Billy Connely once said that nothing was off-limits when it came to humour, a view I also subscribe to. Decency might prevent me from making a joke about something where it would hurt someone's feelings, but that doesn't stop it being funny.
Also, if they're stirring up guilt about something, it's probably a good thing - guilt implies morals, which is something the world needs to be damn sure it doesn't continue to lose at the current rate.
There seem to be two discussions going on in the comments today, one about mail storage for an MUA and one for storing mail on servers.
As far as the client end is concerned, from the point of view of writing an MUA, having an SQL backend is a complete godsend because you have to write virtually no IO code, you can put all the logic in the queries. However, there are some tricks you need to use to keep up the speed, most importantly to use two tables, one for metadata and one for the mails themselves. This keeps the speed up by keeping the metadata table small (maybe on a better RDBMS than MySQL this wouldn't make a difference, but I found that >10,000 mails all in a single table in MySQL got quite slow until I moved the metadata into a seperate table).
The obvious downside of using a DB for client end storage is that you have to have a centreal DB server, or one on each client and you need to admin one more set of authentication/permission details, plus you can't move the mail very easily to other MUAs. IMO a much better solution would be to keep the use of SQL/RDBMS, but move the DB into the filesystem so you can just have a bunch of files with metadata stored in the fs. Need to make an mbox? "cat ~/mail/* >>/tmp/my_new_mbox".
From the server point of view, many people have been mentioning Exchange/Domino etc. Personally I can't stand Exchange, I've had to admin it on several occasions and it's generally done everything it can to stop me from having an easy life (just thought I'd air my predjudice against Exchange in the spirit of fairness and honesty;)
I've never used OpenMail/Domino/Notes/whatever, but I guess they do roughly the same thing, which is a pretty good idea. However, these things all have the distinct disadvantage that they use propritary protocols and aren't particularly cheap. There's always IMAP, which many people really like, but I feel is too complex a protocol (compare with the infant levels of complexity in POP3).
With a colleague of mine, I'm working on a set of POP3 extensions that give some IMAP like features, but is really designed to keep multiple mail clients in sync with each other by way of a transaction log. There are still some limitations, but I think I know what they are and how to fix them (e.g. not enough metadata can be associated with each mail yet). It adds about 6 or 7 commands to POP3 and currently lacks any decent client support, but I have written a fairly usable library and patch to gnu-pop3d for it. I've just submitted it as my University final year project, so I'll try and get the protocol description documentation online soon. In the mean time, if you're interested, it's on SourceForge
I love somafm.com, I really need to give those guys some money. Groove Salad is *exactly* the kind of music I want to listen to when I'm sitting at a computer doing some work. If independant net radio gets killed by CARP/DMCA, who is going to provide a service that meets my needs? Sure as hell not the music companies, they'll want me to listen to the shitty bands they're wasting A&R money on. I've certainly not come across any AM/FM radio stations in this country (UK) that play exclusively ambient/downtempo stuff. I have discovered so many excellent bands through Groove Salad and gone on to buy their music - the record companies have sure as shit made a profit from me because of SomaFM that they wouldn't have done otherwise. Idiots.
Outstanding work for getting a rip up this early. Image quality looks a little shonky, but I don't really care, in a few days time I'll be seeing it on a very very big screen, then a week after that I'm going to London to see it on a stupidly big Digital Projection screen. LucasArts is going to get their pretty penny out of me on this movie, I will probably see it 3 or 4 times at the cinema and I'll be pre-ordering the DVD as soon as it shows up on http://play.com so I don't think they can begrudge me a quick sneak peek off usenet.
If you want to have your cake and eat it, I suggest you go to a cake shop. My experience thus far of such shops has been that they are more than willing to sell you a cake and place no munch-through licenses preventing you from eating it.
malicious intent or otherwise, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that companies sometimes might like to think more about doing the right thing and less about their bottom line. Oh, I forgot, we have laws saying that companies are required to put profit above decency and the common good. Lucky us.
