NDA as in non-disclosure agreement? Say what... what happened to the freedom/liberty idea? (Honest question here, I haven't even googled for anything on this topic.)
Hurd is not vapourware. Debian has packages in unstable for hurd-i386. See http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/main/. I don't know if the next stable release will include hurd. (By the time it's ready for release, maybe Hurd will be finished.:)
> What happens if the matter/antimatter mix is not correct?
Matter/antimatter mix? Watching to much Star Trek and not enough physics lectures? Whichever there was more of will have leftovers. Hopefully, this is the ship, and not the fuel:) You are correct that putting enough antimatter to do something useful is dangerous. It is even more dangerous when the ship's sail is made of U235, since then you have radioactive material to get scattered around. Given what they said about fission being important to making this work, they probably need a lot less antimatter than they would otherwise.
The nature of an antimatter explosion would be different from a hydrogen or uranium/plutonium explosion. In a fusion or fission reaction, there are fast moving massive particles, including atomic nuclei and neutrons. In an antimatter annihilation, there is _no_ matter left over, only energy. You get two gamma rays for each annihilation event. (There are always two, not one, because the total momentum of the system is constant.) The gamma rays would heat up surrounding matter, but I'm not sure it would make any of it radioactive (it would have to knock particles out of atomic nuclei to do that). The penetration depth of gamma rays in air is around 400m. This means that the energy of the reaction is distributed over a very large area, unlike in a fusion or fission reaction. This large distribution of enegy would not make for explosive expansion unless there was a very large amount of energy released. You might end up with some plasma close the the explosion. Of course, ionizing radiation is bad for living creatures, so anyone too close to the reaction could end up dead or with radiation poisoning. There wouldn't be any lingering radiation, though, because all the antimatter would react right away and produce only photons.
If the same thing happened near something that absorbed gamma rays pretty well, like the ground, or a building, that matter would be heated very hot in a much smaller area. It would expand explosively. Of course, there wouldn't be fallout. There would be lots of dust thrown into the air, which could create a nuclear winter effect, setting back global warming by several decades:)
yeah, that's what I was trying to say, but got sidetracked half way through:(. Of course they would use pf where Debian on linux uses iptables. However, the C library, as an interface between the kernel and user space, takes a lot of work to get working on a different kernel, or a different architecture. However, some GNU software is designed to run on a GNU system, and uses things like getline() instead of fgets(). (read the GNU libc info page if you don't know about this.) Most major pieces of software are portable to non-GNU systems, so they could get by without the GNU C extensions.
10 seconds with google was all it took to find evidence to prove you wrong. This is just a DoS, but you just said exploit, not run arbitrary code or anything like that. There's also the Mac Attack: send a certain 40 byte UDP packet to a MacOS computer, and it sends a 1500 byte ICMP packet to the source address of the UDP packet. There is a Mac security website that looks useful for people interested in making a Mac secure (rather than raving on/.)
Cool Mac software that I found while looking for info: ssh and sftp for mac with SSH2 support. License? Well, there's a GNU head on the website:)
There were plans to create a Debian GNU/FreeBSD operating system. (Maybe not just FBSD, without the GNU/. (They would probably use the FBSD C library, but most things would be the existing Debian packages. I guess there would be some new packages with FreeBSD software.)) I can't remember what I saw most recently about the Debian on FreeBSD project, but I don't think it's totally abandoned.
Anyway, pf is specific to OpenBSD's kernel, and I don't think it is likely to be ported to other kernels.
> > Last time I checked, Sweden is not in Calgary.
> Thats affirmative. It is, however, in Canada you fucktard. I'm assuming that you're an American because you are geographically retarded.
Nope, sorry, Sweden is not in Canada. Calgary is a city in western Canada, and Sweden is a nordic country. Apparently someone in Sweden uses OpenBSD, and is running on too little sleep.
The US isn't a problem for crypto anymore. You just send an email to the gov't to tell them about your program that uses crypto. (haha suckers, Canadian's don't have to do lame stuff like that:) There are still other countries where crypto is a problem, though.
> BSD is more free than GPL. [GPL forces you to do stuff...]
