just ask motorola and the swath of linux powered handsets they're selling.
i kissed nokia goodbye the day i bought my motoming, and judging by the sales, i think moto is on this for the long haul. here at work mings are poping up like weed. at least 4 co-workers have them, some other have motorazr2s (also linux powered).
and you know what ? the ming is awesome. not only because it runs linux, but because it looks nice, is functional and simple to use, the later being the reason why i always bought nokia before i got the ming.
i think linux is on the mobile market to stay. it's fast, stable, allows for great customization, and if you don't like what you got from factory... just dowload the sources and make your own firmware. wanna see symbian beat this./disclaimer: linux fanboy here
two dubai students created a computer model that said brasil would beat italy on the finals to win it's sixth title.
unfortunately, the model was unable to predict the humiliating defeat we sufered to the french (we played francec three times on world cups. lost all three, including a final) and italy's victory on the penalty shoot-out over france.
if the model correctly placed italy on the finals, that was more a lucky guess than a correct prediction.
football (not the america kind, mind you. the regular kind) is by definition unpredictable.
they don't allow re-downloads, so the downloader for entire albuns is probably to ensure you'll actually finish the download without errors.
for individual songs, it's less of a problem, 'cause it's just one file (instead of many) and relativelly small if compared to the whole album.
oh, and about.zip files, do you have any idea how much the creation of a.zip taxes a server's CPU ? specially when compressing files that are _already_ compressed ? multiply that for thousands of ppl dowloading stuff at the same time, and amazon would need a private nuclear reactor to power the datacenter. the alternative being a dog-slow service.
Registrant:
Purdue University
501 Harrison Street
SCCA Room 36
West Lafayette, IN 47907
UNITED STATES
Administrative Contact:
Scott M. Ballew
Sr. Network Architect
Purdue University
501 Harrison Street
SCCA Room 36
West Lafayette, IN 47907
UNITED STATES
(765) 496-8232
smb@purdue.edu
Technical Contact:
Kenneth F. Rice
Purdue University
501 Harrison Street
SCCA
West Lafayette, IN 47907
UNITED STATES
(765) 496-8320
rice@purdue.edu
Name Servers:
NS.PURDUE.EDU 128.210.11.5
NS1.RICE.EDU
PENDRAGON.CS.PURDUE.EDU 128.10.2.5
HARBOR.ECN.PURDUE.EDU 128.46.154.76
Domain record activated: 24-Apr-1985 Domain record last updated: 11-Dec-2006 Domain expires: 31-Jul-2008
not everybody is a car machanic (ooops. car analogy... sorry! let's change that.)
not everybody is a plumber, but even a non-plumber can be punished by law if he/she let's the gas pipes in the house rot to the point it causes an explosion.
being a layman is simply not an excuse, specially since the mainstream media began publishing news about viruses, trojans and rootkits a long time ago.
ideally the server sending the message should generate the NDR, this way network traffic would be reduced and delivery of NDRs quicker. for this to work is neccessary that the receiving server runs a directory search for the recipient and replies with a 5xx message (permanent error) after the sending server issues a "RCPT" command.
sendmail and postfix both do this. don't know about MS exchange or courrier. a default qmail install (without patches) certainly don't. i believe there's a patch to implement this, but it's unofficial.
standard qmail accepts and queues anything you throw at it, then pipes the message to another proccess that runs the dictionary search. the result is that if you suffer a dictionary attack (i.e. a spammer takes a huge list of common names - say, 100.000 - and prefixes them to @yourdomain.com), you end up with a thousands of NDRs on your outbound queue, effectively swaping the server and/or connection.
sendmail and postfix in contrast, issue an error if the recipient doesn't exists, which leaves to the sending server the task of creating the NDR, wich IMHO is the correct thing to do.
i wasted too many time cleaning qmail's queue in a couple of servers i inherited from a previous admin untill i got fed up and replaced it with postfix. life is too short to waste cleaning up after spammers.
"Do you see those two large keys towards the bottom of your keyboard labeled "shift"? You press them while typing on a letter to get an upper case letter. Upper case letters are best used at the beginning of sentences to demarcate them from other text"
i only use capital leters for emphasis or acronyms. any other use of capitals in my texts are purelly incidental. sometimes i forget that i shouldn't hit those keys while typing. it's called "writing style". i live in a free country (no, not US. another free country), and i'm even free to disrespect orthographic and grammatical conventions.
