There seems to be a growing obsession with the use of audio streams on the Web. Now, I know its justified in some cases, but what are the benefits here? Certainly, it means I will never know what is said (I can't really listen to all 21 minutes at the office, and I don't currently have a connection at home).
Sure, an occasional recording of the free software song might be fun (at least for some), but I like the Web as a primarily-text medium.
Interesting you should mention it... but that's another case of a previously-thought-to-be-useless tissue turned out to play a part in the immune system.
'course, they only found this out after mine was gone.
I'm typing on one right now (running `potato' Debian). Seriously, they seem to be one of the best options around if you want GNU/Linux on the move. It's just a shame that I have an old desktop machine sitting next to me, which is basically acting as a modem server:(.
I've been trying to get information for writing a driver for a while now. I get the feeling that the modem code itself does have restrictions on it which would probably make a public release out of the question BUT as far as I can tell, most (all?) of the critical algorithms are implemented in DSP machine code, and there would be no reason to recompile this for a Linux driver. Can anyone else comment on this?
The problem, of course, is the fact that AMD and Cyrix probably do not have the resources to fund/promote similar efforts, so this does end up being a means for Intel to un-level the playing field.
Hmmm, AMD et al. may not be as big as Intel, but they're not exactly tiny, either. I think you'll find that they could afford to fund stuff like this if they really wanted to. Perhaps Intel just have more creative marketing strategists... Also remember that the Open Source OSes tend to be seen primarily as server systems at the moment, and until now AMD haven't really been aiming for that end of the market. Of course, the K7 changes all that, so maybe we'll see something interesting from them soon.
No, the 23*6 was referring to NT. I'm not sure Metcalfe really likes Windows any more than I do, he just seems to be resigned to it. Which is a shame, really.
So what Unix is 1970s technology? It's stood the test of time, and nobody can say that it never evolves. It's here to stay.
Postscript on the display is seriously cool
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Fifteen Years of X
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· Score: 1
It got another chance in the form of NextStep, but unfortunately that didn't catch on first time round, and I've heard rumous that Apple have pulled DPS out of MacOS X. Which is a big shame if it's true.
Ah well, it looks like GNUstep is making some progress, I'll have to have a proper look at that soon and see if the display ghostscript stuff is any good.
I'm pretty sure IBM do understand what OpenSource is about. However, this package can never be opensource, since it's based heavily on Sun's code, for which IBM had to sign a licence.
As for mirroring, I think you'll find that the main issue is that IBM wants to know how many people are interested, to help them gauge the size of the market. I can't see anything wrong with that -- I'd be interested to know myself.
I've just downloaded my copy now, and IBM seem to have enough bandwidth to keep up with demand:).
If I don't have libcurses for glibc2.1 installed, and the program requires it, why can't it install it for me?
If you're talking about the Windows approach to this problem, this adds a lot of garbage which has to be distributed with every binary-format application. Which may not be a problem if you're shipping a CD ROM, but it's a pain to have to keep downloading versions of libc that you already have. Personally I'm not the hugest fan of RPM, but some kind of package management (I use dpkg) is a big help.
Also, I'm not entirely sure I want every application I install to come with custom scripts which fsck around with my main system libraries, thankyou very much.
That said, some versions of the Blackdown JDK did come with their own set of libraries. And I must admit that back in the bad old days it did seem to help. Hopefully we're past needing that now though.
You can see all the setuid binaries on your machine using something along the lines of
find / -perm +4000
Be warned, on a typical system that will actually come up with quite a lot...
Re:Feature set only omits one thing for me ...
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AbiWord 0.7 release
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There is some graphics support in there, it's just that at the moment then only format that's supported is PNG. Hopefully once the W3C Scaleable Vector Graphics standard is ready, they'll add support for that too.
With a new slashdot forum automatically created for new kernel releases, in case people want to discuss them. Obviously only important new releases should get a mention in the `main' slashdot. Perhaps only post if a new release is seen as a major milestone, or if it contains fixes for a major data loss/security problem (e.g. 2.2.0 would have been announced. 2.2.9 would probably get a mention because of the filesystem problem, but 2.2.8 wouldn't).
Some of them (2.1.44 comes to mind) can even trash your file systems.
