at the very least it would have saved me the occasional hassle of grabbing a rescue CD because I stupidly forgot to turn on support for IDE harddisks
Agreed, this is a problem. I can think of two solutions:
Have someone (you?) spend over a year developing a very complex database of rules and interactions. Drivers are constantly changing so you're going to have to maintain the database daily. Expect breakage. You're going to have to be very good at answering email and dealing with inexperienced users.
Use the modular kernel provided by your distribution.
That reminds me of long ago, when I was a high school junior working at ComputerWare Palo Alto. A customer came in wanting to demo Vette, a game by Spectrum Holobyte. Vette was copy protected: you needed to insert original disk before it would start up. Problem is, someone had stolen our demo.
So I said, hang on a moment. With the customer watching over my shoulder, I dropped into TMON and started banging around. 5 minutes later I had managed locate the copy protection was and hopped the PC right over it (TMON ruled). Vette fired right up.
The customer liked it a lot and bought a few copies of the game. That was one of my proudest engineering moments of my life.
Wonder what the DMCA would have said about that.:)
I really don't see the need. make menuconfig works great for me
The current CML is a heinous mess. It's a strange , mix of shell syntax and cusom declarations, making it difficult and error-prone to express even moderatly complex dependencies. Kernel configuration needs a purely declarative language, which is what Roman has made.
It won't make your life much easier so I'm not sure why this story made Slashdot. But it will probably make kernel developers' lives much easier. And, OK, it might make your life slightly easier. No more weird questions like "why do I have to statically link the framebuffer driver just to use SiS DRI?" Answer: it was too hard to express the correct dependencies in CML1.
Having it detect my hardware and build a static kernel with no modules would be pretty damn cool.
No, it really would not. If you're compiling a super tight kernel for a beowulf cluster, you've already got the expertise needed to compile your own kernel. You don't need hardware detection. And, if you're Joe User, then please, for pity's sake, use one of the nice, modular kernels that comes with your distribution. Do not cause yourself grief.
There really is no middle ground. Aunt Tillie is a purely fictional character. When he wrote CML2, ESR for some reason burned huge amounts of time on autodetection. I'm happy to say that all that work was thrown in the garbage. Nobody wanted it. Kernel-level hardware detection is simply unneeded complexity.
Module-level hardware detection is desperately needed, however. It's coming in various forms, like the PCI hotplug scripts and driverfs. I can't wait.
Nope, you just didn't actually read the link you posted. Here's an excerpt:
In principle, you can use CMYK Decompose, print the outcome on a laser printer, and give it to a professional print shop, but the professional printer will most likely do a much better separating job than you can. However, you can certainly achieve very interesting results with CMY/CMYK decomposed images, even if you don't use them for printing purposes.
In Photoshop, you can edit in CMYK with full color correction. In the Gimp, you have to convert to and from RGB, and there's no color correction. These are showstoppers.
...fonts are not software. They can be created with free software, they can be distributed gratis together with free software, but they are, in the end, data.
You don't actually know what a multiple-master font is, do you? I recommend running a google search.
You know the Gimp can be programmed in Scheme, and that is as easy as it gets short of hiring programmers.
But, and this is so obvious I should not even have to say it, the Gimp is not itself programmed in Scheme. What does that tell you?
I love free software. I use it every day. However, we've got a long way to go...
any software that demands extra buttons [more than one] suffers from feature creep.
Wrong. Witness any non-trivial Macintosh drawing or CAD program. For example, let's say you want to move an object to the front.
1-button: Click on the object. Move the mouse cursor to the very top of the screen (on my 1600x1200 monitor, that's a long way away -- don't quote Tog here, he used 512x342 screens). Wonder what menu title "Move to Front" is behind. Is it behind Edit, View, Object, or Action? It takes a while to find because these menus are really long and half the items are grayed out. But, hey, that's the way the Apple User-Interface Guidelines say to do it.
3-button: Right-click on the object. Select move-to-front. Get on with life.
Context-sensitive menus rule. You should try them out some time.
The shortest legitimate name for this system is "GNU", but we call it "GNU/Linux" for the reasons given below.
