Re:they need updated docs for todays ram amounts
on
Is Swap Necessary?
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, that's completely stupid.
I used to run a mail server with 128MB RAM and 256MB swap, just like you suggest. It mostly ran fine. However, then I set up spamassassin and procmail to download mail from my ISPs account.
Since the CPU and network were slow, spamassassin couldn't finish before a new mail was delivered, so the queue grew. Soon this consumed so much RAM that it started using swap, slowing things down even more, and making the queue grow even faster... this situation would get out of hand in less than 10 minutes.
The end result would be a computer swapping like mad, with a load average of 70, and completely unusable for at least 3 or 4 hours.
Nope, I didn't design it, I just maintain and extend it. I'm pretty happy with that too. Might not be the most exciting thing ever, but it's easy, and it pays.
Hint: If you can't earn money with royalties, work for hire. Or as you said, learn, evolve and grow:-)
What the heck? It's definitely going to be that way if you sit on your ass, look with despair at the situation and tell people that we'd better get used to it.
How about complaining for a change? If enough people complain, it will make a difference. Call whoever is responsible, for example.
Heh. I recommend you to move from this obsolete form of earning money. Here I couldn't care less if somebody distributes my work. I get paid to write code for a vertical app for a company. They're almost certainly not going to sell it, and if they do it's not really of my concern.
That Apple is a big company with enough money to pay lots of consultants doesn't mean it can't make mistakes. Perhaps you have a point, but since you haven't provided any arguments I can't agree with you at the moment.
The application should simply crash, and stop executing completely. Alternatively, you could get it restarted from the beginning.
Think of it, your program segfaulted because somehow the CPU tried to execute something that was marked as "don't execute". How do you recover from that? It should be pretty clear that either it's a bug, or an exploit, and in both cases it makes little sense to recover since there's no guarantee that you can get the program back to a good state.
The solution to make stable programs is to write them in some language that's not exploitable. If you can't overflow a buffer, or somehow force the program to try to execute something you want, then this mechanism will not be used, and your program remain running.
And to add something to it, one of the things that gets the most on my nerves is that educating users about this is near impossible. Even the ones with some brains.
Here my friend is pretty smart and although not an expert would probably understand simple security measures pretty well. The problem is that to explain it all to him I'd have to give him a long lecture where I'd come up as a paranoid security nazi, and give him the impression that I'm just exaggerating.
Seriously. I'd have to explain: The thing about the firewall coming up after the connection, the trojans, adware, and spyware, that this "cute" Bonzi Buddy thing is bad, that comet cursor is also bad, that just accepting the request to install an ActiveX is bad, that if you have a direct internet connection you can get infected before you can download an update, that despite the Service Pack being a 30MB download he's got to get it before doing anything else, that in some rare cases it will leave the machine unbootable, that Outlook Express is really problematic, that installing the latest IE version still means you have to get the updates for it separately, that running as Administrator is a pretty bad idea, even though using a normal account is a huge pain in the ass...
In comparison, security measures for Linux machines for normal users are actually simple! Don't run as root. If you install from the network, you're almost certainly getting the latest patched versions. If you install from CD, and don't install every server available, the updates will be small. And there are infinitely less places where you can be attacked.
Uhh... that's the thing, plugging in a new machine often DOES make it start crashing! Due to Blaster, for example.
Now, as somebody interested in security, I completely agree that users should have some understanding about how things work and not be complete morons. However... all this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that a newly installed Windows box can be broken into in about 20 ways, most of them completely automated, within minutes.
Even the greatest security specialist can make the simple mistake of turning on a recently reformatted machine. That it's enough with this little to get infected is just NOT RIGHT! What's worse, s/he might not even have a better option.
I perfectly knew about this when I was trying to eradicate Sasser at a friend's home, but he's got an USB ADSL modem which connects directly to his recently reformatted computer, and downloading patches in those conditions is pretty hard.
Well, I run Gentoo here. I don't really know about Slackware. On many distributions you can install with SMP by choosing the kernel from the menu that you get when you boot from the CD. In most the default is an UP kernel. Most also come with packages, kernel-image-2.6.3-1-686-smp in Debian.
