We have switched completely to Opteron for our gruntier servers now, and it seems good. Certainly the em64t processors don't rate in comparison.
Unfortunately for Dell this has meant that they only got orders for the low-end gear from us for the last 12 months, so their failure has forced us to experience some of their opposition...
You betcha there's a difference. I'm a fairly full-on Linux geek in a company with 34-odd staff using Linux on the Desktop and one Graphics Designer... running Photoshop under Windows.
On the home front, my wife is also a graphics designer. She has two PCs: a dual-Athlon MP 2100+ with 2G RAM running Linux, and a Celeron 450 with 512M RAM running Windows 98. The Windows box is used for photoshop and photoshop only - she can't even do web browsing, printing or scanning on it.
I have even installed Photoshop on the Linux box, but she still flicks back to Windows 98 to run Photoshop so there must be some serious subtleties about the Photoshop UI under real Windows 98 vs Wine's emulation. To me Photoshop 7 seems to run OK under Wine, and on a dual Athlon 2100+ it is _heaps_ faster under than natively under Win98 on a Celeron 450.
Well eventually that old Windows box will crap out and I sure hope Wine does the needful by then, or we'll have to shell out more for another machine solely to run Photoshop.
Both of these people would be only too happy to be running a Linux version of Photoshop, too. As it stands they are the odd ones out in an environment where everyone around them is using Linux.
The distribution (including it's being freely distributed) is being backed by Mark Shuttleworth and I think it is likely to last a while. I have no association with Mark or Ubuntu, but there was a lot of discussion around this release at Debconf4.
Since there is no option to buy the CDs I think it will very likely last for more than a few releases.
I've ordered a bunch of CDs myself, and plan on giving them out all over, including burning some more from the ones I receive.
There are well-founded alternative arguments as well.
If you have two companies wrestling for market share in a particular area, but if one of them is the no-contest, hands-down winner in a 10% segment and they are then only really fighting over the 90% remainder, then that company has an advantage.
That 10% of the market (20% of their own market share) is like a base they don't have to worry about. If the company that doesn't compete in the 10% is totally successful, they have a competitor who can still come back from that base. If the 10% one is totally successful they have wiped out the competition.
But there are more subtle reasons for supporting the wider market - it isn't simply about 'we can make money selling video cards to 10 million Linux users'. Those 10 million users are almost by definition not "average" users. Of the people I know who run Windows, vs the people I know who run Linux, there are many many more of the Windows people who are just "users", and many many more of the Linux people who are "early adopters" and get looked to for advice by their friends. That's an important market to cultivate, if you're trying to sell the latest and greatest hardware. ATI seem to be making the mistake of thinking that only hardcore gamers influence people's purchasing decisions, but that is soo not the case.
Also, your points about driver development costs are not necessarily true. I have seen people purport to know exactly the oppposite from their own experience, i.e. that WHQL costs $$$ to the developer. Other people have asserted that the driver architecture under Windows is somewhat baroque and difficult to write. A company that did the job right should be able to reuse an awful lot of code across platforms in any case.
In fact Familiar is partly based on Debian, using ipkg rather than apt / dpkg and command like:
ipkg update
ipkg upgrade
will do exactly what you expect them to, coming from a Debian environment. It's true that there aren't as many packages though - around 800-odd in the current unstable feed I think, which includes gpe, opie, and a fair amount of other stuff.
I'm very impressed with the OpenEmbedded build system too - it seems to be a very well-thought-out environment for cross-compiling to a customised image.
It may also be possible to go from a Familiar installation to a Debian one with a dchroot. I recently did that to convert from i386/woody to sarge/pure64 on an Opteron box, and it worked well.
Yes, the 9200 is OK, but subsequently ATI have not released good drivers for 9500 and higher.
I have a laptop with a 9700 in it, and the XFree86 or X.Org drivers are not 3D accelerated. The download from ATI doesn't work with ACPI suspend / resume in my laptop, which kind of sucks with a laptop. Until recently they also just kind of crashed randomly, etc, etc.
At home I had an ATI 7500 in my wife's machine. I had endless problems with the binary drivers from ATI and eventually replaced it with an NVidia card which has been excellent, even if I do have to use binary drivers.