True enough. The BSD license is more Free (i.e. "libre", the French word that is the root of "liberty") than the GPL. However, it doesn't protect that freedom at all. The GPL is slightly less Free, but the restrictions it imposes are not difficult to meet, and are quite simple.[1] Its impositions protect the Freedom of the software quite well, though. If you care about freedom, the GPL is obviously superior.
[1]: Usually. The line between linking and running separately can get blurry. Embeded systems and component software architectures are examples of where things get complicated:(.
People are citizens. Corporations are just corporations. Citizens are more important than corporations. The government should always act in the (long term) interest of the people. (Of course, it doesn't, which is why I'm so pissed off.) Corporations doing well can benefit the people, by providing more jobs, with better pay, better working conditions, etc. If increases in corporate fortunes are not helping the people, but instead only the few in control of the corporations, then the gov't should not just help the corporations more. It is my belief that we (in north america and europe) have reached that point.
US corporations are unlikely to go around mirroring the government's BSD-licensed software for the benefit of non-US corporations. If a US corp wants to make code available to a non-US corp, they're probably getting some sort of benefit from it somehow, which is what the US gov't wants.
> Second of all thank god air molecules aren't actually traveling around the room at 300m/s.
Your god isn't helping you very much, apparently:(
> I mean a tornado can send a pencil thorugh a telephone pole at a slower velocity.
A pencil masses ~5 grams. An average CO molecule weighs 28.009 atomic mass units. The pencil is 10^23 times heavier. That is a _lot_, and has a big influence on pole penetrating ability.
> Thanks for showing why you can't indiscriminately put two energy equations together and come out with the right answer.
This is true, but E=kT*3/2 does give the average kinetic energy of particles in a gas. Thus, it is not at all indescriminate to use this to find the average velocity.
Air molecules really do go zipping around at hundreds of meters per second. (RMS velocity of air molecules at 15C is ~500m/s.) They are not very massive, so each one doesn't do much. Moreover, at atmospheric pressure, there are so many collisions per second that everything averages out really really well. The chance of a large enough imbalance of air molecules all hitting a pencil from the same direction and accelerating it to tornado velocities is infinitesimal. (Think thermodynamics and entropy: a lot of molecules all going in the same direction would be a lower entropy state than the usual random directions. Starting with a high entropy, random direction, set of air molecules, you're going to have to wait more than the age of the universe to see them all going in the same direction (for a large amount of air molecules, where large is a number at least big enough to make my claim true).)
If you don't believe me (even though I have a physics&CS honours degree), go look it up. I got the 498 m/s RMS speed for molecules of dry air at 1atm, 15C from G.K. Batchelor's "An Introduction to Fluid Dynamics", in Appendix 1 (p. 594). (Every physics book is "intro to" something. I'd hate to see how hard a textbook that wasn't "just an introduction" was.:)
> I think the point is, at least in this example, you want to be able to edit/etc/passwd with vi. > You wouldn't be able to do that if it were in some form of real database. However, since flat files can represent > database tables when given a delimiter it shouldn't be difficult or resource intensive to write > these functions into your filesystem. This is true innovation, I like it.:)
I don't know if I've got this right, but one thing you get from doing this is that you don't need to lock the whole password file to change something in it. You could echo 1001 >/etc/passwd.tmp; mv/etc/passwd.tmp/etc/passwd/peter/uid to change the uid of an account atomically. (Could someone who uses reiserfs's fancy features tell me if that is correct and/or possible?)
That might work. You wouldn't have one reiserfs volume mounted, like if you were using reiserfs for/home. Each program that wanted to have a config directory of small files could create a config file that was really a database, but was accessed through the reiserfs library like it was a directory. The reiserfs library might include a wrapper for open(2), etc. to do this more transparently. From the kernel's perspective, it would be like a config file with binary data in it. Messing around with the config file with other tools would be a bit of a problem, unless your shell could transparently look inside the reiserfs files and handle redirecting to/from them. You'd probably have to use something other than mv or cp to get files between the "directory" structure of the reiserfs file and the actual FS that the kernel knows about.
