Quite a few companies still assume that you have a bootable DOS disk handy to do BIOS upgrades on their firmware. This makes floppies practically mandatory, unless you want to waste a good CD making a floppy image (which will still require DOS)
Agreed. MSNBC has printed quite a few stories about Linux and very few seemed to have any hint of anti-Linux bias. It seems every time MSNBC publishes a Linux story, people either look for the smallest negative connotation and scream "BIAS!!!" or find none and say that they are just trying to build a reputation as unbiased so they can cover up the real Microsoft evils.
Oddly, MSNBC has also published quite a few articles that do not make Microsoft look all that appealing. Unless somebody has some hard evidence as to why MSNBC is biased, like, oh-I-don't-know one single clearly biased story, give them a break. Does everyone think that every honorable journalist was instantly corrupted by Microsoft's aura?
Ahh, thankyou. I have read several posts on the drive, but it never seemed to be agreed upon whether the drive was smaller or larger, the platters were not exactly 60GB, or if the remainder of the space was simply not mapped on the drive for marketing reasons. Good to know it's been cleared up.:-)
Yes, of course a collision that destroys an entire continent would have no effect on the rest of the world at all. Regardless you're right, why bother worrying about potentially a few _billion_ people?
I'm hoping that if it does get close, we will shatter it with nukes and a few strategic chunks will land in Redmond, WA., preferably missing Nintendo.
The idea is to only blur the curved edges of the font, such as the bottom part of a lower-case "t" and all of an "o" or "0". The problem is that doing so isn't easy and is easily screwed up. The native Windows font antialiasing, as well as the antialiasing on MacOS9 (and presumably MacOSX?) actually does this pretty darn well. Some of the best techniques for font rendering are patented by Adobe, which is one reason why fonts on Linux appear more blurry and more dull than fonts on Windows. Gentoo Linux actually makes a small, well-known, but illegal modification to a font rendering library to improve things, but it still isn't perfect. It's a work in progress. (getting close though)
In other news... Pentium IV processors can now use DDR memory, you can now get dual-processor Athlons systems, and the Intel Pentium-3 processor has new instructions that will allow it to "revolutionize your internet experience" dubbed "SSE"
Not needed. Linux and FreeBSD both handle different priority levels quite nicely, and in fact can handle them in a much more fine-grained fashion. NT actually has additional priority levels in-between each that you described above, but Linux and BSD have a total of 41 possible priority values (from -20 to 20, including zero) If you set an application to a priority of 20, it isn't going to be bothering any other processes, and if you set an application to -20, it is going to be worshipped like a god by the scheduler. As far as I know, neither have a real-time scheduling mode like NT, which is actually a good thing in many cases. If a program running at real-time priority goes into an infinite loop, or for any reason uses 100% of hte CPU (SETI@Home, for example) than the system is locked the hell up. Even the mouse will not get any time for cursor movement, and you have to reset the machine.
Read "man nice", "man renice", and probably "man top" (which I use to change priorities of running processes as root)
That is a very informative link, thanks! Someone please mod this person up as my comment, currently at +5 (undeservingly), obviously has some flaws that Drishmung has corrected.
"First, what do I do when someone submits a patch that violates my 'mission'? Should I try to be democratic about it and try to add it? Should I ignore it? What should I say to the contributor?"
I would just be honest. "Thankyou for your hard work, but this good idea of yours really doesn't bring Foo in the direction that I was targetting."
What if I get a patch that I don't understand? Perhaps it is garbage. Perhaps it is over my head and too complex for me to see how I can integrate it and still see the structure of my whole project.
That is unlikely to happen often if you know enough C (or whatever language) to have written a significant project in the first place, unless the patch is poorly written (hard to read, not necessarily a poor algorithm). In either case, if it isn't obviously a joke or something from a "Teach yourself C in 24-hours" background, I would politely ask for an explanation of what the code does. Having the original, you can always patch your code and see for yourself, but you never know what surprises may lurk in the depths of some of those patches.;-)
What if someone gets angry and decides to fork the project? Under GPL, they would have the right to do this, but the excess competition could be unbeneficial when it would have been better for the contributor to wait for me to be ready for their suggestions at a later time.
