I strongly disagree on this point. WPA is a bad thing
Yep, I'm with you. It doesn't affect me in the
slightest. I don't use windows, and if a windows
app doesn't run under Wine, I don't use it. But
for the general (and for the most part, ignorant)
population, it's a nightmare. They're not aware
that their rights are being eroded and the things
they used to do in the past (quite legitimately,
as fair use) they will no longer be able to do.
The worst bit is, they won't even become aware of
it until it's too late.
The primary reason to make the switch then is that the x86 intel clones are all CISC proccesors, which is an archaic and limited architecture, destined to grow bigger and more power-hungry over time.
Not really. Sure, there's a complex instruction
set, but these days, it's essentially a RISC core,
and the x86 opcodes get mapped to internal RISC
ops for execution. Furthermore, PPC (and SPARC
and the others) have been
moving further and further away from true RISC,
and their instruction sets are anything but
reduced now -- although admittedly, they're
nowhere near as bloated as the x86 ISA.
The only true RISC chip left with any
sizeable market share is probably ARM.
Personally, I miss the Motorola m88k. One of the
nicest instruction sets I've come across since
the 6502...
Of course if you really want a Linux-compatible printer, you buy a Lexmark.
Errr, no. I bought an Optra E312, and it's one
of the best decisions I could have made. However,
their Linux support is non-existant. For reasons
best known to Lexmark, the default setting out of
the box is to have PostScript errors turned off,
so you don't know *why* something doesn't print.
I phoned their technical support, who said to use
their MarkVision software to turn it on. It
wasn't on the CD, but they pointed me to a
location I could download it from (the 25MB
download is painful when you have to pay for
phone calls). So once I'd got it installed, it
couldn't see any printers. Turns out, they'd lied
to me, and MarkVision for Linux only works if you're using
one of their external print servers, and can't
help if your printer is directly connected.
They sent me some magic runes to try printing,
but that didn't work, and after many, many weeks
and several attempts, they finally sent me a
small binary file to send to the printer that
worked.
The product is great, but their whole tech support
infrastructure is entirely geared to Windows and
Mac, and they don't have a clue when it comes to
Linux.
"strace binaryname" to see what they are _doing_ when they say what they say, and "ldd binaryname" to see what (dynamic) libs it wants
That would be the obvious plan of attack, but it doesn't work. ldd complains with the same error
as you get when trying to run the binary directly.
Similarly, strace fails because it can't get as
far as trying to exec the target binary.
I solved this problem some time ago for RH7.0 by installing
some RPMs from RH6.2. From memory, I think it was
the glibc-2.1.3 RPM, and possibly one other.
My guess is that since the SPARC HW is so expensive
Actually, that's not strictly true. The new Sun Blade 100 workstation comes in at US$995, which
is pretty impressive. Admittedly, it's essentially
a PC with a SPARC CPU rather than a "real" SPARC,
but it's there, nonetheless, and even though
they've had to remove 90% of the on-chip cache
to get it under the $1000 price point, performance
is still acceptable. Of course, enterprise SPARC
hardware still costs the earth...
Bring back the PowerPC port, and release an Alpha port (yea! Solaris on powermac!)
Far more interesting, to me at least, would be
to revive the DG/UX port to SPARC. In the early
days of Solaris, it sucked so badly that Sun paid
Data General to port DG/UX to SPARC as an
insurance policy in case the Solaris team didn't
get it right. As it turned out, Solaris eventually
got to a usable stage (and lets face it, it
couldn't get any worse), so the DG/UX port
disappeared into oblivion. Sad, really, as I
suspect DG/UX is actually the better OS. Even
more sad is that DG are dropping it completely,
as was inevitable after the EMC buyout, to
concentrage on storage solutions:-(
Loki, Tribsoft, and Hyperion will never be able to release at the same time as the Windows version. Well, maybe not never, but not until there is a history of games selling for Linux
As I understand it, the recently released Tribes 2
was released pretty much simultaneously for Linux
and Windows. But in general, this doesn't happen,
and in the highest profile case, Q3A, it really
hurt sales of the Linux version.
why would someone prefer Linux to Solaris on SPARC
Well apart from the fact that giving people choice
is always a good thing, perhaps they're
using a 32-bit SPARC (e.g., a sun4c or sun4m
machine). Solaris 8 no longer supports 32-bit
CPUs, and while older version of Solaris continue
to run, I don't know how committed Sun are to
providing timely updates for security holes, for
example. I personally run Linux on my SPARC because it gives me a hetrogeneous network.
I run Linux on everything, which makes admin very
easy.
Re:Incompetence and the assessment thereof
on
To the Moon, Alice
·
· Score: 1
Fagot and O'Brien (1994) found that socially incompetent boys were largely unaware of their lack of social graces (see Bem & Lord, 1979 , for a similar result involving college students)."
