The last series of "fixes" from M$ seems to have placed my video driver on my laptop into a nonfunctioning state. I only boot into XP to use my winmodem and use it very rarely. I don't understand how ppl use M$ stuff exclusively on a regular basis. I guess they have those cars on blocks in front of thier houses, and think their gonna run some day too.
Re:Any ideas?
on
Back To SCO
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I wonder if anyone has an opinion of how long this SCO thing will go on for. It seems only to benefit sco that they drag it on for as long as possible.
Yes, it does benefit SCO to continue dragging this out. Check out sec.gov's info on the very regular and systematic selling of stocks by SCO execs. I don't know the details, but I have heard that there is some law that says something to the effect that insider trading is not able to be detected as insider trading so long as small regular sellings are done.
The top execs are dumping ~3% or so of thier stock at a time, and would like to keep the price inflated for as long as possible.
parse_dir()
on
Back To SCO
·
· Score: 2, Informative
grep -r '^\s*$' * | wc -l
Shell independant, most likely much faster and easier to remember and type for future uses. I belive that the -r flag is only available for GNU grep.
"Thank God for the ratings," Safer added. "If it wasn't for the ratings, we wouldn't all be millionaires."
60 minutes is the longest running TV show since there has been TV. So yeah, I think higher ratings by putting Jerry Springer trash on there will help improve the show and its success.
Re:BLUE SCREEN of DEATH on BOOT!
on
MRAM in 2004?
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· Score: 1
This memory get's rid of the need to save your settings to the hard disk as you power down.
More hardware to get around software problems. What settings are you talking about? Isn't persistant data supposed to be written to the harddisk when the changes are made? When I'm done editing a file, I save it and exit the program. Ever since linux's ext3 journaling filesystem, I actually prefer to shutdown machines with the power button. Note that these are simple compute nodes. Its difficult to walk across the room to login and shut them down with software, have had 0 problems thus far doing this. The only time I can see "saving your settings" as appropriate is if there were a database or some other kind of program that is designed to keep information in memory or of course on a multiuser system to let your users to save thier data.
A couple of friends of mine were badly burned because the web hosting company they were using lost all their data (customer and their own) in one humungous crash, and didn't have any backups.
Err, burned or they got what they paid for?
If your friends really cared about thier data, they would still have it. Period.
Who are thier customers going to blame? Not the ISP. ISPs are a commodity item that can be hosted just about anywhere, and I'm sure that some of them provide backups/offsite backups as part of thier contracts.
This is about SCO. If you sick of it, well, you've been warned.
I know this was meant to be a joke, and for an embedded device, I belive that SCO is letting ppl use thier ip in binary form in embeded devices for something like $35.
Is SCOs plan & business model to collect from the end user with embeded devices such as PVRs? It was mildly amusing that they thought they could get massive checks from people using servers, but its utterly absurd to think that your average Joe Consumer is going to bring home a new electronic device that he paid $XXX for, and then think its OK to turn around and then license the software for an additional $35 or whatever the price is once the introductory pricing is over.
SCO's silly license is a "Binary right to use" license. It covers _nothing_ about distribution, nor anything about source code.
I have never heard of such a thing. Maybe there is a service that I will pay for with a product (like with a Tivo), but that money is known up front, and I am paying that money to the company I bought the device from, not to some random person that says I now owe them $35 to "use" some product that I just paid for.
Trust me. There's plenty of content, especially free music.
I'm lucky, because I listen to that silly hippy music where the bands allow people to downloadconcerts thanks to ppl like this. Also, the quality of audience (microphones on stands) recordings are amazing with good mics and a preamp.
Back on topic. However, I have a $15/month dialup connection because, as others have already pointed out, the broadband connections are asymetrical. I refuse to pay more for any connection unless I get full upload speeds. Yes, those are available. No, I cannot justify the price. I have incredibly fat pipes at work and a laptop. I can download whatever I want and transfer it at home easily.
I agree, thats one huge footprint. I used to work at Tech, and believe me, they have the space for such a system, but its still kinda wierd.
Remember: the system price is a small part of TCO.
Really. My system cost about $1mil and over 5 years it will cost less than $350,000 to run (cooling, electricity, rent, and me). Hell, after I pay my SCO licenses (NOT!) it would only be another $100k or so.
fan configuration will make it extrordinarily loud
You must not have ever been in a machine room. They are all pretty noisy and cold.
OSX/Darwin does work fairly well, but I'd think that the entire purpose of this computer originally would make it ill-suited to this task
Compute nodes are pretty stripped down. All they really need to do is run one app per cpu. The standard *NIX tools like rsh, rcp, nfs (optional), etc are all you need.