If slackware comes with a 2.6 kernel, then you might have your current configuration in/proc/config.gz. Then just:
cd/usr/src/linux/ zcat/proc/config.gz >.config make xconfig
(enable smp) make bzImage cp arch/i368/boot/bzImage/boot/
update grub/lilo
This way you can get your current kernel, just with SMP support without having to go through the whole config process.
BTW, Creative doesn't appear to support SMP in Windows. I think ALSA in Linux does though, and my sound card works fine in Win2K too.
True, but I would expect that it'd have at least some effect. Maybe it won't keep it charged, but if it can add an hour of run time, it'd still be very nice.
I've just googled around and there are indeed standalone panels, but that has the inconvenience of having to carry an extra thing around, instead of having it integrated.
That's only if your equipment needs an awful amount of energy.
According to some simple calculations I did a while ago, my laptop uses about 25W. My laptop's 30x23 cm. So, if I'm right, a panel of that size would produce about 70W.
So, with some luck, if I attached a solar panel to the back of my screen, and sat in some sunny place, I could have my battery not ever run out? Why didn't anybody try this yet?
In fact, this makes me really curious! When I replace this old laptop, I think I could try this experiment. If anybody has any comments about this idea, please reply!
Used some old Linux distribution maybe? Here everything works perfectly.
Dual Athlon 2000+: Works Tyan Tiger MPX board: Works, random generator and network support included Terratec DMX X-Fire 1024 sound card: works GeForce FX 5600: Works Logitech Cordless desktop mouse and keyboard: works USB 2.0 card: works USB hard disk: works USB hub: works CompactFlash card reader: works MP3 player (Flash): works HP LaserJet 1010: works Aiptec tablet: works
My ancient laptop (Toshiba 470CDT) also works, power management and network included.
Linux was a pain to get to work in 1997. Now it works pretty well. I had more problems with Windows 2000 on the Athlon than with Linux.
Probably because smart mail servers will always ensure that the file has been written to disk before confirming delivery. In these conditions, gigabytes of cache won't help at all, the mail server's still waiting for the disk.
The advantage of these systems would be that they're insanely fast, and have a battery in case power is lost. Since they emulate a hard disk, the mail server thinks everything has been safely written, and since there is a battery this works pretty well.
Requiring the player to keep clicking to attack is a bad thing. As an example, take Nox: you have to do some fancy movements with your mouse in order to defeat some powerful monsters -- click on monster to attack, swing mouse to other side of screen and click to retreat, swing mouse back to attack monster, etc. One wrong move, and you are either dead, or have 90% of your health taken off. Failing to have ultra-1337 mousing skills should not warrent a player's death.
And this is exactly something that I miss. DS is pretty, but that's all that it really is. Nox was very diablo-like but it was fun because it was challenging and actually required some ability - mousing ability as you said.
Games like BG2 on the other hand, are won through thinking - knowing what skills to apply where, how to use your characters the best, etc.
DS requires no ability of any kind at all. Attack is automated. There's no need to think. The campaign is braindead - no real story of any kind I could see from the first few hours. Somehow they made something even more boring than Diablo, where at least some ability was needed.
So you're basically claiming that if the terrorists want us to do anything and we do that, we're automatically obeying the terrorists? For example, suppose some prominent fascist argues that we should give more money to public schools. Should we say "no" just because we'd be agreeing with a fascist?
This happened not because the terrorists wanted it. It happened because the current president was an utter moron, and a puppet of Bush to boot. He made it completely evident what his priorities were by urging everybody to condemn ETA before there was any proper investigation. Sure ETA is bad, but it's not automatically responsible for everything bad that happens in Spain, and blaming it for things it didn't do will only result in investigating the wrong organization.
So, the moment Aznar demostrated his priorities, people instantly went with his direct adversary, who of course used the opportunity to say that he never wanted that war, and plans to remove the troops. This is what everybody wanted anyway, NOBODY in Spain wanted that war. There were huge protests against it.
I used several naming systems over time. Normally, a different way per network, and names are picked trying to be appropiate.
