As an avid Linux user, and programmer, I've always been interested in developing the kernel. However, the sheer size of the kernel has been rather intimidating, and kept me away from it. I've also found myself to be better at programming "utilities" rather than "end-user" types of programs. Is there any section of the kernel that would be "the best place to start"?
With that in mind, are there any suggestions you could make to those of us interested in kernel development, on how to get started?
The issue at hand here is NOT the video games. Seeing violence other places could cause it too. There are MANY things that could be blamed for violence. The REAL problem, is that (some) parents are not teaching their children the difference between TV/Video Games and Real Life (tm). Along with that, knowing the difference between right and wrong is something that these violent people seem to be lacking.
Its just that video games are the unfortunate victim of blame for violence, much the same way cell phones are blamed for causing accidents. Irresponsibility on the USER'S BEHALF of either of these is what causes the problems they're blamed for - not the game/phone itself.
Congress really should get their heads out of their a$$es and realize that video games really aren't the problem - lack of common sense is. And you can't legislate that.
P.S. I've played violent video games since Doom, and I've never committed any violent crimes (actually, no crimes period). So they're obviously NOT the problem. My friends have too, and they're just the same way I am. (BTW, I'm only 16 now. So it is very much an issue with parents, IMNSHO)
Let's divide this project in to sub-components, so when we get conquered we will be able to can the entire (insert team here) team and claim "those people were lying sons of b*tches. We've canned 'em and we're clean now. Now leave us alone to hire another equally bad team." Not to mention that the (insert team here) was instructed to do so, and as such - if they DIDN'T program it in, they'd get fired. And when M$ gets caught, they're fired anyway.
Bah. "Mistake on the part of the Search team." It's more like "Netscape found... and removed. Press OK to apologize."
What an apt comment, even if it was meant as a joke. One could easily say that this is (unfortunately) a problem with many more places in society than just programmes and their software. More and more, people are merely in their profession for the money - NOT for the love of doing it. And as such, they will do anything, such as write spyware, to get more money or keep their job.
We do need people with some morals left, to stand up and say that exploiting the consumer is WRONG. We all know it is, we all hate being exploited, but somebody out there keeps writing the code that does it. Personally, as a programmer, I could not let myself write a program that does that (partially because I am best at programming underlying utilities, not end-user applications).
Anyway, my point is there doesn't seem to be enough in the way of people willing to stand up for their beleifs and/or morals and say that something is just plain wrong. This is the case in many fields, and not least in politics. If we could just stand up and truly protest, something might get changed - but there have to be ENOUGH, and that is a common problem that we're seeing both here and in other areas of society.
I've heard it said before that the downfall of every great civilization (such as Rome) was preceded by a moral decline. And if this isn't a wonderful example of that happening here in America. We need to return to the values that too few of us never left.
IMO, I kind of like not having anonymous posting, because there's been a notable absence of AC trolls today, from what I've seen. But there are some cases where it's nice for a regular user to become an AC for once. I'm rather torn over the subject:)
I can't speak for everybody else, but its both funny and interesting all at once. Feel free to mod this down, it is kind of OT.
If losing a root server is so bad, then maybe all of us with *nix and *BSD boxes should start running caching DNS servers? It'd essentially be a distributed DNS, but then you'd lose all central control of DNS names. If they fear losing one of their root servers, maybe they should offer a distributed solution that would make it hard to take out 'the server,' if you will.
As we've seen with other distributed networks, like gnutella and Kazaa (please excuse the crude analogy), it's nearly impossible to take the entire network down in one fell swoop, as it is with a centralized server (like Napster had/has).
Maybe you could design it such that the launch apparatus is like those used today, but breaks off after exiting the atmosphere, where nuclear propulsion commences. (IE, you release no neutrons in to the reactor until the craft is a specified number of miles outside our atmosphere).
Even if it is practical, here's a comforting thought if you were an astronaut:
"Yay! We're going to Mars!... And we're propelling ourselves using the worlds largest (hopefully controlled/directed) nuclear bomb!"