While I dislike the fact that the drivers are binary, the likely fact is that both of these companies infringe each other's patents and copyrights to a large degree, and if they open-sourced their drivers they would end up with lawsuits forever, kind of in a deadly embrace.
For this reason I don't expect to see binary drivers any time soon. Maybe a new company can come along, and produce decent video hardware, and open-source drivers, without infringing patents and copyrights. That would be great, but I won't hold my breath.
You should come to New Zealand sometime. I generally buy ice at the local gas station, but I'm sure if I wanted to I could get it from the supermarket.
Anyway, what else would you fill the chilli-bin with to keep the beer at the right temperature?
Which is, of course, why ice doesn't sell in England: they drink beer at the wrong temperature.:-)
We're using Nagios (multiple redundant geographically diverse installations) and RRDTool fairly successfully, but that's for maybe 200 machines, tops.
From looking at what we've achieved with these I would say that you will need to be careful trying to scale them to large networks. They can start huge numbers of processes each minute, when monitoring many servers.
It depends what you're monitoring, of course - in our case we are monitoring maybe 20-30 operational parameters on each server. If we were only monitoring a single parameter then we could probably look at around 1-2000 machines from a single P4-based monitoring box, without any real problems. Using a 2.6 kernel on the monitoring box would also dramatically increase the scalability of it all.
Scalability issues bite similarly with rrdtool: numbers of parameters monitored per server can ramp the load on the monitoring machine(s) quite quickly. Again that is process load, not CPU load though, and a 2.6 kernel will be significantly better in this area. It can also be resolved by scripting the collection process better - not just running some collect-the-statistics routine from cron every minute.
If you're looking at monitoring 1000's of systems though, maybe you have enough of a budget to be able to plan around these issues.
I'm sure that ultimately all monitoring apps run into issues with how many (parameters * servers) each monitoring system can monitor too.
You are likely to know a lot more than me about all this then, but it appears that Debian has two packages for Electonic Circuit Design: GNU EDA ("geda") and "electric". I have used neither of these, but they both claim to be functional, although GNU EDA suggests it is alpha. YMMV.
For CAD the one I have used is QCad, which takes a bit of time to get used to the UI, but appears to be fairly functional, and it has been around and improving for some time.
In all of these cases these are not "industry-leading" applications, I am sure, but they are all quite capable of meeting basic needs. If you haven't tried them, I suggest you see how much of what you need is met by them.
Also, as you point out, EAGLE does appear to be a pretty good product too, and for a relatively trivial price.
It would be really nice if they'd just check to see if they were old unmodified config files and replace them if they were...
This is something that Debian seems to do right, so perhaps Gentoo should be taking a look at that bit of code.
Debian maintains an md5 of the originally installed configuration file, and if it hasn't changed, silently installs the new one. If it has changed then the user gets a menu offering a diff, an overwrite, or a leave untouched (the default) and the menu is re-presented after the diff, if you choose that. More recently I see options for a three-way diff and three-way merge, which are much simpler than a unified diff, and tend to highlight exactly the right stuff.
As for the breadth of software available under Linux distributions (and really, all distributions have a huge variety - no need to be partisan, even if I am a Debian Developer:-) it is hard for Windows to scale in this way to having a continuously improving pool of things that all work together in relative harmony, but are all developed separately by individual and largely uncoordinated teams. For Windows to do this they would need to be paying all those people for their participation, because that's the model on which they have founded their empire.
It's no wonder we see Microsoft VPs screaming about developers - it's too big now, and to extend their empire they have to get people doing it for free, but the developers they will get are going to tend to be primarily motivated by money.
Big as Microsoft are, there are significant holes in their product line: graphic design, electronic circuit design, music composition, genealogy, CAD, Mathematical modelling, and so on. To some people these are killer apps, and FOSS does cover significant chunks in these areas. If it can cover the basics (which it mostly does now) then these will be the areas that will encourage people to switch.
We do a lot of Open Source work, but by far the bulk of it (especially for enterprise level applications) is done with Perl.
Of course if we were "bigger" or writing "bigger" applications, Java starts to see some advantages, but the biggest hurdle is to actually get a reliably installable version.
