Yeah, I know yast has only been available as open-source for the last week or so. I guess I really don't care if all the hand-holding of a GUI is present, I just want to be able to boot up a CD, partition and format my drive and then load the software. Even the do-it-yourself approach of Gentoo would work for me. Just make it possible for me to setup my disk(s) properly and then run the installer to fill up the space. That's really all I want. Right now, Debian doesn't seem to want me to do that.:/
I've been trying to get Debian on a box for the last couple of days and have been having a heck of a time. Gee, I want to use XFS - so, I snag an XFS enabled installer. Oops, I also want to use LVM. Hmm, there are installers for that too, but none that support both. Well, I did find one but it doesn't support USB devices (like my keyboard). C'mon guys, use anaconda or yast or something. It's all open source.
Amusing terminology
on
NASA Tests X-43A
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I had to laugh out-loud when one of the NASA folks (S2?) referred to the B52 as a BUFF. (Air Force jargon: Big Ugly Fat Fscker...)
I'd imagine that they think folks are screwing off on company time and are trying to crack down on people doing personal business during work hours. If you need to get alerts and whatnot from apps or machines, then your employer needs to provide you with a device to receive them.
I guess I'm not convinced that adding the Debian layer between the package authors and the users is all that useful. A package, to me, is simply a binary version of the source provided by the package's author(s). Sure it's configured to find things in the right place for the particular distro but actual behavior changes? If I use Firefox on Solaris, I would expect it to behave in a similar fashion to the FreeBSD or RedHat versions.
I guess that's my view of the ideal and it doesn't map to the reality of current distribution practice.
Having read the emails in the archive, I think I side with the Mozilla folks on this one. For exactly the same reason that you mention. If the Firefox packaged in Debian has been patched from the standard distro, then there it should not be called Firefox. After all, the Debian changes could introduce side-effects that would yield a different set of bugs and would be a nightmare to keep track of in Mozilla's Bugzilla. "Oh, you're using Debian Carrot release APTed up at 12:31 PDT from the Lower Slowblovia mirror site. Which happens to use the Zimgar patchset. Of *COURSE* it tries to remove your home directory. That's a part of its privacy feature-set." It'll be hard enough to keep track of all the bugs in the underlying libraries (this zlib has that bug while another version fixed it but broke something else).
To drift off-topic a bit, I believe this is precisely the morass that Sun wants to avoid with Java. They don't want to have to deal with IBM's build of Java having certain scalability adjustments that trigger odd bugs when using large numbers of threads. Or having WebGain's Java break mysteriously with particular steppings of Pentiums.
Bug fixes are good but we need to provide them to the authors of the program and see if they'll churn out official patches or something. That way, you can point at a program and say "I'm using exactly *THIS* version." Not "I'm using this version, but maybe when I did my last emerge against the core repository, some whitespace patch snuck in and fubared my ld.so config and that misplaced a shared lib that login needs to operate."
It's idiotic. I've never been much of a fan of any of the BSDs (started first on Linux so it's got the benefit of inertia), but I'm working my way there out of sheer frustration in trying to accomplish useful things with Linux. "Oh, I see. I can't use the boxed version of Postgres to do TLS because the libc and gcc that was used to compile this version has a set of patches that trigger a bug in openssl. Gee."
Guess I forgot to take my anti-cranky meds today but this sort of crap is becoming more and more common.
I'm in the same boat. I've got a couple of old UPSes that the batteries are shot in. I talked with some folks about attaching much larger batteries to the unit. No problem right? Just take a bit longer to charge?
Nuh uh.
I disremember all the mechanics of it, but essentially, the integrated charger in the UPS will be unable to supply enough oomph (voltage? amperage?) to the batteries when charging and will burn itself out trying. Usually a literal burn-out with all the attendant flames and smoke.:(
Now, if there was some way to disable the integrated charger and somehow scab in the guts from a proper charger, then it'd probably be all good. I am not, however, that handy with electronics.
