I remember hearing about this statistic a while ago. I believe it comes from a survey printed (and possibly performed by) the Washington Post. 92% of journalists voted Democrat in the last election, and the majority of journalists are registered Democrats.
Just because the Washington Post said so doesn't make it true, of course, but I think that it helps drive home the point that it's important to get BOTH sides of the story.
Maybe manufacturers will start building crypto into PCs. If the average Joe can encrypt all his data easily and with no slow-down, he probably will. Having everyone use encryption would be a Good Thing (tm).
Of course, something better than DES would be nice. The write-up implies that it would be easy to switch crypto methods, though.
I read on www.caffeine.com that the LD50 (lethal dose 50% of the time for caffeine) in humans is 50mg/kg. The average dose required for caffeine intoxication (heart palpitations, etc.) is 200mg. (I haven't been able to get through to the web site recently, so it may be down).
If that's accurate, you have to drink a lethal dose of coffee to protect yourself from lethal levels of radiation. Great...
Does anyone know if this (or any other patch) will fix the problem that prevents >2.2.7 from building on a ppc?
It seems that 2.2.8 broke a bunch of stuff with IDE for PowerMacs. When trying to build 2.2.8 or 2.2.9, I get errors like this:
syscalls.c: In function 'pmac_init' syscalls.c: 'ISA_DMA_THRESHOLD' undeclared syscalls.c: 'DMA_MODE_READ' undeclared syscalls.c: 'DMA_MODE_WRITE' undeclared make[1]: *** [pmac_setup.c] error 1
I tried commenting out the three offending lines in pmac_setup.c (ISA_DMA_THRESHOLD, etc.), but it only goes slightly farther before erroring out on kernel.o.
I found a partial fix in the mailing list archives:
Add #include to arch/ppc/kernel/syscalls.c Seems someone forgot to include this.
With that change, I can compile, but IDE support is broken (probably because I just commented out that stuff since I don't know how to fix it).
Since I have an iMac (IDE-baed), both IDE support and USB support are extremely important. I can't get either the usb stack included in 2.2.7 or the uusbd stack to build on 2.2.7 or later (will 2.3.x kernels work better?).
Yes, I could stay with my 2.2.6 kernel, but this is really bugging me. The main reason I'm using linux is to learn it. As far as I can tell, nobody (with the possible exception of that one guy who posted to the mailing list) has gotten >2.2.7 to work on a PowerMac.
While I do think that restricting Playstations is ridiculous (a case of barn door a few years too late), the government is right to be worried about China and other countries like that gaining advanced technology. Before I go any further, I want to make it clear that when I say China, I mean the Chinese government. I have nothing against the Chinese people.
China already has over a dozen nuclear missiles pointed at the US. The technology to allow accurate guidance of these missiles was 'accidentally' leaked by Lorel. The technology to build various advanced nuclear weapons, such as neutron bombs (which kill people and leave buildings standing) have been stolen by the Chinese. China has demonstrated its willingness to use military force against its own citizens (Tienammen Square).
China appears to be headed down a new and dangerous path, combining communism with capitalism, in a mix with a high potential for growth and an even higher potential for instability.
I think it's quite likely the US will see themselves in some form of conflict with China fairly soon (i.e. next decade). It may come in the form of a limited conflict over Taiwan, or another cold war, or (hopefully not) WWIII.
Unless China's government changes to something more democratic and less oppresive, I don't see any way around it--China wants to be a superpower, and the US isn't going to just shove over and step down. There are two main ways to subvert another country's government.
A) Force--this is bad, for many reasons. B) Destabilize, then cause a revolution from within. In this case, this might be achieved through trade, by making it obvious to the people how much better democracy is. Of course, if this doesn't work, you're left with A, and your enemy now has way better technology.
Basically, the US is stuck between a rock and a hard place. It might be worthwhile for them to work on Star Wars-like anti-ICBM technology. Otherwise, China can rattle their nuclear sabre to keep the US at bay while they go pillage Taiwan or the rest of Asia.