"I was running a stock Debian kernel on an old Dell, and it was slow as hell. When I switched to a custom compiled kernel, I noticed a significant boost in performance. So I think making a blanket statement like yours is a little premature."
as has been said in another reply, your boost of performance could be from removing unneccessary stuff from the kernel, and my blanket bullshit statement was limited to optimizing the code to a particular CPU architecture, not about removing stuff from the code. so my statement remains.
"Not necessarily. What if the package that's broken hasn't been updated in the repository yet?"
the idea of "quick" in my post was not of how quickly the vendor makes the package available, but of how quick it is to: dowload, read the README file with installation instructions|dependencies, execute dpkg|pkgadd|rpm|whatever and close the issue on your change management system, as oposed to download, read the README, set up manually a bunch of stuff on the Makefile, find about several parameters|variables for the./configure script, build the stuff just to find it installed in/usr/local instead of/opt, and... you get the idea.
not to mention that some packaging systems allows you to revert any change made to the system. IIRC, rpm have a --repackage option that allows you to create a package with whatever is in your system at the moment, including altered config files, which is great if you need to roll back the update.
"Run a compiled KDE/OpenOffice system from gentoo with the appropriate flags for your CPU in make.conf
Compare the performance to the pre-compiled Gentoo, Fedora, or Ubuntu performance
The taste (err, performance) is a lot better with the compiled yourself. And you don't get asked 40-50 questions, or if you do, you forgot to set batch mode."
I call that BS.
binary packages perform as well as any self compiled code out there. i had the same discussion a couple of years ago, when gentoo was all the rage. i went home, dowloaded the source code of both Glibc and GCC and ran a series of kernel compilations first with Debian's i686 optimized packages of both Glibc and GCC, then ran the same tests this time with athlon optimized packages (my CPU at the time was an athlon Tbird running at 1.4 GHZ). The result was a statiscaly negligible 1% (yes, ONE percent) in favor of the athlon optimized code.
You know why such small diference ? it's because modern CPUs are capable of optimizing the code internally themselves. Anandtech and tom's hardware have lots of articles about how this kind of stuff happens. the point being that you can run pentium-optimized code in an athlon or AMD64 optimized code in an intel 64bit Core 2 without loss of performance.
in other words: compiling the code yourself to get better performance is (in the best penn jillette style) BULLSHIT!!!
Oh, and there's another thing. as a professional syadmin, I always favor vendor compiled packages for stability and support. try convincing a middle manager of a fortune 100 company about the advantages of self compiled code, and he'll be glad to staple a copy of their site-support contract with Sun/IBM/HP/Red Hat/whatever to your pink slip.
big companies loathe this kind of adventure with the code that runs their business. whith their asses on the line, they want someone to fix any mistake quickly and efficiently (and binary packages are waaaay quicker than compiling), and if it doesn't work, they want some external party to blame and pay contractual fees.
because not everyone in the world speak english. and nasa colaborates wit the ESA, wich is composed by many countries wich speak latin languages (portuguese, spanish, french, italian,...). and "sol" comes right from latin.
i hate to bust your bubble pal, but package managment is the least of any big company's concerns when choosing a unix system. specially because is a ROYAL PAIN IN THE ASS to even change a simple configuration on those boxes.
lots of planning and preparation goes on top of this. it involves filling change request forms, getting management approval (implying explaining to a non-techie boss what that thing does), meetings with managements, supliers and users, you need a full backup of the server in some cases, other departments must be on stand by just in case... it's burocracy gone mad.
the result is that patches and fixes are not installed that often, even security patches only get installed when there's a clear and present danger and no workarounds (disabling the service, changing configs, etc.) are found.
if you ever get to work for a fortune 100 company, (like my last 3 jobs as unix admin) you'll understand what i mean.
not to mention that your comparison was the most unfortunate one. RPM sucks even more than solaris pkg tools. if you have to wade through dependency hell during a change and it ends delayed, you're toast. the next change you'll be making will be to your resume.
i received my compaq presario with linux mandriva pre-installed this saturday. mandriva got the proverbial axe for the simple reason that it was a 32-bit version on a 64-bit sempron. so kubuntu FTW.
granted, i live in brasil, where the pseudo-socialist goverment of pres. lula is giving a push for open software, but still...
go to any super store market (wall mart, extra, carefour, etc.) here in sao paulo and you'll find half a dozen notebooks and/or desktops with some sort of linux from factory. usually R$ 300 cheaper than the very same hardware running windows from factory.
