I prefer black on white, and I always have terminals beyond 80x25, but aside from colors and window sized, I think that the cli is _the_ UI for Linux, and it is better than any other *NIX out there in that department. Most other *NIX's have died out, but the cli for Solaris makes me type date and make sure that it really is 2008. I'm not knocking Solaris in terms of its kernel and Sun's hardware can be good (sometimes it sucks). But in 2008 if I do vi/var/adm/messages and it tells me that my window is too wide, I am forced to type the date command again.
A little more on topic, I think that it will really take a commercial company to make a GUI for any *NIX that is worthwhile. It just seems too big of a project for open source to come together and do. The best that we have to date are two windows ripoffs with the groovy option to have wiggly windows and stuff.
My rank orderings of GUIs are:
1) OS X 2) Windows 3) other
Hint. I don't use windows, and I don't see that happening for another 5-10 years. I'm a Linux/UNIX fan. I like what is under the hood, and to me it just "makes sense". For me, windows does not, under the hood nor the shiny exterior. Today, OS X is UNIX with a good GUI thrown on top. Sure, its not perfect, but I'm at home and looking at my nice OS X GUI after looking at my Gnome desktop all day at work makes my eyes feel better. I also find it ironic that of all the terminal apps I've used, OS X has the best Terminal app out there. Its also nice to have the hard stuff in Linux taken care of by the GUI in OS X.
Now the BIG difference here, is that I would not want to run OS X on all of the servers that I manage under Solaris and Linux. Why? Like Windows, the GUI is the OS.
This is really tough, but there needs to be a GUI that works with Linux that can help novices with the basics, but those GUIs can't break if a "power user" comes in and modifies the config file in a text editor and now the GUI is either broken or it screws up the config file. This is _NOT_ a trivial task to accomplish, and this is one of the reasons that a good GUI has not come to surface for Linux.
In fact, I think that the GUI experience was better like 10 years ago under Linux with things like AfterStep and WindowMaker, and Enlightenment. I even know some older *NIX folks that still use FVWM, and I liked that back in the day too. So, I dunno, maybe 2009 is the year of Linux on the desktop. However, unless an excellent GUI comes out for it, I don't think this will be the year.
You or me wouldn't be able to pressure the FBI to do that, but Myspace and Fox are big enough.
Yeah, lets let the corps run our country, we the people is overrated/sarcasm
The moral of the story here is that outside of the 1 in 1,000,000+ odds, you cannot get rich quick legally, and if you go the illegal route, that is fine, but the reason you are making the profit is because of the risk involved. Like the saying goes, if your not willing to do the time, don't do the crime.
It looks like openssl is pulling in "entropy" from uninitialized memory, causing valigrind to complain. The debian maintainer "fixed" this issue by memsetting the buffer to zero.
If you look further down the code, it then fills up the buffer with stuff from some random device (/dev/random/dev/urandom, or other things found in./configure).
AFAIK, all modern Linux implementations have/dev/urandom and isn't that enough entropy for a seed?
I only spent a minute looking that the code and the diff in the parent's post, but this is looking not to be a bug to me. But, like I said that I didn't look at the code that long, but I don't see where memsetting the memory makes any difference if its all being overwritten.
But the point here is that the freedom that OSS gives you does require you to trust the whole distribution chain.
Yeah, I just got blind-sided by a Debian developer at a party last week. He knocked me out cold, I can't trust any of them anymore.
That was sarcasm, dunno why.
Seriously, this was a BIG silly mistake by someone. Maybe someone was doing some testing and forgot to undo the testing code? I don't know.
But as far as this being some kind of universal distrust, even the king of trusts like Verisign and Microsoft were dinged when someone was able to get a java development cert that could have done anything. I don't remember the details, but it was very similar to this kind of incident.
I like debian, and I trust their package people as much or more than any other distro because they do a damn good job with their packages. I have a feeling this was some kind of mistake. I mean, nobody in their right mind would take out the entropy to seed generation to a security package. But for development reasons, sometimes its nice to have consistant seeds for testing (or similar).
