You're thinking of a hub. Hubs are essentially repeaters and work at the lowest common speed. If you plug 10 and 100Mbps devices into a hub it will work at 10. Hubs also send the traffic to every cable, because they're dumb.
Switches, on the other hand, are smart and direct traffic only to the machine that's receiving it. This frees a lot of network resources and means there can be much more than 100Mbps passing through a switch. A hub won't let you have 5 computers talking to 5 other computers at 100Mbps, but a switch will. The 100Mbps ones are also able to handle different speeds. In a home network that means that if you have 5 computers at 100Mbps and an ADSL/cable router at 10Mbps your network won't slow down, and you'll be able to transfer data at 100Mbps between your computers.
In this case what it means is that the server computer can have a fast network card because it sends data to everybody, but since the clients don't need so much bandwidth they can use a 10Mbps card. It's also even somewhat safer because a single client can't saturate the server's connection due to bugs or mischevous students.
I'm not completely sure about Knoppix because I never used it, but I've heard it's very good. Debian looks like another good choice. Some things that are great about it is that stable is *stable* and security fixes are easy to automate, for example apt-get upgrade in cron using your own source to install only tested patches, and in general its configuration is very simple. Unlike Mandrake and other fancy distributions, Debian has very simple boot scripts and configuration, which makes it much easier to adapt it to your needs. It also has some great tools like make-kpkg that make it much easier to compile a kernel that will be installed on several computers.
Honestly, I don't care how many people use Windows. I'm just tired of people exagerating statistics for their own benefit. If you want to point how many people use it, fine, but say where you got that information from. Also, that poll was about the OS on the main computer. I know of many people who use Windows because they need it to work and play but have a Linux server in the corner. And AFAIK there are no reliable statistics about that.
You mean this poll? The one that says that Win2K is used by 40% and Linux by 33%? If you look at that poll you'll see that the sum of all the Windows systems is just 47%.
Now, I don't have anything people using windows (hell, I do), but please, stop lying about it. And your condescending tone doesn't impress me at all.
On a side note.. if we all just plug our cars into our house to charge it... electric companies then will have to produce more electricity.. then burning more of what ever fuel they use. Thus creating more polution.. or possibly some other environmental effect or danger even if your electric company doesn't produce from fossil fuels right..?
I'm pretty sure electric companies are much more efficent than a typical car motor. A huge plant gives way more space for technology and efficency than a tiny car. The same happens with solar and wind power. Of course creating a solar panel produces pollution, but if during its useful life it generates more energy than what a power plant could with the amount of pollution it took to create the panel, then it's a win.
Not really, this seems to be pretty common, and I'm almost sure it's not illegal. They know making a too good effort would be counter-productive, so they don't. It's pretty logical, too. When you're in the business of selling something you will never offer your customers the possibility of never needing it again.
Those companies will probably never release cure, just like car manufacturers won't make a car that never breaks or needs maintenance, or Microsoft make a complete version of Visual Basic (it always misses something important, like using user defined types in public methods or inheritance)
The second one works only until the rest of the companies find a cure. I'm sure as soon as you announce your cancer cure they'll put more effort into finding it, and after a while they will. And probably offer it at a cheaper price. Then you'll only get a share, just like in 1, but with less clients.
I'm sure all companies realize this, and probably prefer to stay in a situation where they have a not huge, but reliable income to risking losing a lot of clients in the end.
You missied the point. Currently there are many people with cancer. Companies have a choice:
1. Make something that doesn't kill it completely, making cancer reappear when the medicine isn't taken anymore. The potential clients are everybody with cancer, during the length of their lives.
2. Make something that kills it. The potential clients are everybody with cancer once. After that only the people with new cases of cancer.
No, I just found it was the sound driver. It tries to use ALSA and hangs while opening/dev/snd/dsp (approximate name), maybe due to the crappy AC97 sound I'm using. Telling it to use artsd works fine, but then it crashes when trying to play a video. This could have something to do with that I'm using a Debian package that doesn't have Windows codecs.
But still, that doesn't make it any better. It's not capable of starting up without extra help, and even after that has a bug somewhere. Which is why I still think it's not ready.
It's somewhat different. Your friend may have been right. For example if the power supply died after working for years and getting clogged with dust, or a power surge, or something that was your friend's fault. There's quite a difference from something not working because the quality was bad and because somebody broke it. If all Northstar computers were shipped with bad power supplies then I'd agree with you.
Now, I agree with you completely with what you said about software that doesn't work.
Thanks for pointing me to Xine, it looks very nice:-) Unfortunately it doesn't work. The window appears and then locks up. Which is mostly what I meant. Yeah, there's some support, but it's not very good yet.
