Greg Bear's Eon trilogy (Eon -> Eternity -> Legacy) has the descendents of such a vessel find something rather more interesting to do than just sitting waiting to get to their destination.
David Brin and Gregory Benford's Heart of the Comet has a group of people try to colonise a comet to bring it back to Earth to mine it, but find their original goal becomes increasingly more remote.
Unfortunately, being among the majority of people in the known Universe, I don't get 1000 channels to choose from, so unless it's going to be on terrestrial or Sky One (which already has constant reruns of The Simpsons, 3-4/day ffs) or so, the closest me and 10 million other Brits are going to get to seeing it is a dodgy DivX:(
So far I've seen the first series cut very badly on Channel 4, the first two in crappy.rm format, and about 3 DivXed episodes after that.
> If your filesystem is truncating files, the
> packaging system is the least of your problems
This is what happens when you mount filesystems async on drives that do write behind caching and you get powercuts or crashes.
Using one big fragile file for core system information is the same sort of braindamaged concept as a registry, or having/bin dynamically linked, or filling base system dirs with cruft.
I think the biggest reason for thinking they're likely to be successful is because they're targeted; if you're looking for something in particular and you get an advert related to it, you're more likely to click on it than you are on $some_randon_ignorable_banner.
I too have had package db corruption, several times.
> More serious is when an update breaks, say,
> Ethernet or Modem access and I can no longer
> connect to the Net to fetch repaired packages.
> That's when I'd love to be able to roll back to a
> known working configuration.
portupgrade on FreeBSD creates a package of every port it upgrades before replacing it so the update can be rolled back if install breaks. Taring up everything on the packing list and leaving a backup package would be a lot simpler (and probably faster) to impliment than a transactional fs.
> Keeping a separate package database in one huge
> (ASCII!) file is advantageous. By being separate
> from the individual packages, the dependencies
> are kept nicely so they can be easily referenced
This is in no way an advantage of the implimentation format being one huge file. It could just as easily be one file per package, or one directory per package and multiple files referencing things like packing list, uninstall commands etc, plus a static, throwaway index file. It makes updates faster and a lot less disaster prone.
> As an ASCII file, any sort of little error
> which might cause a problem is easily
> correctable, as opposed to other packaging
> systems.
That's great until your filesystem decides to truncate it to 0 bytes, and it's lots of fun looking for parse errors 40,000 lines into a file and guessing what might have been in the garbage that you find.
> Regardless, this is not what the article
> submitter was talking about at all.
It is one of the dangers of Debian; upgrade to the latest unstable apt -> nuked package db, upgrade to the latest kernel and get fs corruption -> nuked package db. Find your ATA driver/chipset is buggy on handling large files -> nuked package db. Install a borked package -> nuked package db.
XP has system restore points, where it stores old drivers etc until you clean them up. Last time I did that I regained 2.5GB of disk space..
Personally I think the answer for Debian is to stop using such a fragile packaging system, *shrug*:)
(no, I don't mean switch to RPM, I mean things like not storing the entire package database for packages in one huge big file, and using that same file to keep track of what's installed. That's just asking to be nuked)
> That said, it's not as if you can go out and
> claim any programming job without a degree,
Degrees don't magically make for a clueful person, or a good programmer, or someone who doesn't just hack at everything he writes. It's more a question of attitude ("I'm a hacker", vs "I'm a programmer") than qualifications.
Anyway, they spoon-fed us Visual Basic and miniscule quantities of C during my degree..
> unless you are coding web scripts for Amazon.
> This is NOT programming. It's scripting. And
> frankly, anyone can learn to Script in 21 days.
Web applications have just as much scope for good design and real programming practices as any other app, just like any other app has huge scope for quick hacks, bad structure and poor maintainability.
Sure, anyone can come up with a quick PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby/sh/tcl hack and produce formail.cgi, but there's a big difference between the sort of code 100,000 PHP cluebies will hack on (think: phpNuke, the perfect example of how NOT to develop a website) and properly written well factored systems you would at least hope to find on any semi-professional site.
With NTL - the service is fairly stable, I've had a few days downtime since it was installed, that was about, um, 6 months ago.
