I'm not philosophical, I'm pissed that some idiot yanked my moderator status. Until I can find an idiot other than myself to blame, though, I'm just going to take it with quiet good humor, hope my friends aren't reading the user comments on this article, and muse on the fact that my public shame is being recorded in Rob's MySQL database for perpetuity...
I do find it ironic that I got yanked as a moderator for mentioning it immoderately... that's almost philosophical.
He didn't yank moderator status because I made some commentary on the moderation system, but because I was an idiot and forgot to log out and keep anonymity before doing it. If he wants to keep moderators anonymous for whatever reason, there's no way to say "It's OK, just don't do it again."
when you feel like you're on the wrong rung of the evolutionary ladder? There's got to be some reason I'm the 10th moderator to forget to hit the "Log Out" link but the first to get hosed for it.
Ah, well, at least I get to set threshold=5 again now.
One thing that should be pointed out - not all the unfair negative scores are intentional. I just noticed a comment, Score=1, that while not deserving to be stricken from the page didn't deserve to be filtered up, either. So, I hit the checkbox to knock it's score back down a point.
Apparantly somebody else agreed with me, and tried to fix the problem at the same time, because when I came back, the comment was gone completely, Score=-1.
Rob, a request: Could you set all Moderator thresholds to -100, and just let those who really want to change them back? One of the most important ways to spend a moderator point is fixing an unfairly negative-scored post, but I suspect 98% of the moderators still have their thresholds set not to see negative-scored posts at all.
Compatibility with and capabilities of Microsoft Office are the biggest obstacles for a lot of users who would otherwise switch away from Windows. Microsoft is not about to kill a ton of OS revenue for a few more office suite sales.
Besides, since when does Microsoft write software for a competing x86 OS? A couple Mac ports, a Solaris/SPARC port of IE, fine - those are platforms that Windows will never run on anyway. Is there a Solaris/x86 port of IE? Was there ever any OS/2 software from Microsoft? Linux, on the other hand, threatens to take people away from Microsoft and keep them away. There's no way they would do anything to accelerate that process.
Oh, yeah, and they'd rue the day that one of the technically-challenged reporters covering Linux accidentally installs it on two computers, and discovers X is network-transparent. "Hey, everybody, we can run and administer Office from our servers now, without waiting for W2K to materialize. All we have to do is upgrade all these obsolete Win98 client systems to Unix!"
Take a look at the "GiveConsole" and "TakeConsole" scripts in/etc/X11/xdm - you can do a "chmod o-rwx" on any device like/dev/dsp that you don't want non-console access to, then add lines to these scripts to change the owner of these devices to the current console user.
And if the console user wants to "chmod o+rwx" and let other people decide what he listens too, that's allowed - just make sure that "TakeConsole" sets the permissions back when he's done.
It's simple: I'm not paying $100 for a game-only system with half the resolution, half the rendering capabilities, and a fraction of the memory, of my $1000 general purpose computer.
I will, however, pay $70 or whatever outrageous amount they're charging for Zelda 64 if I can then grab the ROM off the net and play it on UltraHLE/Wine (or even just on Windows).
Nintendo's just pissed because they crippled their system by using cartridges instead of CD-ROMs, adding $25+ to each game's manufacturing costs and cutting game data size 10-fold, all to prevent game reproduction; and they still can't believe that they failed totally (and were even counter-productive, since the smaller ROMs are more pirate-friendly over the net than Playstation CDs).
Be wants to sell an operating system that will be the premier OS for one niche of the computing public. Microsoft wants a computer on every desk, and a Microsoft OS on every computer. These are not compatible goals...
Of course, the judge would do well to keep in mind that "victory" for Be constitutes grabbing and holding that 5% market niche, not dethroning MS.
...without the means to make them into plastic integrated circuits. Somehow I suspect lithography and ion deposition isn't going to quite cut it. (Of course, the link broke for me so I could be completely wrong...)
a) Set your computer to boot from HDD only. b) Require a password on BIOS setting changes. c) Add the "restricted" keyword to lilo.conf and rerun lilo. Now nobody gets into your computer without logging in with a valid account or cracking your case.
In Windows 9x, that means:
a) Set your BIOS not to boot without a password Now nobody gets into your computer at all. If you want to let someone use your computer, you've given them root. Hope they like you.