As a programmer, I've written for the z80 before, and I'd have to say no. Actually, I would argue the other way - when computer hardware becomes obsolete, it has become outdated and 'hard to program for.' But the advantage in this is learning how programmers did things in such a limited environment (such as the 8-bit z80 with only 64k of mem).
You can learn a lot from old programs, such as how you can use bitwise commands to your advantage (which is priceless, IMO). Anyway, my point is that you can learn good and/or efficient programming techniques from old/obsolete hardware, which might otherwise go unlearned if you only program in languages that hide these things (like the use of bitmasks and toying with flags, and self-modifying code) from the programmer.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only versions of windows that I know of that are 64-bit are the 64-bit WinXP and maybe versions of NT (but those were probably for Alpha anyway), which are now outdated.
There are probably enough people like me that don't want to upgrade to WinXP just for 64-bit (I don't like lots of things about XP, but thats my opinion). So it would seem that Linux with Cross-platform portability (hence, x86-64) will have a better chance at propagating (spelling?) itself in to this market faster than windows.
We have C derivatives (C, C++, C#, Java). They all have their benefits and weaknesses.
We have things like Pascal (none of which IMO, are very powerful).
Then we have LISP, which scares the hell out of me. [I won't thouch that with a 20-foot pole]
All of these are OO in some shape or form, but some are better in certain places. I have never cared for Java, or interpreted languages period, but I suppose they've got advantages like Java does in web plugins. So there is no 'logical evolution,' but just a wider variety of niche languages. (Somebody still has to use stuff like C and C++, to run interpreted languages like Java and.NET's CLR, unless somebody comes up with a hardware CLR processor, or hardware JVM. Yeah, right)
People have strayed from languages like LISP because it is so radically different, and most programmers are familiar with C-style programming. Personally, I have no dillema - I don't see C or C++ going out of style anytime in the forseeable future. Maybe you have one if you're a newcommer.
It appears to be the norm (or at least through my experience), that when some DSL provider uses a major corporate wire, certain problems are encountered when you sign up:
1. You may be *conveniently* too far away from the 'central office' [They make the restrictions tighter for 3rd-party service: like only up to 10,000 feet, when the real limit is several thousand feet more]
2. The phone company is painfully slow in getting the wires required to your house (ISDN, at least)
3. The phone company and your 3rd-party provider bicker about who's at fault when a problem appears. Nobody admits its their fault, so you (the consumer) is virtually screwed over.
So essentially, they want you to sign up for *their* service (gee, that installation time gets a lot shorter!). So they're already monopolizing. This was the case with Rythms ISDN (spelling?) when we had it. And Rythms went bankrupt as I recall. *cough*
Just some stuff to think about, as they alredy monopolize the wires/equipment to an extent.
The problem with things like this is the fact that people don't know they're being cheated. If everybody knew that recording your favorite episode of while you're out for dinner is illegal under the DMCA due to the (Begin Rant) legal crap the sleazebag lawyers who work for the MPAA think up (End Rant), then people would not buy it.
So if people knew what the MPAA, etc... is doing behind our backs, they wouldn't buy it - instituting a sort of boycott. Then, maybe the MPAA would realize that we are the source of their money and better suck it up and make us happy.
We're always complaining about how deep corporate pockets can be, but if we have a probem with it - then don't buy it - we're the ones giving them that money.
I don't know about anybody else, but I have only ~8 months of programming
experience, and I feel that I'm relatively proficient. (I know there
are always people better than me, and things to learn - this isn't a flame/troll).
But my point is, I learned most of this stuff myself, and I can't help but
wonder if part of the reason I grasped some of these concepts faster is that
I was able to actually examine Open Source code multiple times to learn how
things were done. So in that way, I was learning from professional programmers,
which in turn, could possibly (most likely) generate more professional
programmers, which due to their background of learning from OSS will probably
also contribute to the OSS community, and some other new programmer will start
the same way.