There are many who's voice is loud and whiny, but they are not representative of all. They merely repeat the herding calls of their self-appointed leader, RMS. His contributions are great, but his views are not wise, nor are they practical, especially when they are focused most accutely on those who aim to bring market share and stability to Open/Free platforms.
I wish you and Hyperion the very best of luck, the niche gaming market is a tough one. I hope you can forgive the zealots and return to Linux when the conditions improve.
My point is, that page is specifically about the AthlonXP and it prominently links to the patch. Of course they will still be providing support for the older Athlons, but patches relating to them wouldn't be on the AthlonXP page, they'd be on the Athlon page, which is here: http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResou rces/0,,30_182_739_2983,00.html
Of course it could just be AMD being overly cautious or someone not telling the content people that the patch isn't relevant, but the fact that the patch is linked to from the AthlonXP page suggests to me that it is still required, suggesting that the bug isn't fixed.
It would be a bit silly to provide a patch that downgrades performance when it's not needed for the product in question, hence my original assumption that the AthlonXP suffers from the bug too. Understand now?;)
I went to AMD's site and into the tech section for the Athlon XP and it contained a link to the Win2k patch, so I guess the bug is still there:(
What I also want to know is if adding the "nopentium" kernel option will disable anything other than 4mb pages - I'd rather not lose a whole gamut of optimisations just because of one bug.
Is there more information about this bug anywhere? I'd like to know if it affects the Athlon XP I upgraded to in the last couple of months.
I had a Duron before which was very unstable with the nVidia driver AGP support enabled, but I've had a couple of crashes with the AGP support enabled on the Athlon XP - if I disable the AGP support it runs rock solid (current uptime is 8 days with GL screensavers and various GL apps having run for hours and hours of that 8 days).
I hope it's bugs in the drivers/agpgart and not the CPU - if AMD knew about this in 2000 the Duron I bought shouldn't even have had it, let alone me new Athlon XP.
More info (specifically, which CPUs it affects) would be really good. Any takers?
This game is so much damn fun, especially if you can hook up to a big server (e.g. the Barrysworld MegaGame which has space for dozens of people). The smaller servers are fun, but 60 or more people all battling is outstanding.
"if you could afford 100GB" - oh come on, disk is pitifully cheap these days, Maxtor 120GB drives can be bought new for under 200 UK Pounds (including our sales tax). Quite a lot of people are getting "interactive digital devices" like PDAs (consider the 5GB disk you can use in an iPAQ expansion slot), digital cameras (consider a 2GB CompactFlash microdrive holding thousands of photos), mp3 players (how big is the iPod?) and dv stuff (Lucas will have everyone equipped with a hard disk based camcorder one of these days;), with such devices likely to continue to grow in size as well as market penetration, everyone is going to need more storage. Problem is that backup storage has been very stagnant. DVDr goes some way to solve this, but it's not quite big enough (swapping media half way through a backup is not cool).
It's a pity we don't have sufficiently accurate models to be able to track and predict stuff like this, I want someone to be able to prove to me that this will lead to an atmospherically sustainable increase in the levels of CO2 (ie they won't just leak out into space), which will lead to rising temperatures, which will melt all the ice that's under the surface (obviously I'll need someone to prove that too;) giving rise to seas, then all the little martians that have been hibernating for the last few centuries can wake up and be our friends.
Ok, so it isn't going to play like that, but it would be nice;)
that would be fine if he was actually capable of reading the script. From watching the extra footage on the TPM dvd it looks to me like they had to basically rework each of his scenes around whatever random crap he decided to spout that day. Why did no-one say to him "look, kid, this script was written for a reason, stick to it"? Bloody Hollywood luvvies;)
This whole article is extremely confused. The Fink maintainer resigned for a number of reasons, only one of which was the supposed ordeal he's been through with these other Mac sites. It looked to me from his resignation mail more like it was general tiredness with the project.
Firstly, he was being a little unfair by getting into slanging matches with people where he pretty much demanded credit, something he is not granted by the GPL (so that issue is therefore irrelevant).
