You know, I have alot of respect for someone who is willing to admit to liking pop stuff on a forum full of opinionated non-pop people like/. I agree - musical taste is something that is incredibly personal. If you like Britney, more power to you, just don't insist that I like it too. In return, I won't insist that you like the Butthole Surfers:-) As long as you write good code, it really doesn't matter what you listen too. Its all about what makes you happy, and what inspires you to greater heights of creativity.
Any number of things - its been many years of coding to music. The first that I really remember was Neil Young, "Everyone Knows This is Nowhere" - because at the time it was a great tape to just play over and over and over and over..... Recently, its been Joy Division (Substance, the "Ideal for living" tracks,) Husker Du, Spot 1019, Cake, Rube Waddell, the Mermen, Corduroy, the Meices, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Me First and the Gimme gimmies, The Fall (early stuff, Perverted By Language, Dragnet, Live at the Witch Trials, Grotesque) The Gang of Four, BIG BLACK (without whon NIN would not exist), the Butthole Surfers, the Sinister Six, Nirvana, the Spacemen 3, Beck, The Minutemen!!!!!... Oh shit, I could really go on for a long time here, but I have to stop.
>>"Electricity is both inexpensive and environmentally safe"
>Is it really more environmentally sound than burning rocket fuel? Isn't a lot of electricity still produced by burning coal? Seems to me we're far from having "environmentally safe" electricity.
I guess the argument is the same as electric cars vs gas cars. With electric cars, all the pollution of the energy generation is located in a single source where the pollution is more easily captured and treated. (This does not take into account the pollution caused by the batteries, of course) The gas powered car must carry its pollution control apparatus with it, and the pollutants are less easily caputured. In addition, there are many, many small mechanisms that must be kept in correct working order, rather than one large one.
In a rocket launch, much of the energy is spent overcoming air resistance in the lower parts of the athmosphere. If you could launch from high in the air, or use a ground-based propulsion system to get the launch vehicle started, you could make a smaller and cheaper vehicle.
>>Furthermore, as bad as coal may be, I tend to suspect that rocket fuel is worse on an environmental impact per joule basis. Unless you're dealing with reeeeealy high-sulfur coal...
> Nope, they use hydrogen and oxygen as fuel, the exhast is steam.
Well, SOME rocket motors use hydrogen and oxygen. The Space Shuttle's liquid fuel main engines do, but what do you think the solid fuel booster they strap on to the main tank uses? In fact, most rockets don't use hydrogen and Oxygen. The ones derived from ICBMs don't because they have to stay fueled for months at a time, and hydrogen and oxygen evaporate too quickly. All rockets have a fuel and an oxydizer - in solid rockets these are combined into a ready to ignite solid. These are frequently some pretty nasty things. In other liquid fueled rockets,things like nitric acid, flourine, nitrogen tetroxide and others can be oxidizers, with fuels like kerosene, hydrazine, alcohol hydyne, and others.
> "Metric system? My car gets 12 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way i likes it!" Jeez, thats pretty crappy mileage! You need a tuneup or something. 1 Rod == 5.5 yards 1 Hogshead = 52.5 gallons 12 rods/hogshead =.0000714 miles/gallon, thats 3.77 feet per gallon Unless of course you are using a pre-1824 hogshead, which held 63 gallons -:) Cheers Eric
>..with the exception that you don't need to go through a ton of menu options to compile the kernel (which compiles a damn sight faster than the Linux kernel).
What you are doing on SCO is re-linking the kernel, NOT recompiling it - the drivers and the kernel core are shipped as binary modules. I am not completely familiar with what all happens when you relink on SCO, but I believe there are some modules that are re-compiled. All these hold are the configuration information you can edit - basically a bunch of constants and data areas, no code to speak of. Its considerably less work than compiling the source for the entire kernel and all the drivers.
I think it might be handy to have a similar mechanism for tweaking settings on an already compiled set of Linux kernel object modules, but it would involve a considerable reorganization of the code and kernel build process, for a limited benefit.
>>The answer to the enduring mystery of why the hatch blew may have been in the inside-the-capsule camera that was running when >>Liberty Bell 7 splashed down. But the camera was found broken open and the film was ruined.
> That is awfully convenient...I wonder what would have caused the camera to break like that...
I rember seeing an interview with one of the astronauts (Apollo, I think) describing his splashdown. The last thing on his checklist was to remove a camera from a mount and secure it. He didn't do it, and on splashdown it came loose and hit him very hard on the head, nearly knocking him unconcious. He said he was lucky he was not killed by it. It could be something similar happened when Grissom hit, and the camera hit the button for the explosive bolts.
