For those interested in x32, I wrote an article for Linux Weekly News last May. x32 ABI support by distributions may have some information on x32 you might not have been aware of.
In short, I found it easy to use the experimental x32 architecture for Debian, and there are certain scientific apps out there that might get significant benefit from it. Web application accelerators like Varnish might also have something to gain by using x32.
I visited Santa Cruz, CA last month and discovered that Google Maps, my rental car's GPS, and every other system evidently gives the wrong directions the the UCSC Inn. Right street, wrong end of it out in the middle of the woods.
You can edit a plain text file in user space and write it to CMOS with at utility like lxbios or cmos_util. The options I've seen are: boot sequence related, ECC memory related, power on after failure, debug level, cpu throttling, and NMI related. I didn't see anything about the enabling and disabling of devices or fan control, but I'm sure it depends on how much effort the developers have put into a particular chipset/motherboard.
LinuxBIOS supports several different types of payloads: Linux, Open Firmware, Etherboot, etc. If you are using a Linux kernel payload, then you probably don't want to be upgrading it often. In that case, you can set up the first kernel to kexec a second kernel (before kexec, there was a patch called the two kernel monte).
AMD64's 64-bit mode is definitely supported.
It's not trivial (yet) to boot a version of MS Windows with LinuxBIOS, but using Linux as a BIOS can give all sorts of benefits. One very
interesting capability for people running beowulf clusters is that you can boot over any network device that Linux supports (e.g. Myrinet or Infiniband). That may not mean anything to a regular home user, but the point is that you have a whole lot more flexibility in what you
can do. Even if you don't want to make it boot your home system over your wireless LAN, it does increase your freedom and it prevents people from nibbling away at the freedom you already have.
I would say freedom from future DRM really is the biggest incentive for trying out LinuxBIOS at home. You can avoid Intel's EFI standard (they're pushing for it to be on all desktops and servers), which will enable companies to inflict DRM on you. Linus has made some very good points about why EFI is not good. One way to look at EFI is that it is basically an OS, and not a very good one.
There are several white papers and tutorials that do a good job of explaining how LinuxBIOS works. Look at the LinuxBIOS documentation section.
If you take "humans deserve equal opportunities/rights/etc." as an axiom, then it doesn't really make sense to make the argument "all humans deserve equal rights because they are all human and all deserve rights." You don't need to recast it as an argument because you've already assumed it.
One problem with that axiom, however, is that humans throughout history tend to disagree on the definition of the word "human". If a person doesn't want to think of another person as an equal, then they will generally call them something else (e.g. an animal, savage, monkey, etc.)
If we accept a genetic definition of what it means to be human, then at what point does a genetic relative no longer deserve equal rights and why?
I haven't set up MediaWiki, but my coworkers and I chose MoinMoin because it doesn't require a database. We've been pleased with its ease of use, speed, and stability.
They have a Wiki Engine Comparison page that was useful for helping us decide which one best fit our needs.
You should check out cilk. Two of the people behind the project used to work for Thinking Machines, the company that made one of the best supercomputers of its day. Cilk adds a few key words to C and it requires much less effort than most other parallel programming models. Unfortunately, the distributed version of it was only a prototype and isn't included in the latest release. If nothing else, you should read the papers these guys have written.
They also had a couple of graduate students that made Jilk (Cilk for Java). From the sound of their papers it isn't ready for production use yet, but it's something to keep in mind if you prefer writing code in Java.
If you want an OpenGL window with more than 4096 pixels across, then you'll have to go distributed for now. Chromium is used by many visualization clusters in combination with Distributed Multihead X (DMX). Chromium distributes OpenGL and DMX provides the unified desktop.
I've recently heard of a commercial product, VGP, but I don't know how well it works yet.
LMbench is great for testing the subsystems of different UNIX systems. It is probably one of the most useful benchmarks other than whatever applications you will actually be running.
IBM is contributing to GCC...specifically, this thread on the GCC mailing list talks about how they are collaborating on introducing autovectorization support.
Freedom is harmful if it is not balanced with responsibility. In our society, we have laws to help us keep ourselves responsible. We also have revolutionaries/patriots that keep watch so that laws don't become unbalanced and limit freedom too much.
