I believe you are being intentionally misleading. The complete quote which you began is "all right, title, and interest to all intellectual property with respect to the Products shall remain with Corel and it's licensors" This clearly indicates that the original owners of non-Corel code, still retain all their rights. The GPL code is therefore not owned by Corel.
Oh, damn. I wasn't being misleading, I was being flat out wrong. It wasn't intentionally, I swear. I don't know how I missed that.
Well, never mind then. The only concern in the license is the restricted redistribution after all.
Just to get something straight, they define "the Products" to be "Beta builds for Corel LINUX" - not just their own software, but the whole wad.
They then claim that they have "all right, title, and interest to all intellectual property with respect to the products", and that "User may not, however, reproduce or distribute copies of the Products"... granted, that last part is GPL-specific, and the GPL has never been tested in court... but the first claim is just a gross violation of copyright law.
And even if they could find a loophole to get away with the second claim, do they really want to be remembered as the company who broke the GPL?
There's no such thing as a spiral orbit; barring perturbations from third bodies, all orbits follow conic sections (ellipses, circles, parabolas, hyperbolas) around the center of mass of the system. To send something into the sun, you need to put it into an elliptical orbit whose perihelion will be inside the sun's radius... which basically means killing most of it's initial velocity.
If you figure you're already in orbit around a planet, you can probably get a free couple miles per second by boosting on the right half of your orbit, and maybe you can do a gravity assist or two... but most of the 25 miles per second delta V you'd need to send something into the sun would have to come from your own engines.
But who wants to send nuclear waste into the sun anyway? If you've got cheap spaceflight, pick a spot on the moon, dump or bury it all there, and forget about it. It won't hurt anybody, and it'll be useful someday.
You just have to pick the right code. With ideal block codes (which exist, for certain block lengths), every two parity symbols gives you the ability to correct one symbol error. So if you've got a medium with a low enough error rate (and aren't hard drives less than 1e-6 error probability?), 4% overhead can be more than enough.
So anyway, it's possible; as to whether that's how much is actually used, your guess is as good as mine.
I'm still unclear on whether this guy actually sent out this virus to anybody's computer, or whether he just posted it to Usenet and waited for people to download it. If the latter happened, it seems it would be arguable that he didn't do any damage at all. I'd like to see someone post a similarly virulent macrovirus to Usenet, with clear warnings that "This is a worm", with the actual code commented out so the Usenet post doesn't hurt anyone accidentally, but with effects that are tempting enough to script kiddies that a million people are infected the next week. If you write malicious code, but someone else uses it, whose fault is it?
Sorry about the last post; forgot to escape the less than and greater than signs...
Any idea how Linux will use this much main memory?
A large ram disk for databases? A larger virtual address space?
It *won't* be a larger virtual address space. How would we do that? Use 64 bit pointers on a 32 bit architecture, and force everyone to recompile? Or use the God-awful segment/offset crap that Intel seems to have a fetish for, and still force everyone to recompile?
Technically it would be possible to give less than 4GB to each process, simply allowing multiple processes access to different 4GB chunks so that the total RAM used is more than 4GB... but it would be a hideous hack - NT will do it; Linus (and therefore Linux) won't.
There's a patch in that will give databases access to "anonymous pages" of memory - I'm not sure how they get accessed, but apparantly it's in a fashion both Linus and the large DB makers are happy with.
But damn it, I tried to program Win16 once, and I thank God Linus doesn't want to get bogged down in a segmented architecture more than necessary. If you want more than 32 bits of addressable memory, don't use a 32 bit machine, damn it!
Any idea how Linux will use this much main memory?
A large ram disk for databases? A larger virtual address space?
It *won't* be a larger virtual address space. How would we do that? Use 64 bit pointers on a 32 bit architecture, and force everyone to recompile? Or use the God-awful segment/offset crap that Intel seems to have a fetish for, and still force everyone to recompile?
Technically it would be possible to give 4GB... but it would be a hideous hack - NT will do it; Linus (and therefore Linux) won't.
There's a patch in that will give databases access to "anonymous pages" of memory - I'm not sure how they get accessed, but apparantly it's in a fashion both Linus and the large DB makers are happy with.
But damn it, I tried to program Win16 once, and I thank God Linus doesn't want to get bogged down in a segmented architecture more than necessary. If you want more than 32 bits of addressable memory, don't use a 32 bit machine, damn it!
(or was this macro? damn, maybe I should have studied more too...)
Price discrimination isn't the result of a happy, healthy, ideal marketplace. It's something that monopolies can do to turn most of that annoying "consumer surplus" straight into profit for themselves. In an ideal market, with lots of producers, anyone who tried to pull a stunt like this would simply be undercut and beaten down by their competitors who didn't disable cheap SMP chips.
We'll see how soon Athlon SMP motherboards come out. It's not quite in the Celeron price range, but between a bus designed for point to point SMP, and a cheap set of K7-500s with that sweet, sweet FPU, dual PII systems just aren't going to cut it.
This would be a useful script to have. An entire dorm at Rice had to change their passwords (and check their computers) last year because one person's Linux box got cracked and had a packet sniffer running. (and because the hubs were at that time misconfigured; normally packet sniffing doesn't work here).
Ok, I've been using Linux for over two years now without coming across this before - it would have been damn useful those times when SVGAlib stole my keyboard and I didn't have a network to telnet in from.
