The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon. This book blew my mind. It's the story of a kid with Asperger's Syndrome written from his perspective. You get so lost in his head, the amazing complexity of his world and the techniques he's developed to cope with the people and situations around him, and then you are with him as he is forced out into the raw real world. Perdito Street Station by China Mieville was a strong runner up for me. I think both books are particularly well suited for geeks.
Worst book? I'm past the point where I waste my time with books that suck. I used to push through just to finish the book but now that I'm realizing that life is short I just close the book and move on.
What do you mean by "care about Free Software" in this context? I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
Are you asking why anyone would work on and maintain an open source project without strong ideological reasons, such as considering closed source software amoral? In that case, I expect that the majority of open source project communities do not fit your criteria. BSD, Apache, MySQL, Bind... many projects exist because they filled a niche and the open source method just out-competed their commercial rivals. People participate in the projects for many reasons that have nothing to do with ideologies that require Capital Letters to discuss.
Parent is dumb. Embedded systems are not designed like that system on your desktop. Typically in embedded applications you have a watchdog timer which will reboot the system within ms of the system locking up. With Linux this will take just a few seconds, and the system was running in RAM so no need to worry about disk corruption.
Anyone else notice that Theo de Raadt was quoted in the VIA Eden-N press release? We're at the point now where PR departments of billion dollar hardware companies ask project leaders of open source projects for pithy quotes to improve their press releases. Quite a suprise... and oh my GOD is that VIA processor cool. Can't wait to see one.
Or maybe the VIA website noticed Slashdot in the referer when I clicked to read it, and inserted quotes appropriate to the audience?:-)
we just need better standards for low form addon cards (pci) before these rip offs finally bite the bullet they've had coming.
Something to keep in mind is that PC/104 products are often designed and tested to go from -40C to +80C without a fan, deal with factors like radiation and humidity, and have much longer expected lifetimes than "equivalent" products in the consumer PC market. Your cheap VIA Nano-ITX board will blow up when subjected to the conditions PC/104 was designed for, i.e. space, vehicles, aircraft, outdoors, bottom of the sea, etc.
Having said that, PC/104 is like most of the rest of the niches in the embedded industry... the profit margins would make Dell weep, but Dell sells more in a day than that vendor will sell in a year. The customer base is very small, and that has nothing to do with the prices.
Disclosure: I work in the PC/104 industry:-)
P.S. I agree with another poster that the reward for the contest sucks, and I was totally disappointed in the winner last year. Yay! Glue! Way to inspire the Next Generation to learn about PC/104 folks! Every week I talk to people building way cooler stuff than this... using electrical signals passed along rails in a subway system to implement an open network for subway control... scanning shipping containers for WMD... satelites watching earth's magnetic field to predict earthquakes...
This is a great example of where nit picking "Linux the kernel" vs "Linux the operating system" is right on.
"Linux" does NOT "start its services before it brings up the password prompt". Redhat does that. SuSE does that. That is a limitation of the init.d system used by some distributions, and has nothing to do with this work that FSMLabs has announced.
If you slim down a 2.4.x kernel a bit and run it with a minimal setup like BusyBox it is very easy to get a login prompt within 5 seconds of the BIOS screen beginning to load Linux. Getting a 2.4.x kernel to boot much faster than this involves kernel hacking. Fortunately, the GPL requires that FSMLabs release this source code to their customers. As an embedded systems developer, I hope that some day we'll get a "boot quickly" option in the generic kernel as well.;-)
Google shows two Lee R West entries for Oklahoma. The first lives in what appears to be a suburb just outside of Oklahoma City. No clue if this is him or not.
Besides, I have no doubt they'll fix this shortly. The point is that this shows the level of incompetence at Verisign. We can look forward to them demonstrating this again and again as their marketing department canibalizes key elements of Internet infrastructure into minor profit opportunities for the company.
I feel so much better now knowing that the geniuses at Verisign have so much power over DNS. For example, notice that their web page has a basic cross site scripting security hole. Idiots!
This example only opens a Javascript alert, but could just as easily steal your *.verisign.com cookies, etc.
And sorry to break it to you, but people have been putting Linux in missiles, tanks, and all sorts of other deadly devices for years. I work for an embedded systems company and I do Linux developer support all the time for people in the defense industry. Once they figure out how to get some pseudo real-time behavior out of Linux, they are very comfortable with it.
Isn't there some law, some precedence you can easily refer to and dismiss this as FUD? It'd do a lot to stop (corporate) Linux end-users from worrying.
