I live in Mexico. About 15 years ago, my parents sent me to a computing introduction course. Like any good course in the mid-80s, it started where it should start: Teaching the kid to think, to program. Most of us knew little or no English, so the staff at that school took the job of translating all (at least, most of) Logo to Spanish. It was quite usable... I don't remember Logo's syntax anymore, but it was more or less:
Of course, Logo had a very limited syntax... Although, of course, it was very fun and easy to use for kids... All my best wishes to Dr. Seymour Papert, who made me what I am today:)
A few years later, at a local expo, I recall seeing a BBC computer (don't remember the name, they were pretty popular back then in Europe), with EBASIC in a cartridge - A translation of BASIC to Spanish. You could switch between BASIC and EBASIC. Of course, an EBASIC program would not run on BASIC, the commands were completely different.
However, they both were educational programs. I doubt a similar thing has been done (successfully) in any serious language... for kids, anyway, languages did not have to be THAT confortable:)
I am pursuing a BSc title right now, not a PhD. I know, the article talked about doctorate thesis, but it still is a thesis. I am studying in an American university, and yes, the copyright remains mine - double checked. In Mexico, this is also usually the case: Your work will always remain yours, even though it is published as work for a university.
I am working on my thesis, and it will be (well, what I have done already IS) under the FSF FDL - Free Documentation License. It is much better suited to writings than the GPL. GPL was written to protect code, FDL was written to protect writings.
FDL takes some approaches that it would be very hard to take on programs. It contemplates invariant sections, which should always appear. It also provides for invariant texts which should appear at the cover, back or first/last pages of the book.
That's the original goal of many -most- of our projects. To date, however, every single piece of software written *does* suck, in some way or another.
Unix gives some provision for reusable code - libraries, for example... Of course, Unix was designed over 30 years ago, and the issue was really not important... But well, today we have a great deal of programs which *do* implement ways of reusable code... Very successfully, IMHO.
Windows, OTOH, was built around the.DLLs, making everything (supposedly) reusable. What happens there? Hell breaks loose, every time you install a program which relies upon a newer/older DLL, your whole system crumbles down gradually... I think "Enthropy 2000" would be a more correct name for W2K.
As many of you may know, in Mexico we had elections last week. Many say that they were the first clean elections ever. The 71-year old regime was defeated - 71 years the same party ruled the country, not anymore...
Anyway, among the loser official candidate's strategies for advertising his candidature was to say that he would teach English and computers to every kid in urban and rural areas... Well, that was among his most foolish affirmations. Cartoonists all over the country started making jokes on him - "Finally we will be able to talk with the indigenous people who still don't know any Spanish - we will talk in English!", a little kid asking the candidate: "Mr. Candidate, Mr. Candidate! Can we have laptops on my village? We still do not have electricity!"...
The fact is, even though Mexico is among the most developed countries in Latin America, the rural areas completely lack the infrastructure needed to use computers... Let alone Internet access. There are still many small and medium sized cities that do not have a local ISP. How dare they say that our rural areas have any better luck? In Latin America, the rural areas have always been unimportant to the government.
How would you call a Celeron? I think it would be a Pentium 1.5
(Or... Well, Intel used roman numerals, right? Would it be Pentium I.V? Now, that would be too similar to Pentium IV, so maybe that's the reason why they decided to go back to the good old 4)
They do not -and I think, will not- add things such as KDE to their ports... OpenBSD is not built for beauty... It is built for rock-solid security. You can still add KDE, using the built-in Linux emulation, but IMHO you are defeating OpenBSD's reason to exist.
I don't like the idea... PnP has never really worked, it has always been a mess. Adding TCP/IP to PnP will only make it a distributed mess.
A printer must still have its OS-specific drivers. A scanner? same story. Yes, the peripherials will tell you where they are, and that's a plus... But I don't think our problems will end when everything is automatically recognized.
Much to the opposite.
But anyway, users want to be fed in the mouth... Why don't they include a slave techie with each sold system?