Remember, individual cases, power supplies, and the like become way overkill in such a large computer, and it would probably be cheaper to convert electricity once for a large section of the computer, supplying 12v, 5v, and 3.3v without each computer converting itself.
Maybe. I've never heard of such a thing. The whole point of buying a bunch of commodity machines and connect them together is that its cheaper and easier than buying a "real" supercomputer with one or a few boxes.
This just seems like the wrong way to do something thats hallmark has been in being cheap
I believe this as well, but for different reasons.
For what its worth, I just called SCO and they said that thier licences are being printed now and that they will be in next week. So expect yours in the mail soon.
Someone else mentioned this. How can anybody be obligated to pay anything without a PO? Is it standard operating procedure for companies just to cut checks for any invoice they get in the mail?
Why doesn't SCO offer an IP License for Linux to the Linux distribution companies so that they can bundle SCO IP with their Linux distribution?
The SCO compliance program is an end-user program for the right to use SCO IP in binary format. The IP License for Linux does not grant distribution rights, nor does it grant any rights associated with source code. SCO doesn't offer a license to cure the infringement on the part of the Linux distributor because SCO's source license agreement directly conflicts with the GPL.
None of the three articles say that SCO is going after vendors distributing Linux.
On a side note, its been weeks since I called the 1st time to SCO so I could write them a check (NOT), and they have not called back. I currently "owe" about 100k, and soon that will be escalated to 128k.
Think I will call again to see what their holdup is....
I havn't seen a DMBS FS, but I can see the benefits. I can really see the pitfalls. M$ went this route with configuration settings and stuffed it into a binary database (registry) which is OK I guess when it works. When your registry gets corrupted, bloated, etc, problems arise.
What I've thought about for some time now, is a hook into the fs or even just a file browser that contains massive amounts of metadata like on a mp3. That metadata can go into a DBMS where the key is the full pathname of the file or whatever. I think it would also be cool to have versioning, not necessarily full CVS style, but possibly X number of previous copies of a file.
However, unlike the M$ solution (I'm speculating here), this metadata is completely optional. Meaning that if the metadata were to be corrupted or lost, your system would not be useless.
A very primitive example of this kind of system is the locate database in linux or the Fast Find feature in M$ Office. Speaking of locate (or slocate to be exact), I really like that it relies on the filesystem as the canonical source for permissions. I would feel more comfortable with the metadata option over the longhorn method, simply because standard filesystems are, well, standard, but I would like some of the features of a more advanced filesystem.
I made the mistake of making too many partitions on my drive.
Aside from putting users' home directories on a separate partition (or drive, nfs, etc) on a multiuser system, can someone enlighten me why one should partition a drive? I can see making/boot to get around booting issues, but in the few years that I've been doing *NIX administration, I have never found any benefits of partitioning a drive, yet I have spent many an hour moving stuff from one partition to another, making symlinks, etc to get around the problems caused from a drive that has been partitioned all to hell.
I don't believe that they do. A DSL line (don't you love it when acronyms are so clear that you need to use one of the embeded words to make it clear?) is digital. Modulation and demodulation are used for converting between analogue to digital.
How could they NOT sue the distributors of the infamous IP infringing products, while they ARE more than willing to sue users of the same IP infringing products?
The owner of IP can do whatever they want with it. They dont have to sue or go after anyone.
If you have read the SCO Linux license, you will see that it is a binary runtime use license. It does not cover distribution nor does it cover source code. In fact, it says that SCO will not even provide you with a binary! They just want money for you to use it.
Also, out of the kindness of thier hearts, the SCO linux license is a one time deal that covers all updates, patches, etc that SCO will not provide to you.
Of course, there is no support or warantee with the license either.
If you ask Joe User "what is windows?" he will start talking about the task bar, the Start Menu and a lot of images that user has fixed in his mind. If you try to push linux on them, you must have a familiar look that they can be used to, even when they sit in a different computer. I'm not talking about us geeks but the everyday users that ultimately stack up to give Windows the 95% (or so) in the Desktop market.
So after you have "pushed" linux on this poor soul, and his "desktop" now looks just like windows, and you ask him "what OS are you using?" what is he going to say?
Anyway, I'm tired of this whole linux on the "Desktop" thing. What the hell does that mean? On top of my desk I have a laptop computer running linux. Outside I have my gas guzzling SUV. My car does not have reigns, nor is it a ripoff of another car.
Huh? you ask. What did he say about reigns?