Which in the current one is:
Internal network: Alice in Wonderland Alice (This one, dual Athlon MP 2000+), Cheshire (vmware virtual machine), Bill (Windows computer), Dormouse (router)
DMZ: Sylvie and Bruno Sylvie (web, ftp, etc server), Warden (router)
Mobile devices LAN: Chip & Dale Gadget (laptop, development, some work), Jack (router), Chip (PDA when I get it)
To make it all odder, every computer has ASCII art of the appropiate character, if I could find it. People find it a bit strange that I have a full screen ASCII image of Gadget Hackwrench in/etc/issue, but oddly enough nobody seems to know who that is.
We tend to trust our things more than somebody else's.
For example, a simple example: If at an exam it turns out I don't have a pen and borrow one, I will always check if it writes. I never do that with my own pen since I'm pretty sure it does write well.
Same way, I take notes on my P200 laptop , instead of using one of the much more powerful computers (Pentium 3 at least), because it's my laptop, it's configured the way I like it, and I know every single quirk it has. I know how long it takes to turn on, that nothing unexpected will happen when I need to start typing. I also know that I can save at the latest moment without worrying about the quality of the floppy I'm saving to.
I bring my optical mouse too. I could use the mouse from the class, but those are ball mice and often too dirty to be comfortable.
The same way, it's uncomfortable when I have to deal with my brother's computer because it doesn't have things in the same place (explorer in quick launch bar), often has lots of spyware, the directory structure is strange, it lacks the latest updates, etc...
I think it's nothing strange really. It's just that computers are one of the few things that are often shared. Many people almost certainly have a similar bond to their car, and even things like CDs (I know for sure my Gentoo CD works), pens, calculators, cell phones, keyboards, and even books. I wouldn't replace my quite old and somewhat ragged LOTR book with a new prettier one, don't ask me why.
There are some. Look for games made by small developers. For example, check Starscape by Moonpod. Works on any video card with more than 16 MB, looks great. Made by just 3 guys.
So I looked at it, and thought, what the heck, I can live with $30 less, and for once somebody is doing something fun and quite original.
Re:What old DOS games did you play that were easy?
on
Is DOS Gaming Dead?
·
· Score: 1
That was a problem in the beginning. Then fortunately lots of games started being written with extenders like DOS4GW.
I tried writing code with them myself a bit, it was wonderful. Knowing that the machine is 100% dedicated to your game with no possible interruptions was great, all while having a nice flat memory model.
I got a Yamaha OPL3SA2 to work on my old Toshiba laptop, with ALSA on kernel 2.4
It's a bit of a pain though. Basically, you go into the BIOS, enable sound support, check the list of ports, IRQs, and DMA, write it down, and then pass it all to the module as parameters, disabling autodetection.
After that, it works just fine. If you need more details just reply to this post.
For me they'd probably apply the maximum sentence. I not only log my conversations, I also parse them with a Perl script and store them in a mySQL database.
This is because I have a rather bad memory, and it also comes very handy sometimes. For example, it's useful to find URL that appeared in a conversation, find what exactly somebody said about some subject without having to dig in all my logs (having 4 different places with logs is quite a nuisance), and it's especially useful to find things like birthdays and addresses.
I think the current database has somewhere about 100K rows.
Not every female character in a game is weak and stupid. Take Jaheira from Baldur's Gate 2. Now that was a good game. There was pretty much every kind of character in it. If you want a more stereotyped girl, there was Aerie. Of course Jaheira didn't like her at all.
There are some fun characters in other games too. For example, in Kabuki Klash (NeoGeo game) there's Tsunade. There's something funny about repeatedly beating up somebody with a 9 year old girl that uses a big battle axe.
Re:It'll be interesting to look back on
on
The Blues for LEDs
·
· Score: 1
Huh? Seriously, beige is horribly ugly. I mean, switch used to look prettier than my computer. So I bought a Lian Li case. Pretty, and much more comfortable inside than the old ugly beige one.
Well, take the Creatures games for example. I was quite involved in that.
First, it was made by an extremely friendly team. We got to talk to programmers, who even offered help. There was something very nice about appearing a couple times on the official site.
Then, there were people who really liked the concept, but wanted to fix something. The initial creatures were rather dumb, this was noticeably improved. They originally couldn't live underwater or fly, this was also done. There were made dozens of new creature breeds that added lots of variety to the game.