This is when your diplomatic skills come into play more than your coding skills. If they really want to fork it, well, they will fork it. Most of the time, I would imagine, you can have an intelligent discussion and possibly compromise to avoid the fork. If it is ultimately forked, that is when your competitive skills come into play. Crush the competition like so many grapes, but by making yours better and more focused (not by pulling a Microsoft!:-)
My one released open source project GTerm went fine, but that was mostly because I had only one contributor who contributed only because he want to use my tool to make his tool. Actually, it was mostly a flop, because there was very little interest in it that I could see.
Most non-major open-source products have few contributors but the main author. This is a blessing and not a curse, unless the project becomes overwhelmingly large. Usually by the time that occurs, as it did with Linux, there is enough interest that those with other talents will be able to help. Then you can deal with the issues in question.
I have had other (non-software) experiences, however, where people took my ideas and terribly misrepresented them and twisted them into utter confusion. People tried to 'contribute' but ended up just making a mess of things. Sometimes, it's very hard to maintain the integrity of something that you have worked very hard to build.
Remember that you can refuse or even ignore any number of patches, be they good/bad/confusing/brilliant/whathaveyou. If the going gets tough, just think that Linux and Cox have it much tougher. How many bizarre patches do they have to turn down? What would Linux be like now if every one with a semi-good idea were accepted? I don't even want to think about it.
It is your project, and if someone really wants to add something that mutilates it, see the "forking" section above.:-)
Good luck, and thanks for contriburing to the community.
The scheduler is closely tied with the kernel, and MacOSX does not use the FreeBSD kernel at all. It uses the Mach kernel, which is not only a different kernel entirely but a different core kernel philosophy. Mach is a microkernel whereas FreeBSD's is a monolithic kernel. Both types have their advantages and disadvantages, but microkernels are vastly superior for a commercial OS and for driver installations. Monolithic kernels are theoretically faster and easier to implement.
MacOSX gets its BSD label by using the BSD userland utilities. It is great that Mac's OS is no longer junk. In three months I went from "Macs are toy computers for kiddies and Photoshop pros" to "Wow--I can replace every PC and OS in my house with a single Mac! Great desktop, good server, and all the power of Unix." I have never been happier with the state of Apple Inc.
I am not going to claim that FreeBSD is perfect, but FreeBSD is more secure than the vast majority of Linux-based OSes. It has supported features like the new "GR Security" patch for years, and because it shares a great deal of code with OpenBSD which is audited frequently, it benefits from their work as well. Of note is that FreeBSD's libc is just over half the size of Linux's Glibc (not that has a thing to do with security)
With FreeBSD, for years, admins have been able to set certain files as "append only" (so even root can only add to, not remove from, log files) and "immutable" (so even root cannot modify or delete the file) and has been able to set firewall rules to the same (immutable) so that creative crackers can't add their personal favorites if they root the system. This can of course be bypassed by restarting the machine in single-user mode and redusing the kernel security level, but that isn't going to be very easy for your average remote hacker.:)
Furthermore, since 4.0 you can multiple run complete but separate entire copies of FreeBSD on the same system, each with their own FreeBSD system files and such. You can have a single server run an instance of FreeBSD for Apache, one for Postfix, one for BIND, etc. and if any one of them does get compromised (say, BIND since that happens entirely too often) the cracker can not only not effect any of the other instances--he/she cannot even see that they exist! Very interesting stuff. Of course, IMHO Linux is worlds ahead of FreeBSD on the desktop front, and the new GRsecurity and ACL features will be a real competitor for the *BSD family. It will be most fascinating to see how things turn out. I wish the best to both of them, and I use both of them every day.
Oh, I see. Nevermind. Hmm, I could have sworn that the "O" in my books was a zero. I guess i'll have to double-check that. Thanks for the correction. Oops.
Is FreeBSD's new one a 0(1) scheduler? 0(1) is a "term" from computer science. When applied to schedulers, it basically means that no matter how many processes there are to schedule, a 0(1) scheduler's overhead will not significantly increase. Of course, with a small number of threads/processes to schedule, the Linux 0(1) scheduler will have greater initial overhead. It isn't until there are quite a few processes that it starts to show its power, and the more processes there are, the more useful it is. On a busy server with 4+ processors and thousands of processes, a standard scheduler's overhead is so great that it often exceeds the overhead of most of the individual server processes.