The only bright side I can see to all of this is that China is going to get hit especially hard by Y2K, as almost all of their government's software is pirated (making it much harder to get updates or otherwise fix). Kinda ironic...
First thing to do is make sure that your house's wiring is good. This could be a symptom of a more serious problem (like having no ground connection in your house) that could result in nasty stuff like electrocution or a fire. You could get an electrician to check everything, but that wouldn't be the/. way *grin*.
Somewhere around your house, you may find a metal stake driven into the ground with a wire attached, or an attachment to a cold water pipe. Make sure all the connections are good. If the house is old, you may want to test each ground circuit individually to make sure it's connected to the (actual) ground. Really old houses use two-prong plugs instead of three-prong, because one of the two prongs does double-duty as ground. (To figure out which is ground, stick something metal in it--no pain means ground *grin*).
If everything above is good, try grounding the outside shielding of your cable by attaching it in some manner to your electrical system's ground. Don't just remove or disconnect the outer shielding--it acts as a capacitor, and doing so will alter the signal-carrying abilities of your cable.
Anyone know how well PPCs overclock (specifically, the G3 and the 604)? There's not that much out there about overclocking PPC chips.
I hear Motorola makes quad-G3 motherboards (although I haven't been able to find a price or source anywhere). If they're not too expensive, I might pick one up and try overclocking it... Imagine four G3s at 600 MHz each...
I live in British Columbia, Canada. Local calls are free, and long distance calls within Canada during off-hours have a cap of $20 CAN (that means that you never have to pay more than $20 a month for off-hours long distance). Off-hours is from 6pm to 8am.
While at university, I shared a phone line with three other guys. In one month, we racked up 8000 minutes (yes, eight thousand) of long distance (and who knows how much local calling), and only ended up paying about $90 CAN (that's less than $60 US). That includes basic service, call waiting, four voice mailboxes, and long distance.
Since the CRTC opened up the long distance market to competition, prices have become very reasonable. BCTel (now BCTTELUS after the merger with Alberta's phone company) has started giving really good deals on long distance, and local calls are free, as always.
I can't imagine having to pay for local calls--it would totally change the way I use the phone. I remember seeing stats somewhere about phone use in the UK vs. US. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think phone use was at least an order of magnitude greater in the US. You poor Europeans don't realize how great non-metered local calling (not to mention non-metered long distance) is. No wonder you're so defensive about how good your infrastructure is. Does it really matter if you have all-digital exchanges if it's so expensive that you almost never use them?
Installation and support are the two areas where Linux is still deficient (at least from the point of view of Linux novices).
Support: this area is rapidly improving, but is still not at the level of that provided by a company like Gateway or Apple (where one company will give you support for your hardware and software). Disclaimer--I know neither Gateway nor Apple has perfect tech support--don't flame me with incidents of them screwing up--but my point is that they provide support for the hardware AND the software, so it's a lot harder for them to try to pass the buck.
My own experience with Corel's tech support was horrible--they charged me $25 to tell me how to work around a blatant bug in their software, and posted a defective updater on their website (and never told anyone when they replaced it with a working one). Unless they've made some huge changes in the past year, there's no way I'll buy from them.
Installation: yes, Windows sucks here, but RedHat still has a ways to go. My friend ended up having to buy a new network card to get RedHat to recognize it. Compare either installer to the MacOS 8.x installer, which is extremely easy to use, as well as being customizable.
Yes, Apple does have the advantage that they control Apple hardware, but the MacOS installer works just fine on Mac clones, too. You simply boot off the install CD, click a few buttons, and it scans your drive for problems, fixes them, updates hard drive drivers, and does the install (and it actually works right off the bat). It doesn't get much easier.
I know it will be difficult to make a Linux distro this easy to install, but the end user really doesn't care about that--they just want be able to check their email, print their documents, and do their work without much hassle.
Linux is probably the most stable and most powerful OS around (aside from other UNIX variants), but it still has a long ways to go in ease of use.
It will be a long time before I can consider making Linux my primary OS--too many things, like my printer, sound input, etc. don't work yet under Linux.