Writing that kind of thing from scratch would have been *hard*. Currently I have some plans for trying something, but it's not going easy, so it seems that it'll have to be extremely modular, to let every developer try their favorite ideas without conflicting with everybody else.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, that's completely stupid.
I used to run a mail server with 128MB RAM and 256MB swap, just like you suggest. It mostly ran fine. However, then I set up spamassassin and procmail to download mail from my ISPs account.
Since the CPU and network were slow, spamassassin couldn't finish before a new mail was delivered, so the queue grew. Soon this consumed so much RAM that it started using swap, slowing things down even more, and making the queue grow even faster... this situation would get out of hand in less than 10 minutes.
The end result would be a computer swapping like mad, with a load average of 70, and completely unusable for at least 3 or 4 hours.
Nope, I didn't design it, I just maintain and extend it. I'm pretty happy with that too. Might not be the most exciting thing ever, but it's easy, and it pays.
:-)
Hint: If you can't earn money with royalties, work for hire. Or as you said, learn, evolve and grow
What the heck? It's definitely going to be that way if you sit on your ass, look with despair at the situation and tell people that we'd better get used to it.
How about complaining for a change? If enough people complain, it will make a difference. Call whoever is responsible, for example.
Heh. I recommend you to move from this obsolete form of earning money. Here I couldn't care less if somebody distributes my work. I get paid to write code for a vertical app for a company. They're almost certainly not going to sell it, and if they do it's not really of my concern.
That Apple is a big company with enough money to pay lots of consultants doesn't mean it can't make mistakes. Perhaps you have a point, but since you haven't provided any arguments I can't agree with you at the moment.
The application should simply crash, and stop executing completely. Alternatively, you could get it restarted from the beginning.
Think of it, your program segfaulted because somehow the CPU tried to execute something that was marked as "don't execute". How do you recover from that? It should be pretty clear that either it's a bug, or an exploit, and in both cases it makes little sense to recover since there's no guarantee that you can get the program back to a good state.
The solution to make stable programs is to write them in some language that's not exploitable. If you can't overflow a buffer, or somehow force the program to try to execute something you want, then this mechanism will not be used, and your program remain running.
And to add something to it, one of the things that gets the most on my nerves is that educating users about this is near impossible. Even the ones with some brains.
Here my friend is pretty smart and although not an expert would probably understand simple security measures pretty well. The problem is that to explain it all to him I'd have to give him a long lecture where I'd come up as a paranoid security nazi, and give him the impression that I'm just exaggerating.
Seriously. I'd have to explain: The thing about the firewall coming up after the connection, the trojans, adware, and spyware, that this "cute" Bonzi Buddy thing is bad, that comet cursor is also bad, that just accepting the request to install an ActiveX is bad, that if you have a direct internet connection you can get infected before you can download an update, that despite the Service Pack being a 30MB download he's got to get it before doing anything else, that in some rare cases it will leave the machine unbootable, that Outlook Express is really problematic, that installing the latest IE version still means you have to get the updates for it separately, that running as Administrator is a pretty bad idea, even though using a normal account is a huge pain in the ass...
In comparison, security measures for Linux machines for normal users are actually simple! Don't run as root. If you install from the network, you're almost certainly getting the latest patched versions. If you install from CD, and don't install every server available, the updates will be small. And there are infinitely less places where you can be attacked.
Uhh... that's the thing, plugging in a new machine often DOES make it start crashing! Due to Blaster, for example.
Now, as somebody interested in security, I completely agree that users should have some understanding about how things work and not be complete morons. However... all this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that a newly installed Windows box can be broken into in about 20 ways, most of them completely automated, within minutes.
Even the greatest security specialist can make the simple mistake of turning on a recently reformatted machine. That it's enough with this little to get infected is just NOT RIGHT! What's worse, s/he might not even have a better option.
I perfectly knew about this when I was trying to eradicate Sasser at a friend's home, but he's got an USB ADSL modem which connects directly to his recently reformatted computer, and downloading patches in those conditions is pretty hard.
Hey, you can perfect this and make a self-defense device out of it!
Just tape both pennies to a glove. Then you should be able to touch people and shock them instead.