It's not law, but a comparison that works for me is: "as if Fox News sent letters to all New York Times subscribers threatening to sue them unless they paid $60, because Fox News claims that the New York Times copied the text from some of their stories which they refuse to name."
Anyone else seeing that the "Our Sponsors" link on the Caldera/SCO site is broken?
http://www.sco.com/2003forum/agenda.html
All the links on the sidebar are working except for "Our Sponsors" which is not found. I guess the webmaster got tired of updating the page as people were dropping out so he decides to just delete it instead? Haaa haaaa.
Not to support Microsoft or anything, but your Dad isn't using "embedded" Windows. This is like complaining that RedHat 9 takes too long to boot on your i486 embedded CPU.
Both Windows CE and XP Embedded are designed to let you remove whatever components you want. You can strip out the GUI, networking, swap files, etc. Windows CE can definitially be customized to boot in just a few seconds.
On the other hand, as an embedded developer I must say that Windows CE is the WORST OS by far I have ever had to work with. It's so bad my company discarded 3 months of work on drivers and a BSP (Board Support Package) for our hardware because neither we nor any of our customers could figure out how to use it reliably. It's an absolute nightmare.
Linux is very nice for embedded systems and I'd guess 40% of our customers are using it with our hardware, losing out to DOS believe it or not. The only OS I think is better for embedding is QNX. If you can afford it, QNX absolutely rocks.
The only point of your post was to get your nice referral bonus for all the Slashdotters clicking through to Amazon.
Moderators should know to look out for this... it's way worse than karma whoring. Did you even read this book? I wouldn't be wondering this if your post wasn't so clearly a cash grab.
If so, it might help if you wrote something useful about why you're recommending it! (And I don't mean cut-n-paste from an Amazon review either...)
I've always had the same problem. You have to really think hard about what it is that prevents you from working, and attack those things relentlessly. This may take years. What breaks your concentration? When you notice you've gotten a lot done, think hard about what led up to you reaching that state!
It's totally different for everyone, but here are some things that work for me:-)
Really strict use of source control like Perforce or CVS so I can review what I did last time or just rollback my changes if I get off track.
A Makefile that lets me build my entire environment from scratch without having to remember exactly how I'd configured mySQL, Apache, etc. When I move to a new machine or upgrade something I just type one command and go to work.
My physical work environment has to be totally clean. I'm not at all an organized person normally but a cluttered work environment always distracts me. It took me years to figure this out.
Booming loud music in headphones. What's that ringing sound I'm always hearing?
My work environment needs to be cold and have fresh air. The colder the better. I'm always fighting co-workers for control of the AC.
It needs to be early in the morning or late at night.
If it's late at night, a single shot of tequilla does wonders, but no more.:-)
Drink water non stop. As much as I can stand.
I tell myself I'm only going to get a little bit done, like get something to compile, write a function. Usually I'll just keep going once that's done.
Other people find techniques like making schedules, having a really strong routine, making lists, etc very helpfull but not I. Also, caffeine is an evil drug that makes you THINK you're really productive, when in fact you're not getting shit done... at least in my case. Avoid it unless it's measurably helping.
I visited this place a few years ago when it was a bit harder to get into and it was fantastic! Back then you had to call ahead and get an escort through the guarded gate onto the base. The museum was a few ancient warehouses in the shadow of this monstrous dirigile hanger which is also an amazing sight.
I forget his name, but the person who ran the museum was very cool and took an hour just guiding me and a friend through the museum chatting about all the computers they had. Back then everything was in a huge dark warehouse on big dusty shelves. It felt like walking into the government warehouse at the end of the Raiders of the Lost Arc. Every time you turned a corner you were facing a lost treasure.
Crazy old LISP OS machines in wooden cabinets. One of the original Internet routers the size of a refrigerator with a hand drawn network map of the Internet from 1979 still taped to the side. An amazing old Cray that looked like an art deco couch from the movie 2001. Computers that look like telephone switches from 1901. The kitchen computer! Oh my GOD they actually built this thing! See it and believe it.:-)
If you are using C/C++ check out gSOAP. It goes real fast, runs on many platforms, and I've used it to talk to Java, PHP, C# etc without a problem. It does about 3000 transactions per second on my little desktop PC. Obviously 100 parallel clients aren't going to get that speed, but it sounds like it will be much faster than what you're using!
I was all fired up to do this myself before I really thought it through. We all know that SCOX will soon be worth $0.01 but what happens between now and then can ruin you if you short their stock today.