... for those of us using a LAN/NAT to put multiple computers on 1 connection, then the bottleneck on a 10 GBit internet connection will still be our ethernet cards and hubs/switches/routers. And also, for a machine not on a NAT, with the modem inside, would most likely still take an enormous amount of processing power to recieve 10 GBits of data per second. (And to store it somewhere. Most computers have an IDE drive, of which the *fastest* transfer rate is 133 MB(its?) a second, which is another bottle neck even if you have a 1 GBit NIC -- I'm not sure about SCSI)
So it may sound nice (I agree, I'd love to have it), but a internet connection is only as fast as the slowest link in between Machine A and Machine B. (So on a 10 GBit network, you'd still be capped at the speed of your network card, which is usually only 10 MBits.)
Not to mention any caps that the ISP sets up (which is already happening on 1.5 MBit cablemodems)
OK, I apologize for any confusion, but we're using Borland 3.x (I don't know the 'x'). But yes it's ancient, and thats the problem we've run in to. But the problem is, I'm looking at deploying this in a high school environment, and we need the IDE for debugging our programs, as that is what all the students are used to already.
I'm used to both the Borland IDE, and VIM/GCC/GDB in Linux, but nobody else in the class would be. We've all run in to quirks with the Borland compiler so that's why we want something new (copmiler-wise, and gcc is both free and extremely good, IMHO) with a familiar IDE, or one of comparable usage.
I hope this clarifies some of the questions.
So far it sounds like RHIDE is the way to go (with DJGPP), and those of us that want to can still use Makefiles to manage multiple-file projects. (I'd probably have to explain that to the class) Also, from my experience, we'd also be able to use RHIDE for both C++ and Pascal via gcc and Free Pascal. So this could provide an all-in-one solution for our Computer Science department.
If I convince the teacher(s) to use it, it will be a score for OSS =)
Maybe I'm wrong, and if I am, I'll just crawl back in to my hole and shut up.
But the article claims that the new technology will allow them to *embed* the
processor(s) inside the casing material, unlike today where the core actually
sticks out above the packaging.
But the advantage, as I see it, to having the core *above* the packaging, is
that heatsinks, thermal grease, etc... all have direct (or extremely close
to direct) contact with the core - which is what generates the heat. Mabye
in reducing voltage, heat output will drop significantly, but I digress.
With the core embedded in the casing, it would seem hard to help cool the core
when a heatsink doesn't have direct contact.
I may be wrong, and in that case just ignore this comment, but I don't know
how Intel would plan on dealing with that as a problem (if it in fact is one).
If this goes over well, this could be the first big step in terms of OGG's popularity, and a step towards
entering the realm that formats like MP3 and RealAudio have dominated for far too long.
I opened the Radio 1 stream in XMMS, and it sounds much better than an MP3 stream at 60 kbps.
Something you may consider is that not EVERY Microsoft employee necessarily feels negatively
towards Open Source stuff like PHP.
For example, if they really want to help Mircrosoft, then indirectly this is a good move.
By making the competition better, your department has to improve even more. So it is very likely
that somebody from a non-ASP department at Microsoft may have done that to try to increase the
quality of the ASP software they are forced to put out to compete with PHP.
Sorry for opposing the common Anti-Microsoft ethos here on/., but it makes sense if you think about
it. A little friendly between-department competition (well, maybe not friendly). I'm sure it happens
at most corporations.
Singing atoms... brain... storage...
on
Nobel Prizes Awarded
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I'm not sure I'd want "computers that rival the brain in... storage."
My experience is the brain has an exceedingly high rate of data loss =)
... a judge could exercise that power on organizations other than the government
itself. Any guesses one of the first ones to go down for being insecure?
*cough* Passport *cough*
A lot of people's money and other things would be more secure if
the government forced Microsoft to make Passport a bit more secure,
as they are doing to their own institutions.
The implementation though, would be a nightmare, so maybe it's
OK the way it is now.
Slashdot Mirror
As an avid Linux user, and programmer, I've always been interested in developing the kernel. However, the sheer size of the kernel has been rather intimidating, and kept me away from it. I've also found myself to be better at programming "utilities" rather than "end-user" types of programs. Is there any section of the kernel that would be "the best place to start"?
