A couple of days after some Lawyers get together for a class-action suit alleging that Pentium IVs are slower than the AMD competition, new BAPCO tests 'prove' that the Pentium IV was quicker all along. Nice one Intel. At the very least, this should muddy the waters with respect to which one is quicker being a matter of opinion. I use a 7 Watt Via C3 as opposed to one of the 60 Watt P4/Athlone and do not really care either way.
That is making some assumptions. I hired 2 a couple of years ago to work on a mainframe, supporting a package vaguely like Oracle. Only your last suggestion would have been at all feasable since I did not know that package myself. For the record, one was useless and the second was his replacement. The replacement was first class. From the first one, I learnt to find out how the candidate's general knowledge of the OS was; the second one taught me a lot of my early knowledge of Linux. Unintended side-effects:)
At a guess, the executives would not even need to go to oz. If their companies indulged in such activities against computers in Australia, then conspiracy laws could be applied. In an extreme case, the company could be held to be a criminal organisation.
Wonder if that would really work.
Your 'small price to pay' would be a monster if it really happened and a lawyer could prove that someone in the chain of responsibility had said that.
Having said that, when was the last collision in the NY system? If the event is sufficiently unlikely then flywheels could still be a good move.
We are getting new (modern) Compaq's in about 6 weeks so I'll wait and see. The company take a dim view of non-standard software (the old PCs have no CD and no Floppy) so this may be a political problem. Hopefully Netscape 6.x3 will be allowed but this is a reserve solution.
Sorry, I just tried that link with my home-page and it was not a success. It abandoned processing at line 1, presumably because some characters were lower-case when it was expecting uppercase, or vice versa.
It even told me what it wanted to see. Apart from the case, the only difference was that I have html 4.0 transitional and it's example was 4.01 transitional.
I have never had a browser have this problem, believe it to be standards compliant and am not about to 'fix' it to make a broken validator happy.
Two reasons why I still use Netscape 4 a lot:
At work (also a large company), we have no choice. They do not allow IE for security reasons and my P166 with 80MB memory would be totally inadequate for the lizard. The OS is NT 4.0 and the thing grinds to a complete halt if I use more than 3 of (Lotus Notes, Netscape, Acrobat 5, M$ Word 97 and Excel 97) at once. I also have a terminal emulator for a mainframe running the whole time, but that has a small footprint.
The other reason was when I was connecting my laptop through a 2.4 kernel machine with IP forwarding recently. Mozilla and the Konq refused to work, Netscape 4.7x was just fine. No idea why, but I was glad I had not de-installed it.
Links 1 to 6 look fine (I recognise some of those addresses and they are clean) but 7 looks very nasty and I am not about to click on it to find out.
Re:standardized locations, etc.
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Package A will have been written for and tested on the API as it was defined at the time. The author(s) could not know what part of the API was going to become obsolete. I work on mainframes where things are a lot more stable, but occasionally some interface is changed and something has to be done. If we are lucky (most cases), that 'something' is just recompiling. If it goes beyond that, then most times the software vendor warns us of impending problems.
Konqueror dies on you? - Netscape 4.xx has always been unstable under Linux. - Netscape 6.1 (?) was pretty good under SuSE 7.3 but the SuSE 8.0 version is totally unstable - The new Mozilla is almost as bad (it was pretty solid before) Only the Konk still cuts it for me - the only browser I use that still works fine under 8.0
You wish Now it is time for my rant. This comes in late because I had to re-install the whole thing because I could no longer get into X11 after having installed Open Office 1.0 yesterday morning.
- Do NOT install SuSE if you have a wheel-mouse. If you get a 'spurious 8259a interrupt: IRQ7' then that it is the cause. Other symptoms were hanging during the install of icons-xpm or 'hot plugging services'. Installation on that laptop was a real pain.
- If you are updating from a previous level, make sure you do not have any partitions mounted read-only. Yast2 cannot handle them. At least the error-message is relatively friendly.