Couple considerations...
on
Linux BIOS
·
· Score: 1
First of all... This would be very cool - boot speed close to zero... But what about kernel updates? We would have to have a Flashable EPROM... And what would happen if I flashed the wrong file? Well, sorry, no OS anymore! this calls for a mandatory, non-erasable ROM with a monitor (similar to Sun's) that would load from the flashable ROM. In short, it's not going to fit into current-generation motherboards.
A good point would be having the possibility (like in the good ol' Amiga) to change the pointers to a RAM address - In the Amiga, if I still had ROM 1.3 and wanted to run 3.1, I just told the machine to go look for it somewhere else (and give up 512KB RAM, which was still a sizable part of my RAM)... And voila, Workbench 3.1!
How well does it scale? How many nodes will we be able to have on a single circuit? How well will it deal with electrically noisy circuits? Will it be possible to isolate my network from my neighbor's?
This sounds pretty sweet, but... There is no heaven on earth... Things are not usually as perfect as they seem...
Spoofing is not a hard task to accomplish. If I was to attack a machine I knew was well hardened, I might have decided to attack an aggressive, less-protected sysadmin pretending to come from that machine. If I tricked him into attacking back, I would effectively trick him into helping me.
A good sysadmin must learn from the experience, harden his computer, report it to an Incident Response Team, and... Well, be prepared for the next time.
IBM is commiting to give users the chance to run Linux on their systems - but they can not possibly phase out their own OS for a simple reason: One of the main features of their systems is the ability to transparently virtualize everything. If you had a huge 370 devoted 100% to Linux, it would be a real waste of resources. You have to set up a virtual machine to do this - and that's where both OS's start playing along nicely.
As it is right now, it exists merely in a oblivious theoric state only... But I think that pattern matching can actually be pushed beyond Perl's ability... And it can be VERY benefical to projects like mine.
I recently bought a 600MHz 21164 Alpha and am running it with RedHat 6.1... The machine runs VERY good usually, but I have LOGS of "unaligned traps" (mostly from Postgres and Emacs) showing up in my/var/log/messages. X also freezes at least once a day, and I think it could be a related problem. How can I recompile those apps with the proper bit alignment?
When has this been enforced? We have.com churches,.net commercial entities,.org commercial entities... Even worse, who stays in his country's TLD? At least in Mexico, over half the domain population is not.mx... This should be addressed, but it is too late now:(
I run my Linux with an Alpha processor. I don't know if this makes such a difference... But anyway, I have been running Mozilla since M12, and, while I can't deny it looks miles ahead than Netscape on my Intel boxes, it simply sucks... Every milestone it sucks less, but anyway, Mozilla loves crashing. As Netscape is not available for Alpha (or at least, I was not able to find it), I had to settle for this second best. Well, it did just not work out. It is way too unstable, and for people like me who open 10 browser windows and have interesting/important stuff in all of them, having the browser suddenly die is just not an option.
I am a GNOME person. I dislike KDE, and I'd rather not have Qt installed on my computer. However, the only alternative I had to get my browsing without losing my liver were to install KDE and use KFM as a browser. So far so good, does not crash often (although, of course, it does).
Does someone use an Alpha? What do you use for browsing?
I'm sure this question will be asked more than once... But here I go.
We have all been long waiting for the HURD kernel. Some of us have read a bit about it, and -no doubt- it sounds very, very good. Now, HURD has been in pre-beta stages for several years already. Do you think that Linux has acted as a negative effect for the HURD development? Many developers, in my opinion, prefer adding features or polishing existing ones in an already-working and very popular system than hacking the most obscure bits of a system which may never see the light.
On the other hand, being the HURD as modular as I understand it is (and please don't flame me, I am not very much into the guts of operating systems, and what follows may be nonsense), do you think it will be possible to port some modules from the Linux kernel to the HURD?
And, as a last point, about other free OS efforts... What future do you see in them? I'm not talking about the classic Linux/*BSD systems, but about another radical attempts at something undone, such as Freedows.
