Debian isn't particularly hard to get up and running, and once it's up it is so easy to administer. Did someone find a security hole in BIND this week? Fine; with a single command you can get and install the fixed version. In fact, with a single command you can get all the latest stuff. (The command is "apt-get upgrade" and you can specify which mirror it should get the stuff from; I use the University of New Mexico, for example. You can choose from "stable", "testing", and "unstable"; for servers you would probably only use "stable".)
That seems pretty nice. It is a little more complicated in FreeBSD.
Run cvsup to get updated sources and things. The config file you need is described in the handbook "cvsup config-file" and clicking on "get" will do, it can be run without X as well.
cd/usr/src; make world
cd sys/i386/conf
vi YOUR_KERN_CONFIG; conf YOUE_KERN_CONF
cd../compile (or something like that; conf will tell you the exact location)
make depnd&&make&&make install
mergemaster
reboot
The middle bunch of steps on making a new kernel are optional, only needed in the unlikely event that you want something not compiled into the GENERIC kernel, but recomended as you seldom need anywhere close to all the stuff that is in GENERIC.
By following the handbook directions you can get the stable branch, the bleeding-edge branch, or one of the numbered releases, or a stable branch for a older major version. There are a few other choices as well.
They still have a chance at winning me over: they just need to code up a BSD version of apt-get. (This implies Debian-style packages... does BSD even have packages?)
It has packages, and ports. Mostly just the ports are enough. They are trivial to use (for example "cd/usr/ports/lang/smalltalk; make install" will fetch source for smalltalk, and all the packages it needs, patch them and install them).
I'm afraid I'm another one of those apt-thing bigots.
If all you are afaid of is how to replace apt-get and apt-install, that one is easy. Try "cd/usr/ports/[catagory]/[thing]; make install". That's it. It'll find any dependent packages, and make them, download source from any of N place, apply and FreeBSD patches, and do the install.
/usr/ports is one of the coolest things about FreeBSD. I do have to admit that mergemaster isn't too bad either.
FreeBSD is a pure server OS. Nobody has to worry about the other possible applications, it is designed purely for one purpose, and one purpose alone. It does it well.
If FreeBSD is a server-only OS why did it get USB support before Linux did?
If FreeBSD is a server-only OS, what is PicoBSD all about?
Fact of the matter is FreeBSD serves multiple intrests as well. And it does them all reasonably well.
Remeber, that's four interrupt lines PER SLOT. Each slot can have its own set of 4--in non-IA32-land, at least.
You get for interrupt pins per slot, but they can map all into the same IRQ. Or more likely you have about 6 PCI slots and 5 IRQs total, and IRQ assignments roll (so Pin A on slot 1 is the same as Pin B on slot 2). There isn't a hardware problem with shared IRQs on a PCI bus, so as long as the drivers are happy, it is only a small loss of performance.
Or maybe years ago....The AMD K6-III (that was years ago, wasn't it?) had a L1 and L2 cache. It went into existing K6 motherbords that had an existing L2 cache, and it worked with the existing cache, making that an L3 cache.
I looked it up and mine is a 7200, but I'm still wondering what bugs you're talking about.
Before buying my TiVo I did some research. I asked a friend with the 7200 and he told me it was fairly unreliable, losing signal far more offen then his other recievers, and having it stay lost for a time, or locking up for no reason. He said a bunch of other bad things as well, but I don't recall them in any detail. As he reads slashdot, maybe he will come to my aid:-)
One of the Charlie Chats with the tech people there were a lot of comments about how many people were having trubble with the 7200. That is a pretty big admition from the folks that were selling the thing, so I can only assume it was pretty buggy, or had a pretty nasty UI.
DISH also is coming out with a new PVR, so I think they didn't like the 7200.
I also noticed this in another forum:
Hello!
Thank you for subscribing to Personal TV. If you have your DISHPlayer(TM) satellite receiver set to record "Friends" on NBC every Thursday night, we have some news for you.
Instead of its normal 30-minute episodes, "Friends" will be playing 40 minute episodes every Thursday night in February! Here's how to make sure you record all 40 minutes of each episode:
Go to Personal TV.
Choose "Friends" where it is set to record in the future (in blue), not one you have already recorded (in green).
Choose Erase.
From TV Home, choose TV Listings.
Choose "View TV Listings by day and time."
Go to the evening of February 1 and choose the new "Friends" episode on NBC.
Press RECORD twice on your remote control (you should see a "triple red circle" symbol to indicate multiple recordings will occur).
You are now set up to record the full 40 minutes of "Friends" every Thursday. To go back to the regular 30-minute recording time after February 22, simply repeat the steps above but in step #6, choose the "Friends" episode on the evening of March 1.
Happy "Friends" viewing!