- After having installed Open Office 1.0 yesterday, I could no longer get into X11. I tried everything and was finally reduced to a controlled 'format and re-install'. The re-install hung twice. Plan B was then to install 7.3 (a minimal system) and upgrade. That went fine, except that Yast2 died between CDs 4 and 5 while I was adding the special software I need. This left me having to re-install about half of the software again because the new stuff had not been configured.
It works now. I am sticking to the slightly older Open Office version that came on the CDs.
SuSE changed a lot of configuration stuff between 7.3 and 8.0 (rc.config is virtually dead) so I can understand only wishing to maintain one configuration tool, but Yast1 was always easier to use than Yast2.
Red Hat 5.1 (I think, somewhere around then) drove me to using SuSE. Much more like this and I might be looking around again.
The production servers I run will be staying on 7.3.
What is going on? When I try to look at the original article my browser hangs up. It is a Mozilla built about 25 days ago (not sure exactly what version) and it came with SuSE 8.0.
This is very worrying - I recognise just two names on those lists. Ursula LeGuin and Vernor Vinge. The ones I knew are dying off (Zelazny, Herbert, Asimov, Heinlein . ..)
This whole article seems to come from inside IBM.
While I am prepared to believe that the company are behind GMR (I remember the original announcement), it seems a bit implausible that they invented all other forms of magnetic mass storage as well - something that this article implies.
Remington Rand bought up the ENIAC in the early 1960s and tried to make a commercial proposition of it. They must have used some form of mass storage apart from 12" floppies.
This sounds a bit like Al Gore inventing the Internet (which he apparently never actually claimed anyway).
When I saw the name Vinge, I thought you meant Joan. Her visions of worlds dominated by drugs lords, Caste systems and big business are coming true already. It is very nihilistic (if that is a word) but very accurate.
I used to use RedHat and now use SuSE. I have often had show-stopper problems with the vendor-updated kernels that were simply not there in the vanilla kernels. Random hangs, that sort of stuff.
The vanilla 2.4.x kernels seem to be generally less stable than the 2.2 and 2.0 kernels, possibly because there is no 2.5 series yet.
Recently I have had problems with 2 NIC drivers, the Vortex driver had problems on dual-boot machines starting around 2.4.5 and another network card simply hangs up the machine when I use it. The 8390 driver is the second one. In the end I just junked that card (after having spoken to someone in Britain who could reproduce the problem with the same driver).
The vortex got fixed. Could not even find the maintainer for the 8390.
I saw which file was causing the problem and simply turned that option off. Very bad move.
Writing to my zip drive (imm, not ppa) now no longer works properly. I can say 'sync' and even umount the thing while it is writing and it simply does it. What it does not do is wait for my data to be written.
It is back to 2.4.10 for me, even the 2.4.11 bug is preferable to this. I will be upgrading to SuSE 7.3 at the end of the week anyway and it uses 2.4.10 so this is not just defeatism.
1. Gulf war - was decided by air power (we do deserts, not mountains)
2. Somalia - went very badly indeed.
3. Haiti was not really comparable, it was more peacekeeping than a real shooting war.
4. Bosnia - ditto.
5. Kosovo. This was essentially fought as an air war against non-military targets, attacks on military targets went less well because the Serbs were good at hiding things. Let's not talk about old maps of central Belgrade . . .
The second phase is more than simple peacekeeping, but neither of the parties involved have any reason to chew the Americans up (even if they could). Don't get me wrong, that particular action took place a few years too late.
The Korean war was even before I was born, I agree that the US forces aquitted themselves very well there.
As for the exercises, they are pretty irrelevant when it comes to assessing fighting strength. Can you imagine the sort of fighting that would be necessary in Afghanistan being available in an Egyptian desert? Only if the Muslim Brotherhood got involved, and they would not be there for fun.
The one that was closest to Afghanistan in terms of what was needed is Somalia. That operation ended when the UN (not just the US) left at high speed with their tails between their collective legs. I believe Afghanistan could be much much worse, unless any invaders can win over the non-Taliban locals.