Come on... Maybe it is not a backdoor... But the fact is -and will remain no matter what they do- that this shows us how insecure closed source applications are... If the purpose of this DLL is not opening up a backdoor... Well, there must be another purpose for calling the Netscape engineers weenies - It must be somewhere else in the code... One more of the infamous MS Easter Eggs? A slightly more perverse and obscure function than what we might imagine? With closed source, we will never know.
Anyway, even if it is just text, I think it shows lack of seriousness for a company as Microsoft...
(What would happen epacsteN were overwritten with 1~sorciM, would we have a working Windows?)
I bought recently a complete Alpha system at The Linux Store. It runs really nice. Besides, it costed me more or less the same than a good Intel system to be used as a server - US$2500. 600MHz, 128MB RAM, 13GB. I could not be more satisfied with it.
And ask them if there NT servers are C2 certified. The funny thing, against any other claim, it isn't (NT 3.5x is certified, but only if it has no disk drive and no network connection...).
Correct me if I'm wrong... NT should not have even a hard disk drive in order to be C2 certified, right?
For inclusion in Perl 5.6, Randall L. Schwartz wrote perlroot.pod as a standard file to go with the distribution. It's a very good tutorial on Perl objects. I can't post it here or in my page because permission is only granted for inclusion in the Perl distribution (or that is what I understood), but you can look for that file in the Perl source tree.
Remember that Transmeta stated clearly that this would not be the fastest or most powerful chip around. It is made specifically for mobile applications, not for servers or power-hungry geeks.
I think the future Transmeta CPUs will allow some kind of multiprocessing - right now, it would serve no purpose but distracting the motherboard manufacturers from what they need to do - produce motherboards and chipsets for simple laptops.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in Mexico. About 15 years ago, my parents sent me to a computing introduction course. Like any good course in the mid-80s, it started where it should start: Teaching the kid to think, to program. Most of us knew little or no English, so the staff at that school took the job of translating all (at least, most of) Logo to Spanish. It was quite usable... I don't remember Logo's syntax anymore, but it was more or less:
:x :y
:x
:y
:x
:y
:)
:)
para Caja
camina
derecha 90
camina
derecha 90
camina
derecha 90
camina
derecha 90
Of course, Logo had a very limited syntax... Although, of course, it was very fun and easy to use for kids... All my best wishes to Dr. Seymour Papert, who made me what I am today
A few years later, at a local expo, I recall seeing a BBC computer (don't remember the name, they were pretty popular back then in Europe), with EBASIC in a cartridge - A translation of BASIC to Spanish. You could switch between BASIC and EBASIC. Of course, an EBASIC program would not run on BASIC, the commands were completely different.
However, they both were educational programs. I doubt a similar thing has been done (successfully) in any serious language... for kids, anyway, languages did not have to be THAT confortable
I am pursuing a BSc title right now, not a PhD. I know, the article talked about doctorate thesis, but it still is a thesis. I am studying in an American university, and yes, the copyright remains mine - double checked. In Mexico, this is also usually the case: Your work will always remain yours, even though it is published as work for a university.
Greetings,
I am working on my thesis, and it will be (well, what I have done already IS) under the FSF FDL - Free Documentation License. It is much better suited to writings than the GPL. GPL was written to protect code, FDL was written to protect writings.
FDL takes some approaches that it would be very hard to take on programs. It contemplates invariant sections, which should always appear. It also provides for invariant texts which should appear at the cover, back or first/last pages of the book.
That's the original goal of many -most- of our projects. To date, however, every single piece of software written *does* suck, in some way or another.
.DLLs, making everything (supposedly) reusable. What happens there? Hell breaks loose, every time you install a program which relies upon a newer/older DLL, your whole system crumbles down gradually... I think "Enthropy 2000" would be a more correct name for W2K.
Unix gives some provision for reusable code - libraries, for example... Of course, Unix was designed over 30 years ago, and the issue was really not important... But well, today we have a great deal of programs which *do* implement ways of reusable code... Very successfully, IMHO.
Windows, OTOH, was built around the
As many of you may know, in Mexico we had elections last week. Many say that they were the first clean elections ever. The 71-year old regime was defeated - 71 years the same party ruled the country, not anymore...