Windowing system: What, KDE is not easy enough? My mom said "Well, looks just like Windows". Use a Windows theme for maximum similarity.
Installer: apt-get or RPM is much better than that buggy InstallShield thing. If something goes wrong during the initial stage InstallShield will leave a zero-size file in the installation folder, and the next time you run the installer it'll complain about not being able to initialize the uninstaller. Installation can proceed, losing the ability to uninstall. Unless you're smart enough to know about this and delete the file.
Filesharing: I don't see what's the problem with Samba, I'm pretty sure all recent distributions have a GUI to configure it
Video: okay, agree with you here
Support: Commercial distributions have offered support for ages, and I'm sure some other Linux users will be glad to help.
All the versions of Windows don't impress me much, he could also have installed all DOS versions from 1.0 to DOS 6.22. Lots of Linux distributions IMO don't count either, they're just different configurations of the same thing.
And he even missed some. I have used PC DOS and PTS-DOS. Solaris x86 is also missing.
That's interesting, but still makes me think that a 100GHz CPU would never be available in a consumer market. Sure, now the clock speed competition still continues, but how long? People seem to have already began to realize they don't need a 3GHz machine for word processing. Who will buy a 100GHz CPU when it fails to be noticeably faster than a 75GHz one? Besides, most supercomputers have multiple CPUs, and I can't think of any game that can use more than one CPU.
Of course if what you use it for is cracking encryption then it will be very useful. But for desktop use it will be mostly doing random memory accesses that will slow it to a crawl. Things like compression wouldn't be very fast on this CPU. For example, according to the bzip2 man page, the algorhitm accesses memory quite randomly, and cache memory speeds it up more than clock speed.
Also the CPU isn't the only thing that affects performance, the RAM speed and FSB will have to catch up. If (when) they do you'll still have to keep the CPU busy somehow, and unless you have all the data in RAM the hard disk will slow down it a lot. Of course maybe somebody will come up with something better than hard disks by that time.
I'm think it's more probable that before we reach 100GHz we'll need to start exploring other ways of speeding things up, like quantum computing, or multiple CPUs in desktop computers.
That's not exactly right. My knowledge of math isn't great, so somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but 1024 public key encryption can't be compared to 1024bit symmetric encryption. In public key crypto there are lots of holes in the key space. 384 bit public key crypto has already been cracked and 768 bit is probably not very secure.
Please explain? Suppose we do build a 100GHz CPU. Okay, the CPU itself works. Now, it will have a cache miss at some point. My DIMMs are at maybe 5cm from my CPU. That's 32 lost clock cycles just while the signal gets to the chip and comes back from it. At 4Ghz a clock cycle should be already lost due to this delay.
So what's the point of making a CPU so fast? Even if it gets to fit into 3mm how much cache can we put there?
Maybe it uses devfs? devfsd will try to modprobe everything you try to access in/dev. If you're feeling really curious, you could replace modprobe with a wrapper shell script and write the output of pstree to a file from it.
Well, that might be mostly true, but Windows is something almost everybody has, and at the same time something that almost everybody hates. Newbies blame the computer not knowing it's the OS though.
I've got a Creative Webcam 5 (USB). It gives a good image during the day but the results are pretty bad at night. It's directly supported by the Linux kernel("USB Philips Cameras" option), but to get a bigger image you'll have to load a closed source driver. Without it it will work just fine, but only give you a 160x120 image.
If you meant a wireless one, then I don't know. Just see what chips are supported by the kernel and then search google to find what cameras have it
IIRC the first 3D cards were accelerator cards. They worked together with a 2D card and took over when 3D was required. But as you can see they weren't very popular and were replaced by the all in one ones.
Well, I'm pretty sure that with a large enough wireless network Internet use would decrease. For example, I use a *tiny* part of the internet. I visit few websites. In my case, the wireless network would be my new place to be, where I'd chat with friends and share my files. The big files I need (Debian mirrors) would be replicated quickly. The Internet then would be only used to talk to my friends, as I'm sure a wireless network would need a lot of development to reach Australia from Spain.
Besides, a wireless network offers awesome possibilities. Think for example about having Slashdot on a wireless network. No ISP bills! And much more bandwidth than most people can get. Here I'm hearing the town hall is planning to enable wireless in my area so that I can have free internet access from the park. I'm sure that sooner or later wireless networks will be everywhere.
What ISP? If I understood correctly, there's nothing that's stopping me from buying wireless equipment, connecting it to a mail server and putting a few CGIs on it to let anybody have an account. No ISPs, and no bills to be paid with the exception of electricity.