Sorry for the long comment, but/. has comment truncating working nicely now, and it's all worth it.
* What is the magic SysRQ key? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ It is a 'magical' key combo you can hit which kernel will respond to regardless of whatever else it is doing, unless it is completely locked up.
* How do I enable the magic SysRQ key? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ You need to say yes to 'Magic SysRq key (CONFIG_MAGIC_SYSRQ)' when configuring the kernel. This option is only available it 2.1.x or later kernels.
* How do I use the magic SysRQ key? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ On x86 - You press the key combo 'ALT-SysRQ-'. Note - Some (older?) may not have a key labeled 'SysRQ'. The 'SysRQ' key is also known as the 'Print Screen' key.
On SPARC - You press 'ALT-STOP-', I believe.
On other - If you know of the key combos for other architectures, please let me know so I can add them to this section.
* What are the 'command' keys? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 'r' - Turns off keyboard raw mode and sets it to XLATE.
'k' - Kills all programs on the current virtual console.
'b' - Will immediately reboot the system without syncing or unmounting your disks.
'o' - Will shut your system off via APM (if configured and supported).
's' - Will attempt to sync all mounted filesystems.
'u' - Will attempt to remount all mounted filesystems read-only.
'p' - Will dump the current registers and flags to your console.
't' - Will dump a list of current tasks and their information to your console.
'm' - Will dump current memory info to your console.
'0'-'9' - Sets the console log level, controlling which kernel messages will be printed to your console. ('0', for example would make it so that only emergency messages like PANICs or OOPSes would make it to your console.)
'e' - Send a SIGTERM to all processes, except for init.
'i' - Send a SIGKILL to all processes, except for init.
'l' - Send a SIGKILL to all processes, INCLUDING init. (Your system will be non-functional after this.)
* Okay, so what can I use them for? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Well, un'R'aw is very handy when your X server or a svgalib program crashes.
sa'K' (system attention key) is useful when you want to exit a program that will not let you switch consoles. (For example, X or a svgalib program.)
re'B'oot is good when you're unable to shut down. But you should also 'S'ync and 'U'mount first.
'S'ync is great when your system is locked up, it allows you to sync your disks and will certainly lessen the chance of data loss and fscking. Note that the sync hasn't taken place until you see the "OK" and "Done" appear on the screen. (If the kernel is really in strife, you may not ever get the OK or Done message...)
'U'mount is basically useful in the same ways as 'S'ync. I generally 'S'ync, 'U'mount, then re'B'oot when my system locks. It's saved me many a fsck. Again, the unmount (remount read-only) hasn't taken place until you see the "OK" and "Done" message appear on the screen.
The loglevel'0'-'9' is useful when your console is being flooded with kernel messages you do not want to see. Setting '0' will prevent all but the most urgent kernel messages from reaching your console. (They will still be logged if syslogd/klogd are alive, though.)
t'E'rm and k'I'll are useful if you have some sort of runaway process you are unable to kill any other way, especially if it's spawning other processes.
* Sometimes SysRQ seems to get 'stuck' after using it, what can I do? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ That happens to me, also. I've found that tapping shift, alt, and control on both sides of the keyboard, and hitting an invalid sysrq sequence again will fix the problem. (ie, something like alt-sysrq-z). Switching to another virtual console (ALT+Fn) and then back again should also help.
* I hit SysRQ, but nothing seems to happen, what's wrong? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~ There are some keyboards which do not support 'SysRQ', you can try running 'showkey -s' and pressing SysRQ or alt-SysRQ to see if it generates any 0x54 codes. If it doesn't, you may define the magic sysrq sequence to a different key. Find the keycode with showkey, and change the define of '#define SYSRQ_KEY 0x54' in [/usr/src/linux/]include/asm/keyboard.h to the keycode of the key you wish to use, then recompile. Oh, and by the way, you exit 'showkey' by not typing anything for ten seconds.
* I have more questions, who can I ask? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ You may feel free to send email to myrdraal@deathsdoor.com, and I will respond as soon as possible. If that email address does not work, use myrdraal@jackalz.dyn.ml.org. -Myrdraal
So how long until Corel Office for Linux?
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Corel Linux Preview
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· Score: 2
I bought their Corel Office 7 for Windows (for $80 or so at student discount) and was quite pleased. I used WP8 for Linux (free edition) extensively and was again happy. I see their new release for Windows on shelves, but at the moment I boot Windows for MechWarrior 3 and nothing else.
I want Corel Office for Linux! If it's good, I'll be happy to pay hundreds of dollars for Corel Office for Linux. I know they're taking a risk by working on Winelib instead of maintaining separate Motif sources like WP8 used; does anyone know if problems here are holding them up any?
I don't care that Corel has Yet Another Distro. There are a hundred of them listed on LWN. All of the big ones now are easy to install, pop you into a *dm graphical login, then from there to KDE or GNOME. I don't see Corel improving much upon this, with or without new kwm icons.
I do care that Corel has a full-featured, easy to use office suite coming out. Applixware is showing a little age, StarOffice is a bloated monster; I want Corel Office!
Yes, this sounds like "gimme, gimme", but I'm willing to shell out cash for it...
IANAFA (I Am Not A Financial Advisor), but my understanding is that this practice is derisively known as "flipping" and is a good way to guarantee that you will have a much more difficult time getting in on future IPOs.