Anyway, among the loser official candidate's strategies for advertising his candidature was to say that he would teach English and computers to every kid in urban and rural areas... Well, that was among his most foolish affirmations. Cartoonists all over the country started making jokes on him - "Finally we will be able to talk with the indigenous people who still don't know any Spanish - we will talk in English!", a little kid asking the candidate: "Mr. Candidate, Mr. Candidate! Can we have laptops on my village? We still do not have electricity!"...
The fact is, even though Mexico is among the most developed countries in Latin America, the rural areas completely lack the infrastructure needed to use computers... Let alone Internet access. There are still many small and medium sized cities that do not have a local ISP. How dare they say that our rural areas have any better luck? In Latin America, the rural areas have always been unimportant to the government.
How would you call a Celeron? I think it would be a Pentium 1.5
(Or... Well, Intel used roman numerals, right? Would it be Pentium I.V? Now, that would be too similar to Pentium IV, so maybe that's the reason why they decided to go back to the good old 4)
They do not -and I think, will not- add things such as KDE to their ports... OpenBSD is not built for beauty... It is built for rock-solid security. You can still add KDE, using the built-in Linux emulation, but IMHO you are defeating OpenBSD's reason to exist.
On where to find a list of ports, anyway... You can find a list at ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/2.7/ ports.tar.gz.
I don't like the idea... PnP has never really worked, it has always been a mess. Adding TCP/IP to PnP will only make it a distributed mess.
A printer must still have its OS-specific drivers. A scanner? same story. Yes, the peripherials will tell you where they are, and that's a plus... But I don't think our problems will end when everything is automatically recognized.
Much to the opposite.
But anyway, users want to be fed in the mouth... Why don't they include a slave techie with each sold system?
First of all... This would be very cool - boot speed close to zero... But what about kernel updates? We would have to have a Flashable EPROM... And what would happen if I flashed the wrong file? Well, sorry, no OS anymore! this calls for a mandatory, non-erasable ROM with a monitor (similar to Sun's) that would load from the flashable ROM. In short, it's not going to fit into current-generation motherboards.
A good point would be having the possibility (like in the good ol' Amiga) to change the pointers to a RAM address - In the Amiga, if I still had ROM 1.3 and wanted to run 3.1, I just told the machine to go look for it somewhere else (and give up 512KB RAM, which was still a sizable part of my RAM)... And voila, Workbench 3.1!
Let's see for IA64 on...
The first couple that come to my mind:
Commodore PET/16/64/Plus4/128
Atari 400/800/600XL/800XL/similars
Ok, Ok, BASIC is not an OS... Here I go:
Atari 520ST/1040ST/Falcon (or was it Dragon?)
Amiga 1000/500/2000/2500/3000/600/1200/4000
In short, the machines we grew up with.
How well does it scale? How many nodes will we be able to have on a single circuit? How well will it deal with electrically noisy circuits? Will it be possible to isolate my network from my neighbor's?
This sounds pretty sweet, but... There is no heaven on earth... Things are not usually as perfect as they seem...
Spoofing is not a hard task to accomplish. If I was to attack a machine I knew was well hardened, I might have decided to attack an aggressive, less-protected sysadmin pretending to come from that machine. If I tricked him into attacking back, I would effectively trick him into helping me.
A good sysadmin must learn from the experience, harden his computer, report it to an Incident Response Team, and... Well, be prepared for the next time.
Many people in this thread talk about Theo's harsh personality... I have a little doubt:
Is RMS a nicer person than Theo?
They both will rage about their positions and will not tolerate any other person's - But they both have done great things for all of us!
Few products with the word "open" in their names are Free (Stallman's definition) or even Open (Raymond's). OpenBSD is Open and Free.
IBM is commiting to give users the chance to run Linux on their systems - but they can not possibly phase out their own OS for a simple reason: One of the main features of their systems is the ability to transparently virtualize everything. If you had a huge 370 devoted 100% to Linux, it would be a real waste of resources. You have to set up a virtual machine to do this - and that's where both OS's start playing along nicely.