Maybe Corel can change these things--if so, I will reconsider my opinion of them. Until then, Linux will only be useful as a server or a toy for hackers.
Damn it, doesn't look like there will be a PPC distribution for a while. Isn't one of the big "advantages" of Open Source and Linux that it's easy to port things to different platforms? If so, why does it seem that Linux is so x86-centric? A lot of companies that release commercial software for linux don't even bother making a PPC binary, even though it would probably only take them a day or two...
The PPC linux distributions are also a big pain in the ass. X was broken in both LinuxPPC 4 and in YellowDog Server 1.0 after install on my iMac... Linux may be doing well on x86, but it has a long way to go on other platforms...
If Eta Carinae becomes a black hole, would it be the closest known black hole, or does anyone know of one that is closer to us?
Should make for an interesting show if it goes nova... I wonder if we'd get any sort of increase in cosmic radiation (which has happened from other supernovas, apparently).
My iMac (rev. A, upgraded to 96 MB RAM, 64 MB VRAM, with MacOS 8.6, running at 16-bit color, 1024x768) seems to do about one unit every 26 hours (hasn't finished its first one, so I'm extrapolating).
I've noticed the application will only work in the foreground. The RC5 client was a lot better about running in the background--I really don't need all my CPU cycles if I'm just word processing, but SETI@home can't share with other apps. It would also be nice if the client was more configurable, and could cache work units (what if I want to go away, and don't want my computer dialing up by itself?)
Anybody know where I can find an online guide to PPC assembler? I'm a broke student, and I don't think my university bookstore has any books on the subject...
BTW, the newest version of CodeWarrior (v.5) can target Linux... Don't think it's released yet, though. Metrowerks has also announced CodeWarrior for Red Hat Linux. Although I don't have much experience with other compilers, CodeWarrior seems pretty good to me.
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I remember hearing about this statistic a while ago. I believe it comes from a survey printed (and possibly performed by) the Washington Post. 92% of journalists voted Democrat in the last election, and the majority of journalists are registered Democrats.
Just because the Washington Post said so doesn't make it true, of course, but I think that it helps drive home the point that it's important to get BOTH sides of the story.
Maybe manufacturers will start building crypto into PCs. If the average Joe can encrypt all his data easily and with no slow-down, he probably will. Having everyone use encryption would be a Good Thing (tm).
Of course, something better than DES would be nice. The write-up implies that it would be easy to switch crypto methods, though.
I read on www.caffeine.com that the LD50 (lethal dose 50% of the time for caffeine) in humans is 50mg/kg. The average dose required for caffeine intoxication (heart palpitations, etc.) is 200mg. (I haven't been able to get through to the web site recently, so it may be down).
If that's accurate, you have to drink a lethal dose of coffee to protect yourself from lethal levels of radiation. Great...
Oops, the partial fix didn't show up properly because I forgot things in angle-brackets are treated as HTML
The line to add to arch/ppc/kernel/syscalls.c is
#include [linux/file.h]
but using angle-brackets instead of the square brackets.
Thanks to pochini@denise.shiny.it for this.
Does anyone know if this (or any other patch) will fix the problem that prevents >2.2.7 from building on a ppc?
It seems that 2.2.8 broke a bunch of stuff with IDE for PowerMacs. When trying to build 2.2.8 or 2.2.9, I get errors like this:
syscalls.c: In function 'pmac_init'
syscalls.c: 'ISA_DMA_THRESHOLD' undeclared
syscalls.c: 'DMA_MODE_READ' undeclared
syscalls.c: 'DMA_MODE_WRITE' undeclared
make[1]: *** [pmac_setup.c] error 1
I tried commenting out the three offending lines in pmac_setup.c (ISA_DMA_THRESHOLD, etc.), but it only goes slightly farther before erroring out on kernel.o.
I found a partial fix in the mailing list archives:
Add
#include
to arch/ppc/kernel/syscalls.c
Seems someone forgot to include this.
With that change, I can compile, but IDE support is broken (probably because I just commented out that stuff since I don't know how to fix it).