Still, it would work if there wasn't much need to deal with the file other than from special applications, which could use a library to see it as a directory. This would let people get started using such structures for config info before reiserfs is widespread.
Re:DOS didn't have automount.
on
Linux 3.0
·
· Score: 2
> Actually, what's with CD's and intel machines? It seems the only thing that locks my windows. The whole damn machine just falls asleep while waiting for CD seek. Same with debian. On almost any pc it's the same.
Try running hdparm -u/dev/cdrom. -u tells the kernel IDE driver to unmask interrupts while waiting for things. Presumably, the cdrom driver is waiting for a seek with interrupts disabled. Read hdparm's man page before you use it, and be prepared for a system lockup in case your hardware doesn't like it. (save your files, and preferably shutdown to single user mode.) If things seem ok with concurrent access to the cdrom and the hard drive, run hdparm from your boot scripts. Do test things first, though. Crappy mobo chipsets can cause data corruption when accessing both IDE channels in parallel if you enable DMA on your hard drives. -u is not so risky, wrt. to data corruption. The main risk would be a crash.
However, if your system is going to crash because of IDE driver settings, it won't take all that long to do so. If the system is stable while you dd if=foo of=bar all over the place for a quarter of an hour, you shouldn't have to worry about occasional crashes.
> Do OS's traditionally implement these crappily or is it in the implementations in modern ide/mobo/cdrom hardware?
Linux implements things conservatively because of all the crappy old hardware that might crash with. Someone should make a bootdisk that tests all the things the hardware can do without crashing, and save info on how to enable it normally. Linux 2.4 has an option to enable DMA by default, and I think distros usually enable that these days, since ATA100 is so much better than PIO mode 4!
I've got an old 486 clunker that doesn't have either of those problems. An Apple laptop would be quiet and cool(er). If you have a good font, and use full-screen text mode, it can be very readable. Of course, if you really like books, get them from the library just like usual. They are a lot more portable, which is one of the reasons I phrased my opinion the way I did:)
I'm not saying we should scan our books and burn the paper, I'm just saying that the laptop option is worth trying, for those that haven't already.
If you have a laptop with a decent screen, you can curl up with it almost as well as a book. A pager like less works fine with a flat text file, but it lacks the ability to save bookmarks across sessions. If your laptop can suspend or hibernate, that's not a problem.
Someone should make a text viewer with a "screen" made from that e-ink stuff. (ink in a ball controlled by electrostatic forces to turn on or off. draws zero current when idle (with image displayed), very high resolution.) That way you could have a flexible screen. It could have some RAM and a USB connection so you could send web pages or man pages or other docs to it, for reference while using your computer monitor's real estate for other things. Besides that, the RAM would let you store a couple books in it to read away from the computer. e-ink would mean a lot of pixels, so a decent CPU would be needed, maybe an ARM.
They could probably shrink that a bit if they looked for multiple implementations of the same thing. Rumour has it that Linux used to include four copies of zlib:) Farming out some of the/proc stuff to user space might help too. (and might reduce the amount of unpageable memory needed by the kernel.) Most of the space is in the source tree (as opposed to a compiled binary) is architecture and hardware specific code, though. (There are 16 subdirs in linux/arch, and 16 corresponding include/asm-* directories.)
llama]~$ du -s/usr/src/linux/* 6076/usr/src/linux/Documentation 31176/usr/src/linux/arch 83420/usr/src/linux/drivers 14208/usr/src/linux/fs 29304/usr/src/linux/include [19MB of this is arch-specific include/asm-*] 48/usr/src/linux/init 96/usr/src/linux/ipc 520/usr/src/linux/kernel 128/usr/src/linux/lib 436/usr/src/linux/mm 7604/usr/src/linux/net 560/usr/src/linux/scripts
(This is 2.4.19 with RML's preempt patch, after compiling on my PIII.)
Having all the drivers included with the kernel source is kind of a mixed blessing. It makes the kernel source really big, but you don't have to worry about driver-vs.-kernel version compatibility. Linux's monolithic kernel design would make that a serious problem otherwise.
