You said:
Maybe because everyone thinks/knows their isntaller is better than the others'
That's not the case here. Almost everyone thinks the Mandrake, Red Hat, and SuSE installers are way better than the Debian installer. Heck, that's why the Debian people are writing a new installer.
I like being able to choose between Word/Wordperfect/Writer when I decide to write a document That misses the point. If you wanted a word processor "just right" for you, you would not write it from scratch, unless you were doing it for the educational experience. You would take an existing open source word processor that was close to what you wanted, and modify it. Same thing with installers.
I think the Mandrake installer is a bloated POS, and would much rather have Debian's Ha ha ha. The installer is bloated? You run it once. It doesn't get installed on your hard drive, or take up memory when you are using the system. Complaining about the installer being bloated makes about as much sense as complaining about the distribution coming on three CDs.
If you prefer Debian's installer, you are in a minority. Even the Debian developers mostly don't like it.
The whole reason Free/OpenSource Software exists is to show that we have a choice. If all factions had the same stuff, what's the point of having the movement in the first place
No, you are missing the point. Of course we have a choice, that's not the issue. The issue is it is stupid to write a new installer FROM SCRATCH instead of taking a good, existing, working installer and changing/customizing it for Debian.
The point of the free software movement is to have the source code. This gives you the ability to use the source, change the source, customize, enhance, fix bugs, etc. Of course it gives you all sorts of choices as well.
But to HAVE the source and NOT USE IT is stupid. And that's what anyone writing a new linux installer is doing.
I've been thinking about some of the same problems. I also suspect that, given the way things are going, the so-called "intellectual property" industries will pretty much control the internet in a few years - with the cooperation of ISPs, they will shut down peer-to-peer networking, police all file sharing, and pretty much force everyone to play along. People who use interesting geeky techniques to get around their blocking will get sued under the DMCA for circumvention.
So what do you do? I've also looked at freenet, and I'm not running a server for exactly the same reason you aren't - there's no way I'll donate my hard disk space and bandwidth to a system that people can use for swapping child porn.
But heck, we need something - something where there's a little space, some gaps in the system where people can do innovative stuff, but also where people who do seriously illegal stuff can be tracked down and prosecuted. The ideal medium seems to be a system where tracking people down is difficult enough that no one will bother to do it for friends sharing music.
Personally, my hopes are on "grid" style networking - if a few dozen people in a neighborhood set up wireless LAN access points, wired them all together with some nice routing, and run the whole thing on worthlessly out of date Pentium 200's running Linux... well, there's a network where people can have some fun. In some ways, it would be like the old BBS days before everyone had Internet.
People could put servers on the neighborhood grid, people could connect multiple gateways to the internet, local stores and services could find ways to advertise on it... a local neighborhood chat room could maybe be a useful thing...
And just firewall out the big, boring, commercial, controlled, corporate-sponsor-pop-up-ad-no-servers-allowed-mic rosoft-ownZ-Y00 net, and be happy on the local grid.
Maybe. Or maybe we are all just doomed, and Internet will turn into TV.
I agree with all of that. Just thought I'd point out that "something better" than MP3's has come along - ogg vorbis. I've been ripping all my stuff as oggs for the last few months, there are plugins for XMMS and WinAmp, and it sounds really really good. It's just as easy to set up GRip to encode stuff as Oggs as MP3. The only drawback is the encoder is slower than the LAME MP3 coder. But hey, you only need to encode it once.
At the bitrates I use (256 Kbps) I can't really tell the difference between MP3, OGG, and the original WAV. The limiting factor seems to be the quality of my sound card now.
And KPresenter is even usable. I recently ran a slide-show thingy for my brother's wedding, and I did the whole thing from KPresenter on my Linux machine. My presentation ended up being huge - over 50 full-screen pictures at 1024x768, with some text overlaid, a few transition effects, etc.
It's the first time I had ever used any kind of presentation software, and I was able to learn my way around it pretty well in less than an hour.
Two little gotcha's:
1. Make sure you get the latest version. This applies to almost all Open Source projects, they change so fast.
2. Turn off Autosaves. With a very large presentation, the every-5-minute-autosave completly froze the app for 30 seconds at a time while I was working on it. It took me a while to figure out what the problem was. Of course, that was with the Mandrake 8.0 kernel, now that I'm running a custom-compiled 2.4.16-low-latency I'm sure it would be much better...
But hey, I'm happy. I did the whole presentation with Linux and other free software - scanned the images with my USB scanner with SANE, did photo retouching and color balancing in the GIMP, loaded the images into KPresenter... no problem.
And now that the Linux binaries for Return to Casle Wolfenstein are out, I don't need Windows at all.
The World's Strongest Man competitions are already like this, a little. *cough* not that I would ever watch it, but it's a common occurrence during those contests for one of the competitors to blow out a joint, rip a tendon, or even break bones under the pressure. Those guys are huge, scary, steroid monsters who can lift cars and stuff. Seems like with enough training / drugs, muscles grow without much limit - other body parts become the weakest links.
The great thing is that there are a few ISPs that do this intelligently.
For the last 18 months I've had Verizon DSL in Redmond, WA, and my ISP was Northwest Link. NWLink's contract was simple: $10/month plus $12/gigabyte. One static IP. They didn't care what I did with it, no ports were blocked, no hassles... Had an OpenBSD box running NAT and firewall, a collection of Linux machines behind it... I ran a web server and could secure shell into my home machines from anywhere... beautiful. I don't think NWLink would have called that stealing, after all, the more traffic I put through it, the more they charged me.