If I offer a mail server, somebody else gives a web server, a few people set up chat servers and so on we could have a new network pretty soon. People could link it to the internet, but if it got big enough it wouldn't be really necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
You're thinking of a hub. Hubs are essentially repeaters and work at the lowest common speed. If you plug 10 and 100Mbps devices into a hub it will work at 10. Hubs also send the traffic to every cable, because they're dumb.
Switches, on the other hand, are smart and direct traffic only to the machine that's receiving it. This frees a lot of network resources and means there can be much more than 100Mbps passing through a switch. A hub won't let you have 5 computers talking to 5 other computers at 100Mbps, but a switch will. The 100Mbps ones are also able to handle different speeds. In a home network that means that if you have 5 computers at 100Mbps and an ADSL/cable router at 10Mbps your network won't slow down, and you'll be able to transfer data at 100Mbps between your computers.
In this case what it means is that the server computer can have a fast network card because it sends data to everybody, but since the clients don't need so much bandwidth they can use a 10Mbps card. It's also even somewhat safer because a single client can't saturate the server's connection due to bugs or mischevous students.
I'm not completely sure about Knoppix because I never used it, but I've heard it's very good. Debian looks like another good choice. Some things that are great about it is that stable is *stable* and security fixes are easy to automate, for example apt-get upgrade in cron using your own source to install only tested patches, and in general its configuration is very simple. Unlike Mandrake and other fancy distributions, Debian has very simple boot scripts and configuration, which makes it much easier to adapt it to your needs. It also has some great tools like make-kpkg that make it much easier to compile a kernel that will be installed on several computers.
47% is less than half
</pedantic>
Honestly, I don't care how many people use Windows. I'm just tired of people exagerating statistics for their own benefit. If you want to point how many people use it, fine, but say where you got that information from. Also, that poll was about the OS on the main computer. I know of many people who use Windows because they need it to work and play but have a Linux server in the corner. And AFAIK there are no reliable statistics about that.
Now, I don't have anything people using windows (hell, I do), but please, stop lying about it. And your condescending tone doesn't impress me at all.
I'm pretty sure electric companies are much more efficent than a typical car motor. A huge plant gives way more space for technology and efficency than a tiny car. The same happens with solar and wind power. Of course creating a solar panel produces pollution, but if during its useful life it generates more energy than what a power plant could with the amount of pollution it took to create the panel, then it's a win.
Not really, this seems to be pretty common, and I'm almost sure it's not illegal. They know making a too good effort would be counter-productive, so they don't. It's pretty logical, too. When you're in the business of selling something you will never offer your customers the possibility of never needing it again.
Those companies will probably never release cure, just like car manufacturers won't make a car that never breaks or needs maintenance, or Microsoft make a complete version of Visual Basic (it always misses something important, like using user defined types in public methods or inheritance)
The second one works only until the rest of the companies find a cure. I'm sure as soon as you announce your cancer cure they'll put more effort into finding it, and after a while they will. And probably offer it at a cheaper price. Then you'll only get a share, just like in 1, but with less clients.
I'm sure all companies realize this, and probably prefer to stay in a situation where they have a not huge, but reliable income to risking losing a lot of clients in the end.
You missied the point. Currently there are many people with cancer. Companies have a choice:
1. Make something that doesn't kill it completely, making cancer reappear when the medicine isn't taken anymore. The potential clients are everybody with cancer, during the length of their lives.
2. Make something that kills it. The potential clients are everybody with cancer once. After that only the people with new cases of cancer.
Which is more profitable?
No, I just found it was the sound driver. It tries to use ALSA and hangs while opening /dev/snd/dsp (approximate name), maybe due to the crappy AC97 sound I'm using. Telling it to use artsd works fine, but then it crashes when trying to play a video. This could have something to do with that I'm using a Debian package that doesn't have Windows codecs.
But still, that doesn't make it any better. It's not capable of starting up without extra help, and even after that has a bug somewhere. Which is why I still think it's not ready.
It's somewhat different. Your friend may have been right. For example if the power supply died after working for years and getting clogged with dust, or a power surge, or something that was your friend's fault. There's quite a difference from something not working because the quality was bad and because somebody broke it. If all Northstar computers were shipped with bad power supplies then I'd agree with you.
Now, I agree with you completely with what you said about software that doesn't work.
Thanks for pointing me to Xine, it looks very nice :-) Unfortunately it doesn't work. The window appears and then locks up. Which is mostly what I meant. Yeah, there's some support, but it's not very good yet.
Huh? Linux has almost all of that. Let's see:
Trashcan: This article
Windowing system: What, KDE is not easy enough? My mom said "Well, looks just like Windows". Use a Windows theme for maximum similarity.
Installer: apt-get or RPM is much better than that buggy InstallShield thing. If something goes wrong during the initial stage InstallShield will leave a zero-size file in the installation folder, and the next time you run the installer it'll complain about not being able to initialize the uninstaller. Installation can proceed, losing the ability to uninstall. Unless you're smart enough to know about this and delete the file.