Sincerely,
Your DISHPlayer Team
As far as TiVo goes you get the extra 40 minutes by havign asked for that show, or a session pass ("all the shows with that name on that chanel"), the only way you get screwed is if you made a manual recording for a specific time range, and in that case I can't blame the thing.
I rejected the Replay because they have an anti-hacking stance, and I didn't like their record paradime, oh and I heard about bugs on (I think) the Panosonic with macrovision.
I rejeted the DirecTiVo because it only records stuff off of DirecTV, no off-air signals, and no WB. I'm not going to pay a ton of money to not watch Buffy:-)
I was pretty leary of the Stand-Alone TiVo just because I'm not thrilled with taking a nice MPEG2 signal, and needlessly turning it into NTSC, and running it through a lower quality MPEG2 codec. But it seemed the least bad, and I got it. I have been quite happy with it. More so then my DVD player.
it means that TiVo may may have even less competition now
Well, with Microsoft's second PVR (the buggy DISHPlayer7000 being their first) coming to market this year TiVo has a bit of competition on it's hands still...
Yes, I know UltimateTV isn't for sale yet, but competing with Microsoft's vapor-releases is harder then competing with it's real products!
While I don't know what TiVo's offical responce to UTV is, I like to imagine it is stright out of their comercials "Bring it on fat boy!"....
I have gotten VMWare to crash. If it crashes there is some behaviour that the programmers were not aware of. These behaviours may well be secrity problems (buffer overuns frequently cause crashes, only choosing the right data to overun with will show a security problem).
I wouldn't be very thrilled with the idea of VMWare being part of a secure system (even if it is more the CMW part then the "secure from the outside" part) until it pretty much is impossable to crash.
Most of the coders I know type anywhere from 60-140 words per minute. When coding, this measure of speed goes out the window, but it still is a fair shade faster than actually discussing what they are in the midst of coding.
I had ViaVoice for a while. For coding it is pretty worthless because you have to switch to the military alphabet to do most variable names, and lots of keywords, and unix commands, and....
It did Ok for email messages, and was pretty allright for web browsing. Then again a good optical mouse with the scroolwheel is almost as good, and not that bad on my RSI.
If integrated in the UI it would probbably be useful for lots of things where you have to look over a button panel before deciding what to "click" on. I look forward to seeing it work, but doubt it will allow a whole lot more hands-off use. Er, let me clarify, it won't make hands-off as effecent as hands-on. People that can't use their hands, or shouldn't may well get a lot out of it.
[...]
Linux still discriminates against a significant proportion of the population!
But who do you mean, you ask. Well let me tell you, for the many, many people out there who suffer from dyslexia the stubborn insistance of the Linux crowd to stick with their command line interfaces is nothing short of discrimination!
I'm dislexic. Not just a little either. Had to ride the short
bus the school for six years. I have an extremely hard time spelling
anything right. Spell checkers that don't have the correct spelling
for me are worthless (thanks aspell!)
I don't find Unix names all that hard. They are short. Easy
to memorize. I don't have trouble with three letter words. I do
when we hit five.
So don't you go changing/etc to some damn thing I can't spell
worth a damn in my name!
Even the PSX2 doesn't really have anything on the Dcast game- or graphics-wise.
From playing with a PSX2 at a friend's, and owning a Dreamcast I can say the PSX2 does have better graphics. One of the psudo-wargames the PSX2 has (real time) rendered people as detailed as the Dreamcast fighting games, but rather then at most 4 at ones (like DOA2) it had twenty, thirty, 100 or so of them swarming around.
As far as gameplay goes, nothing grabbed me as a must own game like, say, Soul Calibur was for me on the Dreamcast (they have DOA2 Hardcore, which is a bit better then DOA2 on the DC, but not a lot).
I assume the game play will get better: if nothing else Sega will make good PSX2 games:-)
I assume the graphics will get better as well as the thing gets pushed.
Wow, in one case, all three of these (very important) pieces of case law are getting argued. This could set a lot
of precedents in all the areas Your Rights Online cares about.
Not likely. Assuming 2600 wins, they only need to win on one of those three grounds (or some other ground). There is no need for a judge to stick their neck out to establish that "Restrictions on linking are restraint of free press" if they decide that "The DCMA circumvention clauses are not a valid use of constitutional power".
I can hope that all three are held, but I expect not. Well I guess if it goes to a N judge panel (say the suprime court) some judges may rule on (1) others on (2) and others on (3), but I'm not sure if that eastablishes all three as legal doctrone, or only any (if any!) of the three that get a majority...
why do people keep gunning for Transmeta to go into the embedded market? why do you want antiquated x86-based chips in the embedded market anyhow?
I don't want a x86 in my embedded product, but lots of people who design them do. Either because lots of tools work with x86s, or it is easy to find people who can do x86 code, or x86 drivers exist for devices they want, or because that is what their boss wants.