Just in case, I'm pulling my tin foil hat so that its snug on my head.
here are so many parasitics to model, that you can only ever get an approximation anyway, so what difference does it make if you get a tiny error from a look up table, vs. the "exact" integration routine value?
Some of the original Cray computes would do approximations to get speed performance. One day, someone noticed that their answer was a couple of bits off, and Semour Cray said something to the effect, "Do you want it fast, or right?"
Then, when you think that we are 98-99% the same genetically as chimpanzees and 90% the same as a rat, and then you look at how different people are that are practically identical codewise.
I dunno, whenever I talk about this, its basically a parse error in my brain.
A goofy friend of mine said that a cum shot is one of the fastest bandwidth that humans can achieve to date. Funny and true at the same time:)
For those who don't know, Tandem is a high-availability platform designed to never go down. They had the power off to the building earlier in the year and the Tandem folks weren't sure they knew how to power the system on properly - that's how long it had been running. I've seen a Tandem system before when I was at a datacenter doing an install. Someone who worked at the datacenter pointed at the machine as I was looking around and asking questions, and he said, "Yeah, thats the Tandem machine, it just works, has never gone down". It was big too, about 5 foot tall, and 15-20 feet long if I remember correctly (this was in 2000).
Its just strange to hear of such a thing when you work with computers, and there are computer systems that "never go down". Mind boggling.
And why should they? It works. It does precisely the job it was designed to do, and continues to do it at at least the level of ability it originally had, often better if the hardware underneath has been upgraded. Something only truly becomes obsolete when it no longer satisfies today's needs. A well designed, task-specific system could theoretically never become obsolete.
There are tons of engineering/scientific Fortran code out there that is from the Fortran 66 days that is still in use. The code is unchanged because its known to work. Period, and the code can still be compiled and used in new apps. I don't have any examples laying around, but at other jobs I've seen pieces of code that was older than me that was still in use.
A funny tangent, I saw on Digg earlier today where a bug in BSD was found that was 25 years old. I can't find it now, but I thought that was pretty odd to have such a basic function in reading the contents of a directory being broken for 25 years.
Just anecdotal evidence, but I certainly see more than 4/100 laptops being Apple laptops when I'm out and about. And I believe that laptops are a significant number of sales for computers today.
And as Douglas Adams said:
"The Macintosh may only have 10% of the market, but it is clearly the top 10%." (Douglas Adams)"
Things would be so different if the politicians, rich and famous were subject to the same law enforcement that the rest of us are.
I break laws all the time. Everybody does. In fact, I almost got run over by a policeman today in a crosswalk while he was screwing around with his cellphone.
When they decide to fsck at the same time, it can take 1/2 hour or longer to get to the login screen.
Why do they do this?
The defaults for mke2fs are unfortunately wrong. The check after X mounts and Y amounts of time are not done by any OS installers that I know of. man tune2fs on how to stop these checks on boot. I've turned these off on over 1000 disks in my time and it has yet to of come to haunt me since, doing a reboot and having to wait an unknown amount of time really sucks.
That seems to be their business model, which defies most all of the characteristics of a goal. Its not achievable, believable, or concrete.
I simply refuse to use their products. I don't like them, nor do I have a need for them, but I hear about them all the time. A coworker yesterday switched from Outlook to Thunderbird yesterday because Outlook wasn't able to get his mail reliably for a few days. Switched to Thuderbird, and now he can read his mail. Someone that works in the cafeteria where I work knows I work with computers and was complaining about the new interface to Excell. I mean, I'm sure he does not do much besides put crap in there for inventory or something for the kitchen, and he was like "Why do they just change crap around. Its not like its better, its just different".
Actually, the two best things that come from MS are things that most people never see. Their development tools and their research division. Outside of that, they just throw crap out there because they have little competition, or have been able to eliminate the competition.
The sad thing is that it really seems as though despite their ability to do things that people want, they are successful at making money.
And to think that all of this started from this crappy thing called DOS that was practically stolen, but the person let them have it because they didn't think much of it. Strange "success" story, and likely to never be repeated.
SQL Server remains off-limits for benchmarking. From the EULA for SS2005 Std / Ent:
5. BENCHMARK TESTING. You must obtain Microsoft's prior written approval to disclose to a third party the results of any benchmark test of the software.