Valuable information concerning thousands of slashdot readers, I'd say.
Maybe so, but not in my case. I've always been
very aware of quite how socially incompetent I
am, and so are most of the other Slashdot-types
I know. The problem I have is that I see social
etiquette as a game that someone invented with
arbitrary rules, and I just don't see the point
of playing the game. Consequently, I don't bother.
Cable DOES, however, require that you share bandwidth with your neighbour
As does DSL, usually. Here in the UK, you can choose
between a 20:1 and a 50:1 contention ratio for ADSL,
depending on how much you want to pay. If you're
really lucky (and have sufficiently deep pockets),
you might be in an area where you can get SDSL,
which isn't shared with other users, but it's so
rare as to be effectively non-existent at the moment. Where ADSL wins over cable is that you're guaranteed a maximum contention ratio.
As I understand it, a cable modem line over here
will be shared with as many other users as the
cable company can sign up. Also, cable providers
tend to place all sort of restrictions on the type
of traffic they'll allow, which is fine for Joe
Public, but sucks for the rest of us...
If the Oil community could purchace the patent on that engine and keep it from the general consumer, it would effectively keep potential users from weening ourselves off of our Oil dependencies
Sadly, this stuff has been going on for years.
Philips bought up the patent on an everlasting
lightbulb, for example, but you don't see it for
sale, because it would hurt sales of their
traditional bulbs. There are numerous other
examples that are happening right now.
Heinlein wrote about this in one of his books
(Expanded Universe, I think).
Sleepycat is a commercial embedded database. Sure, it's Open Source, but it's still commercial.
More to the point, it's playing in a completely
different market to all of the others. It isn't,
and probably never will be considered a replacement
for Oracle, because it's not SQL based. It is,
however, a fully fledged database, supporting
transactions, fine grained locking, online
backups etc.
Also, anyone that thinks MySQL or PostgreSQL are
players in the database leader struggle is
dreaming. Sure, they're fine databases in their
own right, and in time, they well gain some of
the features that they're missing. They're fine
for small to medium businesses, but for
enterprise use (which is where Oracle and DB2
reign supreme), they're just not even close.
c) There will be no quality control, 99% of the games for this thing will be crap.
I can't believe that you of all people would fall
for this argument (or that you'd use Microsoft's
Moronic HTML, but that's another matter:-).
Sure, I believe the TuxBox will fail, for most of
the same reasons that Indrema did, but quality
control won't come into it. Official submission
may increase the quality of the end product,
but if it does so, it's not by much. Does the
vast quantities of useless apps currently
available for Windows (or for that matter,
Linux)
make the quality apps any worse? No? So why
do you think it would do the same for TuxBox?
Yes, the gaming market is very competetive, and
obsoletes products and technology even quicker
than the mainstream software market, so there is
a certain amount to pressure to release before
the product is fully ready, but I doubt that'll
be sufficient to cause a significant drop in quality.
The key to the long term success of any platform
is an unrestricted third party development market.
Sadly, it's just not economically feasible to do
this in the console market now, so we're stuck
with the current situation. Even MS backed away
from their initial stance of not requiring
approval for Xbox games.
Actually, this concept is really not that new. Check out the Strokes extension in Emacs and XEmacs. It does this very thing.
No, it's not new at all. In fact, it's been used
all over the place in the gaming world for some
time. Good examples are Hybris and Battle Squadron,
two Amiga games that used circular motions with
the joystick to launch a smart bomb, or separate
the wings from the ship. Of course, that was back
in the days when gameplay was important, so
making the user interface efficient was more
of a priority than it is in today's world of flashy
graphics and sound but no gameplay.
I use bigfoot since '97 (seems like forever:-) and they always (as far as I remember) had services that you'd have to pay for...
Yes, but the problem I have is that they've
changed what's free and what's not. Some time
ago, I set up a bigfoot web redirection service.
That web site has now moved to a different server,
so I went to update the redirection, only to find
that I now have to pay for it. So my options are
to either stick with the outdated URL, or change
it to the new one, and pay a monthly fee in
perpetuity. I've chosen the former option, with
a pit of PHP on my old server doing the redirection
to the new server...
do it really matter if your web server can fill a gigabit ethernet pipe?
Until recently, I used to agree with you, as
no-one could afford that much bandwidth to the
internet. However, that's all changed now, and
we're looking at getting a gigabit internet link
to the office at work, and the prices are *really*
cheap. For high volume sites, a web server like
TUX may well be needed.
I'm always resorting to a hunt for packages on rpmfind, where their origin is less clear.
Huh? rpmfind tells you *exeactly* where it got the RPM from. What's the problem?
Re:What about the wrong spaces?
on
Spaces vs. Tabs?
