Freedom and price are not the same thing. The two are neither mutually inclusive nor mutually exclusive. You can have free, for-fee software, free, gratis software, non-free, for-fee software, or non-free, gratis software. To say that illegal copying of software ("piracy") doesn't come with source is a grand generalisation. Perhaps you don't remember Mitnick illegally sharing the source to a certain operating system?
I'm just guessing here, so don't cut me down too hard. I assume that most of the money goes to the programmers. The rest would go to bandwidth and the such, and maybe even some equipment (if they needed to buy new stuff).
*sigh* I was hoping the smiley in the topic would explain, but my post was an attempt (and apparently an unsuccessful one) at being humourous. The previous poster used the word "sigfault". I believe the quote was "a kernel panic is similar to a sigfault in userland" (I'm too lazy to go and look at the real quote). It would seem that he was thinking of both "segfault" and "SIGSEGV" in his mind, and then proceeded to mix them up. It is this mixing up which I thought created a humourous situation. Haha you see because there is in fact no such thing as a "sigfault". And haha, well...the joke is dead now so I guess it doesn't really matter.
"sarcasm - a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language that is usually directed against an individual"
I don't know about QAM, but I can explain the difference between baud and throughput.
Baud is a measure of signal changes per second. Thus, a 1200 baud, 1200 bps signal might look like this: - - -- --- - - - - - - --- -- - (where '-' is on and ' ' is off...it's a graph versus time)
Well then someone found out that it was practical to carry more than one bit on one signal change. Hence, here's a 1200 baud, 2400 bps signal (2 bits per signal change): . -O -O - -.. O - ..OO. . ...O -OOO. (where ' ', '.', 'O' and '-' are all distinct signals)
The problem is that, especially with poor quality phone lines, it's hard for the modem to distinguish between the different signals. "Is 3V closer to 5V or 1V?"
As for the actual maximum number of baud (signal changes per second), I'm not sure, but 9600 sounds about right. For a 36.6 modem, that means 4 bits per signal change?
Re:Putting an anhydride on the bottom to collect H
on
CPU Cooling Insanity
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· Score: 1
Are you talking about anhydrous Na(s)?? I should hope not, since it reacts violently with water to create NaOH(aq), much worse than the water itself. As for those little crystal package things that come with electronic stuffs, I'm not familiar with those...what are they?
No this is the buzzword of the early 80's. I wish the media would pick a new buzzword, like l33t0r, or h4X0rab1 or something. If nothing else, it would make the articles a little more entertaining (at least entertaining enough that I could finish a whole article).
can someone clear this up?
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The KDE Future
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· Score: 1
Why do KDE and GNOME need another layer of abstraction on CORBA to get an object model. I thought CORBA already provided an object model. Can someone explain this to me?
As you said yourself, it's a typing lab. I could type on a block of wood if I really wanted to. If there are typing labs with better than 8086s, it would be quite a waste.
I think you're misinterpreting the problem. It would seem to me that if the school systems want to start teaching about computers, they would actually teach about computers, not about software. So as I see it the school boards have two options:
buy fancy new Pentium II's so that they can teach the students how to use Windows98 and Office97. In three years, they will have to throw out all their computers so that they can buy Pentium V's, Win2K and Office02. The students that learned Office97 will have no clue how to use Office02 and will have to be retrained. Repeat every three years for the entire school system and all the students that have ever gone through said school system
teach them general computer skills so they can adapt well to changes in software and hardware. Thus they can make use of old 386's Macintosh Classics, Apple ][E's, C64's, Amigas, 4004's.
Just curious, but it would seem strange to assign yourself 2 cents, no matter the number of cents you had before. Never mind that my.cents seems gramatically a little strange. Wouldn't you want something like me.cents -= 2; instead? (or maybe my_cents -= 2;)?
If I'm not mistaken, there is little pgcc code that rolls back into egcs. pgcc offers better optimisation for Pentium-class chips, although I'm not entirely sure about the details. By passing it -march and -mcpu options, you can get it to use Pentium-only (or whatever-only; I think it even does MMX now?) instructions. But the biggest problem with gcc was that it assumed that you had a lot of general purpose registers. This is fine for a lot of architectures, but not so hot for i386 and friends. pgcc I think addresses some of the i386 deficiencies, but I couldn't tell you exactly how it optimises for Pentium-class processors.