Transmeta shouldn't argue with those suckers, it should take their money.
If I kept intentionaly crashing my car into yours and you did the same, don't you think we'd fast realize that we're both wasting one another's money in fixing our cars and agree to stop?
Sure, unless I have more cars (or repair money) then you, and am willing to spend it to keep you the hell off the street.
You can win a war of equal exchanges, or even losing more money/men/whatever then the oponent on each exchange. You "just" need to be very determined and/or well funded.
Look at the USA WW2 tanks. They couldn't even hurt the German Tiger tanks unless they got a shot to their back, but we had so many of the damm things we beat them anyway.
Look at the Vietnam war. We killed more of them then they killed of us. Buy a fairly wide margin even. But we wern't willing to keep dieing to win, and they were. We lost.
I suggest that the higher-ups in the military that plan this read some of Isaac Asimov's work - he wrote a good one about something like this.
He has written a lot of good fiction, but I'm not sure how much is relivant to forming military doctrine. "A Letter Home" was really entertaining, but we wouldn't have won the Gulf War (or at least not with as little loss of our lives as there was) if we had payed any real attention to it.
No matter how fanatical an untrained and unarmed person is, he is not going to be able to defeat a fully armed and trained army, that's just preposterous.
Well, kind of. The unarmed person can be part of a wave attack, the person in the front gets a rifle, when killed the guy behind him grabs it up and continues on.
I beleve the Russians had to do that in some WW2 battles.
There were also the woefully under-armed folks who found one of the USA Libberator45 drops, a single fire 45 pistol GM made two a minute at the height of production. It came with an instruction comic book that showed how to sneek up behind a lone german and shoot him in the back, and then take their much better gun/rifle.
Fanatisam is a force multiplyer. So is training. So is equiptment. If you had a shotgun, and 1000 people who wanted to kill you had nothing but sticks, I'm pretty sure your going to die. You'll be able to kill a lot more of them then they will of you, but they can rush you in great enough numbers that you won't be able to reload fast enough.
The GPL exists to protect the authors of Free Software from having their work stolen (yes, I said "stolen") by people who aren't willing to give back to the community
On the other hand the BSD licence is for people who would rather see good code running things, even if there is no way to get money or code or (assuming the advertising clause is dropped) even fame.
If you spend a month tweeking a LaPlacian predictor for whatever reason and slap the BSDL on it you get code that might make it into your automatic transmition, or anti-lock breaks. If you GPL it chances are very slim.
Either is your right. The GPL is somewhat more likely to force others to open their code. The BSDL won't force anyone to, but people who use it migh feel like contributing on their own. Or not.
Seriously, why would you think that you can freely partake of the efforts of a programmer without giving him some sort of compensation?
Well, if they BSDL it, or (to a lesser extent) LGPL it, I would say it is Ok, because they told you it was. If the code is GPLed, and allready packaged up as a usable program, maybe it is Ok. Is it OK for a comercial web browser to fire up a GPLed helper app? Is it ok for a comercal shell to use GPLed programs inside a pipeline? Is it OK for a comercial program to run under the Linux kernel? Is it OK for the same comercal entity to ship a Linux distribution "for free" along with the comercial (close source) program?
Honestly, I don't think it's moral to used GPLed code without GPLing your product that takes advantage of it, regardless of whether you can find a legal loophole for doing so. Doing so violates the intent of the author.
Yeah, but one man's loophole is another's clear intent. Is what TiVo did exploiting a loophole? Or did Linus intend to allow it?
I'll totally admit that taking a GPLed liberey and turning it into a program, and than effectavly into a LGPLed one by talking to that program over a pipe or shared mem or whatever is...distasteful, cheeting, and immoral at least if the program isn't generally useful. The harder part is, what if that program is gennerally useful?
If gzip was only libgzip.a, and GPLed, would writing a commandline gzip and gzcat be immoral? Even if the primary intent is to let it be used from a non-GPLed program?
IDSL may be "better" in terms of how far from the central office it can go, but it's typically not "better" in terms of how much bandwidth you can get - it's just running, as I understand it, a raw bit stream over an ISDN line, i.e., instead of splitting a basic rate 144K bits/second ISDN line into 2 64K bits/second B channels and 1 16K bits/second D channel, they just give you one 144K bits/second channel (or maybe you only get 128K bits/second).
You do get the 144Kbits/sec. Around here it is even a fair bit cheeper then ISDN.
It may be VDSL (others in this thread have spoken of VDSL in this context), which is higher speed than typical ADSL.
Never heard of it, but that doesn't mean anything. There are more xDSLs then you can shake a stick at. I know there is an HDSL which is 1.5Mbps/sec both ways, and an SDSL that I think is symetric, but no specific speed, and quite a few others. There is also a lot of variation in supported speeds and distances depending on the equiptment at each end.