I tried TurboLinux and the one thing that sticks in my memory was one of the help texts in the install, which talked about a certain library being "Required for your Redhat system." Not only had they blatantly ripped RH's package descriptions, but they didn't even bother to change the name to their own. That, and the tools were mediocre... turbolinuxcfg, etc.
Programmer's Heaven has tons of information on Assembler, Basic, C / C++, C#, Delphi & Kylix, Java, Java Script, Pascal,,Perl, PHP, Python, VB, and VB.NET.
Perhaps he has realized, past his zealotry, that Windows is not the end-all, be-all of operating systems for every task, and that Microsoft's products are not better simply because they are Microsoft's. Perhaps he has seen the light of human honesty and integrity in his soul finally overshadow the lingering "Must figure out a way to word this, regardless of accuracy, that makes us look good and them look bad." thoughts that seemto possess many executives these days. Perhaps he has realized that he is nothing but a particularly rich slave to others, the shareholders, and that it is his human freedom and right to say something honest and with true integrity and ethical reasoning--granting him a euphoria of freedom and confidence in his humanity...
Except that it is incorrect. Well, not so much incorrect as highly unlikely. In the unlikely event that a business tries to use GPL sourcecode for a closed-source commercial application, and in the event that they get caught, they are overwhelmingly more likely to either remove the offending code and replace it with their own, use similar BSD licensed code, or fight tooth and nail with lawyers until the product is obsolete and doesn't matter anymore.
...usage can reduce the risk of Alzheimers, geek caffiene intake must be able to reverse it. Some geeks consume enough caffeine to not only prevent their own Alzheimers, but to cure anyone within three hops from them.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite a few companies still assume that you have a bootable DOS disk handy to do BIOS upgrades on their firmware. This makes floppies practically mandatory, unless you want to waste a good CD making a floppy image (which will still require DOS)
Agreed. MSNBC has printed quite a few stories about Linux and very few seemed to have any hint of anti-Linux bias. It seems every time MSNBC publishes a Linux story, people either look for the smallest negative connotation and scream "BIAS!!!" or find none and say that they are just trying to build a reputation as unbiased so they can cover up the real Microsoft evils.
Oddly, MSNBC has also published quite a few articles that do not make Microsoft look all that appealing. Unless somebody has some hard evidence as to why MSNBC is biased, like, oh-I-don't-know one single clearly biased story, give them a break. Does everyone think that every honorable journalist was instantly corrupted by Microsoft's aura?
"...you should email Dave."
Poor Dave.
Yep, just like we got a day two days ago!
Perhaps we should make this a weekly thing, including getting a raise and a hardware upgrade.
Ahh, thankyou. I have read several posts on the drive, but it never seemed to be agreed upon whether the drive was smaller or larger, the platters were not exactly 60GB, or if the remainder of the space was simply not mapped on the drive for marketing reasons. Good to know it's been cleared up. :-)
Western Digital already announced 200GB drives a few weeks ago, so this is probably a Maxtor announcement.
What I want to know is how they made a 200GB hard drive with 60GB platters. Doesn't seem to add up.
Yes, of course a collision that destroys an entire continent would have no effect on the rest of the world at all.
Regardless you're right, why bother worrying about potentially a few _billion_ people?
I'm hoping that if it does get close, we will shatter it with nukes and a few strategic chunks will land in Redmond, WA., preferably missing Nintendo.
The idea is to only blur the curved edges of the font, such as the bottom part of a lower-case "t" and all of an "o" or "0". The problem is that doing so isn't easy and is easily screwed up. The native Windows font antialiasing, as well as the antialiasing on MacOS9 (and presumably MacOSX?) actually does this pretty darn well. Some of the best techniques for font rendering are patented by Adobe, which is one reason why fonts on Linux appear more blurry and more dull than fonts on Windows.
