Actually there is a Debian/OpenBSD port in the works as well as Hurd. I'm thinking about trying it out one of these days. I already have Hurd running experimentally.
Its almost impossible to elect sensible politicians. Over half the voting population are senior citizens, about half of the rest are doofus's. That leaves about 25% intelligent informed voters. No way we can win unless it just perchance happens that the sensible candidate appeals to the seniors and doofus's as well. Unfortunately this is an oxymoron.
Their whole system is horrible IMHO. When you use GNU gcc and friends you can just about pull any old book about C or C++ off the shelf and write a program that works like you would expect it to.
Even after paying the big bucks for Visual Studio, you have to wade through a big freakin stack of Microsoft manuals about the Windows API (which is horrible to work with) and basically all you can ever hope to do is turn an elegant 100 line program into a 1000 line windowed app which probably looks like crap and is less useful than the command line version would be.
Of course the command line is obsolescent in Windows, instead you have to click a button a thousand times with your mouse to do anything because nobody can type anymore. Shit they should stop selling keyboards with PC's equipped with Windows because you can't hardly ever use the thing.
This is my favorite scheme... a large number of antenna are arranged and connected to L-C oscillator circuits which are set at harmonic resonation frequencies. The thing gains energy from background static radio waves, building up enough charge to periodically produce a spark. Its not free energy by any "physics" definition, but its free as in beer.
Unfortunately any resistance in the system really causes problems. And the resulting power output would be almost insignificant. Try simulating it with PSpice for some fun!
We were helping a buddy clean up his garage and he came across a small toolbox. He opened it up and pulled out some small gizmo with an electric plug and a handle and a little round head. He said "What is this?" To which I replied "Fuck if I know." Then he pulled out this weird crescent shaped knife with a T-shaped handle and said "how about this?" I said "Some kind of knife?"
That whole thing still gives me nightmares. Was our buddy a maniac? Were they cops? What the hell was that weird shit doing in his garage?
This is what I'm thinking. Every kid who wants a computer of their own will beg for one of these units! Until now I have been trying to keep a MacII system running for my step-daughter (10 years old). I could grab up one of these puppies, run a ether cable up to it, and plug her right into my lan. Since I already run Linux on my boxen here it would be a nice easy addition.
These console games are rugged and are designed to take the beating that kids can dish out. And at 392 bogoMIPS that is more than my wife's celeron-266! Think of the savings I'll have by loading that thing up with Linux games rather than having to buy every single stinking piece of software at console game prices!
Now we not only have to contend with their infuriatingly buggy and hideously bloated software, but now these frelling x-boxes have arrived to supply the world with game consoles which can run their shoddy wares.
Well I hope these things don't crash at inoppourtune times like their PC games are renowned for doing. I can't even fathom how many times a windows game crashed on me right before or as I was saving it.
Maybe since they have the line on the hardware they can get a reliable machine working. I sure hope so, they can use some help.
The #1 reason why I ever started using linux was because of games constantly crashing on pc's and little or no support forthcoming. Not that linux doesn't crash occasionally, but at least I can fool myself into thinking I'll go into the source code and fix it myself if I have to.
Now with a good food source of red ants, the cane toad population will skyrocket!
Australia always seems to have problems with alien species. If this is typical, there will soon be fire ant mounds the size of houses, and they will cover the ground in square mile swarms. Then billions of cane toads will zoom in and eat them, then, uh, there will be billions of really fat cane toads hopping around.
MI$ is intimidated by Open Source, thats why...
on
Opposing Open Source?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
They are behind the times, don't even understand how to configure Windows servers, and we expect them to compile and install experimental software on the bleeding edge of development and make it stable for corporate usage?
If you were running a telnet based Point-of-Sale system, then Open Source might rule, but for typical corporate computer work it would be far to difficult to install and train employees to use open source solutions. Remember that in the Universities, typically only compsci, engineering, and science students every really get to play around with workstations. Your typical business person just learned to use computers on the job.
Not to mention a lot of companies had unix(tm) systems running before they got pc's, and they were considered to be expensive, mysterious, and associated with dumb terminal POS-type systems written in unix(tm); unibasic(tm) sphagetti code.