If ReST appeals, then a Wiki might also be appropriate. Wiki engines also have the added benefit of tracking versions and allowing anyone to annotate the material. They've been implemented in nearly every language and can be hosted on just about any combination of backends too.
If you do an 'lspci -v', what does it show for the 3ware card? My card is detected as:
00:0f.0 RAID bus controller: 3ware Inc 3ware 7000-series ATA-RAID (rev 01)
Subsystem: 3ware Inc 3ware 7000-series ATA-RAID
Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 10
I/O ports at dc00 [size=16]
Memory at ed805000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16]
Memory at ed000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8M]
Expansion ROM at [disabled] [size=64K]
Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 1
That isn't entirely correct as the card is really an 8000 series card, but I believe it's accurate for older cards. I'll try popping the old one in a machine and see what it identifies as. One thing that you may want to do if you can ID the card and if you can take the box down for a bit is to upgrade the firmware. I seem to recall that later drivers require later firmwares.
Re:Use IDE-Raid: 3Ware will do the job for you!
on
Hot-Swapping IDE Drives?
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'd be curious about which card you have that is so bad. I've used 3Ware products for a while now and have had zero problems with the cards themselves. RedHat on a 3Ware card has periodically been problematic (early 7.x releases wouldn't boot because RedHat broke the module mapping in their installer - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi? id=26954) Not the fault of the card, but rather the installer. *shrug* I've since replaced that 6200 card with an 8506 (two-port parallel ATA to a four-port serial ATA) and it has continued to work flawlessly.
If you do a search on RedHat's bugzilla on 3Ware https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?s hort_desc_type=allwordssubstr&short_desc=3ware&ord er=Bug+Number+Ascending you'll see that most of the bugs relate to the installer and to their enterprise product. They seem to be testing their consumer-grade stuff with 3Ware more consistently now, but are dropping the ball with their enterprise stuff. A quick search on Google for issues with 3Ware and Debian didn't turn up much so a change in distro might be appropriate (just to spark off the obligatory flame war - hehe, just kidding).
Since 3Ware has been very active in the development of their driver (moreso than ANY other manufacturer) I would be surprised to find any lingering problems that weren't the fault of the distribution.
I cannot speak to Adaptec's SCSI line but their SATA line is not at all Linux friendly. For the time being, they are providing only binary drivers. Want to use FreeBSD? You're totally SOL.
Also, I've been using a pair of WD 1200JB drives on a 3Ware 6200 controller and they've been completely solid since I installed them about a year ago, so I'd be curious where you've seen problems with them.
I heartily second the recommendation for 3Ware controllers.
A couple of years ago I replaced a software mirror with a 3Ware 6200 card doing the mirroring. The card has performed flawlessly since that time although I've upgraded the drives on it a couple of times. (I do wish that there was some way to grow the size of the partition once you've upgraded both drives to a bigger size.)
Despite rock-solid performance, I decided to upgrade to Serial-ATA to clean up some cabling issues in the server (one of the IDE ribbon cables blocks about 1/4 of the fan on the second CPU). I looked at the available hardware-RAID controllers and there seemed to be only a choice between Adaptec and 3Ware. I opted to be a cheapskate and purchase an Adaptec 1210SA. *DON'T* Though they claim Linux support on the box, what they actually mean is that they provide binary drivers for a couple of releases of a couple of distros. Want to use RedHat 9? Sorry, they haven't packaged up a driver yet although there was recently a drop for RedHat 8! *rolls eyes* I fought with it for a couple of days before I broke down and ordered a 3Ware 8506 which has worked perfectly for me (although it was nearly three times the price of the Adaptec).
I guess the bottom line is that you get what you pay for. I wonder why I always end up trying to go cheap and re-learning this lesson...
There is no way to create a "hack-proof" piece of software. If you have an interesting program, people will figure out a way to unlock it. If you make two different versions available (lite and registered) then the warez sites will make the for-pay version available. *shrug* There's not a darn thing you can do. You can make it difficult, but in the end, the energy spent making the product hard to crack would be better spent on making the product better. Not until we have DRM integrated into the hardware of everone's PC will we be able to fix that particular problem.
