Re:WinNT!?! First angry, then understanding.
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John Carmack Answers
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> 1. X servers don't hold up the "solid as a rock, > no crashes" reputation that Linux has built for > itself. Sometimes this is because > of buggy servers or window managers, but more > frequently it's because of driver problems. The > common advice is "You can still recover. Just > ssh in from another machine and skill the server > processes." But what about the single machine > home user? I disagree. For a project of its size, X is a marvel of stability. I've been running it (under Linux) now for about 5.5 years and I've had *one* segfault from X in that time - *one*. Then again I've never had to deal with a poorly supported video card (ET4000, then S3 968, then Matrox G200 and now a G400). Are there any real troublesome drivers left? ATI is all well supported in 2D as is Matrox, and I'd imagine that covers 75% of the market right there.
Because there's nothing stopping *you* from putting together your own distribution, or simply copying one.
You can't do that with the SCL.
Of course it's still your choice about whether you want to help Sun or not - I certainly wouldn't hold it against you. But, it's understandable that many people are less than enthused with the idea of contributing work to something which they don't get anything out of.
This page has some hints for people with computer DVD players who are having problems: http://www.pcfriendly.co m/support/title/matrix/default.htm The PC Friendly people have been collecting information on problems in set-top players as well and say they'll keep people posted.
It's a series of hardware problems. The disc is apparently completely conformant but really pushing the envelope on the spec - less well tested players have problems with it.
Even some players that work with it have some problems - my Toshiba 2109 is very sluggish at responding to keypresses at the (fully animated) root menu.
Something like this is probably a good thing in the long term - having a title like The Matrix which is extremely popular show these problems *forces* the manufacturers to fix it. You can bet if the DVD that exposed this was "Universal Soldier XII: The Return (Again)" that it wouldn't be getting the attention it is.
Realize that de Raadt's notion of a "vulnerability" is somewhat different than a lot of people's... there was a thread on Bugtraq maybe 6 months or a year ago (? I'm too lazy to look) where Theo was trying to convince the list that an OpenBSD exploit which allowed unpriveledged users to crash the system was really a minor matter and was *not* an "exploit."
Of course, not to minimize OpenBSD - what they've done is certainly impressive and the most secure system out there. But, take anything Theo says with a grain of salt.
> Friggin geeks, for the most part, simply like > like linux because it makes ya stand out about > the rest of the croud and makes ya look special. Sure, maybe some do. Just like there are people who use the Macintosh because it's "not windows" and makes them feel like they're part of the "counter-culture." Just like BeOS. Just like OS/2. Hell, you even get people bragging about running NT because they're *not* running the latest OS du jour. Summary - every OS has people running it because it makes them feel special. But saying "most Linux users only use it because they want to be different" is grossly unfair.
The "BSD" the article is referring to is the BSD layer on top of Mach, NOT any of the current "free" BSD derivitives. As far as I know, FreeBSD doesn't yet run on PowerPC (a port is underway perhaps?).
I've had mediaone in two towns in the Boston area (Wellesley and Cambridge) and my experiences in both towns have been good. Asides from some random hiccoughs (which any ISP has), Mediaone generally delivered the full advertised throughput at all times during the day. Maybe mw.mediaone.net isn't as good as ne.mediaone.net tho, from what I gather they're basically two seperate organizations.
Mediaone actually blocks out the SMB ports by default. I believe at the moment you can request this filtering be turned off, but they occasionally make noise about disallowing that.
ftp to floppies? I wish! I had to ftp to my father's VMS account (With a 2 meg quota nonetheless), then use zmodem to download Slackware 1.0 to floppies over a 14.4k modem. (This was mid-1994) No, I don't miss those days at all.:>
Agreed - the speeding tax has everything to do with politics and money, and nothing to do with safety. Do yourself, and everyone else, a favor and contest all tickets you get - if everyone did, the speeding tax would go away.
If you set the swap priority to two swap partitions to be the same in Linux 2.0 and later it will stripe accesses to them. By default however, it assigns swap priorities in decreasing order according to fstab
Of course you can get DVD players which are "region-free" and can modify players which aren't to be regionfree. I can't remember offhand the sites selling/modifying players like this, but if you search rec.video.dvd.* on dejanews, it should be pretty easy to find info.