Filesharing: I don't see what's the problem with Samba, I'm pretty sure all recent distributions have a GUI to configure it
Video: okay, agree with you here
Support: Commercial distributions have offered support for ages, and I'm sure some other Linux users will be glad to help.
Oh, I'm sure something could be done about that. Maybe something like vmware or dosemu could get it to work
All the versions of Windows don't impress me much, he could also have installed all DOS versions from 1.0 to DOS 6.22. Lots of Linux distributions IMO don't count either, they're just different configurations of the same thing.
And he even missed some. I have used PC DOS and PTS-DOS. Solaris x86 is also missing.
That's interesting, but still makes me think that a 100GHz CPU would never be available in a consumer market. Sure, now the clock speed competition still continues, but how long? People seem to have already began to realize they don't need a 3GHz machine for word processing. Who will buy a 100GHz CPU when it fails to be noticeably faster than a 75GHz one? Besides, most supercomputers have multiple CPUs, and I can't think of any game that can use more than one CPU.
Of course if what you use it for is cracking encryption then it will be very useful. But for desktop use it will be mostly doing random memory accesses that will slow it to a crawl. Things like compression wouldn't be very fast on this CPU. For example, according to the bzip2 man page, the algorhitm accesses memory quite randomly, and cache memory speeds it up more than clock speed.
Also the CPU isn't the only thing that affects performance, the RAM speed and FSB will have to catch up. If (when) they do you'll still have to keep the CPU busy somehow, and unless you have all the data in RAM the hard disk will slow down it a lot. Of course maybe somebody will come up with something better than hard disks by that time.
I'm think it's more probable that before we reach 100GHz we'll need to start exploring other ways of speeding things up, like quantum computing, or multiple CPUs in desktop computers.
That's not exactly right. My knowledge of math isn't great, so somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but 1024 public key encryption can't be compared to 1024bit symmetric encryption. In public key crypto there are lots of holes in the key space. 384 bit public key crypto has already been cracked and 768 bit is probably not very secure.
Please explain? Suppose we do build a 100GHz CPU. Okay, the CPU itself works. Now, it will have a cache miss at some point. My DIMMs are at maybe 5cm from my CPU. That's 32 lost clock cycles just while the signal gets to the chip and comes back from it. At 4Ghz a clock cycle should be already lost due to this delay.
So what's the point of making a CPU so fast? Even if it gets to fit into 3mm how much cache can we put there?
Maybe it uses devfs? devfsd will try to modprobe everything you try to access in /dev. If you're feeling really curious, you could replace modprobe with a wrapper shell script and write the output of pstree to a file from it.
You mean like the one in the Windows taskbar? Apple might have money, but I doubt they're very interested in suing Microsoft for such a tiny feature.
Well, that might be mostly true, but Windows is something almost everybody has, and at the same time something that almost everybody hates. Newbies blame the computer not knowing it's the OS though.
I've got a Creative Webcam 5 (USB). It gives a good image during the day but the results are pretty bad at night. It's directly supported by the Linux kernel("USB Philips Cameras" option), but to get a bigger image you'll have to load a closed source driver. Without it it will work just fine, but only give you a 160x120 image.
If you meant a wireless one, then I don't know. Just see what chips are supported by the kernel and then search google to find what cameras have it
I just gave the URL to a friend and the reply was "Ew... freak! o_o"
IIRC the first 3D cards were accelerator cards. They worked together with a 2D card and took over when 3D was required. But as you can see they weren't very popular and were replaced by the all in one ones.
Well, I'm pretty sure that with a large enough wireless network Internet use would decrease. For example, I use a *tiny* part of the internet. I visit few websites. In my case, the wireless network would be my new place to be, where I'd chat with friends and share my files. The big files I need (Debian mirrors) would be replicated quickly. The Internet then would be only used to talk to my friends, as I'm sure a wireless network would need a lot of development to reach Australia from Spain.
Besides, a wireless network offers awesome possibilities. Think for example about having Slashdot on a wireless network. No ISP bills! And much more bandwidth than most people can get. Here I'm hearing the town hall is planning to enable wireless in my area so that I can have free internet access from the park. I'm sure that sooner or later wireless networks will be everywhere.
What ISP? If I understood correctly, there's nothing that's stopping me from buying wireless equipment, connecting it to a mail server and putting a few CGIs on it to let anybody have an account. No ISPs, and no bills to be paid with the exception of electricity.
If I offer a mail server, somebody else gives a web server, a few people set up chat servers and so on we could have a new network pretty soon. People could link it to the internet, but if it got big enough it wouldn't be really necessary.