Cars used to be called "horseless carriges", and yes people thought this metaphor thing was such a good way to introduce that some early cars actually had reigns to steer them so that ppl could pick up the new technology quickly.
Driving a car by reigns was and still is a poor way to drive a car. But a hundred years later we are are still trying to use silly metaphors that have nothing to do with the task at hand.
For example, why do scroll bars stop at the top and bottom? Because its more like a page metaphor I guess. I believe that all scrollbars should cycle through, this would work especially well with those wheel mice that people use (I would even get one then). That would sure make a long treaded discussin in slasdot more readable. The other common metaphor breaking things still apply as well. Like enabling comments in a word processor file or other things that will break the WYSIWYG page metaphor.
Another larger example. Look at palmtop (love that metaphor) computing. What OS is dominant here? PalmOS. Does it look like windows? No. Is their a windows like palmtop OS? Yes, Windows CE. Why don't people use it? Because its a "Desktop" os lightened up to work on a small display and input device, not an OS for a small display and input device.
Look at what Linux is good at. Being a server and developemnt platform. What metaphors are used there? Not sure.
Why can't the GUI ppl (I'm not a gui person myself, I'm fine with Linux now) look at the tasks at hand that need to be performed on a "desktop" machine and fix them.
I'll start a list.
1) centralized cut and paste 2) drag and drop (direct manupulation, gotta love it) 3) a file browser 4) a mime type/extension hook to do common tasks on common file formats. For example, a context menu (love them, direct manupulation, no metaphor points either) that has common things that are done with files like edit, view, etc and possibly a list of common programs to do these tasks with your most commonly used one on the top of the list 5) hardware configuration
etc
I hate these "desktop" discussions where ppl just want to copy windows. If I liked windows that much, I would use them (is it plural?).
I think the talent and desire is there, but noone has any good direction towards making a good GUI.
Slashdot Mirror
The last series of "fixes" from M$ seems to have placed my video driver on my laptop into a nonfunctioning state. I only boot into XP to use my winmodem and use it very rarely. I don't understand how ppl use M$ stuff exclusively on a regular basis. I guess they have those cars on blocks in front of thier houses, and think their gonna run some day too.
I wonder if anyone has an opinion of how long this SCO thing will go on for. It seems only to benefit sco that they drag it on for as long as possible.
Yes, it does benefit SCO to continue dragging this out. Check out sec.gov's info on the very regular and systematic selling of stocks by SCO execs. I don't know the details, but I have heard that there is some law that says something to the effect that insider trading is not able to be detected as insider trading so long as small regular sellings are done.
The top execs are dumping ~3% or so of thier stock at a time, and would like to keep the price inflated for as long as possible.
grep -r '^\s*$' * | wc -l
Shell independant, most likely much faster and easier to remember and type for future uses. I belive that the -r flag is only available for GNU grep.
"Thank God for the ratings," Safer added. "If it wasn't for the ratings, we wouldn't all be millionaires."
60 minutes is the longest running TV show since there has been TV. So yeah, I think higher ratings by putting Jerry Springer trash on there will help improve the show and its success.
This memory get's rid of the need to save your settings to the hard disk as you power down.
More hardware to get around software problems. What settings are you talking about? Isn't persistant data supposed to be written to the harddisk when the changes are made? When I'm done editing a file, I save it and exit the program. Ever since linux's ext3 journaling filesystem, I actually prefer to shutdown machines with the power button. Note that these are simple compute nodes. Its difficult to walk across the room to login and shut them down with software, have had 0 problems thus far doing this. The only time I can see "saving your settings" as appropriate is if there were a database or some other kind of program that is designed to keep information in memory or of course on a multiuser system to let your users to save thier data.
Does anyone know if MRAM will be sensative to external magnets? Aka if I bump my portable mp3/ogg player into a giant fridge mag will I lost my data?
Dunno, its probably good to keep giant magnets and large amounts of water away from portable electronics.
A couple of friends of mine were badly burned because the web hosting company they were using lost all their data (customer and their own) in one humungous crash, and didn't have any backups.
Err, burned or they got what they paid for?
If your friends really cared about thier data, they would still have it. Period.
Who are thier customers going to blame? Not the ISP. ISPs are a commodity item that can be hosted just about anywhere, and I'm sure that some of them provide backups/offsite backups as part of thier contracts.
This is about SCO. If you sick of it, well, you've been warned.
I know this was meant to be a joke, and for an embedded device, I belive that SCO is letting ppl use thier ip in binary form in embeded devices for something like $35.