Mind you, it sounds as though 2.2.8 could do that for you, too. That said, the `stable' branch does get a lot more attention paid to stability before each release, so you should at least bear that in mind before grabbing whatever the latest 2.3.x is now.
Well, not a complete virtual machine in the sense of the JVM. This approach of completely emulating the target processor has been tried -- the best example is Bochs, which actually works pretty well. But it's seriously slow.
The point of vmware is to provide the fastest possibly emulation of an ia32 machine. So it want to execute all (or nearly all) the instructions directly on the host processor, rather than having to emulate them. The clever bit is to allow it to do this without clobbering the host OS -- this is what requires lots of memory management tricks.
No, masquerading is a quick fix, not a true solution. Sure, it'll be fine for some things, but you'll regret it when you remember that you've forgotten to set the video, and have no way of telnetting to it through the masquerade box.
The difficulty is in getting anyone to make the first move towards IPv6
But even so, they have a point -- I type almost everything I do, either on my desktop machines or on my Psion portable. Now I've got my final exams coming up in a few weeks time and it's going to be the first time I've written more than a few sentances at a time since... well, my exams last year, come to think of it. And those were enough of a struggle.
I guess I'm going to have to get some practice in between now and then (I've been meaning to for a while, and this article might just have done me a favour by prodding me in the right direction). But in the long term, I can't help wondering if (hand)written examinations are actually a fair way to assess people any more.
You may have some point there, but do remember that the computer market is still growing. Already in much of the `developed' world computers are rapidly heading towards becoming ubiquitous (hell, my father was talking about getting one for my grandmother the other day) and in poorer countries penetration is increasing quite rapidly. Linux et al. have a big advantage there, since cost and good performance on modest hardware are more important than having the latest whizz-bangs.
Unless something radically new comes along (always a possibility) I think Linux usage is going to go on increasing for some time yet.
TYA is not a full VM implementation, it's just a JIT which plugs into Sun's VM, using a standard JIT interface. Yes, it can give a useful speed improvement against the Sun/blackdown JDK1.1 implementation. JDK1.2 already includes a JIT (at least on the ia32 platform) so I doubt TIA would make too much difference.
Which ones are you talking about? If you're talking free software rather than free beer, that really just leaves us with Kaffe (which is only a PersonalJava implementation, and has never particularly impressed me), and Japhar (which is getting to be pretty good on the standards compliance front, but is currently slow as hell). Then there's ElectricalFire, but that's still some way off.
Hmmm, does anyone have a reference to this which can be cited properly? I find it very interesting, since surely that's just how Bill started out. *sigh*.
As I understand it, the glibc folks now have a version number on each symbol, so, at least in principle, they'll be able to make all future releases work okay with 2.1 binaries, even if they end up making fairly major changes. At least, that's the principle, I guess now we have to wait a while to see if it actually works that way.
The point of the standard is to say that everyone should be using at least glibc 2.1. Or else. Which is fair enough -- there are still a lot of libc5 boxes knocking around, and having to support those is getting to be a pain.
I haven't really had the time to look properly at EJB, so if I'm wrong someone please correct me... But it occurs to me that, if communications are all going through IIOP, there should be no particular reason why EJB needs to be completely tied to Java. When EJB is specifying is a set of interfaces, and these can be implemented in any language
Sure this might favour Java a little bit, but I can't see it tying developers to that language inextricably.
There have already been plenty of demonstrations that Linux works well on small server. What's really needed now is an impartial test run on a nice big SMP box with oodles of memory and a decent RAID array -- the system Mindcraft were (ab)using would do fine -- to demonstrate that, especially with 2.2 kernels, Linux scales quite well.
Remember that a certain number of sites really need big-iron servers (hey, slashdot isn't exactly gentle on its hardware, although in that case I suspect database performance may be more of an issue), and even when they don't it's the results from high-end server tests which impress the management the most.
Having seen Linux/SMP in action and made some subjective judgements I'm quite confident that, properly configured, it ought to scale fairly well onto hardware of the class Mindcraft were `testing'. But it would still be nice to have some number...
To a lot of people, `The Internet' is just one, fairly amorphous lump. A lot of people don't really care that IRC and FTP are different protocols, in the end it's all `The Internet', and it makes sense to use the same tool to access it.
Remember that many businesses now have a lot of their internal software accessible using Intranets. Some people almost never need to leave the browser any more.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether you agree with this or not is another matter entirely, but it's clearly his reasoned view, and I doubt it's going to change now.
