No, not vocal-filled rock tracks, just mood-inspiring MIDIs and MP3s that people can use in their software. I remember working on a couple amateur games a while back where eager programmers were a dime a dozen, but finding inspiring background music was next to impossible. The World Forge project currently has some music up, for instance, but not as much as they'll need.
The nice thing about public domain (or freely redistributable, anyway) music is even if a software project using it fails, and code written for it becomes useless, all the music is pretty much 100% salvageable.
Yes, I mean the recent, 1999 stuff, not the aged tarball at the end of the code hyperlink.
One could speculate that the decision to keep new/. CGI code hidden is more Andover's desire than Rob's.
Don't get me wrong, it's their right not to release source code - it's their code! It's just that for such a big open source advocacy site not to do so is a little hypocritical, and for them not to do so in violation of a long standing statement of intention ("It'll be out someday. Maybe. I hope.") is a little disappointing.
On the bright side, as far as I can tell there aren't any other negative consequences of Andover's investment, so if it's keeping Rob & Hemos supplied with food, beer, and silicon, it's an overall win.
I've been told before that the difficulty of becoming an XFree86 developer is more psychological than real, but it's still a big factor. I'm only a casual C/C++ programmer; I've never made any huge open source contributions, just download source tarballs and SRPMs of a half dozen things here and there, discovered that I could find bugs or improvements to be made in a couple, and that I couldn't in most. But if I had to apply for permission every time I noticed a quirk in say, autofs, and wanted to look at the latest source code... I wouldn't have done anything at all.
Hell, I *haven't* done anything at all. XFree 3.3.5 has a bug with a garbled mouse cursor on my girlfriend's and former boss's computers, and it has a bug with mouse recapturing and memory leaks on my computer. I always mean to jump on a beta release as soon as it comes out so I can see if little bugs like these are fixed or easily fixable... but releases come out infrequently, and who wants to work on three month old code when you know there's later stuff out there?
It's my understanding that while the Hurd is aiming for Posix compatibility, and going to use glibc as the standard library, they're going to be much more modular and abstracted (read: cool but possibly slow) under the hood.
The neatest things I've heard of:
The whole system is basically cooperating servers running atop the GNU Mach microkernel:
the idea that every user can build up his own system on top. So, if you want to operate, start compatible servers. It's after all your decision, much like it is your personal decision if you use one desktop system (like Gnome) or Xlib, Athena etc programs together. Latter don't interoperate well (drag n drop etc). As they run in user space, you can tweak the system to your liking, even as a user.
But there are still some servers that are the base of the Hurd system. Those are the auth, proc, init and password server at least. You don't need to register your process with the proc server (and it won't show up in the output of "ps" if you don't do so), but that the only thing that will give you access to the features of the proc server. Same with auth. If you don use auth, your tasks will have little to none privilegdes.
Better yet, filesystem support comes from servers, which I believe means that users can have files or filesystems (limited to user permissions) that live off their own servers. Every mounted filesystem is just another new filesystem server added to the pool. No need to make smbmount suid root or put every smb share with the user option into fstab, for instance; any user process would be able to mount arbitrary smb shares in their own directories and make them viewable without being able to circument security. Cooler yet, in theory you could make.signature be randomly generated by a program without using ugly named pipe hacks, you could "cd file.tar.gz" without ugly virtual filesystem libraries, you could implement albods more easily... I can't imagine all the possibilities, but it's fun to try.
Superficially you'd think there's an element of jealousy there because Stallman almost wrote an OS then someone else got most of the limelight by writing the kernel... but that just doesn't feel like the case.
There's appropriate mailing lists you can hunt down for deep info, but you can follow the Cliff's Notes of the Debian Hurd work at the debian-hurd Kernel Cousin page.
How are people supposed to "shut up and code" on XFree86 when the application process to become a developer intimidates the casual bug-fixing C coder, and when the releases are so infrequent that released code is probably too far behind the current code for an outside developer to work on?