Since I have an iMac (IDE-baed), both IDE support and USB support are extremely important. I can't get either the usb stack included in 2.2.7 or the uusbd stack to build on 2.2.7 or later (will 2.3.x kernels work better?).
Yes, I could stay with my 2.2.6 kernel, but this is really bugging me. The main reason I'm using linux is to learn it. As far as I can tell, nobody (with the possible exception of that one guy who posted to the mailing list) has gotten >2.2.7 to work on a PowerMac.
While I do think that restricting Playstations is ridiculous (a case of barn door a few years too late), the government is right to be worried about China and other countries like that gaining advanced technology. Before I go any further, I want to make it clear that when I say China, I mean the Chinese government. I have nothing against the Chinese people.
China already has over a dozen nuclear missiles pointed at the US. The technology to allow accurate guidance of these missiles was 'accidentally' leaked by Lorel. The technology to build various advanced nuclear weapons, such as neutron bombs (which kill people and leave buildings standing) have been stolen by the Chinese. China has demonstrated its willingness to use military force against its own citizens (Tienammen Square).
China appears to be headed down a new and dangerous path, combining communism with capitalism, in a mix with a high potential for growth and an even higher potential for instability.
I think it's quite likely the US will see themselves in some form of conflict with China fairly soon (i.e. next decade). It may come in the form of a limited conflict over Taiwan, or another cold war, or (hopefully not) WWIII.
Unless China's government changes to something more democratic and less oppresive, I don't see any way around it--China wants to be a superpower, and the US isn't going to just shove over and step down. There are two main ways to subvert another country's government.
A) Force--this is bad, for many reasons.
B) Destabilize, then cause a revolution from within. In this case, this might be achieved through trade, by making it obvious to the people how much better democracy is. Of course, if this doesn't work, you're left with A, and your enemy now has way better technology.
Basically, the US is stuck between a rock and a hard place. It might be worthwhile for them to work on Star Wars-like anti-ICBM technology. Otherwise, China can rattle their nuclear sabre to keep the US at bay while they go pillage Taiwan or the rest of Asia.
The only bright side I can see to all of this is that China is going to get hit especially hard by Y2K, as almost all of their government's software is pirated (making it much harder to get updates or otherwise fix). Kinda ironic...
Although this has nothing to do with Transmeta...
/. way *grin*.
First thing to do is make sure that your house's wiring is good. This could be a symptom of a more serious problem (like having no ground connection in your house) that could result in nasty stuff like electrocution or a fire. You could get an electrician to check everything, but that wouldn't be the
Somewhere around your house, you may find a metal stake driven into the ground with a wire attached, or an attachment to a cold water pipe. Make sure all the connections are good. If the house is old, you may want to test each ground circuit individually to make sure it's connected to the (actual) ground. Really old houses use two-prong plugs instead of three-prong, because one of the two prongs does double-duty as ground. (To figure out which is ground, stick something metal in it--no pain means ground *grin*).
If everything above is good, try grounding the outside shielding of your cable by attaching it in some manner to your electrical system's ground. Don't just remove or disconnect the outer shielding--it acts as a capacitor, and doing so will alter the signal-carrying abilities of your cable.
Anyone know how well PPCs overclock (specifically, the G3 and the 604)? There's not that much out there about overclocking PPC chips.
I hear Motorola makes quad-G3 motherboards (although I haven't been able to find a price or source anywhere). If they're not too expensive, I might pick one up and try overclocking it... Imagine four G3s at 600 MHz each...
I live in British Columbia, Canada. Local calls are free, and long distance calls within Canada during off-hours have a cap of $20 CAN (that means that you never have to pay more than $20 a month for off-hours long distance). Off-hours is from 6pm to 8am.
While at university, I shared a phone line with three other guys. In one month, we racked up 8000 minutes (yes, eight thousand) of long distance (and who knows how much local calling), and only ended up paying about $90 CAN (that's less than $60 US). That includes basic service, call waiting, four voice mailboxes, and long distance.
