No doubt. Oracle really is a great product. Expensive as shit, but worth it if you need it. My previous employer ran it on Windows for some reason, but why is totally beyond me. Windows is such a secretary's OS. If MS had kept Xenix then they would be a contender, but the very fact that they dropped it years ago shows that they are clueless.
I'm not a MS basher by nature, but rather from experience. I have endured over 10 years of crashy shitty programs that were developed for their sucky OS and I just can't deal with it anymore.
At work, I probably know more about MS Windows than anybody else, but if anybody asks me for help I shut them down and tell them to call the IT department. I simply do not have the time or inclination to help a company which has caused me so much grief. Ask me a Linux question and I will help you all day, ask me a Windows question and I will tell you to call MS Tech support.
Yeah, well keep in mind that Germany is about the size and economic equivalent of one US State. We are a serious juggernaut like you wouldn't believe. Iraq is freaking insane to be doing what they are. We could pulverize their entire country just by dropping scrapped cars from junkyards on them..
This is a good thing as the US DoD uses ADA95 for most everything AFAIK and the GNAT compiler works just dandy with Linux. This is what DoD needs, an inexpensive, yet totally robust system which they can put unleash the military programmers on.
A good example is BRL-Cad which is available for free download by US Citizens. This is a nice OpenGL capable solid modeler, somewhat clunky, but probably better than any other free CAD program available for Linux right now.
I'm a veteran of the US Military, and I think that Linux is a great choice for them, since they have the capability to provide cheap, effective, and efficient training about their computer systems to all the members of the armed forces. The US Military could easily train several million service personnel to be effective Linux programmers in a quite short period of time.
And of course, as a taxpaying citizen, I want my armed forces buying the best weaponry, not lining some 2-bit computer software vendor's pockets, especially when those vendors undermine the rights of the citizens by channeling that money back into lobbying for laws like the DMCA.
This is where RedHat shines. I use Debian myself, but Debian is too chaotic to apply for these certifications; however, RedHat could make a killing by supplying the US Government their software, and since Linux is Linux is Linux, this gives my government the state of the art software: it is secure, it is robust, it is inexpensive, and it is the best development environment in the world!
I've been running Linux 2.4 ever since 2.4.0-pre10, my Apache server hasn't crashed in months (click my link above), don't use OpenSSL, won't use Samba, rarely use KDE (E16 all the way!), love Mozilla, and I think IBM is the highest quality computer manufacturer in the world! I love my IBM P200 monitor!
Why -o- why would you download it from a pirate site if you already own it?
For that matter, why download anything from a pirate site? I cannot even keep up with all the new free Linux games that pop up every day on Happy Penguin.
Yeah, back in the pioneer days of the internet I hit a few warez sites, but you are taking a big risk these days. I suggest you hit the bargian bin instead and spend some time installing Debian or something if you want a lot of great games.
Don't even piss with warez sites. Funnel your efforts into more productive endeavors.
If they let one group have access, would they not have to let others?
That is a misconception. Business does not have to be fair or equal. Business makes sweet deals with a select few all the time.
That said, I think bnetd should be on their own. They reverse engineered it so they are The Competitor! No business in its right mind gives the competitor anything at all, except maybe to fly predator drones over to their factory and wipe 'em out.
Thats a good idea, hmmm... except I never sign up for anything. I guess I could start doing "online sweepstakes" entries and give them a hotmail address. The only problem is I would never log in to delete my inbox. Is there a way to set up hotmail filters so that everything goes into the trash automatically?
If Debian could ever get a GUI version of dselect working it would be excellent. The apt-get command is ok, I guess, but I'm old school and almost always use dselect to browse and search through packages.
The problem with it is that its keyboard commands are pretty alien. It resembles vi or less somewhat but the rest is just weird. I've just learned how to use it from years of use, but sometimes it still seems strange and kind of scarey even to me.
Its probably inertia that has resulted in dselect remaining unchanged for so many years. Some kind of user-friendly new GUI version would be so welcome for Debian, and would just make reviewers rave. So what if you have 10000 packages -- doesn't do much good if you can't find the one you are looking for. Thats why I use dselect because by hitting the "/" key you can search through the available package names. A big improvement would be a glimpse style text search function to search all the text fields related to a particular package.