In an ideal world there wouldn't be child pornography. Also in an ideal world we could live free and responsibly without laws. Unfortunately we don't, but I prefer a reasonably limited freedom necessary to safeguard the defenseless from abuse to some self-serving, damn-the-cost-as-long-as-I'm-not-paying ideal of "indiscriminate" freedom.
You should check out the Access Grid. It is flexible, powerful, and based on open standards and software. A full installation would be too pricey for you, but I know people run PIGs (Personal Interface to the Grid) on laptops with $30 USB webcams and $30 headsets. So you can start with simple netmeeting-style video conferencing, and if you feel the need you can then move on to a full AG node with dedicated audio and video machines and multiple projectors.
Note that the AG uses multicast, which your router or ISP may not support well. Also, there is a bit of a learning curve to put everything together. There are AG vendors if you want to buy a fully supported solution.
I use Amaya every once in a while, but I generally use vim. One nice feature Amaya has is its structure view. I don't use wysiwyg editors that much, so I don't know if that is a common feature.
I saw the webpad in the CNN article and was wondering to myself what processors other webpads like Qubit's are using and how they stacked up against Crusoe. Anyway, I thought other people may be interested in reading about National Semiconductor's GXLV processor.
I only looked quickly at the faq at www.talkorigins.org, so maybe I missed it, but does it give any example of any observed evolution?
I mean, according to the faq, "Biological evolution is a change in the genetic characteristics of a population over time." What viable organisms can we point to and say for certain that their actual genome changed? What if the external changes we observe are simply caused by inherent genetic variation? As I understand it, the theory of genetic variation states that an organism carries a multidude of genes that are only sometimes switched on. This would explain several interesting puzzles concerning the races of humankind without resorting to evolution.
I just think it is an interesting alternative to ponder.
Evolution is not the single most important thing necessary to understand biology any more than it is the single most important thing necessary to understand computers. Understanding living organisms comes from understanding their building blocks.
"The trouble with biology is that it is full of facts. An unimaginable number of factual statements could be made about the few million species of organisms on earth. Someone once published an example of a college zoology exam from the pre-Darwinian era that required only the recitation of endless anatomical facts; the Darwinian paradigm changed that, and for a long time, biology was taught primarily as a collection of these facts organized around the principle of natural selection and the fact of evolution. Of course, students of biology must still learn many facts about the natural world, often fascinating facts that motivate them to continue their personal explorations. But as the science of biology matures, it should increasingly subsume facts under general principles and develop coherent general concepts. As our knowledge of molecular, cellular, and physiological processes has grown, that foundation emerges from the genetic conception of an organism: a structure that operates on the basis of information in its genome."
Burton Guttman, author of the College textbook Biology
Slashdot Mirror
For those interested in x32, I wrote an article for Linux Weekly News last May. x32 ABI support by distributions may have some information on x32 you might not have been aware of.
In short, I found it easy to use the experimental x32 architecture for Debian, and there are certain scientific apps out there that might get significant benefit from it. Web application accelerators like Varnish might also have something to gain by using x32.
If only Linus had an army of people with a huge variety of hardware ...
running release candidate kernels looking for regressions
I visited Santa Cruz, CA last month and discovered that Google Maps, my rental car's GPS, and every other
system evidently gives the wrong directions the the UCSC Inn. Right street, wrong end of it out in the
middle of the woods.
LinuxBIOS supports several different types of payloads: Linux, Open Firmware, Etherboot, etc. If you are using a Linux kernel payload, then you probably don't want to be upgrading it often. In that case, you can set up the first kernel to kexec a second kernel (before kexec, there was a patch called the two kernel monte).
AMD64's 64-bit mode is definitely supported.
It's not trivial (yet) to boot a version of MS Windows with LinuxBIOS, but using Linux as a BIOS can give all sorts of benefits. One very interesting capability for people running beowulf clusters is that you can boot over any network device that Linux supports (e.g. Myrinet or Infiniband). That may not mean anything to a regular home user, but the point is that you have a whole lot more flexibility in what you can do. Even if you don't want to make it boot your home system over your wireless LAN, it does increase your freedom and it prevents people from nibbling away at the freedom you already have.