How is this legal?
I'm not just thowing a car analogy out there, but its the first thing that I thought of. Cars when they say they have XXX horsepower, these claims are within government guidelines on how to measure horsepower.
The same is true for gas milage.
Benchmarks are part of the decision making process, and they are useful within and between different products (eg, SQL Server 1998 vs SQL server 2001 vs Oracle 15).
Yes, I know that benchmarks are not the end all be all, but they are a fairly standardized unit of measure that is used in many industries.
I also just hate EULAs, especially ones that don't even stay the same within a single product.
What is more important? Is developer time and productivity over the software lifetime more valuable than CPU cycles?
There is no Moore's "law" regarding developer productivity.
Also, an architecture that is clean an easy to understand an maintain makes people happy a) keeps them around b) when they do leave, new people can understand what in the world is goin g on.
I have the unfortunate temporary situation where I have neither a clean design, nor a performant one. I'm also talking with two other employers...
48volt DC is standard in telco computer systems, and has been for years. I would suspect that AC will still bring the power into datacenters for a while, but then PDUs will drop and disperse the power in DC to the UPS units and computers as well.
McBride really COULD go to prison over this for perjury
Obviously, you've never been busted, or had much experience with "the system".
Criminal charges come like a tidal wave for larger offenses. Its never, "The state vs McBride on one count of perjury". Its the state vs McBride for a laundry list of ranges of crimes, and odds are one of em will be good enough.
Now with the supposed McBride quote to the supposed jury: "When you go to the bookstore and look in the UNIX section, there's books on "How to Program UNIX" but when you go to the Linux section and look for "How to Program Linux" you're not gonna find it, because it doesn't exist."
That is utter bullshit. At least where I live, if I go to the local Barnes and Noble, and look in their computer section, there is the Linux section, and under it are the books on "UNIX".
Even though McBride is backwards in his evidence collecting, the same result could be said by a nutcase like him. That Linux is so much of a now popular version of UNIX that you can't even find a programming UNIX book, you have to look between the Linux books for a UNIX book.
I simply can't wait until this is over. This has been going on how long now? Like 6-7 years or so. My employers have lost some significant amount of money over this thing while I waste my time commenting/reading on slashdot about this train wreck.
Its also interesting to note that chages against companies take about an order of magnatude longer to try than those against an individual. For business, this is just part of the game of business. Even when you lose. as in theory McBride has done here, he has been able to finacially gain what? What have the lawyers and other people part of the pump and dump scam gained as a result of this?
I like the idea, I like the idea a lot, but the fact that they opted for a simple but slow topology doesn't fill me with hope. Especially as they suggest running SMP over it. Processors close to the centre of the "mesh" will be resource-starved.
These chips seem to be designed for specific applications, not as a general purpose CPU, especially in the DSP and digital video markets. I found this and this .
I don't see these chips as being that revolutionary or anything. Yes, they are similar to the transputer, and somewhere I read where they have a "revolutionary" shared L3 cache, which AMD ships today, and Intel either has them or are shipping soon as well.
These things seem pretty cool, but I see these as having a limited range of usage.
Nvidia makes SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) multicore processors...
That is untrue. The Nvidia cuda environment can do MIMD. I don't know the granularity, or much about it, but you don't have to run in complete SIMD mode.
I'm sorry, but I'm sick of things like this - his girlfriend HAS to be some untutored user who has no clue about computers, tee-hee.
Get over it. I use "normal" people, my mom, and dad, as examples of usability all the time. I read girlfriend as "normal person", which I believe was the intent.
No computer, not even Mac's are ready for "normal" people yet. They are getting better, but still suck.
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Oracle has a different concurrency model to older versions of MS-SQL. There are no read locks.
You just violated the MS-SQL license.
Oracle also supports views which are very powerful for these kinds of things.
And as others have said, No is sometimes a great answer to questions.