Why aren't all ISPs like that? It's the only business model that makes sense.
On the other hand, NWLink was bought by some big conglomerate ISP since I signed up and I don't know if new signups can get the same deal. I guess I'll see now that I've moved...
No, it isn't a "solved" problem. And the Linux VM subsystem is a surprisingly good one.
Remember that benchmarking Linux against other OS'es back in the 2.2 kernel days showed that Linux was at least in the same ballpark as the best BSD and Microsoft OS'es, and the 2.4 kernels are even faster.
Of course there are lots of well known algorithms and approaches - take an advanced computer science operating systems course to find out - but it's a really difficult problem and it changes all the time, because hardware and user level software changes all the time. It's a combination of an art and a science. Many, many things have to be balanced against each other, hopefully using self-tuning systems.
An excellent VM for running one workload (say, a database) might suck horribly when running a different workload (like a huge multiprocess scientific computation).
Here are some of the things that make VM complicated. Consider how other operating systems deal with these:
- Virtual Memory. Many applications allocate far more memory than they ever use. People expect this to work. So almost all VM's allow programs to allocate much more memory than is actually available, even when including swap. That makes the next point more tricky:
- Out Of Memory. What should happen when a system runs out of memory? How do you detect when you are out of memory? If you are going to start killing processes when the system runs out of memory, what process should be chosen to die?
- Multiprocessors. List of memory pages need to be accessed safely by multiple processors at the same time. And this needs to happen quickly, even on systems with 64 or more processors.
- Portability. The Linux VM runs on everything from 486'es with 8 MB of RAM and 100 MB of swap to 16-processor, 64 GB RAM RISC systems to IBM 390 mainframes. These systems tend to have different hardware support - the details of the hardware TLB's, MMUs, CPU cache layout, CPU cache coherency... it's amazing how portable Linux is.
- Interaction of the VM with file systems. File systems use a lot of virtual memory, for buffering and cacheing. These parts of the system need to communicate with eachother and work together well to maximize performance. Linux supports a lot of filesystems and this gets complicated. For example, you may want to discard buffered file data while keeping metadata in memory when available memory is low.
- Swap. When should a system start swapping out? How hard should it try to swap out? What algorithms should be used to determine what pages should be swapped out? When swapping in, how much read-ahead should you do? Read ahead on swap-in might speed things up, but not if you are short on memory and end up discarding other pages...
- Accounting for memory usage is complicated by (among other things) memory-mapped files, memory shared between multiple processes, memory being used as buffers, and memory "locked" in to be non-swappable.
- Keeping track of the state of each page of memory - is it dirty (modified)? Anonymous? Buffer? Discardable? Zeroed out for reuse? Shared? Locked? Some combination of the above?
- Even worse: memory zones. On some multiprocessor systems, each processor may be able to access all the memory, but some (local RAM) may be reachable faster than others. The VM system should keep track of this and try to use faster memory when possible - but how do you balance that when the fast local RAM is getting full?
- Interactions with networking and other drivers. Sometimes drivers need to allocate memory to do what they do. This can get very tricky when the system is low on memory. What if you need to allocate memory in a filesystem driver in order to write out data to the disk to make space because you are running out of memory? Meanwhile network packets are arriving and you need to allocate memory to store them. Sometimes hardware devices need to have multiple contiguous pages allocated for doing DMA, but if space is tight it can be very hard to find contiguous blocks of free memory.
I'm not an expert on VM's either, but I've taken courses on operating system design and I read the kernel mailing list --- it is a hard, hard problem to make a fast, reliable, portable, feature-rich system.
If anyone out there has been having problems with 2.4 vm's (and there have been some problems) you should give 2.4.14-pre7 a try. Things have been moving fast on this front for a while now, but Linus thinks it's pretty much there now.
In his words, "In fact, I'd _really_ like to know of any VM loads that show bad behaviour. If you have a pet peeve about the VM, now is the time to speak up. Because otherwise I think I'm done.
This is an experimental patch to 2.4.13, and you shouldn't run it on an important machine, but the VM by all accounts is much improved.
Even Alan Cox (who has been maintaining the older Rik Van Riel version of the VM in his -ac patches) agrees that the new VM is faster and simpler, and he plans to switch to it as soon as it is reliable enough to pass his stress testing. (which should be really soon, it seems.)
(Yes, I spend an hour a day reading the kernel mailing list.)
Interesting. But your syllogism is not totally bulletproof. The major flaw with your argument is that studios could claim that a physical DVD contains both software and data. They would pretend that the DVD contains a "program" which plays the "movie data"
Then they can have it both ways: the data is protected under the first amendment, while the program is not. They don't want software to be first-amendment protected of course, and for DVDs they don't need it to be.
From what I understand of the DVD format, I think that would be bulls**t. But, they might be able to get it past a judge.
Other flaws with your proposed syllogism:
1. Not all movies are protected by the first amendment. (child porn)
2. Not all movies ARE software, because not all movies are on DVD.
A better version:
1. There exist DVDs which contain motion pictures protected by the first amendment as free speech in the United States.
2. DVDs contain software (as claimed by the studios)
3. The software and motion picture content of a DVD are inseparable. (the potentially weak point)
3. Therefore, there exists software which is protected by the first amendment as free speech in the United States.
I agree with the rest of your post - if you can get to point #3, it would be difficult for the studios to say that other software, including DeCSS, should not be protected as free speech.