3dfx drivers are available as tarballs, RPMs, (and probably DEBs).
The glide version, 2.53, is about 4 months older than 3.0 (the revisions on which are finally settled down), which is being ported to Linux as well.
My Voodoo 2 runs Quake 2 fine (and displays Unreal fine under Wine). If yours doesn't switch back to passthrough mode (which it won't if there's an error in the 3dfx app), besides telnetting in or blind typing you could just use a wrapper script to reset the display.
Can we get a SCSI-3 host adapter to behave as if it were a client disk drive? If so, put said SCSI card in a system with a gig of SDRAM, a processor fast enough to handle both, a UPS and a magnetic drive for power-down/power failure backups and suddenly you've got a solid state disk with.2% of the seek time for 20% of the cost...
These are ALPHA projects! Granted they seem to be progressing faster than Word is, but Word has 8 revisions headstart! That's EIGHT revisons! KOffice may be useful in a year, or as good as Office in a few years... but right now there's no competition here.
I've looked at a couple databases for web based genetics applications at UT-Houston - your choice depends quite a bit on what your needs are.
For raw speed, nothing beats MySQL on the benchmarks. This comes at a price, though, as any functionality that might negatively impact best-case speed (e.g. triggers, transactions) as well as other useful capabilities (sub-selects, views) are missing. Administration is easy, and DBD, JDBC, etc. drivers are quite solid.
On the other hand, if "number of cool capabilities" is what you're looking for, Oracle is quite good. We're using an Oracle backend as the master database (probably for other tasks as well), with a MySQL database on the webserver itself. Oracle seems to have an enormous learning curve, is a PITA for a few admin tasks, and would almost certainly be overkill for small databases.
PostgreSQL has some nice GUI admin apps, is totally free, but is neither as fast as MySQL nor as full-featured as Oracle.
Most of the commercial DBs with Linux ports came out shortly after we had the MySQL/Oracle setup running - DB2 looks promising.
If you can code around it's shortcomings, use MySQL (but read the license - you can't distribute it even with your app or use the Windows port for free)... and if you run into a stumbling block in the future, you shouldn't have difficulty upgrading to another DB.
Make sure you stick with a database-independent API (and as portable SQL as feasable) so you're not locked into one vendor - we're using Perl/DBI (probably mod_perl with persistent connections later) but JDBC or ODBC both have drivers for everything as well
I do like several Niven/Pournelle team books (esp. Lucifer's Hammer) better than what either of them has written alone, but Pournelle isn't a bad writer even alone. I just finished reading through his Falkenberg novels, and while they aren't exactly bleeding-heart-liberal, they aren't bad writing or ultraconservative propaganda either.
As for Reagan, I'm not at all disappointed with the results of his right-wing foreign policies - there are reasons we have one Germany and zero Soviet Unions today, and he was one of them. I'm much less happy with the $2 trillion in debt piled up during his administration, the tax cut and broken economic theory that boosted it, and the inept handling of the air traffic controller strike...
And as for Star Wars, well, hit User Info and see my older/. postings on the shuttle - the political failures again far outweighed the technical ones.
And a great SF writer when he's teamed up with Larry Niven. I know fiction writing is supposed to be much harder than non-fiction, but he'd have contributed a lot more to society if he had dropped the computer article gig ten years ago and put just a tenth of those words into novel form.
In Linux, it is theoretically impossible to protect an audio file from copying. If it were't for the ioctls, anyone with basic shell experience could do something like "mv/dev/dsp/dev/realdsp; mkfifo/dev/dsp; tee savedmusic.wav/dev/realdsp" to intercept sound. In any case, anyone with C/Unix programming experience can make a kernel module to do the same for any app. (if ALSA doesn't make that possible already, of course...)
I think you can do the same in Windows - don't the "MP3 radio stations" work by intercepting sound from any player on the system?
Exactly how do these "secure MP3's" plan to do the technically impossible, in spite of the fact that "audio I can play once" == "audio I can record (or recompress) and redistribute/play as often as my conscience lets me?"?