As for benchmarking, you'd best go to the pgcc homepage, but I've heard improvements from 2% to 30%. The places where you'll find a lot of improvement (10%-30%) would be stuff like bzip, gzip, tar, stuff like that...stuff that doesn't really do much besides compute.
If you ever want to see the data on that HPFS partition again, don't. Using a development kernel, you're assuming that you will lose all your data. Be careful.
Re:Please stop posting devel kernel releases.
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Linux 2.3.2 Released
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· Score: 1
How? Filter out everything relating to Linux? A "Linux Kernel" category would be nice. I can't imagine what the icon for it would be. But really, unless there's something significant about a new kernel, I don't see why it needs to be posted. Especially since the hackers are in the development tree now, and kernels are going to be popping up once every few days.
As much as I enjoy reading random rants about kernel stability, it has nothing to do with GGI. GGI is does not affect the kernel. GGI is not a patch for the kernel. GGI is not in the kernel.
Ahh but then you say, "well GGI isn't much fun without KGI, which needs to be in the kernel". Oh ho, but now we have this new toy called FBcon, which is in the kernel. And what's this taken verbatim from a GGI FAQ: There is a glue layer called KGIcon that will allow KGI drivers to be loaded as fbcon drivers.
Besides which, graphics in the kernel is far more attractive than the (as of yet) only alternative. I don't care what Linus says, running every graphical application as SUID root is not just wrong; it's bordering on lunacy. You think graphics in the kernel would be unstable? Have you ever had X Windows crash? Was the system still usable? Were you able to see anything other than oddly coloured strips on the screen?
Graphics in the kernel did not ruin NT's stability. Show me a version of NT without graphics in the kernel which is more stable and I'll concede. The fact of the matter is: under no cirmustances do you put raw, direct hardware access in userland. The graphics card is no different than any other piece of hardware. Is IDE controller code put in userland? Is soundcard code put in userland? Is Ethernet card code put in userland? What is so special about graphics?
Why do you think we're fighting a battle here? Unlike certain operating systems (which shall remain unnamed), Linux's strengths lie in its technology, not its marketing. We're not running a popularity contest here. This could be quite beneficial really: the Linux people get a chance to see how Linux really compares to NT on high-end hardware (I have not heard of such a comparison before), so as to improve Linux's scalability; and Microsoft could very well get some good publicity. Win-win if you ask me.
Actually Linux is nothing more than a kernel. The day a kernel benchmarks itself and posts the results by itself, we'll have an interesting system to say the least:)
To me the Mindcraft report proved that Linux is not scalable. OK, there was supposedly some 512MB RAM issue that (I think) has been addressed in the latter 2.2 kernels. But the fact remains, if the Linux people bitch and complain about the hardware being "unrealistic" and "too high-end", they're sending the message that Linux cannot scale up: it's not even worth testing; NT will win.
And what on earth is wrong with "wide links = no"?? As hard as it may be to believe, some people may want to use the same data on a Unix network and a Windows network. As hard as it may be to believe, some people don't want their losers doing an "ln -s / r00t" to gain access to the the root directory from Windows. I don't see why this shouldn't be allowed: I can see many plausible scenarios where it would be useful. It seems that people think it's "cheating" just because it makes Linux look bad. Oh, I'm sorry, making Linux look bad under any circumstances is called "FUD" now, isn't it?
Every benchmark I've seen proving Linux faster than NT has used "sane" hardware: one, maybe two, processers; 128MB, maybe 256MB, RAM; one NIC; one SCSI hard drive, maybe a RAID 0 or RAID 1. If we bitch and complain enough, then, besides being known for bitchers and complainers, we'll be able to prove what is already carved in stone: Linux is good for low-end servers, maybe useful for small to mid-sized organisations, maybe useful for small ISPs. Personally, I think a little bad press would be worth it to find out exactly how horrendous Linux is when scaled upwards, and I definitely don't think whining about it and pretending the problem isn't there is going to solve anything.
Well if it's just going to a non-existant IPv4 address, then it's effectively like having an IPv4 address. In which case what you're talking about is useless, since you could just have an interface having both an IPv4 and IPv6 address.