In other words, if they thought they could get away with it, the FSF would try to force everybody to call it simply GNU. "RedHat GNU 8.0", etc.
I loathe this type of zealotry. How hard could it be to eradicate GNU code from my system? They just wrote glibc and a whole ton of smallish accessories (I use vi). Shouldn't be too hard, and will certainly result in a much cleaner system.
This idiocy might actually be a blessing in disguise.
Most EL works just fine from 120V AC. It would be silly to convert your wall power to DC just to invert it back up to drive the EL.
Buy a sample and plug it into the wall (safely!). If it works, buy a bunch. I did this myself while harvesting EL backlights from dead LCD displays. It worked great.
When you're happy that cut and paste actually works I think it's a sign you've been using X-Windows for too long.
Amen to that. I'm using Gnome 2.0 and KDE 3.1 and cut and paste STILL doesn't work reliably. Don't quit the application you cut/copied the text from before pasting! You want to cut and paste something other than straight 7-bit ASCII text? ha! Save it as a file and import.
This is insane. The Mac had both these problems solved 18 years ago. I guess Linux programmers don't copy/paste much.
On the Video RAM Cache: Not every box has a sooper-dooper fast mega-card in it. I have boxes with old Cirrus Logic and Mach64 cards in 'em. And not every PC is equipped with AGP. Enabling this can yield a performance boost on some hardware, a little more detail here would help.
I'd be surprised if you ever saw a speedup for normal usage. Most VRAM writes are done via an acceleration engine/blitter that has no ability to use the L2 cache. And, for normal writes, good MTRRs will take care of the rest. So, they're correct: it's almost always wrong to use L2 to cache VRAM. Disable this option.
Note that this is not the same as caching the video driver in system RAM. Back in the DOS days, the entire video driver was contained on the card in slow ROM. This option would cause that ROM to be copied to the system memory, offering a big speedup. However, all modern OSes use their own video drivers (assuming XFree86 is part of the OS). Caching the ROM driver in RAM only wastes RAM. Disable this option too.
How do I build one? You've got screenshots, etc. on your web site but no schematics. No pics of hardware. No antennas. How do I follow in your footsteps?
I think the command you're looking for is 'xrandr' (rotate and resize).
No, it's not. This allows a user to zoom in on a portion of his desktop. However, it doesn't allow the user to change its size or bit depth. Why? Because this is impossible in XF4.2. This is insane. Mac and Windows have been able to do this from day one.
So don't try to boot off of it! That fixes three of your four problems right there. To fix the last issue, don't use it in a render farm. Use it as a docserver, where 100Mb is more than enough.
Your gripes don't have anything to do with the iSCSI standard or its readiness for prime time. You misunderstand the whole purpose behind iSCSI. FibreChannel is definitely a more elegant solution, just like SCSI is a more elegant solution than the vastly more popular IDE. You you're forgetting that people need the proper tool for the job, nothing more.
When you think iSCSI, don't think FibreChannel, think VPN.
There's one in the Saleen S7
on
Rear View LCD?
·
· Score: 1
The S7 is street legal and has a live video rear view mirror. It shouldn't be too hard to see how they did it. It might be expensive though -- the car costs $375,000.
"I'm aware there are compatibility problems between this version and MacOS X 10.2 aka Jaguar. There are a few solutions for this, you can downgrade to Pepper 3.6.6b (which only works if you bought a 3.x version initially instead of a 4.x version). Another solution might be to throw away the current preferences (make sure you keep a copy of your serial number somewhere before you do)."
"Why the rest of the world hate Amercia?" I will assume you ment hates America... 1. All the money we give out every year to keep most 3rd world countries from colapsing?
You mean the money spent to prop up corrupt and failing puppet democracies?
Also, you snidely corrected a previous poster's silly grammatical error, then went on to make one yourself in the very next sentence. FYI.
2. The constant military help we give countries who need it?
You mean like Cambodia? Nicaragua? WWII was a long time ago. Since then, with one possible exception, our military interventions have almost certainly done more harm than good.
6. Having a country where a "common" class person can become the richest person in the world? Granted I don't like Bill Gates.
