Mmmm, I was thinking more along the lines of the "ping of death" and flood ping'ing the Windows lusers back in the day, as sort of a way to "promote" Linux (but mainly just because we could).
Today it's all botnets and stuff, but not exactly for any sort of evangelical reasons. I was sort of expecting some sort of OS boot-sector virus by now that would hijack a Windows box or something and install Linux or something and join it to a cloud and congratulate the user. But I suppose the passive botnets are more effective, where the poor user doesn't even notice they've been subverted.
They make good games. But their handling of the bnetd was pretty lame.
We used bnetd for our group games for a good while, and even hacked it up to show ladder stats, all kinds of achievements (which player had the highest mining, or DPS, or kills, etc.), and so forth back before that sort of thing became available, popular, or even expected. Neat stuff.
To this day I think one of my friends still donates an equal amount to the EFF any time he buys a Blizzard game.
Yep, the last two major aerospace companies I worked for recently still required IE6 for all of their mandatory training and tracking (required to comply with government regulations), timecard & expense reports (required for accounting regulations), etc. That's pretty firmly entrenched if you ask me.
Emulation is the only easy way I see, at least until the training modules and accounting systems finally go out of date... but as those are core requirements, it may take almost a decade at least...
Could probably use blktrace to do the profiling by logging inode access patterns and identifing inodes that are frequently accessed together. Then those inodes could be packed / defragged next to each other on disk.
I kind of like the idea of rivals being friendly with each other. Better than the alternative... extremism. Not really sure what an OS extremist would do, though.
Anyway, I'm sure MS Office is still pretty big on Mac OS. And iTunes on Windows probably pulls in a decent amount of money for Apple.
So there are plenty of benefits to being able to play well with others.
Step 1: Oops, something bad happened. Pretend it's not a big deal for as long as possible. Step 2: Well, let's try to salvage the well, we have to protect our investment. Cover it up with chemical dispersants in the mean time Step 3: Crap, we can't siphon anything off of our caps Step 4: OK, the PR is getting worse now that it hit land, and the Feds are threatening to "take over" and invoke some long-term impact, fine let's plug it:/
Unfortunately, any rational business would do the same... they'd probably be in just as much deep water with their investors if they killed their wellhead right away to limit the political / PR / (and maybe a distant third) environmental damage.
Hopefully anything they could salvage from the well might help with the cleanup, sort of like getting taken to the hospital by the car that hit you.
It's our responsibility now to make them responsible for as much of the cleanup costs as possible, but I reckon they'll be fighting to keep the money much more than the news media will keep it in the public eye.
For my part, I haven't been to an Exxon in over 10 years. And I've sort of been avoiding BPs since their merger, but I could avoid them much more now.
/ OK, I made a bad pun and a bad car analogy. Thread over.
I like the quote from yesterday's/. thread... it went something like:
We just had extremely unlucky timing with Louisiana disaster response. If Obama had been president during Katrina, he would have done everything possible to save those people. If Bush had been president during the Deep Horizon spill, he would have done everything possible to save that oil.
Nearest equivalent for X / Linux that I've used is xte, which uses the XTest extension to send keyboard and mouse events to the desktop. xte is usually included with the "xautomation" package for various distributions.
I've also seen people use xvkbd -text to automate keystrokes (often in concert with xbindkeys), but I've found xte works a bit better in many cases, for example, when activating CTRL/ALT/Shift/etc. modifiers.
To complete the package, xprop can also give you some useful window state information and control so you can find and manipulate application windows.
Well, you can already sort of assign money to your (nonprofit/charitable) pet projects... You can steer some money away from the feds by making charitable contributions -- but only if you can itemize deductions (which isn't terribly easy unless you have a mortgage or some other means of getting you above the standard deduction). The money you contribute isn't taxed, which means if you donate $100 you might keep $20 out of the hands of the feds to spend on things you have no control over (other than by ticking a box on a ballot every couple years)
And really, the whole thing is largely symbolic. Congress will still set individual budgets for things and just add more or less depending on how much receives publicly-allocated funding. The point is to actually collect data from people on what they think is actually important.
But I understand how collecting actual data from people diminishes Congress's ability to spin and weave and politick and wield control.