Cheers Eric
Re:I don't know if I like the new format
on
Return of The Onion
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· Score: 1
Open my browser bigger than 800 wide? Thats why I bought such an effing huge monitor, and run it at a high resolution. Its always open at least 950 wide, and I still have plenty of real estate for other things. With such a large screen and high resolution, I doubt my eye travel is too great compared to my friends who like 800x600 on their 17" monitors. Many webpages are designed so that they look like crap when they are opened bigger 800 wide. What makes 800 wide such a special number anyway? Just because it is a least common denominator does not mean it is 'correct' or 'best' for all pages.
That said, the type is too small under Linux Netscape, a common failing apparently caused by Microsoft, if I read some of the other comments correctly.
> such as when some lunatic over in Boston, USA, patented Linux, I believe, and then tried demainding money from Linus, Red Hat, etc.
It was not a patent, it was a copyright. But the guy did attempt to enforce his copyright on the term, by sending threatening letters to all of the major distributors (but not Linus).
>The flight recorder was retrieved and had recordings of them screaming after the explosion - pretty conclusive evidence they were alive I'd say
I have seen this transcript, and it is a fake. It is unfortunate that someone decided to create such a thing. As pointed out by the other respondent to this post, the flight recorders lost power when the explosion ocurred, so there was no way they could have recorded anything.
> So instead of starting religious wars...{I mean Linux and Windows are JUST OSes after all, there are many more serious things to war about)...let's concentrate on interoperability, and getting our favourite OSes up to snuff. It would be a great world if all OSes could share data and services seamlessly with each other, without much tinkering. Instead of trying to drill the pipedream that KDE is as polished as the Windows UI, start helping the KDE project, give them coherent and useful suggestions.
Well, I agree with you that we need people to work on a many of the open source projects and get them as polished and user-friendly as possible. But the other half of your idea, making the OSes inter-operate, is impossible as long as the current Microsoft is in their picture. Microsoft is not interested in the slightest in interoperating with other systems. They want to tie people into MS-only solutions, by making interoperating a headache. This applies at the minimum to any system that competes directly with MS products. They don't mind working with Mainframes or some other huge systems, but desktops, servers and similar systems they want MS-only. They are not interested in publishing their own protocols, and the open standards they use the have a bad habit of implementing in non-standard ways. they even re-implement existing open protocols with MS replacments, just to tie organizations in.(WINS vs DNS for example). My only hope to deal with this is to have the anti-trust case resolution force MS to open its APIs, file formats and other implementations to the whole world.
>Well, you're never going to send one forklift to the long-term facility. You're going to send a convoy of trucks.
> More than anything, my point is that "only a car is like a car". Can't we just evaluate computer technology using its own terms? Bringing forklifts into the discussion won't help much, I think.
I think his point is not about forklifts, it is about time, and the difference between two minutes and 4 years. But then, it does not take four years to get data off your drive, and as he pointed out, the cpu can keep working on something else while it waits those four years.
I once worked at one of the first computer stores in the Bay Area, what was originally the Byte Shop of Walnut Creek, but by the time I worked there had become Microsun computers. (Sort of an ironic name nowadays..) Anyway, I worked there in 1979, and the owner of the shop told me about the time that Jobs and Wozniak asked him for investment money for starting Apple. My boss was involved in the Homebrew Computing Club, and thats how he met the guys back then. He and his father went down to the famous garage to look at the machine, to see what their money (something like $10,000 to $30,000, I forget exact the amount) was going to buy. Jobs and Wozniak had the first Apple I prototype, but they could not get it to work at all - it crashed every time they tried to do anything at all with it. They spent the whole vening trying things, without any success. As a result, my boss and his father decided not to invest any money in it, because they thought it was never going to work. In 1979, my boss told me this story, kicking himself because even then he knew that he would have been a multi-millionaire. I can't imagine how much money he would have ended up with, but he certainly would have done quite well.
If I remember correctly, it was RMS himself whom invented the 'lignux' name when he released a version of Emacs that generated 'lignux' as the OS in the configuration. Or something like that, I was pretty new to Linux and GNU stuff at the time and didn't have a clear understanding of exactly what it is he made generate the 'lignux' identifier. But there was a huge shitstorm on the GNU and Linux newsgroups about it. In fact, a quick DejaNews search reveals it was the 19.31 release of Emacs, released in late May, 1996. Here is a URL for those of you interested in this piece of nomenclature history:
This was the first round of arguments concerning Linux, GNU and the proper nomenclature and it was started by a unilateral act by RMS. It is amazing reading these old threads years later how the arguments on either side basically have not changed one bit since the inception of the debate. My favorite from the time was 'since GNU software makes so much of the WWWeb work, why don't we call it the WWWegnub?" I didn't see that particular post in my searches, but I remember laughing hysterically when I first read it.
