No one every said Linux was stable on every single machine in the world, it supports a whole lot of hardware which itself isn't all that stable itself.:)
Linux Max Uptime: 845 days, 08:59m FreeBSD Max Uptime: 690 days, 23:48m
Then again, there are about 1/10th the number of FreeBSD entrants... overall not a real big sampling group in general.
Plus there's no information about hardware anyone is using and why the machine was rebooted (kernel ugprades, hardware upgrades or crash).
Overall, it's sorta pointless other than a nice figure to say my oscar meyer is bigger than yours.
--
Re:I'm looking forward to the day they ditch X
on
Some KDE news
·
· Score: 2
It amazes me when Open Source advocates defend The X Window System. It makes you wonder if anyone has bothered to look at who controls X.
The X Consortium is a closed group of members with a membership fee of $50,000/year to do any significant work on X. X is far from the nice open development environment of traditional open source applications.
This is why all sorts of development has gone into what goes ontop of X rather than what goes in X and is the reason behind projects such as Berlin. It's simply not possible to get things added to X unless you have some serious weight behind you... especially the sort of radical changes the Berlin folks are doing.
Of course, I am biased in this:)
--
Re:Huray! Now, more people use C++!!
on
GCC 2.95 Released
·
· Score: 2
Oh lord, another language war.
C++ and other OO languages have been proven to be more efficient for programmers on projects larger than 100k lines.
It takes less time for a programmer to start working with a large codebase written in C++ than in C plain and simple.
For example, I was able to make modifications to a bug in Mozilla roughly 20 minutes after I first took a look at the source. When you break your namespace for functions and variables down into peices the way C++ does, it is easier to digest.
While it is true you can write OO-like code in C, why would you want to? C++ is just an extension of C; all the functionality of C is included in C++ at a minimal cost.
I've recently investigated into switching users from POP to IMAP and have realized that IMAP simply doesn't scale well. Client CPU for doing the type of operations IMAP does is cheap, while server CPU is expensive.
Cyrus and UW IMAP are not light solutions. They are very large binaries which run from inetd and are anything but clean implementations.
Really, I'd say stick to POP3 using something like Qpopper or go with a commercial vendor. Qpopper is probably the best POP3 server you are going to find in the OSS world, though it does still run from inetd.
Open source POP3/IMAP4 servers really are lacking in the Unix world once you get past a certain number of users.
Or has the Mozilla team suddenly kicked everything into high gear. Two milestones in under a month, my lord.
There are still things I'd love to see in Mozilla. I actually fixed a bug in the up/down key scrolling, Mozilla is amazingly easy to read and understand.
I'm not sure why people complain that it's too much, it's a very clean C++/C program and my lord LXR is useful:)
Well for one thing, 9 GB of data can fit on a $14 12/24 gig DDS-3 tape.
These tapes were made to be rewritten over 1,000 times, aren't prone to scratching, doesn't require swapping for only 9 gigs of data, and are very small.
Not to mention tape is slightly faster writing than CD-RW's. While CD-RW's write at 300-600 KB/s, tapes can write at about 10-20x that.
You pay a little more for a tape drive, $700-$900 for an drive depending on make/model and internal or external.
--
Re:just one thing, if something goes wrong
on
NASA's X-37
·
· Score: 1
If something goes wrong at 40k feet in the air, chances are you won't make it either.
I don't know of too many commercial airlines which package parachutes & o2 tanks for each passenger on their plane for high altitude jumping.
The same goes for low flying aircraft where parachutes are not useful. Being a chopper at 100 ft, you are done for if something goes wrong.
You are right... the aerospike allows better compensation between external pressure and internal combustion gas pressure resulting in better performance at high altitudes.
Thanks for the info.
--
The path to commercial space travel
on
NASA's X-37
·
· Score: 1
While the X-37 is interesting, what I like is the X-33, which is the experimental prototype for testing technology for the VentureStar.
The VentureStar virtually eliminates those bulky O2 tanks by using O2 in our atmosphere most of the ride up. It weighs a little more than half of what the current shuttles weigh and can lift roughly 80% of what current shuttles can lift.
The great thing about it is it's single stage which means a whole lot of money is saved.
Commercial space travel would seriously be a great thing to see in my lifetime.
--
Re:ipv4=4 8 bit values, ipv6 = 6 8 bit values?
on
IANA Deploying IPv6
·
· Score: 1
16 bytes or 128 bits...