Absolutely. I have a 6000 series card (2 port) and one of their new low-profile 8506 SATA cards. Leave the consumer grade junk behind and get a well supported product. Linux works flawlessly on them and the Windows support is pretty decent also (they still make NT4 drivers available for the 6000 card).
I tried out an Adaptec 1210SA raid controller since the box claimed Linux compatability. Bull. They support a handful of distros and and even smaller number of patchlevels of kernels with their set of binary drivers. Back in the box and back to the store.
Now, granted, the 3Ware cards are more pricey. However, you get exactly what you pay for.
Amen. I installed a generic NEC chipset firewire card in a RedHat 9 box to use for backups. Next, I connect a pair of Buslogic external 80gb drives. First drive gets detected okay. Second is ignored. Grr.
... aha, there's the second drive. Start dumping data to the drives and leave for lunch.
... [time passes]...
Return from lunch and tap the ctrl key to wake up the console. Nada. Observe that both of the drives lights are constantly on. Swivel over to the Windows 2000 box and try to ping the machine... no response. Grr. Punch reset button. Notice that both drives' activity lights are still pegged. Power-cycle both drives. Disconnect from Linux box and plug into the Windows 2000 box. Share out the drives and mount on Linux with smbmount. Backup completes flawlessly (not to mention that Windows correctly handled attaching both drives and is a lot more sane about removable storage in general).
Firewire support in Linux seems to work okay for pulling video from my little iBot camera, but certainly not for data storage. It's possible that there's a weakness in the bridge chip that Buslogic used and Linux stresses it into breaking, but that's hardly useful behavior.
As far as USB goes, at home I plugged in a USB cable modem, configured it and was pleased when it worked properly out of the box. Then my local power company decided that I needed to reboot my network and all my attached devices (gee, thanks - tho I guess it's my own fault for trying to do work when it's raining outside). Power flickered a few times and then returned. System appeared to come back up properly (no error beeps and the drive access pattern looked reasonable - this particular machine is headless as it is simply an ogg player and NAT router). However, no can pingy machine and nothing is routing. Grr. Drag monitor and keyboard out of the closet and plug in. Poke at the networking stuff. Odd, the cablemodem is now eth0 and the network card is eth1. But, that's not the way it's setup in modules.conf... oh, I get it. The USB subsystem was being helpful. Gee thanks. Eventually, I figured out that if I update my initial ramdisk and force it to load the onboard ethernet driver before control gets passed off to init (and then on to the USB subsystem) the order would remain sane.
And don't get me started about my pair of cute little IBM Spacesaver USB keyboards (complete with integrated Trackpoint mouses - good for my tiny desk). Windows sees them just fine but Linux loses track of all USB related stuff the very instant I plug one of 'em into a Linux box. Very helpful.
Oh, and try to do anything with an NVidia chipset system. Or Adaptec's new Serial-ATA RAID adaptor. Good ol' binary drivers that work with only very specific revs of certain vendors kernels. Too bad that Linus and company think it's a good thing to constantly destabilize code produced by vendors who are interested in protecting their R&D investment. Oh well, I'm just not patient enough anymore.
I'll admit that by book three I was quite tired of being told that organized religion of any sort was evil and inherently destructive. Don't get me wrong, there has been great evil worked by powerful religions, but also great good. It is a fundamental problem with any human organization.
Mr. Pullman (as noted above) was more than a little in his treatment of religion seeming to indicate that the only real path to enlightenment was one of our own devising. *shrug* That's his right to think that, but don't spend 2/3 of a book in an otherwise reasonable series beating me over the head with such things. As a practitioner of organized religion, I am supposed to be sensitive to his viewpoint and celebrate our differences. But why can't he celebrate my differences too?
I host my own web stuff off my DSL line at home, but for mail, it made sense for me to outsource it to a professional outfit. These guys seem to be fairly clued about privacy and security.