Yep - Plan 9 from Outer Space - Written and directed by the inimitible Ed Wood Jr., himself the subject of a very entertaining film a few years ago. Plan 9 was Bela Lugosi's last film, and he died before it was finished. So Ed Wood just got some other guy to put on the costume and continued on, even though there was NO resemblence between the two.
I sent one of the 100 emails Paul Thurrott received when he wrote the article on Bill Gates' comments about Linux. My point in the email was that reporting Mr. Gates statements as if they were facts was bad journalism. If they are reported as facts, they should be checked for correctness, just like any statement a reporter makes should be. I also said that by passing on statements uncritically, they are acting as a mouthpiece for Microsoft PR. I said I understood if WinInfo, as a Windows-based publication did not have knowledge of Linux, but if they didn't they should be more careful in the future. His reponse was basically "I was just repeating Gates' words, so I have no responsibility for what he said." He then went on to tell me that he did indeed have Linux experience, and knew what he was talking about. To me, it just proved my point - that he knew (or should have known) Gates' statements were incorrect, but let them pass unchallenged. If he didn't then he was just acting as a FUD machine for Microsoft.
As far as his comments on the Mindcraft test, he does have a point - just because Microsoft paid for the test does not necessarily mean that they could not perform a valid test, even if is did tarnish the credibility of the test. But Mr. Thurrott did not comment on the many valid points brought up in the/. comments on the Mindcraft test - that there were simple tunings that could have been done and weren't, and in fact Apache and Samba seemed to be de-tuned.
I do agree with him to some on one point - that we have to avoid rabid advocacy without having facts to support the advocacy.
There is one thing that really bugs me about the FSF and that is that stupid drawing of the gnu. It looks like it was done by a 7th grader. I'll probably get some hate mail for this, but I really think the FSF should get some skilled professional artists and web designers to volunteer some time.
> What every fails to see is that Linux has enjoyed it's popularity from the media only within the timespan of the Microsoft antitrust trials. Could this be coincidence?
Actually, I think it is. About 18 months ago, I was at a party with a bunch of my tech-type friends, telling them that Linux was gaining the critical mass needed to really compete on the OS arena. In that time span, features have been added, and packages have matured that have given Linux capabilities it didn't have before. Those capabilities make it much more usable as both a network server and a user desktop. What is even better is that the more usable Linux is, the more people want to use it, and mor importantly the more people contribute system stuff or applications. The train goes down the track that much faster. Hype does not create applications, but enough applications DO create hype.
> have seen two people attempt to compile simple, have seen two people attempt to compile simple, introductory C++ programs with VC++ and have it fail because there was insufficient space on the floppy they were using for compilation. *NOT* because of the final executable size, but because of the several 200-500k intermediate files left behind by the compiler. I cannot say what these files were (they didn't end in ".o") or what they did.
HA! I have used VC++ some, and I have some idea what these are. The first culprit is the.pch - pre-compiled headers. These can easily grow over 1Mb, and all it is is pre-processed headers. I once had a directory tree with about 15 projects, some with several executables, and.pch files were taking about 400Mb, almost all of it exact duplicates. Turning off.pch's in all the projects was a major pain in the arse, it took me about 2 days just locate all the files that had pch generation turned on.
The next candidate is the.ilk, itermediate link - a device to speed up the linker that tends to once again eat tons of disk space with if you have lots of projects.
Next in line are the.bsc - browse source, which speeds up source browsing in projects. I don't find it that useful, and usually turn it off.
There are about 10 other extensions,.ncb,.pdb, etc etc, each of which was designed to speed up some part or other of the IDE. All of them are turned on by default, and the just chew up massive amounts of disk. I have noticed very little preformance decrease by eliminating many of them, if you have enough memory and CPU. Maybe if I had a pentium 66, 8Mb RAM and a very slow disk they would speed things up, but with 128MB RAM , a fast CPU (PPro 200 or better) and a decent hard drive, the performance benefits of most ofthese monsters are pretty marginal.
It would be nice if there was a common panel somewhere in the IDE that would allow me to control whole classes of files -.ilk,.pch or.bsc, for the whole environment, rather than having to deal with them on a by project or by file basis. It would also be nice if there was an option to delete all of theses files at once, rather than having to delete them manually if I decide to archive a whole projects directory. It is convienient for me to archive whole project trees at once, and having to archive all the only marginally useful, or automatically regenerated IDE speedup files is a pain in the ass.