There are few advantages to going with an Adaptec card. They're heinously expensive and really aren't anything special. You can get equivelent performance out of a Symbios-based card ($65 for an Ultrawide, U2W is still much cheaper than Adaptec) and if you really want high performance, step up to a Mylex or DPT. The advantage to a Symbios, Mylex or DPT is also that these companies have historically been strong supporters of Linux. (The astute reader can probably also point out other good Adaptec alternatives...ICP Vortex, Initio, Advnasys etc). Bottom line - Adaptec is very popular and common because it's "the standard," but is often not the best choice.
Well I don't know...secondspin for instance charges a hell of a lot less for basically identical service. Maybe the bigger place has higher overhead? I thought that defeated the point. The point is - if you save $2.50 by shopping online and then spend $3 for shipping, you might as well have gone down to your local Sam Goody or other overpriced music shop and indulged in some instant gratification. And disregarding CDNow's current sale because of the musicblvd thing, their prices really aren't that good outside of top-100 music.
It still wouldn't be as good a deal as it looks. CDNow has pretty outrageous shipping charges and their prices aren't all that good to begin with. Not sure if there are any real good online music places right now tho in any case. www.800.com and www.buy.com have good prices, but shitty customer service. www.secondspin.com is good for used music stuff.
Gack, before you give advice please do some research. Just because the major consumer-oriented DSL is assymetric, that doesn't mean it *has* to be. You're thinking about ADSL, many companies also offer SDSL (also called plain "DSL") which is symmetric. Here in Boston you can get SDSL at rates of 1.5Mbps (symmetric) and possibly even higher.
DVD should theoretically be able to accomodate both on the same disc. Try renting "Crash" sometime (well maybe you don't want to but anyhow...): it gives you the choice between "NC-17" and "R", automatically inserting or removing the proper scenes based on your choice.
You support DIVX because you think it will be cracked? I think you need to look into the medium a bit more before saying that. Most people who've looked at it agree that there is little chance that it will ever be cracked due to the strength of the crypto involved.
Just say no to DIVX, there are no positive aspects. http://www.bandivx.com
I'm pretty sure the very first Stampede was just a "value-added" Redhat, so this is probably just another case of the article being out of date with the facts...
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> 1. X servers don't hold up the "solid as a rock,
> no crashes" reputation that Linux has built for
> itself. Sometimes this is because
> of buggy servers or window managers, but more
> frequently it's because of driver problems. The
> common advice is "You can still recover. Just
> ssh in from another machine and skill the server
> processes." But what about the single machine
> home user?
I disagree. For a project of its size, X is a marvel of stability. I've been running it (under Linux) now for about 5.5 years and I've had *one* segfault from X in that time - *one*. Then again I've never had to deal with a poorly supported video card (ET4000, then S3 968, then Matrox G200 and now a G400). Are there any real troublesome drivers left? ATI is all well supported in 2D as is Matrox, and I'd imagine that covers 75% of the market right there.
I had heard that Chris Carter's vision was "7 seasons" but I could be misremembering
Because there's nothing stopping *you* from putting together your own distribution, or simply copying one.
You can't do that with the SCL.
Of course it's still your choice about whether you want to help Sun or not - I certainly wouldn't hold it against you. But, it's understandable that many people are less than enthused with the idea of contributing work to something which they don't get anything out of.
This page has some hints for people with computer DVD players who are having problems: http://www.pcfriendly.co m/support/title/matrix/default.htm The PC Friendly people have been collecting information on problems in set-top players as well and say they'll keep people posted.
It's a series of hardware problems. The disc is apparently completely conformant but really pushing the envelope on the spec - less well tested players have problems with it.
Even some players that work with it have some problems - my Toshiba 2109 is very sluggish at responding to keypresses at the (fully animated) root menu.
Something like this is probably a good thing in the long term - having a title like The Matrix which is extremely popular show these problems *forces* the manufacturers to fix it. You can bet if the DVD that exposed this was "Universal Soldier XII: The Return (Again)" that it wouldn't be getting the attention it is.
Samsung supposedly already has a fix tested for their players. No idea what it will take to get the upgrade.
(This isn't WB's fault, the disc is conformant by all accounts, it just pushes the limits of the spec)
Realize that de Raadt's notion of a "vulnerability" is somewhat different than a lot of people's ... there was a thread on Bugtraq maybe 6 months or a year ago (? I'm too lazy to look) where Theo was trying to convince the list that an OpenBSD exploit which allowed unpriveledged users to crash the system was really a minor matter and was *not* an "exploit."
Of course, not to minimize OpenBSD - what they've done is certainly impressive and the most secure system out there. But, take anything Theo says with a grain of salt.
> Friggin geeks, for the most part, simply like
> like linux because it makes ya stand out about
> the rest of the croud and makes ya look special.