I say this here every time mention of XFree86 4 comes up, but I'll say it again: now that they've got a modular architecture that they can split NDA'ed drivers away from, they need to open up the bulk of XFree86 development to the public. How much of the work that goes into other open source software projects comes from people who download the latest bleeding-edge CVS and fix one little instability? How many now-full-time coders on other large open source projects started as people who simply liked poring through bleeding-edge releases and hacking on them?
There are two ways to recruit development for free software projects: you can plead for more full time developers on your web page like XFree86 does, or you can give people something bleeding edge to develop, like most other projects do. It's a shame that the most important free software project out there is hurting for lack of interested developers, but I think they're partially bringing the problem upon themselves.
You don't need to use imwheel, you just need to use a version of XFree86 from the last year or two, and you need to follow the instructions on the X Mouse Wheel Scroll Page (basically make sure scroll wheel support is turned on in XF86Config, then add new netscape entries to your.Xdefaults file).
Then voila, you've just added mouse wheel support to an app that was written before mouse wheels existed. I was thinking about how cool this was the other day while wondering why Regedit (in Win98) was ignoring my friend's wheel mouse...
Oh, sure, they're changing it to "Windows Powered" now, because it "emphasizes the integrated nature of the palmtop appliance," or some such BS.
But we all know the truth: It took the geniuses of Microsoft marketing this long before it finally dawned on them that the natural contraction of "Windows CE" is a word meaning "an expression of pain".
There's a lot of Linux/Windows dual booters out there who aren't willing to wait three more weeks to get the right version of the game. The number of purchases of the Linux version thus won't reflect the number of people who would prefer a Linux game to a Windows game, but will more closely reflect the number of people who wouldn't have bought Quake 3 at all if it hadn't had a Linux version.
Which is what companies need to know to make their porting decisions, I guess... but it's still annoying to know that there's going to be some skewed, easily misinterpreted marketing data out there because of this.
I was being rude towards a MS PR flack, and now a Slashdot AC is taking it personally? What are you, "grassroots support"?
JAVA is no closer to being a open-standard now, and never will be.
Well, I'm cynical enough to agree that Java will never be an open standard, but it's a hell of a lot closer than J++, whose entire reason for existance was that Java is too cross-platform for Microsoft tastes.
I'm interested in hearing for people with better insight then myself into this sort of programming, if it is plausible to write a program where the key cannot be retrieved from the memory when the encryption is going on?
Not only is it implausible, it is theoretically impossible without tamper-proof "black box" hardware to help.
Read Bruce Schneier's latest Crypto Gram for a better discussion of this topic than I could give you, but here's a thought experiment or two to get you started:
People are going to want to play DVD Audio with their existing DVD-Rom and sound card (albeit at "only" CD quality levels), without getting a special "DVD audio card", right? So that means that DVD Audio players will have to come out that use existing Windows sound drivers. What's to prevent someone from writing a dummy sound driver that simply stores unencrypted audio to disk? Or from hooking up the digital output on their high end sound card to the digital input, and recording while they play?
Even if Windows 95/98 didn't let you pretty much bypass the kernel (Check out the Wine devel lists for info on Bleem's naughty tricks) to get a complete memory dump at any point in time, you could always do just that with Win9x running on a virtual machine in VMWare; just suspend the VMWare process and dump/proc/processid#/mem to examine at your leisure. (or dump/dev/kmem if necessary; doesn't VMWare require kernel patches or some similar weirdness?)
Anyway, they're fighting a losing battle. Computer systems aren't black box hardware, and they're going to stay that way.
The only complaints with releasing the latest/. source code, as Rob supposedly has been planning to do for a while now:
The code page claims it's not in a state ready for release - well then, tarball it up and that's good enough for me. It may not work right off the bat on another site, or there may be too many slashdot-isms hardcoded into the scripts, but we'll get things ironed out and smoothed out soon enough. Nobody wants to try and clone slashdot's style, just to use the cool forum design, customizability, and user moderation for sites covering other topics.
There is the security concern involved with open sourcing something suddenly - don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating "security through obscurity" - but while open source software may have fewer security flaws than closed source software, closed source software that suddenly is liberated is bound to have more bugs, more visible, for a while after the initial code release.