In fact, the only thing this article has to do with GPL (and thus utterly negating the "due to GPL infringement" in the title) is that forked.net didn't provide source and removed the license details from binary packages, but that's not even what the Fink maintainer seems to care about. I quote from his email discussion with the forked.net people:
"My problem is not that you take Fink and
repackage it. My problem is that you hide the origins and take credit for the work"
...and that is just retarded, he can have that problem all he wants and he can whine about it to whomever he wants because he has no right under the GPL or anything else to demand credit for his work. If he'd said "hey, you're supposed to stick the source with that and not take out my copyright statements from the source, or the license agreement from both source and binary packages" then this would probably all be solved by now, at least it would mean that/. got the headline right.
THINK people, don't just knee-jerk react on the assumption that either the/. headline or article body are the full facts, they rarely are.
Well what the hell did the orphans have to complain about? A few thousand years earlier they wouldn't have had to worry about little things like coal machines ripping their limbs off, they'd be mauled and eaten alive by large beasts while hunting.
Jeez, conditions have (mostly) improved for everyone, but that's no excuse for complacency. People deserve to be treated as people, not machines that stitch shoes and don't need to take a leak.
Totally agree, Bletchley Park is a great place, but it's been completely screwed around and needs lots of money to fix itself up.
The tour they do is particularly good and offers some insight into how the base worked (although not a huge amount - apparantly they are still having problems getting people who worked there to talk about it, such is the level of commitment to the Official Secrets Act).
The tour guide when I was there told us a story of a previous tour he'd done there where an elderly couple were walking round and at one point the man said to his wife "I used to work in that building during the war", to which she replied "that's funny, I used to work in that building over there". 50 years and they'd never told each other!
Various news sources are reporting that a lone ethic was found roaming around the Microsoft campus in Redmond early this morning. A senior Microsoft official has been quoted as saying "The ethic was quickly located by our campus death squads and was terminated on sight. I'm pleased to report that once again Microsoft is operating completely normally and without any ethics. All our staff have been alerted to the problem of stray ethics and will be given bonuses for supplying information to Microsoft's Department for Ethical Suppression and Moral Irradication that leads to the capture and termination of a free-roaming ethic".
At this time it's unknown exactly which ethic was found on the campus, however, rumours abound that it was an 'integrity' ethic, possibly explaining the rapidity with which it was removed from existence.
I'm assuming you're talking about my howto (LinuxDude).
I'm sorry if the HOWTO wasn't able to help you, I do my best despite having next to zero free time. I get quite a lot of mail about the HOWTO and I try to answer as much as I can, but as much as I'd like to I just don't have time to walk everyone through the setup (which is stupidly complex unfortunately).
In your case it seems that things are working now, but for anyone else that is having problems, I strongly suggest you drop by the Linux forum of ADSLGuide, there are plenty of people there who have the Alcatel SpeedTouch USB ADSL modem working and there should be enough eyeballs looking at your questions to make them trivial.
For anyone who is annoyed with the deficiencies of my HOWTO, if you can improve it, feel free. The SGML source is available on the LinuxDude site at the URL I posted above, I will graciously accept patches. If you can send me a patch (or at least the corrected/improved text as ASCII) I should be able to get the thing converted and uploaded within a few hours.
Fair enough the little kiddies are annoying and don't do us any favours, but I don't believe it's exclusively a Linux thing. Look at the hoo-haa about Windows 2000/XP drivers for things (notably HP gear) - I think these kiddies are all-pervasive in the computing world.
Kiddies - shut up, let those of us who at least pretend to be mature sort these things out;)
Slashdot Mirror
Billy Connely once said that nothing was off-limits when it came to humour, a view I also subscribe to. Decency might prevent me from making a joke about something where it would hurt someone's feelings, but that doesn't stop it being funny.
Also, if they're stirring up guilt about something, it's probably a good thing - guilt implies morals, which is something the world needs to be damn sure it doesn't continue to lose at the current rate.