You're right that flipping is frowned upon, but it shouldn't be. You'd think there would be at least one person on Wall Street conversant with supply and demand...
The "bubble" phenomenon you see with hot IPOs would be *reduced* if flipping was encouraged. For every single person who watches a stock's rise and tries to sell when that rise slows, their sale itself acts to brake the excessive rise of the stock price.
If every IPO was aggressively watched by people waiting to dump their stock the moment it went up too unrealistically, well, it wouldn't go up unrealistically at all.
Take the Red Hat CD image, the boot image, you get off of this site, pass them as appropriate options to cdrecord (or whatever GUI), and voila. Custom boots for machines without floppies.
Granted, this is a little beyond the realm of "new users that want a neat web-based installer", but for people who want to do many multiple machine installs, this looks viable even without a floppy to do it with.
So how do the guts of this thing work? Does it just set up Red Hat's kickstart system?
We don't need tons of "crackers" putting HTML and Javascript tags in the guestbooks of each site. Yes, it's funny that both sites have been spammed with tags to pop up windows, spin in infinite JavaScript loops, etc, and redirected (to both porn sites and freebsd.org - cool) with meta tags.
But unless you can tickle their cgi into running system commands and giving you a shell (or downloading/running BO2K) then it's all pointless. Microsoft figured it out and filtered out tags eventually; LinuxPPC will too.
The DOS attacks are annoying, but not completely worthless - it's interesting to see LinuxPPC pages come up after as much as a minute under the network spamming, while MS is unpingable for hours on end.
No - what I'd like to see is a page with traceroute stats - a script to probe their networks (routers, other computers on the same subnet, etc) repeatedly and save the results. Someone on Linux Today asserted that he could ping both MS's routers and other computers in the same 255.255.255.0, during the period when they "were having router problems". If he's right, then Microsoft is just plain lying to a whole lot of reporters and to the public - but we could hardly say so without evidence. If the script hit the main web pages regularly, that would be good too - there have been periods where the MS server was pingable but IIS wasn't responding.
I'd like to see this for both servers, of course. Someone said crack.linuxppc.org wasn't pingable once, but I tried 5 minutes after his comment was posted and both ping and Netscape (although slowly) got through.
It would be important to summarize the stats, of course. Neat graphs of things like percentage of dropped pings and timed out HTTP requests would be cool.
I'd do this myself, but I'm tired and lazy. If anyone else wants to do it with Perl and LWP, though, I'll help.
Specifically, I thought about the laptop sitting next to me as I posted, with 8MB video RAM. Granted, that's not as standard on new laptops as on new desktops, but it will be very soon. RAM (even the cool RAM your video card uses) is cheap and small - there's no reason not to use a ton of it.
On the other hand, there are a lot of old laptops out there that aren't upgradable, at least not in the video chipset. If you can upgrade the system RAM (or have enough to begin with), running two X servers at once in different bit depths is a useful workaround. Depending on how you work, that may be less or more convenient than flipping desktop settings back and forth.
Ok, granted, font anti-aliasing would be nice and needs to be added (although current improvements in the existing renderers are visually helpful without antialiasing), even just as an extension for future applications.
But is it really such a big inconvenience in this day and age to be unable to change color depths on the fly? Being able to go from 800x600x32 to 1152x768x8 (or whatever; I haven't done the math) might have been important when trying to balance out resolution vs. color depth on a 2MB video card... but every video card in every new computer or store shelf today will do 16 million colors in any resolution you please, and there's just no reason to use a non 32-bit color depth. There's that one xscreensaver hack that uses palette shifting on 8-bit displays and is slow on other color depths... but that's the only advantage to 8bit color left, and there is no advantage to 16 bit color.
It costs $15 now to get a 4MB video card; $30 to get an 8MB card. Bring sandwiches to work for a week instead of buying lunch, and never worry about sub-par color again.
Take a look at the demo they used - crusher.dm2, the traditional "put a lot of polys and a lot of lightmaps on the screen so the CPU is the bottleneck not the video card" demo. With most game demos, you max out around 90fps because of the fill rate of the video card, because game designers keep their poly counts low to accomodate low end CPUs.
Off-the-shelf, AGP 3D cards now are competitive in fill rate even with sweet SGI workstations, but for the geometry portion of rendering PCs get blown away, and seriously blown away with high polygon scenes. Until we get PC dedicated hardware to do geometry acceleration and not just texture filling (doesn't the G200/G400 do some geometry on the card?), we need heavy CPU FPUs to do it for us.
Sure, spitting out a bunch of 60 poly models at 120 fps might be overkill, but displaying 400 poly models at 60 fps won't be. In the near future I can imagine game designers giving "low poly -> high poly" options in the video setup just as they give "320x200 -> 1600x1200" options today to balance quality vs. performance. (doesn't half life do this to some extent already?) We're seeing the first 3D engines that render bezier curves by breaking them up into polys (does Q3 do this when the level is compiled or when it's played?) and the more polys you use the smoother it looks. Hell, the more polys you use the more cool stuff you can do with background effects (remember how the Unreal flies blew away the Q2 buzzing dots?) and realistically moving human models. And man, some of us want to play games with that kind of image quality.