Is SCOs plan & business model to collect from the end user with embeded devices such as PVRs? It was mildly amusing that they thought they could get massive checks from people using servers, but its utterly absurd to think that your average Joe Consumer is going to bring home a new electronic device that he paid $XXX for, and then think its OK to turn around and then license the software for an additional $35 or whatever the price is once the introductory pricing is over.
SCO's silly license is a "Binary right to use" license. It covers _nothing_ about distribution, nor anything about source code.
I have never heard of such a thing. Maybe there is a service that I will pay for with a product (like with a Tivo), but that money is known up front, and I am paying that money to the company I bought the device from, not to some random person that says I now owe them $35 to "use" some product that I just paid for.
And how many undetected errors do you log each week?
infinity - 7.3 I think.
Trust me. There's plenty of content, especially free music.
I'm lucky, because I listen to that silly hippy music where the bands allow people to download concerts thanks to ppl like this. Also, the quality of audience (microphones on stands) recordings are amazing with good mics and a preamp.
Back on topic. However, I have a $15/month dialup connection because, as others have already pointed out, the broadband connections are asymetrical. I refuse to pay more for any connection unless I get full upload speeds. Yes, those are available. No, I cannot justify the price. I have incredibly fat pipes at work and a laptop. I can download whatever I want and transfer it at home easily.
Just curious. Do you log your memory errors, and if so what is the error frequency?
Actually, yes. And they are mailed to me nightly. I usually get 1 or 2 correctable errors a week.
I agree, thats one huge footprint. I used to work at Tech, and believe me, they have the space for such a system, but its still kinda wierd.
Remember: the system price is a small part of TCO.
Really. My system cost about $1mil and over 5 years it will cost less than $350,000 to run (cooling, electricity, rent, and me). Hell, after I pay my SCO licenses (NOT!) it would only be another $100k or so.
fan configuration will make it extrordinarily loud
You must not have ever been in a machine room. They are all pretty noisy and cold.
OSX/Darwin does work fairly well, but I'd think that the entire purpose of this computer originally would make it ill-suited to this task
Compute nodes are pretty stripped down. All they really need to do is run one app per cpu. The standard *NIX tools like rsh, rcp, nfs (optional), etc are all you need.
Remember, individual cases, power supplies, and the like become way overkill in such a large computer, and it would probably be cheaper to convert electricity once for a large section of the computer, supplying 12v, 5v, and 3.3v without each computer converting itself.
Maybe. I've never heard of such a thing. The whole point of buying a bunch of commodity machines and connect them together is that its cheaper and easier than buying a "real" supercomputer with one or a few boxes.
This just seems like the wrong way to do something thats hallmark has been in being cheap
I believe this as well, but for different reasons.
I hear this comparison of apples and oranges all the time.
Aren't both fruits that grow from trees?
How about comparing sea water and comets?
Itanium: er, um, we have a new architecture! I think RedHat has a port to it.
I admin a cluster of Itaniums. They are very fast and have not had one single hint of a problem with them.
To me, something that is completely unacceptable about the G5s for scientific use is that the machines do not support ECC memory!
My users run up to 5 days at a time across 8-10 processors, and its not cool to get a wrong answer after that run, and possibly never know about it.
I personally would not care to admin a cluster of Macs. I think they are excellent machines, but not for science.
Last I looked, the government prosecutes crimes.
For what its worth, I just called SCO and they said that thier licences are being printed now and that they will be in next week. So expect yours in the mail soon.
Someone else mentioned this. How can anybody be obligated to pay anything without a PO? Is it standard operating procedure for companies just to cut checks for any invoice they get in the mail?
None of the three articles say that SCO is going after vendors distributing Linux.
On a side note, its been weeks since I called the 1st time to SCO so I could write them a check (NOT), and they have not called back. I currently "owe" about 100k, and soon that will be escalated to 128k.
Think I will call again to see what their holdup is....
I havn't seen a DMBS FS, but I can see the benefits. I can really see the pitfalls. M$ went this route with configuration settings and stuffed it into a binary database (registry) which is OK I guess when it works. When your registry gets corrupted, bloated, etc, problems arise.
What I've thought about for some time now, is a hook into the fs or even just a file browser that contains massive amounts of metadata like on a mp3. That metadata can go into a DBMS where the key is the full pathname of the file or whatever. I think it would also be cool to have versioning, not necessarily full CVS style, but possibly X number of previous copies of a file.
However, unlike the M$ solution (I'm speculating here), this metadata is completely optional. Meaning that if the metadata were to be corrupted or lost, your system would not be useless.