Sure, we can download it from IBM, or from Sun, or from Blackdown, but they all have differences of opinion, differences of quality and differences of ideals.
We use Debian for all of our systems, and every other damn software package we run is built and works for Debian, and plays nicely with everything else. But not Java. There's no standard place that it gets installed - to the extent that some packages will successfully identify that you have it, and others won't. It isn't in synch with the libc or libgcc that's current at any point in time. Since I upgraded my laptop to Mozilla 1.7, Java no longer works: not that it was ever particularly reliable.
So while there might be some wonderful advantages to building applications with Java, the general flakiness of my experiences with applications written to use it, means that I can't develop for it, because I can't inflict that flakiness onto my clients.
Partly, of course, this flaw is because Debian's approach to licensing means that something with the shackles around it that all JVM's will have, will never be part of core Debian. In fact though, that's mostly the case for any distribution, even the commercial ones, because they are all depending on open-source licenses for all the rest of the environment, and to be in synch with those, you have to be part of everyone's standard install.
Commercial distros must have to put lots of effort into making their setup work with their chosen JVM, rather than sticking the horse in front of the cart and making their chosen JVM work within their environment.
I sure would like to see an DFSG free implementation of Java, and I don't understand why this entails Sun "losing control" of the standard, and why they are in such a panic about allowing that to happen.
Download and build chkrootkit. This will detect a lot (most?) stealthed kits on Linux systems, and it is always my first port of call when I'm invited in to clean up after a breakin.
Plug in a hub (so all traffic can be seen by multiple machines - a switch ain't as good, unless it has a monitoring port) in front of the machine(s) and run tcpdump or ethereal on another system to watch traffic from the machine. This will let you watch exactly what traffic is happening on those weird ports, or watch outbound SMTP traffic for spammer activity.
We don't put Windows-based systems on the internet, partly for security reasons, and partly because we don't have any Windows specialists, so I can't help for on-the-box detection there, although I would expect a commercial virus scanner should find everything.
I only have very limited experience with non-geeks using linux
While this is no doubt true for you, you should consider also that a book doesn't have to be a solution for everyone for it to be a very worthwhile and useful book.
My own mother certainly would read such a book. Whenever my parents get some new technology she will sit down and read the documentation, cover to cover, going through all of the examples, until she understands it. That might not make her an average 70-year-old, but it does mean that there is some sort of a market for this.
So while my father would fit more within your experience, my mother would love a book like this to go with her shiny new Linux install.
Unfortunately I haven't got my parents running Linux yet. I did try once a few years ago, but had problems getting my father's #1 most important application working: Microsoft Encarta World Atlas.
I am tempted to try again now though (using the latest Wine, WineX or Crossover Office to run the Windows apps) because I think that the experience would be better for them now they've gone through the nightmare of a brand-new (but unpatched) Windows XP box and a dial-up internet connection.
If I do try again I think I will definitely be buying them this book, or something similar, to go along with the installation. At least they are already happy users of Mozilla and OpenOffice.org:-)
Yep, you're the only one. If you haven't read this then you're undereducated: fact.
Here in New Zealand I give this book to any new employee who is ready to understand it.
The learning around the idea of the second-system effect alone is worth it, but a thoughtful person will inevitably start looking for (and seeing:-) meta-behaviour around projects after reading this, and that is truly invaluable.
So, you're a slashdotter, and an Indian (so you assert, albeit anonymously). You're commenting on this. Why do you think others in Slashdot's readership can't be equally (or better) qualified?
I'm not Indian myself, and I don't pretend to know what's best for India either, but I'm sure that Slahdot's readership includes plenty of Indians and expatriate Indians who do have worthwhile things to share.
I think I'll stop now, because I'm starting to foam at the mouth...:-)
I wonder what the latency is?
on
eyeBlog
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I wonder what the latency is between when someone hears something interesting, and when they look up at the person who is speaking.
It seems to me that this sort of thing (great as the idea is) should be recording full-time, and then discarding anything that hasn't prompted the wearer's interest with "N" seconds.
There are probably also ways to detect the wearer's interest outside of trying to figure if they are looking at a person. Eyeball behaviour. Head behaviour. Mental activity. Probably the sorts of cluster of patterns that some sort or neural net would do well with once it was trained to recognise them.