Heh, 16 8 bit values, you just want to make things difficult don't you?:)
Actually, the programs themselves are responsible for doing this, windows doesn't restrict how many times you can run a program. You can open up 50 copies of command.com if you really wanted to.
Netscape itself will check to see if it's already running under Windows and automatically issue a command to it's already running browser to open a new window.
The notes say SGI has released XFS recently for Linux, yet the link they give is to an internal development box no one can get at. Anyone see it loose out there?
What I wouldn't give for just the Borland project management/build tool to replace GNU Make/Autoconf/Automake tools.
A tool which actually did proper dependancies and did silly things like cache headers so dependancy checks didn't take so long.
A tool which didn't require recursive execution which eats up needless CPU and RAM reparsing the same rules over and over and over and over.
A tool which could actually do cross-directory dependancies easily and cleanly.
A tool which did parallel and distributed builds correctly every time.
A tool which actually understands the compilers and interpreters and understands distribution package files in a way as to know what programs are installed and what aren't correctly.
A tool which doesn't require unnecessarily long human edited files:)
Unfortunatly, working on primarily open source projects makes commercial tools pretty much worthless for this sort of thing. Sigh.
Actually, we recently had this discussion (not less than a week ago) on the berlin-design mailing list reguarding CORBA compilation of IDL files into source and the linking of non-GPL compatible libraries to GPL executables.
However, using the GPL on IDL files might have a substantial practical effect even if it isn't legally airtight. It might discourage much proprietary software from being written to talk to your objects, and it might convince many of the people who write programs that use your objects to make their programs free.
No one forces you to use all the features. Features which you do not use do not bloat your code. Even though I personally find almost all of C++ features useful in some way, I do not use 100% of them every time I start a project.
Things such as multiple inheritance (which I find extremely useful especially when it comes to CORBA), operating overloading and what not are there to help simplify your code...
I think this is probably one of the few times people have complained that something has too many features.
2. C++ is missing some features like garbage collection.
C++ is also missing a built-in mail client, a recipe for ice cream, and fourty-two flavors of regex processing.
You want a feature, there are 1000 different sources for them.
The addition of things such as garbage collectors, bounds checkers, etc *would* bloat the executable.
3. C++ is too complicated, I can't understand it
This is probably one of the sillier arguments. Just because you don't undersatnd it doesn't mean no one does. C++ and other languages based from it (Java), are easy to understand and work with once you understand the principals.
If you are used to using languages which are not similar to C++ and provide OO features, then you will be confused.
I just find it stupid that someone would consider using an underdeveloped, nonstandard, and completely unsupported language because they don't like the way C++ code looks and they don't understand how it works.
These are the same people who write new SMTP servers from scratch because they didn't like the configuration file format of existing ones.
I don't know what gave you that impression. Writing CORBA in anything but an object-oriented programming langauge is an extremely difficult thing to do because the CORBA bindings for things like C try to emulate OOP.
C++ itself is a fine language. It's been proven that above about 50k lines of code, C++ is far more efficient to work in than C and simply easier to understand.
What really bugs me are the people who say C++ is complex because it features things like operator overloading. This always struck me as funny, just because a feature exists doesn't mean you have to use it.
And C++ is well accepted. BeOS uses it as it's primary application development language as does Windows. Until recently C++ was horrible to develop for under Unix because of the poor compiler support, but Egcs has changed that.
Now I don't want to start a language war, but really... is there any real reason why C++ is a bad language or is it because you simply don't understand it?
(RAM) (Previously "direct-access memory"). A data storage device for which the order of access to different locations does not affect the speed of access. This is in contrast to, say, a magnetic disk, magnetic tape or a mercury delay line where it is very much quicker to access data sequentially because accessing a non-sequential location requires physical movement of the storage medium rather than just electronic switching.
I tend to trust FOLDOC's since I've never heard of any RAM which couldn't access linearly and randomly at the exact same speed.
I would never call CD-RWs, hard drives, or floppy disks RAM because they all access data linearly faster than randomly.
We've been having this discussion on the Berlin mailing list because we wanted to use ILU, which is a great little Unicode library which is under the IBM Public License.
The problem is, IBM PL and GPL don't get along, so we either have to drop ILU or forget about GPL. It's really a tough decision as so much software under Linux and other Unices is under GPL now.
Debian folks are extremely into GPL, so anything not GPL compatible is considered non-free. I find this attitude a bit disappointing.
I think RMS is right though, software should be open. Open software increases quality of software, development speed, and reduces lost productivity.