I mean that. I don't want to hear any more whimpering about "I don't like first person shooters" or "What kind of a name is BFRIS?" - this is a game that any right-thinking human being will agree must be purchased, must be played, and must be played under Linux. A year from today, the Linux (not counting Wine) games situation could be Id Software, or it could be a number of widely varied games with more jumping on the bandwagon; the success of these people (a commercial Linux-game-porting crew!) is going to be a decisive factor. If you don't like non-GPL'ed apps, suck it up and realize you're acting for the greater good. If you don't play computer games, isn't now a good time to start? And if you don't like Civilization, lie down immediately and drink plenty of liquids until the fever breaks, then go out and buy this game when you come to your senses. You know you want to.
We need more people like Windows programmers, like those in the Gnome and KDE camps - people who actively try to program to a userbase of new computer users rather than geeks like themselves. We need people who program to the best traditions of Windows.
What we don't need, however, is people who program to the worst traditions of Windows. Before you switch to Unix coding, learn the differences between (and the rational behind)/usr and/var, share and local, $HOME and/etc, and program with those concepts in mind. Use getopt_long() (including --help/-?/-h), write a useful man page; use $EDITOR/stdin/stdout if applicable; even let users use regexps, shell, or perl commands if they would work with your app. The last thing we need is another grotesque internal pseudo window manager like StarOffice's, or a multiuser-blind app.
And I mean that in the most literal sense of the term: they had a goal, to develop a "space truck" that was fully reusable, with minimal turnaround time and support crew, that would thus lower earth-to-orbit payload costs enough to replace expendable rockets; they failed on all these counts. Instead, we have a vehicle whose ET is thrown away, whose boosters get recovered from splashdown at practically their own production cost, whose heat shielding and engines have to be practically rebuilt in the months between successive launches, which requires a small city to service it, and which costs 3-4 times more per kilo payload than even expendables. The only technical niche the shuttle is successful at is extended manned payloads; instead it fills the political niche of spreading a lot of money to a lot of districts, and it's successor program isn't looking much better yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not philosophical, I'm pissed that some idiot yanked my moderator status. Until I can find an idiot other than myself to blame, though, I'm just going to take it with quiet good humor, hope my friends aren't reading the user comments on this article, and muse on the fact that my public shame is being recorded in Rob's MySQL database for perpetuity...
I do find it ironic that I got yanked as a moderator for mentioning it immoderately... that's almost philosophical.
He didn't yank moderator status because I made some commentary on the moderation system, but because I was an idiot and forgot to log out and keep anonymity before doing it. If he wants to keep moderators anonymous for whatever reason, there's no way to say "It's OK, just don't do it again."
Think of it as evolution in action.
when you feel like you're on the wrong rung of the evolutionary ladder? There's got to be some reason I'm the 10th moderator to forget to hit the "Log Out" link but the first to get hosed for it.
Ah, well, at least I get to set threshold=5 again now.
One thing that should be pointed out - not all the unfair negative scores are intentional. I just noticed a comment, Score=1, that while not deserving to be stricken from the page didn't deserve to be filtered up, either. So, I hit the checkbox to knock it's score back down a point.
Apparantly somebody else agreed with me, and tried to fix the problem at the same time, because when I came back, the comment was gone completely, Score=-1.
Rob, a request: Could you set all Moderator thresholds to -100, and just let those who really want to change them back? One of the most important ways to spend a moderator point is fixing an unfairly negative-scored post, but I suspect 98% of the moderators still have their thresholds set not to see negative-scored posts at all.
Compatibility with and capabilities of Microsoft Office are the biggest obstacles for a lot of users who would otherwise switch away from Windows. Microsoft is not about to kill a ton of OS revenue for a few more office suite sales.
Besides, since when does Microsoft write software for a competing x86 OS? A couple Mac ports, a Solaris/SPARC port of IE, fine - those are platforms that Windows will never run on anyway. Is there a Solaris/x86 port of IE? Was there ever any OS/2 software from Microsoft? Linux, on the other hand, threatens to take people away from Microsoft and keep them away. There's no way they would do anything to accelerate that process.
Oh, yeah, and they'd rue the day that one of the technically-challenged reporters covering Linux accidentally installs it on two computers, and discovers X is network-transparent.
"Hey, everybody, we can run and administer Office from our servers now, without waiting for W2K to materialize. All we have to do is upgrade all these obsolete Win98 client systems to Unix!"
Take a look at the "GiveConsole" and "TakeConsole" scripts in /etc/X11/xdm - you can do a "chmod o-rwx" on any device like /dev/dsp that you don't want non-console access to, then add lines to these scripts to change the owner of these devices to the current console user.