Since the CRTC opened up the long distance market to competition, prices have become very reasonable. BCTel (now BCTTELUS after the merger with Alberta's phone company) has started giving really good deals on long distance, and local calls are free, as always.
I can't imagine having to pay for local calls--it would totally change the way I use the phone. I remember seeing stats somewhere about phone use in the UK vs. US. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think phone use was at least an order of magnitude greater in the US. You poor Europeans don't realize how great non-metered local calling (not to mention non-metered long distance) is. No wonder you're so defensive about how good your infrastructure is. Does it really matter if you have all-digital exchanges if it's so expensive that you almost never use them?
Installation and support are the two areas where Linux is still deficient (at least from the point of view of Linux novices).
Support: this area is rapidly improving, but is still not at the level of that provided by a company like Gateway or Apple (where one company will give you support for your hardware and software). Disclaimer--I know neither Gateway nor Apple has perfect tech support--don't flame me with incidents of them screwing up--but my point is that they provide support for the hardware AND the software, so it's a lot harder for them to try to pass the buck.
My own experience with Corel's tech support was horrible--they charged me $25 to tell me how to work around a blatant bug in their software, and posted a defective updater on their website (and never told anyone when they replaced it with a working one). Unless they've made some huge changes in the past year, there's no way I'll buy from them.
Installation: yes, Windows sucks here, but RedHat still has a ways to go. My friend ended up having to buy a new network card to get RedHat to recognize it. Compare either installer to the MacOS 8.x installer, which is extremely easy to use, as well as being customizable.
Yes, Apple does have the advantage that they control Apple hardware, but the MacOS installer works just fine on Mac clones, too. You simply boot off the install CD, click a few buttons, and it scans your drive for problems, fixes them, updates hard drive drivers, and does the install (and it actually works right off the bat). It doesn't get much easier.
I know it will be difficult to make a Linux distro this easy to install, but the end user really doesn't care about that--they just want be able to check their email, print their documents, and do their work without much hassle.
Linux is probably the most stable and most powerful OS around (aside from other UNIX variants), but it still has a long ways to go in ease of use.
It will be a long time before I can consider making Linux my primary OS--too many things, like my printer, sound input, etc. don't work yet under Linux.
Maybe Corel can change these things--if so, I will reconsider my opinion of them. Until then, Linux will only be useful as a server or a toy for hackers.
Damn it, doesn't look like there will be a PPC distribution for a while. Isn't one of the big "advantages" of Open Source and Linux that it's easy to port things to different platforms? If so, why does it seem that Linux is so x86-centric? A lot of companies that release commercial software for linux don't even bother making a PPC binary, even though it would probably only take them a day or two...
The PPC linux distributions are also a big pain in the ass. X was broken in both LinuxPPC 4 and in YellowDog Server 1.0 after install on my iMac... Linux may be doing well on x86, but it has a long way to go on other platforms...
-Travis
A bitter PPC user...
If Eta Carinae becomes a black hole, would it be the closest known black hole, or does anyone know of one that is closer to us?
Should make for an interesting show if it goes nova... I wonder if we'd get any sort of increase in cosmic radiation (which has happened from other supernovas, apparently).
-tbo
My iMac (rev. A, upgraded to 96 MB RAM, 64 MB VRAM, with MacOS 8.6, running at 16-bit color, 1024x768) seems to do about one unit every 26 hours (hasn't finished its first one, so I'm extrapolating).
I've noticed the application will only work in the foreground. The RC5 client was a lot better about running in the background--I really don't need all my CPU cycles if I'm just word processing, but SETI@home can't share with other apps. It would also be nice if the client was more configurable, and could cache work units (what if I want to go away, and don't want my computer dialing up by itself?)
Anybody know where I can find an online guide to PPC assembler? I'm a broke student, and I don't think my university bookstore has any books on the subject...
BTW, the newest version of CodeWarrior (v.5) can target Linux... Don't think it's released yet, though. Metrowerks has also announced CodeWarrior for Red Hat Linux. Although I don't have much experience with other compilers, CodeWarrior seems pretty good to me.