I don't think either of those things are a really convincing argument for keeping the code to the epitome of open source advocacy sites under wraps, though. I don't suppose Andover is against releasing the code, worried about competing web portals taking your ad revenue?
Despite the hopes of platform vendors or open-source zealots, the computing world will always be comprised of different programming languages, operating systems, and computing hardware.
What the fuck are they smoking? While Microsoft "Windows Everywhere" Corp. has dropped support for platform-independent Windows NT, is struggling just to put out a 64-bit NT, and puts 90% of it's development in wasted efforts to make their software as incompatible with existing standards and other vendors as possible (Win16/Win32 instead of POSIX, Windows Terminal Server instead of X, Direct3D instead of OpenGL, ActiveX/J++ instead of Java...); "open source zealots" put out multiple differing-yet-compatible Unix-like operating systems with software written in half a dozen languages, all of which strives to be portable to commercial systems and the other open source systems with little more than a recompile.
Do you have an AMD K6-2 350 by any chance? There is a known windows 95 patch to prevent intermittent lockups when booting with this processor.
It's a K6II 300, but with Windows 98.
Funny thing... with a different motherboard, Win98 wouldn't boot at all until a DOS guru friend had me put "STACKS=12,256" in config.sys; when I switched motherboards (hardware failure) my Windows side freaked and required a reinstall, and it seemed to work without that config.sys hack.
I never really worried about it; I boot Windows to play Homeworld and Starcraft, and that's not often enough that rebooting two or three times is more than a minor PITA.
Into Windows, that is. I get about a 40% chance of Windows locking up (hard, no Ctrl-Alt-Del, no working NumLock even) on the first splash screen when I try to boot.
But I doubt it's a CPU problem; Linux never seems to encounter it.
I wouldn't worry so much if Windows failed to boot 100% of the time... but 40%? You'd think success or failure would at least be deterministic.
Even in the rosiest scenerio all the metals will eventually have been recycled to the point to where there is nothing left (remember, no process is 100% effecient)
Please; I've seen better discussions of thermodynamics in creationist literature...
That forced inefficiency refers to usable energy (work), not to *mass*. Yes, it costs energy to recycle material.. but 100% of the material is still there, and the Sun is currently hitting us with 100+ million gigawatts of power, and will continue doing so for about 4 billion years.
We don't need to go into space because we're in danger of "running out of resources" on Earth; we may want to go into space because it will allow us to use even more resources, and to use the ones we have more efficiently.
Check out the regulations; it's just a bit tricky to get permission to fly a private rocket.
And once you've got permission, where are you getting the cash? The big aerospace companies are sitting pretty; it isn't often that you find a market where the government will pay you hundreds of millions of dollars to build a vehicle and then throw it away ASAP. And the small aerospace companies are dying through lack of private investment after being told by investors (and rightly) that it doesn't pay to compete with the government.
So now we have NASA paying a billion dollars for Lockheed-Martin to produce an over-weight, over-budget "technology demonstrator" while companies like Rotary Rocket and Kistler are hunting their couches for spare change.
I think Slashdot has already been over the interesting international treaties regarding private ownership of celestial territory..
Well, how do you want to do it? Do you want to spend a couple billion dollars and a decade of R&D to develop reusable SSTO vehicles to take people to low orbit cheaply? And another decade and a few more billion dollars to develop things like air-breathing scramjets to reduce launch costs for people and sensitive equipment, and magnetic catapults to really reduce launch costs for fuel pods, structural materials, and other cargo that can take extreme G's? And yet another decade to develop high-thrust ion propulsion or nuclear rockets to give us the high specific impulse necessary to make reusable interplanetary tugs efficient? And maybe another decade and another couple billion to develop better space suits, in-orbit construction techniques to make those deep-space-only tugs, and large scale self-sufficient human habitats? If you want humanity to do that, then by the time you die we'll be in a position to put a city on Mars, start bussing scientists and tourists back and forth, drill kilometers into the crust, and generally do space exploration the way it should be done.