Gentoo Linux actually makes a small, well-known, but illegal modification to a font rendering library to improve things, but it still isn't perfect. It's a work in progress. (getting close though)
In other news... Pentium IV processors can now use DDR memory, you can now get dual-processor Athlons systems, and the Intel Pentium-3 processor has new instructions that will allow it to "revolutionize your internet experience" dubbed "SSE"
Not needed. Linux and FreeBSD both handle different priority levels quite nicely, and in fact can handle them in a much more fine-grained fashion. NT actually has additional priority levels in-between each that you described above, but Linux and BSD have a total of 41 possible priority values (from -20 to 20, including zero)
If you set an application to a priority of 20, it isn't going to be bothering any other processes, and if you set an application to -20, it is going to be worshipped like a god by the scheduler.
As far as I know, neither have a real-time scheduling mode like NT, which is actually a good thing in many cases. If a program running at real-time priority goes into an infinite loop, or for any reason uses 100% of hte CPU (SETI@Home, for example) than the system is locked the hell up. Even the mouse will not get any time for cursor movement, and you have to reset the machine.
Read "man nice", "man renice", and probably "man top" (which I use to change priorities of running processes as root)
That is a very informative link, thanks!
Someone please mod this person up as my comment, currently at +5 (undeservingly), obviously has some flaws that Drishmung has corrected.
"First, what do I do when someone submits a patch that violates my 'mission'? Should I try to be democratic about it and try to add it? Should I ignore it? What should I say to the contributor?"
;-)
:-)
:-)
Good luck, and thanks for contriburing to the community.
I would just be honest. "Thankyou for your hard work, but this good idea of yours really doesn't bring Foo in the direction that I was targetting."
What if I get a patch that I don't understand? Perhaps it is garbage. Perhaps it is over my head and too complex for me to see how I can integrate it and still see the structure of my whole project.
That is unlikely to happen often if you know enough C (or whatever language) to have written a significant project in the first place, unless the patch is poorly written (hard to read, not necessarily a poor algorithm). In either case, if it isn't obviously a joke or something from a "Teach yourself C in 24-hours" background, I would politely ask for an explanation of what the code does. Having the original, you can always patch your code and see for yourself, but you never know what surprises may lurk in the depths of some of those patches.
What if someone gets angry and decides to fork the project? Under GPL, they would have the right to do this, but the excess competition could be unbeneficial when it would have been better for the contributor to wait for me to be ready for their suggestions at a later time.
This is when your diplomatic skills come into play more than your coding skills. If they really want to fork it, well, they will fork it. Most of the time, I would imagine, you can have an intelligent discussion and possibly compromise to avoid the fork. If it is ultimately forked, that is when your competitive skills come into play. Crush the competition like so many grapes, but by making yours better and more focused (not by pulling a Microsoft!
My one released open source project GTerm went fine, but that was mostly because I had only one contributor who contributed only because he want to use my tool to make his tool. Actually, it was mostly a flop, because there was very little interest in it that I could see.
Most non-major open-source products have few contributors but the main author. This is a blessing and not a curse, unless the project becomes overwhelmingly large. Usually by the time that occurs, as it did with Linux, there is enough interest that those with other talents will be able to help. Then you can deal with the issues in question.
I have had other (non-software) experiences, however, where people took my ideas and terribly misrepresented them and twisted them into utter confusion. People tried to 'contribute' but ended up just making a mess of things. Sometimes, it's very hard to maintain the integrity of something that you have worked very hard to build.
Remember that you can refuse or even ignore any number of patches, be they good/bad/confusing/brilliant/whathaveyou. If the going gets tough, just think that Linux and Cox have it much tougher. How many bizarre patches do they have to turn down? What would Linux be like now if every one with a semi-good idea were accepted? I don't even want to think about it. It is your project, and if someone really wants to add something that mutilates it, see the "forking" section above.
The scheduler is closely tied with the kernel, and MacOSX does not use the FreeBSD kernel at all. It uses the Mach kernel, which is not only a different kernel entirely but a different core kernel philosophy. Mach is a microkernel whereas FreeBSD's is a monolithic kernel. Both types have their advantages and disadvantages, but microkernels are vastly superior for a commercial OS and for driver installations. Monolithic kernels are theoretically faster and easier to implement.
MacOSX gets its BSD label by using the BSD userland utilities. It is great that Mac's OS is no longer junk. In three months I went from "Macs are toy computers for kiddies and Photoshop pros" to "Wow--I can replace every PC and OS in my house with a single Mac! Great desktop, good server, and all the power of Unix."