BTW, the important thing about Warner w.r.t. the DeCSS case is that they are a member of the DVD CCA (the movie / CSS people), not the RIAA (the music people). They're all evil, so it's easy to get them mixed up...
Mixed messages: movies and Linux
on
Behind the Scenes
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· Score: 5, Insightful
What's really weird about Linux in the film industry is that the business / distribution / promotion side of the industry would love to outlaw free software. (SSSCA, DMCA, etc.)
Meanwhile, the production side has realized that it is really useful and is wholeheartedly embracing it.
You have to wonder if sooner or later some pointy-haired boss at the MPAA is going to wake up and go "WHAT! We USE Linux!? We use that communist, anti-American.... Well that had better stop immediately!"
I wonder how the "copyright" industries will try to resolve this - they don't want regular people to have powerful tools like programmable PCs and free software. But they sure want to use free software to make movies.
Maybe they'll go for an approach of requiring "computer licensing" but only if you use "non-approved" software. Most people wouldn't care because most people just run Windows, and they wouldn't need a license. Only Linux users, software developers, and computer science students would have to get licensed.
Kind of like you need a license for a car, but not for a bicycle. (Or continuing the analogy, Windows XP == tricycle...)
Yes, well... I think the general population of the US can probably be brainwashed into thinking that things like the DMCA and SSSCA are good, but I don't think they'll ever be convinced that it would be a good idea to go to war against... oh, Finland, say, "because those Scandanavian bastards are writing evil communist Free software that lets people copy music, and hurting American Industry!"... I think people would start thinking "uh, wait a minute, why do we have to go over there and get in a war when we could just outlaw it here?"
God help us all if anything like this ever happens.
I've been watching the United States slow slide towards becoming a police state since the early 90's, when I discovered the Clipper Chip fiasco on comp.org.eff.talk. Thanks for your dedicated work to fight this trend, it won't be forgotten, even if it fails...
So, my question is: If the United States becomes a hostile place for freedom (DMCA, SSSCA, extreme anti-terrorism laws, etc.) where are some good places to flee to?
I write and use free software, and I expect I'll be leaving the US within a couple of years. (I've got a great job, otherwise I'd be leaving already). I don't mind learning a different language... Do you know of any comparative study of different countries of the world, considering at least:
- free speech
- free software
- software patents
- Privacy
- public awareness of the above issues (Most important, perhaps!)
- A just and fair, uncorrupted legal system
- Reasonable balance of taxation, government spending on useful things like education, health care, etc.
- High standard of living
Someone tried to load an xbox executable with a bad format. It was likely that the executable was compiled with a different Xbox Development Kit version than the previously loaded executable.
Ummm, this is a screen shot of a crashed xbox from a kiosk in a software store.
How the heck do you think an executable compiled on a different Xbox Development Kit would get onto that box? Microsoft almost certainly sent these things out as packages - hardware, software, kiosk, marketing material, the works, all in one big crate to the store, along with detailed information on how to set it up.
Therefore, this image is an Xbox crashing - or at least, the DVD drive is broken - like the error message says - "could not load executable..." - so either the hardware or the software is bad.
Mine is one of the medium-high tower models. It's a really nice case, but yes, it was awfully overpriced. And mine didn't even come with a power supply - by the time you add the price of a premium power supply, it gets really spendy. However, I don't reget the purchase.
I got sick of all those garbage $50 cases made out of stamped metal with the razorblade sharp inside edges, cheaply riveted together.
The Lian Li case looks good (especially with Tux, Gnu, and Linux stickers on it!). More importantly, it fit my motherboard perfectly (a dual Slot 1 Tyan) and the drive cage at the bottom is PERFECT for a small RAID setup. I've got four 60 GB Maxtors stacked in there, and with the twin drive cooling fans right in front of them they don't even get warm to the touch. (I have a lot of MP3 and OGG files...) The cooling works well for the twin 800 Mhz CPUS as well.
The whole case comes apart with thumbscrews. You can pull out the power supply, the motherboard, all the drive cages... very quick and easy.
Best of all, even with all those fans it isn't too loud. The twin cooling fans on the front have a three-way switch that lets you adjust the speed (and noise) as appropriate for your cooling needs. I have mine at max speed, and I still have no trouble sleeping next to it.
From reading the Linux Audio mailing list, I can offer a quick summary: There is pretty decent hardware support for a variety of pro audio gear. See below. The software side is not quite so good. As one poster put it: "The problem is not a lack of developers for Linux Audio. The problem is that instead of two or three 90% complete software packages, we've got twelve or fifteen 20% complete packages."
That might be a little pessimistic, but there's some truth to it. However, there is usable software out there, even if it is not done. Broadcast 2000 was aimed at video editing, but was apparently useful for audio as well. Ardor is a hard disk recorder package. There's a lot of stuff out there - heck, just search Google and Sourceforge.
The ALSA project http://www.alsa-project.org/ is an important site if you are looking for pro audio Linux drivers and software.