Sometimes you can get a faster speed from one provider or the other even though they all use the same wires from the RBOC.
IIRC, DirecTv or The Dish Network don't allow you to hook up more than 4 TVs per dish
DISH has a switch, I think the SW64 that can be used to hook up 6 recievers to the two dish's (two LNB's per dish, one dish per satalite, or the DISH500 which is actually two dishes, four LNBs...).
Or you can skip four recievers, and hook up another SW64 and six recievers to the second SW64...or another SW64 and....
That was a bit over a year and a half ago. There was talk about a bigger multi-switch. A house two doors down has this setup and a lot of recievers for it's local population (I only have one reciever).
The real problem is each dish gets an even and odd polairity signal, and can feed out one but not both. The reciever asks for whichever one has the channel it needs. There are two LNBs on some of the recievers so it can can serve two recievers. A switch can take in both LNBs, and set on to even and one to odd forever, and give the recievers whichever they ask for.
That is then compounded by having more then one satalite. DISH does this by having either two dish'es, and a switch, or one slightly eliptical dish that gets both signals and acts as the switch as well. I beleve that DirecTv does the same thing, but I'm not sure.
The external multi-switches are a bit of a kludge, but they work. I don't know if DirecTv has them.
P.S. I think the mPhase stuff doesn't send 60 video channels down the phone line, just one selected channel (or two or so). The limit of 60 is probbably in the head end, and not that hard to change. But that is a total total total guess. It would work that way if I had to design around the current constraints...:-)
However, once again the Linux camp is "doing things their own way" and contributing even more to the
separation between different Unix flavors (as well as making those sigs that go something like "Linux - the
Unix defragmentation tool" even funnier). Don't get me wrong, iptables seems to have a few cool features
that are not present in ipfilter, but just why was ipfilter not used instead ?
Being compatable at the cost of better functionality isn't allways a good idea. Would iptable's "cool new features" have fit into the ipfilter framework? Is there some fundomental reason that iptable might be faster, or even just simpler to implment?
I don't even run Linux (three diffrent BSDs, no Linux), but I wouldn't want them to give up useful features just to stay compatable with me any more then I would want FreeBSD to adopt some else's FireWire framework if that framework could never do foo, or was boud to allways suck in some way.
In fact OpenBSD has a framework for Crypto cards. It works great for IPSEC, but poorly for other things (like cryptoFS, or userland crypto apps). If FreeBSD adopted it as is they would get half a dozen working crypto cards, bitchn' fast IPSEC. I think it would also be a giant mistake. I would rather end up with an incompatable framework that is better, then a compatable one that isn't so hot. It would be nice if the new one was very similar and could be "backported" to OpenBSD if they were so inclined...
Sometime the first implmentation isn't such a good idea, so the second should be diffrent. Or the third, or the sixtyith. That is why we run Unix-like OSes rather then TOPS-8086.
No, i didn't. They *are* using the FreeBSD kernel, and PB is running a heavily modified FreeBSD 3.3 on a heavily modified Mach kernel.
Nope. Explain why "sysctl kern.symfile" would print "kern.symfile = \mach.sym" on a non-MACH kernel?
Besides the IP stack has a lot of anoying little problems not in FreeBSD that I remember from the NeXT. Like needing the arp cache cleared once in a while. Oh, and a very mach like "top" (which I would post along with a FreeBSD one, but slashdot rejects it as "lame"). The MACH one is reporting a lot more thread info and four memory stats vs two.
I know Apple says a lot about FreeBSD, but they don't quite say they are FreeBSD. They can use FreeBSD device drivers, but that can be done with a shim layer (which is a good idea -- it would be nice if they had one for Linux and NetBSD drivers as well).
It still ain't bad. It is a lot better then OS9, but it isn't as nice as it would be if it were on a modern kernel (like FreeBSD 4.x, or Linux).
Technology as a panacea has fallen flat on its ass, and I don't think anybody here can name me a technology that has fulfilled this oft-repeated promise of turning our lives from Pb into Au.
Dwarf wheet.
Land survay and scientific laying of irragation (my great grandparents could barely make a living on 100 acres of farm land, their decendents use the exact same 100 acres and have not just plants but also dairy cows)
A vast many other improvments that allow the current population to live (twenty years ago we couldn't have made enough food).
.
Oh, fire was good. The wheel wasn't bad either, but not as good as fire.
Go read slouching towards utopia if you want more examples, and a well reasoned argument about where technology is taking us (some slower then others).
A lot of folks seem to have very rosy memories of the NeXT cube. I'll be the first to admit that software-wise, it was cool. The hardware, on the other hand, was not ``years ahead of its time.''