And if the console user wants to "chmod o+rwx" and let other people decide what he listens too, that's allowed - just make sure that "TakeConsole" sets the permissions back when he's done.
Do I see open source, network-transparent, hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in X on the horizon?
It's simple: I'm not paying $100 for a game-only system with half the resolution, half the rendering capabilities, and a fraction of the memory, of my $1000 general purpose computer.
I will, however, pay $70 or whatever outrageous amount they're charging for Zelda 64 if I can then grab the ROM off the net and play it on UltraHLE/Wine (or even just on Windows).
Nintendo's just pissed because they crippled their system by using cartridges instead of CD-ROMs, adding $25+ to each game's manufacturing costs and cutting game data size 10-fold, all to prevent game reproduction; and they still can't believe that they failed totally (and were even counter-productive, since the smaller ROMs are more pirate-friendly over the net than Playstation CDs).
Be wants to sell an operating system that will be the premier OS for one niche of the computing public. Microsoft wants a computer on every desk, and a Microsoft OS on every computer. These are not compatible goals...
Of course, the judge would do well to keep in mind that "victory" for Be constitutes grabbing and holding that 5% market niche, not dethroning MS.
...without the means to make them into plastic integrated circuits. Somehow I suspect lithography and ion deposition isn't going to quite cut it. (Of course, the link broke for me so I could be completely wrong...)
In Linux, that means:
a) Set your computer to boot from HDD only.
b) Require a password on BIOS setting changes.
c) Add the "restricted" keyword to lilo.conf and rerun lilo.
Now nobody gets into your computer without logging in with a valid account or cracking your case.
In Windows 9x, that means:
a) Set your BIOS not to boot without a password
Now nobody gets into your computer at all. If you want to let someone use your computer, you've given them root. Hope they like you.
3dfx drivers are available as tarballs, RPMs, (and probably DEBs).
The glide version, 2.53, is about 4 months older than 3.0 (the revisions on which are finally settled down), which is being ported to Linux as well.
My Voodoo 2 runs Quake 2 fine (and displays Unreal fine under Wine). If yours doesn't switch back to passthrough mode (which it won't if there's an error in the 3dfx app), besides telnetting in or blind typing you could just use a wrapper script to reset the display.
Can we get a SCSI-3 host adapter to behave as if it were a client disk drive? If so, put said SCSI card in a system with a gig of SDRAM, a processor fast enough to handle both, a UPS and a magnetic drive for power-down/power failure backups and suddenly you've got a solid state disk with .2% of the seek time for 20% of the cost...
Freecell has worked perfectly under Wine for a year.
But hardcore microgamers play reversi (othello) anyways.
These are ALPHA projects! Granted they seem to be progressing faster than Word is, but Word has 8 revisions headstart! That's EIGHT revisons! KOffice may be useful in a year, or as good as Office in a few years... but right now there's no competition here.
I've looked at a couple databases for web based genetics applications at UT-Houston - your choice depends quite a bit on what your needs are.
For raw speed, nothing beats MySQL on the benchmarks. This comes at a price, though, as any functionality that might negatively impact best-case speed (e.g. triggers, transactions) as well as other useful capabilities (sub-selects, views) are missing. Administration is easy, and DBD, JDBC, etc. drivers are quite solid.
On the other hand, if "number of cool capabilities" is what you're looking for, Oracle is quite good. We're using an Oracle backend as the master database (probably for other tasks as well), with a MySQL database on the webserver itself. Oracle seems to have an enormous learning curve, is a PITA for a few admin tasks, and would almost certainly be overkill for small databases.
PostgreSQL has some nice GUI admin apps, is totally free, but is neither as fast as MySQL nor as full-featured as Oracle.
Most of the commercial DBs with Linux ports came out shortly after we had the MySQL/Oracle setup running - DB2 looks promising.
If you can code around it's shortcomings, use MySQL (but read the license - you can't distribute it even with your app or use the Windows port for free)... and if you run into a stumbling block in the future, you shouldn't have difficulty upgrading to another DB.