Ohhhh, I remember them, yes indeed!!!! I think it was Mainway Toys, with Dan Ackroyd as Mr. Mainway. Toys like "Bag O'Glass" a large bag of broken glass. And a "spaceman" costume taht was just a plastic bag. hahahahahahahahaha
> "The GNU system, whether you call it GNU or whether you think it's Linux, right now offers you an alternative with freedom."
and: > "People should take a look at www.gnu.org. and they'll find out the reasons why the so called Linux operating system exists. It's not just a matter of engineers having fun doing engineering, it's a political force that actually has an idealistic cause, that has actually had practical results. "
Well, on the first quote - from the way he phrases it, Stallman is not even willing to admit that the other side of the argument even exists, much less that they have a point! I can call it GNU, or I can think (erroneously, it is obvious from context) that it is Linux. It is exactly that attitude that really bugs me - that I am too dim to really figure out the truth according to RMS. I am quite willing to admit that GNU utilities run on my Linux system, that without GNU utilities it would have been much more difficult to develop the Linux kernel, and that the availability of the GNU utilities made a complete OS package happen that much sooner. But to insist that I adopt a nomeclature dictated by RMS is really asking much more than is appropriate. If he had wanted the right to name the whole system, he should have put it in the license. I think that if the GNU utilities had NOT existed, there would have been something developed to replace it. The development model that Linus popularized (maybe even invented - I don't know) would have helped build the critical mass to make it work. It would have put the development effort back several years, but I believe that it would have happened.
On the second quote - its not the 'so-called linux' bit that bothers me, its the whole thrust of the quote. Once again, it assumes that he knows the motivations of the developers better than they do themselves. My experience with the Linux community in the last four or so years is that people have contributed their time, code and other resources is not because of some particular political goals. It is because they were engineers who enjoyed doing engineering. I installed Linux because it was FUN. I worked to get a device driver for my SCSI card because it was FUN, and when I got the driver going I could have MORE FUN. I have never had ANY political purposes or motives. If what I did had political side effects, well so be it - I don't disagree with those effects. But I knew why I was doing it when I did it. Maybe in RMS's mind we all are deluded, or ignorant, or whatever, and don't understand what our motives really are, or ought to be. I find that attitude incredibly condescending and insulting to those whose motives are different than his.
In a way, I think this second quote can show the two camps in the disagreement clearly - The GNU camp, that insists that it is more than just an OS, more than just a pile of programs, it is an entire political agenda you must buy into. On the other side, are the 'engineering for engineering's sake: or the "I like it cause it does what I want" or whatever camp, who contribute just as much or more, but don't feel the need to toe RMS's line of 'this is politics, not just engineering'. They just want to build an OS, because they like the control they get from it.
Okay, I did a little research on this. Gary Kildall (note corrected spelling) died on July 11, 1994 of head injuries sustained in a fight in a bar in Monterrey, California. No one was ever prosecuted in the case. The most through article I could find in a brief search suggested that he rode his motorcycle to a biker bar, got in a fight over how he was dressed, and suffered a fatal head injury. The article suggested that he was wearing Harley Davidson patches, and the patrons of the bar took exeception to a 'yuppie' dressing as a biker.
Now maybe Microsoft was able to lure Gary Kildall to a biker bar where somebody picked a fight with him and killed him, but somehow I doubt it. It seems to me to be more of a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time wearing the wrong clothes.
> I think we should take Linus, Alan, and Richard and move them to a secure location. Look what happened to Gary Killdal.
Huh? Gary Killdal died of cancer, if my memory serves me well. And he died well after Gates and Microso~1 had pretty much wiped out DR-DOS and the other Digital Research products. Besides, Linus works for TransMeta - if that isn't a secure location, what is:-)
Cheers Eric
Kernel-of-the-week Club
on
Linux 2.2.4
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· Score: 1
> Aren't you people tired of recompiling a new kernel every week?
I don't. And I don't imagine that everyone else does. I like to stay reasonably up to date, but I'm running 2.2.1 on my home system. Just because a new kernel is released doesn't mean that everyone *MUST* install it. I probably will install 2.2.4 at some point soon, when I'm done tweaking some other stuff on my system. But I'm in no hurry, 2.2.1 is working just great for me.
> Let me put it to you this way: would you accept a serious slowdown on your 1-4 processor home machine just > so you could brag that linux scales well on 64-processor machines (that very, very few people own)?
It seems to me that you could select the 'CPU Count' your kernel supports as a kernel compile option. I'm not much of a kernel hacker, and I can see how it could make a mess of some code, but it could be done. I can just see the options: Uniprocessor, 1-4 CPUs, 1-16 CPUs, or 1-64 CPUs. The only performance drawback would be when a kernel from a system with lots of CPUs is used on a system with only one or two. Oh, and when you set up a system you would need to put the right kernel on it to take proper advantage of the number of CPUs you have.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I have alot of respect for someone who is willing to admit to liking pop stuff on a forum full of opinionated non-pop people like /. I agree - musical taste is something that is incredibly personal. If you like Britney, more power to you, just don't insist that I like it too. In return, I won't insist that you like the Butthole Surfers :-)
As long as you write good code, it really doesn't matter what you listen too. Its all about what makes you happy, and what inspires you to greater heights of creativity.