SPEC int2000 consists of gcc, gzip, perl, bzip2, crafty (a Free chess engine), and some other stuff. I happen to be interested in building a computer to run crafty fast, so it's very handy to have good benchmark results for it on recent AMD and Intel CPUs. (Athlons kick P4 butt on crafty, probably because of bit shifts and things like that that P4 is slow on.) Many people would find the gcc, perl, and compression benchmarks interesting when buying a *NIX workstation.
SPEC fp2000 includes Mesa, but only doing software rendering. The other programs are mostly scientific computing apps. (Not just synthetic matrix multiplies or things like that.)
> Result: You're surrounded by people who despise George W. Bush and see you as their personal GWBush voodoo doll. So they harangue and harass you about every screwed up thing the U.S. does as if you personally ordered it.
That's not even close to true. In any place you might actually want to move to, most of the people are reasonable enough to know that most Americans don't like the things their gov't is up to. There's a big difference between disagreeing with what your gov't does, and hating Americans in general.
Someone who left the US as a refugee from the DMCA would be very unlikely to be shunned because they grew up in the US. Anyone who leaves once they figure out how bad it is must not be the kind of person that keeps electing people who pull shit like Bush does.
It's fairly well known how difficult it is to get a clue from the US news media, which is why most people don't blame the US public for what their gov't does. Democracy is broken, so it's not the people's fault.
There are some places in the world where people are brainwashed into blind hatred of entire cultures or groups of people. You might encounter the kind of treatment you describe in some places like that. BTW, Canada is not one of those places. Right now, a lot of us hate your gov't. This is separate from the ongoing we're-better-than-the-US sentiment. We like to point to things like gun ownership, and crime involving guns, as reasons why Canada is better. Canada has always had a need to feel superior, probably because we guess that the rest of the world sees us as the US's little brother (or even lap dog). This sentiment does _not_ apply to individual Americans. If you came to Canada (or most E.U. countries, I would imagine), and told people you left the states because of gov't oppression, you would be welcomed with open arms. (You might want to avoid talking about it too much if you support most of the rest of what Bush is up to, since most people outside the states would hope you meant you didn't like everything he's doing, and maybe want to talk about how much Bush's unilateralism sucks. Still, there are people who defend America's war plans, etc., and people don't egg their houses or knock down their mail boxes. Nobody will care that you used to live in the states unless you make a big deal about it. (err, you might want to own a vehicle other than an SUV or pickup truck to avoid the stereotype of the resource-guzzling American.))
Hmm, good point. I guess anything would seem better than what he was doing before, so of course Linus likes it. I still don't think the argument was a falacious appeal to authority, but instead a somewhat biased authority. The examples cited in the web page about appeal to authority were things like "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV. Use these drugs, they are good." Linus actually does use BK, and he manages a really big project with it. His opinion is relevant, especially his opinon on how much the Linux kernel benefits from the use of BK, since that is an issue as much as whether other people should use BK for other projects. The general consensus is that it's great to be able to see what Linus's tree looks like in near real time, rather than snapshots every two days. The loss of freedom is starting to mount as BK's no-cost license becomes more and more restrictive. A couple years ago, it was GPL+you have to use the open-logging stuff.
> This, my friends, is the fallacy commonly known as "appeal to autority". Tell your family and colleagues! It's fun.
From the website you linked to:
Since this sort of reasoning is fallacious only when the person is not a
legitimate authority in a particular context...
Almost everyone on/. knows who Linus is. Most would agree that he is a very talented developer. He handles submissions from lots of people every day, and keeps the kernel project going quite nicely. He is one of the best know people who is obviously in a position to evaluate software like CVS and BK. The post you replied to was phrased like a falacious appeal to authority, but it's actually a good point.
Also note that part of the issue here is whether Linus should be using BK to manage the kernel. Thus, it is a lot more relevant what Linus thinks about BK than if you were trying to decide for yourself whether to use it. I hope Linus will eventually decide that BK is too non-Free for him, or, preferably, pressures BitMover to make BK more Free.
Slashdot Mirror
NDA as in non-disclosure agreement? Say what ... what happened to the freedom/liberty idea? (Honest question here, I haven't even googled for anything on this topic.)