Speeds are good, it's actually 600kbps down in some areas (mine included:), but the service is pretty basic; support is practically non existant (NTL are in way too much debt to pay monkeys to sit at helldesks:)
There are no up/download limits, and their news setup is excellent. Aside from a transparent HTTP proxy which goes pear shaped every so often, there are no blocks to, for instance, port 25 in/outgoing.
So that's £25 (~$35) for the CM, plus £15 (~$21) for the phone/TV.
> Is/bin/sh POSIX on all major platforms? Or do
> some have it in an alternate location like/bin/posix/sh?
In theory,/bin/sh should be POSIX compliant, yes - there's certainly grounds for complaint if it's not. Unfortunately, on most Linux systems they seem to think the basic failsafe shell should be a (dynamically linked, duh) copy of bash, which tends to result in people writing scripts to POSIX + a couple of bash extensions.
> print `echo foo; sleep 5; echo bar`;
> This won't print anything until the after the
> entire program completes, unlike sh.
sh won't print it until it all completes either - try the equivilent:
$ echo `echo foo; sleep 5; echo bar`
:)
> Is there a way to do that in perl?
Yes, use "system 'echo foo; sleep 5; echo bar';".
If you need to process the command output, you can use a pipe and do it progressively.
> A "mess of shell scripts" can be very useful for a proof-of-concept.
Indeed. The language doesn't make a whole lot of difference, and well written/bin/sh code is going to work pretty much anywhere. Hell, cvsup is written in Modula 3 and people use that:P
Personally I wouldn't mind a Ruby version..:)
(having said that, C isn't all that wonderful a language - it's low level power can just as easily be used to blow your head off as make for a super-fast program).
Being RISC, the PPC tends to result in much bigger executables than x86 code, with a comparative increase in memory requirements. Factor in a bloat factor of 1.5-2, and 128MB looks rather more reasonable.
> we all know monolithic kernels are MUCH faster than microkernels
Not really. A bit of extra message passing doesn't make for a hugely slower system. On the other hand, you get a smaller, neater, and above all, more modular system.
> I don't have to mention the GUI do I. Apple's is terribly slow and most of it is in fact useless.
Right, and Linux is overflowing with kickass GUI's and reliable, well designed system configuration tools that don't mess up your configs.
> How about system requirements. Linux needs very little to run while OS X needs 128 MB RAM min
Don't forget to add the cost of XFree86 and Gnome/KDE to your "very little", and don't go skimping into swap-hell, since this is aimed at desktop/workstation type environments.
> How about price. Linux is free while OS X is not. OS X costs $129.00 at the Apple store.
Add to the cost of Linux books, time you spend working things out, trying out and breaking various dist's. Apple target people who just want to Get Things Done - the real cost of learning and getting used to Linux is very high for such people.
> Apple should have built OS X off of Linux if they were smart.
Why would they want to use a big-ass barely designed kernel they can't even touch without having to hire teams of lawyers and beg their coders to be careful to stop their code being automatically GPL'd? What's so good about Linux that makes it so much better despite it's shortcomings?
To be honest I've never felt the need for an IDE. My favourite text editor, a webserver, a command line version of PHP, and very occasionally a PHP debugger do me just fine.
Every IDE I tried was either slow, unstable, missed basic features of a good editor, or just Crap[tm].
It's not as if PHP is the hardest language in the world to fit in your head, you don't need an IDE to constantly try to stop it leaking out. Well, maybe you do, but I don't:)
My first Debian system started life as a Coral Linux install - I edited/etc/apt/sources.list to point at debian/unstable, did an apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade, and 80MB or so later I had a real Debian system.
> Contrary to popular belief, the ports system is
> a steaming pile of horse crap. It offers little
> or no flexibility in regards to how packages
> are built,
Most ports include all the options you need as make defines. If you need more, you can copy the makefile and edit it to your hearts content, and maybe type "send-pr" and submit a patch. Or you can just compile from bog standard source and have the rest of the ports tree use it because they look for libs, binaries and executables, not packages.
> and has a nasty habit of installing
> unecassary dependencies.
Such as? It's certainly nowhere near as bad as Debian, where the entire packages system is so complex and interdependent that it needs to go through years of testing before a release is concidered stable.
> For an example, try compiling PostgreSQL on a
> non-XFree FreeBSD machine from the ports tree.