Cheers
Eric Geyer
corduroy@sfo.com
Any number of things - its been many years of coding to music. The first that I really remember was Neil Young, "Everyone Knows This is Nowhere" - because at the time it was a great tape to just play over and over and over and over.....
Recently, its been Joy Division (Substance, the "Ideal for living" tracks,) Husker Du, Spot 1019, Cake, Rube Waddell, the Mermen, Corduroy, the Meices, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Me First and the Gimme gimmies, The Fall (early stuff, Perverted By Language, Dragnet, Live at the Witch Trials, Grotesque) The Gang of Four, BIG BLACK (without whon NIN would not exist), the Butthole Surfers, the Sinister Six, Nirvana, the Spacemen 3, Beck, The Minutemen!!!!!... Oh shit, I could really go on for a long time here, but I have to stop.
Cheers
Eric
>>"Electricity is both inexpensive and environmentally safe"
>Is it really more environmentally sound than burning rocket fuel? Isn't a lot of electricity still produced by burning coal? Seems to me we're far from having "environmentally safe" electricity.
I guess the argument is the same as electric cars vs gas cars. With electric cars, all the pollution of the energy generation is located in a single source where the pollution is more easily captured and treated. (This does not take into account the pollution caused by the batteries, of course) The gas powered car must carry its pollution control apparatus with it, and the pollutants are less easily caputured. In addition, there are many, many small mechanisms that must be kept in correct working order, rather than one large one.
In a rocket launch, much of the energy is spent overcoming air resistance in the lower parts of the athmosphere. If you could launch from high in the air, or use a ground-based propulsion system to get the launch vehicle started, you could make a smaller and cheaper vehicle.
Cheers
Eric
>>Furthermore, as bad as coal may be, I tend to suspect that rocket fuel is worse on an environmental impact per joule basis. Unless you're dealing with reeeeealy high-sulfur coal...
> Nope, they use hydrogen and oxygen as fuel, the exhast is steam.
Well, SOME rocket motors use hydrogen and oxygen. The Space Shuttle's liquid fuel main engines do, but what do you think the solid fuel booster they strap on to the main tank uses? In fact, most rockets don't use hydrogen and Oxygen. The ones derived from ICBMs don't because they have to stay fueled for months at a time, and hydrogen and oxygen evaporate too quickly. All rockets have a fuel and an oxydizer - in solid rockets these are combined into a ready to ignite solid. These are frequently some pretty nasty things. In other liquid fueled rockets,things like nitric acid, flourine, nitrogen tetroxide and others can be oxidizers, with fuels like kerosene, hydrazine, alcohol hydyne, and others.
Cheers
Eric Geyer
> "Metric system? My car gets 12 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way i likes it!" Jeez, thats pretty crappy mileage! You need a tuneup or something. 1 Rod == 5.5 yards 1 Hogshead = 52.5 gallons 12 rods/hogshead = .0000714 miles/gallon, thats 3.77 feet per gallon Unless of course you are using a pre-1824 hogshead, which held 63 gallons -:) Cheers Eric
> ..with the exception that you don't need to go through a ton of menu options to compile the kernel (which compiles a damn sight faster than the Linux kernel).
What you are doing on SCO is re-linking the kernel, NOT recompiling it - the drivers and the kernel core are shipped as binary modules. I am not completely familiar with what all happens when you relink on SCO, but I believe there are some modules that are re-compiled. All these hold are the configuration information you can edit - basically a bunch of constants and data areas, no code to speak of. Its considerably less work than compiling the source for the entire kernel and all the drivers.
I think it might be handy to have a similar mechanism for tweaking settings on an already compiled set of Linux kernel object modules, but it would involve a considerable reorganization of the code and kernel build process, for a limited benefit.
Cheers
Eric
>>The answer to the enduring mystery of why the hatch blew may have been in the inside-the-capsule camera that was running when
>>Liberty Bell 7 splashed down. But the camera was found broken open and the film was ruined.
> That is awfully convenient...I wonder what would have caused the camera to break like that...
I rember seeing an interview with one of the astronauts (Apollo, I think) describing his splashdown. The last thing on his checklist was to remove a camera from a mount and secure it. He didn't do it, and on splashdown it came loose and hit him very hard on the head, nearly knocking him unconcious. He said he was lucky he was not killed by it. It could be something similar happened when Grissom hit, and the camera hit the button for the explosive bolts.