I prefer black on white, and I always have terminals beyond 80x25, but aside from colors and window sized, I think that the cli is _the_ UI for Linux, and it is better than any other *NIX out there in that department. Most other *NIX's have died out, but the cli for Solaris makes me type date and make sure that it really is 2008. I'm not knocking Solaris in terms of its kernel and Sun's hardware can be good (sometimes it sucks). But in 2008 if I do vi
A little more on topic, I think that it will really take a commercial company to make a GUI for any *NIX that is worthwhile. It just seems too big of a project for open source to come together and do. The best that we have to date are two windows ripoffs with the groovy option to have wiggly windows and stuff.
My rank orderings of GUIs are:
1) OS X
2) Windows
3) other
Hint. I don't use windows, and I don't see that happening for another 5-10 years. I'm a Linux/UNIX fan. I like what is under the hood, and to me it just "makes sense". For me, windows does not, under the hood nor the shiny exterior. Today, OS X is UNIX with a good GUI thrown on top. Sure, its not perfect, but I'm at home and looking at my nice OS X GUI after looking at my Gnome desktop all day at work makes my eyes feel better. I also find it ironic that of all the terminal apps I've used, OS X has the best Terminal app out there. Its also nice to have the hard stuff in Linux taken care of by the GUI in OS X.
Now the BIG difference here, is that I would not want to run OS X on all of the servers that I manage under Solaris and Linux. Why? Like Windows, the GUI is the OS.
This is really tough, but there needs to be a GUI that works with Linux that can help novices with the basics, but those GUIs can't break if a "power user" comes in and modifies the config file in a text editor and now the GUI is either broken or it screws up the config file. This is _NOT_ a trivial task to accomplish, and this is one of the reasons that a good GUI has not come to surface for Linux.
In fact, I think that the GUI experience was better like 10 years ago under Linux with things like AfterStep and WindowMaker, and Enlightenment. I even know some older *NIX folks that still use FVWM, and I liked that back in the day too. So, I dunno, maybe 2009 is the year of Linux on the desktop. However, unless an excellent GUI comes out for it, I don't think this will be the year.
You or me wouldn't be able to pressure the FBI to do that, but Myspace and Fox are big enough.
/sarcasm
Yeah, lets let the corps run our country, we the people is overrated
The moral of the story here is that outside of the 1 in 1,000,000+ odds, you cannot get rich quick legally, and if you go the illegal route, that is fine, but the reason you are making the profit is because of the risk involved. Like the saying goes, if your not willing to do the time, don't do the crime.
It looks like openssl is pulling in "entropy" from uninitialized memory, causing valigrind to complain. The debian maintainer "fixed" this issue by memsetting the buffer to zero.
/dev/urandom, or other things found in ./configure).
/dev/urandom and isn't that enough entropy for a seed?
If you look further down the code, it then fills up the buffer with stuff from some random device (/dev/random
AFAIK, all modern Linux implementations have
I only spent a minute looking that the code and the diff in the parent's post, but this is looking not to be a bug to me. But, like I said that I didn't look at the code that long, but I don't see where memsetting the memory makes any difference if its all being overwritten.
But the point here is that the freedom that OSS gives you does require you to trust the whole distribution chain.
Yeah, I just got blind-sided by a Debian developer at a party last week. He knocked me out cold, I can't trust any of them anymore.
That was sarcasm, dunno why.
Seriously, this was a BIG silly mistake by someone. Maybe someone was doing some testing and forgot to undo the testing code? I don't know.
But as far as this being some kind of universal distrust, even the king of trusts like Verisign and Microsoft were dinged when someone was able to get a java development cert that could have done anything. I don't remember the details, but it was very similar to this kind of incident.
I like debian, and I trust their package people as much or more than any other distro because they do a damn good job with their packages. I have a feeling this was some kind of mistake. I mean, nobody in their right mind would take out the entropy to seed generation to a security package. But for development reasons, sometimes its nice to have consistant seeds for testing (or similar).
Just in case, I'm pulling my tin foil hat so that its snug on my head.
here are so many parasitics to model, that you can only ever get an approximation anyway, so what difference does it make if you get a tiny error from a look up table, vs. the "exact" integration routine value?
Some of the original Cray computes would do approximations to get speed performance. One day, someone noticed that their answer was a couple of bits off, and Semour Cray said something to the effect, "Do you want it fast, or right?"