Did you see that report by an Iranian filmmaker in the replies to this theme? It took me 30 minutes to read (very long) but makes the scale of the disaster that is Afghanistan much clearer. One million people there are on the verge of starvation after the war against the Russians and now a 4-year drought. If those people can be fed and convinced that the invaders are their friends, the Taliban could be dogmeat within months.
Loyalties can also be flexible, a lot of people joined the Taliban because they were winning and it was the best way of staying alive. Then again, what do I know? I know people who have been there years ago but by the time I could have gone, the Russians were there.
The IRA sometimes rang up and warned the security forces, but sometimes they did not. Sometimes they claimed the bomb was somewhere else.
British soldiers (and civilians) were frequently just shot.
Having said that, the Army were originally sent in to protect the Catholics there. Unfortunately, their officers decided that they had a lot more in common with the other side.
What really set the IRA up then was 'Bloody Sunday' in 1967, when the paratroopers killed 6 people at a demonstration. The UK Government under Heath set up an inquiry which was always seen as a whitewash for the authorities - the paras claimed that they had come under fire. The inquiry decided to believe them, or at least accept this version.
One attack on a Moscow block of flats was foiled when the police stepped in.
The people setting it up turned out to be working for the government (they were secret service agents).
They claimed that it was an exercise to see if the police were being as alert as they should be.
The Chechens had no sensible reason (ok, that does not always count for a lot) to be going for Moscow at the time, but Putin (yup, ex secret service) founded his bid for the Presidency on his 'counter attack' in Chechenia.
Conspiracy theories are usually garbage. Some are real.
The next source of Muslim extremists is Algeria, the government are using 'Ukranian tactics' there against the Muslims.
There is (or at least, was until recently) a facility in Georgia which trains foreign military personell in counter insurgency techniques.
A number of third world dictators (most now deposed) have been there. The death squads in a number of Central American countries are mostly run by graduates of this school.
Remember the 'Renamo' in Mozambique, they were backed by the South Africans to destabilise the country and to weaken the ANC. They were a bunch of terrorists. The US backed them while Reagan was president.
Take Angola and Savimbi's Unita. The only difference between Renamo and Unita is that Unita are still active, they finance themselves by smuggling diamonds nowadays.
The Contras were essentially founded by the US. Do you remember when the CIA dropped mines into the sea just off Managua's harbor. That was a terrorist attack aimed at civilian shipping.
All this is over 12 years ago and stopped as soon as that maniac Reagan was replaced by Bush, but back then the US routinely trained and sponsored terrorist organisations. The current President cames from the same ideological corner, but has yet to make any moves in this direction. Hopefully he never will.
Al-Qaeda is not directly about the US support of Israel, although that certainly helps their recruiting. At least one of the hijackers was from Lebanon. The US left there after a suicide attack killed a large number of marines, Israel (and specifically, Sharon) were heavily involved there.
One of the suicide pilots was from Egypt, what apparently radicalised him was the crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood a few years back. Egypt depends heavily on US money.
Al-Qaeda has a lot to do with US foreign policy, otherwise they would have gone for Russia or someone else.
As to the Taliban doing things to women that would make Himmler and Gobbels go white with shock, you underestimate Himmler. Read up on what that bunch got up to. I did over a number of years and was repeatedly shocked every time I thought I had plumbed the depths of their evil.
It being about Good and Evil makes it very easy to stop thinking and take sides, but I personally saw Reagan's foreign policies as being a reason to suspect that the devil might really exist. They were that bad. That insanity stopped the moment Papa Bush was inaugurated - something that really surprised me at the time.
- the Soviets were rusty.
Well, the US have not fought a ground war for a while now. Those that they did fight went extremely badly.
Since you think so highly of the SAS, look at this article written by one of their number who was out in Afghanistan 22 years ago training the locals: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4 260023,00.html
One of the reasons (apart from oil) why the US and UN were so happy to take on Iraq was that air power is worth a lot in a desert. That was also the reason they were so reluctant to get involved in Serbian hills. The 'war' in Serbia was won by using air-power against non-military targets and making life very unpleasant for the locals. That is not a promising option here.