I think technology ought to enable a more direct digital democracy, rather than the representative democracy we now have. And we could start with relatively small steps that wouldn't be terribly disruptive or even revolutionary.
OK, so this is going to be very corny in a karate kid / Bruce Lee "Enter the Dragon" sort of way, but my nightmares of running away from aggressors while my legs turned to molasses got much better after a few years of studying martial arts. They'd still catch up with me, but then I'd have some things to give to them in return and I'd wake up feeling good rather than miserable.
I probably don't play the right video games, but the dreams induced by L4D are mostly tedious rather than scary. Except when I spawn as the infected. Then I'm absolutely terrified.
Ha, I didn't have to wait long... Linux Mint 9 (based on Ubuntu 10.04) came out of beta last week. And I've still been installing new machines with version 8 since then:-P
I'll wait until Linux Mint makes a release based on ubuntu:
I've been recommending it to friends as a nicer, friendlier, greener (yes, it's also Irish) Ubuntu that is not shy about providing support for proprietary video drivers and Adobe flash out of the box.
mint green > aubergine
I still run Debian testing on my primary box, though.
I'd love to be able to control where my tax dollars go... so I'd be able to say, "30% to education, 10% to research, 20% to paying off national debt, 0% to the DoD". Congress can still fight over what's left.
Hell, they could even phase it in slowly... maybe let people earmark even just the first $100 or $1000 of their taxes, so everyone gets a nearly equal say, and it would serve as a great data collection tool as to the political priorities of most people... better than anything else I can think of.
Yes! The DC/Metro area is great! All the seasons! Free museums! Lots of jobs (in administrative overhead)! You really want to move here! You could live in my condo by a Metro station!
I for one, am in favor of Pacific-Northwest fearmongering, no one really wants to live there!
/ Been trying to relocate to the Pacific Northwest for quite a few years now // Have a feeling a lot of this fearmongering is encouraged by residents who don't want others to move in and bespoil it:-P /// Says something about the praise we have for the DC/Metro area... hmmm....
But on the "meh" side, I simply just pay a small premium for my ISP's alternative "Business" package, which unblocks ports 25 and 80 so I can run my own mail and web server, and maybe does a few other things in a more net neutral manner.
On the community wifi mesh thing, still hoping OLSRD makes it big or something... But I do what I can to just leave an open AP.
There's no technical way to guarantee privacy and anonymity... quite the opposite: technology should be used to increase transparency.
Privacy is to be respected. If someone doesn't respect your privacy, then by all means take socio-political-legal action. But you sort of have to implicitly trust your infrastructure provider - be it your ISP, your phone company, your email provider, etc. to not abuse your trust. And by all means don't use that infrastructure to transmit anything you don't trust them with.
The good thing about the increased transparency the technology has provided us is that now it's easier to find out if our trust has been abused.
Seems like you could do better if you simply could reorder the files on your traditional hard disk so that you'd get 100% readahead buffer hits. If properly optimized this way, your traditional hard disk should always be transferring near the max block read rate of ~100MB/s
I'm guessing this is what some of the boot profilers / optimizers are doing.
The readahead utility used by Redhat / Fedora (and also available for Debian) gives you some benefit loading lots of small files from the disk by reordering reads by inode number to minimize head seeks. The next major benefit would be if it could actually reorganize all those files into a single tarfile, and maybe even compress it a bit, so it can do a single large block read to get all that content off of disk and into RAM cache.
Not at all like fragmentation in the Apple world. I had an old G3 iBook with OS X 10.3 , and it wouldn't run any modern software (stuck at Firefox 2.x). It's like it was simply abandoned because the OS was a couple of releases old. It would have been even worse if Apple hadn't given us a free upgrade from 10.2 after servicing a recall.
Not paying for the updates to 10.4 / 10.5... OTOH, it sold pretty quickly at the yard sale, though, compared to the much beefier Dell laptops that had larger full color LCDs and could run anything.
This is an *apple* developer we're talking about here. You must only help them find ways of *reducing* testing complexity. For example, so that you only have to test with one mouse button.