The M-Audiopro hardware has a lot of good cards - everything from an inexpensive 24 bit / 96 Khz DA/AD card all the way up to the 10 channel Delta 1010, suitable for real pro / recording work. These cards have Linux support, and is probably your best bet for really good AD / DA and Midi under Linux.
The RME Hammerfall card is also supported under Linux. Other quality hardware (from Echo and other companies) is unfortunately not so well supported.
Personally, I'm planning on getting one of the M-Audio cards just for playing with.
This is the kind of comment that has stopped me from completely giving up on reading Slashdot. Thanks! Wish I hadn't already used up my moderator points.
(Replying to my own message on September 21, one week after the original Slashdot story and my posting regarding LinuxDA...)
For the record, I just got an email message from LinuxDA and they finally did put up the source code for download - I'm pulling it down now.
I don't know if the +5 post on Slashdot got someone's attention, or they just did get around to it eventually, but it's good to see that they did the right thing after all.
I think it would be very entertaining to watch Microsoft try to enforce this one. Can you imagine it? I'm sure there's a few news organizations that would be all over it.
Does someone out there want to volunteer to be a test case? Write a page in Frontpage detailing all the (true) nasty things that Microsoft has done, "disparage" them, call Bill names, and other rude things. But be careful to not actually say anything that violates a real law, like libel. A quick check with a real lawyer might be a good idea.
Then send an anonymous tip to Microsoft's Department of License Compliance, or whatever they call themselves, with the url, and see what happens. I would try this myself but I don't have Frontpage. Or even better - maybe a real news organization can do it:
CNN Headline: Microsoft Sues CNet for Frontpage License Violation: Today, Microsoft announced that they are suing CNet for violation of the terms of use of the FrontPage HTML editor. "The pseudonymous "Spencer Katt" columnist disparaged Microsoft, called Bill Gates a "World Dictator Wannabe", and said Frontpage is crap and generated awful HTML. But he used Frontpage to write the article, and that's a clear violation of our fearsome and deadly EULA, a Microsoft PR lackey told the press..."
Actually, I think there's a much more serious copyright violation of the GPL license going on. At least RTLinux makes the souce code available (contrary to the posted story, sigh, usual Slashdot fact checking...)
Anyway, the company LinuxDA has made modifications to Linux (the kernel) to run it on Palm Pilots. A demo version is freely available for download. (see http://www.linuxda.com/download/index.html)
There's a "Coming Soon" spot on that page for "Source Code For Linux Kernel". But it has been months, and no source has shown up.
Not only that, but they have been asked (by Rick Van Riel, one of the significant contributors and copyright holders of the Linux Kernel) to provide source.
They still have not provided source.
I sent them an email about this, and got the following form letter:
Dear User:
We are committed to the Linux Open Source Movement.
We are currently working on making the source code for the modifications to
the Linux kernel available. Please continue to check www.linuxda.com for
download availability.
Thank you for your continual patience and support.
Best Regards,
Linux DA Customer Support Team
I sent them another letter asking them if they thought they were violating the terms of the GPL by allowing months to go by without releasing the source, and if not, why not, but got no reply.
I also pointed out that it's not difficult to provide source (make mrproper, tar cvzf linuxda.tar.gz *, then ftp the file to the web site... it would take about 10 minutes.) Obviously they are purposely dragging their feet, and I'm a lot more worried that someone is getting away with that than the RTLinux patent thing.
I fully expect that if things keep going the way they are (i.e. "badly" for freedom and free speech) that all significant websites will end up having a sign in process like the Wall Street Journal does now.
You will be required to fill out a form saying you are not from Australia, Afghanistan, France, Germany, the U.K., the United States, or whatever (depends on what's on the website).... your IP will be checked and logged, and then you will be given access... maybe.
Big companies would like this, actually, as it would be such a pain that all the "little players" would either be forced off the net or have very boring content.
Damn. I'm so depressed about the future of the net - Dimitry was indited last night, now this, seems like every week there's some new stupidity. I'd support Freenet, but right now it's mostly child porn from what I hear, so I won't even run a server for it. But really, we need something like Freenet, but better organized - kind of a parallel, "underground" internet where national laws can't be applied, but where people can still link, surf, put up content and tell people about it...
well yes, that's why anyone who manages to mess things up in read-only mode should send in a bug report, because that would indicate an unknown, serious problem that should be fixed right away.
Problems in the write support are less serious, because they are not on by default and the developers know about them anyway.
I suspect the original poster was using the experimental write support. That used to be so bad that it probably should not have been in the kernel at all, but started getting better around 2.4.5 or so - search the LKML archives for "PATCH" and "NTFS" for details.
NTFS read-only works fine on my dual-boot machine, btw.
There is a developer actively working on NTFS support now. It should be safe for read-only mode.
Note that- write support for NTFS is a dangerous, EXPERIMENTAL feature that you have to explicitly select in the kernel configuration. Until recently, it was almost certain to destroy your disk, and it is still not recommended although rumor has it that it "mostly works now".
If you blew up an NT partition running in the "read only" mode, send in a bug report to the mailing list. If you want to experiment with write support, send in bug reports for that too, I'm sure the developer will be interested, but don't expect a lot of sympathy if you wipe out important data.
There's often a good reason why "EXPERIMENTAL" features are called that, even though sometimes it seems political - reiserfs, for example, is pretty safe - reported problems with it usually turn out to be hardware failures.
