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User: PugMajere

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Comments · 165

  1. Re:OMFG! on FAA Grants RSC Status to Linux-Friendly RTOS · · Score: 1

    That's properly spelled "ETLA".

  2. Re:KDB on Linux Troubleshooting · · Score: 1

    There's no debugger in the mainline kernel, but most things that get flagged as "oops, this shouldn't be happening", generate a stack backtrace, dump registers, decode symbols, show the loaded list of modules, etc.

    Probably about the same as what bug reports from reasonably knowledgeable users of OpenBSD collect out of the in-kernel debugger and submit (thouhg I have to admit that I've never even tried to look for an OpenBSD kernel bug report).

  3. Re:My dad's ISP is already trying to kill P2P on Music Industry Drafts Code of Conduct for ISPs · · Score: 1

    That also makes doing things like playing network games or even working from home rather hard.

    It makes using it for VOIP darn near impossible.

    Heck, it makes doing a long download difficult to complete without a resume.

    Good business plan there - make sure all the reasons to get broadband, other than purely web-surfing, are broken every 2 hours so your customers move elsewhere.

  4. Re:I cant wait on No More BitKeeper Linux · · Score: 1

    Does Perforce work distributed?

    The fact that *everyone* has a complete repository of the source code is one of the big features of BitKeeper, imo.

  5. Re:There's a few things you can do to help on Free/Open Source Software Hardware Requirements? · · Score: 1

    MIPS support was dropped a while back (with 2k, IIRC), but supporting 1 other platform is not quite the same as talking to people that have software running on 17 (Linux, if I remember the count correctly) or 30+ (NetBSD), and have real competition to be concerned with, i.e, Solaris vs Linux on Sun hardware.

    The depth of knowledge of what hardware is good and what hardware is annoying and hard to deal with is massively different.

  6. Re:Well... on Free/Open Source Software Hardware Requirements? · · Score: 1

    Yes, NDA can be bad. It certainly isn't preferred.

    It can be made to be workable, if there is a need for it on the hardware vendor's side of things. (Some people do have contractual obligations that complicate this!)

  7. Re:Well... on Free/Open Source Software Hardware Requirements? · · Score: 1

    Right. That's what I meant.

    I guess distributing binary drivers make so little sense to me I totally ignored the idea.

  8. There's a few things you can do to help on Free/Open Source Software Hardware Requirements? · · Score: 5, Informative

    First of all, provide documentation and an engineering contact to answer questions about the documentation. Keep in mind that you will get asked questions from sources other than those related to the core Linux development team - the *BSD teams may have questions for you, some hobbiest may ask questions - answer them all. Incorporate the answers to their questions into your documentation, etc.

    If you are doing anything that is truly groundbreaking, for your company, but has been done in other places, at other times, the experienced OS developers in the free software community can sometimes provide invaluable feedback on what is wrong with your design.

    For example, as I understand it, the AMD64 architecture did not have an IOMMU until rather late. The Linux developers working with AMD on providing support for this architecture pointed out that it was useful and a huge performance win to have one, so AMD reworked that into the architecture. That kind of feedback is invaluable, and something a company like MicroSoft simply can't give, because they lack the necessary cross-platform experience to care. I believe the major Linux distributors are open to consulting arrangements of this type - approach them and ask them for assistance!

    If the hardware you have needs firmware to be loaded into it, consider what license the firmware is distributed under, and how that interacts with the licenses of the free software you are trying to work with. At the very least, make sure other people can redistribute the firmware, unmodified, so the users are not dependent on a download from your site.

    So, document the hardware interfaces. Answer questions on the hardware, and involve those more knowledgeable than your company early and often to give a better design.

  9. Re:Well... on Free/Open Source Software Hardware Requirements? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Documentation available under NDA is fine, so long as the drivers developed using it can be distributed.

    It is, however, not preferred.

    The preference is that the necessary documentation be freely available, and even, redistributable, so that it can accompany the source if it would be beneficial.

  10. Re:Meet The Forkers on Microsoft Remains Firm On Ending VB6 Support · · Score: 1

    I'm a little puzzled.

    What's a non-geographic area?

  11. Re:Use comments only when needed on Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective · · Score: 1

    I've actually seen it, within the last year, even.
    I translated it from Perl, to be more accessible, but it was:

    #+ # if support_agent EQ SalesForce
    #+ if ( $support_agent eq 'SalesForce' ) {

  12. Re:Use comments only when needed on Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective · · Score: 1

    Exactly.

  13. Re:Learning from decades-old code on Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective · · Score: 1

    A friend of mine once wrote a script that used grep.

    His script was called "grep".

    "." was in the path. :)

  14. Re:Use comments only when needed on Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective · · Score: 1

    If you have a need to say either, that should tell you something about how clear your code is.

    If you need the comment to explain how the code works, fix the code, then delete the now unnecessary comment.

    Nothing is worse than seeing code that says:

    /* if status == 1 */
    if (status == 1) {

    That comment does *absolutely* nothing for readability.

  15. Re:QA on Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective · · Score: 1

    You should only indent with the tab key - that lets other people change the look to fit their whims.

    Now, 13 levels of nesting with 8 character tabs? That's rough. But the fact that you can't see the code should tell you something - the code is structured wrong. :)

  16. Re:Except that he could travel by air without ID on John Gilmore's Search for the Mandatory ID Law · · Score: 1

    They said he could get on the plane, then they pulled him out of line and refused to let him fly.

    How does that end up meaning, "HE ALREADY FOUND HE COULD TRAVEL, BY PLANE, WITHOUT ID"?

  17. Re:And who on French Court Orders Google to Stop Competing Ad Displays · · Score: 1

    Ok, so I put in BMW Mustang as a search term.

    Can anyone's ads show up?

  18. Re:The important question on Atari 2600 Mac Mod · · Score: 1

    ET was better than Daikatana, though.

  19. Re:New Terms on GPL Revision Coming Soon · · Score: 2, Informative

    Alan Cox is definitely not one of them.

    Linux Torvalds, however, distributes the Linux kernel under that license.

    See This post (and thread) on the linux-kernel list.

  20. Re:cf Penny Black on Beat Spam Using Hashcash · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Hashcash predates the MS Research project.

    This article is about the first correct (supposedly) Python implementation of hashcash.

  21. Re:Huh? on Blackboxvoting.org Raises Vote-Audit FOIA Request · · Score: 1

    She was actively campaigning for the Bush/Cheney campaign. I call that being "in the campaign".

  22. Re:Huh? on Blackboxvoting.org Raises Vote-Audit FOIA Request · · Score: 1

    Err, she wasn't outed.

    She's been openly gay for a while.

  23. Re:.... so can we compile the kernel on C++ In The Linux kernel · · Score: 1

    That brings a whole new meaning to the term, "self-hosting"

  24. Re:14k? Whippersnapper! on 7 hour BBS Documentary Nearly Ready · · Score: 1

    I thought that in the 110 and 300 bps days, bps was the same as baud.

    But I could be wrong.

  25. Re:Blacksmith? on The Extinction of the Programming Species · · Score: 1

    Travel agents are under a lot of pressure, though.

    They only really work for the odd or complicated jobs, these days, I think.

    (Think - school going on a trip, not family going on a trip.)