Well, I run Gentoo here. I don't really know about Slackware. On many distributions you can install with SMP by choosing the kernel from the menu that you get when you boot from the CD. In most the default is an UP kernel. Most also come with packages, kernel-image-2.6.3-1-686-smp in Debian.
/proc/config.gz. Then just:
/usr/src/linux/ /proc/config.gz > .config
/boot/
If slackware comes with a 2.6 kernel, then you might have your current configuration in
cd
zcat
make xconfig
(enable smp)
make bzImage
cp arch/i368/boot/bzImage
update grub/lilo
This way you can get your current kernel, just with SMP support without having to go through the whole config process.
BTW, Creative doesn't appear to support SMP in Windows. I think ALSA in Linux does though, and my sound card works fine in Win2K too.
True, but I would expect that it'd have at least some effect. Maybe it won't keep it charged, but if it can add an hour of run time, it'd still be very nice.
I've just googled around and there are indeed standalone panels, but that has the inconvenience of having to carry an extra thing around, instead of having it integrated.
That's only if your equipment needs an awful amount of energy.
According to some simple calculations I did a while ago, my laptop uses about 25W. My laptop's 30x23 cm. So, if I'm right, a panel of that size would produce about 70W.
So, with some luck, if I attached a solar panel to the back of my screen, and sat in some sunny place, I could have my battery not ever run out? Why didn't anybody try this yet?
In fact, this makes me really curious! When I replace this old laptop, I think I could try this experiment. If anybody has any comments about this idea, please reply!
Used some old Linux distribution maybe? Here everything works perfectly.
Dual Athlon 2000+: Works
Tyan Tiger MPX board: Works, random generator and network support included
Terratec DMX X-Fire 1024 sound card: works
GeForce FX 5600: Works
Logitech Cordless desktop mouse and keyboard: works
USB 2.0 card: works
USB hard disk: works
USB hub: works
CompactFlash card reader: works
MP3 player (Flash): works
HP LaserJet 1010: works
Aiptec tablet: works
My ancient laptop (Toshiba 470CDT) also works, power management and network included.
Linux was a pain to get to work in 1997. Now it works pretty well. I had more problems with Windows 2000 on the Athlon than with Linux.
Probably because smart mail servers will always ensure that the file has been written to disk before confirming delivery. In these conditions, gigabytes of cache won't help at all, the mail server's still waiting for the disk.
The advantage of these systems would be that they're insanely fast, and have a battery in case power is lost. Since they emulate a hard disk, the mail server thinks everything has been safely written, and since there is a battery this works pretty well.
And this is exactly something that I miss. DS is pretty, but that's all that it really is. Nox was very diablo-like but it was fun because it was challenging and actually required some ability - mousing ability as you said.
Games like BG2 on the other hand, are won through thinking - knowing what skills to apply where, how to use your characters the best, etc.
DS requires no ability of any kind at all. Attack is automated. There's no need to think. The campaign is braindead - no real story of any kind I could see from the first few hours. Somehow they made something even more boring than Diablo, where at least some ability was needed.
Ah, come on, not this stupid argument again.
So you're basically claiming that if the terrorists want us to do anything and we do that, we're automatically obeying the terrorists? For example, suppose some prominent fascist argues that we should give more money to public schools. Should we say "no" just because we'd be agreeing with a fascist?
This happened not because the terrorists wanted it. It happened because the current president was an utter moron, and a puppet of Bush to boot. He made it completely evident what his priorities were by urging everybody to condemn ETA before there was any proper investigation. Sure ETA is bad, but it's not automatically responsible for everything bad that happens in Spain, and blaming it for things it didn't do will only result in investigating the wrong organization.
So, the moment Aznar demostrated his priorities, people instantly went with his direct adversary, who of course used the opportunity to say that he never wanted that war, and plans to remove the troops. This is what everybody wanted anyway, NOBODY in Spain wanted that war. There were huge protests against it.
I used several naming systems over time. Normally, a different way per network, and names are picked trying to be appropiate.
/etc/issue, but oddly enough nobody seems to know who that is.
