Stick with Utah-GLX. The new drivers don't support the Riva 128 at all I'm afraid, the FAQ saying that they're supported only by the base XFree86-4.0 server (ie. 2-D only).
I might give that Utah-GLX stuff a looksee though, now I've dusted off my Quake2 CD...
I seem to recall that Pluto is such a small rock that some astronomers wouldn't bother calling it a planet at all if they found it these days, and that it's more like just a large body in the Kuiper Belt (sp?).
Mind you, it makes me wonder how tempted they were to call Charon "Mickey" instead...
Check out this link for a very good "yes and no" debunking of the glass-is-liquid myth:
http://www.discover.com/oct_99/physics.html
The quick answer is that glass isn't a liquid, or even a solid, it's a distinct type of matter in it's own right. If you want to find out why then follow the link...
I'll agree that a good proportion of PC games are very poorly written, released too early and so on. The flip side is that the few decent ones that come out can really take advantage of the higher-spec hardware found in recent PCs. Although slickly presented, PSX games look terrible these days. Thank God you have to look at them on a television, because on a monitor the blockiness would make me nauseous. Add on the fact that you only get a limited range of software (needs a keyboard or mouse? Oh well...) and PCs are as bad as they first look.
They may cost four times as much, but they're a much more versatile platform for games. Consoles definitely have their place though. Nothing better than a post-pub game of Tekken with your mates!
Sorry to get all pedantic on you, but you've got yourself a rounding error there. The bus runs at 133.333 (recurring) MHz, or 400/3 if you prefer, which actually is 1000 MHZ when multiplied by 7.5.
All motherboard clock speeds are like this, just rounded down so that Intel don't have to start advertising stuff like the P2-333.33333333...
However, the question is whether their software is mathematically correct when it comes to the brute force approach. Are there any bugs in there which would produce a non-optimal solution? If so we'll end up with a series of near-optimal Goulomb rulers, which is better than a poke in the eye but not what the project was about.
Actually, there's nothing bad for consumers with one company holding a monopoly on a market. It only gets nasty when that company abuses there position to squash competition, as a way of keeping their monopoly going.
Legally, you can either use bullying tactics, or be a monopoly, but not both (from what I understand of the current legal proceedings). Judge Jackson's Findings of Fact showed that Microsoft does indeed have a monopoly. Now, did they abuse their power?
If only courtroom battles took place in Internet Time. This has been dragging on for what seems like an eternity!
What if that "someone" with a lame box is your ISP? What if it's the company you work for, your government? What if it's the Debian FTP servers (for example) and the intruders start introducing subtley-designed backdoors into packages that *you* download and install because *you* trust the server?
As they said in the report, we don't live in isolation on the Internet. If any host is insecure then there's usually a knock-on effect which could affect any one of us.
It's a real problem if any of my ISPs systems are vulnerable, and a real problem if those of our governments and militaries are also open. By simply pointing out that they could perform such a broad scan with such success they've shown that anyone else could do the same. Why should we think that this bunch of hackers were the first to do this? If our infrastructure is insecure then we need to be told.
CERT reports are useful, but people need a wake-up call to actually do something about them. This is a good first step, and some sort of automatic monitoring agency could well be a good second.
God help me, I'm still running kernel 1.1.59 on one of the machines here at work as a UUCP gateway. It's not heavily loaded, but the thing refuses to crash - current uptime is over 200 days, and that was only due to an air con. failure that tripped our UPS over the weekend.
Rob
Re:*BSD is the continuation of a failed idea.
on
*BSD News
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· Score: 1
Scalability is a very ambitious technology, and something that only high-end Unix systems really have a claim to. I keep laughing when I hear about NT clustering. Can they really call two nodes a cluster whilst keeping a straight face? If it seems "sexy" on NT, it's probably been around with Unix for ten years already.
1. The information is there if people want to get it - it's not concealed by anyone. I wouldn't even buy hardware for my Windows box without first checking that it was supported, let alone under Linux. Windows NT has a similar problem.
2. All documentation should be provided in SGML at the maintainer level so that distributions can put out text and HTML, or anything else they decide is appropriate. For many purposes, HTML simply isn't good enough, so a blanket ban on SGML is short-sighted. My theory is that any documentation is better than none, so I wouldn't complain if it came in GIF format.
3. This one's nonsense, I'm afraid. Debian is using 3.3.2, which is hardly "retrograde". So it's missing the G200. So what? You fail to understand that upgrading an enormous suite of software like X takes a long time to fully test and integrate with the rest of the distribution. Fortunately for Red Hat, that's something they've never been too bothered about (hence all of the recent updates and patches, security advisories, etc). Shame on Red Hat, perhaps?