> Notice how it insists on installing XFree86.
It used to want TK, which would want the XFree libs. That's no longer the case.
> You can't pass it any configure script options > like --without-xfree or ---don't build-
> retarded-gui.
For most people flags like -DWITHOUT_X11 etc are good enough. Otherwise scratch your itch and send-pr.
> Even with RPMs I can do that. In the end, you
> usually just wind up downloading the tarball
> and compiling it yourself, which seems to
> defeat the purpouse of a Ports/ Package
> Managment system entierly.
Making your own ports is trivial, pr's usually get resolved in a couple of days, and installing from source interacts with the ports system far better than any RPM/DEB system I've seen.
Frankly it sounds like you haven't tried it in a while. Sure, it's nowhere near perfect, but what is? Certainly not a binary package system with fragile dep issues and completely unaudited sources.
I don't usually reply to trolls, but I haven't got anything better to do that I cba doing atm:P
> Well, what the hell do expect from an obsolete,
> ancient code base which is developed in a
> closed fashion?
Linus and friends approves patches to the kernel, does that make it's development model closed?
Having the core team approve commits to the base OS is no different to any other open source project, and just serves to keep the base system as high quality as possible.
As for old, since when has maturity been a bad thing for Unix?
> (Yeah, it "supports" SMP. As in, when one CPU
> is running, the other is locked idle. And vice-
> versa.
FreeBSD's current SMP support scales poorly because the kernel is based around a "Giant" lock, which prevents multiple CPU's from entering most of the kernel at the same time. However, except on systems where the kernel itself is heavily loaded, and/or on systems with lots of CPU's (4 or more), it's not a major problem.
FreeBSD 5, due out at the end of the year, will have Giant mostly removed, as well as things like kernel preemption and advanced userland threading. It'll scale as well as if not better than Linux.
It'll also have a new startup system based on NetBSD's (have a look at it, it's pretty cool - http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/basesrc/etc/ ?cvsroot=netbsd), much improved random data generation, and a lot of other things that'll only really interest geeks.
Some moons are fairly boring chunks of rock (like, say, The Moon), others tell a story of an extremely violent past (like, they've been blasted to bits and only just managed to stay as one entity, like Miranda).
Others have thick atmospheres containing weird-ass chemicals (like Titan), others have vulcanism driven by processes we barely understand (like Triton, or Io)
Some may have oceans, others are small chunks of rock we would barely notice if they weren't orbiting some other body (like Phobos).
The planets may be more interesting in some respects, but there are a lot more moons to look at:)
rsync is good for updating iso's; grab the 4.4 and when it's done and you really want a 4.5 iso, rsync your 4.4 one and just get the changes.
Not that there's much point; the first thing most people (well, me, anyway:) do when their system's up and running is cvsup/usr/src and/usr/ports and rebuild everything to the latest -STABLE. Checking out like that ensures you only get the diffs, too, so the latest iso release isn't that useful..
While we're on the subject; don't even think about putting cvsup on a cron, at least not on one that runs a lot. cvsup is very I/O intensive, so hammering the servers constantly with no real reason to do so doesn't help anyone.
http://freshports.org/ is a nice way to keep track of when to bother updating/usr/ports.
Funny retrograde orbit, dodgy orientation, nitrogen geysers, evidence that it was formed outside the solar system, but they include "Phobos Missions" but not Triton Missions?
Why go to yet another piece of inert rock when there are places like this? (ignoring for a second the small matter of cost, obviously).
> although I also use opera and have configured it
> such that I only have the google search box on my
> toolbar.
I have it set up too, but I never use it; it's easier just to type "g foo bar wibble" in a nearby address bar.
You can make IE do this too, btw; HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\g, set the default value to http://www.google.com/search?q=%s. Repeat for other search engines.
(Yeah, editing the registry for something like this.. I know.. bleugh:)
> This highlights the problem that Email is not
> really the best medium for threaded discussions
> involving more than two people, whereas news
> groups are designed with exactly this in mind.
Mailing lists are fine, aside from being more complex to join/leave. Mass-Ccing and group replies are also handy for small discussions between a few people, but you're right; for internal stuff, a private news setup's a good alternative. I have always been surprised at the lack of good Win32 news software to the tune of NewsRog though.