Slashdot Mirror
A couple of days after some Lawyers get together for a class-action suit alleging that Pentium IVs are slower than the AMD competition, new BAPCO tests 'prove' that the Pentium IV was quicker all along.
Nice one Intel. At the very least, this should muddy the waters with respect to which one is quicker being a matter of opinion.
I use a 7 Watt Via C3 as opposed to one of the 60 Watt P4/Athlone and do not really care either way.
That is making some assumptions. :)
I hired 2 a couple of years ago to work on a mainframe, supporting a package vaguely like Oracle. Only your last suggestion would have been at all feasable since I did not know that package myself.
For the record, one was useless and the second was his replacement. The replacement was first class.
From the first one, I learnt to find out how the candidate's general knowledge of the OS was; the second one taught me a lot of my early knowledge of Linux.
Unintended side-effects
At a guess, the executives would not even need to go to oz. If their companies indulged in such activities against computers in Australia, then conspiracy laws could be applied. In an extreme case, the company could be held to be a criminal organisation.
Wonder if that would really work.
Your 'small price to pay' would be a monster if it really happened and a lawyer could prove that someone in the chain of responsibility had said that.
Having said that, when was the last collision in the NY system? If the event is sufficiently unlikely then flywheels could still be a good move.
That depends whose fault it is, and what that party does to clean up their act.
thanks.
bookmarked.
We are getting new (modern) Compaq's in about 6 weeks so I'll wait and see. The company take a dim view of non-standard software (the old PCs have no CD and no Floppy) so this may be a political problem. Hopefully Netscape 6.x3 will be allowed but this is a reserve solution.
Sorry, I just tried that link with my home-page and it was not a success. It abandoned processing at line 1, presumably because some characters were lower-case when it was expecting uppercase, or vice versa.
It even told me what it wanted to see. Apart from the case, the only difference was that I have html 4.0 transitional and it's example was 4.01 transitional.
I have never had a browser have this problem, believe it to be standards compliant and am not about to 'fix' it to make a broken validator happy.
Two reasons why I still use Netscape 4 a lot:
At work (also a large company), we have no choice. They do not allow IE for security reasons and my P166 with 80MB memory would be totally inadequate for the lizard. The OS is NT 4.0 and the thing grinds to a complete halt if I use more than 3 of (Lotus Notes, Netscape, Acrobat 5, M$ Word 97 and Excel 97) at once. I also have a terminal emulator for a mainframe running the whole time, but that has a small footprint.
The other reason was when I was connecting my laptop through a 2.4 kernel machine with IP forwarding recently. Mozilla and the Konq refused to work, Netscape 4.7x was just fine. No idea why, but I was glad I had not de-installed it.
Links 1 to 6 look fine (I recognise some of those addresses and they are clean) but 7 looks very nasty and I am not about to click on it to find out.
Package A will have been written for and tested on the API as it was defined at the time.
The author(s) could not know what part of the API was going to become obsolete.
I work on mainframes where things are a lot more stable, but occasionally some interface is changed and something has to be done. If we are lucky (most cases), that 'something' is just recompiling. If it goes beyond that, then most times the software vendor warns us of impending problems.
Konqueror dies on you?
- Netscape 4.xx has always been unstable under Linux.
- Netscape 6.1 (?) was pretty good under SuSE 7.3 but the SuSE 8.0 version is totally unstable
- The new Mozilla is almost as bad (it was pretty solid before)
Only the Konk still cuts it for me - the only browser I use that still works fine under 8.0
Now it is time for my rant. This comes in late because I had to re-install the whole thing because I could no longer get into X11 after having installed Open Office 1.0 yesterday morning.
- Do NOT install SuSE if you have a wheel-mouse. If you get a 'spurious 8259a interrupt: IRQ7' then that it is the cause. Other symptoms were hanging during the install of icons-xpm or 'hot plugging services'. Installation on that laptop was a real pain.