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You said:
Maybe because everyone thinks/knows their isntaller is better than the others'
That's not the case here. Almost everyone thinks the Mandrake, Red Hat, and SuSE installers are way better than the Debian installer. Heck, that's why the Debian people are writing a new installer.
I like being able to choose between Word/Wordperfect/Writer when I decide to write a document
That misses the point. If you wanted a word processor "just right" for you, you would not write it from scratch, unless you were doing it for the educational experience. You would take an existing open source word processor that was close to what you wanted, and modify it. Same thing with installers.
I think the Mandrake installer is a bloated POS, and would much rather have Debian's
Ha ha ha. The installer is bloated? You run it once. It doesn't get installed on your hard drive, or take up memory when you are using the system. Complaining about the installer being bloated makes about as much sense as complaining about the distribution coming on three CDs.
If you prefer Debian's installer, you are in a minority. Even the Debian developers mostly don't like it.
The whole reason Free/OpenSource Software exists is to show that we have a choice. If all factions had the same stuff, what's the point of having the movement in the first place
No, you are missing the point. Of course we have a choice, that's not the issue. The issue is it is stupid to write a new installer FROM SCRATCH instead of taking a good, existing, working installer and changing/customizing it for Debian.
The point of the free software movement is to have the source code. This gives you the ability to use the source, change the source, customize, enhance, fix bugs, etc. Of course it gives you all sorts of choices as well.
But to HAVE the source and NOT USE IT is stupid. And that's what anyone writing a new linux installer is doing.
Can someone PLEASE explain to me why the Debian people don't just take the Mandrake, or SuSE, or Red Hat installers and modify it to install Debian?
Hmmmm?
Writing another installer is just stupid. It's like writing another word processor.
And what's worse is that it misses the whole point of having Free Software! Debian people should know better!
I've been thinking about some of the same problems. I also suspect that, given the way things are going, the so-called "intellectual property" industries will pretty much control the internet in a few years - with the cooperation of ISPs, they will shut down peer-to-peer networking, police all file sharing, and pretty much force everyone to play along. People who use interesting geeky techniques to get around their blocking will get sued under the DMCA for circumvention.
c rosoft-ownZ-Y00 net, and be happy on the local grid.
So what do you do? I've also looked at freenet, and I'm not running a server for exactly the same reason you aren't - there's no way I'll donate my hard disk space and bandwidth to a system that people can use for swapping child porn.
But heck, we need something - something where there's a little space, some gaps in the system where people can do innovative stuff, but also where people who do seriously illegal stuff can be tracked down and prosecuted. The ideal medium seems to be a system where tracking people down is difficult enough that no one will bother to do it for friends sharing music.
Personally, my hopes are on "grid" style networking - if a few dozen people in a neighborhood set up wireless LAN access points, wired them all together with some nice routing, and run the whole thing on worthlessly out of date Pentium 200's running Linux... well, there's a network where people can have some fun. In some ways, it would be like the old BBS days before everyone had Internet.
People could put servers on the neighborhood grid, people could connect multiple gateways to the internet, local stores and services could find ways to advertise on it... a local neighborhood chat room could maybe be a useful thing...
And just firewall out the big, boring, commercial, controlled, corporate-sponsor-pop-up-ad-no-servers-allowed-mi
Maybe. Or maybe we are all just doomed, and Internet will turn into TV.
I agree with all of that. Just thought I'd point out that "something better" than MP3's has come along - ogg vorbis. I've been ripping all my stuff as oggs for the last few months, there are plugins for XMMS and WinAmp, and it sounds really really good. It's just as easy to set up GRip to encode stuff as Oggs as MP3. The only drawback is the encoder is slower than the LAME MP3 coder. But hey, you only need to encode it once.
At the bitrates I use (256 Kbps) I can't really tell the difference between MP3, OGG, and the original WAV. The limiting factor seems to be the quality of my sound card now.
And KPresenter is even usable. I recently ran a slide-show thingy for my brother's wedding, and I did the whole thing from KPresenter on my Linux machine. My presentation ended up being huge - over 50 full-screen pictures at 1024x768, with some text overlaid, a few transition effects, etc.
It's the first time I had ever used any kind of presentation software, and I was able to learn my way around it pretty well in less than an hour.
Two little gotcha's:
1. Make sure you get the latest version. This applies to almost all Open Source projects, they change so fast.
2. Turn off Autosaves. With a very large presentation, the every-5-minute-autosave completly froze the app for 30 seconds at a time while I was working on it. It took me a while to figure out what the problem was. Of course, that was with the Mandrake 8.0 kernel, now that I'm running a custom-compiled 2.4.16-low-latency I'm sure it would be much better...
But hey, I'm happy. I did the whole presentation with Linux and other free software - scanned the images with my USB scanner with SANE, did photo retouching and color balancing in the GIMP, loaded the images into KPresenter... no problem.
And now that the Linux binaries for Return to Casle Wolfenstein are out, I don't need Windows at all.
The World's Strongest Man competitions are already like this, a little. *cough* not that I would ever watch it, but it's a common occurrence during those contests for one of the competitors to blow out a joint, rip a tendon, or even break bones under the pressure. Those guys are huge, scary, steroid monsters who can lift cars and stuff. Seems like with enough training / drugs, muscles grow without much limit - other body parts become the weakest links.
Ugh.
The great thing is that there are a few ISPs that do this intelligently.