It's all a great idea though, and naturally enough one that has seen more mature versions appearing in SF books for decades. Good to see reality moving in this direction too.
I've been using ACPI sleep from the day I got this laptop, both suspend to ram and suspend to disk, with 2.6.x kernels. Initially I had to apply a few patches for some USB stuff, but that seems no longer needed from 2.6.5 and 2.6.6 has worked all day today (suspended / resumed three times so far).
Things are much better for me more recently though, now I have built X.Org R6.7 and my Radeon Mobility 9700 is all good to go too.
If you don't want to build your own kernels, you needn't do that either. The latest Knoppix includes an option to boot a 2.6 kernel (type "knopix26" at the boot prompt), and I have seen success stories discussed on the Debian Laptop mailing list as well, using the standard Debian 2.6 kernel.
With the Debian kernel you have to add "acpi=on" to the Grub/Lilo command line, but that isn't needed for Knoppix.
I don't think he was disputing that the installer sucked in previous versions (although the new one seems to have substantially resolved most issues). What he was saying was that you don't need to reinstall.
We have a bunch of machines in my company, and the installs were all done essentially "when the box was bought", and then sometimes we upgrade the hardware.. new disk here, new motherboard there...
Even in amongst all this, I have original Debian boxes that have not been "reinstalled" in seven years! These systems have just been upgraded, more or less continuously (for security patches) and occasionally (for new major releases). And they just work! The fact that they still work, without wierd crufty unexplained problems that give someone the idea that "Hey, it might be time for a reinstall here!".
Nope. They just carry on.
Our LAN server started as a P100 with 6G disk and 32M RAM, and the same installation is now running kernel 2.6.6 on a P4 2.8, 2G RAM, with 4xSATA and 2xPATA 120G software RAID 5.
And nobody has ever even made the merest suggestion that we should reinstall. Why should they?
We have a bunch of people in the office who choose to run Mandrake on their desktop systems, and that's fine. Even one of our sysadmins does that, but he is totally behind Debian on the server - even though he wasn't when he joined the company.
Of course if you're running on i386, then the best Debian installer is Knoppix, or MEPIS or something like that.
Hardly - I said he's over-generalising, but within any sufficiently large group of individuals there will always be annoying little pricks.
I don't even agree that Debian has more than it's fair share, just that the nature of the beast is that the organisation is comprised of people who actually care. Passionately.
As with any group of over 1000 individuals, your statement is a vast generalisation.
How can you call us "rude and confrontational" when all you are basing that on are some mailing list posts, primarily in a mailing list which is renowned for that behaviour.
Personally, as a Debian Developer, I try to assist people and fix bugs in my packages, as my way of contributing back to a phenomenal set of software. Debian has over 5000 packages in the distribution, and while those are mostly not written by DDs, they are packaged, and made to play together nicely and install, upgrade and uninstall cleanly, and the whole damn thing just works.
Yes, of course Debian Developers are principled people who care passionately about things other than software, and if you stick a thousand of them in a mailing list together there is bound to be fire! And hell, some of us are geeks without social skill. Cry me a river.
Could be, although you have to be pretty good with people to keep a job waiting tables.
Also, remember that if you are an asshole, and I have no way of knowing of course, it is quite likely that people will not tell you so to your face.
I have been unemployed myself, but only for eight months or so, when a series of contracts changed their timetable and I was left without a job at a bad time of year. It's tough, I know, and when I got out the end of it I was extremely motivated to work hard.
I interview most people who come looking for a job at our company, and the hardest ones to turn down have definitely been the ones who are willing to work for nothing for a month or two. In my country it is a significant business risk to take on a new employee because if they are no good it will take the best part of a year to lose them (minimum) and if they are grumpy about that, and you slipped up on the process somewhere, you could well still find yourself facing court action. If we have any doubts now we create a defined short-term contract and try someone out on that - if they do a good job (and that includes fitting in with everyone and dealing with clients OK), we offer them a permanent position.
I've had people through my door who thought the world of themselves, but no matter how good they thought they were I need some sort of proof before I could employ them, and it is certainly tempting to believe those opinions were inflated. I don't tell those people that I think they are up themselves - I simply tell them that we don't have any role for them at the moment...