Cheers
Eric
Open my browser bigger than 800 wide? Thats why I bought such an effing huge monitor, and run it at a high resolution. Its always open at least 950 wide, and I still have plenty of real estate for other things. With such a large screen and high resolution, I doubt my eye travel is too great compared to my friends who like 800x600 on their 17" monitors. Many webpages are designed so that they look like crap when they are opened bigger 800 wide. What makes 800 wide such a special number anyway? Just because it is a least common denominator does not mean it is 'correct' or 'best' for all pages.
That said, the type is too small under Linux Netscape, a common failing apparently caused by Microsoft, if I read some of the other comments correctly.
Cheers
Eric
> such as when some lunatic over in Boston, USA, patented Linux, I believe, and then tried demainding money from Linus, Red Hat, etc.
It was not a patent, it was a copyright. But the guy did attempt to enforce his copyright on the term, by sending threatening letters to all of the major distributors (but not Linus).
Cheers
Eric Geyer
>The flight recorder was retrieved and had recordings of them screaming after the explosion - pretty conclusive evidence they were alive I'd say
I have seen this transcript, and it is a fake. It is unfortunate that someone decided to create such a thing. As pointed out by the other respondent to this post, the flight recorders lost power when the explosion ocurred, so there was no way they could have recorded anything.
MinusOne
> So instead of starting religious wars...{I mean Linux and Windows are JUST OSes after all, there are many more serious things to war about)...let's concentrate on interoperability, and getting our favourite OSes up to snuff. It would be a great world if all OSes could share data and services seamlessly with each other, without much tinkering. Instead of trying to drill the pipedream that KDE is as polished as the Windows UI, start helping the KDE project, give them coherent and useful suggestions.
Well, I agree with you that we need people to work on a many of the open source projects and get them as polished and user-friendly as possible. But the other half of your idea, making the OSes inter-operate, is impossible as long as the current Microsoft is in their picture. Microsoft is not interested in the slightest in interoperating with other systems. They want to tie people into MS-only solutions, by making interoperating a headache. This applies at the minimum to any system that competes directly with MS products. They don't mind working with Mainframes or some other huge systems, but desktops, servers and similar systems they want MS-only. They are not interested in publishing their own protocols, and the open standards they use the have a bad habit of implementing in non-standard ways. they even re-implement existing open protocols with MS replacments, just to tie organizations in.(WINS vs DNS for example). My only hope to deal with this is to have the anti-trust case resolution force MS to open its APIs, file formats and other implementations to the whole world.
>Well, you're never going to send one forklift to the long-term facility. You're going to send a convoy of trucks.
> More than anything, my point is that "only a car is like a car". Can't we just evaluate computer technology using its own terms? Bringing forklifts into the discussion won't help much, I think.
I think his point is not about forklifts, it is about time, and the difference between two minutes and 4 years.
But then, it does not take four years to get data off your drive, and as he pointed out, the cpu can keep working on something else while it waits those four years.
Cheers
Eric Geyer
I once worked at one of the first computer stores in the Bay Area, what was originally the Byte Shop of Walnut Creek, but by the time I worked there had become Microsun computers. (Sort of an ironic name nowadays..) Anyway, I worked there in 1979, and the owner of the shop told me about the time that Jobs and Wozniak asked him for investment money for starting Apple. My boss was involved in the Homebrew Computing Club, and thats how he met the guys back then. He and his father went down to the famous garage to look at the machine, to see what their money (something like $10,000 to $30,000, I forget exact the amount) was going to buy. Jobs and Wozniak had the first Apple I prototype, but they could not get it to work at all - it crashed every time they tried to do anything at all with it. They spent the whole vening trying things, without any success. As a result, my boss and his father decided not to invest any money in it, because they thought it was never going to work. In 1979, my boss told me this story, kicking himself because even then he knew that he would have been a multi-millionaire. I can't imagine how much money he would have ended up with, but he certainly would have done quite well.
If I remember correctly, it was RMS himself whom invented the 'lignux' name when he released a version of Emacs that generated 'lignux' as the OS in the configuration. Or something like that, I was pretty new to Linux and GNU stuff at the time and didn't have a clear understanding of exactly what it is he made generate the 'lignux' identifier. But there was a huge shitstorm on the GNU and Linux newsgroups about it. In fact, a quick DejaNews search reveals it was the 19.31 release of Emacs, released in late May, 1996. Here is a URL for those of you interested in this piece of nomenclature history:
= 157611483
http://www.dejanews.com/[ST_rn=qs]/getdoc.xp?AN
This was the first round of arguments concerning Linux, GNU and the proper nomenclature and it was started by a unilateral act by RMS. It is amazing reading these old threads years later how the arguments on either side basically have not changed one bit since the inception of the debate.
My favorite from the time was 'since GNU software makes so much of the WWWeb work, why don't we call it the WWWegnub?" I didn't see that particular post in my searches, but I remember laughing hysterically when I first read it.