Here is an example timeline:
Today you short SCOX at $10/share knowing they'll probably be dead in a week.
Tomorrow SCO reveals source code which is indeed found in both UnixWare and Linux. SCOX rockets up to $150 because people are dumb and drooling over the $3 billion payoff.
In one week it is revealed that both stole that code from BSD. SCOX falls to $0.01. Yay!
Everyone is happy in one week except for you, because tomorrow your broker will come knocking asking you to buyback all the stock at $150/share. If you don't have enough cash in your account they'll liquidate your stock and take your house. Sorry.
What is stopping the people within SCO who started this case and subsequently destroyed SCO utterly from quietly selling all of their SCO stock sometime between now and the point SCO goes into court
You mean, like if their VP of Engineering sold every bit of stock he had? Ha ha, yeah... wouldn't that be.... hmmm...
I work in the embedded industry and I can tell you why: people have heard of Linux. Almost all of the people calling me asking about running Linux on embedded hardware are doing it for the first time, and they've never heard of BSD.
In other words, anything in Linux which ``belongs to SCO'' has probably actually been copied, perfectly legitimately, from BSD.
In other words, what you're saying is that code released under the BSD license is "public domain" and can be copied and pasted into GPLed code without copyright statement or attribution? Nice.
Mail agents like Mozilla will have to become more sophisticated about what mail relays they use when sending mail. Suddenly it's not okay to send both your personal e-mail and your work-from-home e-mail through your DSL ISP's mail server since your work domain DNS will claim no relationship with your DSL ISP's server.
Could Mozilla use RMX to determine on the fly what relay to use? It sees that you're sending from a @slashdot.org address, so it does an RMX lookup on slashdot.org and discovers the IP of all the relays for that address. Ah, a nice clean new standard... the desire to abuse it is overwhelming.:-)
An ironic side effect is that mail administrators are going to have to open up more holes in their relays. Your users can't just bounce mail off their random ISPs anymore. They have to use the real corporate mailserver now, which means you can't just lock things down by IP address such that only internal corporate users can use the relay.
Embedded systems have to be able to deal with abrupt loss of power and EXT2's instability there really ruled out Linux as a flexible embedded OS for a long time. Lately with EXT3, JFFS2, and XFS maturing Linux has become much more useful here. Thanks to all the filesystem developers out there!
SMTP is just a message passing protocol. What features are missing from SMTP which would solve the spam problem? The idea that AIM is a suitable replacement for SMTP is laughable.
What are the protocols and environments which are already being spammed? E-mail. Faxes. Telephones. Chat rooms. Web guestbooks. Weblog comments. IM. Religious nuts knocking on the front door of your house. What all these interfaces have in common is that you can't offer them to your friends without it becoming available to strangers.
The solution is to either add authentication, try to decrease instances of spam through legislation, or ignore the problem. Examining how we reduced problems such as fax, telephone, and front door spam may provide uselfull lessons in how to fight this.
Slashdot Mirror
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon. This book blew my mind. It's the story of a kid with Asperger's Syndrome written from his perspective. You get so lost in his head, the amazing complexity of his world and the techniques he's developed to cope with the people and situations around him, and then you are with him as he is forced out into the raw real world. Perdito Street Station by China Mieville was a strong runner up for me. I think both books are particularly well suited for geeks.
Worst book? I'm past the point where I waste my time with books that suck. I used to push through just to finish the book but now that I'm realizing that life is short I just close the book and move on.
What do you mean by "care about Free Software" in this context? I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
Are you asking why anyone would work on and maintain an open source project without strong ideological reasons, such as considering closed source software amoral? In that case, I expect that the majority of open source project communities do not fit your criteria. BSD, Apache, MySQL, Bind... many projects exist because they filled a niche and the open source method just out-competed their commercial rivals. People participate in the projects for many reasons that have nothing to do with ideologies that require Capital Letters to discuss.
Parent is dumb. Embedded systems are not designed like that system on your desktop. Typically in embedded applications you have a watchdog timer which will reboot the system within ms of the system locking up. With Linux this will take just a few seconds, and the system was running in RAM so no need to worry about disk corruption.
Anyone else notice that Theo de Raadt was quoted in the VIA Eden-N press release? We're at the point now where PR departments of billion dollar hardware companies ask project leaders of open source projects for pithy quotes to improve their press releases. Quite a suprise... and oh my GOD is that VIA processor cool. Can't wait to see one.
:-)
Or maybe the VIA website noticed Slashdot in the referer when I clicked to read it, and inserted quotes appropriate to the audience?