is a nice way to pull pranks... most of the show room machines are kept locked, with a password created by the store people. but of course, these people don't know jack s*#t about the root user, so a quick ctrl+alt+backspace, i'm back to the login prompt, root passwd on HP's machines is usually "mandriva", so there i am, with root access, ready to put some pr0n slideshow for everyone to enjoy... yeah, i'm that evil!
we have this "everyone gets a number" here in in brasil and it works great. it's CPF, short for "Cadastro de Pessoas Fisicas" (Natural Persons Registration).
other than the ocasional fraud for identity theft (nothing of the epidemic scale of ID theft i heard is happening in US), it's not used by the government to spy on people or opress the population. but it helps a great deal to find out who has bad credit without risking flaging the wrong person, plus it helps identifying a particular person where common names (like "maria josé da silva". more than 8 thousand registered voters with that name in sao paulo city alone) are concerned.
granted, it's kinda abused by employers as a sort of "no-employ" list. a friend o'mine was denied at least one job, that i know of, because his CPF number was listed in a credit protection agency. but i still think the benefits of having this unique number outweights the drawbacks.
the "water modem" is already an old joke here in the tropics (the website was created in november 2001).
some of the seling points:
- sharing internet connection was possible, as long as every PC had access to a faucet; - optional "waterwall" to protect your computer - WaterNet(tm) pressure gauge
and more. it came with 2.000 liters/month (256 kbps), 6.000 liter/month (768 kbps) and 12.000 liters month (1.5 Mbps).
i laughed my ass of the first time i saw it. the worst is that the 1st coworker i showed it to believed the thing was real, to the point of filling the ordering form.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a nokia 6111 and it synced flawlessly and pretty quickly with my macbook via bluetooth.
just buy a decent handset and you won't have problems.
just ask motorola and the swath of linux powered handsets they're selling.
/disclaimer: linux fanboy here
i kissed nokia goodbye the day i bought my motoming, and judging by the sales, i think moto is on this for the long haul. here at work mings are poping up like weed. at least 4 co-workers have them, some other have motorazr2s (also linux powered).
and you know what ? the ming is awesome. not only because it runs linux, but because it looks nice, is functional and simple to use, the later being the reason why i always bought nokia before i got the ming.
i think linux is on the mobile market to stay. it's fast, stable, allows for great customization, and if you don't like what you got from factory... just dowload the sources and make your own firmware. wanna see symbian beat this.
perhaps because US has sanctions against lybia, making a press release about the deal unwise ?
http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/06/06/07/10045272.html
two dubai students created a computer model that said brasil would beat italy on the finals to win it's sixth title.
unfortunately, the model was unable to predict the humiliating defeat we sufered to the french (we played francec three times on world cups. lost all three, including a final) and italy's victory on the penalty shoot-out over france.
if the model correctly placed italy on the finals, that was more a lucky guess than a correct prediction.
football (not the america kind, mind you. the regular kind) is by definition unpredictable.
yeah. we don't have voodoo. we have something even better: macumba!
are you peopple farking batshiat crazy ???
/what's next ? //slashies ?
i came here looking for "news for nerds" and end up on fark.com ???
they don't allow re-downloads, so the downloader for entire albuns is probably to ensure you'll actually finish the download without errors.
.zip files, do you have any idea how much the creation of a .zip taxes a server's CPU ? specially when compressing files that are _already_ compressed ? multiply that for thousands of ppl dowloading stuff at the same time, and amazon would need a private nuclear reactor to power the datacenter. the alternative being a dog-slow service.
for individual songs, it's less of a problem, 'cause it's just one file (instead of many) and relativelly small if compared to the whole album.
oh, and about
Domain Name: PURDUE.EDU
Registrant:
Purdue University
501 Harrison Street
SCCA Room 36
West Lafayette, IN 47907
UNITED STATES
Administrative Contact:
Scott M. Ballew
Sr. Network Architect
Purdue University
501 Harrison Street
SCCA Room 36
West Lafayette, IN 47907
UNITED STATES
(765) 496-8232
smb@purdue.edu
Technical Contact:
Kenneth F. Rice
Purdue University
501 Harrison Street
SCCA
West Lafayette, IN 47907
UNITED STATES
(765) 496-8320
rice@purdue.edu
Name Servers:
NS.PURDUE.EDU 128.210.11.5
NS1.RICE.EDU
PENDRAGON.CS.PURDUE.EDU 128.10.2.5
HARBOR.ECN.PURDUE.EDU 128.46.154.76
Domain record activated: 24-Apr-1985
Domain record last updated: 11-Dec-2006
Domain expires: 31-Jul-2008
not everybody is a car machanic (ooops. car analogy... sorry! let's change that.)