Ok I'll make it happen. Watch this. Everytime I decide to make a program for Debian, somebody always beats me to it.
I'm going to write a Python / Tkinter front-end for dselect with nice buttonbars, better search capabilities, and use little scrollable textareas to read descriptions.
There, that should do it. Piece of cake. And now for my next magical trick...
Desktop setup for sure on a laptop. They just aren't made to run 24/7 due to heat and battery issues. If you want to use one as a server to save on electrical bills then something like a Netwinder is a lot better suited to being a server. I have an old ARM based 'Winder and it has been running my website since around July nonstop with no noticable impact on my electric bill. I might have rebooted it a half dozen times since then.
I'd think a Linux laptop should have ftp, telnet, maybe Apache for browsing local docs, but not much else. You want to be able to take it to work and network to your desktop but not necessarily with the office network. If you office is running Linux then it should be pretty secure anyways, but if it is running "Client for Microsoft Networks" then I wouldn't connect it because the first time the network crashes the IT department will point the finger at you and claim that your "unauthorized" machine is making the network crash out of Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.
I agree, the laptop world has some absolutely horrible sound and video chipsets. They are usually pretty buggy and ship with buggy windows drivers preinstalled. If you accidentally fry your disk and have to reinstall you better hope you have those driver disks. My friend has an older laptop with CS4236 sound and some crap Cirrus Logic video chipset. The sound is just barely working with a 2.4.18 kernel and the video is now obsoleted in XF86-4 so he has to run an X 3.3.6 XServer. It works, but I had a heck of a time getting it going.
I've done a few Linux laptop installs with Debian and setting up the XServer can be a nightmare, I know more about XF86Config modelines than I care to think about. Usually with the laptops its just trial and error.
If you get a laptop that comes with any kind of Linux installed then you get a working XF86Config-4, and a kernel which supports all the hardware, including having good drivers for the Cardbus slots and all that.
I'll reiterate, most laptops have buggy chipsets and pretty crappy windows drivers. Don't necessarily expect them to work well with Linux, you're lucky to get ~75% functionality unless you carefully research the laptop beforehand. One that comes with Linux preinstalled ought to be pretty sweet with about any distro.
We could sure use some new fonts. Three cheers for Bitstream! Remember the horrors of trying to get True-Type fonts to work with Star Office 5? If you never had the experience I assure you that it was truly horrendous. Yaay!
I have a Thawte cert. They are free but don't include your real name, more like this:
Email: boofer@somewhere.net
ID: Thawte Freemail Member
You can get your name into your cert if you can find a Thawte "Web of Trust" Notary. You present your ID's, maybe pay a small fee, and you get notarized and can have your name in your cert.
The freebie certs work well enough for encrypted email anyways, the only annoying thing is that MSIE won't recognize Mozilla style certs, still, I have an Outlook cert for work and enables me to clearsign a message which gives it a distinctive looking red prize ribbon icon that nobody else has figured out how to get (going on two years now:-)
Note that these are only for email. You cannot use one of these certs for your SSL encrypted Apache server, for instance. I am not currently aware of a do-it-yourself SSL cert, but I'm sure such a thing exists. Unfortunately it will give a security alert as being from an untrusted source.
I use Cygwin all the time at work because I don't have the option of installing Linux. It is pretty dang convenient for a lot of things, especially little bash 1-liners for doing bulk file renaming and such. Consider:
$ for i in *.ps; do ps2pdf.bat $i; done $ for i in *.pdf; do mv $i form_${i%.pdf}-031015.pdf; done
If you have a hundred or so files which you want to rename or prepend things or change the suffix, for instance, it is a slick way to do it rather than clicking away for hours.
Likewise, you can use awk to do some pretty nifty tricks with large text files.
And finally, I don't rate to get a copy of Visual Studio, so if I want to write a little program for some reason then Cygwin's g++ is my only option, or the GNAT Ada95 compiler in GNUWin (I have it installed as well). These GNUWinII programs are more GUI-style programs which really Cygwin is mainly command-line based. I can't get by without Gimp and I have been using the GNUWin version for a couple years at work now.
Nah. Just eject the 256MB SD Card or the IBM MicroDrive. Why would you spend big $$$ on one of these toys and not get a couple flash cards? Heck, thats their best feature.