No. This petition is for people who want to spend $30 billion (the lowest estimate I've seen, and who doesn't think this thing would pork barrel like the Shuttle and ISS?) to plant a flag on and take some rock souvenirs from the Martian surface, then stay away from the place for 30+ years because "it's been done, and it's too expensive." We screwed up that way with Apollo, and we don't need to do it again. If all you want is a Mars rock, let's send another RC car and get a Mars rock.
The NSA is interested in real threats, not (1) nutcases who don't do more then make a lot of noise or (2) people who pretend to be be nutcases by posting random keywords.
You're just wasting my tax dollars. Cut it out.
So which is it? Does posting gobs of "echelon keywords" in cleartext bog down the NSA or not?
If it does, then the people posting them are doing exactly what they intended to, and your "adults acting like children" post was foolish. (By the way, is it gall or just a short attention span that causes you to complain about an inflammatory subject line, which was a reply to a post with an inflammatory subject line?)
If it doesn't, then why are you complaining about your "wasted tax dollars"?
Either way, how on earth do you come to the conclusion that your tax dollars aren't being wasted by the NSA, who commands multi billion dollar budgets to spy on you; they're being wasted by the trivial protests intended to make that espionage harder?
Oh, that brings up one last point - you don't seem to grok "Jam Echelon" in the first place. The point is to raise awareness of the downright criminal desire of government agencies to spy on innocent citizens; any actual hinderance to those agencies is just gravy.
IANAL, and I don't know what the law literally states... but there's absolutely no way that the software industry would let a "minors aren't bound by software licenses" precedent be set. What, is it OK to be a warez dude as long as you're under 18? Does CompUSA have to start checking IDs before it sells the next Kings Quest installment?
They're looking at where your message is from, where it is to, and what it is about. They really couldn't care less about your posts to comp.os.linux.misc with "plutonium" and "Iraq" at the bottom.
No, of course not; everybody knows all international criminals obey proper netiquette by posting only to alt.terrorist.evil. Or better yet, they send nice, properly addressed SMTP messages to "binladen@secrethideout.org"! No terrorist organization would even think of using a massively distributed system like Usenet, where tracking the receiver of a message is impossible and tracking the sender (assuming something like mixmaster is used) can be close to impossible.
You know, I just wanted to post this because I got a chuckle imagining alt.terrorist.evil, but now I wonder just how many alt.binaries.* posts actually have steganographic content.
Never mind that company after company who originally used the "we'll be giving away all our proprietary secrets to our competitors" excuse to keep those annoying source advocates away is realizing that interface and implementation are two separate things after all and are releasing specs and source code. Matrox, Nvidia, ATI, Adaptec, Creative Labs, and 3Dfx (off the top of my head) all claimed that releasing technical specs would be a travesty, but have all released full specs (and in some cases, open source Linux drivers) since.
The Digi hardware drivers are presumably (from the article context) GPL'ed and copyrighted by someone other than the hardware manufacturer. So, they can't be redistributed under a BSD-style license, which is what would be required to link them into the FreeBSD kernel and distribute the whole kernel under a BSD license.
The Borland compilers, on the other hand, don't link against anything but system libraries, are under a proprietary license, and Borland is free to compile them on any OS they want to, and redistribute them however they want to.
You may be wondering, "How good is CDE really? Is this expensive, old, committee-designed Unix 'standard' really that much better than the Gnome & KDE environments I use daily? Should I shell out cash for one of the Linux CDE sellers?"
No, it isn't, and no you shouldn't, unless you want a panel that is more limited and harder to configure, a widget set which is nasty to use and 10 times nastier to program in, a limited utility set (which is admittedly on par with Gnome's selection I've seen, but not up to KDE's), a hideous looking window manager, and a nearly useless file manager. The text editor is OK for people used to Notepad, I guess.
I could see where some people might prefer some of the stylistic decisions behind CDE's interface, (hence XFce, in large part), but nobody could possibly honestly mistake it for "genius" or even "worth the effort that got wasted to make it a Unix standard".
By default, if you're sitting at the keyboard and want to reboot a Linux computer, you can yank the plug whether you're root or not. It seems to me that giving non-root local users a way to avoid pulling the plug is a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
No, not vocal-filled rock tracks, just mood-inspiring MIDIs and MP3s that people can use in their software. I remember working on a couple amateur games a while back where eager programmers were a dime a dozen, but finding inspiring background music was next to impossible. The World Forge project currently has some music up, for instance, but not as much as they'll need.