Oh, yeah, and it'll be a big boon for scientific computing, video editing, professional rendering, etc. when they're reasonable on cheap x86 hardware too.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Mach 25 was orbital velocity. Sounds good enough to me.
Of course, I'll be surprised if this project is successful and not just another "interesting technology testbed" that runs over budget and way over schedule... but that's just me. Someone already posted links to Kistler and Rotary in another comment; take a look there if you're interested in private gambles toward the goal of cheap spaceflight.
Do a "man sched_setscheduler" if you want to know how to include it in your own programs, or hunt down the (years old) "rt" utility if you want to be able to set any arbitrary program to be scheduled realtime. It's a nice thing to do with your MP3 player, for instance: in my experience, any system that can play MP3s at all can play them with zero skips if the player is running realtime.
The biggest problem here is security on multiuser systems, and safety against broken programs. Basically, if you run a program with SCHED_FIFO or another realtime scheduling strategy, no non-realtime programs get to run until the realtime one is in a blocking system call. In other words, if your realtime program infinite loops, you've just locked up one CPU in your system. For this reason, only root (or a suid root program) can set a process to run with realtime scheduling; otherwise running "rt cat/dev/zero >/dev/null" is a pretty sweet denial of service attack, freezing the X server and console by starving them of CPU cycles. You can still ping the system, and you can still open TCP connections... but inetd will never get a timeslice to spend answering those connections.
The reason not to use an environmental variable is that already-running apps are not notified.
The reason not to use an environmental variable is that it's redundant information which could be obtained just as easily from ifconfig.
Put CORBA support in your ifup/ifdown program, which will then (de)activate an interface, report that action to all the apps who want to know, and exit when they're done.
It would be necessary to have this ifup/ifdown program the default way of handling network interfaces, but if you could get Gnome & KDE to agree on it the free Unix distributions will all fall over backwards to accomodate.
There's the question of proprietary Unix support - but is this network monitoring daemon going to be able to do anything better than polling 'ifconfig' on them anyway?
I think that criticizing this sort of stuff before it's built is really a bad idea.
I think doing planning & design consideration before you start writing code is a good idea. You can hack an inefficient or bad implementation of a program at your leisure, but fixing an inefficiently or badly designed program is something to avoid if at all possible.
If you don't like it, then don't use it or come up with something better. For the most part, though, these guys know full well what they're doing, as evidenced by the quality so far of GNOME and KDE both. Just kut them some gslack.
You'll get no argument from me there. But keep in mind, one of the mixed blessings of Open Source development is the thousand back seat drivers waiting in the wings to point out segfaults, memory leaks, and even potential bad ideas. I think leaving a process sitting on it's ass 99% of the time to provide the functionality containable in a short shared library is a bad idea.
Does someone want to explain to me exactly what advantages this "network connection daemon" will have over a few hundred shared library lines that call "route" (or play with/proc) and "ifup"?
I've got enough sleeping processes taking up RAM on my system as it is.
If you want brainless system installs, look into Ghost by Symantec. It is a dos program that does disk duplication. It is completely configurable from the command line. With a bootable CD containg ghost and the disk image (compressed) an entire machine can be installed in less than 10 minutes. Assuming they have a decently fast CD-ROM of course.
So it's like setting "gunzip | dd" as the init program of a bootable Linux CD, only $40, right?
Take a look at mixmaster remailers if you really want to keep even the recipient of your emails a secret. Properly used, The Man can tell that you put a message into a remailer, and that your recipient got a message from a different remailer some time afterward... but connecting the two is pretty much intractable.
Price: $2195 vs. $$$$
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Linus @BALUG
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· Score: 2
That's for a 533Mhz 21264-based computer (yes, computer: everything but monitor) from Microway. You could probably go under $2000 if you looked harder, but in any case we're already talking prices low enough to make the NT Tax noticeable, and low enough to make the NT Maintenance Tax* and Code Maintenance Tax* the major factor in your purchasing decision.
*NT Maintenance Tax: cost of crashes/downtime, plus the cost of either hiring either an admin dull enough to want NT or an admin pricy enough to accept it anyways
*Code Maintenance Tax: the money you'll be paying expensive programmers someday to fix the kludges you used to try and use 64-bit addressing on a 32-bit system, when you eventually do upgrade to a 64-bit processor.
Oh, give me a clone Of my own flesh and bone With its Y-chromosome changed to X And after it's grown Then my own little clone Will be of the opposite sex.
(Chorus) Clone, clone of my own, With your Y-Chromosome changed to X And when I'm alone With my own little clone We will both think of nothing but sex.
Oh, give me a clone Is my sorrowful moan A clone that is wholly my own. And if she's X-X And the feminine sex Oh, what fun we will have when we're prone.
My heart's not of stone, As I've frequently shown When alone with my own little X And after we've dined I am sure we will find Better incest than Oedipus Rex.
Why should such sex vex Or disturb or perplex Or induce a disparaging tone? After all, don't you see, Since we're both of us me, When we're having sex, I'm alone!
And after I'm done She will still have her fun For I'll clone myself twice ere I die. And this time without fail, They'll be both of them male And they'll each ravage her by and by.
First verse and chorus by Randall Garrett; other verses by Isaac Asimov.