A very primitive example of this kind of system is the locate database in linux or the Fast Find feature in M$ Office. Speaking of locate (or slocate to be exact), I really like that it relies on the filesystem as the canonical source for permissions. I would feel more comfortable with the metadata option over the longhorn method, simply because standard filesystems are, well, standard, but I would like some of the features of a more advanced filesystem.
I made the mistake of making too many partitions on my drive.
/boot to get around booting issues, but in the few years that I've been doing *NIX administration, I have never found any benefits of partitioning a drive, yet I have spent many an hour moving stuff from one partition to another, making symlinks, etc to get around the problems caused from a drive that has been partitioned all to hell.
Aside from putting users' home directories on a separate partition (or drive, nfs, etc) on a multiuser system, can someone enlighten me why one should partition a drive? I can see making
Am I missing something?
Does it modulate and demodulate?
I don't believe that they do. A DSL line (don't you love it when acronyms are so clear that you need to use one of the embeded words to make it clear?) is digital. Modulation and demodulation are used for converting between analogue to digital.
A cable modem might be a modem though. Not sure.
How could they NOT sue the distributors of the infamous IP infringing products, while they ARE more than willing to sue users of the same IP infringing products?
The owner of IP can do whatever they want with it. They dont have to sue or go after anyone.
If you have read the SCO Linux license, you will see that it is a binary runtime use license. It does not cover distribution nor does it cover source code. In fact, it says that SCO will not even provide you with a binary! They just want money for you to use it.
Also, out of the kindness of thier hearts, the SCO linux license is a one time deal that covers all updates, patches, etc that SCO will not provide to you.
Of course, there is no support or warantee with the license either.
Soviet Russia
Slashdot is only something like 5 years old. The Soviet Union broke up in 1991, and Russia, per se, has never been Soviet.
If you ask Joe User "what is windows?" he will start talking about the task bar, the Start Menu and a lot of images that user has fixed in his mind. If you try to push linux on them, you must have a familiar look that they can be used to, even when they sit in a different computer. I'm not talking about us geeks but the everyday users that ultimately stack up to give Windows the 95% (or so) in the Desktop market.
So after you have "pushed" linux on this poor soul, and his "desktop" now looks just like windows, and you ask him "what OS are you using?" what is he going to say?
Anyway, I'm tired of this whole linux on the "Desktop" thing. What the hell does that mean? On top of my desk I have a laptop computer running linux. Outside I have my gas guzzling SUV. My car does not have reigns, nor is it a ripoff of another car.
Huh? you ask. What did he say about reigns?
Cars used to be called "horseless carriges", and yes people thought this metaphor thing was such a good way to introduce that some early cars actually had reigns to steer them so that ppl could pick up the new technology quickly.
Driving a car by reigns was and still is a poor way to drive a car. But a hundred years later we are are still trying to use silly metaphors that have nothing to do with the task at hand.
For example, why do scroll bars stop at the top and bottom? Because its more like a page metaphor I guess. I believe that all scrollbars should cycle through, this would work especially well with those wheel mice that people use (I would even get one then). That would sure make a long treaded discussin in slasdot more readable. The other common metaphor breaking things still apply as well. Like enabling comments in a word processor file or other things that will break the WYSIWYG page metaphor.
Another larger example. Look at palmtop (love that metaphor) computing. What OS is dominant here? PalmOS. Does it look like windows? No. Is their a windows like palmtop OS? Yes, Windows CE. Why don't people use it? Because its a "Desktop" os lightened up to work on a small display and input device, not an OS for a small display and input device.
Look at what Linux is good at. Being a server and developemnt platform. What metaphors are used there? Not sure.
Why can't the GUI ppl (I'm not a gui person myself, I'm fine with Linux now) look at the tasks at hand that need to be performed on a "desktop" machine and fix them.
I'll start a list.
1) centralized cut and paste
2) drag and drop (direct manupulation, gotta love it)
3) a file browser
4) a mime type/extension hook to do common tasks on common file formats. For example, a context menu (love them, direct manupulation, no metaphor points either) that has common things that are done with files like edit, view, etc and possibly a list of common programs to do these tasks with your most commonly used one on the top of the list
5) hardware configuration
etc
I hate these "desktop" discussions where ppl just want to copy windows. If I liked windows that much, I would use them (is it plural?).
I think the talent and desire is there, but noone has any good direction towards making a good GUI.
Easy. The headline:
SCO sues IBM for 3.5 Billion for Contract violation
is business news. The retaliation:
Linux kernel programmers find that "stolen" code was actually BSD licensed
Is geek news, not business news.