·
· Score: 2
If a file contains tabs you can easily:se ts=4 or:se ts=2 to your preference.
Precisely! A tab is a single indent. That's
completely portable across any environment.
By far the biggest argument against using spaces
(and I've seen it in *every* instance I've worked
anywhere that uses spaces) is that people try to
do it manually -- i.e., without having the editor
automatically expand tabs. And that leads to them
getting it wrong! Try maintaining code written
five years ago when the indentation varies between
2 and 9 spaces in the same file. It's not much
fun.
Linus has a strong opinion of another kernel for an operating system, this is news?
No, not at all. Linus' dislike of Mach has been
known for *years*. When I first heard his
complaints, I wasn't entirely convinced. Mach
appeared to offer so much, but as time has
progressed, I've foud myself siding with Linus
more and more. An OS is the one place where you
really don't want extreme flexibility at the
expense of performance.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, I'm with you. It doesn't affect me in the slightest. I don't use windows, and if a windows app doesn't run under Wine, I don't use it. But for the general (and for the most part, ignorant) population, it's a nightmare. They're not aware that their rights are being eroded and the things they used to do in the past (quite legitimately, as fair use) they will no longer be able to do. The worst bit is, they won't even become aware of it until it's too late.
Not really. Sure, there's a complex instruction set, but these days, it's essentially a RISC core, and the x86 opcodes get mapped to internal RISC ops for execution. Furthermore, PPC (and SPARC and the others) have been moving further and further away from true RISC, and their instruction sets are anything but reduced now -- although admittedly, they're nowhere near as bloated as the x86 ISA. The only true RISC chip left with any sizeable market share is probably ARM. Personally, I miss the Motorola m88k. One of the nicest instruction sets I've come across since the 6502...
Errr, no. I bought an Optra E312, and it's one of the best decisions I could have made. However, their Linux support is non-existant. For reasons best known to Lexmark, the default setting out of the box is to have PostScript errors turned off, so you don't know *why* something doesn't print.
I phoned their technical support, who said to use their MarkVision software to turn it on. It wasn't on the CD, but they pointed me to a location I could download it from (the 25MB download is painful when you have to pay for phone calls). So once I'd got it installed, it couldn't see any printers. Turns out, they'd lied to me, and MarkVision for Linux only works if you're using one of their external print servers, and can't help if your printer is directly connected. They sent me some magic runes to try printing, but that didn't work, and after many, many weeks and several attempts, they finally sent me a small binary file to send to the printer that worked.
The product is great, but their whole tech support infrastructure is entirely geared to Windows and Mac, and they don't have a clue when it comes to Linux.
Heinlein predicted that the long term effects of low-level radiation would cause problems. It was in Waldo, his story about broadcast power.
That would be the obvious plan of attack, but it doesn't work. ldd complains with the same error as you get when trying to run the binary directly. Similarly, strace fails because it can't get as far as trying to exec the target binary.
I solved this problem some time ago for RH7.0 by installing some RPMs from RH6.2. From memory, I think it was the glibc-2.1.3 RPM, and possibly one other.
Actually, that's not strictly true. The new Sun Blade 100 workstation comes in at US$995, which is pretty impressive. Admittedly, it's essentially a PC with a SPARC CPU rather than a "real" SPARC, but it's there, nonetheless, and even though they've had to remove 90% of the on-chip cache to get it under the $1000 price point, performance is still acceptable. Of course, enterprise SPARC hardware still costs the earth...
Far more interesting, to me at least, would be to revive the DG/UX port to SPARC. In the early days of Solaris, it sucked so badly that Sun paid Data General to port DG/UX to SPARC as an insurance policy in case the Solaris team didn't get it right. As it turned out, Solaris eventually got to a usable stage (and lets face it, it couldn't get any worse), so the DG/UX port disappeared into oblivion. Sad, really, as I suspect DG/UX is actually the better OS. Even more sad is that DG are dropping it completely, as was inevitable after the EMC buyout, to concentrage on storage solutions :-(
Yes, I do. I spotted it in that fraction of a second before my finger clicked "Submit", but it was too late to change it...
As I understand it, the recently released Tribes 2 was released pretty much simultaneously for Linux and Windows. But in general, this doesn't happen, and in the highest profile case, Q3A, it really hurt sales of the Linux version.
Well apart from the fact that giving people choice is always a good thing, perhaps they're using a 32-bit SPARC (e.g., a sun4c or sun4m machine). Solaris 8 no longer supports 32-bit CPUs, and while older version of Solaris continue to run, I don't know how committed Sun are to providing timely updates for security holes, for example. I personally run Linux on my SPARC because it gives me a hetrogeneous network. I run Linux on everything, which makes admin very easy.