I don't see that as funny at all. I thought that there was 750 MB in a sperm and 2x of that would make a "human", but these articles http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/science/26DNA.html and http://askville.amazon.com/information-encoded-human-DNA-GB-TB/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=3907491 say that the whole human code is only 750MB.
That will fit on a CD.
To me, thats _really_ impressive.
Then, when you think that we are 98-99% the same genetically as chimpanzees and 90% the same as a rat, and then you look at how different people are that are practically identical codewise.
I dunno, whenever I talk about this, its basically a parse error in my brain.
A goofy friend of mine said that a cum shot is one of the fastest bandwidth that humans can achieve to date. Funny and true at the same time
Its just strange to hear of such a thing when you work with computers, and there are computer systems that "never go down". Mind boggling.
And why should they? It works. It does precisely the job it was designed to do, and continues to do it at at least the level of ability it originally had, often better if the hardware underneath has been upgraded. Something only truly becomes obsolete when it no longer satisfies today's needs. A well designed, task-specific system could theoretically never become obsolete.
There are tons of engineering/scientific Fortran code out there that is from the Fortran 66 days that is still in use. The code is unchanged because its known to work. Period, and the code can still be compiled and used in new apps. I don't have any examples laying around, but at other jobs I've seen pieces of code that was older than me that was still in use.A funny tangent, I saw on Digg earlier today where a bug in BSD was found that was 25 years old. I can't find it now, but I thought that was pretty odd to have such a basic function in reading the contents of a directory being broken for 25 years.
Several maintenance men were paid full time to keep this stupidity going.
How big was their office?
Just anecdotal evidence, but I certainly see more than 4/100 laptops being Apple laptops when I'm out and about. And I believe that laptops are a significant number of sales for computers today.
And as Douglas Adams said:
"The Macintosh may only have 10% of the market, but it is clearly the top 10%." (Douglas Adams)"
yes, we want laws to be 100% enforced...
Speak for yourself. I certainly don't want that.
Things would be so different if the politicians, rich and famous were subject to the same law enforcement that the rest of us are.
I break laws all the time. Everybody does. In fact, I almost got run over by a policeman today in a crosswalk while he was screwing around with his cellphone.
G-forces demagnetize things as well, so thats a double whammy.
When they decide to fsck at the same time, it can take 1/2 hour or longer to get to the login screen.
Why do they do this?
The defaults for mke2fs are unfortunately wrong. The check after X mounts and Y amounts of time are not done by any OS installers that I know of. man tune2fs on how to stop these checks on boot. I've turned these off on over 1000 disks in my time and it has yet to of come to haunt me since, doing a reboot and having to wait an unknown amount of time really sucks.
But most importantly it isn't clear how much longer their current business model is viable.
/. this quote from BG to the DOJ There's no level of performance or specific application of corporate information systems that we don't intend to go after... [and] there won't be anything we won't say to people to try and convince them that our way is the way to go.
What does someone speculate as Microsoft's business model?
Yesterday, I saw posted here on
That seems to be their business model, which defies most all of the characteristics of a goal. Its not achievable, believable, or concrete.
I simply refuse to use their products. I don't like them, nor do I have a need for them, but I hear about them all the time. A coworker yesterday switched from Outlook to Thunderbird yesterday because Outlook wasn't able to get his mail reliably for a few days. Switched to Thuderbird, and now he can read his mail. Someone that works in the cafeteria where I work knows I work with computers and was complaining about the new interface to Excell. I mean, I'm sure he does not do much besides put crap in there for inventory or something for the kitchen, and he was like "Why do they just change crap around. Its not like its better, its just different".
Actually, the two best things that come from MS are things that most people never see. Their development tools and their research division. Outside of that, they just throw crap out there because they have little competition, or have been able to eliminate the competition.
The sad thing is that it really seems as though despite their ability to do things that people want, they are successful at making money.
And to think that all of this started from this crappy thing called DOS that was practically stolen, but the person let them have it because they didn't think much of it. Strange "success" story, and likely to never be repeated.