Slashdot Mirror
We have switched completely to Opteron for our gruntier servers now, and it seems good. Certainly the em64t processors don't rate in comparison.
Unfortunately for Dell this has meant that they only got orders for the low-end gear from us for the last 12 months, so their failure has forced us to experience some of their opposition...
You betcha there's a difference. I'm a fairly full-on Linux geek in a company with 34-odd staff using Linux on the Desktop and one Graphics Designer... running Photoshop under Windows.
On the home front, my wife is also a graphics designer. She has two PCs: a dual-Athlon MP 2100+ with 2G RAM running Linux, and a Celeron 450 with 512M RAM running Windows 98. The Windows box is used for photoshop and photoshop only - she can't even do web browsing, printing or scanning on it.
I have even installed Photoshop on the Linux box, but she still flicks back to Windows 98 to run Photoshop so there must be some serious subtleties about the Photoshop UI under real Windows 98 vs Wine's emulation. To me Photoshop 7 seems to run OK under Wine, and on a dual Athlon 2100+ it is _heaps_ faster under than natively under Win98 on a Celeron 450.
Well eventually that old Windows box will crap out and I sure hope Wine does the needful by then, or we'll have to shell out more for another machine solely to run Photoshop.
Both of these people would be only too happy to be running a Linux version of Photoshop, too. As it stands they are the odd ones out in an environment where everyone around them is using Linux.
The distribution (including it's being freely distributed) is being backed by Mark Shuttleworth and I think it is likely to last a while. I have no association with Mark or Ubuntu, but there was a lot of discussion around this release at Debconf4.
Since there is no option to buy the CDs I think it will very likely last for more than a few releases.
I've ordered a bunch of CDs myself, and plan on giving them out all over, including burning some more from the ones I receive.
There are well-founded alternative arguments as well.
If you have two companies wrestling for market share in a particular area, but if one of them is the no-contest, hands-down winner in a 10% segment and they are then only really fighting over the 90% remainder, then that company has an advantage.
That 10% of the market (20% of their own market share) is like a base they don't have to worry about. If the company that doesn't compete in the 10% is totally successful, they have a competitor who can still come back from that base. If the 10% one is totally successful they have wiped out the competition.
But there are more subtle reasons for supporting the wider market - it isn't simply about 'we can make money selling video cards to 10 million Linux users'. Those 10 million users are almost by definition not "average" users. Of the people I know who run Windows, vs the people I know who run Linux, there are many many more of the Windows people who are just "users", and many many more of the Linux people who are "early adopters" and get looked to for advice by their friends. That's an important market to cultivate, if you're trying to sell the latest and greatest hardware. ATI seem to be making the mistake of thinking that only hardcore gamers influence people's purchasing decisions, but that is soo not the case.
Also, your points about driver development costs are not necessarily true. I have seen people purport to know exactly the oppposite from their own experience, i.e. that WHQL costs $$$ to the developer. Other people have asserted that the driver architecture under Windows is somewhat baroque and difficult to write. A company that did the job right should be able to reuse an awful lot of code across platforms in any case.
In fact Familiar is partly based on Debian, using ipkg rather than apt / dpkg and command like:
ipkg update
ipkg upgrade
will do exactly what you expect them to, coming from a Debian environment. It's true that there aren't as many packages though - around 800-odd in the current unstable feed I think, which includes gpe, opie, and a fair amount of other stuff.
I'm very impressed with the OpenEmbedded build system too - it seems to be a very well-thought-out environment for cross-compiling to a customised image.
It may also be possible to go from a Familiar installation to a Debian one with a dchroot. I recently did that to convert from i386/woody to sarge/pure64 on an Opteron box, and it worked well.
50,000 feet is certainly doable in a plane - not that much higher than where a commercial international flight gets to.
And there are things that will get to 60 miles without too much trouble...
Yes, the 9200 is OK, but subsequently ATI have not released good drivers for 9500 and higher.
I have a laptop with a 9700 in it, and the XFree86 or X.Org drivers are not 3D accelerated. The download from ATI doesn't work with ACPI suspend / resume in my laptop, which kind of sucks with a laptop. Until recently they also just kind of crashed randomly, etc, etc.