Yep. According to the story they were short on software, but they were targeted against Sun and DEC workstations, and they had tons more easy-to-use software. It shipped with Mathmetica and a WISIWIG word processor! It was swimming with software.
On the other hand it was more expensave then the Sun 3/60 (mono) -- I think. And not much faster. Slower for disk I/O even (MO drives were kinda slugish). And by the time UofMD was buying them the SPARC1 was allready out, which was way way way faster then the 68030. Bad timing for NeXT.
I also think they did poorly at universities because they had poor security. You could play sounds, or record from the mic of any NeXT without logging on (no cleartext password needed even!). I remember learning enough ObjectaveC to do that. It was great fun to start playing the "Paper is jammed in your printer" sound on the lab aid's NeXT and watch him/her rush off. Every five minutes. (OK, I was a bit childish, but it was a decade ago!)
Still, it had wonderful software. A pity it took ten years to get it anywhere!
The reason I'm interested is that TiVo, for all it's wonderfulness and the fact that it's a finished product, is still just television. What I want is a multimedia box that sits in my Family room and does TiVo stuff for the TV (with video ports on the front panel for patching in camcorders, etc.) and can play computer games using the TV as a monitor (with USB ports on the front panel for joystick, etc.) and can serve as an audio jukebox (with audio ports on the front panel) to pipe music to PCs (or perhaps to one or two of these) throughout the house and can do them all at the same time -- play a game while recording a TV show while serving music to another room.
I don't want a TiVo-like box that does all that. Mostly I want to keep the game playing in a diffrent unit (possably loading games off the home entertainment system...). Game systems tend to push down to the bare metal, and I don't want to have that on my "mission critical" TV recorder:-) Nor do I want to force the game makers to not go to bare metal if they want too...
However it would be nice if it did the jukebox stuff. And I would love to be able to hook together more then one of these and have them record from diffrent streams, and also any one should be able to read off of the others. And if some get diffrnet channel line ups *say two on satalite, one on cable, one on an antenna), well I should see the union of all of them when I go to select stuff to record. Oh, and you need to be able to tell it how the reception is ("don't record ABC from there unless you really really have too, it ghosts").
Camcorder input would be nice. Non-linear video editing would be nice. Archiving (onto a DAT or DLT jukebox?) would rock. Being able to accept suggestions from friends could be cool. There are a ton of things that I think would fit into the perview of "networked super video recorder and playback monster".
Does anyone know of a TV tuner card with a built-in MPEG codec chip -- and Open, of course, preferably with Linux drivers already written (hey, an AC can dream, right?)
Not that I know of, but Hauppage just announced a new one. And they are advetising this kind of feature, so I expect they would publish docs...maybe.
... how one gets to a bash prompt on the ReplayTV?
I don't think it runs a Unix. Some people have been working on reverse engenering it's filesystem though. I don't think they have gotten as far as the DISHPlayer 7000 folks though.
Slashdot Mirror
That seems pretty nice. It is a little more complicated in FreeBSD.
The middle bunch of steps on making a new kernel are optional, only needed in the unlikely event that you want something not compiled into the GENERIC kernel, but recomended as you seldom need anywhere close to all the stuff that is in GENERIC.
By following the handbook directions you can get the stable branch, the bleeding-edge branch, or one of the numbered releases, or a stable branch for a older major version. There are a few other choices as well.
It has packages, and ports. Mostly just the ports are enough. They are trivial to use (for example "cd /usr/ports/lang/smalltalk; make install" will fetch source for smalltalk, and all the packages it needs, patch them and install them).
If all you are afaid of is how to replace apt-get and apt-install, that one is easy. Try "cd /usr/ports/[catagory]/[thing]; make install". That's it. It'll find any dependent packages, and make them, download source from any of N place, apply and FreeBSD patches, and do the install.
/usr/ports is one of the coolest things about FreeBSD. I do have to admit that mergemaster isn't too bad either.
Enjoy.
If FreeBSD is a server-only OS why did it get USB support before Linux did?
If FreeBSD is a server-only OS, what is PicoBSD all about?
Fact of the matter is FreeBSD serves multiple intrests as well. And it does them all reasonably well.
You get for interrupt pins per slot, but they can map all into the same IRQ. Or more likely you have about 6 PCI slots and 5 IRQs total, and IRQ assignments roll (so Pin A on slot 1 is the same as Pin B on slot 2). There isn't a hardware problem with shared IRQs on a PCI bus, so as long as the drivers are happy, it is only a small loss of performance.
And where did this all come from anyway?
Or maybe years ago....The AMD K6-III (that was years ago, wasn't it?) had a L1 and L2 cache. It went into existing K6 motherbords that had an existing L2 cache, and it worked with the existing cache, making that an L3 cache.
Not that it was all that popular.