- If you are updating from a previous level, make sure you do not have any partitions mounted read-only. Yast2 cannot handle them. At least the error-message is relatively friendly.
- After having installed Open Office 1.0 yesterday, I could no longer get into X11. I tried everything and was finally reduced to a controlled 'format and re-install'. The re-install hung twice. Plan B was then to install 7.3 (a minimal system) and upgrade. That went fine, except that Yast2 died between CDs 4 and 5 while I was adding the special software I need. This left me having to re-install about half of the software again because the new stuff had not been configured.
It works now. I am sticking to the slightly older Open Office version that came on the CDs.
SuSE changed a lot of configuration stuff between 7.3 and 8.0 (rc.config is virtually dead) so I can understand only wishing to maintain one configuration tool, but Yast1 was always easier to use than Yast2.
Red Hat 5.1 (I think, somewhere around then) drove me to using SuSE. Much more like this and I might be looking around again.
The production servers I run will be staying on 7.3.
What is going on? When I try to look at the original article my browser hangs up. It is a Mozilla built about 25 days ago (not sure exactly what version) and it came with SuSE 8.0.
This is very worrying - I recognise just two names on those lists. Ursula LeGuin and Vernor Vinge. .)
The ones I knew are dying off (Zelazny, Herbert, Asimov, Heinlein . .
This whole article seems to come from inside IBM.
While I am prepared to believe that the company are behind GMR (I remember the original announcement), it seems a bit implausible that they invented all other forms of magnetic mass storage as well - something that this article implies.
Remington Rand bought up the ENIAC in the early 1960s and tried to make a commercial proposition of it. They must have used some form of mass storage apart from 12" floppies.
This sounds a bit like Al Gore inventing the Internet (which he apparently never actually claimed anyway).
The vanilla 2.4.x kernels seem to be generally less stable than the 2.2 and 2.0 kernels, possibly because there is no 2.5 series yet.
Recently I have had problems with 2 NIC drivers, the Vortex driver had problems on dual-boot machines starting around 2.4.5 and another network card simply hangs up the machine when I use it. The 8390 driver is the second one. In the end I just junked that card (after having spoken to someone in Britain who could reproduce the problem with the same driver).
The vortex got fixed. Could not even find the maintainer for the 8390.
I saw which file was causing the problem and simply turned that option off. Very bad move.
Writing to my zip drive (imm, not ppa) now no longer works properly. I can say 'sync' and even umount the thing while it is writing and it simply does it. What it does not do is wait for my data to be written.
It is back to 2.4.10 for me, even the 2.4.11 bug is preferable to this. I will be upgrading to SuSE 7.3 at the end of the week anyway and it uses 2.4.10 so this is not just defeatism.
1. Gulf war - was decided by air power (we do deserts, not mountains)
2. Somalia - went very badly indeed.
3. Haiti was not really comparable, it was more peacekeeping than a real shooting war.
4. Bosnia - ditto.
5. Kosovo. This was essentially fought as an air war against non-military targets, attacks on military targets went less well because the Serbs were good at hiding things. Let's not talk about old maps of central Belgrade . . .
The second phase is more than simple peacekeeping, but neither of the parties involved have any reason to chew the Americans up (even if they could). Don't get me wrong, that particular action took place a few years too late.
The Korean war was even before I was born, I agree that the US forces aquitted themselves very well there.
As for the exercises, they are pretty irrelevant when it comes to assessing fighting strength. Can you imagine the sort of fighting that would be necessary in Afghanistan being available in an Egyptian desert? Only if the Muslim Brotherhood got involved, and they would not be there for fun.
The one that was closest to Afghanistan in terms of what was needed is Somalia. That operation ended when the UN (not just the US) left at high speed with their tails between their collective legs. I believe Afghanistan could be much much worse, unless any invaders can win over the non-Taliban locals.
Did you see that report by an Iranian filmmaker in the replies to this theme? It took me 30 minutes to read (very long) but makes the scale of the disaster that is Afghanistan much clearer. One million people there are on the verge of starvation after the war against the Russians and now a 4-year drought. If those people can be fed and convinced that the invaders are their friends, the Taliban could be dogmeat within months.