Hehe... surely some genious will soon figure out how to use USB hubs to make a USB Zaurus Beowulf. Hmm... a battery powered supercomputer? Well, actually StrongARM processors are a bit light on the floating point area. It would probably take a hundred Zaurus's to equal one AMD Hammer, but they would fly if they did integer calcs...
I am a happy owner of a Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 and I have to say that its display is wonderful. It really is true that it looks great in bright sunlight. Actually the brighter the better. This is the first LCD screen I have ever owned that has this quality, and it is a really nice feature. Otherwise, its QVGA display also looks very nice with the backlight on indoors. Sharp PDA's are excellent geek-toys. My PDA runs a FTP server and I can telnet to it... does yours?;-P
Yeah. I have an IBM P200 (20") which I essentially got for free doing a bit of Ebay wheeling and dealing with RS/6000 boxes. It will be a while before 20" LCD's are free. Also it is so heavy I loathe to carry it out to my truck to throw it away. Need a freight dolly. Now that I think about it, I did pay some shipping on it so it wasn't exactly free. Still, Ryan's Serious Sam BETA for Linux looks fan-fscking-tastic! Yessir, I like it!
Yep. I've seen it. Draw a big bracket over a horrific set of terms and set it equal to "star", then similarly group other items and set them to convenient things. Do some algebra on it, and finally plug the original values back in. Pretty nifty trick.
And right now, any new binaries which I need to write, I do them in Ada95. If D is somehow better than Ada then I will start using it when possible. Obviously if you are doing something which relies on c++ libs then just stick with that, but if you have the luxury of a new project, then hey what the heck use the new D compiler. Why not, anyways.
Right On! NEW Linux now with SGI tech!
on
New SGI Altix 3000
·
· Score: 1
To think that the people that brought you the Cray Supercomputer have been tinkering with the Linux kernel just makes me shudder with delight. Truly things are really getting better all the time! And these are not just minor modifications to the kernel either, making it run on SGI quality systems with scalability over hundreds of processors is incredulous! This is probably the most exciting Slashdot story I've seen in a long time.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, busted. Some of IBM's equipment is extremely high quality. Do the research before you buy.
I'm not a MS basher by nature, but rather from experience. I have endured over 10 years of crashy shitty programs that were developed for their sucky OS and I just can't deal with it anymore.
At work, I probably know more about MS Windows than anybody else, but if anybody asks me for help I shut them down and tell them to call the IT department. I simply do not have the time or inclination to help a company which has caused me so much grief. Ask me a Linux question and I will help you all day, ask me a Windows question and I will tell you to call MS Tech support.
Yeah, well keep in mind that Germany is about the size and economic equivalent of one US State. We are a serious juggernaut like you wouldn't believe. Iraq is freaking insane to be doing what they are. We could pulverize their entire country just by dropping scrapped cars from junkyards on them..
This is a good thing as the US DoD uses ADA95 for most everything AFAIK and the GNAT compiler works just dandy with Linux. This is what DoD needs, an inexpensive, yet totally robust system which they can put unleash the military programmers on.
A good example is BRL-Cad which is available for free download by US Citizens. This is a nice OpenGL capable solid modeler, somewhat clunky, but probably better than any other free CAD program available for Linux right now.
I'm a veteran of the US Military, and I think that Linux is a great choice for them, since they have the capability to provide cheap, effective, and efficient training about their computer systems to all the members of the armed forces. The US Military could easily train several million service personnel to be effective Linux programmers in a quite short period of time.
And of course, as a taxpaying citizen, I want my armed forces buying the best weaponry, not lining some 2-bit computer software vendor's pockets, especially when those vendors undermine the rights of the citizens by channeling that money back into lobbying for laws like the DMCA.
This is where RedHat shines. I use Debian myself, but Debian is too chaotic to apply for these certifications; however, RedHat could make a killing by supplying the US Government their software, and since Linux is Linux is Linux, this gives my government the state of the art software: it is secure, it is robust, it is inexpensive, and it is the best development environment in the world!
I've been running Linux 2.4 ever since 2.4.0-pre10, my Apache server hasn't crashed in months (click my link above), don't use OpenSSL, won't use Samba, rarely use KDE (E16 all the way!), love Mozilla, and I think IBM is the highest quality computer manufacturer in the world! I love my IBM P200 monitor!