Before buying my TiVo I did some research. I asked a friend with the 7200 and he told me it was fairly unreliable, losing signal far more offen then his other recievers, and having it stay lost for a time, or locking up for no reason. He said a bunch of other bad things as well, but I don't recall them in any detail. As he reads slashdot, maybe he will come to my aid :-)
One of the Charlie Chats with the tech people there were a lot of comments about how many people were having trubble with the 7200. That is a pretty big admition from the folks that were selling the thing, so I can only assume it was pretty buggy, or had a pretty nasty UI.
DISH also is coming out with a new PVR, so I think they didn't like the 7200.
I also noticed this in another forum:
As far as TiVo goes you get the extra 40 minutes by havign asked for that show, or a session pass ("all the shows with that name on that chanel"), the only way you get screwed is if you made a manual recording for a specific time range, and in that case I can't blame the thing.
I rejected the Replay because they have an anti-hacking stance, and I didn't like their record paradime, oh and I heard about bugs on (I think) the Panosonic with macrovision.
I rejeted the DirecTiVo because it only records stuff off of DirecTV, no off-air signals, and no WB. I'm not going to pay a ton of money to not watch Buffy :-)
I was pretty leary of the Stand-Alone TiVo just because I'm not thrilled with taking a nice MPEG2 signal, and needlessly turning it into NTSC, and running it through a lower quality MPEG2 codec. But it seemed the least bad, and I got it. I have been quite happy with it. More so then my DVD player.
Well, with Microsoft's second PVR (the buggy DISHPlayer7000 being their first) coming to market this year TiVo has a bit of competition on it's hands still...
Yes, I know UltimateTV isn't for sale yet, but competing with Microsoft's vapor-releases is harder then competing with it's real products!
While I don't know what TiVo's offical responce to UTV is, I like to imagine it is stright out of their comercials "Bring it on fat boy!"....
I have gotten VMWare to crash. If it crashes there is some behaviour that the programmers were not aware of. These behaviours may well be secrity problems (buffer overuns frequently cause crashes, only choosing the right data to overun with will show a security problem).
I wouldn't be very thrilled with the idea of VMWare being part of a secure system (even if it is more the CMW part then the "secure from the outside" part) until it pretty much is impossable to crash.
I had ViaVoice for a while. For coding it is pretty worthless because you have to switch to the military alphabet to do most variable names, and lots of keywords, and unix commands, and....
It did Ok for email messages, and was pretty allright for web browsing. Then again a good optical mouse with the scroolwheel is almost as good, and not that bad on my RSI.
If integrated in the UI it would probbably be useful for lots of things where you have to look over a button panel before deciding what to "click" on. I look forward to seeing it work, but doubt it will allow a whole lot more hands-off use. Er, let me clarify, it won't make hands-off as effecent as hands-on. People that can't use their hands, or shouldn't may well get a lot out of it.
Besides, it's just palin cool.
I'm dislexic. Not just a little either. Had to ride the short bus the school for six years. I have an extremely hard time spelling anything right. Spell checkers that don't have the correct spelling for me are worthless (thanks aspell!)
I don't find Unix names all that hard. They are short. Easy to memorize. I don't have trouble with three letter words. I do when we hit five.
So don't you go changing /etc to some damn thing I can't spell
worth a damn in my name!
From playing with a PSX2 at a friend's, and owning a Dreamcast I can say the PSX2 does have better graphics. One of the psudo-wargames the PSX2 has (real time) rendered people as detailed as the Dreamcast fighting games, but rather then at most 4 at ones (like DOA2) it had twenty, thirty, 100 or so of them swarming around.
As far as gameplay goes, nothing grabbed me as a must own game like, say, Soul Calibur was for me on the Dreamcast (they have DOA2 Hardcore, which is a bit better then DOA2 on the DC, but not a lot).
I assume the game play will get better: if nothing else Sega will make good PSX2 games :-)
I assume the graphics will get better as well as the thing gets pushed.
Not likely. Assuming 2600 wins, they only need to win on one of those three grounds (or some other ground). There is no need for a judge to stick their neck out to establish that "Restrictions on linking are restraint of free press" if they decide that "The DCMA circumvention clauses are not a valid use of constitutional power".
I can hope that all three are held, but I expect not. Well I guess if it goes to a N judge panel (say the suprime court) some judges may rule on (1) others on (2) and others on (3), but I'm not sure if that eastablishes all three as legal doctrone, or only any (if any!) of the three that get a majority...
I don't want a x86 in my embedded product, but lots of people who design them do. Either because lots of tools work with x86s, or it is easy to find people who can do x86 code, or x86 drivers exist for devices they want, or because that is what their boss wants.
Transmeta shouldn't argue with those suckers, it should take their money.