Hurd is not vapourware. Debian has packages in unstable for hurd-i386. See http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/main/. I don't know if the next stable release will include hurd. (By the time it's ready for release, maybe Hurd will be finished. :)
> What happens if the matter/antimatter mix is not correct?
:) You are correct that putting enough antimatter to do something useful is dangerous. It is even more dangerous when the ship's sail is made of U235, since then you have radioactive material to get scattered around. Given what they said about fission being important to making this work, they probably need a lot less antimatter than they would otherwise.
:)
Matter/antimatter mix? Watching to much Star Trek and not enough physics lectures? Whichever there was more of will have leftovers. Hopefully, this is the ship, and not the fuel
The nature of an antimatter explosion would be different from a hydrogen or uranium/plutonium explosion. In a fusion or fission reaction, there are fast moving massive particles, including atomic nuclei and neutrons. In an antimatter annihilation, there is _no_ matter left over, only energy. You get two gamma rays for each annihilation event. (There are always two, not one, because the total momentum of the system is constant.) The gamma rays would heat up surrounding matter, but I'm not sure it would make any of it radioactive (it would have to knock particles out of atomic nuclei to do that). The penetration depth of gamma rays in air is around 400m. This means that the energy of the reaction is distributed over a very large area, unlike in a fusion or fission reaction. This large distribution of enegy would not make for explosive expansion unless there was a very large amount of energy released. You might end up with some plasma close the the explosion. Of course, ionizing radiation is bad for living creatures, so anyone too close to the reaction could end up dead or with radiation poisoning. There wouldn't be any lingering radiation, though, because all the antimatter would react right away and produce only photons.
If the same thing happened near something that absorbed gamma rays pretty well, like the ground, or a building, that matter would be heated very hot in a much smaller area. It would expand explosively. Of course, there wouldn't be fallout. There would be lots of dust thrown into the air, which could create a nuclear winter effect, setting back global warming by several decades
yeah, that's what I was trying to say, but got sidetracked half way through :(. Of course they would use pf where Debian on linux uses iptables. However, the C library, as an interface between the kernel and user space, takes a lot of work to get working on a different kernel, or a different architecture. However, some GNU software is designed to run on a GNU system, and uses things like getline() instead of fgets(). (read the GNU libc info page if you don't know about this.) Most major pieces of software are portable to non-GNU systems, so they could get by without the GNU C extensions.
Cool Mac software that I found while looking for info: ssh and sftp for mac with SSH2 support. License? Well, there's a GNU head on the website :)
There were plans to create a Debian GNU/FreeBSD operating system. (Maybe not just FBSD, without the GNU/. (They would probably use the FBSD C library, but most things would be the existing Debian packages. I guess there would be some new packages with FreeBSD software.)) I can't remember what I saw most recently about the Debian on FreeBSD project, but I don't think it's totally abandoned.
Anyway, pf is specific to OpenBSD's kernel, and I don't think it is likely to be ported to other kernels.
> > Last time I checked, Sweden is not in Calgary.
> Thats affirmative. It is, however, in Canada you fucktard. I'm assuming that you're an American because you are geographically retarded.
Nope, sorry, Sweden is not in Canada. Calgary is a city in western Canada, and Sweden is a nordic country. Apparently someone in Sweden uses OpenBSD, and is running on too little sleep.
The US isn't a problem for crypto anymore. You just send an email to the gov't to tell them about your program that uses crypto. (haha suckers, Canadian's don't have to do lame stuff like that :) There are still other countries where crypto is a problem, though.
> BSD is more free than GPL. [GPL forces you to do stuff...]
:(.
True enough. The BSD license is more Free (i.e. "libre", the French word that is the root of "liberty") than the GPL. However, it doesn't protect that freedom at all. The GPL is slightly less Free, but the restrictions it imposes are not difficult to meet, and are quite simple.[1] Its impositions protect the Freedom of the software quite well, though. If you care about freedom, the GPL is obviously superior.
