Cromell have a mini-itx board that takes PIV-Mobile processors, but its very hard to get hold of. They also have one that takes a standard PIV (aka "system on a heatsink" 8))
For cheap and small the VIA processors are generally better. 60W will run a full VIA C3 based system, and they are fanless to 600MHz (1Ghz with the right cases). Some of these boxes are tiny - the Travla 134 is the same size as a car radio for example
Birmingham International Airport had a maglev back in the 1980's. Very cute, technically brilliant and eventually replaced with a bus for simple economic reasons.
Maglev is terribly "neat", but nobody seems to have solved the fundamental problem that if you use just a fraction of the amount of power required to levitate the train to push a wheeled one instead, the wheeled one goes a damn site faster and costs less to run
Games are a monopoly product, you price them to get the largest profit the market will let you, and differently in each market. Chinese buying power is not yet on parity with US ones (or even UK) so the prices must be lower.
Next you need to prevent grey market imports (region code etc) and then you finally have to find an excuse so that the other customers carry on buying the product and don't feel aggreived
Piracy is IMHO the excuse, nothing more, to explain to US and EU customers why they are paying vastly more for the same games. Just like Americans being ripped off with drug and school text book prices, and EU people with DVD pricing.
If you look at archive.org wayback machine you will also find that until after the trademark filing by Red Hat they were called "F.E.D.O.R.A." - without a tm, which is an acronym not a trademark.
Makes you wonder which computer companies sponsor their research
Believe me "do we just join Debian" was a seriously asked question in planning Fedora. But Fedora is about somewhat slightly different things like regular and rapid releases and so the idea of merging into Debian didnt look like it would work out.
The Fedora trademark is deliberately arranged so that people can make and sell CD images of it (see fedora.redhat.com for details). Fedora is like the old old Red Hat, with people making images and rapid turnaround. I know several people who will be selling Fedora on CD - which is important - we don't all have broadband.
Its like the world was in Red Hat 5 and 6, because with business split off you can go both ways.
Not really. An efficient EU car does 50+ so that becomes 40+. Some of the smart cars do a lot better. Amazing how putting fuel costs in tax *on the fuel* motivates the market to innovate instead of letting flat taxes distort it.
I disagree in part. Sending a command to a device without knowing it is supported is not good ATA practice at all. The patch they applied should have checked but didn't.
Shipping easy to fry drives isnt bright either and I suspect LG know this without any help, especially when they get lorry fulls of faulty drives back. Not only can a wrong command occur due to an error on the cable (very unlikely) so should be handled tolerantly, but every virus writer on the planet now knows how to toast all the LG ROMs (and rebadged LG ROMs).
I just hope Mandrake have the decency to recall any boxed sets sitting in warehouses and heading to shops and replace the CD's in them.
Its shortermism - everything in the UK and US is driven around short term results. A lot of real smaller business is driven by the long term , and for the long term you build productive relationships instead
People want short term results from their banks/funds/pensions, so the banks/pensions want the same so the companies get to suffer.
It depends where in europe you look. Sad to say I think a lot of EU politicians think the US is cool, it has all the things they care about - rich fatcat politicians, a powerless electorate and media control.
Its a shame really - the US has some wonderful ideals and managed to figure out stuff like source code being speech (Bernstein case), but the implementation of the USA on the whole is just rather buggy 8)
Support and fixing bugs in bugzilla are two different things. You can expect folk to be fixing bugs, scribbling in bugzilla and the like but you won't be able to pay someone to fix stuff or get guarantees anything will be fixed.
You need an update tool like apt. Upgrade the redhat-release package by hand and the tiny number of bits you need to get apt-rpm for the new version installed (its about 10-12 packages). Then just tell apt/yum/.. to update your box and wait.
You don't get the automatic migration and addition of extra goodies that the installer does but in general it works fine and for anyone with a little knowledge adding a few packages on top by hand is not hard.
Funnily enough the new rawhide up2date has the option "--upgrade-to-release=[version]"
The goal is to provide as many routes for distribution as we can - both of ISO files and updates for the current version - which in generally will be following the mainstream, so if sendmail 8.foo has a bug and they put out 8.foo+1, expect the path to be an update to foo+1. We can do this with Fedora while with RHEL you have to do careful backports of specific fixes.