I think your project could go hand-in-hand with mine... Take a look at http://www.gwolf.cx/wrap
As it is right now, it exists merely in a oblivious theoric state only... But I think that pattern matching can actually be pushed beyond Perl's ability... And it can be VERY benefical to projects like mine.
I recently bought a 600MHz 21164 Alpha and am running it with RedHat 6.1... The machine runs VERY good usually, but I have LOGS of "unaligned traps" (mostly from Postgres and Emacs) showing up in my /var/log/messages. X also freezes at least once a day, and I think it could be a related problem. How can I recompile those apps with the proper bit alignment?
Thanks!
When has this been enforced? We have .com churches, .net commercial entities, .org commercial entities... Even worse, who stays in his country's TLD? At least in Mexico, over half the domain population is not .mx... This should be addressed, but it is too late now :(
I run my Linux with an Alpha processor. I don't know if this makes such a difference... But anyway, I have been running Mozilla since M12, and, while I can't deny it looks miles ahead than Netscape on my Intel boxes, it simply sucks... Every milestone it sucks less, but anyway, Mozilla loves crashing. As Netscape is not available for Alpha (or at least, I was not able to find it), I had to settle for this second best. Well, it did just not work out. It is way too unstable, and for people like me who open 10 browser windows and have interesting/important stuff in all of them, having the browser suddenly die is just not an option.
I am a GNOME person. I dislike KDE, and I'd rather not have Qt installed on my computer. However, the only alternative I had to get my browsing without losing my liver were to install KDE and use KFM as a browser. So far so good, does not crash often (although, of course, it does).
Does someone use an Alpha? What do you use for browsing?
I'm sure this question will be asked more than once... But here I go.
We have all been long waiting for the HURD kernel. Some of us have read a bit about it, and -no doubt- it sounds very, very good. Now, HURD has been in pre-beta stages for several years already. Do you think that Linux has acted as a negative effect for the HURD development? Many developers, in my opinion, prefer adding features or polishing existing ones in an already-working and very popular system than hacking the most obscure bits of a system which may never see the light.
On the other hand, being the HURD as modular as I understand it is (and please don't flame me, I am not very much into the guts of operating systems, and what follows may be nonsense), do you think it will be possible to port some modules from the Linux kernel to the HURD?
And, as a last point, about other free OS efforts... What future do you see in them? I'm not talking about the classic Linux/*BSD systems, but about another radical attempts at something undone, such as Freedows.
Come on... Maybe it is not a backdoor... But the fact is -and will remain no matter what they do- that this shows us how insecure closed source applications are... If the purpose of this DLL is not opening up a backdoor... Well, there must be another purpose for calling the Netscape engineers weenies - It must be somewhere else in the code... One more of the infamous MS Easter Eggs? A slightly more perverse and obscure function than what we might imagine? With closed source, we will never know.
Anyway, even if it is just text, I think it shows lack of seriousness for a company as Microsoft...
(What would happen epacsteN were overwritten with 1~sorciM, would we have a working Windows?)
I bought recently a complete Alpha system at The Linux Store. It
runs really nice. Besides, it costed me more or less the same
than a good Intel system to be used as a server - US$2500.
600MHz, 128MB RAM, 13GB. I could not be more satisfied
with it.
And ask them if there NT servers are C2 certified. The funny thing, against any other claim, it isn't (NT 3.5x is certified, but only if it has no disk drive and no network connection...).
Correct me if I'm wrong... NT should not have even a hard disk drive in order to be C2 certified, right?
For inclusion in Perl 5.6, Randall L. Schwartz wrote perlroot.pod as a standard file to go with the distribution. It's a very good tutorial on Perl objects. I can't post it here or in my page because permission is only granted for inclusion in the Perl distribution (or that is what I understood), but you can look for that file in the Perl source tree.
Remember that Transmeta stated clearly that this would not be the fastest or most powerful chip around. It is made specifically for mobile applications, not for servers or power-hungry geeks.
I think the future Transmeta CPUs will allow some kind of multiprocessing - right now, it would serve no purpose but distracting the motherboard manufacturers from what they need to do - produce motherboards and chipsets for simple laptops.