For that matter, why download anything from a pirate site? I cannot even keep up with all the new free Linux games that pop up every day on Happy Penguin.
Yeah, back in the pioneer days of the internet I hit a few warez sites, but you are taking a big risk these days. I suggest you hit the bargian bin instead and spend some time installing Debian or something if you want a lot of great games.
Don't even piss with warez sites. Funnel your efforts into more productive endeavors.
That is a misconception. Business does not have to be fair or equal. Business makes sweet deals with a select few all the time.
That said, I think bnetd should be on their own. They reverse engineered it so they are The Competitor! No business in its right mind gives the competitor anything at all, except maybe to fly predator drones over to their factory and wipe 'em out.
Nah. I surely don't need this game. Maybe I'll snag it from the bargain bin in five years, maybe not.
c:\windows\system32\fdisk.exe
Thats a good idea, hmmm... except I never sign up for anything. I guess I could start doing "online sweepstakes" entries and give them a hotmail address. The only problem is I would never log in to delete my inbox. Is there a way to set up hotmail filters so that everything goes into the trash automatically?
Im Amerika das scheissenpapieren ist bergotten uns des UberMarketten mit dein plastchekarten.
If Debian could ever get a GUI version of dselect working it would be excellent. The apt-get command is ok, I guess, but I'm old school and almost always use dselect to browse and search through packages.
The problem with it is that its keyboard commands are pretty alien. It resembles vi or less somewhat but the rest is just weird. I've just learned how to use it from years of use, but sometimes it still seems strange and kind of scarey even to me.
Its probably inertia that has resulted in dselect remaining unchanged for so many years. Some kind of user-friendly new GUI version would be so welcome for Debian, and would just make reviewers rave. So what if you have 10000 packages -- doesn't do much good if you can't find the one you are looking for. Thats why I use dselect because by hitting the "/" key you can search through the available package names. A big improvement would be a glimpse style text search function to search all the text fields related to a particular package.
Ok I'll make it happen. Watch this. Everytime I decide to make a program for Debian, somebody always beats me to it.
I'm going to write a Python / Tkinter front-end for dselect with nice buttonbars, better search capabilities, and use little scrollable textareas to read descriptions.
There, that should do it. Piece of cake. And now for my next magical trick...
Desktop setup for sure on a laptop. They just aren't made to run 24/7 due to heat and battery issues. If you want to use one as a server to save on electrical bills then something like a Netwinder is a lot better suited to being a server. I have an old ARM based 'Winder and it has been running my website since around July nonstop with no noticable impact on my electric bill. I might have rebooted it a half dozen times since then.
I'd think a Linux laptop should have ftp, telnet, maybe Apache for browsing local docs, but not much else. You want to be able to take it to work and network to your desktop but not necessarily with the office network. If you office is running Linux then it should be pretty secure anyways, but if it is running "Client for Microsoft Networks" then I wouldn't connect it because the first time the network crashes the IT department will point the finger at you and claim that your "unauthorized" machine is making the network crash out of Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.
I agree, the laptop world has some absolutely horrible sound and video chipsets. They are usually pretty buggy and ship with buggy windows drivers preinstalled. If you accidentally fry your disk and have to reinstall you better hope you have those driver disks. My friend has an older laptop with CS4236 sound and some crap Cirrus Logic video chipset. The sound is just barely working with a 2.4.18 kernel and the video is now obsoleted in XF86-4 so he has to run an X 3.3.6 XServer. It works, but I had a heck of a time getting it going.
I've done a few Linux laptop installs with Debian and setting up the XServer can be a nightmare, I know more about XF86Config modelines than I care to think about. Usually with the laptops its just trial and error.
If you get a laptop that comes with any kind of Linux installed then you get a working XF86Config-4, and a kernel which supports all the hardware, including having good drivers for the Cardbus slots and all that.
I'll reiterate, most laptops have buggy chipsets and pretty crappy windows drivers. Don't necessarily expect them to work well with Linux, you're lucky to get ~75% functionality unless you carefully research the laptop beforehand. One that comes with Linux preinstalled ought to be pretty sweet with about any distro.
Whew... what a rant. Whatever got into me?