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I believe you are being intentionally misleading. The complete quote which you began is "all right, title, and interest to all intellectual property with respect to the Products shall remain with Corel and it's licensors" This clearly indicates that the original owners of non-Corel code, still retain all their rights. The GPL code is therefore not owned by Corel.
Oh, damn. I wasn't being misleading, I was being flat out wrong. It wasn't intentionally, I swear. I don't know how I missed that.
Well, never mind then. The only concern in the license is the restricted redistribution after all.
Just to get something straight, they define "the Products" to be "Beta builds for Corel LINUX" - not just their own software, but the whole wad.
They then claim that they have "all right, title, and interest to all intellectual property with respect to the products", and that "User may not, however, reproduce or distribute copies of the Products"... granted, that last part is GPL-specific, and the GPL has never been tested in court... but the first claim is just a gross violation of copyright law.
And even if they could find a loophole to get away with the second claim, do they really want to be remembered as the company who broke the GPL?
(copied to corellinux@corel.com)
*grin* Just poking fun..
There's no such thing as a spiral orbit; barring perturbations from third bodies, all orbits follow conic sections (ellipses, circles, parabolas, hyperbolas) around the center of mass of the system. To send something into the sun, you need to put it into an elliptical orbit whose perihelion will be inside the sun's radius... which basically means killing most of it's initial velocity.
If you figure you're already in orbit around a planet, you can probably get a free couple miles per second by boosting on the right half of your orbit, and maybe you can do a gravity assist or two... but most of the 25 miles per second delta V you'd need to send something into the sun would have to come from your own engines.
But who wants to send nuclear waste into the sun anyway? If you've got cheap spaceflight, pick a spot on the moon, dump or bury it all there, and forget about it. It won't hurt anybody, and it'll be useful someday.
You just have to pick the right code. With ideal block codes (which exist, for certain block lengths), every two parity symbols gives you the ability to correct one symbol error. So if you've got a medium with a low enough error rate (and aren't hard drives less than 1e-6 error probability?), 4% overhead can be more than enough.
So anyway, it's possible; as to whether that's how much is actually used, your guess is as good as mine.
I'm still unclear on whether this guy actually sent out this virus to anybody's computer, or whether he just posted it to Usenet and waited for people to download it. If the latter happened, it seems it would be arguable that he didn't do any damage at all. I'd like to see someone post a similarly virulent macrovirus to Usenet, with clear warnings that "This is a worm", with the actual code commented out so the Usenet post doesn't hurt anyone accidentally, but with effects that are tempting enough to script kiddies that a million people are infected the next week. If you write malicious code, but someone else uses it, whose fault is it?
Sorry about the last post; forgot to escape the less than and greater than signs...
Any idea how Linux will use this much main memory?
A large ram disk for databases?
A larger virtual address space?
It *won't* be a larger virtual address space. How would we do that? Use 64 bit pointers on a 32 bit architecture, and force everyone to recompile? Or use the God-awful segment/offset crap that Intel seems to have a fetish for, and still force everyone to recompile?
Technically it would be possible to give less than 4GB to each process, simply allowing multiple processes access to different 4GB chunks so that the total RAM used is more than 4GB... but it would be a hideous hack - NT will do it; Linus (and therefore Linux) won't.
There's a patch in that will give databases access to "anonymous pages" of memory - I'm not sure how they get accessed, but apparantly it's in a fashion both Linus and the large DB makers are happy with.
But damn it, I tried to program Win16 once, and I thank God Linus doesn't want to get bogged down in a segmented architecture more than necessary. If you want more than 32 bits of addressable memory, don't use a 32 bit machine, damn it!
Any idea how Linux will use this much main memory?
A large ram disk for databases?
A larger virtual address space?
It *won't* be a larger virtual address space. How would we do that? Use 64 bit pointers on a 32 bit architecture, and force everyone to recompile? Or use the God-awful segment/offset crap that Intel seems to have a fetish for, and still force everyone to recompile?
Technically it would be possible to give 4GB... but it would be a hideous hack - NT will do it; Linus (and therefore Linux) won't.
There's a patch in that will give databases access to "anonymous pages" of memory - I'm not sure how they get accessed, but apparantly it's in a fashion both Linus and the large DB makers are happy with.
But damn it, I tried to program Win16 once, and I thank God Linus doesn't want to get bogged down in a segmented architecture more than necessary. If you want more than 32 bits of addressable memory, don't use a 32 bit machine, damn it!
(or was this macro? damn, maybe I should have studied more too...)
Price discrimination isn't the result of a happy, healthy, ideal marketplace. It's something that monopolies can do to turn most of that annoying "consumer surplus" straight into profit for themselves. In an ideal market, with lots of producers, anyone who tried to pull a stunt like this would simply be undercut and beaten down by their competitors who didn't disable cheap SMP chips.
We'll see how soon Athlon SMP motherboards come out. It's not quite in the Celeron price range, but between a bus designed for point to point SMP, and a cheap set of K7-500s with that sweet, sweet FPU, dual PII systems just aren't going to cut it.
This would be a useful script to have. An entire dorm at Rice had to change their passwords (and check their computers) last year because one person's Linux box got cracked and had a packet sniffer running. (and because the hubs were at that time misconfigured; normally packet sniffing doesn't work here).
Ok, I've been using Linux for over two years now without coming across this before - it would have been damn useful those times when SVGAlib stole my keyboard and I didn't have a network to telnet in from.