I have never been happier with the state of Apple Inc.
I am not going to claim that FreeBSD is perfect, but FreeBSD is more secure than the vast majority of Linux-based OSes. It has supported features like the new "GR Security" patch for years, and because it shares a great deal of code with OpenBSD which is audited frequently, it benefits from their work as well.
:)
Of note is that FreeBSD's libc is just over half the size of Linux's Glibc (not that has a thing to do with security)
With FreeBSD, for years, admins have been able to set certain files as "append only" (so even root can only add to, not remove from, log files) and "immutable" (so even root cannot modify or delete the file) and has been able to set firewall rules to the same (immutable) so that creative crackers can't add their personal favorites if they root the system.
This can of course be bypassed by restarting the machine in single-user mode and redusing the kernel security level, but that isn't going to be very easy for your average remote hacker.
Furthermore, since 4.0 you can multiple run complete but separate entire copies of FreeBSD on the same system, each with their own FreeBSD system files and such. You can have a single server run an instance of FreeBSD for Apache, one for Postfix, one for BIND, etc. and if any one of them does get compromised (say, BIND since that happens entirely too often) the cracker can not only not effect any of the other instances--he/she cannot even see that they exist! Very interesting stuff.
Of course, IMHO Linux is worlds ahead of FreeBSD on the desktop front, and the new GRsecurity and ACL features will be a real competitor for the *BSD family. It will be most fascinating to see how things turn out. I wish the best to both of them, and I use both of them every day.
Oh, I see. Nevermind. Hmm, I could have sworn that the "O" in my books was a zero. I guess i'll have to double-check that. Thanks for the correction. Oops.
Yes, I used the number "zero" (0) and not the letter "O" :)
Is FreeBSD's new one a 0(1) scheduler?
0(1) is a "term" from computer science. When applied to schedulers, it basically means that no matter how many processes there are to schedule, a 0(1) scheduler's overhead will not significantly increase.
Of course, with a small number of threads/processes to schedule, the Linux 0(1) scheduler will have greater initial overhead. It isn't until there are quite a few processes that it starts to show its power, and the more processes there are, the more useful it is.
On a busy server with 4+ processors and thousands of processes, a standard scheduler's overhead is so great that it often exceeds the overhead of most of the individual server processes.
I tried TurboLinux and the one thing that sticks in my memory was one of the help texts in the install, which talked about a certain library being "Required for your Redhat system." Not only had they blatantly ripped RH's package descriptions, but they didn't even bother to change the name to their own. That, and the tools were mediocre... turbolinuxcfg, etc.
Coda?
What is so important about NFS that an alternative cannot be used? And yes, NFS sucks, but so does SMB for different reasons.
Programmer's Heaven has tons of information on Assembler, Basic, C / C++, C#, Delphi & Kylix, Java, Java Script, Pascal, ,Perl, PHP, Python, VB, and VB.NET.
My new monitor is made obsolete already.
Perhaps he has realized, past his zealotry, that Windows is not the end-all, be-all of operating systems for every task, and that Microsoft's products are not better simply because they are Microsoft's.
Perhaps he has seen the light of human honesty and integrity in his soul finally overshadow the lingering "Must figure out a way to word this, regardless of accuracy, that makes us look good and them look bad." thoughts that seemto possess many executives these days.
Perhaps he has realized that he is nothing but a particularly rich slave to others, the shareholders, and that it is his human freedom and right to say something honest and with true integrity and ethical reasoning--granting him a euphoria of freedom and confidence in his humanity...
And then I woke up.
Except that it is incorrect. Well, not so much incorrect as highly unlikely. In the unlikely event that a business tries to use GPL sourcecode for a closed-source commercial application, and in the event that they get caught, they are overwhelmingly more likely to either remove the offending code and replace it with their own, use similar BSD licensed code, or fight tooth and nail with lawyers until the product is obsolete and doesn't matter anymore.
Pay customers to use their product, of course. Some may actually agree! ;-)
...usage can reduce the risk of Alzheimers, geek caffiene intake must be able to reverse it. Some geeks consume enough caffeine to not only prevent their own Alzheimers, but to cure anyone within three hops from them.