For the last 18 months I've had Verizon DSL in Redmond, WA, and my ISP was Northwest Link. NWLink's contract was simple: $10/month plus $12/gigabyte. One static IP. They didn't care what I did with it, no ports were blocked, no hassles... Had an OpenBSD box running NAT and firewall, a collection of Linux machines behind it... I ran a web server and could secure shell into my home machines from anywhere... beautiful. I don't think NWLink would have called that stealing, after all, the more traffic I put through it, the more they charged me.
Why aren't all ISPs like that? It's the only business model that makes sense.
On the other hand, NWLink was bought by some big conglomerate ISP since I signed up and I don't know if new signups can get the same deal. I guess I'll see now that I've moved...
No, it isn't a "solved" problem. And the Linux VM subsystem is a surprisingly good one.
Remember that benchmarking Linux against other OS'es back in the 2.2 kernel days showed that Linux was at least in the same ballpark as the best BSD and Microsoft OS'es, and the 2.4 kernels are even faster.
Of course there are lots of well known algorithms and approaches - take an advanced computer science operating systems course to find out - but it's a really difficult problem and it changes all the time, because hardware and user level software changes all the time. It's a combination of an art and a science. Many, many things have to be balanced against each other, hopefully using self-tuning systems.
An excellent VM for running one workload (say, a database) might suck horribly when running a different workload (like a huge multiprocess scientific computation).
Here are some of the things that make VM complicated. Consider how other operating systems deal with these:
- Virtual Memory. Many applications allocate far more memory than they ever use. People expect this to work. So almost all VM's allow programs to allocate much more memory than is actually available, even when including swap. That makes the next point more tricky:
- Out Of Memory. What should happen when a system runs out of memory? How do you detect when you are out of memory? If you are going to start killing processes when the system runs out of memory, what process should be chosen to die?
- Multiprocessors. List of memory pages need to be accessed safely by multiple processors at the same time. And this needs to happen quickly, even on systems with 64 or more processors.
- Portability. The Linux VM runs on everything from 486'es with 8 MB of RAM and 100 MB of swap to 16-processor, 64 GB RAM RISC systems to IBM 390 mainframes. These systems tend to have different hardware support - the details of the hardware TLB's, MMUs, CPU cache layout, CPU cache coherency... it's amazing how portable Linux is.
- Interaction of the VM with file systems. File systems use a lot of virtual memory, for buffering and cacheing. These parts of the system need to communicate with eachother and work together well to maximize performance. Linux supports a lot of filesystems and this gets complicated. For example, you may want to discard buffered file data while keeping metadata in memory when available memory is low.
- Swap. When should a system start swapping out? How hard should it try to swap out? What algorithms should be used to determine what pages should be swapped out? When swapping in, how much read-ahead should you do? Read ahead on swap-in might speed things up, but not if you are short on memory and end up discarding other pages...
- Accounting for memory usage is complicated by (among other things) memory-mapped files, memory shared between multiple processes, memory being used as buffers, and memory "locked" in to be non-swappable.
- Keeping track of the state of each page of memory - is it dirty (modified)? Anonymous? Buffer? Discardable? Zeroed out for reuse? Shared? Locked? Some combination of the above?
- Even worse: memory zones. On some multiprocessor systems, each processor may be able to access all the memory, but some (local RAM) may be reachable faster than others. The VM system should keep track of this and try to use faster memory when possible - but how do you balance that when the fast local RAM is getting full?
- Interactions with networking and other drivers. Sometimes drivers need to allocate memory to do what they do. This can get very tricky when the system is low on memory. What if you need to allocate memory in a filesystem driver in order to write out data to the disk to make space because you are running out of memory? Meanwhile network packets are arriving and you need to allocate memory to store them. Sometimes hardware devices need to have multiple contiguous pages allocated for doing DMA, but if space is tight it can be very hard to find contiguous blocks of free memory.
I'm not an expert on VM's either, but I've taken courses on operating system design and I read the kernel mailing list --- it is a hard, hard problem to make a fast, reliable, portable, feature-rich system.
If anyone out there has been having problems with 2.4 vm's (and there have been some problems) you should give 2.4.14-pre7 a try. Things have been moving fast on this front for a while now, but Linus thinks it's pretty much there now.
In his words, "In fact, I'd _really_ like to know of any VM loads that show bad behaviour. If you have a pet peeve about the VM, now is the time to speak up. Because otherwise I think I'm done.
This is an experimental patch to 2.4.13, and you shouldn't run it on an important machine, but the VM by all accounts is much improved.
Even Alan Cox (who has been maintaining the older Rik Van Riel version of the VM in his -ac patches) agrees that the new VM is faster and simpler, and he plans to switch to it as soon as it is reliable enough to pass his stress testing. (which should be really soon, it seems.)
(Yes, I spend an hour a day reading the kernel mailing list.)
oops. I can't count after 5 pm.
Interesting. But your syllogism is not totally bulletproof. The major flaw with your argument is that studios could claim that a physical DVD contains both software and data. They would pretend that the DVD contains a "program" which plays the "movie data"
Then they can have it both ways: the data is protected under the first amendment, while the program is not. They don't want software to be first-amendment protected of course, and for DVDs they don't need it to be.
From what I understand of the DVD format, I think that would be bulls**t. But, they might be able to get it past a judge.