Once all it becomes impractical to route to new IPv4 addresses (or we run out of them), then you'll have IPv6 machines with no legitimate IPv4 addresses, and people stuck on IPv4 clients or backbones will have some problems.
How many people have cable modem or *DSL lines now? All you're doing is getting a unique IP address for your house. I haven't heard any great uproar about this so far, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Freedom and price are not the same thing. The two are neither mutually inclusive nor mutually exclusive. You can have free, for-fee software, free, gratis software, non-free, for-fee software, or non-free, gratis software. To say that illegal copying of software ("piracy") doesn't come with source is a grand generalisation. Perhaps you don't remember Mitnick illegally sharing the source to a certain operating system?
I'm just guessing here, so don't cut me down too hard. I assume that most of the money goes to the programmers. The rest would go to bandwidth and the such, and maybe even some equipment (if they needed to buy new stuff).
*sigh* I was hoping the smiley in the topic would explain, but my post was an attempt (and apparently an unsuccessful one) at being humourous. The previous poster used the word "sigfault". I believe the quote was "a kernel panic is similar to a sigfault in userland" (I'm too lazy to go and look at the real quote). It would seem that he was thinking of both "segfault" and "SIGSEGV" in his mind, and then proceeded to mix them up. It is this mixing up which I thought created a humourous situation. Haha you see because there is in fact no such thing as a "sigfault". And haha, well...the joke is dead now so I guess it doesn't really matter.
...from someone who can't think.
"sarcasm - a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language that is usually directed against an individual"
Is that a mix between a segfault and a SIGSEGV? Don'
I don't know about QAM, but I can explain the difference between baud and throughput.
.OO. . . ..O -OOO.
Baud is a measure of signal changes per second. Thus, a 1200 baud, 1200 bps signal might look like this:
- - -- --- - - - - - - --- -- -
(where '-' is on and ' ' is off...it's a graph versus time)
Well then someone found out that it was practical to carry more than one bit on one signal change. Hence, here's a 1200 baud, 2400 bps signal (2 bits per signal change):
. -O -O - -.. O - .
(where ' ', '.', 'O' and '-' are all distinct signals)
The problem is that, especially with poor quality phone lines, it's hard for the modem to distinguish between the different signals. "Is 3V closer to 5V or 1V?"
As for the actual maximum number of baud (signal changes per second), I'm not sure, but 9600 sounds about right. For a 36.6 modem, that means 4 bits per signal change?
Are you talking about anhydrous Na(s)?? I should hope not, since it reacts violently with water to create NaOH(aq), much worse than the water itself. As for those little crystal package things that come with electronic stuffs, I'm not familiar with those...what are they?
What does this have to do with Linus? No offence to Rob, but I don't think watching this show is Linus' top priority.
Will this even be shown international?
Hmm let's think about this for a moment. Being broadcast over the Internet...hmmmmm.
No this is the buzzword of the early 80's. I wish the media would pick a new buzzword, like l33t0r, or h4X0rab1 or something. If nothing else, it would make the articles a little more entertaining (at least entertaining enough that I could finish a whole article).
Why do KDE and GNOME need another layer of abstraction on CORBA to get an object model. I thought CORBA already provided an object model. Can someone explain this to me?
As you said yourself, it's a typing lab. I could type on a block of wood if I really wanted to. If there are typing labs with better than 8086s, it would be quite a waste.
Hmm, tough choice.
Just curious, but it would seem strange to assign yourself 2 cents, no matter the number of cents you had before. Never mind that my.cents seems gramatically a little strange. Wouldn't you want something like me.cents -= 2; instead? (or maybe my_cents -= 2;)?
Try strip -s
If I'm not mistaken, there is little pgcc code that rolls back into egcs. pgcc offers better optimisation for Pentium-class chips, although I'm not entirely sure about the details. By passing it -march and -mcpu options, you can get it to use Pentium-only (or whatever-only; I think it even does MMX now?) instructions. But the biggest problem with gcc was that it assumed that you had a lot of general purpose registers. This is fine for a lot of architectures, but not so hot for i386 and friends. pgcc I think addresses some of the i386 deficiencies, but I couldn't tell you exactly how it optimises for Pentium-class processors.
As for benchmarking, you'd best go to the pgcc homepage, but I've heard improvements from 2% to 30%. The places where you'll find a lot of improvement (10%-30%) would be stuff like bzip, gzip, tar, stuff like that...stuff that doesn't really do much besides compute.