It's not cheap ($15 a month) but it beats the alternative. An account with them, coupled with a good DNS provider should work wonders for you. Besides, all they do is email and if it doesn't work, it directly impacts their business. Unlike a lot of the bozos whose primary business is web hosting and email is an extra.
"Now that's a name I've not heard in a long, long time." - O. Kenobi
Man, I'd nearly forgotten about LodeRunner. I bought LodeRunner returns from Sierra, but like a great many of their products, it's been effectively orphaned. That and they messed with the gameplay a bit in that you had to get keys to unlock doors to access certain areas of the map and there were "sticky" spots where your walking speed was halved. The appeal of the original was the simplicity of play and the simplemindedness of the enemies. Man, I burned some hours on it.
I also wasted scads of time on Wizardry (1-3) and several of the Eamon text adventures. Mmmm, might have to bust out the Apple II emulator and rerun some of these classics. Sleep is for mortals!
RedHat has been VERY good about not radically changing their platform between point releases so I'm not surprised to see this incremental filesystem improvement.
I would, however, be surprised to see them skip XFS, JFS or ReiserFS in their 8.0 release. It would make sense for them to add that capability at that time (and would allow the implementations to mature that much more).
SDL existed for quite a while prior to Loki coming into existance. I recall a FAQ item from prior to the website redesign that taked about whether or not Sam's job with Loki would interfere with continued development of SDL.
First off, some terminology. An RDBMS (relational database management system) like Oracle or MSSQL server or DB2 is a substantially different beast than Access or MySQL which are simply RDBs (relational databases). MySQL offers some minor facets of a full-blown database management system but comes NOWHERE close in full-featured transaction systems with full integrity constraints and in-system procedures. PostgreSQL has a larger subset but lacks clustering and extreme scalability.
Now, for the average website, a full-blown RDBMS is overkill in the extreme. That much I'll agree with. (And Oracle in particular has some REALLY annoying features in their JDBC driver like only being able to deal with 4000 characters at a time in an insert [without resorting to tricks and hacks reaching around the standard JDBC layer] - whereas MySQL can handle much larger chunks of data.)
So, for websites that are web-centric and not dealing with internal systems, MySQL or PostgreSQL are probably fine.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I know yast has only been available as open-source for the last week or so. I guess I really don't care if all the hand-holding of a GUI is present, I just want to be able to boot up a CD, partition and format my drive and then load the software. Even the do-it-yourself approach of Gentoo would work for me. Just make it possible for me to setup my disk(s) properly and then run the installer to fill up the space. That's really all I want. Right now, Debian doesn't seem to want me to do that. :/
Amen!
I've been trying to get Debian on a box for the last couple of days and have been having a heck of a time. Gee, I want to use XFS - so, I snag an XFS enabled installer. Oops, I also want to use LVM. Hmm, there are installers for that too, but none that support both. Well, I did find one but it doesn't support USB devices (like my keyboard). C'mon guys, use anaconda or yast or something. It's all open source.
I had to laugh out-loud when one of the NASA folks (S2?) referred to the B52 as a BUFF. (Air Force jargon: Big Ugly Fat Fscker ...)
Still chuckling a bit. =)
I'd imagine that they think folks are screwing off on company time and are trying to crack down on people doing personal business during work hours. If you need to get alerts and whatnot from apps or machines, then your employer needs to provide you with a device to receive them.
I guess I'm not convinced that adding the Debian layer between the package authors and the users is all that useful. A package, to me, is simply a binary version of the source provided by the package's author(s). Sure it's configured to find things in the right place for the particular distro but actual behavior changes? If I use Firefox on Solaris, I would expect it to behave in a similar fashion to the FreeBSD or RedHat versions.
I guess that's my view of the ideal and it doesn't map to the reality of current distribution practice.
This is true. However, if all distros were compliant with the filesystem hierarchy standard then patches of that nature wouldn't be needed.