There seem to be two discussions going on in the comments today, one about mail storage for an MUA and one for storing mail on servers. ;)
I've never used OpenMail/Domino/Notes/whatever, but I guess they do roughly the same thing, which is a pretty good idea. However, these things all have the distinct disadvantage that they use propritary protocols and aren't particularly cheap. There's always IMAP, which many people really like, but I feel is too complex a protocol (compare with the infant levels of complexity in POP3).
As far as the client end is concerned, from the point of view of writing an MUA, having an SQL backend is a complete godsend because you have to write virtually no IO code, you can put all the logic in the queries. However, there are some tricks you need to use to keep up the speed, most importantly to use two tables, one for metadata and one for the mails themselves. This keeps the speed up by keeping the metadata table small (maybe on a better RDBMS than MySQL this wouldn't make a difference, but I found that >10,000 mails all in a single table in MySQL got quite slow until I moved the metadata into a seperate table).
The obvious downside of using a DB for client end storage is that you have to have a centreal DB server, or one on each client and you need to admin one more set of authentication/permission details, plus you can't move the mail very easily to other MUAs. IMO a much better solution would be to keep the use of SQL/RDBMS, but move the DB into the filesystem so you can just have a bunch of files with metadata stored in the fs. Need to make an mbox? "cat ~/mail/* >>/tmp/my_new_mbox".
From the server point of view, many people have been mentioning Exchange/Domino etc. Personally I can't stand Exchange, I've had to admin it on several occasions and it's generally done everything it can to stop me from having an easy life (just thought I'd air my predjudice against Exchange in the spirit of fairness and honesty
With a colleague of mine, I'm working on a set of POP3 extensions that give some IMAP like features, but is really designed to keep multiple mail clients in sync with each other by way of a transaction log. There are still some limitations, but I think I know what they are and how to fix them (e.g. not enough metadata can be associated with each mail yet). It adds about 6 or 7 commands to POP3 and currently lacks any decent client support, but I have written a fairly usable library and patch to gnu-pop3d for it. I've just submitted it as my University final year project, so I'll try and get the protocol description documentation online soon. In the mean time, if you're interested, it's on SourceForge
Even if they can't use it for BigURL anymore, they could just install Festival, which is a pretty excellent TTS system from CMU (afair).
I love somafm.com, I really need to give those guys some money. Groove Salad is *exactly* the kind of music I want to listen to when I'm sitting at a computer doing some work.
If independant net radio gets killed by CARP/DMCA, who is going to provide a service that meets my needs? Sure as hell not the music companies, they'll want me to listen to the shitty bands they're wasting A&R money on.
I've certainly not come across any AM/FM radio stations in this country (UK) that play exclusively ambient/downtempo stuff. I have discovered so many excellent bands through Groove Salad and gone on to buy their music - the record companies have sure as shit made a profit from me because of SomaFM that they wouldn't have done otherwise.
Idiots.
Outstanding work for getting a rip up this early.
Image quality looks a little shonky, but I don't really care, in a few days time I'll be seeing it on a very very big screen, then a week after that I'm going to London to see it on a stupidly big Digital Projection screen.
LucasArts is going to get their pretty penny out of me on this movie, I will probably see it 3 or 4 times at the cinema and I'll be pre-ordering the DVD as soon as it shows up on http://play.com so I don't think they can begrudge me a quick sneak peek off usenet.
If you want to have your cake and eat it, I suggest you go to a cake shop. My experience thus far of such shops has been that they are more than willing to sell you a cake and place no munch-through licenses preventing you from eating it.
malicious intent or otherwise, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that companies sometimes might like to think more about doing the right thing and less about their bottom line. Oh, I forgot, we have laws saying that companies are required to put profit above decency and the common good. Lucky us.
There are many who's voice is loud and whiny, but they are not representative of all. They merely repeat the herding calls of their self-appointed leader, RMS. His contributions are great, but his views are not wise, nor are they practical, especially when they are focused most accutely on those who aim to bring market share and stability to Open/Free platforms.