I just wish GPL was a little more lax about linking against non-GPL compatible libraries so this whole mess could be avoided, because while GPL guarantees open software, it closes a lot of doors as well.
I'm confused, I thought RAM stood for random access memory where all accesses to the hardware happen at the exact same speed.
For instance, with RAM you can read the first byte of RAM and then read the last byte of RAM at the same speed as if you were to read the second byte of RAM.
I never quite understood how RAM got the additional meaning of being read-write but still maintain it's acronym as random access memory.
This is why I push for DVD-RW, which has a sane name:)
First, IBM in the past 10 years has become extremely big on open standards.
Next, IBM is not a PC only company, they make a killer Unix system and mainframes. They are very Unix-friendly company and have always been known to make quality products.
As far as IBM making a desperate movie. They are worth 262 billion dollars. Desperation doesn't exactly enter the picture when you are pulling down 35% profit margins and 1.4 billion dollars a quarter (US billions, not UK billions).
There is no hatred towards big companies. Microsoft is hated because of their poor quality products, unethical business tactics, and their obvious need to wipe out every software vendor on the planet by integrating their features into their OS.
Adderall has some nasty side effects. At certain levels, you start to experience ticks, I personally get frigging eye tick at 30 mg. It also kills your appetite (which some people would consider good) and basically prevents sleep while you are using it:)
Dexydrine lasts almost as long (8-10 hours as opposed to 10-12 hours) and doesn't have as many side effects.
They also make a time-release Ritalin which supposedly lasts 8-10 hours as well.
Also, these pills aren't cheap. 10 mg adderall pills run about $1/pill, but they definately help me focus and stay awake. They aren't that strong, I mean if I don't sleep, 10 mg of Adderall isn't going to keep me awake. Some people get perscribed as much as 50 mg doses.
Also, remember these are all amphetamines, which means they are government controlled and regulated. It is not easy to find a doctor which will diagnose you for ADD, I personally had to go to an ADD institute (basically shrinks) which ran $200/visit.
Slashdot Mirror
No one every said Linux was stable on every single machine in the world, it supports a whole lot of hardware which itself isn't all that stable itself. :)
Linux Max Uptime: 845 days, 08:59m
FreeBSD Max Uptime: 690 days, 23:48m
Then again, there are about 1/10th the number of FreeBSD entrants... overall not a real big sampling group in general.
Plus there's no information about hardware anyone is using and why the machine was rebooted (kernel ugprades, hardware upgrades or crash).
Overall, it's sorta pointless other than a nice figure to say my oscar meyer is bigger than yours.
--
It amazes me when Open Source advocates defend The X Window System. It makes you wonder if anyone has bothered to look at who controls X.
:)
The X Consortium is a closed group of members with a membership fee of $50,000/year to do any significant work on X. X is far from the nice open development environment of traditional open source applications.
This is why all sorts of development has gone into what goes ontop of X rather than what goes in X and is the reason behind projects such as Berlin. It's simply not possible to get things added to X unless you have some serious weight behind you... especially the sort of radical changes the Berlin folks are doing.
Of course, I am biased in this
--
Oh lord, another language war.
C++ and other OO languages have been proven to be more efficient for programmers on projects larger than 100k lines.
It takes less time for a programmer to start working with a large codebase written in C++ than in C plain and simple.
For example, I was able to make modifications to a bug in Mozilla roughly 20 minutes after I first took a look at the source. When you break your namespace for functions and variables down into peices the way C++ does, it is easier to digest.
While it is true you can write OO-like code in C, why would you want to? C++ is just an extension of C; all the functionality of C is included in C++ at a minimal cost.
--
I've recently investigated into switching users from POP to IMAP and have realized that IMAP simply doesn't scale well. Client CPU for doing the type of operations IMAP does is cheap, while server CPU is expensive.
Cyrus and UW IMAP are not light solutions. They are very large binaries which run from inetd and are anything but clean implementations.
Really, I'd say stick to POP3 using something like Qpopper or go with a commercial vendor. Qpopper is probably the best POP3 server you are going to find in the OSS world, though it does still run from inetd.
Open source POP3/IMAP4 servers really are lacking in the Unix world once you get past a certain number of users.
--
Or has the Mozilla team suddenly kicked everything into high gear. Two milestones in under a month, my lord.
:)
There are still things I'd love to see in Mozilla. I actually fixed a bug in the up/down key scrolling, Mozilla is amazingly easy to read and understand.