Which in the current one is:
Internal network: Alice in Wonderland
Alice (This one, dual Athlon MP 2000+), Cheshire (vmware virtual machine), Bill (Windows computer), Dormouse (router)
DMZ: Sylvie and Bruno
Sylvie (web, ftp, etc server), Warden (router)
Mobile devices LAN: Chip & Dale
Gadget (laptop, development, some work), Jack (router), Chip (PDA when I get it)
To make it all odder, every computer has ASCII art of the appropiate character, if I could find it. People find it a bit strange that I have a full screen ASCII image of Gadget Hackwrench in
We tend to trust our things more than somebody else's.
For example, a simple example: If at an exam it turns out I don't have a pen and borrow one, I will always check if it writes. I never do that with my own pen since I'm pretty sure it does write well.
Same way, I take notes on my P200 laptop , instead of using one of the much more powerful computers (Pentium 3 at least), because it's my laptop, it's configured the way I like it, and I know every single quirk it has. I know how long it takes to turn on, that nothing unexpected will happen when I need to start typing. I also know that I can save at the latest moment without worrying about the quality of the floppy I'm saving to.
I bring my optical mouse too. I could use the mouse from the class, but those are ball mice and often too dirty to be comfortable.
The same way, it's uncomfortable when I have to deal with my brother's computer because it doesn't have things in the same place (explorer in quick launch bar), often has lots of spyware, the directory structure is strange, it lacks the latest updates, etc...
I think it's nothing strange really. It's just that computers are one of the few things that are often shared. Many people almost certainly have a similar bond to their car, and even things like CDs (I know for sure my Gentoo CD works), pens, calculators, cell phones, keyboards, and even books. I wouldn't replace my quite old and somewhat ragged LOTR book with a new prettier one, don't ask me why.
There are some. Look for games made by small developers. For example, check Starscape by Moonpod. Works on any video card with more than 16 MB, looks great. Made by just 3 guys.
So I looked at it, and thought, what the heck, I can live with $30 less, and for once somebody is doing something fun and quite original.
That was a problem in the beginning. Then fortunately lots of games started being written with extenders like DOS4GW.
I tried writing code with them myself a bit, it was wonderful. Knowing that the machine is 100% dedicated to your game with no possible interruptions was great, all while having a nice flat memory model.
I got a Yamaha OPL3SA2 to work on my old Toshiba laptop, with ALSA on kernel 2.4
It's a bit of a pain though. Basically, you go into the BIOS, enable sound support, check the list of ports, IRQs, and DMA, write it down, and then pass it all to the module as parameters, disabling autodetection.
After that, it works just fine. If you need more details just reply to this post.
For me they'd probably apply the maximum sentence. I not only log my conversations, I also parse them with a Perl script and store them in a mySQL database.
This is because I have a rather bad memory, and it also comes very handy sometimes. For example, it's useful to find URL that appeared in a conversation, find what exactly somebody said about some subject without having to dig in all my logs (having 4 different places with logs is quite a nuisance), and it's especially useful to find things like birthdays and addresses.
I think the current database has somewhere about 100K rows.
Not every female character in a game is weak and stupid. Take Jaheira from Baldur's Gate 2. Now that was a good game. There was pretty much every kind of character in it. If you want a more stereotyped girl, there was Aerie. Of course Jaheira didn't like her at all.
There are some fun characters in other games too. For example, in Kabuki Klash (NeoGeo game) there's Tsunade. There's something funny about repeatedly beating up somebody with a 9 year old girl that uses a big battle axe.
Huh? Seriously, beige is horribly ugly. I mean, switch used to look prettier than my computer. So I bought a Lian Li case. Pretty, and much more comfortable inside than the old ugly beige one.
Well, take the Creatures games for example. I was quite involved in that.
First, it was made by an extremely friendly team. We got to talk to programmers, who even offered help. There was something very nice about appearing a couple times on the official site.
Then, there were people who really liked the concept, but wanted to fix something. The initial creatures were rather dumb, this was noticeably improved. They originally couldn't live underwater or fly, this was also done. There were made dozens of new creature breeds that added lots of variety to the game.
Writing that kind of thing from scratch would have been *hard*. Currently I have some plans for trying something, but it's not going easy, so it seems that it'll have to be extremely modular, to let every developer try their favorite ideas without conflicting with everybody else.