I would say freedom from future DRM really is the biggest incentive for trying out LinuxBIOS at home. You can avoid Intel's EFI standard (they're pushing for it to be on all desktops and servers), which will enable companies to inflict DRM on you. Linus has made some very good points about why EFI is not good. One way to look at EFI is that it is basically an OS, and not a very good one.
There are several white papers and tutorials that do a good job of explaining how LinuxBIOS works. Look at the LinuxBIOS documentation section.
One problem with that axiom, however, is that humans throughout history tend to disagree on the definition of the word "human". If a person doesn't want to think of another person as an equal, then they will generally call them something else (e.g. an animal, savage, monkey, etc.)
If we accept a genetic definition of what it means to be human, then at what point does a genetic relative no longer deserve equal rights and why?
I haven't set up MediaWiki, but my coworkers and I chose MoinMoin because it doesn't require a database. We've been pleased with its ease of use, speed, and stability.
They have a Wiki Engine Comparison page that was useful for helping us decide which one best fit our needs.
I've never tried it, but there is a project that claims to have an OpenMP implementation that runs over distributed shared memory.
Omni/SCASH: Cluster-enabled Omni OpenMP on a software distributed shared memory system SCASH
You should check out cilk. Two of the people behind the project used to work for Thinking Machines, the company that made one of the best supercomputers of its day. Cilk adds a few key words to C and it requires much less effort than most other parallel programming models. Unfortunately, the distributed version of it was only a prototype and isn't included in the latest release. If nothing else, you should read the papers these guys have written.
They also had a couple of graduate students that made Jilk (Cilk for Java). From the sound of their papers it isn't ready for production use yet, but it's something to keep in mind if you prefer writing code in Java.
I've recently heard of a commercial product, VGP, but I don't know how well it works yet.
LMbench is great for testing the subsystems of different UNIX systems. It is probably one of the most useful benchmarks other than whatever applications you will actually be running.
IBM is contributing to GCC...specifically, this thread on the GCC mailing list talks about how they are collaborating on introducing autovectorization support.
Freedom is harmful if it is not balanced with responsibility. In our society, we have laws to help us keep ourselves responsible. We also have revolutionaries/patriots that keep watch so that laws don't become unbalanced and limit freedom too much.
In an ideal world there wouldn't be child pornography. Also in an ideal world we could live free and responsibly without laws. Unfortunately we don't, but I prefer a reasonably limited freedom necessary to safeguard the defenseless from abuse to some self-serving, damn-the-cost-as-long-as-I'm-not-paying ideal of "indiscriminate" freedom.
Note that the AG uses multicast, which your router or ISP may not support well. Also, there is a bit of a learning curve to put everything together. There are AG vendors if you want to buy a fully supported solution.
-Andrew
I use Amaya every once in a while, but I generally use vim. One nice feature Amaya has is its structure view. I don't use wysiwyg editors that much, so I don't know if that is a common feature.
I mean, according to the faq, "Biological evolution is a change in the genetic characteristics of a population over time." What viable organisms can we point to and say for certain that their actual genome changed? What if the external changes we observe are simply caused by inherent genetic variation? As I understand it, the theory of genetic variation states that an organism carries a multidude of genes that are only sometimes switched on. This would explain several interesting puzzles concerning the races of humankind without resorting to evolution.
I just think it is an interesting alternative to ponder.
"The trouble with biology is that it is full of facts. An unimaginable number of factual statements could be made about the few million species of organisms on earth. Someone once published an example of a college zoology exam from the pre-Darwinian era that required only the recitation of endless anatomical facts; the Darwinian paradigm changed that, and for a long time, biology was taught primarily as a collection of these facts organized around the principle of natural selection and the fact of evolution. Of course, students of biology must still learn many facts about the natural world, often fascinating facts that motivate them to continue their personal explorations. But as the science of biology matures, it should increasingly subsume facts under general principles and develop coherent general concepts. As our knowledge of molecular, cellular, and physiological processes has grown, that foundation emerges from the genetic conception of an organism: a structure that operates on the basis of information in its genome."
Burton Guttman, author of the College textbook Biology