Make sure you stick with a database-independent API (and as portable SQL as feasable) so you're not locked into one vendor - we're using Perl/DBI (probably mod_perl with persistent connections later) but JDBC or ODBC both have drivers for everything as well
I do like several Niven/Pournelle team books (esp. Lucifer's Hammer) better than what either of them has written alone, but Pournelle isn't a bad writer even alone. I just finished reading through his Falkenberg novels, and while they aren't exactly bleeding-heart-liberal, they aren't bad writing or ultraconservative propaganda either.
/. postings on the shuttle - the political failures again far outweighed the technical ones.
As for Reagan, I'm not at all disappointed with the results of his right-wing foreign policies - there are reasons we have one Germany and zero Soviet Unions today, and he was one of them. I'm much less happy with the $2 trillion in debt piled up during his administration, the tax cut and broken economic theory that boosted it, and the inept handling of the air traffic controller strike...
And as for Star Wars, well, hit User Info and see my older
And a great SF writer when he's teamed up with Larry Niven. I know fiction writing is supposed to be much harder than non-fiction, but he'd have contributed a lot more to society if he had dropped the computer article gig ten years ago and put just a tenth of those words into novel form.
In Linux, it is theoretically impossible to protect an audio file from copying. If it were't for the ioctls, anyone with basic shell experience could do something like "mv /dev/dsp /dev/realdsp; mkfifo /dev/dsp; tee savedmusic.wav /dev/realdsp" to intercept sound. In any case, anyone with C/Unix programming experience can make a kernel module to do the same for any app. (if ALSA doesn't make that possible already, of course...)
I think you can do the same in Windows - don't the "MP3 radio stations" work by intercepting sound from any player on the system?
Exactly how do these "secure MP3's" plan to do the technically impossible, in spite of the fact that "audio I can play once" == "audio I can record (or recompress) and redistribute/play as often as my conscience lets me?"?
I mean that. I don't want to hear any more whimpering about "I don't like first person shooters" or "What kind of a name is BFRIS?" - this is a game that any right-thinking human being will agree must be purchased, must be played, and must be played under Linux. A year from today, the Linux (not counting Wine) games situation could be Id Software, or it could be a number of widely varied games with more jumping on the bandwagon; the success of these people (a commercial Linux-game-porting crew!) is going to be a decisive factor. If you don't like non-GPL'ed apps, suck it up and realize you're acting for the greater good. If you don't play computer games, isn't now a good time to start? And if you don't like Civilization, lie down immediately and drink plenty of liquids until the fever breaks, then go out and buy this game when you come to your senses. You know you want to.
We need more people like Windows programmers, like those in the Gnome and KDE camps - people who actively try to program to a userbase of new computer users rather than geeks like themselves. We need people who program to the best traditions of Windows.
/usr and /var, share and local, $HOME and /etc, and program with those concepts in mind. Use getopt_long() (including --help/-?/-h), write a useful man page; use $EDITOR/stdin/stdout if applicable; even let users use regexps, shell, or perl commands if they would work with your app. The last thing we need is another grotesque internal pseudo window manager like StarOffice's, or a multiuser-blind app.
What we don't need, however, is people who program to the worst traditions of Windows. Before you switch to Unix coding, learn the differences between (and the rational behind)
The problem will be caught at the linker, where one compiler requires symbols that the other doesn't export.
I think you can still run your old C++ programs as long as you have both libstdc++ & libg++ installed.
Commercial apps take the most paranoid route and link C++ libs in statically.
And I mean that in the most literal sense of the term: they had a goal, to develop a "space truck" that was fully reusable, with minimal turnaround time and support crew, that would thus lower earth-to-orbit payload costs enough to replace expendable rockets; they failed on all these counts. Instead, we have a vehicle whose ET is thrown away, whose boosters get recovered from splashdown at practically their own production cost, whose heat shielding and engines have to be practically rebuilt in the months between successive launches, which requires a small city to service it, and which costs 3-4 times more per kilo payload than even expendables. The only technical niche the shuttle is successful at is extended manned payloads; instead it fills the political niche of spreading a lot of money to a lot of districts, and it's successor program isn't looking much better yet.
How ironic. The sequence I use (OK, I'm still on 2.1.131, but same principles apply) is:
/usr/src
cd
bunzip2 patch-2.1.131.bz2 #or gunzip if applicable
patch -p0 patch-2.1.131
(the -p0 tells it not to strip any directories from the filenames being patched)