The nice thing about public domain (or freely redistributable, anyway) music is even if a software project using it fails, and code written for it becomes useless, all the music is pretty much 100% salvageable.
Yes, I mean the recent, 1999 stuff, not the aged tarball at the end of the code hyperlink.
/. CGI code hidden is more Andover's desire than Rob's.
One could speculate that the decision to keep new
Don't get me wrong, it's their right not to release source code - it's their code! It's just that for such a big open source advocacy site not to do so is a little hypocritical, and for them not to do so in violation of a long standing statement of intention ("It'll be out someday. Maybe. I hope.") is a little disappointing.
On the bright side, as far as I can tell there aren't any other negative consequences of Andover's investment, so if it's keeping Rob & Hemos supplied with food, beer, and silicon, it's an overall win.
I've been told before that the difficulty of becoming an XFree86 developer is more psychological than real, but it's still a big factor. I'm only a casual C/C++ programmer; I've never made any huge open source contributions, just download source tarballs and SRPMs of a half dozen things here and there, discovered that I could find bugs or improvements to be made in a couple, and that I couldn't in most. But if I had to apply for permission every time I noticed a quirk in say, autofs, and wanted to look at the latest source code... I wouldn't have done anything at all.
Hell, I *haven't* done anything at all. XFree 3.3.5 has a bug with a garbled mouse cursor on my girlfriend's and former boss's computers, and it has a bug with mouse recapturing and memory leaks on my computer. I always mean to jump on a beta release as soon as it comes out so I can see if little bugs like these are fixed or easily fixable... but releases come out infrequently, and who wants to work on three month old code when you know there's later stuff out there?
It's my understanding that while the Hurd is aiming for Posix compatibility, and going to use glibc as the standard library, they're going to be much more modular and abstracted (read: cool but possibly slow) under the hood.
.signature be randomly generated by a program without using ugly named pipe hacks, you could "cd file.tar.gz" without ugly virtual filesystem libraries, you could implement albods more easily... I can't imagine all the possibilities, but it's fun to try.
The neatest things I've heard of:
The whole system is basically cooperating servers running atop the GNU Mach microkernel:
the idea that every user can build up his own system on top. So, if you want to operate, start compatible servers. It's after all your decision, much like it is your personal decision if you use one desktop system (like Gnome) or Xlib, Athena etc programs together. Latter don't interoperate well (drag n drop etc). As they run in user space, you can tweak the system to your liking, even as a user.
But there are still some servers that are the base of the Hurd system. Those are the auth, proc, init and password server at least. You don't need to register your process with the proc server (and it won't show up in the output of "ps" if you don't do so), but that the only thing that will give you access to the features of the proc server. Same with auth. If you don use auth, your tasks will have little to none privilegdes.
Better yet, filesystem support comes from servers, which I believe means that users can have files or filesystems (limited to user permissions) that live off their own servers. Every mounted filesystem is just another new filesystem server added to the pool. No need to make smbmount suid root or put every smb share with the user option into fstab, for instance; any user process would be able to mount arbitrary smb shares in their own directories and make them viewable without being able to circument security. Cooler yet, in theory you could make
Superficially you'd think there's an element of jealousy there because Stallman almost wrote an OS then someone else got most of the limelight by writing the kernel... but that just doesn't feel like the case.
There's appropriate mailing lists you can hunt down for deep info, but you can follow the Cliff's Notes of the Debian Hurd work at the debian-hurd Kernel Cousin page.
How are people supposed to "shut up and code" on XFree86 when the application process to become a developer intimidates the casual bug-fixing C coder, and when the releases are so infrequent that released code is probably too far behind the current code for an outside developer to work on?
I say this here every time mention of XFree86 4 comes up, but I'll say it again: now that they've got a modular architecture that they can split NDA'ed drivers away from, they need to open up the bulk of XFree86 development to the public. How much of the work that goes into other open source software projects comes from people who download the latest bleeding-edge CVS and fix one little instability? How many now-full-time coders on other large open source projects started as people who simply liked poring through bleeding-edge releases and hacking on them?