Mixing the two might be the best compromise; have a news server for those who want to use it, and have a mail news gateway with a list.
> As an aside, the next problem after that for
> that case is actually getting authors to make
> the corrections that are suggested, my only
> solution to which has been to force people to
> put documents in CVS instead, prefereably as
> HTML, rather than binary /.doc files.
WebDAV/SubVersion might be a good way to go in future, especially since you can mount WebDAV shares directly in Explorer (I gather Macs have good WebDAV support too).
HTML, though, *cringe*, make them use a proper descriptive XML format that you can turn into anything with a quick XSL:)
Uhm, I hit the lameness filter on a simple HTML formatted message for the sake of an example list? WTF is the point of allowing HTML if you filter like that? Especially when it allows this mess of 's, pipes and hyphens. Sigh
1) The most important information is at the top.
Except it has no frame of reference; to find out what you're replying to you have to jump to the bottom and find the reply, read it, work out what specific part you're replying to and then read your response again.
2) I can archive a single mail and have saved the whole discussion.
Um, no you can't. Threads aren't usually like:
| Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
\--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
\-- Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
They're:
| Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
|--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
|\--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
|\-- Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
|--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
|\--| Foo (was: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa)
|\-- Re: Foo
\-- Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
How do ypu propose to archive all those with a single message, even assuming you can trust every user to use the same reply method and not ever even concider changing anything?
The standard method of quoting; i.e, quoting as little as needed, replying in-context etc, results in shorter more structured messages that are easier to read and contain a minimum of redundant data. It also scales much better; when you're 20 replies deep in a thread, where your messages are hitting 200k with every previous message still in there, proper quoting is still just leaving the relevent information in there.
If you need to archive threads, you should save the entire thread out to an mbox, not pick one untrusted message and hope the thread is structured enough to all be contained in it.
Slashdot Mirror
David Brin and Gregory Benford's Heart of the Comet has a group of people try to colonise a comet to bring it back to Earth to mine it, but find their original goal becomes increasingly more remote.
Why? Rats are smarter, cleaner, less smelly and make much better pets than mice.
:)
Oh, wait, Microsoft mice rule, rats rule.. I see it now
Unfortunately, being among the majority of people in the known Universe, I don't get 1000 channels to choose from, so unless it's going to be on terrestrial or Sky One (which already has constant reruns of The Simpsons, 3-4/day ffs) or so, the closest me and 10 million other Brits are going to get to seeing it is a dodgy DivX :(
.rm format, and about 3 DivXed episodes after that.
So far I've seen the first series cut very badly on Channel 4, the first two in crappy
> If your filesystem is truncating files, the
/bin dynamically linked, or filling base system dirs with cruft.
> packaging system is the least of your problems
This is what happens when you mount filesystems async on drives that do write behind caching and you get powercuts or crashes.
Using one big fragile file for core system information is the same sort of braindamaged concept as a registry, or having
I think the biggest reason for thinking they're likely to be successful is because they're targeted; if you're looking for something in particular and you get an advert related to it, you're more likely to click on it than you are on $some_randon_ignorable_banner.
I too have had package db corruption, several times.
> More serious is when an update breaks, say,
> Ethernet or Modem access and I can no longer
> connect to the Net to fetch repaired packages.
> That's when I'd love to be able to roll back to a
> known working configuration.
portupgrade on FreeBSD creates a package of every port it upgrades before replacing it so the update can be rolled back if install breaks. Taring up everything on the packing list and leaving a backup package would be a lot simpler (and probably faster) to impliment than a transactional fs.
> Keeping a separate package database in one huge
> (ASCII!) file is advantageous. By being separate
> from the individual packages, the dependencies
> are kept nicely so they can be easily referenced
This is in no way an advantage of the implimentation format being one huge file. It could just as easily be one file per package, or one directory per package and multiple files referencing things like packing list, uninstall commands etc, plus a static, throwaway index file. It makes updates faster and a lot less disaster prone.
> As an ASCII file, any sort of little error
> which might cause a problem is easily
> correctable, as opposed to other packaging
> systems.
That's great until your filesystem decides to truncate it to 0 bytes, and it's lots of fun looking for parse errors 40,000 lines into a file and guessing what might have been in the garbage that you find.