The novice X11 user needs a very restricted shell, almost a chroot to home; however, the pro requires group access and a variety of permissions. I think that most MI$ personnel consider the ramifications of 1000's of users on unix(tm) style systems to be a management disaster, and so they quickly opt out for the more expensive yet easier commercial solution.
Business often has to pay for a quicker solution when they know they could do it themselves just because their time is better served elsewhere. In this respect a lot of Open Source solutions lose because of the time required to tailor the solution to the problem at hand.
At home I use Debian exclusively on a SMP system and it is all I could ask for in a PC, but at work it will be many years before the average employee could walk up to a Debian box and know what to do or expect.
I think that if you are smart enough to figure out how to install and use open source software, then you are perhaps foolish not to do so.
I have a HP 9000 715/80 with PA7100LC cpu. It can boot hppa Debian, has ethernet connectivity, and has its console on a dumb terminal. It is pretty cool, and from what I have read, I believe it has something like 24 general purpose registers, which is quite a lot for a typical cpu. This one is an older 32 bit cpu, but thats still seems like a lot of registers to work with for high performance code and such.
HP workstations certainly seem to be very solid and nifty and they have a lot of potential for linux boxes. Assembly programmers will appreciate all of the registers that are available.
I have been researching the construction of PCI daughtercards, which are essentially Single Board Computers, but designed to be peripherals somehow controllable over the PCI bus.
As a kind of example, suppose the card was assigned a frame buffer address of memory, and reprogrammed to implement OpenGL transformations. Or perhaps load it up with Distributed Net, or a Quake server, or whatever.
Maybe, say, take a PCI ethercard, and modify it, adding a Crusoe processor, ramdisk, couple external connectors. Then the card acts like an ethercard which is connected directly to the embedded system. What I can't find is any documentation about how to interface the chip withought signing up as a Transmeta Developer Associate Member from an Approved Business Partner:-)
NEW! FEATURED Add your own mini-linux server, req'd: 1 PCI slot... NR
At least I got it to read a CF card and got a USB CF reader that works with linux. It's pictures really are not very good, but it was pretty cheap anyways. At least I don't have to rely on PhotoMAX software anymore since I just pop out the flash card, put it in the reader, and mount it as a scsi drive.
I wonder if it will someday become a valuable collectible? The camera that brought down a corporate giant! Own the legend!
And overall, they seem to be much superior to the typical mp3 that one might download on the net. It was easy for me to compile and install the tools from Xiph and they seem to be of very good quality.
Now the tools are available in a Debian Package so I don't need to build them from the source anymore.
If you just want to rip some tracks for your home system, ogg is particularly nice on linux systems. The sound quality is excellent and the tools are relatively easy to use. Combine these with CD Paranoia and it is easy to make great backups of your cd music. I figure that the ogg vorbis developers have worked very hard for a long time on the project and they deserve for people to use and enjoy the fruits of their labors:-)
For Linux, I have: Quake 1,2,3, Soldier of Fortune, Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Terminus, Myth 2, Heavy Gear 2, and numerous Quake expansion packs and add-on's such as Team Fortress for Quake.
My linux system works so good now I am considering wiping that worthless waste of disk space and crappy games into the bit bucket forever. Last time I booted Windoze, it couldn't handle my usb mouse and so I plugged in the ps2 mouse. This changed my IRQ's and caused my ethernet card to go down. It took me over four hours of rebooting to get everything straightened out and after that hassle I haven't screwed with it since.
Surf over to EB Games and do a search for linux they have a whole page of brand new full Loki titles for $9.95.
Traditionally, the unix kernel is named unix or unix.00. Replacing a kernel does not replace the OS.
The kernel itself is nearly worthless, all it does is boot and provide system calls, etc. The whole slew of other programs and utilities are what makes the OS. If UNIX utility source code is released it will just get sucked into GNU as the GNU tools are way better than old UNIX ones for the most part. The GNU replacements typically have like 500% more functionality than classic ones and have only slightly lesser performance in some cases. Anyone who really cares if UNIX grep is 3% faster that GNU probably doesn't consider price to be a factor anyways. Personally, I use grep maybe once a month or so, big deal.
Having used both old SCO and Linux, I would have to say that Linux is far superior. SCO had its bugs too, but everyone was so scared because it was so expensive that "exposing a bug" was more like "you aren't supposed to be using this, come over to my office, etc."