SQL Server remains off-limits for benchmarking. From the EULA for SS2005 Std / Ent:
5. BENCHMARK TESTING. You must obtain Microsoft's prior written approval to disclose to a third party the results of any benchmark test of the software.
How is this legal?
I'm not just thowing a car analogy out there, but its the first thing that I thought of. Cars when they say they have XXX horsepower, these claims are within government guidelines on how to measure horsepower.
The same is true for gas milage.
Benchmarks are part of the decision making process, and they are useful within and between different products (eg, SQL Server 1998 vs SQL server 2001 vs Oracle 15).
Yes, I know that benchmarks are not the end all be all, but they are a fairly standardized unit of measure that is used in many industries.
I also just hate EULAs, especially ones that don't even stay the same within a single product.
What is more important? Is developer time and productivity over the software lifetime more valuable than CPU cycles?
There is no Moore's "law" regarding developer productivity.
Also, an architecture that is clean an easy to understand an maintain makes people happy a) keeps them around b) when they do leave, new people can understand what in the world is goin g on.
I have the unfortunate temporary situation where I have neither a clean design, nor a performant one. I'm also talking with two other employers...
48volt DC is standard in telco computer systems, and has been for years. I would suspect that AC will still bring the power into datacenters for a while, but then PDUs will drop and disperse the power in DC to the UPS units and computers as well.
I'd like to think it does.
So, I can shout at the top of my lungs in front of your house praising the FSM, and you would have no objection?
Its an old saying, but Freedom of Speech means you can say whatever you want, but it does not mean anyone has to listen to you, or to help you say it.
McBride really COULD go to prison over this for perjury
Obviously, you've never been busted, or had much experience with "the system".
Criminal charges come like a tidal wave for larger offenses. Its never, "The state vs McBride on one count of perjury". Its the state vs McBride for a laundry list of ranges of crimes, and odds are one of em will be good enough.
Now with the supposed McBride quote to the supposed jury: "When you go to the bookstore and look in the UNIX section, there's books on "How to Program UNIX" but when you go to the Linux section and look for "How to Program Linux" you're not gonna find it, because it doesn't exist."
That is utter bullshit. At least where I live, if I go to the local Barnes and Noble, and look in their computer section, there is the Linux section, and under it are the books on "UNIX".
Even though McBride is backwards in his evidence collecting, the same result could be said by a nutcase like him. That Linux is so much of a now popular version of UNIX that you can't even find a programming UNIX book, you have to look between the Linux books for a UNIX book.
I simply can't wait until this is over. This has been going on how long now? Like 6-7 years or so. My employers have lost some significant amount of money over this thing while I waste my time commenting/reading on slashdot about this train wreck.
Its also interesting to note that chages against companies take about an order of magnatude longer to try than those against an individual. For business, this is just part of the game of business. Even when you lose. as in theory McBride has done here, he has been able to finacially gain what? What have the lawyers and other people part of the pump and dump scam gained as a result of this?
I like the idea, I like the idea a lot, but the fact that they opted for a simple but slow topology doesn't fill me with hope. Especially as they suggest running SMP over it. Processors close to the centre of the "mesh" will be resource-starved.
These chips seem to be designed for specific applications, not as a general purpose CPU, especially in the DSP and digital video markets. I found this and this .
I don't see these chips as being that revolutionary or anything. Yes, they are similar to the transputer, and somewhere I read where they have a "revolutionary" shared L3 cache, which AMD ships today, and Intel either has them or are shipping soon as well.
These things seem pretty cool, but I see these as having a limited range of usage.
But, they run Linux!
Nvidia makes SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) multicore processors...
That is untrue. The Nvidia cuda environment can do MIMD. I don't know the granularity, or much about it, but you don't have to run in complete SIMD mode.
As the parent said, booting the system from a live CD will let you in.
Doesn't anyone boot with init=/bin/sh anymore?
I'm sorry, but I'm sick of things like this - his girlfriend HAS to be some untutored user who has no clue about computers, tee-hee.
Get over it. I use "normal" people, my mom, and dad, as examples of usability all the time. I read girlfriend as "normal person", which I believe was the intent.
No computer, not even Mac's are ready for "normal" people yet. They are getting better, but still suck.