I wish you and Hyperion the very best of luck, the niche gaming market is a tough one. I hope you can forgive the zealots and return to Linux when the conditions improve.
Read this: http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResou rces/0,,30_182_739_3748,00.html
u rces/0,,30_182_739_2983,00.html
;)
My point is, that page is specifically about the AthlonXP and it prominently links to the patch. Of course they will still be providing support for the older Athlons, but patches relating to them wouldn't be on the AthlonXP page, they'd be on the Athlon page, which is here: http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalReso
Of course it could just be AMD being overly cautious or someone not telling the content people that the patch isn't relevant, but the fact that the patch is linked to from the AthlonXP page suggests to me that it is still required, suggesting that the bug isn't fixed.
It would be a bit silly to provide a patch that downgrades performance when it's not needed for the product in question, hence my original assumption that the AthlonXP suffers from the bug too. Understand now?
I went to AMD's site and into the tech section for the Athlon XP and it contained a link to the Win2k patch, so I guess the bug is still there :(
What I also want to know is if adding the "nopentium" kernel option will disable anything other than 4mb pages - I'd rather not lose a whole gamut of optimisations just because of one bug.
well, except that they released a patch back in 2000.
It would help if you actually read the story before posting uninformed opinions. Dumbass.
Is there more information about this bug anywhere? I'd like to know if it affects the Athlon XP I upgraded to in the last couple of months.
I had a Duron before which was very unstable with the nVidia driver AGP support enabled, but I've had a couple of crashes with the AGP support enabled on the Athlon XP - if I disable the AGP support it runs rock solid (current uptime is 8 days with GL screensavers and various GL apps having run for hours and hours of that 8 days).
I hope it's bugs in the drivers/agpgart and not the CPU - if AMD knew about this in 2000 the Duron I bought shouldn't even have had it, let alone me new Athlon XP.
More info (specifically, which CPUs it affects) would be really good. Any takers?
Tribes 2.
;)
This game is so much damn fun, especially if you can hook up to a big server (e.g. the Barrysworld MegaGame which has space for dozens of people). The smaller servers are fun, but 60 or more people all battling is outstanding.
This game is my precious
"if you could afford 100GB" - oh come on, disk is pitifully cheap these days, Maxtor 120GB drives can be bought new for under 200 UK Pounds (including our sales tax). Quite a lot of people are getting "interactive digital devices" like PDAs (consider the 5GB disk you can use in an iPAQ expansion slot), digital cameras (consider a 2GB CompactFlash microdrive holding thousands of photos), mp3 players (how big is the iPod?) and dv stuff (Lucas will have everyone equipped with a hard disk based camcorder one of these days ;), with such devices likely to continue to grow in size as well as market penetration, everyone is going to need more storage. Problem is that backup storage has been very stagnant. DVDr goes some way to solve this, but it's not quite big enough (swapping media half way through a backup is not cool).
It's a pity we don't have sufficiently accurate models to be able to track and predict stuff like this, I want someone to be able to prove to me that this will lead to an atmospherically sustainable increase in the levels of CO2 (ie they won't just leak out into space), which will lead to rising temperatures, which will melt all the ice that's under the surface (obviously I'll need someone to prove that too ;) giving rise to seas, then all the little martians that have been hibernating for the last few centuries can wake up and be our friends.
;)
Ok, so it isn't going to play like that, but it would be nice
that would be fine if he was actually capable of reading the script. From watching the extra footage on the TPM dvd it looks to me like they had to basically rework each of his scenes around whatever random crap he decided to spout that day. Why did no-one say to him "look, kid, this script was written for a reason, stick to it"? Bloody Hollywood luvvies ;)
This whole article is extremely confused. The Fink maintainer resigned for a number of reasons, only one of which was the supposed ordeal he's been through with these other Mac sites. It looked to me from his resignation mail more like it was general tiredness with the project.
/. got the headline right.
/. headline or article body are the full facts, they rarely are.