Maybe so, but not in my case. I've always been very aware of quite how socially incompetent I am, and so are most of the other Slashdot-types I know. The problem I have is that I see social etiquette as a game that someone invented with arbitrary rules, and I just don't see the point of playing the game. Consequently, I don't bother.
As does DSL, usually. Here in the UK, you can choose between a 20:1 and a 50:1 contention ratio for ADSL, depending on how much you want to pay. If you're really lucky (and have sufficiently deep pockets), you might be in an area where you can get SDSL, which isn't shared with other users, but it's so rare as to be effectively non-existent at the moment. Where ADSL wins over cable is that you're guaranteed a maximum contention ratio. As I understand it, a cable modem line over here will be shared with as many other users as the cable company can sign up. Also, cable providers tend to place all sort of restrictions on the type of traffic they'll allow, which is fine for Joe Public, but sucks for the rest of us...
For more information on this phenomenon, see the scary article at http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp7761121.html.
Sadly, this stuff has been going on for years. Philips bought up the patent on an everlasting lightbulb, for example, but you don't see it for sale, because it would hurt sales of their traditional bulbs. There are numerous other examples that are happening right now. Heinlein wrote about this in one of his books (Expanded Universe, I think).
More to the point, it's playing in a completely different market to all of the others. It isn't, and probably never will be considered a replacement for Oracle, because it's not SQL based. It is, however, a fully fledged database, supporting transactions, fine grained locking, online backups etc. Also, anyone that thinks MySQL or PostgreSQL are players in the database leader struggle is dreaming. Sure, they're fine databases in their own right, and in time, they well gain some of the features that they're missing. They're fine for small to medium businesses, but for enterprise use (which is where Oracle and DB2 reign supreme), they're just not even close.
I can't believe that you of all people would fall for this argument (or that you'd use Microsoft's Moronic HTML, but that's another matter :-).
Sure, I believe the TuxBox will fail, for most of
the same reasons that Indrema did, but quality
control won't come into it. Official submission
may increase the quality of the end product,
but if it does so, it's not by much. Does the
vast quantities of useless apps currently
available for Windows (or for that matter,
Linux)
make the quality apps any worse? No? So why
do you think it would do the same for TuxBox?
Yes, the gaming market is very competetive, and
obsoletes products and technology even quicker
than the mainstream software market, so there is
a certain amount to pressure to release before
the product is fully ready, but I doubt that'll
be sufficient to cause a significant drop in quality.
The key to the long term success of any platform
is an unrestricted third party development market.
Sadly, it's just not economically feasible to do
this in the console market now, so we're stuck
with the current situation. Even MS backed away
from their initial stance of not requiring
approval for Xbox games.
No, it's not new at all. In fact, it's been used all over the place in the gaming world for some time. Good examples are Hybris and Battle Squadron, two Amiga games that used circular motions with the joystick to launch a smart bomb, or separate the wings from the ship. Of course, that was back in the days when gameplay was important, so making the user interface efficient was more of a priority than it is in today's world of flashy graphics and sound but no gameplay.
Well, if we're going to be picky, wasn't it Phoenix that reverse engineered the BIOS, which in turn allowed Compaq to make the first PC clone?
While I agree with the sentiment, I should point out that Judas Priest are from Birmingham. You could have had Bruce Dickinson, though.
Yes, but the problem I have is that they've changed what's free and what's not. Some time ago, I set up a bigfoot web redirection service. That web site has now moved to a different server, so I went to update the redirection, only to find that I now have to pay for it. So my options are to either stick with the outdated URL, or change it to the new one, and pay a monthly fee in perpetuity. I've chosen the former option, with a pit of PHP on my old server doing the redirection to the new server...
Of coure you do, but the better your web server performs, the less members you need in the cluster to satisfy the bandwidth requirements.
Until recently, I used to agree with you, as no-one could afford that much bandwidth to the internet. However, that's all changed now, and we're looking at getting a gigabit internet link to the office at work, and the prices are *really* cheap. For high volume sites, a web server like TUX may well be needed.
Huh? rpmfind tells you *exeactly* where it got the RPM from. What's the problem?
Precisely! A tab is a single indent. That's completely portable across any environment. By far the biggest argument against using spaces (and I've seen it in *every* instance I've worked anywhere that uses spaces) is that people try to do it manually -- i.e., without having the editor automatically expand tabs. And that leads to them getting it wrong! Try maintaining code written five years ago when the indentation varies between 2 and 9 spaces in the same file. It's not much fun.
No, not at all. Linus' dislike of Mach has been known for *years*. When I first heard his complaints, I wasn't entirely convinced. Mach appeared to offer so much, but as time has progressed, I've foud myself siding with Linus more and more. An OS is the one place where you really don't want extreme flexibility at the expense of performance.