Other flaws with your proposed syllogism:
1. Not all movies are protected by the first amendment. (child porn)
2. Not all movies ARE software, because not all movies are on DVD.
A better version:
1. There exist DVDs which contain motion pictures protected by the first amendment as free speech in the United States.
2. DVDs contain software (as claimed by the studios)
3. The software and motion picture content of a DVD are inseparable. (the potentially weak point)
3. Therefore, there exists software which is protected by the first amendment as free speech in the United States.
I agree with the rest of your post - if you can get to point #3, it would be difficult for the studios to say that other software, including DeCSS, should not be protected as free speech.
BTW, the important thing about Warner w.r.t. the DeCSS case is that they are a member of the DVD CCA (the movie / CSS people), not the RIAA (the music people). They're all evil, so it's easy to get them mixed up...
What's really weird about Linux in the film industry is that the business / distribution / promotion side of the industry would love to outlaw free software. (SSSCA, DMCA, etc.)
Meanwhile, the production side has realized that it is really useful and is wholeheartedly embracing it.
You have to wonder if sooner or later some pointy-haired boss at the MPAA is going to wake up and go "WHAT! We USE Linux!? We use that communist, anti-American.... Well that had better stop immediately!"
I wonder how the "copyright" industries will try to resolve this - they don't want regular people to have powerful tools like programmable PCs and free software. But they sure want to use free software to make movies.
Maybe they'll go for an approach of requiring "computer licensing" but only if you use "non-approved" software. Most people wouldn't care because most people just run Windows, and they wouldn't need a license. Only Linux users, software developers, and computer science students would have to get licensed.
Kind of like you need a license for a car, but not for a bicycle. (Or continuing the analogy, Windows XP == tricycle...)
Yes, well... I think the general population of the US can probably be brainwashed into thinking that things like the DMCA and SSSCA are good, but I don't think they'll ever be convinced that it would be a good idea to go to war against... oh, Finland, say, "because those Scandanavian bastards are writing evil communist Free software that lets people copy music, and hurting American Industry!"... I think people would start thinking "uh, wait a minute, why do we have to go over there and get in a war when we could just outlaw it here?"
God help us all if anything like this ever happens.
I've been watching the United States slow slide towards becoming a police state since the early 90's, when I discovered the Clipper Chip fiasco on comp.org.eff.talk. Thanks for your dedicated work to fight this trend, it won't be forgotten, even if it fails...
So, my question is: If the United States becomes a hostile place for freedom (DMCA, SSSCA, extreme anti-terrorism laws, etc.) where are some good places to flee to?
I write and use free software, and I expect I'll be leaving the US within a couple of years. (I've got a great job, otherwise I'd be leaving already). I don't mind learning a different language... Do you know of any comparative study of different countries of the world, considering at least:
- free speech
- free software
- software patents
- Privacy
- public awareness of the above issues (Most important, perhaps!)
- A just and fair, uncorrupted legal system
- Reasonable balance of taxation, government spending on useful things like education, health care, etc.
- High standard of living
Where would you go?
How the heck do you think an executable compiled on a different Xbox Development Kit would get onto that box? Microsoft almost certainly sent these things out as packages - hardware, software, kiosk, marketing material, the works, all in one big crate to the store, along with detailed information on how to set it up.
Therefore, this image is an Xbox crashing - or at least, the DVD drive is broken - like the error message says - "could not load executable..." - so either the hardware or the software is bad.
Mine is one of the medium-high tower models. It's a really nice case, but yes, it was awfully overpriced. And mine didn't even come with a power supply - by the time you add the price of a premium power supply, it gets really spendy. However, I don't reget the purchase.
I got sick of all those garbage $50 cases made out of stamped metal with the razorblade sharp inside edges, cheaply riveted together.
The Lian Li case looks good (especially with Tux, Gnu, and Linux stickers on it!). More importantly, it fit my motherboard perfectly (a dual Slot 1 Tyan) and the drive cage at the bottom is PERFECT for a small RAID setup. I've got four 60 GB Maxtors stacked in there, and with the twin drive cooling fans right in front of them they don't even get warm to the touch. (I have a lot of MP3 and OGG files...) The cooling works well for the twin 800 Mhz CPUS as well.
The whole case comes apart with thumbscrews. You can pull out the power supply, the motherboard, all the drive cages... very quick and easy.
Best of all, even with all those fans it isn't too loud. The twin cooling fans on the front have a three-way switch that lets you adjust the speed (and noise) as appropriate for your cooling needs. I have mine at max speed, and I still have no trouble sleeping next to it.
From reading the Linux Audio mailing list, I can offer a quick summary: There is pretty decent hardware support for a variety of pro audio gear. See below. The software side is not quite so good. As one poster put it: "The problem is not a lack of developers for Linux Audio. The problem is that instead of two or three 90% complete software packages, we've got twelve or fifteen 20% complete packages."
s _Guide/
/AD card all the way up to the 10 channel Delta 1010, suitable for real pro / recording work. These cards have Linux support, and is probably your best bet for really good AD / DA and Midi under Linux.
That might be a little pessimistic, but there's some truth to it. However, there is usable software out there, even if it is not done. Broadcast 2000 was aimed at video editing, but was apparently useful for audio as well. Ardor is a hard disk recorder package. There's a lot of stuff out there - heck, just search Google and Sourceforge.