You've made an unsafe assumption when you say that applications will "of course" run on all distributions. This is not so. Because Red Hat is sometimes a bit funky with the placement of directories, any application which hard-codes a filesystem structure may only work on Red Hat. Of course, applications shouldn't do that, but they do and they will continue to do so for some time.
The single biggest problem with the dominance and commercial acceptance of Red Hat is that support deals are only being announced for Red Hat installations. There may be exceptions, but in most cases these new support contracts don't cover Debian at all, so from that point of view Red Hat will become the de facto Linux standard.
Whilst I wish Red Hat all the luck in the world, and acknowledge that they've done a huge amount for the Linux scene, this recent turn of events is dangerous.
Instead of continuing the pathetic flame, why not contribute something to the discussion? Calling people "luser" is hardly constructive.
My personal opinion is that the original poster didn't really understand what Debian was, probably because he'd only ever actually used Red Hat. Those who have tried both should be able to come up with better arguments that what amount to "Debian sux".
Having said that, why do you think Debian users are lusers? It would amaze me if the average Debian user is less technically skilled than the average Red Hat user, so what's your point?
I'm afraid that you've got yourself the wrong version of Linux then. Red Hat aren't as conformant to the few standards that we have in place already, which is a great shame because that's the distribution that corporate-types are flocking to.
The general educated position is that Debian is, for those with the experience to cope with, far better with that sort of thing. In fact, Debian can also upgrade everything with two commands (look at apt-get), with the added benefit that everything is guaranteed to be thoroughly quality-checked before release. As a power user I'd certainly recommend it over the other distributions.
I agree on your view that Linux needs a FreeBSD style upgrade model though, as an option.
The flaw in your argument is that if "this program changes it's format..." then that won't be the one in the stable distribution. You would've had to have downloaded it from the unstable branch, so it's not guaranteed to work straight away. However, even in that circumstance it's entirely likely that the maintainer of that package would change the dependencies to reflect the move, so there's no way to accidentally stuff it up.
So your argument is wrong, but there's a separate argument about how Debian handles source packages. In that case I'd agree, and that's something that the Debian team are working on at the moment (source dependencies were recently added, for example).
More important that being unbiased it to tell the truth. If some of the journalists had done even some basic research rather than base their opinions on what they heard their mate say after a few pints, then their work might actually be worth reading. Journalists shouldn't be expressing "their own opinions", just facts. Columnists are different, but even then you'd expect good research.
The problem with the ZDnet editors is that they don't seem to have any quality control in place, so that blatantly unresearched, personal flames get published as though they were proper stories, and that's a shame. Some of their stories have been good, but they mix it in with such rubbish that it's hard to give them any credit.
Check out page 14 of Computing this week, which has as a first paragraph:
"Telephone charges could rise and free Internet services could be scrapped in the wake of sweeping reforms by Oftel expecting next month."
Basically, BT are whinging that they can't cope with the demand of 900,000 FreeServe users, especially since they only get 30% of the call charges for it (Energis get the other 70%).
Well, my heart is bleeding for BT. They make money almost as quickly as BillG and their product isn't any better, so they can shove it up their corporate whatnots as far as I'm concerned.
Don't need to be a sphincter... I just asked a Q!!
on
NYT covers WINE
·
· Score: 1
Hey, don't wig out...
To answer your question, the Wine developers aren't limiting themselves to Win9X. Indeed, the project started as only having Windows 3 API calls, but has since extended to include all flavours of Windows.
Additionally, they're not "emulating" or even "simulating" the APIs as you seem to think, but re-implementing them under Linux. Makes a lot of difference, that.
You'll also find that many people use Wine successfully without having fully-working services or security stuff in there, so your IMHO isn't worth the phospur it's printed on, IMHO.
(For instance, thousands only keep Windows partitions to run games, so it's hardly "a joke" that they need to reboot just for that.)
There's no benefit in slagging Wine off just because it doesn't do everything you, and you alone, want it to. Recognise that others may find it useful, or be quiet.
Apart from the nominal cost, the drawback of Windows is that one would need to reboot in order to use even a single Windows application. Running it under Wine allows you to keep your uptime record and save yourself some hard drive space at the same time.
So it's not only the expense - it's the hassle of rebooting that we won't have any more.
You can view HTML in a command-line environment as well, either with Lynx, a HTML to text converter or just from more (crude but effective). Those old man pages need converting.
What would be useful is to have a small team of people doing this sort of testing continually, rather than every five years, to provide bug reports and feedback to coders. Most people find formal testing a chore so they don't bother, but it looks like this sort of "low-knowledge" testing could be done by anybody for any application.
Why don't we go through that list of utilities the good Professor said failed under Linux and get those bug reports filed, rather than hope that the coders see this paper for themselves? This looks like a perfect means by which non-coders can give something back to the Open Source community.