At home I had an ATI 7500 in my wife's machine. I had endless problems with the binary drivers from ATI and eventually replaced it with an NVidia card which has been excellent, even if I do have to use binary drivers.
While I dislike the fact that the drivers are binary, the likely fact is that both of these companies infringe each other's patents and copyrights to a large degree, and if they open-sourced their drivers they would end up with lawsuits forever, kind of in a deadly embrace.
For this reason I don't expect to see binary drivers any time soon. Maybe a new company can come along, and produce decent video hardware, and open-source drivers, without infringing patents and copyrights. That would be great, but I won't hold my breath.
You should come to New Zealand sometime. I generally buy ice at the local gas station, but I'm sure if I wanted to I could get it from the supermarket.
Anyway, what else would you fill the chilli-bin with to keep the beer at the right temperature?
Which is, of course, why ice doesn't sell in England: they drink beer at the wrong temperature. :-)
From looking at what we've achieved with these I would say that you will need to be careful trying to scale them to large networks. They can start huge numbers of processes each minute, when monitoring many servers.
It depends what you're monitoring, of course - in our case we are monitoring maybe 20-30 operational parameters on each server. If we were only monitoring a single parameter then we could probably look at around 1-2000 machines from a single P4-based monitoring box, without any real problems. Using a 2.6 kernel on the monitoring box would also dramatically increase the scalability of it all.
Scalability issues bite similarly with rrdtool: numbers of parameters monitored per server can ramp the load on the monitoring machine(s) quite quickly. Again that is process load, not CPU load though, and a 2.6 kernel will be significantly better in this area. It can also be resolved by scripting the collection process better - not just running some collect-the-statistics routine from cron every minute.
If you're looking at monitoring 1000's of systems though, maybe you have enough of a budget to be able to plan around these issues.
I'm sure that ultimately all monitoring apps run into issues with how many (parameters * servers) each monitoring system can monitor too.
I think that this means that 9:00pm eastern is 1:00pm for me. So presumably this has already happened now...
It's in the standard Debian repository, so the details are all configured at install time, when you choose the country you are in.
You are likely to know a lot more than me about all this then, but it appears that Debian has two packages for Electonic Circuit Design: GNU EDA ("geda") and "electric". I have used neither of these, but they both claim to be functional, although GNU EDA suggests it is alpha. YMMV.
For CAD the one I have used is QCad, which takes a bit of time to get used to the UI, but appears to be fairly functional, and it has been around and improving for some time.
In all of these cases these are not "industry-leading" applications, I am sure, but they are all quite capable of meeting basic needs. If you haven't tried them, I suggest you see how much of what you need is met by them.
Also, as you point out, EAGLE does appear to be a pretty good product too, and for a relatively trivial price.
This is something that Debian seems to do right, so perhaps Gentoo should be taking a look at that bit of code.
Debian maintains an md5 of the originally installed configuration file, and if it hasn't changed, silently installs the new one. If it has changed then the user gets a menu offering a diff, an overwrite, or a leave untouched (the default) and the menu is re-presented after the diff, if you choose that. More recently I see options for a three-way diff and three-way merge, which are much simpler than a unified diff, and tend to highlight exactly the right stuff.
As for the breadth of software available under Linux distributions (and really, all distributions have a huge variety - no need to be partisan, even if I am a Debian Developer :-) it is hard for Windows to scale in this way to having a continuously improving pool of things that all work together in relative harmony, but are all developed separately by individual and largely uncoordinated teams. For Windows to do this they would need to be paying all those people for their participation, because that's the model on which they have founded their empire.
It's no wonder we see Microsoft VPs screaming about developers - it's too big now, and to extend their empire they have to get people doing it for free, but the developers they will get are going to tend to be primarily motivated by money.
Big as Microsoft are, there are significant holes in their product line: graphic design, electronic circuit design, music composition, genealogy, CAD, Mathematical modelling, and so on. To some people these are killer apps, and FOSS does cover significant chunks in these areas. If it can cover the basics (which it mostly does now) then these will be the areas that will encourage people to switch.
We do a lot of Open Source work, but by far the bulk of it (especially for enterprise level applications) is done with Perl.