With regard to custom stuff the best model may well be to set up your own local YUM repository o the extra's you maintain - either for yourself or for the world to use. Turning a collection of RPM files into a yum repository is nice and easy.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux - long support, aimed at maximum stability (jn the sense of predictability especially), with various pricing options from the low end to 24x7 support (its not just a $2000 a year deal!). Aimed mostly at business.
Fedora Project - 2 or 3 releases a year, and as many easy ways of getting it and its updates we can think of - including hopefully stuff like BitTorrent. I'm even kicking around an idea for some wireless "FedoraPoints". After all many people who have wireless but can't share their internet connection due to ISP rules will probably have local Fedora mirrors for their own use too.
The goal of the project is to be current and up to date. That should actually make updating easier since much of the time people tracking current updates will find they basically have the next release when a release point is declared and 'official'.iso images created.
Even with current Red Hat 8, 9,.. upgrading is no big deal. I've taken boxes from 7.1 to 9 without rebooting.
Supporting old releases is expensive and gets vastly more expensive over time. Its why nobody does it in detail for old releases except in the enterprise space, Debian included.
Various non Red Hat folks have talked about doing unofficial RH 7.3 errata, I guess it depends if enough people willing to pay them to make it cost effective.
A trivial demonstration of the problem is to take the number of reported virus infections with Sobig and friends. Compare with the mi2g figures about proven break ins. Note weird difference in size of windows numbers.
As to web sites they *appear* to count each web site affected. So a single linux breakin on a big hosting site scores 10,000 while nobody hosts 10,000 sites on a windows box.
One of the problems with a lot of these metrics is the lack of a fair, formal and neutral third party methodology for analysis of such data that can handle the way proprietary vendors forget to reveal most bugs but just roll them quietly into updates, the difference between vendors in quantity of material and remove overlaps.
Unfortnately that isn't likely to change. There is a marketing game being played by many vendors and security is simply another buzzword and another set of statistics to "optimise". Customers are expendable.
I guess the final thing we all should notice. The number isnt zero. That only emphasizes the need to get more stuff like SELinux out and equivalent other OS products. Preferably before the bad guys mix something like Sobig or slammer with something that does actual damage, potentially hardware damage.
Commell have had a P4M system since May which does passive cooling so it certainly seems possible. They also have a totally *insane* PIV mini-itx board which takes a non mobile processor. More of a "system on a heatsink" than anything else.
Firstly - the Adaptec appears to simply be a third party controller with a different PCI identifier. How do we know - well if you add the adaptec pci idents to the siimage driver - it works.
Pretty much all of the controllers out there are software raid and use BIOS/driver glue to implement raid. Several vendors ship the same hardware with different drivers to sell you a variety of priced cards according to pure s/w features.
For standard PATA the Linux kernel uses its own md layer plus some basic mapping bits for the hpt/promise format (they wouldnt reveal their formats for raid!). For such controllers you might as well use Linux md layer. Be aware that you hit PCI bus performance limits quite rapidly about 40Mbyte/sec with raid1 writing and worse with raid5 because of the multiple copies of data over the PCI bus.
For hardware raid on Linux 3ware is the current controller of choice, although there are now other fairly high end cards from folks like Adaptec (aacraid not AHA1210 stuff) and promise have the SX6000 - which I'd agree is underperforming. I've no idea how 3ware stuff runs on Windows but in the Linux space it rocks - and it goes up to 12 port SATA - or about 3Tb per PCI slot 8)
With the newer SATA stuff its getting more complex and it looks like several hybrid controllers will appear using hardware assists for software raid.
In the UK we have at least one pump storage station for evening out loads - but not for months at time. Its basically two large lakes one above the other, excess power pumps water up, then when there is a surge in demand it goes back down through a generator.
I disagree. The usual way to respond to a patent suit is to contersue. Its more like nuclear wargaming than law (and indeed an all out software patent war in the USA would do the same to the economy as a nuclear war)
The current way to avoid patent lawsuits is to patent in the USA (so you can sue people) but make nothing (so you can sue ibm and they cant nuke you), then sell rights to a "random" chinese or similar company to make them on a royalty and have a third "unrelated" grey import company ship zillions of them into the USA. If anything nasty occurs (patent lawsuit, class action, even safety) then the grey importer folds and everyone else gets to keep all the money.