/. has comment truncating working nicely now, and it's all worth it.
~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~ ~~~~~~~~~~
Sorry for the long comment, but
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/sysrq.txt:
MAGIC SYSRQ KEY DOCUMENTATION v1.2
------------------------------------
[Sat May 16 01:09:21 EDT 1998]
* What is the magic SysRQ key?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It is a 'magical' key combo you can hit which kernel will respond to
regardless of whatever else it is doing, unless it is completely locked up.
* How do I enable the magic SysRQ key?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You need to say yes to 'Magic SysRq key (CONFIG_MAGIC_SYSRQ)' when
configuring the kernel. This option is only available it 2.1.x or later
kernels.
* How do I use the magic SysRQ key?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
On x86 - You press the key combo 'ALT-SysRQ-'. Note - Some
(older?) may not have a key labeled 'SysRQ'. The 'SysRQ' key is
also known as the 'Print Screen' key.
On SPARC - You press 'ALT-STOP-', I believe.
On other - If you know of the key combos for other architectures, please
let me know so I can add them to this section.
* What are the 'command' keys?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
'r' - Turns off keyboard raw mode and sets it to XLATE.
'k' - Kills all programs on the current virtual console.
'b' - Will immediately reboot the system without syncing or unmounting
your disks.
'o' - Will shut your system off via APM (if configured and supported).
's' - Will attempt to sync all mounted filesystems.
'u' - Will attempt to remount all mounted filesystems read-only.
'p' - Will dump the current registers and flags to your console.
't' - Will dump a list of current tasks and their information to your
console.
'm' - Will dump current memory info to your console.
'0'-'9' - Sets the console log level, controlling which kernel messages
will be printed to your console. ('0', for example would make
it so that only emergency messages like PANICs or OOPSes would
make it to your console.)
'e' - Send a SIGTERM to all processes, except for init.
'i' - Send a SIGKILL to all processes, except for init.
'l' - Send a SIGKILL to all processes, INCLUDING init. (Your system
will be non-functional after this.)
* Okay, so what can I use them for?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Well, un'R'aw is very handy when your X server or a svgalib program crashes.
sa'K' (system attention key) is useful when you want to exit a program
that will not let you switch consoles. (For example, X or a svgalib program.)
re'B'oot is good when you're unable to shut down. But you should also 'S'ync
and 'U'mount first.
'S'ync is great when your system is locked up, it allows you to sync your
disks and will certainly lessen the chance of data loss and fscking. Note
that the sync hasn't taken place until you see the "OK" and "Done" appear
on the screen. (If the kernel is really in strife, you may not ever get the
OK or Done message...)
'U'mount is basically useful in the same ways as 'S'ync. I generally 'S'ync,
'U'mount, then re'B'oot when my system locks. It's saved me many a fsck.
Again, the unmount (remount read-only) hasn't taken place until you see the
"OK" and "Done" message appear on the screen.
The loglevel'0'-'9' is useful when your console is being flooded with
kernel messages you do not want to see. Setting '0' will prevent all but
the most urgent kernel messages from reaching your console. (They will
still be logged if syslogd/klogd are alive, though.)
t'E'rm and k'I'll are useful if you have some sort of runaway process you
are unable to kill any other way, especially if it's spawning other
processes.
* Sometimes SysRQ seems to get 'stuck' after using it, what can I do?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
That happens to me, also. I've found that tapping shift, alt, and control
on both sides of the keyboard, and hitting an invalid sysrq sequence again
will fix the problem. (ie, something like alt-sysrq-z). Switching to another
virtual console (ALT+Fn) and then back again should also help.
* I hit SysRQ, but nothing seems to happen, what's wrong?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There are some keyboards which do not support 'SysRQ', you can try running
'showkey -s' and pressing SysRQ or alt-SysRQ to see if it generates any
0x54 codes. If it doesn't, you may define the magic sysrq sequence to a
different key. Find the keycode with showkey, and change the define of
'#define SYSRQ_KEY 0x54' in [/usr/src/linux/]include/asm/keyboard.h to
the keycode of the key you wish to use, then recompile. Oh, and by the way,
you exit 'showkey' by not typing anything for ten seconds.
* I have more questions, who can I ask?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You may feel free to send email to myrdraal@deathsdoor.com, and I will
respond as soon as possible. If that email address does not work, use
myrdraal@jackalz.dyn.ml.org.
-Myrdraal
I bought their Corel Office 7 for Windows (for $80 or so at student discount) and was quite pleased. I used WP8 for Linux (free edition) extensively and was again happy. I see their new release for Windows on shelves, but at the moment I boot Windows for MechWarrior 3 and nothing else.
I want Corel Office for Linux! If it's good, I'll be happy to pay hundreds of dollars for Corel Office for Linux. I know they're taking a risk by working on Winelib instead of maintaining separate Motif sources like WP8 used; does anyone know if problems here are holding them up any?
I don't care that Corel has Yet Another Distro. There are a hundred of them listed on LWN. All of the big ones now are easy to install, pop you into a *dm graphical login, then from there to KDE or GNOME. I don't see Corel improving much upon this, with or without new kwm icons.
I do care that Corel has a full-featured, easy to use office suite coming out. Applixware is showing a little age, StarOffice is a bloated monster; I want Corel Office!