I didn't, I just figured someone else would bring it up, besides the Tiger tanks just lept to mind, and I've allways been a fan of the L45....
Vietnam is a good example though, but I'm not sure what you mean by "shit bombs", maybe I missed a history channel special...
Sure, unless I have more cars (or repair money) then you, and am willing to spend it to keep you the hell off the street.
You can win a war of equal exchanges, or even losing more money/men/whatever then the oponent on each exchange. You "just" need to be very determined and/or well funded.
Look at the USA WW2 tanks. They couldn't even hurt the German Tiger tanks unless they got a shot to their back, but we had so many of the damm things we beat them anyway.
Look at the Vietnam war. We killed more of them then they killed of us. Buy a fairly wide margin even. But we wern't willing to keep dieing to win, and they were. We lost.
He has written a lot of good fiction, but I'm not sure how much is relivant to forming military doctrine. "A Letter Home" was really entertaining, but we wouldn't have won the Gulf War (or at least not with as little loss of our lives as there was) if we had payed any real attention to it.
Well, kind of. The unarmed person can be part of a wave attack, the person in the front gets a rifle, when killed the guy behind him grabs it up and continues on.
I beleve the Russians had to do that in some WW2 battles.
There were also the woefully under-armed folks who found one of the USA Libberator45 drops, a single fire 45 pistol GM made two a minute at the height of production. It came with an instruction comic book that showed how to sneek up behind a lone german and shoot him in the back, and then take their much better gun/rifle.
Fanatisam is a force multiplyer. So is training. So is equiptment. If you had a shotgun, and 1000 people who wanted to kill you had nothing but sticks, I'm pretty sure your going to die. You'll be able to kill a lot more of them then they will of you, but they can rush you in great enough numbers that you won't be able to reload fast enough.
On the other hand the BSD licence is for people who would rather see good code running things, even if there is no way to get money or code or (assuming the advertising clause is dropped) even fame.
If you spend a month tweeking a LaPlacian predictor for whatever reason and slap the BSDL on it you get code that might make it into your automatic transmition, or anti-lock breaks. If you GPL it chances are very slim.
Either is your right. The GPL is somewhat more likely to force others to open their code. The BSDL won't force anyone to, but people who use it migh feel like contributing on their own. Or not.
Well, if they BSDL it, or (to a lesser extent) LGPL it, I would say it is Ok, because they told you it was. If the code is GPLed, and allready packaged up as a usable program, maybe it is Ok. Is it OK for a comercial web browser to fire up a GPLed helper app? Is it ok for a comercal shell to use GPLed programs inside a pipeline? Is it OK for a comercial program to run under the Linux kernel? Is it OK for the same comercal entity to ship a Linux distribution "for free" along with the comercial (close source) program?
Yeah, but one man's loophole is another's clear intent. Is what TiVo did exploiting a loophole? Or did Linus intend to allow it?
I'll totally admit that taking a GPLed liberey and turning it into a program, and than effectavly into a LGPLed one by talking to that program over a pipe or shared mem or whatever is...distasteful, cheeting, and immoral at least if the program isn't generally useful. The harder part is, what if that program is gennerally useful?
If gzip was only libgzip.a, and GPLed, would writing a commandline gzip and gzcat be immoral? Even if the primary intent is to let it be used from a non-GPLed program?
You do get the 144Kbits/sec. Around here it is even a fair bit cheeper then ISDN.
Never heard of it, but that doesn't mean anything. There are more xDSLs then you can shake a stick at. I know there is an HDSL which is 1.5Mbps/sec both ways, and an SDSL that I think is symetric, but no specific speed, and quite a few others. There is also a lot of variation in supported speeds and distances depending on the equiptment at each end.
Sometimes you can get a faster speed from one provider or the other even though they all use the same wires from the RBOC.
DISH has a switch, I think the SW64 that can be used to hook up 6 recievers to the two dish's (two LNB's per dish, one dish per satalite, or the DISH500 which is actually two dishes, four LNBs...).
Or you can skip four recievers, and hook up another SW64 and six recievers to the second SW64...or another SW64 and....
That was a bit over a year and a half ago. There was talk about a bigger multi-switch. A house two doors down has this setup and a lot of recievers for it's local population (I only have one reciever).
The real problem is each dish gets an even and odd polairity signal, and can feed out one but not both. The reciever asks for whichever one has the channel it needs. There are two LNBs on some of the recievers so it can can serve two recievers. A switch can take in both LNBs, and set on to even and one to odd forever, and give the recievers whichever they ask for.
That is then compounded by having more then one satalite. DISH does this by having either two dish'es, and a switch, or one slightly eliptical dish that gets both signals and acts as the switch as well. I beleve that DirecTv does the same thing, but I'm not sure.
The external multi-switches are a bit of a kludge, but they work. I don't know if DirecTv has them.