Loyalties can also be flexible, a lot of people joined the Taliban because they were winning and it was the best way of staying alive. Then again, what do I know? I know people who have been there years ago but by the time I could have gone, the Russians were there.
Here's hoping it all works out for the best.
The IRA sometimes rang up and warned the security forces, but sometimes they did not. Sometimes they claimed the bomb was somewhere else.
British soldiers (and civilians) were frequently just shot.
Having said that, the Army were originally sent in to protect the Catholics there. Unfortunately, their officers decided that they had a lot more in common with the other side.
What really set the IRA up then was 'Bloody Sunday' in 1967, when the paratroopers killed 6 people at a demonstration. The UK Government under Heath set up an inquiry which was always seen as a whitewash for the authorities - the paras claimed that they had come under fire. The inquiry decided to believe them, or at least accept this version.
One attack on a Moscow block of flats was foiled when the police stepped in.
The people setting it up turned out to be working for the government (they were secret service agents).
They claimed that it was an exercise to see if the police were being as alert as they should be.
The Chechens had no sensible reason (ok, that does not always count for a lot) to be going for Moscow at the time, but Putin (yup, ex secret service) founded his bid for the Presidency on his 'counter attack' in Chechenia.
Conspiracy theories are usually garbage. Some are real.
The next source of Muslim extremists is Algeria, the government are using 'Ukranian tactics' there against the Muslims.
There is (or at least, was until recently) a facility in Georgia which trains foreign military personell in counter insurgency techniques.
A number of third world dictators (most now deposed) have been there. The death squads in a number of Central American countries are mostly run by graduates of this school.
Remember the 'Renamo' in Mozambique, they were backed by the South Africans to destabilise the country and to weaken the ANC. They were a bunch of terrorists. The US backed them while Reagan was president.
Take Angola and Savimbi's Unita. The only difference between Renamo and Unita is that Unita are still active, they finance themselves by smuggling diamonds nowadays.
The Contras were essentially founded by the US. Do you remember when the CIA dropped mines into the sea just off Managua's harbor. That was a terrorist attack aimed at civilian shipping.
All this is over 12 years ago and stopped as soon as that maniac Reagan was replaced by Bush, but back then the US routinely trained and sponsored terrorist organisations. The current President cames from the same ideological corner, but has yet to make any moves in this direction. Hopefully he never will.
Al-Qaeda is not directly about the US support of Israel, although that certainly helps their recruiting. At least one of the hijackers was from Lebanon. The US left there after a suicide attack killed a large number of marines, Israel (and specifically, Sharon) were heavily involved there.
One of the suicide pilots was from Egypt, what apparently radicalised him was the crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood a few years back. Egypt depends heavily on US money.
Al-Qaeda has a lot to do with US foreign policy, otherwise they would have gone for Russia or someone else.
As to the Taliban doing things to women that would make Himmler and Gobbels go white with shock, you underestimate Himmler. Read up on what that bunch got up to. I did over a number of years and was repeatedly shocked every time I thought I had plumbed the depths of their evil.
It being about Good and Evil makes it very easy to stop thinking and take sides, but I personally saw Reagan's foreign policies as being a reason to suspect that the devil might really exist. They were that bad. That insanity stopped the moment Papa Bush was inaugurated - something that really surprised me at the time.
A couple of comments on this:
4 260023,00.html
- the Soviets were rusty.
Well, the US have not fought a ground war for a while now. Those that they did fight went extremely badly.
Since you think so highly of the SAS, look at this article written by one of their number who was out in Afghanistan 22 years ago training the locals: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,
One of the reasons (apart from oil) why the US and UN were so happy to take on Iraq was that air power is worth a lot in a desert. That was also the reason they were so reluctant to get involved in Serbian hills. The 'war' in Serbia was won by using air-power against non-military targets and making life very unpleasant for the locals. That is not a promising option here.
They probably did have the market cornered. Unfortunately for them, there turned out to be no market.