Cheers
Eric Geyer
corduroy@sfo.com
Yep - Plan 9 from Outer Space - Written and directed by the inimitible Ed Wood Jr., himself the subject of a very entertaining film a few years ago. Plan 9 was Bela Lugosi's last film, and he died before it was finished. So Ed Wood just got some other guy to put on the costume and continued on, even though there was NO resemblence between the two.
Cheers
Eric
I sent one of the 100 emails Paul Thurrott received when he wrote the article on Bill Gates' comments about Linux. My point in the email was that reporting Mr. Gates statements as if they were facts was bad journalism. If they are reported as facts, they should be checked for correctness, just like any statement a reporter makes should be. I also said that by passing on statements uncritically, they are acting as a mouthpiece for Microsoft PR. I said I understood if WinInfo, as a Windows-based publication did not have knowledge of Linux, but if they didn't they should be more careful in the future. His reponse was basically "I was just repeating Gates' words, so I have no responsibility for what he said." He then went on to tell me that he did indeed have Linux experience, and knew what he was talking about. To me, it just proved my point - that he knew (or should have known) Gates' statements were incorrect, but let them pass unchallenged. If he didn't then he was just acting as a FUD machine for Microsoft.
/. comments on the Mindcraft test - that there were simple tunings that could have been done and weren't, and in fact Apache and Samba seemed to be de-tuned.
As far as his comments on the Mindcraft test, he does have a point - just because Microsoft paid for the test does not necessarily mean that they could not perform a valid test, even if is did tarnish the credibility of the test. But Mr. Thurrott did not comment on the many valid points brought up in the
I do agree with him to some on one point - that we have to avoid rabid advocacy without having facts to support the advocacy.
There is one thing that really bugs me about the FSF and that is that stupid drawing of the gnu. It looks like it was done by a 7th grader. I'll probably get some hate mail for this, but I really think the FSF should get some skilled professional artists and web designers to volunteer some time.
Cheers
Eric
> What every fails to see is that Linux has enjoyed it's popularity from the media only within the timespan of the Microsoft antitrust trials. Could this be coincidence?
Actually, I think it is. About 18 months ago, I was at a party with a bunch of my tech-type friends, telling them that Linux was gaining the critical mass needed to really compete on the OS arena. In that time span, features have been added, and packages have matured that have given Linux capabilities it didn't have before. Those capabilities make it much more usable as both a network server and a user desktop. What is even better is that the more usable Linux is, the more people want to use it, and mor importantly the more people contribute system stuff or applications. The train goes down the track that much faster. Hype does not create applications, but enough applications DO create hype.
Eric Geyer
> have seen two people attempt to compile simple, have seen two people attempt to compile simple, introductory C++ programs with VC++ and have it fail because there was insufficient space on the floppy they were using for compilation. *NOT* because of the final executable size, but because of the several 200-500k intermediate files left behind by the compiler. I cannot say what these files were (they didn't end in ".o") or what they did.
.pch - pre-compiled headers. These can easily grow over 1Mb, and all it is is pre-processed headers. I once had a directory tree with about 15 projects, some with several executables, and .pch files were taking about 400Mb, almost all of it exact duplicates. Turning off .pch's in all the projects was a major pain in the arse, it took me about 2 days just locate all the files that had pch generation turned on.
.ilk, itermediate link - a device to speed up the linker that tends to once again eat tons of disk space with if you have lots of projects.
.bsc - browse source, which speeds up source browsing in projects. I don't find it that useful, and usually turn it off.
.ncb, .pdb, etc etc, each of which was designed to speed up some part or other of the IDE. All of them are turned on by default, and the just chew up massive amounts of disk. I have noticed very little preformance decrease by eliminating many of them, if you have enough memory and CPU. Maybe if I had a pentium 66, 8Mb RAM and a very slow disk they would speed things up, but with 128MB RAM , a fast CPU (PPro 200 or better) and a decent hard drive, the performance benefits of most ofthese monsters are pretty marginal.
.ilk, .pch or .bsc, for the whole environment, rather than having to deal with them on a by project or by file basis. It would also be nice if there was an option to delete all of theses files at once, rather than having to delete them manually if I decide to archive a whole projects directory. It is convienient for me to archive whole project trees at once, and having to archive all the only marginally useful, or automatically regenerated IDE speedup files is a pain in the ass.