Slashdot Mirror
So if you get your ilttle brother to steal a car and then drive around in it yourself, you can't be done for anything? Good luck, mate!
Stick with Utah-GLX. The new drivers don't support the Riva 128 at all I'm afraid, the FAQ saying that they're supported only by the base XFree86-4.0 server (ie. 2-D only).
I might give that Utah-GLX stuff a looksee though, now I've dusted off my Quake2 CD...
I seem to recall that Pluto is such a small rock that some astronomers wouldn't bother calling it a planet at all if they found it these days, and that it's more like just a large body in the Kuiper Belt (sp?).
Mind you, it makes me wonder how tempted they were to call Charon "Mickey" instead...
Check out this link for a very good "yes and no" debunking of the glass-is-liquid myth:
http://www.discover.com/oct_99/physics.html
The quick answer is that glass isn't a liquid, or even a solid, it's a distinct type of matter in it's own right. If you want to find out why then follow the link...
Rob
I'll agree that a good proportion of PC games are very poorly written, released too early and so on. The flip side is that the few decent ones that come out can really take advantage of the higher-spec hardware found in recent PCs. Although slickly presented, PSX games look terrible these days. Thank God you have to look at them on a television, because on a monitor the blockiness would make me nauseous. Add on the fact that you only get a limited range of software (needs a keyboard or mouse? Oh well...) and PCs are as bad as they first look.
They may cost four times as much, but they're a much more versatile platform for games. Consoles definitely have their place though. Nothing better than a post-pub game of Tekken with your mates!
Sorry to get all pedantic on you, but you've got yourself a rounding error there. The bus runs at 133.333 (recurring) MHz, or 400/3 if you prefer, which actually is 1000 MHZ when multiplied by 7.5.
All motherboard clock speeds are like this, just rounded down so that Intel don't have to start advertising stuff like the P2-333.33333333...
However, the question is whether their software is mathematically correct when it comes to the brute force approach. Are there any bugs in there which would produce a non-optimal solution? If so we'll end up with a series of near-optimal Goulomb rulers, which is better than a poke in the eye but not what the project was about.
Actually, there's nothing bad for consumers with one company holding a monopoly on a market. It only gets nasty when that company abuses there position to squash competition, as a way of keeping their monopoly going.
Legally, you can either use bullying tactics, or be a monopoly, but not both (from what I understand of the current legal proceedings). Judge Jackson's Findings of Fact showed that Microsoft does indeed have a monopoly. Now, did they abuse their power?
If only courtroom battles took place in Internet Time. This has been dragging on for what seems like an eternity!
What if that "someone" with a lame box is your ISP? What if it's the company you work for, your government? What if it's the Debian FTP servers (for example) and the intruders start introducing subtley-designed backdoors into packages that *you* download and install because *you* trust the server?
As they said in the report, we don't live in isolation on the Internet. If any host is insecure then there's usually a knock-on effect which could affect any one of us.
Rob Wilderspin
It's a real problem if any of my ISPs systems are vulnerable, and a real problem if those of our governments and militaries are also open. By simply pointing out that they could perform such a broad scan with such success they've shown that anyone else could do the same. Why should we think that this bunch of hackers were the first to do this? If our infrastructure is insecure then we need to be told.
CERT reports are useful, but people need a wake-up call to actually do something about them. This is a good first step, and some sort of automatic monitoring agency could well be a good second.
Rob Wilderspin
God help me, I'm still running kernel 1.1.59 on one of the machines here at work as a UUCP gateway. It's not heavily loaded, but the thing refuses to crash - current uptime is over 200 days, and that was only due to an air con. failure that tripped our UPS over the weekend.
Rob
Scalability is a very ambitious technology, and something that only high-end Unix systems really have a claim to. I keep laughing when I hear about NT clustering. Can they really call two nodes a cluster whilst keeping a straight face? If it seems "sexy" on NT, it's probably been around with Unix for ten years already.
For your three key points:
1. The information is there if people want to get it - it's not concealed by anyone. I wouldn't even buy hardware for my Windows box without first checking that it was supported, let alone under Linux. Windows NT has a similar problem.
2. All documentation should be provided in SGML at the maintainer level so that distributions can put out text and HTML, or anything else they decide is appropriate. For many purposes, HTML simply isn't good enough, so a blanket ban on SGML is short-sighted. My theory is that any documentation is better than none, so I wouldn't complain if it came in GIF format.
3. This one's nonsense, I'm afraid. Debian is using 3.3.2, which is hardly "retrograde". So it's missing the G200. So what? You fail to understand that upgrading an enormous suite of software like X takes a long time to fully test and integrate with the rest of the distribution. Fortunately for Red Hat, that's something they've never been too bothered about (hence all of the recent updates and patches, security advisories, etc). Shame on Red Hat, perhaps?