> Regardless, this is not what the article
> submitter was talking about at all.
It is one of the dangers of Debian; upgrade to the latest unstable apt -> nuked package db, upgrade to the latest kernel and get fs corruption -> nuked package db. Find your ATA driver/chipset is buggy on handling large files -> nuked package db. Install a borked package -> nuked package db.
XP has system restore points, where it stores old drivers etc until you clean them up. Last time I did that I regained 2.5GB of disk space..
:)
Personally I think the answer for Debian is to stop using such a fragile packaging system, *shrug*
(no, I don't mean switch to RPM, I mean things like not storing the entire package database for packages in one huge big file, and using that same file to keep track of what's installed. That's just asking to be nuked)
> That said, it's not as if you can go out and
> claim any programming job without a degree,
Degrees don't magically make for a clueful person, or a good programmer, or someone who doesn't just hack at everything he writes. It's more a question of attitude ("I'm a hacker", vs "I'm a programmer") than qualifications.
Anyway, they spoon-fed us Visual Basic and miniscule quantities of C during my degree..
> unless you are coding web scripts for Amazon.
> This is NOT programming. It's scripting. And
> frankly, anyone can learn to Script in 21 days.
Web applications have just as much scope for good design and real programming practices as any other app, just like any other app has huge scope for quick hacks, bad structure and poor maintainability.
Sure, anyone can come up with a quick PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby/sh/tcl hack and produce formail.cgi, but there's a big difference between the sort of code 100,000 PHP cluebies will hack on (think: phpNuke, the perfect example of how NOT to develop a website) and properly written well factored systems you would at least hope to find on any semi-professional site.
With NTL - the service is fairly stable, I've had a few days downtime since it was installed, that was about, um, 6 months ago.
:), but the service is pretty basic; support is practically non existant (NTL are in way too much debt to pay monkeys to sit at helldesks :)
Speeds are good, it's actually 600kbps down in some areas (mine included
There are no up/download limits, and their news setup is excellent. Aside from a transparent HTTP proxy which goes pear shaped every so often, there are no blocks to, for instance, port 25 in/outgoing.
So that's £25 (~$35) for the CM, plus £15 (~$21) for the phone/TV.
> Is /bin/sh POSIX on all major platforms? Or do
/bin/posix/sh?
/bin/sh should be POSIX compliant, yes - there's certainly grounds for complaint if it's not. Unfortunately, on most Linux systems they seem to think the basic failsafe shell should be a (dynamically linked, duh) copy of bash, which tends to result in people writing scripts to POSIX + a couple of bash extensions.
> some have it in an alternate location like
In theory,
> print `echo foo; sleep 5; echo bar`;
> This won't print anything until the after the
> entire program completes, unlike sh.
sh won't print it until it all completes either - try the equivilent:
$ echo `echo foo; sleep 5; echo bar`
:)
> Is there a way to do that in perl?
Yes, use "system 'echo foo; sleep 5; echo bar';".
If you need to process the command output, you can use a pipe and do it progressively.
Well, it's not *entirely* in sh:
Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):
ansic: 61064 (66.48%)
sh: 27853 (30.32%)
lisp: 1868 (2.03%)
awk: 1044 (1.14%)
sed: 24 (0.03%)
(If you want more detail, run sloccount over it yourself)
Anyay, it could be worse; it could be written in Perl ;)
> A "mess of shell scripts" can be very useful for a proof-of-concept.
/bin/sh code is going to work pretty much anywhere. Hell, cvsup is written in Modula 3 and people use that :P
:)
Indeed. The language doesn't make a whole lot of difference, and well written
Personally I wouldn't mind a Ruby version..
(having said that, C isn't all that wonderful a language - it's low level power can just as easily be used to blow your head off as make for a super-fast program).
Are you comparing Linux/PPC with OS X?
Being RISC, the PPC tends to result in much bigger executables than x86 code, with a comparative increase in memory requirements. Factor in a bloat factor of 1.5-2, and 128MB looks rather more reasonable.
Anyway, Memory is Cheap These Days[tm].
> we all know monolithic kernels are MUCH faster than microkernels
Not really. A bit of extra message passing doesn't make for a hugely slower system. On the other hand, you get a smaller, neater, and above all, more modular system.