The ALSA project http://www.alsa-project.org/ is an important site if you are looking for pro audio Linux drivers and software.
Now, about the hardware: http://www.linuxdj.com/audio/lad/ is a place to start.
Also check out http://www.boosthardware.com/LAU/Linux_Audio_User
The M-Audio pro hardware has a lot of good cards - everything from an inexpensive 24 bit / 96 Khz DA
The RME Hammerfall card is also supported under Linux. Other quality hardware (from Echo and other companies) is unfortunately not so well supported.
Personally, I'm planning on getting one of the M-Audio cards just for playing with.
This is the kind of comment that has stopped me from completely giving up on reading Slashdot. Thanks! Wish I hadn't already used up my moderator points.
FWIW, I read the Linux Kernel Mailing list and there have been a LOT of posts there over the last year about this drive.
Many people have trouble with it.
I have had two go bad myself.
I bought Maxtors for my spiffy new RAID-5.
(Replying to my own message on September 21, one week after the original Slashdot story and my posting regarding LinuxDA...)
For the record, I just got an email message from LinuxDA and they finally did put up the source code for download - I'm pulling it down now.
I don't know if the +5 post on Slashdot got someone's attention, or they just did get around to it eventually, but it's good to see that they did the right thing after all.
So, there's one less worry in the world...
I think it would be very entertaining to watch Microsoft try to enforce this one. Can you imagine it? I'm sure there's a few news organizations that would be all over it.
Does someone out there want to volunteer to be a test case? Write a page in Frontpage detailing all the (true) nasty things that Microsoft has done, "disparage" them, call Bill names, and other rude things. But be careful to not actually say anything that violates a real law, like libel. A quick check with a real lawyer might be a good idea.
Then send an anonymous tip to Microsoft's Department of License Compliance, or whatever they call themselves, with the url, and see what happens. I would try this myself but I don't have Frontpage. Or even better - maybe a real news organization can do it:
CNN Headline: Microsoft Sues CNet for Frontpage License Violation:
Today, Microsoft announced that they are suing CNet for violation of the terms of use of the FrontPage HTML editor. "The pseudonymous "Spencer Katt" columnist disparaged Microsoft, called Bill Gates a "World Dictator Wannabe", and said Frontpage is crap and generated awful HTML. But he used Frontpage to write the article, and that's a clear violation of our fearsome and deadly EULA, a Microsoft PR lackey told the press..."
Wheeee!
Anyway, the company LinuxDA has made modifications to Linux (the kernel) to run it on Palm Pilots. A demo version is freely available for download. (see http://www.linuxda.com/download/index.html)
There's a "Coming Soon" spot on that page for "Source Code For Linux Kernel". But it has been months, and no source has shown up.
Not only that, but they have been asked (by Rick Van Riel, one of the significant contributors and copyright holders of the Linux Kernel) to provide source.
They still have not provided source.
I sent them an email about this, and got the following form letter:
I sent them another letter asking them if they thought they were violating the terms of the GPL by allowing months to go by without releasing the source, and if not, why not, but got no reply.
I also pointed out that it's not difficult to provide source (make mrproper, tar cvzf linuxda.tar.gz *, then ftp the file to the web site... it would take about 10 minutes.) Obviously they are purposely dragging their feet, and I'm a lot more worried that someone is getting away with that than the RTLinux patent thing.
I fully expect that if things keep going the way they are (i.e. "badly" for freedom and free speech) that all significant websites will end up having a sign in process like the Wall Street Journal does now.
You will be required to fill out a form saying you are not from Australia, Afghanistan, France, Germany, the U.K., the United States, or whatever (depends on what's on the website).... your IP will be checked and logged, and then you will be given access... maybe.
Big companies would like this, actually, as it would be such a pain that all the "little players" would either be forced off the net or have very boring content.
Damn. I'm so depressed about the future of the net - Dimitry was indited last night, now this, seems like every week there's some new stupidity. I'd support Freenet, but right now it's mostly child porn from what I hear, so I won't even run a server for it. But really, we need something like Freenet, but better organized - kind of a parallel, "underground" internet where national laws can't be applied, but where people can still link, surf, put up content and tell people about it...
well yes, that's why anyone who manages to mess things up in read-only mode should send in a bug report, because that would indicate an unknown, serious problem that should be fixed right away.
Problems in the write support are less serious, because they are not on by default and the developers know about them anyway.
I suspect the original poster was using the experimental write support. That used to be so bad that it probably should not have been in the kernel at all, but started getting better around 2.4.5 or so - search the LKML archives for "PATCH" and "NTFS" for details.
NTFS read-only works fine on my dual-boot machine, btw.
There is a developer actively working on NTFS support now. It should be safe for read-only mode.
Note that- write support for NTFS is a dangerous, EXPERIMENTAL feature that you have to explicitly select in the kernel configuration. Until recently, it was almost certain to destroy your disk, and it is still not recommended although rumor has it that it "mostly works now".
If you blew up an NT partition running in the "read only" mode, send in a bug report to the mailing list. If you want to experiment with write support, send in bug reports for that too, I'm sure the developer will be interested, but don't expect a lot of sympathy if you wipe out important data.
There's often a good reason why "EXPERIMENTAL" features are called that, even though sometimes it seems political - reiserfs, for example, is pretty safe - reported problems with it usually turn out to be hardware failures.