[1]: Usually. The line between linking and running separately can get blurry. Embeded systems and component software architectures are examples of where things get complicated
People are citizens. Corporations are just corporations. Citizens are more important than corporations. The government should always act in the (long term) interest of the people. (Of course, it doesn't, which is why I'm so pissed off.) Corporations doing well can benefit the people, by providing more jobs, with better pay, better working conditions, etc. If increases in corporate fortunes are not helping the people, but instead only the few in control of the corporations, then the gov't should not just help the corporations more. It is my belief that we (in north america and europe) have reached that point.
Down with the running-dog capitalists.
US corporations are unlikely to go around mirroring the government's BSD-licensed software for the benefit of non-US corporations. If a US corp wants to make code available to a non-US corp, they're probably getting some sort of benefit from it somehow, which is what the US gov't wants.
> Second of all thank god air molecules aren't actually traveling around the room at 300m/s.
:(
:)
Your god isn't helping you very much, apparently
> I mean a tornado can send a pencil thorugh a telephone pole at a slower velocity.
A pencil masses ~5 grams. An average CO molecule weighs 28.009 atomic mass units. The pencil is 10^23 times heavier. That is a _lot_, and has a big influence on pole penetrating ability.
> Thanks for showing why you can't indiscriminately put two energy equations together and come out with the right answer.
This is true, but E=kT*3/2 does give the average kinetic energy of particles in a gas. Thus, it is not at all indescriminate to use this to find the average velocity.
Air molecules really do go zipping around at hundreds of meters per second. (RMS velocity of air molecules at 15C is ~500m/s.) They are not very massive, so each one doesn't do much. Moreover, at atmospheric pressure, there are so many collisions per second that everything averages out really really well. The chance of a large enough imbalance of air molecules all hitting a pencil from the same direction and accelerating it to tornado velocities is infinitesimal. (Think thermodynamics and entropy: a lot of molecules all going in the same direction would be a lower entropy state than the usual random directions. Starting with a high entropy, random direction, set of air molecules, you're going to have to wait more than the age of the universe to see them all going in the same direction (for a large amount of air molecules, where large is a number at least big enough to make my claim true).)
If you don't believe me (even though I have a physics&CS honours degree), go look it up. I got the 498 m/s RMS speed for molecules of dry air at 1atm, 15C from G.K. Batchelor's "An Introduction to Fluid Dynamics", in Appendix 1 (p. 594). (Every physics book is "intro to" something. I'd hate to see how hard a textbook that wasn't "just an introduction" was.
> Canada slightly larger than the US
... maple syrup ... CA*Net4 network ... beavers ... huge barely populated northern islands ... suck on that ... we'll see who's slightly what!
SLIGHTLY? We
> I think the point is, at least in this example, you want to be able to edit /etc/passwd with vi. :)
/etc/passwd.tmp; mv /etc/passwd.tmp /etc/passwd/peter/uid to change the uid of an account atomically. (Could someone who uses reiserfs's fancy features tell me if that is correct and/or possible?)
> You wouldn't be able to do that if it were in some form of real database. However, since flat files can represent
> database tables when given a delimiter it shouldn't be difficult or resource intensive to write
> these functions into your filesystem. This is true innovation, I like it.
I don't know if I've got this right, but one thing you get from doing this is that you don't need to lock the whole password file to change something in it. You could echo 1001 >
That might work. You wouldn't have one reiserfs volume mounted, like if you were using reiserfs for /home. Each program that wanted to have a config directory of small files could create a config file that was really a database, but was accessed through the reiserfs library like it was a directory. The reiserfs library might include a wrapper for open(2), etc. to do this more transparently. From the kernel's perspective, it would be like a config file with binary data in it. Messing around with the config file with other tools would be a bit of a problem, unless your shell could transparently look inside the reiserfs files and handle redirecting to/from them. You'd probably have to use something other than mv or cp to get files between the "directory" structure of the reiserfs file and the actual FS that the kernel knows about.
Still, it would work if there wasn't much need to deal with the file other than from special applications, which could use a library to see it as a directory. This would let people get started using such structures for config info before reiserfs is widespread.
> Actually, what's with CD's and intel machines?