Great for everyone who is rich and doesn't care about unemployment in the western world, or especially in the USA about health and safety issues given the lack of state/national health care.
A lot of people are using Linux and FreeBSD with router cards and Zebra etc doing BGP. It works fairly well but doesn't scale to really high end stuff where you need hardware switching.
Quite the reverse, if you obtained the software images without having the right licenses for it you've probably committed criminal offences in the area of "fraud" and "obtaining services by deception"
I'd disagree here. Granted all current MMORPGs suck, but then its a fairly new art anyway. Richard doesn't seperate communication and immersion nearly enough in my experiences as a game designer. Lets face it when was the last time your fantasy figures were squggles on a monitor. What heroic character controlled his own movements with a joystick ?
None of course, but the player doesn't care. No more than the player will care about voice commands to the game or beeps notifying them of events. If you look at a lot of these games players can also do a lot of "impossible" things like talk to one another wherever they are in the game, if you remove that you'll annoy the players just like any paper RPG game master will annoy players who can't chit-chat out of character just because their character is currently next door.
Tolkien summed up the key to believable fantasy long before MMORPG - it is consistency rather than simulation. The online world has no value to the people who crave the physical experience - thats what the SCA is for. Instead its about story telling - which means that evil guys behave in a believable fashion, swords work the same way all the time, books can all be read and so on.
Another great example is distance. It takes eight hours to make some journey, now try inflicting that on players with live reality simulated eight hour horse rides.
As to "I can tell Foo the Elf is English", I already can - Foo the Elf can spell colour 8),
Abuse btw isnt a problem - the technology for scanning voice data is well understood for things like voice mailboxes, "chat line" services and of course on a large scale by the security services 8).
Slashdot Mirror
Cromell have a mini-itx board that takes PIV-Mobile processors, but its very hard to get hold of. They also have one that takes a standard PIV (aka "system on a heatsink" 8))
For cheap and small the VIA processors are generally better. 60W will run a full VIA C3 based system, and they are fanless to 600MHz (1Ghz with the right cases). Some of these boxes are tiny - the Travla 134 is the same size as a car radio for example
Birmingham International Airport had a maglev back in the 1980's. Very cute, technically brilliant and eventually replaced with a bus for simple economic reasons.
Maglev is terribly "neat", but nobody seems to have solved the fundamental problem that if you use just a fraction of the amount of power required to levitate the train to push a wheeled one instead, the wheeled one goes a damn site faster and costs less to run
Games are a monopoly product, you price them to get the largest profit the market will let you, and differently in each market. Chinese buying power is not yet on parity with US ones (or even UK) so the prices must be lower.
Next you need to prevent grey market imports (region code etc) and then you finally have to find an excuse so that the other customers carry on buying the product and don't feel aggreived
Piracy is IMHO the excuse, nothing more, to explain to US and EU customers why they are paying vastly more for the same games. Just like Americans being ripped off with drug and school text book prices, and EU people with DVD pricing.
Uggh, didn't realise slashdot would strip the tags around the joke part
If you look at archive.org wayback machine you will also find that until after the trademark filing by Red Hat they were called "F.E.D.O.R.A." - without a tm, which is an acronym not a trademark.
Makes you wonder which computer companies sponsor their research
Believe me "do we just join Debian" was a seriously asked question in planning Fedora. But Fedora is about somewhat slightly different things like regular and rapid releases and so the idea of merging into Debian didnt look like it would work out.
The Fedora trademark is deliberately arranged so that people can make and sell CD images of it (see fedora.redhat.com for details). Fedora is like the old old Red Hat, with people making images and rapid turnaround. I know several people who will be selling Fedora on CD - which is important - we don't all have broadband.
Its like the world was in Red Hat 5 and 6, because with business split off you can go both ways.
Not really. An efficient EU car does 50+ so that becomes 40+. Some of the smart cars do a lot better. Amazing how putting fuel costs in tax *on the fuel* motivates the market to innovate instead of letting flat taxes distort it.