Firstly, he was being a little unfair by getting into slanging matches with people where he pretty much demanded credit, something he is not granted by the GPL (so that issue is therefore irrelevant).
In fact, the only thing this article has to do with GPL (and thus utterly negating the "due to GPL infringement" in the title) is that forked.net didn't provide source and removed the license details from binary packages, but that's not even what the Fink maintainer seems to care about. I quote from his email discussion with the forked.net people:
"My problem is not that you take Fink and
repackage it. My problem is that you hide the origins and take credit for the work"
...and that is just retarded, he can have that problem all he wants and he can whine about it to whomever he wants because he has no right under the GPL or anything else to demand credit for his work. If he'd said "hey, you're supposed to stick the source with that and not take out my copyright statements from the source, or the license agreement from both source and binary packages" then this would probably all be solved by now, at least it would mean that
THINK people, don't just knee-jerk react on the assumption that either the
What scares you the most about taking on this fairly hefty responsibility?
Well what the hell did the orphans have to complain about? A few thousand years earlier they wouldn't have had to worry about little things like coal machines ripping their limbs off, they'd be mauled and eaten alive by large beasts while hunting.
Jeez, conditions have (mostly) improved for everyone, but that's no excuse for complacency. People deserve to be treated as people, not machines that stitch shoes and don't need to take a leak.
Does CmdrTaco have a secret desire to be Wesley Crusher? Happy little geekboy growing up in a world for happy little geeks? ;)
Totally agree, Bletchley Park is a great place, but it's been completely screwed around and needs lots of money to fix itself up.
The tour they do is particularly good and offers some insight into how the base worked (although not a huge amount - apparantly they are still having problems getting people who worked there to talk about it, such is the level of commitment to the Official Secrets Act).
The tour guide when I was there told us a story of a previous tour he'd done there where an elderly couple were walking round and at one point the man said to his wife "I used to work in that building during the war", to which she replied "that's funny, I used to work in that building over there". 50 years and they'd never told each other!
Various news sources are reporting that a lone ethic was found roaming around the Microsoft campus in Redmond early this morning. A senior Microsoft official has been quoted as saying "The ethic was quickly located by our campus death squads and was terminated on sight. I'm pleased to report that once again Microsoft is operating completely normally and without any ethics. All our staff have been alerted to the problem of stray ethics and will be given bonuses for supplying information to Microsoft's Department for Ethical Suppression and Moral Irradication that leads to the capture and termination of a free-roaming ethic". At this time it's unknown exactly which ethic was found on the campus, however, rumours abound that it was an 'integrity' ethic, possibly explaining the rapidity with which it was removed from existence.
;)
Ok, so I made that one up
(This story taken from LinuxDude.co.uk)
I'm assuming you're talking about my howto (LinuxDude).
I'm sorry if the HOWTO wasn't able to help you, I do my best despite having next to zero free time. I get quite a lot of mail about the HOWTO and I try to answer as much as I can, but as much as I'd like to I just don't have time to walk everyone through the setup (which is stupidly complex unfortunately).
In your case it seems that things are working now, but for anyone else that is having problems, I strongly suggest you drop by the Linux forum of ADSLGuide, there are plenty of people there who have the Alcatel SpeedTouch USB ADSL modem working and there should be enough eyeballs looking at your questions to make them trivial.
For anyone who is annoyed with the deficiencies of my HOWTO, if you can improve it, feel free. The SGML source is available on the LinuxDude site at the URL I posted above, I will graciously accept patches. If you can send me a patch (or at least the corrected/improved text as ASCII) I should be able to get the thing converted and uploaded within a few hours.
Fair enough the little kiddies are annoying and don't do us any favours, but I don't believe it's exclusively a Linux thing. Look at the hoo-haa about Windows 2000/XP drivers for things (notably HP gear) - I think these kiddies are all-pervasive in the computing world. ;)
Kiddies - shut up, let those of us who at least pretend to be mature sort these things out
Life will be just the same as it is now, but it'll have more flashing LEDs.