/dev/cdrom. -u tells the kernel IDE driver to unmask interrupts while waiting for things. Presumably, the cdrom driver is waiting for a seek with interrupts disabled. Read hdparm's man page before you use it, and be prepared for a system lockup in case your hardware doesn't like it. (save your files, and preferably shutdown to single user mode.) If things seem ok with concurrent access to the cdrom and the hard drive, run hdparm from your boot scripts. Do test things first, though. Crappy mobo chipsets can cause data corruption when accessing both IDE channels in parallel if you enable DMA on your hard drives. -u is not so risky, wrt. to data corruption. The main risk would be a crash.
It seems the only thing that locks my windows. The whole damn machine just falls asleep while waiting for CD seek. Same with debian. On almost any pc it's the same.
Try running hdparm -u
However, if your system is going to crash because of IDE driver settings, it won't take all that long to do so. If the system is stable while you dd if=foo of=bar all over the place for a quarter of an hour, you shouldn't have to worry about occasional crashes.
> Do OS's traditionally implement these crappily or is it in the implementations in modern ide/mobo/cdrom hardware?
Linux implements things conservatively because of all the crappy old hardware that might crash with. Someone should make a bootdisk that tests all the things the hardware can do without crashing, and save info on how to enable it normally. Linux 2.4 has an option to enable DMA by default, and I think distros usually enable that these days, since ATA100 is so much better than PIO mode 4!
> it's warm, the fan comes on every so often
:)
I've got an old 486 clunker that doesn't have either of those problems. An Apple laptop would be quiet and cool(er). If you have a good font, and use full-screen text mode, it can be very readable. Of course, if you really like books, get them from the library just like usual. They are a lot more portable, which is one of the reasons I phrased my opinion the way I did
I'm not saying we should scan our books and burn the paper, I'm just saying that the laptop option is worth trying, for those that haven't already.
> There's always fiction however.
If you have a laptop with a decent screen, you can curl up with it almost as well as a book. A pager like less works fine with a flat text file, but it lacks the ability to save bookmarks across sessions. If your laptop can suspend or hibernate, that's not a problem.
Someone should make a text viewer with a "screen" made from that e-ink stuff. (ink in a ball controlled by electrostatic forces to turn on or off. draws zero current when idle (with image displayed), very high resolution.) That way you could have a flexible screen. It could have some RAM and a USB connection so you could send web pages or man pages or other docs to it, for reference while using your computer monitor's real estate for other things. Besides that, the RAM would let you store a couple books in it to read away from the computer. e-ink would mean a lot of pixels, so a decent CPU would be needed, maybe an ARM.
> Nice mental image. I'll file it right next to my mpeg of Christina Aguilera - Dirty
How well does using MPEG for your mental images work? Does it help you remember more stuff without filling up your brain so much?
> Who uses the -i (--inode) option?
:) Farming out some of the /proc stuff to user space might help too. (and might reduce the amount of unpageable memory needed by the kernel.) Most of the space is in the source tree (as opposed to a compiled binary) is architecture and hardware specific code, though. (There are 16 subdirs in linux/arch, and 16 corresponding include/asm-* directories.)
/usr/src/linux/* /usr/src/linux/Documentation /usr/src/linux/arch /usr/src/linux/drivers /usr/src/linux/fs /usr/src/linux/include [19MB of this is arch-specific include/asm-*] /usr/src/linux/init /usr/src/linux/ipc /usr/src/linux/kernel /usr/src/linux/lib /usr/src/linux/mm /usr/src/linux/net /usr/src/linux/scripts
You can use it to identify hard links.
> Linux 2.4.19 is 24.8 MB!
They could probably shrink that a bit if they looked for multiple implementations of the same thing. Rumour has it that Linux used to include four copies of zlib
llama]~$ du -s
6076
31176
83420
14208
29304
48
96
520
128
436
7604
560
(This is 2.4.19 with RML's preempt patch, after compiling on my PIII.)
Having all the drivers included with the kernel source is kind of a mixed blessing. It makes the kernel source really big, but you don't have to worry about driver-vs.-kernel version compatibility. Linux's monolithic kernel design would make that a serious problem otherwise.