Having read the emails in the archive, I think I side with the Mozilla folks on this one. For exactly the same reason that you mention. If the Firefox packaged in Debian has been patched from the standard distro, then there it should not be called Firefox. After all, the Debian changes could introduce side-effects that would yield a different set of bugs and would be a nightmare to keep track of in Mozilla's Bugzilla. "Oh, you're using Debian Carrot release APTed up at 12:31 PDT from the Lower Slowblovia mirror site. Which happens to use the Zimgar patchset. Of *COURSE* it tries to remove your home directory. That's a part of its privacy feature-set." It'll be hard enough to keep track of all the bugs in the underlying libraries (this zlib has that bug while another version fixed it but broke something else).
To drift off-topic a bit, I believe this is precisely the morass that Sun wants to avoid with Java. They don't want to have to deal with IBM's build of Java having certain scalability adjustments that trigger odd bugs when using large numbers of threads. Or having WebGain's Java break mysteriously with particular steppings of Pentiums.
Bug fixes are good but we need to provide them to the authors of the program and see if they'll churn out official patches or something. That way, you can point at a program and say "I'm using exactly *THIS* version." Not "I'm using this version, but maybe when I did my last emerge against the core repository, some whitespace patch snuck in and fubared my ld.so config and that misplaced a shared lib that login needs to operate."
It's idiotic. I've never been much of a fan of any of the BSDs (started first on Linux so it's got the benefit of inertia), but I'm working my way there out of sheer frustration in trying to accomplish useful things with Linux. "Oh, I see. I can't use the boxed version of Postgres to do TLS because the libc and gcc that was used to compile this version has a set of patches that trigger a bug in openssl. Gee."
Guess I forgot to take my anti-cranky meds today but this sort of crap is becoming more and more common.
I'm in the same boat. I've got a couple of old UPSes that the batteries are shot in. I talked with some folks about attaching much larger batteries to the unit. No problem right? Just take a bit longer to charge?
:(
Nuh uh.
I disremember all the mechanics of it, but essentially, the integrated charger in the UPS will be unable to supply enough oomph (voltage? amperage?) to the batteries when charging and will burn itself out trying. Usually a literal burn-out with all the attendant flames and smoke.
Now, if there was some way to disable the integrated charger and somehow scab in the guts from a proper charger, then it'd probably be all good. I am not, however, that handy with electronics.
If ReST appeals, then a Wiki might also be appropriate. Wiki engines also have the added benefit of tracking versions and allowing anyone to annotate the material. They've been implemented in nearly every language and can be hosted on just about any combination of backends too.
Just something to consider.
If you do an 'lspci -v', what does it show for the 3ware card? My card is detected as:
00:0f.0 RAID bus controller: 3ware Inc 3ware 7000-series ATA-RAID (rev 01)
Subsystem: 3ware Inc 3ware 7000-series ATA-RAID
Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 10
I/O ports at dc00 [size=16]
Memory at ed805000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16]
Memory at ed000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8M]
Expansion ROM at [disabled] [size=64K]
Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 1
That isn't entirely correct as the card is really an 8000 series card, but I believe it's accurate for older cards. I'll try popping the old one in a machine and see what it identifies as. One thing that you may want to do if you can ID the card and if you can take the box down for a bit is to upgrade the firmware. I seem to recall that later drivers require later firmwares.
I'd be curious about which card you have that is so bad. I've used 3Ware products for a while now and have had zero problems with the cards themselves. RedHat on a 3Ware card has periodically been problematic (early 7.x releases wouldn't boot because RedHat broke the module mapping in their installer - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi? id=26954) Not the fault of the card, but rather the installer. *shrug* I've since replaced that 6200 card with an 8506 (two-port parallel ATA to a four-port serial ATA) and it has continued to work flawlessly.
s hort_desc_type=allwordssubstr&short_desc=3ware&ord er=Bug+Number+Ascending you'll see that most of the bugs relate to the installer and to their enterprise product. They seem to be testing their consumer-grade stuff with 3Ware more consistently now, but are dropping the ball with their enterprise stuff. A quick search on Google for issues with 3Ware and Debian didn't turn up much so a change in distro might be appropriate (just to spark off the obligatory flame war - hehe, just kidding).