Rob Wilderspin
You've made an unsafe assumption when you say that applications will "of course" run on all distributions. This is not so. Because Red Hat is sometimes a bit funky with the placement of directories, any application which hard-codes a filesystem structure may only work on Red Hat. Of course, applications shouldn't do that, but they do and they will continue to do so for some time.
The single biggest problem with the dominance and commercial acceptance of Red Hat is that support deals are only being announced for Red Hat installations. There may be exceptions, but in most cases these new support contracts don't cover Debian at all, so from that point of view Red Hat will become the de facto Linux standard.
Whilst I wish Red Hat all the luck in the world, and acknowledge that they've done a huge amount for the Linux scene, this recent turn of events is dangerous.
Instead of continuing the pathetic flame, why not contribute something to the discussion? Calling people "luser" is hardly constructive.
My personal opinion is that the original poster didn't really understand what Debian was, probably because he'd only ever actually used Red Hat. Those who have tried both should be able to come up with better arguments that what amount to "Debian sux".
Having said that, why do you think Debian users are lusers? It would amaze me if the average Debian user is less technically skilled than the average Red Hat user, so what's your point?
I'm afraid that you've got yourself the wrong version of Linux then. Red Hat aren't as conformant to the few standards that we have in place already, which is a great shame because that's the distribution that corporate-types are flocking to.
The general educated position is that Debian is, for those with the experience to cope with, far better with that sort of thing. In fact, Debian can also upgrade everything with two commands (look at apt-get), with the added benefit that everything is guaranteed to be thoroughly quality-checked before release. As a power user I'd certainly recommend it over the other distributions.
I agree on your view that Linux needs a FreeBSD style upgrade model though, as an option.
The flaw in your argument is that if "this program changes it's format..." then that won't be the one in the stable distribution. You would've had to have downloaded it from the unstable branch, so it's not guaranteed to work straight away. However, even in that circumstance it's entirely likely that the maintainer of that package would change the dependencies to reflect the move, so there's no way to accidentally stuff it up.
So your argument is wrong, but there's a separate argument about how Debian handles source packages. In that case I'd agree, and that's something that the Debian team are working on at the moment (source dependencies were recently added, for example).
More important that being unbiased it to tell the truth. If some of the journalists had done even some basic research rather than base their opinions on what they heard their mate say after a few pints, then their work might actually be worth reading. Journalists shouldn't be expressing "their own opinions", just facts. Columnists are different, but even then you'd expect good research.
The problem with the ZDnet editors is that they don't seem to have any quality control in place, so that blatantly unresearched, personal flames get published as though they were proper stories, and that's a shame. Some of their stories have been good, but they mix it in with such rubbish that it's hard to give them any credit.
Check out page 14 of Computing this week, which has as a first paragraph:
"Telephone charges could rise and free Internet services could be scrapped in the wake of sweeping reforms by Oftel expecting next month."
Basically, BT are whinging that they can't cope with the demand of 900,000 FreeServe users, especially since they only get 30% of the call charges for it (Energis get the other 70%).
Well, my heart is bleeding for BT. They make money almost as quickly as BillG and their product isn't any better, so they can shove it up their corporate whatnots as far as I'm concerned.
Hey, don't wig out...
To answer your question, the Wine developers aren't limiting themselves to Win9X. Indeed, the project started as only having Windows 3 API calls, but has since extended to include all flavours of Windows.
Additionally, they're not "emulating" or even "simulating" the APIs as you seem to think, but re-implementing them under Linux. Makes a lot of difference, that.
You'll also find that many people use Wine successfully without having fully-working services or security stuff in there, so your IMHO isn't worth the phospur it's printed on, IMHO.
(For instance, thousands only keep Windows partitions to run games, so it's hardly "a joke" that they need to reboot just for that.)
There's no benefit in slagging Wine off just because it doesn't do everything you, and you alone, want it to. Recognise that others may find it useful, or be quiet.
Apart from the nominal cost, the drawback of Windows is that one would need to reboot in order to use even a single Windows application. Running it under Wine allows you to keep your uptime record and save yourself some hard drive space at the same time.
So it's not only the expense - it's the hassle of rebooting that we won't have any more.
You can view HTML in a command-line environment as well, either with Lynx, a HTML to text converter or just from more (crude but effective). Those old man pages need converting.
What would be useful is to have a small team of people doing this sort of testing continually, rather than every five years, to provide bug reports and feedback to coders. Most people find formal testing a chore so they don't bother, but it looks like this sort of "low-knowledge" testing could be done by anybody for any application.
Why don't we go through that list of utilities the good Professor said failed under Linux and get those bug reports filed, rather than hope that the coders see this paper for themselves? This looks like a perfect means by which non-coders can give something back to the Open Source community.
Worth a thought?