Try this phrasing: Until the laws of physics are (better understood|clarified). Or: Until our understanding of the universe improves.
SPEC int2000 consists of gcc, gzip, perl, bzip2, crafty (a Free chess engine), and some other stuff. I happen to be interested in building a computer to run crafty fast, so it's very handy to have good benchmark results for it on recent AMD and Intel CPUs. (Athlons kick P4 butt on crafty, probably because of bit shifts and things like that that P4 is slow on.) Many people would find the gcc, perl, and compression benchmarks interesting when buying a *NIX workstation.
SPEC fp2000 includes Mesa, but only doing software rendering. The other programs are mostly scientific computing apps. (Not just synthetic matrix multiplies or things like that.)
> Result: You're surrounded by people who despise George W. Bush and see you as their personal GWBush voodoo doll. So they harangue and harass you about every screwed up thing the U.S. does as if you personally ordered it.
That's not even close to true. In any place you might actually want to move to, most of the people are reasonable enough to know that most Americans don't like the things their gov't is up to. There's a big difference between disagreeing with what your gov't does, and hating Americans in general.
Someone who left the US as a refugee from the DMCA would be very unlikely to be shunned because they grew up in the US. Anyone who leaves once they figure out how bad it is must not be the kind of person that keeps electing people who pull shit like Bush does.
It's fairly well known how difficult it is to get a clue from the US news media, which is why most people don't blame the US public for what their gov't does. Democracy is broken, so it's not the people's fault.
There are some places in the world where people are brainwashed into blind hatred of entire cultures or groups of people. You might encounter the kind of treatment you describe in some places like that. BTW, Canada is not one of those places. Right now, a lot of us hate your gov't. This is separate from the ongoing we're-better-than-the-US sentiment. We like to point to things like gun ownership, and crime involving guns, as reasons why Canada is better. Canada has always had a need to feel superior, probably because we guess that the rest of the world sees us as the US's little brother (or even lap dog). This sentiment does _not_ apply to individual Americans. If you came to Canada (or most E.U. countries, I would imagine), and told people you left the states because of gov't oppression, you would be welcomed with open arms. (You might want to avoid talking about it too much if you support most of the rest of what Bush is up to, since most people outside the states would hope you meant you didn't like everything he's doing, and maybe want to talk about how much Bush's unilateralism sucks. Still, there are people who defend America's war plans, etc., and people don't egg their houses or knock down their mail boxes. Nobody will care that you used to live in the states unless you make a big deal about it. (err, you might want to own a vehicle other than an SUV or pickup truck to avoid the stereotype of the resource-guzzling American.))
Hmm, good point. I guess anything would seem better than what he was doing before, so of course Linus likes it. I still don't think the argument was a falacious appeal to authority, but instead a somewhat biased authority. The examples cited in the web page about appeal to authority were things like "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV. Use these drugs, they are good." Linus actually does use BK, and he manages a really big project with it. His opinion is relevant, especially his opinon on how much the Linux kernel benefits from the use of BK, since that is an issue as much as whether other people should use BK for other projects. The general consensus is that it's great to be able to see what Linus's tree looks like in near real time, rather than snapshots every two days. The loss of freedom is starting to mount as BK's no-cost license becomes more and more restrictive. A couple years ago, it was GPL+you have to use the open-logging stuff.
> This, my friends, is the fallacy commonly known as "appeal to autority". Tell your family and colleagues! It's fun.
/. knows who Linus is. Most would agree that he is a very talented developer. He handles submissions from lots of people every day, and keeps the kernel project going quite nicely. He is one of the best know people who is obviously in a position to evaluate software like CVS and BK. The post you replied to was phrased like a falacious appeal to authority, but it's actually a good point.
From the website you linked to:
Since this sort of reasoning is fallacious only when the person is not a
legitimate authority in a particular context...
Almost everyone on
Also note that part of the issue here is whether Linus should be using BK to manage the kernel. Thus, it is a lot more relevant what Linus thinks about BK than if you were trying to decide for yourself whether to use it. I hope Linus will eventually decide that BK is too non-Free for him, or, preferably, pressures BitMover to make BK more Free.