You're proud of this?! Professional ball players whine about only making a few million dollars a year, CEOs rake in tens of millions as they steer their companies into the ground, directors vote themselves loans that they have no intention of repaying, etc. America has many strengths but let me assure you that gross equity imbalance is not one of them!
7. A country where EVERY child has the ability to get an education?
What suburb do you live in? We're making progress towards this every year, and one day this will be true. Today, though, most parents need to start financial planning for their child's college education before the child is even born. It's sickening.
9. A country that produces enough food to not only feed themselves but a large part of the world?
I'm pretty sure that terrorists aren't plotting against us because of our agricultural output...
3. A government run by the people for the people? Granted it could be better.
4. Having our women on equal ground with our men in every aspect of our lives?
5. Having most of our diverse religous and ethnic backgrounds get along together?
8. A country that thoughsands of people are fleeing to every year?
These are different manifestations of the single greatest thing about our country. Let us never forget it.
10. A country where people could protest against the government and ANY political official and NOT get shot or have family members killed? ... Nice to be able to type something like that and not have to worry about the government killing me.
You say this as if it's a bad thing. We also used to send most of communications through the air. When demand outstripped capacity, much higher-capacity fiber was laid in the ground to cover the high-volume routes.
It's time to do this to the transporation system. High speed trains can carry far more people per route, and carry them in greater comfort and safety. They arrive at city center, rather than a $40 cab ride away. And there's no need to check luggage.
One day, hopefully we'll be amazed at the practice of stuffing hundreds of people into flimsy aluminum structures and launching them into the air.
Why does nobody make one with a write-protect switch???
They would be perfect for storing Tripwire databases, read-only boot partitions, etc. I've looked all over, though, and as far as I can tell, all of them are permanently read/write.
1) Demand is much lower 2) Parts count is much higher
You can get a card reader for a desktop machine ($15-$80, depending on what you want) and just use compact flash cards. It just takes a lot of effort to boot from one. It is possible, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, this is a problem. I can think of two solutions:
-
Have someone (you?) spend over a year developing a very complex database of rules and interactions. Drivers are constantly changing so you're going to have to maintain the database daily. Expect breakage. You're going to have to be very good at answering email and dealing with inexperienced users.
-
Use the modular kernel provided by your distribution.
Which sounds like the better idea?So I said, hang on a moment. With the customer watching over my shoulder, I dropped into TMON and started banging around. 5 minutes later I had managed locate the copy protection was and hopped the PC right over it (TMON ruled). Vette fired right up.
The customer liked it a lot and bought a few copies of the game. That was one of my proudest engineering moments of my life.
Wonder what the DMCA would have said about that. :)
The current CML is a heinous mess. It's a strange , mix of shell syntax and cusom declarations, making it difficult and error-prone to express even moderatly complex dependencies. Kernel configuration needs a purely declarative language, which is what Roman has made.
It won't make your life much easier so I'm not sure why this story made Slashdot. But it will probably make kernel developers' lives much easier. And, OK, it might make your life slightly easier. No more weird questions like "why do I have to statically link the framebuffer driver just to use SiS DRI?" Answer: it was too hard to express the correct dependencies in CML1.
Having it detect my hardware and build a static kernel with no modules would be pretty damn cool.
No, it really would not. If you're compiling a super tight kernel for a beowulf cluster, you've already got the expertise needed to compile your own kernel. You don't need hardware detection. And, if you're Joe User, then please, for pity's sake, use one of the nice, modular kernels that comes with your distribution. Do not cause yourself grief.
There really is no middle ground. Aunt Tillie is a purely fictional character. When he wrote CML2, ESR for some reason burned huge amounts of time on autodetection. I'm happy to say that all that work was thrown in the garbage. Nobody wanted it. Kernel-level hardware detection is simply unneeded complexity.
Module-level hardware detection is desperately needed, however. It's coming in various forms, like the PCI hotplug scripts and driverfs. I can't wait.
Nope, you just didn't actually read the link you posted. Here's an excerpt:
In Photoshop, you can edit in CMYK with full color correction. In the Gimp, you have to convert to and from RGB, and there's no color correction. These are showstoppers.