Yes, this sounds like "gimme, gimme", but I'm willing to shell out cash for it...
IANAFA (I Am Not A Financial Advisor), but my understanding is that this practice is derisively known as "flipping" and is a good way to guarantee that you will have a much more difficult time getting in on future IPOs.
You're right that flipping is frowned upon, but it shouldn't be. You'd think there would be at least one person on Wall Street conversant with supply and demand...
The "bubble" phenomenon you see with hot IPOs would be *reduced* if flipping was encouraged. For every single person who watches a stock's rise and tries to sell when that rise slows, their sale itself acts to brake the excessive rise of the stock price.
If every IPO was aggressively watched by people waiting to dump their stock the moment it went up too unrealistically, well, it wouldn't go up unrealistically at all.
Take the Red Hat CD image, the boot image, you get off of this site, pass them as appropriate options to cdrecord (or whatever GUI), and voila. Custom boots for machines without floppies.
Granted, this is a little beyond the realm of "new users that want a neat web-based installer", but for people who want to do many multiple machine installs, this looks viable even without a floppy to do it with.
So how do the guts of this thing work? Does it just set up Red Hat's kickstart system?
We don't need tons of "crackers" putting HTML and Javascript tags in the guestbooks of each site. Yes, it's funny that both sites have been spammed with tags to pop up windows, spin in infinite JavaScript loops, etc, and redirected (to both porn sites and freebsd.org - cool) with meta tags.
But unless you can tickle their cgi into running system commands and giving you a shell (or downloading/running BO2K) then it's all pointless. Microsoft figured it out and filtered out tags eventually; LinuxPPC will too.
The DOS attacks are annoying, but not completely worthless - it's interesting to see LinuxPPC pages come up after as much as a minute under the network spamming, while MS is unpingable for hours on end.
No - what I'd like to see is a page with traceroute stats - a script to probe their networks (routers, other computers on the same subnet, etc) repeatedly and save the results. Someone on Linux Today asserted that he could ping both MS's routers and other computers in the same 255.255.255.0, during the period when they "were having router problems". If he's right, then Microsoft is just plain lying to a whole lot of reporters and to the public - but we could hardly say so without evidence. If the script hit the main web pages regularly, that would be good too - there have been periods where the MS server was pingable but IIS wasn't responding.
I'd like to see this for both servers, of course. Someone said crack.linuxppc.org wasn't pingable once, but I tried 5 minutes after his comment was posted and both ping and Netscape (although slowly) got through.
It would be important to summarize the stats, of course. Neat graphs of things like percentage of dropped pings and timed out HTTP requests would be cool.
I'd do this myself, but I'm tired and lazy. If anyone else wants to do it with Perl and LWP, though, I'll help.
Specifically, I thought about the laptop sitting next to me as I posted, with 8MB video RAM. Granted, that's not as standard on new laptops as on new desktops, but it will be very soon. RAM (even the cool RAM your video card uses) is cheap and small - there's no reason not to use a ton of it.
On the other hand, there are a lot of old laptops out there that aren't upgradable, at least not in the video chipset. If you can upgrade the system RAM (or have enough to begin with), running two X servers at once in different bit depths is a useful workaround. Depending on how you work, that may be less or more convenient than flipping desktop settings back and forth.
Ok, granted, font anti-aliasing would be nice and needs to be added (although current improvements in the existing renderers are visually helpful without antialiasing), even just as an extension for future applications.
But is it really such a big inconvenience in this day and age to be unable to change color depths on the fly? Being able to go from 800x600x32 to 1152x768x8 (or whatever; I haven't done the math) might have been important when trying to balance out resolution vs. color depth on a 2MB video card... but every video card in every new computer or store shelf today will do 16 million colors in any resolution you please, and there's just no reason to use a non 32-bit color depth. There's that one xscreensaver hack that uses palette shifting on 8-bit displays and is slow on other color depths... but that's the only advantage to 8bit color left, and there is no advantage to 16 bit color.
It costs $15 now to get a 4MB video card; $30 to get an 8MB card. Bring sandwiches to work for a week instead of buying lunch, and never worry about sub-par color again.
Take a look at the demo they used - crusher.dm2, the traditional "put a lot of polys and a lot of lightmaps on the screen so the CPU is the bottleneck not the video card" demo. With most game demos, you max out around 90fps because of the fill rate of the video card, because game designers keep their poly counts low to accomodate low end CPUs.
Off-the-shelf, AGP 3D cards now are competitive in fill rate even with sweet SGI workstations, but for the geometry portion of rendering PCs get blown away, and seriously blown away with high polygon scenes. Until we get PC dedicated hardware to do geometry acceleration and not just texture filling (doesn't the G200/G400 do some geometry on the card?), we need heavy CPU FPUs to do it for us.
Sure, spitting out a bunch of 60 poly models at 120 fps might be overkill, but displaying 400 poly models at 60 fps won't be. In the near future I can imagine game designers giving "low poly -> high poly" options in the video setup just as they give "320x200 -> 1600x1200" options today to balance quality vs. performance. (doesn't half life do this to some extent already?) We're seeing the first 3D engines that render bezier curves by breaking them up into polys (does Q3 do this when the level is compiled or when it's played?) and the more polys you use the smoother it looks. Hell, the more polys you use the more cool stuff you can do with background effects (remember how the Unreal flies blew away the Q2 buzzing dots?) and realistically moving human models. And man, some of us want to play games with that kind of image quality.