not everybody is a plumber, but even a non-plumber can be punished by law if he/she let's the gas pipes in the house rot to the point it causes an explosion.
being a layman is simply not an excuse, specially since the mainstream media began publishing news about viruses, trojans and rootkits a long time ago.
since english is not my primary language, can someone help me with all the legalese ?
is this another nail on SCO's coffin, or several of them at the same time ?
this is what you're looking for ? http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif
just used google image and it came right in the first page of results
i thought the were in mormon country...
how would that be called ? mormonia ? mormoland ?
ideally the server sending the message should generate the NDR, this way network traffic would be reduced and delivery of NDRs quicker. for this to work is neccessary that the receiving server runs a directory search for the recipient and replies with a 5xx message (permanent error) after the sending server issues a "RCPT" command.
sendmail and postfix both do this. don't know about MS exchange or courrier. a default qmail install (without patches) certainly don't. i believe there's a patch to implement this, but it's unofficial.
standard qmail accepts and queues anything you throw at it, then pipes the message to another proccess that runs the dictionary search. the result is that if you suffer a dictionary attack (i.e. a spammer takes a huge list of common names - say, 100.000 - and prefixes them to @yourdomain.com), you end up with a thousands of NDRs on your outbound queue, effectively swaping the server and/or connection.
sendmail and postfix in contrast, issue an error if the recipient doesn't exists, which leaves to the sending server the task of creating the NDR, wich IMHO is the correct thing to do.
i wasted too many time cleaning qmail's queue in a couple of servers i inherited from a previous admin untill i got fed up and replaced it with postfix. life is too short to waste cleaning up after spammers.
"Do you see those two large keys towards the bottom of your keyboard labeled "shift"? You press them while typing on a letter to get an upper case letter. Upper case letters are best used at the beginning of sentences to demarcate them from other text"
i only use capital leters for emphasis or acronyms. any other use of capitals in my texts are purelly incidental. sometimes i forget that i shouldn't hit those keys while typing. it's called "writing style". i live in a free country (no, not US. another free country), and i'm even free to disrespect orthographic and grammatical conventions.
"I was running a stock Debian kernel on an old Dell, and it was slow as hell. When I switched to a custom compiled kernel, I noticed a significant boost in performance. So I think making a blanket statement like yours is a little premature."
./configure script, build the stuff just to find it installed in /usr/local instead of /opt, and... you get the idea.
as has been said in another reply, your boost of performance could be from removing unneccessary stuff from the kernel, and my blanket bullshit statement was limited to optimizing the code to a particular CPU architecture, not about removing stuff from the code. so my statement remains.
"Not necessarily. What if the package that's broken hasn't been updated in the repository yet?"
the idea of "quick" in my post was not of how quickly the vendor makes the package available, but of how quick it is to: dowload, read the README file with installation instructions|dependencies, execute dpkg|pkgadd|rpm|whatever and close the issue on your change management system, as oposed to download, read the README, set up manually a bunch of stuff on the Makefile, find about several parameters|variables for the
not to mention that some packaging systems allows you to revert any change made to the system. IIRC, rpm have a --repackage option that allows you to create a package with whatever is in your system at the moment, including altered config files, which is great if you need to roll back the update.
"Run a compiled KDE/OpenOffice system from gentoo with the appropriate flags for your CPU in make.conf
Compare the performance to the pre-compiled Gentoo, Fedora, or Ubuntu performance
The taste (err, performance) is a lot better with the compiled yourself. And you don't get asked 40-50 questions, or if you do, you forgot to set batch mode."
I call that BS.
binary packages perform as well as any self compiled code out there. i had the same discussion a couple of years ago, when gentoo was all the rage. i went home, dowloaded the source code of both Glibc and GCC and ran a series of kernel compilations first with Debian's i686 optimized packages of both Glibc and GCC, then ran the same tests this time with athlon optimized packages (my CPU at the time was an athlon Tbird running at 1.4 GHZ). The result was a statiscaly negligible 1% (yes, ONE percent) in favor of the athlon optimized code.