I disagree in part. Sending a command to a device without knowing it is supported is not good ATA practice at all. The patch they applied should have checked but didn't.
Shipping easy to fry drives isnt bright either and I suspect LG know this without any help, especially when they get lorry fulls of faulty drives back. Not only can a wrong command occur due to an error on the cable (very unlikely) so should be handled tolerantly, but every virus writer on the planet now knows how to toast all the LG ROMs (and rebadged LG ROMs).
I just hope Mandrake have the decency to recall any boxed sets sitting in warehouses and heading to shops and replace the CD's in them.
Its shortermism - everything in the UK and US is driven around short term results. A lot of real smaller business is driven by the long term , and for the long term you build productive relationships instead
People want short term results from their banks/funds/pensions, so the banks/pensions want the same so the companies get to suffer.
They probably do - its easy to slip up with any system
In this case it is scary because if that virus got in who knows what other stuff got in which may have added or removed terrorist database records.
It depends where in europe you look. Sad to say I think a lot of EU politicians think the US is cool, it has all the things they care about - rich fatcat politicians, a powerless electorate and media control.
Its a shame really - the US has some wonderful ideals and managed to figure out stuff like source code being speech (Bernstein case), but the implementation of the USA on the whole is just rather buggy 8)
Support and fixing bugs in bugzilla are two different things. You can expect folk to be fixing bugs, scribbling in bugzilla and the like but you won't be able to pay someone to fix stuff or get guarantees anything will be fixed.
You need an update tool like apt. Upgrade the redhat-release package by hand and the tiny number of bits you need to get apt-rpm for the new version installed (its about 10-12 packages). Then just tell apt/yum/.. to update your box and wait.
You don't get the automatic migration and addition of extra goodies that the installer does but in general it works fine and for anyone with a little knowledge adding a few packages on top by hand is not hard.
Funnily enough the new rawhide up2date has the option "--upgrade-to-release=[version]"
The goal is to provide as many routes for distribution as we can - both of ISO files and updates for the current version - which in generally will be following the mainstream, so if sendmail 8.foo has a bug and they put out 8.foo+1, expect the path to be an update to foo+1. We can do this with Fedora while with RHEL you have to do careful backports of specific fixes.
With regard to custom stuff the best model may well be to set up your own local YUM repository o the extra's you maintain - either for yourself or for the world to use. Turning a collection of RPM files into a yum repository is nice and easy.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux - long support, aimed at maximum stability (jn the sense of predictability especially), with various pricing options from the low end to 24x7 support (its not just a $2000 a year deal!). Aimed mostly at business.
Fedora Project - 2 or 3 releases a year, and as many easy ways of getting it and its updates we can think of - including hopefully stuff like BitTorrent. I'm even kicking around an idea for some wireless "FedoraPoints". After all many people who have wireless but can't share their internet connection due to ISP rules will probably have local Fedora mirrors for their own use too.
Time for drive by upgrading
The goal of the project is to be current and up to date. That should actually make updating easier since much of the time people tracking current updates will find they basically have the next release when a release point is declared and 'official' .iso images created.
.. upgrading is no big deal. I've taken boxes from 7.1 to 9 without rebooting.
Even with current Red Hat 8, 9,
Supporting old releases is expensive and gets vastly more expensive over time. Its why nobody does it in detail for old releases except in the enterprise space, Debian included.
Various non Red Hat folks have talked about doing unofficial RH 7.3 errata, I guess it depends if enough people willing to pay them to make it cost effective.
Then I guess they just went down in quality.
A trivial demonstration of the problem is to take the number of reported virus infections with Sobig and friends. Compare with the mi2g figures about proven break ins. Note weird difference in size of windows numbers.
As to web sites they *appear* to count each web site affected. So a single linux breakin on a big hosting site scores 10,000 while nobody hosts 10,000 sites on a windows box.
One of the problems with a lot of these metrics is the lack of a fair, formal and neutral third party methodology for analysis of such data that can handle the way proprietary vendors forget to reveal most bugs but just roll them quietly into updates, the difference between vendors in quantity of material and remove overlaps.