If you ever want to see the data on that HPFS partition again, don't. Using a development kernel, you're assuming that you will lose all your data. Be careful.
How? Filter out everything relating to Linux? A "Linux Kernel" category would be nice. I can't imagine what the icon for it would be. But really, unless there's something significant about a new kernel, I don't see why it needs to be posted. Especially since the hackers are in the development tree now, and kernels are going to be popping up once every few days.
As much as I enjoy reading random rants about kernel stability, it has nothing to do with GGI. GGI is does not affect the kernel. GGI is not a patch for the kernel. GGI is not in the kernel.
Ahh but then you say, "well GGI isn't much fun without KGI, which needs to be in the kernel". Oh ho, but now we have this new toy called FBcon, which is in the kernel. And what's this taken verbatim from a GGI FAQ:
There is a glue layer called KGIcon that will allow KGI drivers to be loaded as fbcon drivers.
Besides which, graphics in the kernel is far more attractive than the (as of yet) only alternative. I don't care what Linus says, running every graphical application as SUID root is not just wrong; it's bordering on lunacy. You think graphics in the kernel would be unstable? Have you ever had X Windows crash? Was the system still usable? Were you able to see anything other than oddly coloured strips on the screen?
Graphics in the kernel did not ruin NT's stability. Show me a version of NT without graphics in the kernel which is more stable and I'll concede. The fact of the matter is: under no cirmustances do you put raw, direct hardware access in userland. The graphics card is no different than any other piece of hardware. Is IDE controller code put in userland? Is soundcard code put in userland? Is Ethernet card code put in userland? What is so special about graphics?
http://www.ggi-project.org/screenshots. html :)
Hmmm. Bad point. I disagree entirely.
Why do you think we're fighting a battle here? Unlike certain operating systems (which shall remain unnamed), Linux's strengths lie in its technology, not its marketing. We're not running a popularity contest here. This could be quite beneficial really: the Linux people get a chance to see how Linux really compares to NT on high-end hardware (I have not heard of such a comparison before), so as to improve Linux's scalability; and Microsoft could very well get some good publicity. Win-win if you ask me.
Actually Linux is nothing more than a kernel. The day a kernel benchmarks itself and posts the results by itself, we'll have an interesting system to say the least :)
To me the Mindcraft report proved that Linux is not scalable. OK, there was supposedly some 512MB RAM issue that (I think) has been addressed in the latter 2.2 kernels. But the fact remains, if the Linux people bitch and complain about the hardware being "unrealistic" and "too high-end", they're sending the message that Linux cannot scale up: it's not even worth testing; NT will win.
And what on earth is wrong with "wide links = no"?? As hard as it may be to believe, some people may want to use the same data on a Unix network and a Windows network. As hard as it may be to believe, some people don't want their losers doing an "ln -s / r00t" to gain access to the the root directory from Windows. I don't see why this shouldn't be allowed: I can see many plausible scenarios where it would be useful. It seems that people think it's "cheating" just because it makes Linux look bad. Oh, I'm sorry, making Linux look bad under any circumstances is called "FUD" now, isn't it?
Every benchmark I've seen proving Linux faster than NT has used "sane" hardware: one, maybe two, processers; 128MB, maybe 256MB, RAM; one NIC; one SCSI hard drive, maybe a RAID 0 or RAID 1. If we bitch and complain enough, then, besides being known for bitchers and complainers, we'll be able to prove what is already carved in stone: Linux is good for low-end servers, maybe useful for small to mid-sized organisations, maybe useful for small ISPs. Personally, I think a little bad press would be worth it to find out exactly how horrendous Linux is when scaled upwards, and I definitely don't think whining about it and pretending the problem isn't there is going to solve anything.
Well if it's just going to a non-existant IPv4 address, then it's effectively like having an IPv4 address. In which case what you're talking about is useless, since you could just have an interface having both an IPv4 and IPv6 address.
Once all it becomes impractical to route to new IPv4 addresses (or we run out of them), then you'll have IPv6 machines with no legitimate IPv4 addresses, and people stuck on IPv4 clients or backbones will have some problems.
How many people have cable modem or *DSL lines now? All you're doing is getting a unique IP address for your house. I haven't heard any great uproar about this so far, though.