We could sure use some new fonts. Three cheers for Bitstream! Remember the horrors of trying to get True-Type fonts to work with Star Office 5? If you never had the experience I assure you that it was truly horrendous. Yaay!
I have a Thawte cert. They are free but don't include your real name, more like this:
You can get your name into your cert if you can find a Thawte "Web of Trust" Notary. You present your ID's, maybe pay a small fee, and you get notarized and can have your name in your cert.
The freebie certs work well enough for encrypted email anyways, the only annoying thing is that MSIE won't recognize Mozilla style certs, still, I have an Outlook cert for work and enables me to clearsign a message which gives it a distinctive looking red prize ribbon icon that nobody else has figured out how to get (going on two years now :-)
Note that these are only for email. You cannot use one of these certs for your SSL encrypted Apache server, for instance. I am not currently aware of a do-it-yourself SSL cert, but I'm sure such a thing exists. Unfortunately it will give a security alert as being from an untrusted source.
Hmmm... I'm suprised that somebody hasn't tried to use OSKit to build an Emacs kernel. Think of it... Hurd could replace GNUMach with Emacs! Wow!
GNU/Hurd/Emacs - Press [Meta][Bucky][Cokebottle]X to enter kernel debugger mode.
I use Cygwin all the time at work because I don't have the option of installing Linux. It is pretty dang convenient for a lot of things, especially little bash 1-liners for doing bulk file renaming and such. Consider:
$ for i in *.ps; do ps2pdf.bat $i; done
$ for i in *.pdf; do mv $i form_${i%.pdf}-031015.pdf; done
If you have a hundred or so files which you want to rename or prepend things or change the suffix, for instance, it is a slick way to do it rather than clicking away for hours.
Likewise, you can use awk to do some pretty nifty tricks with large text files.
And finally, I don't rate to get a copy of Visual Studio, so if I want to write a little program for some reason then Cygwin's g++ is my only option, or the GNAT Ada95 compiler in GNUWin (I have it installed as well). These GNUWinII programs are more GUI-style programs which really Cygwin is mainly command-line based. I can't get by without Gimp and I have been using the GNUWin version for a couple years at work now.
Nah. Just eject the 256MB SD Card or the IBM MicroDrive. Why would you spend big $$$ on one of these toys and not get a couple flash cards? Heck, thats their best feature.
Hehe... surely some genious will soon figure out how to use USB hubs to make a USB Zaurus Beowulf. Hmm... a battery powered supercomputer? Well, actually StrongARM processors are a bit light on the floating point area. It would probably take a hundred Zaurus's to equal one AMD Hammer, but they would fly if they did integer calcs...
I am a happy owner of a Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 and I have to say that its display is wonderful. It really is true that it looks great in bright sunlight. Actually the brighter the better. This is the first LCD screen I have ever owned that has this quality, and it is a really nice feature. Otherwise, its QVGA display also looks very nice with the backlight on indoors. Sharp PDA's are excellent geek-toys. My PDA runs a FTP server and I can telnet to it... does yours? ;-P
Yeah. I have an IBM P200 (20") which I essentially got for free doing a bit of Ebay wheeling and dealing with RS/6000 boxes. It will be a while before 20" LCD's are free. Also it is so heavy I loathe to carry it out to my truck to throw it away. Need a freight dolly. Now that I think about it, I did pay some shipping on it so it wasn't exactly free. Still, Ryan's Serious Sam BETA for Linux looks fan-fscking-tastic! Yessir, I like it!
Yep. I've seen it. Draw a big bracket over a horrific set of terms and set it equal to "star", then similarly group other items and set them to convenient things. Do some algebra on it, and finally plug the original values back in. Pretty nifty trick.
And right now, any new binaries which I need to write, I do them in Ada95. If D is somehow better than Ada then I will start using it when possible. Obviously if you are doing something which relies on c++ libs then just stick with that, but if you have the luxury of a new project, then hey what the heck use the new D compiler. Why not, anyways.
To think that the people that brought you the Cray Supercomputer have been tinkering with the Linux kernel just makes me shudder with delight. Truly things are really getting better all the time! And these are not just minor modifications to the kernel either, making it run on SGI quality systems with scalability over hundreds of processors is incredulous! This is probably the most exciting Slashdot story I've seen in a long time.