Sure, maybe some do. Just like there are people who use the Macintosh because it's "not windows" and makes them feel like they're part of the "counter-culture." Just like BeOS. Just like OS/2. Hell, you even get people bragging about running NT because they're *not* running the latest OS du jour. Summary - every OS has people running it because it makes them feel special. But saying "most Linux users only use it because they want to be different" is grossly unfair.
The "BSD" the article is referring to is the BSD layer on top of Mach, NOT any of the current "free" BSD derivitives. As far as I know, FreeBSD doesn't yet run on PowerPC (a port is underway perhaps?).
I've had mediaone in two towns in the Boston area (Wellesley and Cambridge) and my experiences in both towns have been good. Asides from some random hiccoughs (which any ISP has), Mediaone generally delivered the full advertised throughput at all times during the day. Maybe mw.mediaone.net isn't as good as ne.mediaone.net tho, from what I gather they're basically two seperate organizations.
Mediaone actually blocks out the SMB ports by default. I believe at the moment you can request this filtering be turned off, but they occasionally make noise about disallowing that.
ftp to floppies? I wish! I had to ftp to my father's VMS account (With a 2 meg quota nonetheless), then use zmodem to download Slackware 1.0 to floppies over a 14.4k modem. (This was mid-1994) :>
No, I don't miss those days at all.
Agreed - the speeding tax has everything to do with politics and money, and nothing to do with safety. Do yourself, and everyone else, a favor and contest all tickets you get - if everyone did, the speeding tax would go away.
That's unlikely. Oracle values its relationships with hardware vendors and wouldn't want to annoy them by trying to undercut them.
[Speaking for myself only and not the company]
If you set the swap priority to two swap partitions to be the same in Linux 2.0 and later it will stripe accesses to them. By default however, it assigns swap priorities in decreasing order according to fstab
Of course you can get DVD players which are "region-free" and can modify players which aren't to be regionfree. I can't remember offhand the sites selling/modifying players like this, but if you search rec.video.dvd.* on dejanews, it should be pretty easy to find info.
There are few advantages to going with an Adaptec card. They're heinously expensive and really aren't anything special. You can get equivelent performance out of a Symbios-based card ($65 for an Ultrawide, U2W is still much cheaper than Adaptec) and if you really want high performance, step up to a Mylex or DPT. The advantage to a Symbios, Mylex or DPT is also that these companies have historically been strong supporters of Linux. (The astute reader can probably also point out other good Adaptec alternatives...ICP Vortex, Initio, Advnasys etc).
Bottom line - Adaptec is very popular and common because it's "the standard," but is often not the best choice.
The Micro-Research BIOS (www.mrbios.com) reboots in probably 1/10 the time of any other.
Well I don't know...secondspin for instance charges a hell of a lot less for basically identical service. Maybe the bigger place has higher overhead? I thought that defeated the point.
The point is - if you save $2.50 by shopping online and then spend $3 for shipping, you might as well have gone down to your local Sam Goody or other overpriced music shop and indulged in some instant gratification. And disregarding CDNow's current sale because of the musicblvd thing, their prices really aren't that good outside of top-100 music.
$3 for the first item is pretty unreasonable in my opinion considering it costs maybe a buck to ship a CD.
It still wouldn't be as good a deal as it looks. CDNow has pretty outrageous shipping charges and their prices aren't all that good to begin with. Not sure if there are any real good online music places right now tho in any case. www.800.com and www.buy.com have good prices, but shitty customer service. www.secondspin.com is good for used music stuff.
Gack, before you give advice please do some research. Just because the major consumer-oriented DSL is assymetric, that doesn't mean it *has* to be. You're thinking about ADSL, many companies also offer SDSL (also called plain "DSL") which is symmetric. Here in Boston you can get SDSL at rates of 1.5Mbps (symmetric) and possibly even higher.
DVD should theoretically be able to accomodate both on the same disc. Try renting "Crash" sometime (well maybe you don't want to but anyhow...): it gives you the choice between "NC-17" and "R", automatically inserting or removing the proper scenes based on your choice.
You support DIVX because you think it will be cracked? I think you need to look into the medium a bit more before saying that. Most people who've looked at it agree that there is little chance that it will ever be cracked due to the strength of the crypto involved.
Just say no to DIVX, there are no positive aspects. http://www.bandivx.com
I'm pretty sure the very first Stampede was just a "value-added" Redhat, so this is probably just another case of the article being out of date with the facts...