P.S. I think the mPhase stuff doesn't send 60 video channels down the phone line, just one selected channel (or two or so). The limit of 60 is probbably in the head end, and not that hard to change. But that is a total total total guess. It would work that way if I had to design around the current constraints... :-)
Being compatable at the cost of better functionality isn't allways a good idea. Would iptable's "cool new features" have fit into the ipfilter framework? Is there some fundomental reason that iptable might be faster, or even just simpler to implment?
I don't even run Linux (three diffrent BSDs, no Linux), but I wouldn't want them to give up useful features just to stay compatable with me any more then I would want FreeBSD to adopt some else's FireWire framework if that framework could never do foo, or was boud to allways suck in some way.
In fact OpenBSD has a framework for Crypto cards. It works great for IPSEC, but poorly for other things (like cryptoFS, or userland crypto apps). If FreeBSD adopted it as is they would get half a dozen working crypto cards, bitchn' fast IPSEC. I think it would also be a giant mistake. I would rather end up with an incompatable framework that is better, then a compatable one that isn't so hot. It would be nice if the new one was very similar and could be "backported" to OpenBSD if they were so inclined...
Sometime the first implmentation isn't such a good idea, so the second should be diffrent. Or the third, or the sixtyith. That is why we run Unix-like OSes rather then TOPS-8086.
Nope. Explain why "sysctl kern.symfile" would print "kern.symfile = \mach.sym" on a non-MACH kernel?
Besides the IP stack has a lot of anoying little problems not in FreeBSD that I remember from the NeXT. Like needing the arp cache cleared once in a while. Oh, and a very mach like "top" (which I would post along with a FreeBSD one, but slashdot rejects it as "lame"). The MACH one is reporting a lot more thread info and four memory stats vs two.
I know Apple says a lot about FreeBSD, but they don't quite say they are FreeBSD. They can use FreeBSD device drivers, but that can be done with a shim layer (which is a good idea -- it would be nice if they had one for Linux and NetBSD drivers as well).
It still ain't bad. It is a lot better then OS9, but it isn't as nice as it would be if it were on a modern kernel (like FreeBSD 4.x, or Linux).
Dwarf wheet.
Land survay and scientific laying of irragation (my great grandparents could barely make a living on 100 acres of farm land, their decendents use the exact same 100 acres and have not just plants but also dairy cows)
A vast many other improvments that allow the current population to live (twenty years ago we couldn't have made enough food). .
Oh, fire was good. The wheel wasn't bad either, but not as good as fire.
Go read slouching towards utopia if you want more examples, and a well reasoned argument about where technology is taking us (some slower then others).
Yep. According to the story they were short on software, but they were targeted against Sun and DEC workstations, and they had tons more easy-to-use software. It shipped with Mathmetica and a WISIWIG word processor! It was swimming with software.
On the other hand it was more expensave then the Sun 3/60 (mono) -- I think. And not much faster. Slower for disk I/O even (MO drives were kinda slugish). And by the time UofMD was buying them the SPARC1 was allready out, which was way way way faster then the 68030. Bad timing for NeXT.
I also think they did poorly at universities because they had poor security. You could play sounds, or record from the mic of any NeXT without logging on (no cleartext password needed even!). I remember learning enough ObjectaveC to do that. It was great fun to start playing the "Paper is jammed in your printer" sound on the lab aid's NeXT and watch him/her rush off. Every five minutes. (OK, I was a bit childish, but it was a decade ago!)
Still, it had wonderful software. A pity it took ten years to get it anywhere!
I don't want a TiVo-like box that does all that. Mostly I want to keep the game playing in a diffrent unit (possably loading games off the home entertainment system...). Game systems tend to push down to the bare metal, and I don't want to have that on my "mission critical" TV recorder :-) Nor do I want to force the game makers to not go to bare metal if they want too...
However it would be nice if it did the jukebox stuff. And I would love to be able to hook together more then one of these and have them record from diffrent streams, and also any one should be able to read off of the others. And if some get diffrnet channel line ups *say two on satalite, one on cable, one on an antenna), well I should see the union of all of them when I go to select stuff to record. Oh, and you need to be able to tell it how the reception is ("don't record ABC from there unless you really really have too, it ghosts").
Camcorder input would be nice. Non-linear video editing would be nice. Archiving (onto a DAT or DLT jukebox?) would rock. Being able to accept suggestions from friends could be cool. There are a ton of things that I think would fit into the perview of "networked super video recorder and playback monster".
Not that I know of, but Hauppage just announced a new one. And they are advetising this kind of feature, so I expect they would publish docs...maybe.
I don't think it runs a Unix. Some people have been working on reverse engenering it's filesystem though. I don't think they have gotten as far as the DISHPlayer 7000 folks though.