Heck, I'd pay them to retrieve the ~20GB worth of personal pics I've posted to the web on my home server if my RAID array suddenly went south, along with the partial backups I've transferred to various friends and relatives.
It seems logical to have a black (or at least grey) market for this kind of thing.
In the end, we're all content aggregators in some form or another... as long as they're not destroying the original works (say, by failing with attribution), then I say archive away.
And as far as privacy and surveillance goes, there are already laws that supposedly prevent you from getting incriminated by recordings (like if you were recorded without permission), so have legal/political solutions to legal/political problems and let the technology roam free.
PTS is also available as a Linux LiveCD, so you can do a rough cut of preliminary testing without even having to spend an hour installing/updating Windows to the same image!
Might be possible to set up similar for Windows using BartPE, but the driver situation usually sucks.
Very straightforward for Windows dorks to install and use, and provides lots of simple graphs and an easy engine to make comparisons. I mostly used the demo version, but the commercial version didn't seem expensive.
Again, be sure to test in as close to the final deployed configuration as possible. I've seen pretty big differences in e.g. x86_64 vs. 32-bit Windows performance, and even with different drivers installed or different BIOS settings.
Yeah, sounds like someone is just trying to play their "Share the Wealth" card.
Incidentally, I just noticed that some time ago the game of Life(TM) had something of a makeover, and no longer has those little legal "Share the Wealth" and "Exemption" cards. Which I applaud for not teaching the next generation to be a bunch of litigious little bastards.
They've also done some interesting things with employment, salary, and education that helps randomize stuff up a bit, so whomever lands on the Doctor/Lawyer square early on isn't guaranteed to dominate the game.
Slashdot Mirror
From the inadvertently bad logo competition some time ago.
OGC
(Turn your head sideways to the left if you don't see the little wanker)
Mmmm, I was thinking more along the lines of the "ping of death" and flood ping'ing the Windows lusers back in the day, as sort of a way to "promote" Linux (but mainly just because we could).
Today it's all botnets and stuff, but not exactly for any sort of evangelical reasons. I was sort of expecting some sort of OS boot-sector virus by now that would hijack a Windows box or something and install Linux or something and join it to a cloud and congratulate the user. But I suppose the passive botnets are more effective, where the poor user doesn't even notice they've been subverted.
They make good games. But their handling of the bnetd was pretty lame.
We used bnetd for our group games for a good while, and even hacked it up to show ladder stats, all kinds of achievements (which player had the highest mining, or DPS, or kills, etc.), and so forth back before that sort of thing became available, popular, or even expected. Neat stuff.
To this day I think one of my friends still donates an equal amount to the EFF any time he buys a Blizzard game.
Yep, the last two major aerospace companies I worked for recently still required IE6 for all of their mandatory training and tracking (required to comply with government regulations), timecard & expense reports (required for accounting regulations), etc. That's pretty firmly entrenched if you ask me.
Emulation is the only easy way I see, at least until the training modules and accounting systems finally go out of date... but as those are core requirements, it may take almost a decade at least...
Hmm, looks like one of the ClamAV developers was proposing something like this in 2006:
http://us.generation-nt.com/answer/patch-rfc-rearranging-files-improve-disk-performanc-help-181277711.html#r
Could probably use blktrace to do the profiling by logging inode access patterns and identifing inodes that are frequently accessed together. Then those inodes could be packed / defragged next to each other on disk.
BTW, here's an interesting utility to plot inode accesses recorded by blktrace/blkparse :
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/jaunty/man1/bno_plot.1.html
Also this looks similar:
http://oss.oracle.com/~mason/seekwatcher/
I kind of like the idea of rivals being friendly with each other. Better than the alternative... extremism. Not really sure what an OS extremist would do, though.
Anyway, I'm sure MS Office is still pretty big on Mac OS.
And iTunes on Windows probably pulls in a decent amount of money for Apple.
So there are plenty of benefits to being able to play well with others.