You know why such small diference ? it's because modern CPUs are capable of optimizing the code internally themselves. Anandtech and tom's hardware have lots of articles about how this kind of stuff happens. the point being that you can run pentium-optimized code in an athlon or AMD64 optimized code in an intel 64bit Core 2 without loss of performance.
in other words: compiling the code yourself to get better performance is (in the best penn jillette style) BULLSHIT!!!
Oh, and there's another thing. as a professional syadmin, I always favor vendor compiled packages for stability and support. try convincing a middle manager of a fortune 100 company about the advantages of self compiled code, and he'll be glad to staple a copy of their site-support contract with Sun/IBM/HP/Red Hat/whatever to your pink slip.
big companies loathe this kind of adventure with the code that runs their business. whith their asses on the line, they want someone to fix any mistake quickly and efficiently (and binary packages are waaaay quicker than compiling), and if it doesn't work, they want some external party to blame and pay contractual fees.
welcome to the real word, kid.
because not everyone in the world speak english. and nasa colaborates wit the ESA, wich is composed by many countries wich speak latin languages (portuguese, spanish, french, italian,...). and "sol" comes right from latin.
it's all about being nice with their partners.
we should name it "find /bin -name *"
i wish i had mod point to givo to you, my friend
i hate to bust your bubble pal, but package managment is the least of any big company's concerns when choosing a unix system. specially because is a ROYAL PAIN IN THE ASS to even change a simple configuration on those boxes.
lots of planning and preparation goes on top of this. it involves filling change request forms, getting management approval (implying explaining to a non-techie boss what that thing does), meetings with managements, supliers and users, you need a full backup of the server in some cases, other departments must be on stand by just in case... it's burocracy gone mad.
the result is that patches and fixes are not installed that often, even security patches only get installed when there's a clear and present danger and no workarounds (disabling the service, changing configs, etc.) are found.
if you ever get to work for a fortune 100 company, (like my last 3 jobs as unix admin) you'll understand what i mean.
not to mention that your comparison was the most unfortunate one. RPM sucks even more than solaris pkg tools. if you have to wade through dependency hell during a change and it ends delayed, you're toast. the next change you'll be making will be to your resume.
krita supports CMYK and is a much better app than gimp. KDE FTW!
feel free to flame me to death now.
i received my compaq presario with linux mandriva pre-installed this saturday. mandriva got the proverbial axe for the simple reason that it was a 32-bit version on a 64-bit sempron. so kubuntu FTW.
granted, i live in brasil, where the pseudo-socialist goverment of pres. lula is giving a push for open software, but still...
go to any super store market (wall mart, extra, carefour, etc.) here in sao paulo and you'll find half a dozen notebooks and/or desktops with some sort of linux from factory. usually R$ 300 cheaper than the very same hardware running windows from factory.
is a nice way to pull pranks... most of the show room machines are kept locked, with a password created by the store people. but of course, these people don't know jack s*#t about the root user, so a quick ctrl+alt+backspace, i'm back to the login prompt, root passwd on HP's machines is usually "mandriva", so there i am, with root access, ready to put some pr0n slideshow for everyone to enjoy... yeah, i'm that evil!
i didn't read /.'s EULA. my peecee was broken.
now, can i sue CmdTaco beacuse of this dupe ?
we have this "everyone gets a number" here in in brasil and it works great. it's CPF, short for "Cadastro de Pessoas Fisicas" (Natural Persons Registration).
other than the ocasional fraud for identity theft (nothing of the epidemic scale of ID theft i heard is happening in US), it's not used by the government to spy on people or opress the population. but it helps a great deal to find out who has bad credit without risking flaging the wrong person, plus it helps identifying a particular person where common names (like "maria josé da silva". more than 8 thousand registered voters with that name in sao paulo city alone) are concerned.
granted, it's kinda abused by employers as a sort of "no-employ" list. a friend o'mine was denied at least one job, that i know of, because his CPF number was listed in a credit protection agency. but i still think the benefits of having this unique number outweights the drawbacks.
http://br.geocities.com/francasite/waternet_index. html (site is in portuguese)
the "water modem" is already an old joke here in the tropics (the website was created in november 2001).
some of the seling points:
- sharing internet connection was possible, as long as every PC had access to a faucet;
- optional "waterwall" to protect your computer
- WaterNet(tm) pressure gauge
and more. it came with 2.000 liters/month (256 kbps), 6.000 liter/month (768 kbps) and 12.000 liters month (1.5 Mbps).
i laughed my ass of the first time i saw it. the worst is that the 1st coworker i showed it to believed the thing was real, to the point of filling the ordering form.