Unfortnately that isn't likely to change. There is a marketing game being played by many vendors and security is simply another buzzword and another set of statistics to "optimise". Customers are expendable.
I guess the final thing we all should notice. The number isnt zero. That only emphasizes the need to get more stuff like SELinux out and equivalent other OS products. Preferably before the bad guys mix something like Sobig or slammer with something that does actual damage, potentially hardware damage.
Commell have had a P4M system since May which does passive cooling so it certainly seems possible. They also have a totally *insane* PIV mini-itx board which takes a non mobile processor. More of a "system on a heatsink" than anything else.
A few comments.
Firstly - the Adaptec appears to simply be a third party controller with a different PCI identifier. How do we know - well if you add the adaptec pci idents to the siimage driver - it works.
Pretty much all of the controllers out there are software raid and use BIOS/driver glue to implement raid. Several vendors ship the same hardware with different drivers to sell you a variety of priced cards according to pure s/w features.
For standard PATA the Linux kernel uses its own md layer plus some basic mapping bits for the hpt/promise format (they wouldnt reveal their formats for raid!). For such controllers you might as well use Linux md layer. Be aware that you hit PCI bus performance limits quite rapidly about 40Mbyte/sec with raid1 writing and worse with raid5 because of the multiple copies of data over the PCI bus.
For hardware raid on Linux 3ware is the current controller of choice, although there are now other fairly high end cards from folks like Adaptec (aacraid not AHA1210 stuff) and promise have the SX6000 - which I'd agree is underperforming. I've no idea how 3ware stuff runs on Windows but in the Linux space it rocks - and it goes up to 12 port SATA - or about 3Tb per PCI slot 8)
With the newer SATA stuff its getting more complex and it looks like several hybrid controllers will appear using hardware assists for software raid.
In the UK we have at least one pump storage station for evening out loads - but not for months at time. Its basically two large lakes one above the other, excess power pumps water up, then when there is a surge in demand it goes back down through a generator.
I disagree. The usual way to respond to a patent suit is to contersue. Its more like nuclear wargaming than law (and indeed an all out software patent war in the USA would do the same to the economy as a nuclear war)
The current way to avoid patent lawsuits is to patent in the USA (so you can sue people) but make nothing (so you can sue ibm and they cant nuke you), then sell rights to a "random" chinese or similar company to make them on a royalty and have a third "unrelated" grey import company ship zillions of them into the USA. If anything nasty occurs (patent lawsuit, class action, even safety) then the grey importer folds and everyone else gets to keep all the money.
Great for everyone who is rich and doesn't care about unemployment in the western world, or especially in the USA about health and safety issues given the lack of state/national health care.
A lot of people are using Linux and FreeBSD with router cards and Zebra etc doing BGP. It works fairly well but doesn't scale to really high end stuff where you need hardware switching.
Quite the reverse, if you obtained the software images without having the right licenses for it you've probably committed criminal offences in the area of "fraud" and "obtaining services by deception"
I'd disagree here. Granted all current MMORPGs suck, but then its a fairly new art anyway. Richard doesn't seperate communication and immersion nearly enough in my experiences as a game designer. Lets face it when was the last time your fantasy figures were squggles on a monitor. What heroic character controlled his own movements with a joystick ?
None of course, but the player doesn't care. No more than the player will care about voice commands to the game or beeps notifying them of events. If you look at a lot of these games players can also do a lot of "impossible" things like talk to one another wherever they are in the game, if you remove that you'll annoy the players just like any paper RPG game master will annoy players who can't chit-chat out of character just because their character is currently next door.
Tolkien summed up the key to believable fantasy long before MMORPG - it is consistency rather than simulation. The online world has no value to the people who crave the physical experience - thats what the SCA is for. Instead its about story telling - which means that evil guys behave in a believable fashion, swords work the same way all the time, books can all be read and so on.
Another great example is distance. It takes eight hours to make some journey, now try inflicting that on players with live reality simulated eight hour horse rides.
As to "I can tell Foo the Elf is English", I already can - Foo the Elf can spell colour 8),
Abuse btw isnt a problem - the technology for scanning voice data is well understood for things like voice mailboxes, "chat line" services and of course on a large scale by the security services 8).
Alan