Step 1: Oops, something bad happened. Pretend it's not a big deal for as long as possible. :/
Step 2: Well, let's try to salvage the well, we have to protect our investment. Cover it up with chemical dispersants in the mean time
Step 3: Crap, we can't siphon anything off of our caps
Step 4: OK, the PR is getting worse now that it hit land, and the Feds are threatening to "take over" and invoke some long-term impact, fine let's plug it
Unfortunately, any rational business would do the same... they'd probably be in just as much deep water with their investors if they killed their wellhead right away to limit the political / PR / (and maybe a distant third) environmental damage.
Hopefully anything they could salvage from the well might help with the cleanup, sort of like getting taken to the hospital by the car that hit you.
It's our responsibility now to make them responsible for as much of the cleanup costs as possible, but I reckon they'll be fighting to keep the money much more than the news media will keep it in the public eye.
For my part, I haven't been to an Exxon in over 10 years. And I've sort of been avoiding BPs since their merger, but I could avoid them much more now.
/ OK, I made a bad pun and a bad car analogy. Thread over.
I like the quote from yesterday's /. thread... it went something like:
We just had extremely unlucky timing with Louisiana disaster response.
If Obama had been president during Katrina, he would have done everything possible to save those people.
If Bush had been president during the Deep Horizon spill, he would have done everything possible to save that oil.
Props to the originator
Nearest equivalent for X / Linux that I've used is xte, which uses the XTest extension to send keyboard and mouse events to the desktop.
xte is usually included with the "xautomation" package for various distributions.
I've also seen people use xvkbd -text to automate keystrokes (often in concert with xbindkeys), but I've found xte works a bit better in many cases, for example, when activating CTRL/ALT/Shift/etc. modifiers.
To complete the package, xprop can also give you some useful window state information and control so you can find and manipulate application windows.
Well, you can already sort of assign money to your (nonprofit/charitable) pet projects... You can steer some money away from the feds by making charitable contributions -- but only if you can itemize deductions (which isn't terribly easy unless you have a mortgage or some other means of getting you above the standard deduction). The money you contribute isn't taxed, which means if you donate $100 you might keep $20 out of the hands of the feds to spend on things you have no control over (other than by ticking a box on a ballot every couple years)
And really, the whole thing is largely symbolic. Congress will still set individual budgets for things and just add more or less depending on how much receives publicly-allocated funding. The point is to actually collect data from people on what they think is actually important.
But I understand how collecting actual data from people diminishes Congress's ability to spin and weave and politick and wield control.
I think technology ought to enable a more direct digital democracy, rather than the representative democracy we now have. And we could start with relatively small steps that wouldn't be terribly disruptive or even revolutionary.
OK, so this is going to be very corny in a karate kid / Bruce Lee "Enter the Dragon" sort of way, but my nightmares of running away from aggressors while my legs turned to molasses got much better after a few years of studying martial arts. They'd still catch up with me, but then I'd have some things to give to them in return and I'd wake up feeling good rather than miserable.
I probably don't play the right video games, but the dreams induced by L4D are mostly tedious rather than scary. Except when I spawn as the infected. Then I'm absolutely terrified.
Ha, I didn't have to wait long... Linux Mint 9 (based on Ubuntu 10.04) came out of beta last week. And I've still been installing new machines with version 8 since then :-P
Well, thanks for the reminder!
I'll wait until Linux Mint makes a release based on ubuntu:
I've been recommending it to friends as a nicer, friendlier, greener (yes, it's also Irish) Ubuntu that is not shy about providing support for proprietary video drivers and Adobe flash out of the box.
mint green > aubergine
I still run Debian testing on my primary box, though.
I'd love to be able to control where my tax dollars go... so I'd be able to say, "30% to education, 10% to research, 20% to paying off national debt, 0% to the DoD". Congress can still fight over what's left.
Hell, they could even phase it in slowly... maybe let people earmark even just the first $100 or $1000 of their taxes, so everyone gets a nearly equal say, and it would serve as a great data collection tool as to the political priorities of most people... better than anything else I can think of.
Yes! The DC/Metro area is great! All the seasons! Free museums! Lots of jobs (in administrative overhead)! You really want to move here! You could live in my condo by a Metro station!
I for one, am in favor of Pacific-Northwest fearmongering, no one really wants to live there!