Something to keep in mind is that PC/104 products are often designed and tested to go from -40C to +80C without a fan, deal with factors like radiation and humidity, and have much longer expected lifetimes than "equivalent" products in the consumer PC market. Your cheap VIA Nano-ITX board will blow up when subjected to the conditions PC/104 was designed for, i.e. space, vehicles, aircraft, outdoors, bottom of the sea, etc.
Having said that, PC/104 is like most of the rest of the niches in the embedded industry... the profit margins would make Dell weep, but Dell sells more in a day than that vendor will sell in a year. The customer base is very small, and that has nothing to do with the prices. Disclosure: I work in the PC/104 industry :-)
P.S. I agree with another poster that the reward for the contest sucks, and I was totally disappointed in the winner last year. Yay! Glue! Way to inspire the Next Generation to learn about PC/104 folks! Every week I talk to people building way cooler stuff than this... using electrical signals passed along rails in a subway system to implement an open network for subway control... scanning shipping containers for WMD... satelites watching earth's magnetic field to predict earthquakes...This is a great example of where nit picking "Linux the kernel" vs "Linux the operating system" is right on.
;-)
"Linux" does NOT "start its services before it brings up the password prompt". Redhat does that. SuSE does that. That is a limitation of the init.d system used by some distributions, and has nothing to do with this work that FSMLabs has announced.
If you slim down a 2.4.x kernel a bit and run it with a minimal setup like BusyBox it is very easy to get a login prompt within 5 seconds of the BIOS screen beginning to load Linux. Getting a 2.4.x kernel to boot much faster than this involves kernel hacking. Fortunately, the GPL requires that FSMLabs release this source code to their customers. As an embedded systems developer, I hope that some day we'll get a "boot quickly" option in the generic kernel as well.
Google shows two Lee R West entries for Oklahoma. The first lives in what appears to be a suburb just outside of Oklahoma City. No clue if this is him or not.
The Google Search
Lee R West (405) 348-0818
Endmond, OK 73003
It's easy, but I'm not gonna tell you how. :-)
Besides, I have no doubt they'll fix this shortly. The point is that this shows the level of incompetence at Verisign. We can look forward to them demonstrating this again and again as their marketing department canibalizes key elements of Internet infrastructure into minor profit opportunities for the company.
I feel so much better now knowing that the geniuses at Verisign have so much power over DNS. For example, notice that their web page has a basic cross site scripting security hole. Idiots!
This example only opens a Javascript alert, but could just as easily steal your *.verisign.com cookies, etc.A) None, B) no.
And sorry to break it to you, but people have been putting Linux in missiles, tanks, and all sorts of other deadly devices for years. I work for an embedded systems company and I do Linux developer support all the time for people in the defense industry. Once they figure out how to get some pseudo real-time behavior out of Linux, they are very comfortable with it.
It's not law, but a comparison that works for me is: "as if Fox News sent letters to all New York Times subscribers threatening to sue them unless they paid $60, because Fox News claims that the New York Times copied the text from some of their stories which they refuse to name."
Anyone else seeing that the "Our Sponsors" link on the Caldera/SCO site is broken?
http://www.sco.com/2003forum/agenda.html
All the links on the sidebar are working except for "Our Sponsors" which is not found. I guess the webmaster got tired of updating the page as people were dropping out so he decides to just delete it instead? Haaa haaaa.
Not to support Microsoft or anything, but your Dad isn't using "embedded" Windows. This is like complaining that RedHat 9 takes too long to boot on your i486 embedded CPU.
Both Windows CE and XP Embedded are designed to let you remove whatever components you want. You can strip out the GUI, networking, swap files, etc. Windows CE can definitially be customized to boot in just a few seconds.
On the other hand, as an embedded developer I must say that Windows CE is the WORST OS by far I have ever had to work with. It's so bad my company discarded 3 months of work on drivers and a BSP (Board Support Package) for our hardware because neither we nor any of our customers could figure out how to use it reliably. It's an absolute nightmare.
Linux is very nice for embedded systems and I'd guess 40% of our customers are using it with our hardware, losing out to DOS believe it or not. The only OS I think is better for embedding is QNX. If you can afford it, QNX absolutely rocks.
The only point of your post was to get your nice referral bonus for all the Slashdotters clicking through to Amazon.
Moderators should know to look out for this... it's way worse than karma whoring. Did you even read this book? I wouldn't be wondering this if your post wasn't so clearly a cash grab.
If so, it might help if you wrote something useful about why you're recommending it! (And I don't mean cut-n-paste from an Amazon review either...)