If you do a search on RedHat's bugzilla on 3Ware https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?
Since 3Ware has been very active in the development of their driver (moreso than ANY other manufacturer) I would be surprised to find any lingering problems that weren't the fault of the distribution.
I cannot speak to Adaptec's SCSI line but their SATA line is not at all Linux friendly. For the time being, they are providing only binary drivers. Want to use FreeBSD? You're totally SOL.
Also, I've been using a pair of WD 1200JB drives on a 3Ware 6200 controller and they've been completely solid since I installed them about a year ago, so I'd be curious where you've seen problems with them.
I heartily second the recommendation for 3Ware controllers.
...
A couple of years ago I replaced a software mirror with a 3Ware 6200 card doing the mirroring. The card has performed flawlessly since that time although I've upgraded the drives on it a couple of times. (I do wish that there was some way to grow the size of the partition once you've upgraded both drives to a bigger size.)
Despite rock-solid performance, I decided to upgrade to Serial-ATA to clean up some cabling issues in the server (one of the IDE ribbon cables blocks about 1/4 of the fan on the second CPU). I looked at the available hardware-RAID controllers and there seemed to be only a choice between Adaptec and 3Ware. I opted to be a cheapskate and purchase an Adaptec 1210SA. *DON'T* Though they claim Linux support on the box, what they actually mean is that they provide binary drivers for a couple of releases of a couple of distros. Want to use RedHat 9? Sorry, they haven't packaged up a driver yet although there was recently a drop for RedHat 8! *rolls eyes* I fought with it for a couple of days before I broke down and ordered a 3Ware 8506 which has worked perfectly for me (although it was nearly three times the price of the Adaptec).
I guess the bottom line is that you get what you pay for. I wonder why I always end up trying to go cheap and re-learning this lesson
This company makes several models targetted at routers/firewalls: Soekris Engineering
There is no way to create a "hack-proof" piece of software. If you have an interesting program, people will figure out a way to unlock it. If you make two different versions available (lite and registered) then the warez sites will make the for-pay version available. *shrug* There's not a darn thing you can do. You can make it difficult, but in the end, the energy spent making the product hard to crack would be better spent on making the product better. Not until we have DRM integrated into the hardware of everone's PC will we be able to fix that particular problem.
Absolutely. I have a 6000 series card (2 port) and one of their new low-profile 8506 SATA cards. Leave the consumer grade junk behind and get a well supported product. Linux works flawlessly on them and the Windows support is pretty decent also (they still make NT4 drivers available for the 6000 card).
I tried out an Adaptec 1210SA raid controller since the box claimed Linux compatability. Bull. They support a handful of distros and and even smaller number of patchlevels of kernels with their set of binary drivers. Back in the box and back to the store.
Now, granted, the 3Ware cards are more pricey. However, you get exactly what you pay for.
Return from lunch and tap the ctrl key to wake up the console. Nada. Observe that both of the drives lights are constantly on. Swivel over to the Windows 2000 box and try to ping the machine
Firewire support in Linux seems to work okay for pulling video from my little iBot camera, but certainly not for data storage. It's possible that there's a weakness in the bridge chip that Buslogic used and Linux stresses it into breaking, but that's hardly useful behavior.
As far as USB goes, at home I plugged in a USB cable modem, configured it and was pleased when it worked properly out of the box. Then my local power company decided that I needed to reboot my network and all my attached devices (gee, thanks - tho I guess it's my own fault for trying to do work when it's raining outside). Power flickered a few times and then returned. System appeared to come back up properly (no error beeps and the drive access pattern looked reasonable - this particular machine is headless as it is simply an ogg player and NAT router). However, no can pingy machine and nothing is routing. Grr. Drag monitor and keyboard out of the closet and plug in. Poke at the networking stuff. Odd, the cablemodem is now eth0 and the network card is eth1. But, that's not the way it's setup in modules.conf
And don't get me started about my pair of cute little IBM Spacesaver USB keyboards (complete with integrated Trackpoint mouses - good for my tiny desk). Windows sees them just fine but Linux loses track of all USB related stuff the very instant I plug one of 'em into a Linux box. Very helpful.