You don't actually know what a multiple-master font is, do you? I recommend running a google search.
You know the Gimp can be programmed in Scheme, and that is as easy as it gets short of hiring programmers.
But, and this is so obvious I should not even have to say it, the Gimp is not itself programmed in Scheme. What does that tell you?
I love free software. I use it every day. However, we've got a long way to go...
299 doesn't sound too bad for 5 gigs of mp3 storage.
Yes, it does. (20 Gb + recording for $255)
any software that demands extra buttons [more than one] suffers from feature creep.
Wrong. Witness any non-trivial Macintosh drawing or CAD program. For example, let's say you want to move an object to the front.
1-button: Click on the object. Move the mouse cursor to the very top of the screen (on my 1600x1200 monitor, that's a long way away -- don't quote Tog here, he used 512x342 screens). Wonder what menu title "Move to Front" is behind. Is it behind Edit, View, Object, or Action? It takes a while to find because these menus are really long and half the items are grayed out. But, hey, that's the way the Apple User-Interface Guidelines say to do it.
3-button: Right-click on the object. Select move-to-front. Get on with life.
Context-sensitive menus rule. You should try them out some time.
From the article:
The shortest legitimate name for this system is "GNU", but we call it "GNU/Linux" for the reasons given below.
In other words, if they thought they could get away with it, the FSF would try to force everybody to call it simply GNU. "RedHat GNU 8.0", etc.
I loathe this type of zealotry. How hard could it be to eradicate GNU code from my system? They just wrote glibc and a whole ton of smallish accessories (I use vi). Shouldn't be too hard, and will certainly result in a much cleaner system.
This idiocy might actually be a blessing in disguise.
Most EL works just fine from 120V AC. It would be silly to convert your wall power to DC just to invert it back up to drive the EL.
Buy a sample and plug it into the wall (safely!). If it works, buy a bunch. I did this myself while harvesting EL backlights from dead LCD displays. It worked great.
Whatever happened to Indrema, BTW? I thought they'd written a bunch of code and given it out under GPL after they went under.
Who cares? All they wrote was a weak form of copy protection. Everything else they demoed was GPL and still exists today.
When you're happy that cut and paste actually works I think it's a sign you've been using X-Windows for too long.
Amen to that. I'm using Gnome 2.0 and KDE 3.1 and cut and paste STILL doesn't work reliably. Don't quit the application you cut/copied the text from before pasting! You want to cut and paste something other than straight 7-bit ASCII text? ha! Save it as a file and import.
This is insane. The Mac had both these problems solved 18 years ago. I guess Linux programmers don't copy/paste much.
On the Video RAM Cache: Not every box has a sooper-dooper fast mega-card in it. I have boxes with old Cirrus Logic and Mach64 cards in 'em. And not every PC is equipped with AGP. Enabling this can yield a performance boost on some hardware, a little more detail here would help.
I'd be surprised if you ever saw a speedup for normal usage. Most VRAM writes are done via an acceleration engine/blitter that has no ability to use the L2 cache. And, for normal writes, good MTRRs will take care of the rest. So, they're correct: it's almost always wrong to use L2 to cache VRAM. Disable this option.
Note that this is not the same as caching the video driver in system RAM. Back in the DOS days, the entire video driver was contained on the card in slow ROM. This option would cause that ROM to be copied to the system memory, offering a big speedup. However, all modern OSes use their own video drivers (assuming XFree86 is part of the OS). Caching the ROM driver in RAM only wastes RAM. Disable this option too.
Yeah, and they're just now coming out with the Perfection 2400 (few weeks maybe).
I can't wait to get my hands on one of these. I have yet to hear about Linux support, tho.
How do I build one? You've got screenshots, etc. on your web site but no schematics. No pics of hardware. No antennas. How do I follow in your footsteps?
I think the command you're looking for is 'xrandr' (rotate and resize).
No, it's not. This allows a user to zoom in on a portion of his desktop. However, it doesn't allow the user to change its size or bit depth. Why? Because this is impossible in XF4.2. This is insane. Mac and Windows have been able to do this from day one.