I've always had the same problem. You have to really think hard about what it is that prevents you from working, and attack those things relentlessly. This may take years. What breaks your concentration? When you notice you've gotten a lot done, think hard about what led up to you reaching that state!
It's totally different for everyone, but here are some things that work for me :-)
Other people find techniques like making schedules, having a really strong routine, making lists, etc very helpfull but not I. Also, caffeine is an evil drug that makes you THINK you're really productive, when in fact you're not getting shit done... at least in my case. Avoid it unless it's measurably helping.
I visited this place a few years ago when it was a bit harder to get into and it was fantastic! Back then you had to call ahead and get an escort through the guarded gate onto the base. The museum was a few ancient warehouses in the shadow of this monstrous dirigile hanger which is also an amazing sight.
I forget his name, but the person who ran the museum was very cool and took an hour just guiding me and a friend through the museum chatting about all the computers they had. Back then everything was in a huge dark warehouse on big dusty shelves. It felt like walking into the government warehouse at the end of the Raiders of the Lost Arc. Every time you turned a corner you were facing a lost treasure.
Crazy old LISP OS machines in wooden cabinets. One of the original Internet routers the size of a refrigerator with a hand drawn network map of the Internet from 1979 still taped to the side. An amazing old Cray that looked like an art deco couch from the movie 2001. Computers that look like telephone switches from 1901. The kitchen computer! Oh my GOD they actually built this thing! See it and believe it. :-)
If you are using C/C++ check out gSOAP. It goes real fast, runs on many platforms, and I've used it to talk to Java, PHP, C# etc without a problem. It does about 3000 transactions per second on my little desktop PC. Obviously 100 parallel clients aren't going to get that speed, but it sounds like it will be much faster than what you're using!
http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~engelen/soap.html
I was all fired up to do this myself before I really thought it through. We all know that SCOX will soon be worth $0.01 but what happens between now and then can ruin you if you short their stock today.
Here is an example timeline:
Everyone is happy in one week except for you, because tomorrow your broker will come knocking asking you to buyback all the stock at $150/share. If you don't have enough cash in your account they'll liquidate your stock and take your house. Sorry.
New Tech Trading: Short Selling
SEC: Short Selling Restrictions
SEC: Short Sales
You mean, like if their VP of Engineering sold every bit of stock he had? Ha ha, yeah... wouldn't that be.... hmmm...
Newsforge: SCO VP Opinder Bawa cashes out
I work in the embedded industry and I can tell you why: people have heard of Linux. Almost all of the people calling me asking about running Linux on embedded hardware are doing it for the first time, and they've never heard of BSD.
Mail agents like Mozilla will have to become more sophisticated about what mail relays they use when sending mail. Suddenly it's not okay to send both your personal e-mail and your work-from-home e-mail through your DSL ISP's mail server since your work domain DNS will claim no relationship with your DSL ISP's server.
:-)
Could Mozilla use RMX to determine on the fly what relay to use? It sees that you're sending from a @slashdot.org address, so it does an RMX lookup on slashdot.org and discovers the IP of all the relays for that address. Ah, a nice clean new standard... the desire to abuse it is overwhelming.
An ironic side effect is that mail administrators are going to have to open up more holes in their relays. Your users can't just bounce mail off their random ISPs anymore. They have to use the real corporate mailserver now, which means you can't just lock things down by IP address such that only internal corporate users can use the relay.
Embedded systems have to be able to deal with abrupt loss of power and EXT2's instability there really ruled out Linux as a flexible embedded OS for a long time. Lately with EXT3, JFFS2, and XFS maturing Linux has become much more useful here. Thanks to all the filesystem developers out there!
SMTP is just a message passing protocol. What features are missing from SMTP which would solve the spam problem? The idea that AIM is a suitable replacement for SMTP is laughable.
What are the protocols and environments which are already being spammed? E-mail. Faxes. Telephones. Chat rooms. Web guestbooks. Weblog comments. IM. Religious nuts knocking on the front door of your house. What all these interfaces have in common is that you can't offer them to your friends without it becoming available to strangers.
The solution is to either add authentication, try to decrease instances of spam through legislation, or ignore the problem. Examining how we reduced problems such as fax, telephone, and front door spam may provide uselfull lessons in how to fight this.
Remember that we have SAIC to thank for the jokers at Network Solutions (now Verisign) having so much power over Internet DNS.
Networking With Spooks by John Dillon
It's Time For ICANN To Go by John Gilmore