With that in mind, are there any suggestions you could make to those of us interested in kernel development, on how to get started?
Thanks up front.
We've been screaming that at Microsoft for ages and look where it's gotten us - Nowhere.
Might as well be speaking greek to the guys.
Amen!
The issue at hand here is NOT the video games. Seeing violence other places could cause it too. There are MANY things that could be blamed for violence. The REAL problem, is that (some) parents are not teaching their children the difference between TV/Video Games and Real Life (tm). Along with that, knowing the difference between right and wrong is something that these violent people seem to be lacking.
Its just that video games are the unfortunate victim of blame for violence, much the same way cell phones are blamed for causing accidents. Irresponsibility on the USER'S BEHALF of either of these is what causes the problems they're blamed for - not the game/phone itself.
Congress really should get their heads out of their a$$es and realize that video games really aren't the problem - lack of common sense is. And you can't legislate that.
P.S. I've played violent video games since Doom, and I've never committed any violent crimes (actually, no crimes period). So they're obviously NOT the problem. My friends have too, and they're just the same way I am. (BTW, I'm only 16 now. So it is very much an issue with parents, IMNSHO)
Let's divide this project in to sub-components, so when we get conquered we will be able to can the entire (insert team here) team and claim "those people were lying sons of b*tches. We've canned 'em and we're clean now. Now leave us alone to hire another equally bad team." Not to mention that the (insert team here) was instructed to do so, and as such - if they DIDN'T program it in, they'd get fired. And when M$ gets caught, they're fired anyway.
Bah. "Mistake on the part of the Search team." It's more like "Netscape found... and removed. Press OK to apologize."
What an apt comment, even if it was meant as a joke. One could easily say that this is (unfortunately) a problem with many more places in society than just programmes and their software. More and more, people are merely in their profession for the money - NOT for the love of doing it. And as such, they will do anything, such as write spyware, to get more money or keep their job.
We do need people with some morals left, to stand up and say that exploiting the consumer is WRONG. We all know it is, we all hate being exploited, but somebody out there keeps writing the code that does it. Personally, as a programmer, I could not let myself write a program that does that (partially because I am best at programming underlying utilities, not end-user applications).
Anyway, my point is there doesn't seem to be enough in the way of people willing to stand up for their beleifs and/or morals and say that something is just plain wrong. This is the case in many fields, and not least in politics. If we could just stand up and truly protest, something might get changed - but there have to be ENOUGH, and that is a common problem that we're seeing both here and in other areas of society.
I've heard it said before that the downfall of every great civilization (such as Rome) was preceded by a moral decline. And if this isn't a wonderful example of that happening here in America. We need to return to the values that too few of us never left.
IMO, I kind of like not having anonymous posting, because there's been a notable absence of AC trolls today, from what I've seen. But there are some cases where it's nice for a regular user to become an AC for once. I'm rather torn over the subject
I can't speak for everybody else, but its both funny and interesting all at once. Feel free to mod this down, it is kind of OT.
Happy april fools day, everybody. Even though anonymous posting has been disabled today (as I see right now), I'd put money this is just a joke.
Just my two cents.
If losing a root server is so bad, then maybe all of us with *nix and *BSD boxes should start running caching DNS servers? It'd essentially be a distributed DNS, but then you'd lose all central control of DNS names. If they fear losing one of their root servers, maybe they should offer a distributed solution that would make it hard to take out 'the server,' if you will.
As we've seen with other distributed networks, like gnutella and Kazaa (please excuse the crude analogy), it's nearly impossible to take the entire network down in one fell swoop, as it is with a centralized server (like Napster had/has).
Just my two cents.
Totally redefines "eating your Words."
Maybe you could design it such that the launch apparatus is like those used today, but breaks off after exiting the atmosphere, where nuclear propulsion commences. (IE, you release no neutrons in to the reactor until the craft is a specified number of miles outside our atmosphere).
Even if it is practical, here's a comforting thought if you were an astronaut:
"Yay! We're going to Mars!