Of course if we were "bigger" or writing "bigger" applications, Java starts to see some advantages, but the biggest hurdle is to actually get a reliably installable version.
Sure, we can download it from IBM, or from Sun, or from Blackdown, but they all have differences of opinion, differences of quality and differences of ideals.
We use Debian for all of our systems, and every other damn software package we run is built and works for Debian, and plays nicely with everything else. But not Java. There's no standard place that it gets installed - to the extent that some packages will successfully identify that you have it, and others won't. It isn't in synch with the libc or libgcc that's current at any point in time. Since I upgraded my laptop to Mozilla 1.7, Java no longer works: not that it was ever particularly reliable.
So while there might be some wonderful advantages to building applications with Java, the general flakiness of my experiences with applications written to use it, means that I can't develop for it, because I can't inflict that flakiness onto my clients.
Partly, of course, this flaw is because Debian's approach to licensing means that something with the shackles around it that all JVM's will have, will never be part of core Debian. In fact though, that's mostly the case for any distribution, even the commercial ones, because they are all depending on open-source licenses for all the rest of the environment, and to be in synch with those, you have to be part of everyone's standard install.
Commercial distros must have to put lots of effort into making their setup work with their chosen JVM, rather than sticking the horse in front of the cart and making their chosen JVM work within their environment.
I sure would like to see an DFSG free implementation of Java, and I don't understand why this entails Sun "losing control" of the standard, and why they are in such a panic about allowing that to happen.
Here's a couple of things you could do:
Download and build chkrootkit. This will detect a lot (most?) stealthed kits on Linux systems, and it is always my first port of call when I'm invited in to clean up after a breakin.
Plug in a hub (so all traffic can be seen by multiple machines - a switch ain't as good, unless it has a monitoring port) in front of the machine(s) and run tcpdump or ethereal on another system to watch traffic from the machine. This will let you watch exactly what traffic is happening on those weird ports, or watch outbound SMTP traffic for spammer activity.
We don't put Windows-based systems on the internet, partly for security reasons, and partly because we don't have any Windows specialists, so I can't help for on-the-box detection there, although I would expect a commercial virus scanner should find everything.
While this is no doubt true for you, you should consider also that a book doesn't have to be a solution for everyone for it to be a very worthwhile and useful book.
My own mother certainly would read such a book. Whenever my parents get some new technology she will sit down and read the documentation, cover to cover, going through all of the examples, until she understands it. That might not make her an average 70-year-old, but it does mean that there is some sort of a market for this.
So while my father would fit more within your experience, my mother would love a book like this to go with her shiny new Linux install.
Unfortunately I haven't got my parents running Linux yet. I did try once a few years ago, but had problems getting my father's #1 most important application working: Microsoft Encarta World Atlas.
I am tempted to try again now though (using the latest Wine, WineX or Crossover Office to run the Windows apps) because I think that the experience would be better for them now they've gone through the nightmare of a brand-new (but unpatched) Windows XP box and a dial-up internet connection.
If I do try again I think I will definitely be buying them this book, or something similar, to go along with the installation. At least they are already happy users of Mozilla and OpenOffice.org :-)
Here in New Zealand I give this book to any new employee who is ready to understand it.
The learning around the idea of the second-system effect alone is worth it, but a thoughtful person will inevitably start looking for (and seeing :-) meta-behaviour around projects after reading this, and that is truly invaluable.
So, you're a slashdotter, and an Indian (so you assert, albeit anonymously). You're commenting on this. Why do you think others in Slashdot's readership can't be equally (or better) qualified?
I'm not Indian myself, and I don't pretend to know what's best for India either, but I'm sure that Slahdot's readership includes plenty of Indians and expatriate Indians who do have worthwhile things to share.
I think I'll stop now, because I'm starting to foam at the mouth... :-)
I wonder what the latency is between when someone hears something interesting, and when they look up at the person who is speaking.
It seems to me that this sort of thing (great as the idea is) should be recording full-time, and then discarding anything that hasn't prompted the wearer's interest with "N" seconds.
There are probably also ways to detect the wearer's interest outside of trying to figure if they are looking at a person. Eyeball behaviour. Head behaviour. Mental activity. Probably the sorts of cluster of patterns that some sort or neural net would do well with once it was trained to recognise them.