> I don't have to mention the GUI do I. Apple's is terribly slow and most of it is in fact useless.
Right, and Linux is overflowing with kickass GUI's and reliable, well designed system configuration tools that don't mess up your configs.
> How about system requirements. Linux needs very little to run while OS X needs 128 MB RAM min
Don't forget to add the cost of XFree86 and Gnome/KDE to your "very little", and don't go skimping into swap-hell, since this is aimed at desktop/workstation type environments.
> How about price. Linux is free while OS X is not. OS X costs $129.00 at the Apple store.
Add to the cost of Linux books, time you spend working things out, trying out and breaking various dist's. Apple target people who just want to Get Things Done - the real cost of learning and getting used to Linux is very high for such people.
> Apple should have built OS X off of Linux if they were smart.
Why would they want to use a big-ass barely designed kernel they can't even touch without having to hire teams of lawyers and beg their coders to be careful to stop their code being automatically GPL'd? What's so good about Linux that makes it so much better despite it's shortcomings?
To be honest I've never felt the need for an IDE. My favourite text editor, a webserver, a command line version of PHP, and very occasionally a PHP debugger do me just fine.
:)
Every IDE I tried was either slow, unstable, missed basic features of a good editor, or just Crap[tm].
It's not as if PHP is the hardest language in the world to fit in your head, you don't need an IDE to constantly try to stop it leaking out. Well, maybe you do, but I don't
My first Debian system started life as a Coral Linux install - I edited /etc/apt/sources.list to point at debian/unstable, did an apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade, and 80MB or so later I had a real Debian system.
I dare say you can do similar things with this.
> Contrary to popular belief, the ports system is
> a steaming pile of horse crap. It offers little
> or no flexibility in regards to how packages
> are built,
Most ports include all the options you need as make defines. If you need more, you can copy the makefile and edit it to your hearts content, and maybe type "send-pr" and submit a patch. Or you can just compile from bog standard source and have the rest of the ports tree use it because they look for libs, binaries and executables, not packages.
> and has a nasty habit of installing
> unecassary dependencies.
Such as? It's certainly nowhere near as bad as Debian, where the entire packages system is so complex and interdependent that it needs to go through years of testing before a release is concidered stable.
> For an example, try compiling PostgreSQL on a
> non-XFree FreeBSD machine from the ports tree.
> Notice how it insists on installing XFree86.
It used to want TK, which would want the XFree libs. That's no longer the case.
> You can't pass it any configure script options > like --without-xfree or ---don't build-
> retarded-gui.
For most people flags like -DWITHOUT_X11 etc are good enough. Otherwise scratch your itch and send-pr.
> Even with RPMs I can do that. In the end, you
> usually just wind up downloading the tarball
> and compiling it yourself, which seems to
> defeat the purpouse of a Ports/ Package
> Managment system entierly.
Making your own ports is trivial, pr's usually get resolved in a couple of days, and installing from source interacts with the ports system far better than any RPM/DEB system I've seen.
Frankly it sounds like you haven't tried it in a while. Sure, it's nowhere near perfect, but what is? Certainly not a binary package system with fragile dep issues and completely unaudited sources.
I don't usually reply to trolls, but I haven't got anything better to do that I cba doing atm :P
/ ?cvsroot=netbsd), much improved random data generation, and a lot of other things that'll only really interest geeks.
> Well, what the hell do expect from an obsolete,
> ancient code base which is developed in a
> closed fashion?
Linus and friends approves patches to the kernel, does that make it's development model closed?
Having the core team approve commits to the base OS is no different to any other open source project, and just serves to keep the base system as high quality as possible.
As for old, since when has maturity been a bad thing for Unix?
> (Yeah, it "supports" SMP. As in, when one CPU
> is running, the other is locked idle. And vice-
> versa.
FreeBSD's current SMP support scales poorly because the kernel is based around a "Giant" lock, which prevents multiple CPU's from entering most of the kernel at the same time. However, except on systems where the kernel itself is heavily loaded, and/or on systems with lots of CPU's (4 or more), it's not a major problem.
FreeBSD 5, due out at the end of the year, will have Giant mostly removed, as well as things like kernel preemption and advanced userland threading. It'll scale as well as if not better than Linux.
