have with rpm is that (at least the last time I used it) it was stupid about dependencies. Has that changed?
All that having been said ... I run LFS. :)
Four words: 3G cellphones in Japan. I think wireless PDAs are getting feasible nowadays too.
neither Mosaic (the first visual browser) nor Netscape 1.0 support HTML table-based layouts
So lets all just use HTML 0.1 with only <br> tags and <a> tags. Whine whine whine...!
Well, I think you missed the point of that bit. That's not what he was saying, in fact he seemed to be advocating the exact opposite of what you say: throw away all the non-standard proprietary cruft that's gotten into our markup and use things that are nice, standard, and well-defined.
I do agree that this 'article' is little more than a nice shill for a book though ^^; Besides, standards and tutorials are available for free online. Buying a book to learn how to write markup right is nice only if you want to take it somewhere other than where your computer is. (Note that I'm writing this on an iBook though ... )
What a horrible, horrible thing to miss. And I missed it. Oh well, these things happen when you're in a hurry ... My bad. Kourino--
So it looks like they DON'T have that nice safe-harbour clause in this case. Good catch.
so, IANAL, but it looks like this suit isn't legally valid, under the DMCA of all things. (Not that we're surprised ... ^^; ) Now's the time to get serious with your boycotts if you haven't been already.
On the other hand, what about this? Say you work successfully as a programmer for five years, then get promoted to the position of software analyst and work as such for ten. After a while, you hear about some pressing issue that's very important, so much so that you feel your life could be affected negatively if it's mishandled. You do what a few do (ofter for the wrong reasons) and decide to run for political office. You are elected, and while in office you are confronted with many diverse issues that you need a lot of diverse knowledge to handle.
Can't happen to you, or won't? Well, it's nice that you believe that. I never though, four years ago, that I would even consider semi-retiring in a decade and a half or so and starting a band. Right now I'm in a position to consider doing just that some years down the read. My point, of course, is that it's really not such a great idea to plan your life with narrow views. Not only could you land yourself in a nice, steaming pile of shit, but you could miss out on a lot of nice opportunites.
Which brings me to my real point, it never hurts to know something that doesn't appear immediately useful. What if you land a job designing a software control on exercise equipment? Life is a complex system, so have a complex base of knowledge is one of your best bets!
After all, it's your life dealing with your laws in your country in your world, so don't you think you might be benefited by knowing more than how to make a radix tree?