So don't try to boot off of it! That fixes three of your four problems right there. To fix the last issue, don't use it in a render farm. Use it as a docserver, where 100Mb is more than enough.
Your gripes don't have anything to do with the iSCSI standard or its readiness for prime time. You misunderstand the whole purpose behind iSCSI. FibreChannel is definitely a more elegant solution, just like SCSI is a more elegant solution than the vastly more popular IDE. You you're forgetting that people need the proper tool for the job, nothing more.
When you think iSCSI, don't think FibreChannel, think VPN.
The S7 is street legal and has a live video rear view mirror. It shouldn't be too hard to see how they did it. It might be expensive though -- the car costs $375,000.
http://www.saleen.com/auto/S7/S7con.htm
"I'm aware there are compatibility problems between this version and MacOS X 10.2 aka Jaguar. There are a few solutions for this, you can downgrade to Pepper 3.6.6b (which only works if you bought a 3.x version initially instead of a 4.x version). Another solution might be to throw away the current preferences (make sure you keep a copy of your serial number somewhere before you do)."
And people paid money for this garbage.
1. All the money we give out every year to keep most 3rd world countries from colapsing?
You mean the money spent to prop up corrupt and failing puppet democracies?
Also, you snidely corrected a previous poster's silly grammatical error, then went on to make one yourself in the very next sentence. FYI.
2. The constant military help we give countries who need it?
You mean like Cambodia? Nicaragua? WWII was a long time ago. Since then, with one possible exception, our military interventions have almost certainly done more harm than good.
6. Having a country where a "common" class person can become the richest person in the world? Granted I don't like Bill Gates.
You're proud of this?! Professional ball players whine about only making a few million dollars a year, CEOs rake in tens of millions as they steer their companies into the ground, directors vote themselves loans that they have no intention of repaying, etc. America has many strengths but let me assure you that gross equity imbalance is not one of them!
7. A country where EVERY child has the ability to get an education?
What suburb do you live in? We're making progress towards this every year, and one day this will be true. Today, though, most parents need to start financial planning for their child's college education before the child is even born. It's sickening.
9. A country that produces enough food to not only feed themselves but a large part of the world?
I'm pretty sure that terrorists aren't plotting against us because of our agricultural output...
3. A government run by the people for the people? Granted it could be better.
4. Having our women on equal ground with our men in every aspect of our lives?
5. Having most of our diverse religous and ethnic backgrounds get along together?
8. A country that thoughsands of people are fleeing to every year?
These are different manifestations of the single greatest thing about our country. Let us never forget it.
10. A country where people could protest against the government and ANY political official and NOT get shot or have family members killed?
... Nice to be able to type something like that and not have to worry about the government killing me.
Amen, brother.
You say this as if it's a bad thing. We also used to send most of communications through the air. When demand outstripped capacity, much higher-capacity fiber was laid in the ground to cover the high-volume routes.
It's time to do this to the transporation system. High speed trains can carry far more people per route, and carry them in greater comfort and safety. They arrive at city center, rather than a $40 cab ride away. And there's no need to check luggage.
One day, hopefully we'll be amazed at the practice of stuffing hundreds of people into flimsy aluminum structures and launching them into the air.
802.11 or 100baseT, HTTP-configured.
a lV ideo/internetCameras/
Sweet stuff.
http://www.dlink.com/products/DigitalHome/Digit
Why does nobody make one with a write-protect switch???
They would be perfect for storing Tripwire databases, read-only boot partitions, etc. I've looked all over, though, and as far as I can tell, all of them are permanently read/write.
1) Demand is much lower
2) Parts count is much higher
You can get a card reader for a desktop machine ($15-$80, depending on what you want) and just use compact flash cards. It just takes a lot of effort to boot from one. It is possible, though.
check out SDLcam. I haven't used it yet but it looks sweet.
Screen Shot
You can do this with AppleScript...
No, you can't. How does AppleScript "simulate mouse clicks, text entry, menu pulldowns?"
Answer: it doesn't. It calls the application directly, skipping the UI. Which is not so good if you want to do user interface testing.
Here's some more information on how to use the compose key:
http://www.trestle.com/linux/xkey/index.html