Oh, and try to do anything with an NVidia chipset system. Or Adaptec's new Serial-ATA RAID adaptor. Good ol' binary drivers that work with only very specific revs of certain vendors kernels. Too bad that Linus and company think it's a good thing to constantly destabilize code produced by vendors who are interested in protecting their R&D investment. Oh well, I'm just not patient enough anymore.
The screenshot seems to bear a lot of similarity to the operating environment that Ed from Cowboy Bebop used to surf around in ...
I'll admit that by book three I was quite tired of being told that organized religion of any sort was evil and inherently destructive. Don't get me wrong, there has been great evil worked by powerful religions, but also great good. It is a fundamental problem with any human organization.
Mr. Pullman (as noted above) was more than a little in his treatment of religion seeming to indicate that the only real path to enlightenment was one of our own devising. *shrug* That's his right to think that, but don't spend 2/3 of a book in an otherwise reasonable series beating me over the head with such things. As a practitioner of organized religion, I am supposed to be sensitive to his viewpoint and celebrate our differences. But why can't he celebrate my differences too?
The case, power-supply and motherboard is also available from AMS, the company that makes the case: http://www.american-media.com/index-CF7989.html
I host my own web stuff off my DSL line at home, but for mail, it made sense for me to outsource it to a professional outfit. These guys seem to be fairly clued about privacy and security.
It's not cheap ($15 a month) but it beats the alternative. An account with them, coupled with a good DNS provider should work wonders for you. Besides, all they do is email and if it doesn't work, it directly impacts their business. Unlike a lot of the bozos whose primary business is web hosting and email is an extra.
"Now that's a name I've not heard in a long, long time." - O. Kenobi
Man, I'd nearly forgotten about LodeRunner. I bought LodeRunner returns from Sierra, but like a great many of their products, it's been effectively orphaned. That and they messed with the gameplay a bit in that you had to get keys to unlock doors to access certain areas of the map and there were "sticky" spots where your walking speed was halved. The appeal of the original was the simplicity of play and the simplemindedness of the enemies. Man, I burned some hours on it.
I also wasted scads of time on Wizardry (1-3) and several of the Eamon text adventures. Mmmm, might have to bust out the Apple II emulator and rerun some of these classics. Sleep is for mortals!
For those interested in Eamon, there's a good page available at http://www.lysator.liu.se/eamon/.
RedHat has been VERY good about not radically changing their platform between point releases so I'm not surprised to see this incremental filesystem improvement.
I would, however, be surprised to see them skip XFS, JFS or ReiserFS in their 8.0 release. It would make sense for them to add that capability at that time (and would allow the implementations to mature that much more).
-- James
SDL existed for quite a while prior to Loki coming into existance. I recall a FAQ item from prior to the website redesign that taked about whether or not Sam's job with Loki would interfere with continued development of SDL.
First off, some terminology. An RDBMS (relational database management system) like Oracle or MSSQL server or DB2 is a substantially different beast than Access or MySQL which are simply RDBs (relational databases). MySQL offers some minor facets of a full-blown database management system but comes NOWHERE close in full-featured transaction systems with full integrity constraints and in-system procedures. PostgreSQL has a larger subset but lacks clustering and extreme scalability.
Now, for the average website, a full-blown RDBMS is overkill in the extreme. That much I'll agree with. (And Oracle in particular has some REALLY annoying features in their JDBC driver like only being able to deal with 4000 characters at a time in an insert [without resorting to tricks and hacks reaching around the standard JDBC layer] - whereas MySQL can handle much larger chunks of data.)
So, for websites that are web-centric and not dealing with internal systems, MySQL or PostgreSQL are probably fine.