Sure, an occasional recording of the free software song might be fun (at least for some), but I like the Web as a primarily-text medium.
Audio postings to slashdot, anyone? ;-(
'course, they only found this out after mine was gone.
I've been trying to get information for writing a driver for a while now. I get the feeling that the modem code itself does have restrictions on it which would probably make a public release out of the question BUT as far as I can tell, most (all?) of the critical algorithms are implemented in DSP machine code, and there would be no reason to recompile this for a Linux driver. Can anyone else comment on this?
So what Unix is 1970s technology? It's stood the test of time, and nobody can say that it never evolves. It's here to stay.
Ah well, it looks like GNUstep is making some progress, I'll have to have a proper look at that soon and see if the display ghostscript stuff is any good.
As for mirroring, I think you'll find that the main issue is that IBM wants to know how many people are interested, to help them gauge the size of the market. I can't see anything wrong with that -- I'd be interested to know myself.
I've just downloaded my copy now, and IBM seem to have enough bandwidth to keep up with demand :).
Also, I'm not entirely sure I want every application I install to come with custom scripts which fsck around with my main system libraries, thankyou very much.
That said, some versions of the Blackdown JDK did come with their own set of libraries. And I must admit that back in the bad old days it did seem to help. Hopefully we're past needing that now though.
There is some graphics support in there, it's just that at the moment then only format that's supported is PNG. Hopefully once the W3C Scaleable Vector Graphics standard is ready, they'll add support for that too.
Linux Kernel
------------ Stable: 2.2.9 (5 comments) Development: 2.3.2 (2 comments)
With a new slashdot forum automatically created for new kernel releases, in case people want to discuss them. Obviously only important new releases should get a mention in the `main' slashdot. Perhaps only post if a new release is seen as a major milestone, or if it contains fixes for a major data loss/security problem (e.g. 2.2.0 would have been announced. 2.2.9 would probably get a mention because of the filesystem problem, but 2.2.8 wouldn't).
The point of vmware is to provide the fastest possibly emulation of an ia32 machine. So it want to execute all (or nearly all) the instructions directly on the host processor, rather than having to emulate them. The clever bit is to allow it to do this without clobbering the host OS -- this is what requires lots of memory management tricks.
The difficulty is in getting anyone to make the first move towards IPv6
I guess I'm going to have to get some practice in between now and then (I've been meaning to for a while, and this article might just have done me a favour by prodding me in the right direction). But in the long term, I can't help wondering if (hand)written examinations are actually a fair way to assess people any more.
Unless something radically new comes along (always a possibility) I think Linux usage is going to go on increasing for some time yet.
TYA is not a full VM implementation, it's just a JIT which plugs into Sun's VM, using a standard JIT interface. Yes, it can give a useful speed improvement against the Sun/blackdown JDK1.1 implementation. JDK1.2 already includes a JIT (at least on the ia32 platform) so I doubt TIA would make too much difference.
Which ones are you talking about? If you're talking free software rather than free beer, that really just leaves us with Kaffe (which is only a PersonalJava implementation, and has never particularly impressed me), and Japhar (which is getting to be pretty good on the standards compliance front, but is currently slow as hell). Then there's ElectricalFire, but that's still some way off.
Hmmm, does anyone have a reference to this which can be cited properly? I find it very interesting, since surely that's just how Bill started out. *sigh*.
The point of the standard is to say that everyone should be using at least glibc 2.1. Or else. Which is fair enough -- there are still a lot of libc5 boxes knocking around, and having to support those is getting to be a pain.
On the other hand, you could go with the Anne McCaffrey view. In which case they're just small, rather common, and sexually promiscuous...
Sure this might favour Java a little bit, but I can't see it tying developers to that language inextricably.
Remember that a certain number of sites really need big-iron servers (hey, slashdot isn't exactly gentle on its hardware, although in that case I suspect database performance may be more of an issue), and even when they don't it's the results from high-end server tests which impress the management the most.
Having seen Linux/SMP in action and made some subjective judgements I'm quite confident that, properly configured, it ought to scale fairly well onto hardware of the class Mindcraft were `testing'. But it would still be nice to have some number...
Remember that many businesses now have a lot of their internal software accessible using Intranets. Some people almost never need to leave the browser any more.