There are two ways to recruit development for free software projects: you can plead for more full time developers on your web page like XFree86 does, or you can give people something bleeding edge to develop, like most other projects do. It's a shame that the most important free software project out there is hurting for lack of interested developers, but I think they're partially bringing the problem upon themselves.
You don't need to use imwheel, you just need to use a version of XFree86 from the last year or two, and you need to follow the instructions on the X Mouse Wheel Scroll Page (basically make sure scroll wheel support is turned on in XF86Config, then add new netscape entries to your .Xdefaults file).
Then voila, you've just added mouse wheel support to an app that was written before mouse wheels existed. I was thinking about how cool this was the other day while wondering why Regedit (in Win98) was ignoring my friend's wheel mouse...
Oh, sure, they're changing it to "Windows Powered" now, because it "emphasizes the integrated nature of the palmtop appliance," or some such BS.
But we all know the truth: It took the geniuses of Microsoft marketing this long before it finally dawned on them that the natural contraction of "Windows CE" is a word meaning "an expression of pain".
There's a lot of Linux/Windows dual booters out there who aren't willing to wait three more weeks to get the right version of the game. The number of purchases of the Linux version thus won't reflect the number of people who would prefer a Linux game to a Windows game, but will more closely reflect the number of people who wouldn't have bought Quake 3 at all if it hadn't had a Linux version.
Which is what companies need to know to make their porting decisions, I guess... but it's still annoying to know that there's going to be some skewed, easily misinterpreted marketing data out there because of this.
What the fuck are you smoking ?
I was being rude towards a MS PR flack, and now a Slashdot AC is taking it personally? What are you, "grassroots support"?
JAVA is no closer to being a open-standard now, and never will be.
Well, I'm cynical enough to agree that Java will never be an open standard, but it's a hell of a lot closer than J++, whose entire reason for existance was that Java is too cross-platform for Microsoft tastes.
I'm interested in hearing for people with better insight then myself into this sort of programming, if it is plausible to write a program where the key cannot be retrieved from the memory when the encryption is going on?
/proc/processid#/mem to examine at your leisure. (or dump /dev/kmem if necessary; doesn't VMWare require kernel patches or some similar weirdness?)
Not only is it implausible, it is theoretically impossible without tamper-proof "black box" hardware to help.
Read Bruce Schneier's latest Crypto Gram for a better discussion of this topic than I could give you, but here's a thought experiment or two to get you started:
People are going to want to play DVD Audio with their existing DVD-Rom and sound card (albeit at "only" CD quality levels), without getting a special "DVD audio card", right? So that means that DVD Audio players will have to come out that use existing Windows sound drivers. What's to prevent someone from writing a dummy sound driver that simply stores unencrypted audio to disk? Or from hooking up the digital output on their high end sound card to the digital input, and recording while they play?
Even if Windows 95/98 didn't let you pretty much bypass the kernel (Check out the Wine devel lists for info on Bleem's naughty tricks) to get a complete memory dump at any point in time, you could always do just that with Win9x running on a virtual machine in VMWare; just suspend the VMWare process and dump
Anyway, they're fighting a losing battle. Computer systems aren't black box hardware, and they're going to stay that way.
The only complaints with releasing the latest /. source code, as Rob supposedly has been planning to do for a while now:
The code page claims it's not in a state ready for release - well then, tarball it up and that's good enough for me. It may not work right off the bat on another site, or there may be too many slashdot-isms hardcoded into the scripts, but we'll get things ironed out and smoothed out soon enough. Nobody wants to try and clone slashdot's style, just to use the cool forum design, customizability, and user moderation for sites covering other topics.
There is the security concern involved with open sourcing something suddenly - don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating "security through obscurity" - but while open source software may have fewer security flaws than closed source software, closed source software that suddenly is liberated is bound to have more bugs, more visible, for a while after the initial code release.