As a programmer, I've written for the z80 before, and I'd have to say no. Actually, I would argue the other way - when computer hardware becomes obsolete, it has become outdated and 'hard to program for.' But the advantage in this is learning how programmers did things in such a limited environment (such as the 8-bit z80 with only 64k of mem).
You can learn a lot from old programs, such as how you can use bitwise commands to your advantage (which is priceless, IMO). Anyway, my point is that you can learn good and/or efficient programming techniques from old/obsolete hardware, which might otherwise go unlearned if you only program in languages that hide these things (like the use of bitmasks and toying with flags, and self-modifying code) from the programmer.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only versions of windows that I know of that are 64-bit are the 64-bit WinXP and maybe versions of NT (but those were probably for Alpha anyway), which are now outdated.
There are probably enough people like me that don't want to upgrade to WinXP just for 64-bit (I don't like lots of things about XP, but thats my opinion). So it would seem that Linux with Cross-platform portability (hence, x86-64) will have a better chance at propagating (spelling?) itself in to this market faster than windows.
Just my opinions, not to be taken as fact.
We have C derivatives (C, C++, C#, Java). They all have their benefits and weaknesses.
.NET's CLR, unless somebody comes up with a hardware CLR processor, or hardware JVM. Yeah, right)
We have things like Pascal (none of which IMO, are very powerful).
Then we have LISP, which scares the hell out of me. [I won't thouch that with a 20-foot pole]
All of these are OO in some shape or form, but some are better in certain places. I have never cared for Java, or interpreted languages period, but I suppose they've got advantages like Java does in web plugins. So there is no 'logical evolution,' but just a wider variety of niche languages. (Somebody still has to use stuff like C and C++, to run interpreted languages like Java and
People have strayed from languages like LISP because it is so radically different, and most programmers are familiar with C-style programming. Personally, I have no dillema - I don't see C or C++ going out of style anytime in the forseeable future. Maybe you have one if you're a newcommer.
Just my $0.02
It appears to be the norm (or at least through my experience), that when some DSL provider uses a major corporate wire, certain problems are encountered when you sign up:
1. You may be *conveniently* too far away from the 'central office' [They make the restrictions tighter for 3rd-party service: like only up to 10,000 feet, when the real limit is several thousand feet more]
2. The phone company is painfully slow in getting the wires required to your house (ISDN, at least)
3. The phone company and your 3rd-party provider bicker about who's at fault when a problem appears. Nobody admits its their fault, so you (the consumer) is virtually screwed over.
So essentially, they want you to sign up for *their* service (gee, that installation time gets a lot shorter!). So they're already monopolizing. This was the case with Rythms ISDN (spelling?) when we had it. And Rythms went bankrupt as I recall. *cough*
Just some stuff to think about, as they alredy monopolize the wires/equipment to an extent.
People knew what they were buying in to.
The problem with things like this is the fact that people don't know they're being cheated. If everybody knew that recording your favorite episode of while you're out for dinner is illegal under the DMCA due to the (Begin Rant) legal crap the sleazebag lawyers who work for the MPAA think up (End Rant), then people would not buy it.
So if people knew what the MPAA, etc... is doing behind our backs, they wouldn't buy it - instituting a sort of boycott. Then, maybe the MPAA would realize that we are the source of their money and better suck it up and make us happy.
We're always complaining about how deep corporate pockets can be, but if we have a probem with it - then don't buy it - we're the ones giving them that money.
"Error: Netscape dectected and removed. Please press 'OK' to apologize."
I don't know about anybody else, but I have only ~8 months of programming
experience, and I feel that I'm relatively proficient. (I know there
are always people better than me, and things to learn - this isn't a flame/troll).
But my point is, I learned most of this stuff myself, and I can't help but
wonder if part of the reason I grasped some of these concepts faster is that
I was able to actually examine Open Source code multiple times to learn how
things were done. So in that way, I was learning from professional programmers,
which in turn, could possibly (most likely) generate more professional
programmers, which due to their background of learning from OSS will probably
also contribute to the OSS community, and some other new programmer will start
the same way.