Linux, however is more understood and it is acceptable to do things like ~reboot~ and stuff that would usually crash a SCO box.
When EBGames had all those Linux games on sale I bought SOF, Heroes3, MythII, Heavy Gear 2, and already had all the linux Quake 123 plus expansion packs. I'm still planning on getting Tribes2 one of these days, and Alpha Centauri is tempting too.
I think the last win~0 game I got was Serious Sam, and that was a long time ago. Nowadays I boot Hurd a lot more often than I boot win~0.
I'm considering phasing out my micros~1 compatibility completely other than making a small FreeDOS boot partition and using the Wine emulator to play Half Life. ( It actually works in OpenGL mode, but the menus are kinda weird ).
Ok, we take a good quality keyboard and do it up c-64 style, add a usb hub, catv-out, vga port, ethernet hub, compact flash slots, and possibly a firewire port. Add some kind of wild Crusoe type processor running in native mode, and allow for an external dc power source, and it would be a cyberdeck just like from ShadowRun!
Just take the thing anywhere, insert a special compact flash card with game, and plug it in! Instant server! Slap in the Lintendo card, hook up to your tv, and attach the usb joystick - instant game console. Take it to work, plug into ethernet, attach firewire drive, connect to monitor and usb devices, and it is an instant X11 workstation!
What a flexible gizmo this would be. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of them...
Lets hope that whatever schools have this rule do not run any non-gnu software. Otherwise if your computer crashed, it could crash the network, and you could be arrested for disrupting the system!
Luckily ~Linux~ seldom crashes, so this really would not be a problem. Use ~Linux~ and avoid breaking stupid laws... Thimk about it.
A very nifty type of bacteria is called a cyanobacteria. It is interesting in that it can use a photosynthetic like process to break down diatomic nitrogen gas into useful nitrate compounds.
For example, soybeans have a symbiotic bacteria which forms nodules on their roots. Because of this, planting soybeans causes the soil to become fertilized if the farmer plows under a field of green soybeans.
Now, if someone could bioengineer a vat of slime which would suck in air and make nitrates, we would have some serious energy to be reconed with. Anybody who has ever studied nitrogen chemistry should be familiar with some of its more popular variants; i.e. nitroglycerine, tetra-nitro-tolulene, hydrazine, etc. You can pack a $h!tload of energy into a beaker of nitro chemicals.
Unfortunately, as soon as the big companies figure this out, they will make this slime, and it will suck all the nitrogen out of our atmosphere, and we will die as our planet turns into a mars-like environment. Nothing will stop it. As long as they can make money from air they will suffocate with a fistfull of cash.
Or rather, imagine what happens when some of this bacteria accidentally gets dumped into the ocean...
Yeah, I have a few spare PCI slots. Wonder if
you could plug them into a PC? Why then I'd
simply hack Hurd's GnuMach microkernel to take
advantage of them, and my new.NOT server would
easily take over the world! Muahahah...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually there is a Debian/OpenBSD port in the works as well as Hurd. I'm thinking about trying it out one of these days. I already have Hurd running experimentally.
Its almost impossible to elect sensible politicians. Over half the voting population are senior citizens, about half of the rest are doofus's. That leaves about 25% intelligent informed voters. No way we can win unless it just perchance happens that the sensible candidate appeals to the seniors and doofus's as well. Unfortunately this is an oxymoron.
I feel sorry for poor Mandrake, but I am not about to join, and don't want or need another version of Linux.
Maybe if they would accept PayPal donations I'd send them a fiver, but thats it man.
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Their whole system is horrible IMHO. When you use GNU gcc and friends you can just about pull any old book about C or C++ off the shelf and write a program that works like you would expect it to.
Even after paying the big bucks for Visual Studio, you have to wade through a big freakin stack of Microsoft manuals about the Windows API (which is horrible to work with) and basically all you can ever hope to do is turn an elegant 100 line program into a 1000 line windowed app which probably looks like crap and is less useful than the command line version would be.
Of course the command line is obsolescent in Windows, instead you have to click a button a thousand times with your mouse to do anything because nobody can type anymore. Shit they should stop selling keyboards with PC's equipped with Windows because you can't hardly ever use the thing.