It'll also have a new startup system based on NetBSD's (have a look at it, it's pretty cool - http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/basesrc/etc
Depends, are kids just a subset of adults? :)
Some moons are fairly boring chunks of rock (like, say, The Moon), others tell a story of an extremely violent past (like, they've been blasted to bits and only just managed to stay as one entity, like Miranda).
Others have thick atmospheres containing weird-ass chemicals (like Titan), others have vulcanism driven by processes we barely understand (like Triton, or Io)
Some may have oceans, others are small chunks of rock we would barely notice if they weren't orbiting some other body (like Phobos).
The planets may be more interesting in some respects, but there are a lot more moons to look at :)
rsync is good for updating iso's; grab the 4.4 and when it's done and you really want a 4.5 iso, rsync your 4.4 one and just get the changes.
:) do when their system's up and running is cvsup /usr/src and /usr/ports and rebuild everything to the latest -STABLE. Checking out like that ensures you only get the diffs, too, so the latest iso release isn't that useful..
/usr/ports.
Not that there's much point; the first thing most people (well, me, anyway
While we're on the subject; don't even think about putting cvsup on a cron, at least not on one that runs a lot. cvsup is very I/O intensive, so hammering the servers constantly with no real reason to do so doesn't help anyone.
http://freshports.org/ is a nice way to keep track of when to bother updating
Funny retrograde orbit, dodgy orientation, nitrogen geysers, evidence that it was formed outside the solar system, but they include "Phobos Missions" but not Triton Missions?
Why go to yet another piece of inert rock when there are places like this? (ignoring for a second the small matter of cost, obviously).
> although I also use opera and have configured it
:)
> such that I only have the google search box on my
> toolbar.
I have it set up too, but I never use it; it's easier just to type "g foo bar wibble" in a nearby address bar.
You can make IE do this too, btw; HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\g, set the default value to http://www.google.com/search?q=%s. Repeat for other search engines.
(Yeah, editing the registry for something like this.. I know.. bleugh
> This highlights the problem that Email is not
.doc files.
:)
> really the best medium for threaded discussions
> involving more than two people, whereas news
> groups are designed with exactly this in mind.
Mailing lists are fine, aside from being more complex to join/leave. Mass-Ccing and group replies are also handy for small discussions between a few people, but you're right; for internal stuff, a private news setup's a good alternative. I have always been surprised at the lack of good Win32 news software to the tune of NewsRog though.
Mixing the two might be the best compromise; have a news server for those who want to use it, and have a mail news gateway with a list.
> As an aside, the next problem after that for
> that case is actually getting authors to make
> the corrections that are suggested, my only
> solution to which has been to force people to
> put documents in CVS instead, prefereably as
> HTML, rather than binary /
WebDAV/SubVersion might be a good way to go in future, especially since you can mount WebDAV shares directly in Explorer (I gather Macs have good WebDAV support too).
HTML, though, *cringe*, make them use a proper descriptive XML format that you can turn into anything with a quick XSL
Uhm, I hit the lameness filter on a simple HTML formatted message for the sake of an example list? WTF is the point of allowing HTML if you filter like that? Especially when it allows this mess of 's, pipes and hyphens. Sigh
Except it has no frame of reference; to find out what you're replying to you have to jump to the bottom and find the reply, read it, work out what specific part you're replying to and then read your response again.
Um, no you can't. Threads aren't usually like:
| Bla Wibble Wobble Wa\--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
\-- Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
They're:
| Bla Wibble Wobble Wa|--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
|\--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
|\-- Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
|--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
|\--| Foo (was: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa)
|\-- Re: Foo
\-- Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
How do ypu propose to archive all those with a single message, even assuming you can trust every user to use the same reply method and not ever even concider changing anything?
The standard method of quoting; i.e, quoting as little as needed, replying in-context etc, results in shorter more structured messages that are easier to read and contain a minimum of redundant data. It also scales much better; when you're 20 replies deep in a thread, where your messages are hitting 200k with every previous message still in there, proper quoting is still just leaving the relevent information in there.
If you need to archive threads, you should save the entire thread out to an mbox, not pick one untrusted message and hope the thread is structured enough to all be contained in it.