I don't think either of those things are a really convincing argument for keeping the code to the epitome of open source advocacy sites under wraps, though. I don't suppose Andover is against releasing the code, worried about competing web portals taking your ad revenue?
Despite the hopes of platform vendors or open-source zealots, the computing world will always be comprised of different programming languages, operating systems, and computing hardware.
What the fuck are they smoking? While Microsoft "Windows Everywhere" Corp. has dropped support for platform-independent Windows NT, is struggling just to put out a 64-bit NT, and puts 90% of it's development in wasted efforts to make their software as incompatible with existing standards and other vendors as possible (Win16/Win32 instead of POSIX, Windows Terminal Server instead of X, Direct3D instead of OpenGL, ActiveX/J++ instead of Java...); "open source zealots" put out multiple differing-yet-compatible Unix-like operating systems with software written in half a dozen languages, all of which strives to be portable to commercial systems and the other open source systems with little more than a recompile.
Do you have an AMD K6-2 350 by any chance? There is a known windows 95 patch to prevent intermittent lockups when booting with this processor.
It's a K6II 300, but with Windows 98.
Funny thing... with a different motherboard, Win98 wouldn't boot at all until a DOS guru friend had me put "STACKS=12,256" in config.sys; when I switched motherboards (hardware failure) my Windows side freaked and required a reinstall, and it seemed to work without that config.sys hack.
I never really worried about it; I boot Windows to play Homeworld and Starcraft, and that's not often enough that rebooting two or three times is more than a minor PITA.
Into Windows, that is. I get about a 40% chance of Windows locking up (hard, no Ctrl-Alt-Del, no working NumLock even) on the first splash screen when I try to boot.
But I doubt it's a CPU problem; Linux never seems to encounter it.
I wouldn't worry so much if Windows failed to boot 100% of the time... but 40%? You'd think success or failure would at least be deterministic.
Even in the rosiest scenerio all the metals will eventually have been recycled to the point to where there is nothing left (remember, no process is 100% effecient)
Please; I've seen better discussions of thermodynamics in creationist literature...
That forced inefficiency refers to usable energy (work), not to *mass*. Yes, it costs energy to recycle material.. but 100% of the material is still there, and the Sun is currently hitting us with 100+ million gigawatts of power, and will continue doing so for about 4 billion years.
We don't need to go into space because we're in danger of "running out of resources" on Earth; we may want to go into space because it will allow us to use even more resources, and to use the ones we have more efficiently.
Check out the regulations; it's just a bit tricky to get permission to fly a private rocket.
And once you've got permission, where are you getting the cash? The big aerospace companies are sitting pretty; it isn't often that you find a market where the government will pay you hundreds of millions of dollars to build a vehicle and then throw it away ASAP. And the small aerospace companies are dying through lack of private investment after being told by investors (and rightly) that it doesn't pay to compete with the government.
So now we have NASA paying a billion dollars for Lockheed-Martin to produce an over-weight, over-budget "technology demonstrator" while companies like Rotary Rocket and Kistler are hunting their couches for spare change.
I think Slashdot has already been over the interesting international treaties regarding private ownership of celestial territory..
Well, how do you want to do it? Do you want to spend a couple billion dollars and a decade of R&D to develop reusable SSTO vehicles to take people to low orbit cheaply? And another decade and a few more billion dollars to develop things like air-breathing scramjets to reduce launch costs for people and sensitive equipment, and magnetic catapults to really reduce launch costs for fuel pods, structural materials, and other cargo that can take extreme G's? And yet another decade to develop high-thrust ion propulsion or nuclear rockets to give us the high specific impulse necessary to make reusable interplanetary tugs efficient? And maybe another decade and another couple billion to develop better space suits, in-orbit construction techniques to make those deep-space-only tugs, and large scale self-sufficient human habitats? If you want humanity to do that, then by the time you die we'll be in a position to put a city on Mars, start bussing scientists and tourists back and forth, drill kilometers into the crust, and generally do space exploration the way it should be done.