This is my favorite scheme... a large number of antenna are arranged and connected to L-C oscillator circuits which are set at harmonic resonation frequencies. The thing gains energy from background static radio waves, building up enough charge to periodically produce a spark. Its not free energy by any "physics" definition, but its free as in beer.
Unfortunately any resistance in the system really causes problems. And the resulting power output would be almost insignificant. Try simulating it with PSpice for some fun!
We were helping a buddy clean up his garage and he came across a small toolbox. He opened it up and pulled out some small gizmo with an electric plug and a handle and a little round head. He said "What is this?" To which I replied "Fuck if I know." Then he pulled out this weird crescent shaped knife with a T-shaped handle and said "how about this?" I said "Some kind of knife?"
That whole thing still gives me nightmares. Was our buddy a maniac? Were they cops? What the hell was that weird shit doing in his garage?
Oh well.
Forget it. Never mind. No way is this thing worth $475. Ok, I get a new Dual AthalonMP, wife gets the Dual PII, kid gets the Celeron-266
These console games are rugged and are designed to take the beating that kids can dish out. And at 392 bogoMIPS that is more than my wife's celeron-266! Think of the savings I'll have by loading that thing up with Linux games rather than having to buy every single stinking piece of software at console game prices!
Yeah, thats the ticket!
Yeah, I ordered mine! Gimme gimme!
I must be like the Linux games king! I gottem all!
Now we not only have to contend with their infuriatingly buggy and hideously bloated software, but now these frelling x-boxes have arrived to supply the world with game consoles which can run their shoddy wares.
Well I hope these things don't crash at inoppourtune times like their PC games are renowned for doing. I can't even fathom how many times a windows game crashed on me right before or as I was saving it.
Maybe since they have the line on the hardware they can get a reliable machine working. I sure hope so, they can use some help.
The #1 reason why I ever started using linux was because of games constantly crashing on pc's and little or no support forthcoming. Not that linux doesn't crash occasionally, but at least I can fool myself into thinking I'll go into the source code and fix it myself if I have to.
Who's gonna issue patches for x-box games? Nobody
Australia always seems to have problems with alien species. If this is typical, there will soon be fire ant mounds the size of houses, and they will cover the ground in square mile swarms. Then billions of cane toads will zoom in and eat them, then, uh, there will be billions of really fat cane toads hopping around.
If you were running a telnet based Point-of-Sale system, then Open Source might rule, but for typical corporate computer work it would be far to difficult to install and train employees to use open source solutions. Remember that in the Universities, typically only compsci, engineering, and science students every really get to play around with workstations. Your typical business person just learned to use computers on the job.
Not to mention a lot of companies had unix(tm) systems running before they got pc's, and they were considered to be expensive, mysterious, and associated with dumb terminal POS-type systems written in unix(tm); unibasic(tm) sphagetti code.
The novice X11 user needs a very restricted shell, almost a chroot to home; however, the pro requires group access and a variety of permissions. I think that most MI$ personnel consider the ramifications of 1000's of users on unix(tm) style systems to be a management disaster, and so they quickly opt out for the more expensive yet easier commercial solution.
Business often has to pay for a quicker solution when they know they could do it themselves just because their time is better served elsewhere. In this respect a lot of Open Source solutions lose because of the time required to tailor the solution to the problem at hand.
At home I use Debian exclusively on a SMP system and it is all I could ask for in a PC, but at work it will be many years before the average employee could walk up to a Debian box and know what to do or expect.
I think that if you are smart enough to figure out how to install and use open source software, then you are perhaps foolish not to do so.
HP workstations certainly seem to be very solid and nifty and they have a lot of potential for linux boxes. Assembly programmers will appreciate all of the registers that are available.
As a kind of example, suppose the card was assigned a frame buffer address of memory, and reprogrammed to implement OpenGL transformations. Or perhaps load it up with Distributed Net, or a Quake server, or whatever.
Maybe, say, take a PCI ethercard, and modify it, adding a Crusoe processor, ramdisk, couple external connectors. Then the card acts like an ethercard which is connected directly to the embedded system. What I can't find is any documentation about how to interface the chip withought signing up as a Transmeta Developer Associate Member from an Approved Business Partner :-)
NEW! FEATURED Add your own mini-linux server, req'd: 1 PCI slot... NR
I wonder if it will someday become a valuable collectible? The camera that brought down a corporate giant! Own the legend!