It's all a great idea though, and naturally enough one that has seen more mature versions appearing in SF books for decades. Good to see reality moving in this direction too.
Things are much better for me more recently though, now I have built X.Org R6.7 and my Radeon Mobility 9700 is all good to go too.
If you don't want to build your own kernels, you needn't do that either. The latest Knoppix includes an option to boot a 2.6 kernel (type "knopix26" at the boot prompt), and I have seen success stories discussed on the Debian Laptop mailing list as well, using the standard Debian 2.6 kernel.
With the Debian kernel you have to add "acpi=on" to the Grub/Lilo command line, but that isn't needed for Knoppix.
*sigh*
I don't think he was disputing that the installer sucked in previous versions (although the new one seems to have substantially resolved most issues). What he was saying was that you don't need to reinstall.
We have a bunch of machines in my company, and the installs were all done essentially "when the box was bought", and then sometimes we upgrade the hardware.. new disk here, new motherboard there...
Even in amongst all this, I have original Debian boxes that have not been "reinstalled" in seven years! These systems have just been upgraded, more or less continuously (for security patches) and occasionally (for new major releases). And they just work! The fact that they still work, without wierd crufty unexplained problems that give someone the idea that "Hey, it might be time for a reinstall here!".
Nope. They just carry on.
Our LAN server started as a P100 with 6G disk and 32M RAM, and the same installation is now running kernel 2.6.6 on a P4 2.8, 2G RAM, with 4xSATA and 2xPATA 120G software RAID 5.
And nobody has ever even made the merest suggestion that we should reinstall. Why should they?
We have a bunch of people in the office who choose to run Mandrake on their desktop systems, and that's fine. Even one of our sysadmins does that, but he is totally behind Debian on the server - even though he wasn't when he joined the company.
Of course if you're running on i386, then the best Debian installer is Knoppix, or MEPIS or something like that.
Thank you, and good night!
Hardly - I said he's over-generalising, but within any sufficiently large group of individuals there will always be annoying little pricks.
I don't even agree that Debian has more than it's fair share, just that the nature of the beast is that the organisation is comprised of people who actually care. Passionately.
:-)
As with any group of over 1000 individuals, your statement is a vast generalisation.
How can you call us "rude and confrontational" when all you are basing that on are some mailing list posts, primarily in a mailing list which is renowned for that behaviour.
Personally, as a Debian Developer, I try to assist people and fix bugs in my packages, as my way of contributing back to a phenomenal set of software. Debian has over 5000 packages in the distribution, and while those are mostly not written by DDs, they are packaged, and made to play together nicely and install, upgrade and uninstall cleanly, and the whole damn thing just works.
Yes, of course Debian Developers are principled people who care passionately about things other than software, and if you stick a thousand of them in a mailing list together there is bound to be fire! And hell, some of us are geeks without social skill. Cry me a river.
Could be, although you have to be pretty good with people to keep a job waiting tables.
Also, remember that if you are an asshole, and I have no way of knowing of course, it is quite likely that people will not tell you so to your face.
I have been unemployed myself, but only for eight months or so, when a series of contracts changed their timetable and I was left without a job at a bad time of year. It's tough, I know, and when I got out the end of it I was extremely motivated to work hard.
I interview most people who come looking for a job at our company, and the hardest ones to turn down have definitely been the ones who are willing to work for nothing for a month or two. In my country it is a significant business risk to take on a new employee because if they are no good it will take the best part of a year to lose them (minimum) and if they are grumpy about that, and you slipped up on the process somewhere, you could well still find yourself facing court action. If we have any doubts now we create a defined short-term contract and try someone out on that - if they do a good job (and that includes fitting in with everyone and dealing with clients OK), we offer them a permanent position.
I've had people through my door who thought the world of themselves, but no matter how good they thought they were I need some sort of proof before I could employ them, and it is certainly tempting to believe those opinions were inflated. I don't tell those people that I think they are up themselves - I simply tell them that we don't have any role for them at the moment...
I meant for "CE" to stand for "Chemical Engineering", but after I posted, and realised the possible misinterpretation it wa s"Oh well... :-)"