HA! I have used VC++ some, and I have some idea what these are. The first culprit is the
The next candidate is the
Next in line are the
There are about 10 other extensions,
It would be nice if there was a common panel somewhere in the IDE that would allow me to control whole classes of files -
Ohhhh, I remember them, yes indeed!!!! I think it was Mainway Toys, with Dan Ackroyd as Mr. Mainway. Toys like "Bag O'Glass" a large bag of broken glass. And a "spaceman" costume taht was just a plastic bag. hahahahahahahahaha
Eric
Two quotes:
> "The GNU system, whether you call it GNU or whether you think it's Linux, right now offers you an alternative with freedom."
and:
> "People should take a look at www.gnu.org. and they'll find out the reasons why the so called Linux operating system exists. It's not just a matter of engineers having fun doing engineering, it's a political force that actually has an idealistic cause, that has actually had practical results. "
Well, on the first quote - from the way he phrases it, Stallman is not even willing to admit that the other side of the argument even exists, much less that they have a point! I can call it GNU, or I can think (erroneously, it is obvious from context) that it is Linux. It is exactly that attitude that really bugs me - that I am too dim to really figure out the truth according to RMS. I am quite willing to admit that GNU utilities run on my Linux system, that without GNU utilities it would have been much more difficult to develop the Linux kernel, and that the availability of the GNU utilities made a complete OS package happen that much sooner. But to insist that I adopt a nomeclature dictated by RMS is really asking much more than is appropriate. If he had wanted the right to name the whole system, he should have put it in the license. I think that if the GNU utilities had NOT existed, there would have been something developed to replace it. The development model that Linus popularized (maybe even invented - I don't know) would have helped build the critical mass to make it work. It would have put the development effort back several years, but I believe that it would have happened.
On the second quote - its not the 'so-called linux' bit that bothers me, its the whole thrust of the quote. Once again, it assumes that he knows the motivations of the developers better than they do themselves. My experience with the Linux community in the last four or so years is that people have contributed their time, code and other resources is not because of some particular political goals. It is because they were engineers who enjoyed doing engineering. I installed Linux because it was FUN. I worked to get a device driver for my SCSI card because it was FUN, and when I got the driver going I could have MORE FUN. I have never had ANY political purposes or motives. If what I did had political side effects, well so be it - I don't disagree with those effects. But I knew why I was doing it when I did it. Maybe in RMS's mind we all are deluded, or ignorant, or whatever, and don't understand what our motives really are, or ought to be. I find that attitude incredibly condescending and insulting to those whose motives are different than his.
In a way, I think this second quote can show the two camps in the disagreement clearly - The GNU camp, that insists that it is more than just an OS, more than just a pile of programs, it is an entire political agenda you must buy into. On the other side, are the 'engineering for engineering's sake: or the "I like it cause it does what I want" or whatever camp, who contribute just as much or more, but don't feel the need to toe RMS's line of 'this is politics, not just engineering'. They just want to build an OS, because they like the control they get from it.
Okay, I did a little research on this. Gary Kildall (note corrected spelling) died on July 11, 1994 of head injuries sustained in a fight in a bar in Monterrey, California. No one was ever prosecuted in the case. The most through article I could find in a brief search suggested that he rode his motorcycle to a biker bar, got in a fight over how he was dressed, and suffered a fatal head injury. The article suggested that he was wearing Harley Davidson patches, and the patrons of the bar took exeception to a 'yuppie' dressing as a biker.
Now maybe Microsoft was able to lure Gary Kildall to a biker bar where somebody picked a fight with him and killed him, but somehow I doubt it. It seems to me to be more of a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time wearing the wrong clothes.
Cheers
Eric
> I think we should take Linus, Alan, and Richard and move them to a secure location. Look what happened to Gary Killdal.
:-)
Huh? Gary Killdal died of cancer, if my memory serves me well. And he died well after Gates and Microso~1 had pretty much wiped out DR-DOS and the other Digital Research products. Besides, Linus works for TransMeta - if that isn't a secure location, what is
Cheers
Eric
> Aren't you people tired of recompiling a new kernel every week?
I don't. And I don't imagine that everyone else does. I like to stay reasonably up to date, but I'm running 2.2.1 on my home system. Just because a new kernel is released doesn't mean that everyone *MUST* install it. I probably will install 2.2.4 at some point soon, when I'm done tweaking some other stuff on my system. But I'm in no hurry, 2.2.1 is working just great for me.
Eric
> Let me put it to you this way: would you accept a serious slowdown on your 1-4 processor home machine just
> so you could brag that linux scales well on 64-processor machines (that very, very few people own)?
It seems to me that you could select the 'CPU Count' your kernel supports as a kernel compile option. I'm not much of a kernel hacker, and I can see how it could make a mess of some code, but it could be done. I can just see the options: Uniprocessor, 1-4 CPUs, 1-16 CPUs, or 1-64 CPUs. The only performance drawback would be when a kernel from a system with lots of CPUs is used on a system with only one or two. Oh, and when you set up a system you would need to put the right kernel on it to take proper advantage of the number of CPUs you have.
Eric