/ Been trying to relocate to the Pacific Northwest for quite a few years now
// Have a feeling a lot of this fearmongering is encouraged by residents who don't want others to move in and bespoil it :-P
/// Says something about the praise we have for the DC/Metro area... hmmm....
Yes.
But on the "meh" side, I simply just pay a small premium for my ISP's alternative "Business" package, which unblocks ports 25 and 80 so I can run my own mail and web server, and maybe does a few other things in a more net neutral manner.
On the community wifi mesh thing, still hoping OLSRD makes it big or something... But I do what I can to just leave an open AP.
There's no technical way to guarantee privacy and anonymity... quite the opposite: technology should be used to increase transparency.
Privacy is to be respected. If someone doesn't respect your privacy, then by all means take socio-political-legal action. But you sort of have to implicitly trust your infrastructure provider - be it your ISP, your phone company, your email provider, etc. to not abuse your trust. And by all means don't use that infrastructure to transmit anything you don't trust them with.
The good thing about the increased transparency the technology has provided us is that now it's easier to find out if our trust has been abused.
Seems like you could do better if you simply could reorder the files on your traditional hard disk so that you'd get 100% readahead buffer hits. If properly optimized this way, your traditional hard disk should always be transferring near the max block read rate of ~100MB/s
I'm guessing this is what some of the boot profilers / optimizers are doing.
The readahead utility used by Redhat / Fedora (and also available for Debian) gives you some benefit loading lots of small files from the disk by reordering reads by inode number to minimize head seeks. The next major benefit would be if it could actually reorganize all those files into a single tarfile, and maybe even compress it a bit, so it can do a single large block read to get all that content off of disk and into RAM cache.
Not at all like fragmentation in the Apple world. I had an old G3 iBook with OS X 10.3 , and it wouldn't run any modern software (stuck at Firefox 2.x). It's like it was simply abandoned because the OS was a couple of releases old. It would have been even worse if Apple hadn't given us a free upgrade from 10.2 after servicing a recall.
Not paying for the updates to 10.4 / 10.5 ... OTOH, it sold pretty quickly at the yard sale, though, compared to the much beefier Dell laptops that had larger full color LCDs and could run anything.
This is an *apple* developer we're talking about here. You must only help them find ways of *reducing* testing complexity. For example, so that you only have to test with one mouse button.
*rimshot*
Heck, I'd pay them to retrieve the ~20GB worth of personal pics I've posted to the web on my home server if my RAID array suddenly went south, along with the partial backups I've transferred to various friends and relatives.
It seems logical to have a black (or at least grey) market for this kind of thing.
In the end, we're all content aggregators in some form or another... as long as they're not destroying the original works (say, by failing with attribution), then I say archive away.
And as far as privacy and surveillance goes, there are already laws that supposedly prevent you from getting incriminated by recordings (like if you were recorded without permission), so have legal/political solutions to legal/political problems and let the technology roam free.
PTS is also available as a Linux LiveCD, so you can do a rough cut of preliminary testing without even having to spend an hour installing/updating Windows to the same image!
Might be possible to set up similar for Windows using BartPE, but the driver situation usually sucks.
I've used Passmark Performance Test before to bench Windows machines:
http://www.passmark.com/products/pt.htm
Very straightforward for Windows dorks to install and use, and provides lots of simple graphs and an easy engine to make comparisons. I mostly used the demo version, but the commercial version didn't seem expensive.
Also, props to them for providing this handy reference:
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/
Again, be sure to test in as close to the final deployed configuration as possible. I've seen pretty big differences in e.g. x86_64 vs. 32-bit Windows performance, and even with different drivers installed or different BIOS settings.
Yeah, sounds like someone is just trying to play their "Share the Wealth" card.
Incidentally, I just noticed that some time ago the game of Life(TM) had something of a makeover, and no longer has those little legal "Share the Wealth" and "Exemption" cards. Which I applaud for not teaching the next generation to be a bunch of litigious little bastards.
They've also done some interesting things with employment, salary, and education that helps randomize stuff up a bit, so whomever lands on the Doctor/Lawyer square early on isn't guaranteed to dominate the game.
Probably not anymore... now if you had a CDMA / GSM / EDGE 3G sniffer, that might be entertaining nowadays...