Now the tools are available in a Debian Package so I don't need to build them from the source anymore.
If you just want to rip some tracks for your home system, ogg is particularly nice on linux systems. The sound quality is excellent and the tools are relatively easy to use. Combine these with CD Paranoia and it is easy to make great backups of your cd music. I figure that the ogg vorbis developers have worked very hard for a long time on the project and they deserve for people to use and enjoy the fruits of their labors :-)
Just load up crystal space. You can easily make
simple levels and it supports walking around,
looking, etc.
Check it out here
My linux system works so good now I am considering wiping that worthless waste of disk space and crappy games into the bit bucket forever. Last time I booted Windoze, it couldn't handle my usb mouse and so I plugged in the ps2 mouse. This changed my IRQ's and caused my ethernet card to go down. It took me over four hours of rebooting to get everything straightened out and after that hassle I haven't screwed with it since.
Surf over to EB Games and do a search for linux they have a whole page of brand new full Loki titles for $9.95.
Windows is frelling worthless. Never again!
The kernel itself is nearly worthless, all it does is boot and provide system calls, etc. The whole slew of other programs and utilities are what makes the OS. If UNIX utility source code is released it will just get sucked into GNU as the GNU tools are way better than old UNIX ones for the most part. The GNU replacements typically have like 500% more functionality than classic ones and have only slightly lesser performance in some cases. Anyone who really cares if UNIX grep is 3% faster that GNU probably doesn't consider price to be a factor anyways. Personally, I use grep maybe once a month or so, big deal.
Having used both old SCO and Linux, I would have to say that Linux is far superior. SCO had its bugs too, but everyone was so scared because it was so expensive that "exposing a bug" was more like "you aren't supposed to be using this, come over to my office, etc."
Linux, however is more understood and it is acceptable to do things like ~reboot~ and stuff that would usually crash a SCO box.
I think the last win~0 game I got was Serious Sam, and that was a long time ago. Nowadays I boot Hurd a lot more often than I boot win~0.
I'm considering phasing out my micros~1 compatibility completely other than making a small FreeDOS boot partition and using the Wine emulator to play Half Life. ( It actually works in OpenGL mode, but the menus are kinda weird ).
Just take the thing anywhere, insert a special compact flash card with game, and plug it in! Instant server! Slap in the Lintendo card, hook up to your tv, and attach the usb joystick - instant game console. Take it to work, plug into ethernet, attach firewire drive, connect to monitor and usb devices, and it is an instant X11 workstation!
What a flexible gizmo this would be. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of them...
Lets hope that whatever schools have this rule do not run any non-gnu software. Otherwise if your computer crashed, it could crash the network, and you could be arrested for disrupting the system!
Luckily ~Linux~ seldom crashes, so this really would not be a problem. Use ~Linux~ and avoid breaking stupid laws... Thimk about it.
A very nifty type of bacteria is called a cyanobacteria. It is interesting in that it can use a photosynthetic like process to break down diatomic nitrogen gas into useful nitrate compounds.
For example, soybeans have a symbiotic bacteria which forms nodules on their roots. Because of this, planting soybeans causes the soil to become fertilized if the farmer plows under a field of green soybeans.
Now, if someone could bioengineer a vat of slime which would suck in air and make nitrates, we would have some serious energy to be reconed with. Anybody who has ever studied nitrogen chemistry should be familiar with some of its more popular variants; i.e. nitroglycerine, tetra-nitro-tolulene, hydrazine, etc. You can pack a $h!tload of energy into a beaker of nitro chemicals.
Unfortunately, as soon as the big companies figure this out, they will make this slime, and it will suck all the nitrogen out of our atmosphere, and we will die as our planet turns into a mars-like environment. Nothing will stop it. As long as they can make money from air they will suffocate with a fistfull of cash.
Or rather, imagine what happens when some of this bacteria accidentally gets dumped into the ocean...
Yeah, I have a few spare PCI slots. Wonder if you could plug them into a PC? Why then I'd simply hack Hurd's GnuMach microkernel to take advantage of them, and my new .NOT server would
easily take over the world! Muahahah...