No. This petition is for people who want to spend $30 billion (the lowest estimate I've seen, and who doesn't think this thing would pork barrel like the Shuttle and ISS?) to plant a flag on and take some rock souvenirs from the Martian surface, then stay away from the place for 30+ years because "it's been done, and it's too expensive." We screwed up that way with Apollo, and we don't need to do it again. If all you want is a Mars rock, let's send another RC car and get a Mars rock.
The NSA is interested in real threats, not (1) nutcases who don't do more then make a lot of noise or (2) people who pretend to be be nutcases by posting random keywords.
You're just wasting my tax dollars. Cut it out.
So which is it? Does posting gobs of "echelon keywords" in cleartext bog down the NSA or not?
If it does, then the people posting them are doing exactly what they intended to, and your "adults acting like children" post was foolish. (By the way, is it gall or just a short attention span that causes you to complain about an inflammatory subject line, which was a reply to a post with an inflammatory subject line?)
If it doesn't, then why are you complaining about your "wasted tax dollars"?
Either way, how on earth do you come to the conclusion that your tax dollars aren't being wasted by the NSA, who commands multi billion dollar budgets to spy on you; they're being wasted by the trivial protests intended to make that espionage harder?
Oh, that brings up one last point - you don't seem to grok "Jam Echelon" in the first place. The point is to raise awareness of the downright criminal desire of government agencies to spy on innocent citizens; any actual hinderance to those agencies is just gravy.
IANAL, and I don't know what the law literally states... but there's absolutely no way that the software industry would let a "minors aren't bound by software licenses" precedent be set. What, is it OK to be a warez dude as long as you're under 18? Does CompUSA have to start checking IDs before it sells the next Kings Quest installment?
They're looking at where your message is from, where it is to, and what it is about. They really couldn't care less about your posts to comp.os.linux.misc with "plutonium" and "Iraq" at the bottom.
No, of course not; everybody knows all international criminals obey proper netiquette by posting only to alt.terrorist.evil. Or better yet, they send nice, properly addressed SMTP messages to "binladen@secrethideout.org"! No terrorist organization would even think of using a massively distributed system like Usenet, where tracking the receiver of a message is impossible and tracking the sender (assuming something like mixmaster is used) can be close to impossible.
You know, I just wanted to post this because I got a chuckle imagining alt.terrorist.evil, but now I wonder just how many alt.binaries.* posts actually have steganographic content.
Never mind that company after company who originally used the "we'll be giving away all our proprietary secrets to our competitors" excuse to keep those annoying source advocates away is realizing that interface and implementation are two separate things after all and are releasing specs and source code. Matrox, Nvidia, ATI, Adaptec, Creative Labs, and 3Dfx (off the top of my head) all claimed that releasing technical specs would be a travesty, but have all released full specs (and in some cases, open source Linux drivers) since.
The Digi hardware drivers are presumably (from the article context) GPL'ed and copyrighted by someone other than the hardware manufacturer. So, they can't be redistributed under a BSD-style license, which is what would be required to link them into the FreeBSD kernel and distribute the whole kernel under a BSD license.
The Borland compilers, on the other hand, don't link against anything but system libraries, are under a proprietary license, and Borland is free to compile them on any OS they want to, and redistribute them however they want to.
You may be wondering, "How good is CDE really? Is this expensive, old, committee-designed Unix 'standard' really that much better than the Gnome & KDE environments I use daily? Should I shell out cash for one of the Linux CDE sellers?"
No, it isn't, and no you shouldn't, unless you want a panel that is more limited and harder to configure, a widget set which is nasty to use and 10 times nastier to program in, a limited utility set (which is admittedly on par with Gnome's selection I've seen, but not up to KDE's), a hideous looking window manager, and a nearly useless file manager. The text editor is OK for people used to Notepad, I guess.
I could see where some people might prefer some of the stylistic decisions behind CDE's interface, (hence XFce, in large part), but nobody could possibly honestly mistake it for "genius" or even "worth the effort that got wasted to make it a Unix standard".
By default, if you're sitting at the keyboard and want to reboot a Linux computer, you can yank the plug whether you're root or not. It seems to me that giving non-root local users a way to avoid pulling the plug is a good thing.
No Linux version? How will us Linux users ever
serve files over ftp, then?