(Self-fulfilling prophecy?)
... for those of us using a LAN/NAT to put multiple computers on 1 connection, then the bottleneck on a 10 GBit internet connection will still be our ethernet cards and hubs/switches/routers. And also, for a machine not on a NAT, with the modem inside, would most likely still take an enormous amount of processing power to recieve 10 GBits of data per second. (And to store it somewhere. Most computers have an IDE drive, of which the *fastest* transfer rate is 133 MB(its?) a second, which is another bottle neck even if you have a 1 GBit NIC -- I'm not sure about SCSI)
So it may sound nice (I agree, I'd love to have it), but a internet connection is only as fast as the slowest link in between Machine A and Machine B. (So on a 10 GBit network, you'd still be capped at the speed of your network card, which is usually only 10 MBits.)
Not to mention any caps that the ISP sets up (which is already happening on 1.5 MBit cablemodems)
OK, I apologize for any confusion, but we're using Borland 3.x (I don't know the 'x'). But yes it's ancient, and thats the problem we've run in to. But the problem is, I'm looking at deploying this in a high school environment, and we need the IDE for debugging our programs, as that is what all the students are used to already.
I'm used to both the Borland IDE, and VIM/GCC/GDB in Linux, but nobody else in the class would be. We've all run in to quirks with the Borland compiler so that's why we want something new (copmiler-wise, and gcc is both free and extremely good, IMHO) with a familiar IDE, or one of comparable usage.
I hope this clarifies some of the questions.
So far it sounds like RHIDE is the way to go (with DJGPP), and those of us that want to can still use Makefiles to manage multiple-file projects. (I'd probably have to explain that to the class) Also, from my experience, we'd also be able to use RHIDE for both C++ and Pascal via gcc and Free Pascal. So this could provide an all-in-one solution for our Computer Science department.
If I convince the teacher(s) to use it, it will be a score for OSS =)
Maybe I'm wrong, and if I am, I'll just crawl back in to my hole and shut up.
But the article claims that the new technology will allow them to *embed* the
processor(s) inside the casing material, unlike today where the core actually
sticks out above the packaging.
But the advantage, as I see it, to having the core *above* the packaging, is
that heatsinks, thermal grease, etc... all have direct (or extremely close
to direct) contact with the core - which is what generates the heat. Mabye
in reducing voltage, heat output will drop significantly, but I digress.
With the core embedded in the casing, it would seem hard to help cool the core
when a heatsink doesn't have direct contact.
I may be wrong, and in that case just ignore this comment, but I don't know
how Intel would plan on dealing with that as a problem (if it in fact is one).
If this goes over well, this could be the first big step in terms of OGG's popularity, and a step towards
entering the realm that formats like MP3 and RealAudio have dominated for far too long.
I opened the Radio 1 stream in XMMS, and it sounds much better than an MP3 stream at 60 kbps.
Something you may consider is that not EVERY Microsoft employee necessarily feels negatively
/., but it makes sense if you think about
towards Open Source stuff like PHP.
For example, if they really want to help Mircrosoft, then indirectly this is a good move.
By making the competition better, your department has to improve even more. So it is very likely
that somebody from a non-ASP department at Microsoft may have done that to try to increase the
quality of the ASP software they are forced to put out to compete with PHP.
Sorry for opposing the common Anti-Microsoft ethos here on
it. A little friendly between-department competition (well, maybe not friendly). I'm sure it happens
at most corporations.
I'm not sure I'd want "computers that rival the brain in ... storage."
My experience is the brain has an exceedingly high rate of data loss =)
... Because he's spent less time on the interview so he could get back to working on the kernel!
=)
... a judge could exercise that power on organizations other than the government
itself. Any guesses one of the first ones to go down for being insecure?
*cough* Passport *cough*
A lot of people's money and other things would be more secure if
the government forced Microsoft to make Passport a bit more secure,
as they are doing to their own institutions.
The implementation though, would be a nightmare, so maybe it's
OK the way it is now.