Oh, yeah, and it'll be a big boon for scientific computing, video editing, professional rendering, etc. when they're reasonable on cheap x86 hardware too.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Mach 25 was orbital velocity. Sounds good enough to me.
Of course, I'll be surprised if this project is successful and not just another "interesting technology testbed" that runs over budget and way over schedule... but that's just me. Someone already posted links to Kistler and Rotary in another comment; take a look there if you're interested in private gambles toward the goal of cheap spaceflight.
Do a "man sched_setscheduler" if you want to know how to include it in your own programs, or hunt down the (years old) "rt" utility if you want to be able to set any arbitrary program to be scheduled realtime. It's a nice thing to do with your MP3 player, for instance: in my experience, any system that can play MP3s at all can play them with zero skips if the player is running realtime.
/dev/zero > /dev/null" is a pretty sweet denial of service attack, freezing the X server and console by starving them of CPU cycles. You can still ping the system, and you can still open TCP connections... but inetd will never get a timeslice to spend answering those connections.
The biggest problem here is security on multiuser systems, and safety against broken programs. Basically, if you run a program with SCHED_FIFO or another realtime scheduling strategy, no non-realtime programs get to run until the realtime one is in a blocking system call. In other words, if your realtime program infinite loops, you've just locked up one CPU in your system. For this reason, only root (or a suid root program) can set a process to run with realtime scheduling; otherwise running "rt cat
The reason not to use an environmental variable is that already-running apps are not notified.
The reason not to use an environmental variable is that it's redundant information which could be obtained just as easily from ifconfig.
Put CORBA support in your ifup/ifdown program, which will then (de)activate an interface, report that action to all the apps who want to know, and exit when they're done.
It would be necessary to have this ifup/ifdown program the default way of handling network interfaces, but if you could get Gnome & KDE to agree on it the free Unix distributions will all fall over backwards to accomodate.
There's the question of proprietary Unix support - but is this network monitoring daemon going to be able to do anything better than polling 'ifconfig' on them anyway?
I think that criticizing this sort of stuff before it's built is really a bad idea.
I think doing planning & design consideration before you start writing code is a good idea. You can hack an inefficient or bad implementation of a program at your leisure, but fixing an inefficiently or badly designed program is something to avoid if at all possible.
If you don't like it, then don't use it or come up with something better. For the most part, though, these guys know full well what they're doing, as evidenced by the quality so far of GNOME and KDE both. Just kut them some gslack.
You'll get no argument from me there. But keep in mind, one of the mixed blessings of Open Source development is the thousand back seat drivers waiting in the wings to point out segfaults, memory leaks, and even potential bad ideas. I think leaving a process sitting on it's ass 99% of the time to provide the functionality containable in a short shared library is a bad idea.
Does someone want to explain to me exactly what advantages this "network connection daemon" will have over a few hundred shared library lines that call "route" (or play with /proc) and "ifup"?
I've got enough sleeping processes taking up RAM on my system as it is.
If you want brainless system installs, look into Ghost by Symantec. It is a dos program that does disk duplication. It is completely configurable from the command line. With a bootable CD containg ghost and the disk image (compressed) an entire machine can be installed in less than 10 minutes. Assuming they have a decently fast CD-ROM of course.
So it's like setting "gunzip | dd" as the init program of a bootable Linux CD, only $40, right?
Take a look at mixmaster remailers if you really want to keep even the recipient of your emails a secret. Properly used, The Man can tell that you put a message into a remailer, and that your recipient got a message from a different remailer some time afterward... but connecting the two is pretty much intractable.
That's for a 533Mhz 21264-based computer (yes, computer: everything but monitor) from Microway. You could probably go under $2000 if you looked harder, but in any case we're already talking prices low enough to make the NT Tax noticeable, and low enough to make the NT Maintenance Tax* and Code Maintenance Tax* the major factor in your purchasing decision.
*NT Maintenance Tax: cost of crashes/downtime, plus the cost of either hiring either an admin dull enough to want NT or an admin pricy enough to accept it anyways
*Code Maintenance Tax: the money you'll be paying expensive programmers someday to fix the kludges you used to try and use 64-bit addressing on a 32-bit system, when you eventually do upgrade to a 64-bit processor.
Oh, give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With its Y-chromosome changed to X
And after it's grown
Then my own little clone
Will be of the opposite sex.
(Chorus)
Clone, clone of my own,
With your Y-Chromosome changed to X
And when I'm alone
With my own little clone
We will both think of nothing but sex.
Oh, give me a clone
Is my sorrowful moan
A clone that is wholly my own.
And if she's X-X
And the feminine sex
Oh, what fun we will have when we're prone.
My heart's not of stone,
As I've frequently shown
When alone with my own little X
And after we've dined
I am sure we will find
Better incest than Oedipus Rex.
Why should such sex vex
Or disturb or perplex
Or induce a disparaging tone?
After all, don't you see,
Since we're both of us me,
When we're having sex, I'm alone!
And after I'm done
She will still have her fun
For I'll clone myself twice ere I die.
And this time without fail,
They'll be both of them male
And they'll each ravage her by and by.
First verse and chorus by Randall Garrett; other verses by Isaac Asimov.