I'm not sure why people complain that it's too much, it's a very clean C++/C program and my lord LXR is useful
--
Well for one thing, 9 GB of data can fit on a $14 12/24 gig DDS-3 tape.
These tapes were made to be rewritten over 1,000 times, aren't prone to scratching, doesn't require swapping for only 9 gigs of data, and are very small.
Not to mention tape is slightly faster writing than CD-RW's. While CD-RW's write at 300-600 KB/s, tapes can write at about 10-20x that.
You pay a little more for a tape drive, $700-$900 for an drive depending on make/model and internal or external.
--
If something goes wrong at 40k feet in the air, chances are you won't make it either.
I don't know of too many commercial airlines which package parachutes & o2 tanks for each passenger on their plane for high altitude jumping.
The same goes for low flying aircraft where parachutes are not useful. Being a chopper at 100 ft, you are done for if something goes wrong.
--
You are right... the aerospike allows better compensation between external pressure and internal combustion gas pressure resulting in better performance at high altitudes.
Thanks for the info.
--
While the X-37 is interesting, what I like is the X-33, which is the experimental prototype for testing technology for the VentureStar.
The VentureStar virtually eliminates those bulky O2 tanks by using O2 in our atmosphere most of the ride up. It weighs a little more than half of what the current shuttles weigh and can lift roughly 80% of what current shuttles can lift.
The great thing about it is it's single stage which means a whole lot of money is saved.
Commercial space travel would seriously be a great thing to see in my lifetime.
--
16 bytes or 128 bits...
:)
Heh, 16 8 bit values, you just want to make things difficult don't you?
--
The link is just a technical document explaining XFS... no software.
--
But doesn't FreeBSD only have one distribution?
--
Actually, the programs themselves are responsible for doing this, windows doesn't restrict how many times you can run a program. You can open up 50 copies of command.com if you really wanted to.
Netscape itself will check to see if it's already running under Windows and automatically issue a command to it's already running browser to open a new window.
--
The notes say SGI has released XFS recently for Linux, yet the link they give is to an internal development box no one can get at. Anyone see it loose out there?
--
What I wouldn't give for just the Borland project management/build tool to replace GNU Make/Autoconf/Automake tools.
:)
A tool which actually did proper dependancies and did silly things like cache headers so dependancy checks didn't take so long.
A tool which didn't require recursive execution which eats up needless CPU and RAM reparsing the same rules over and over and over and over.
A tool which could actually do cross-directory dependancies easily and cleanly.
A tool which did parallel and distributed builds correctly every time.
A tool which actually understands the compilers and interpreters and understands distribution package files in a way as to know what programs are installed and what aren't correctly.
A tool which doesn't require unnecessarily long human edited files
Unfortunatly, working on primarily open source projects makes commercial tools pretty much worthless for this sort of thing. Sigh.
--
And then there is:
And finally a little explanation of "derivative":
--
The basic arguments I keep hearing are:
1. C++ is bloated, it has too many features.
No one forces you to use all the features. Features which you do not use do not bloat your code. Even though I personally find almost all of C++ features useful in some way, I do not use 100% of them every time I start a project.
Things such as multiple inheritance (which I find extremely useful especially when it comes to CORBA), operating overloading and what not are there to help simplify your code...
I think this is probably one of the few times people have complained that something has too many features.
2. C++ is missing some features like garbage collection.
C++ is also missing a built-in mail client, a recipe for ice cream, and fourty-two flavors of regex processing.
You want a feature, there are 1000 different sources for them.
The addition of things such as garbage collectors, bounds checkers, etc *would* bloat the executable.
3. C++ is too complicated, I can't understand it
This is probably one of the sillier arguments. Just because you don't undersatnd it doesn't mean no one does. C++ and other languages based from it (Java), are easy to understand and work with once you understand the principals.
If you are used to using languages which are not similar to C++ and provide OO features, then you will be confused.
I just find it stupid that someone would consider using an underdeveloped, nonstandard, and completely unsupported language because they don't like the way C++ code looks and they don't understand how it works.
These are the same people who write new SMTP servers from scratch because they didn't like the configuration file format of existing ones.
--
I don't know what gave you that impression. Writing CORBA in anything but an object-oriented programming langauge is an extremely difficult thing to do because the CORBA bindings for things like C try to emulate OOP.
C++ itself is a fine language. It's been proven that above about 50k lines of code, C++ is far more efficient to work in than C and simply easier to understand.
What really bugs me are the people who say C++ is complex because it features things like operator overloading. This always struck me as funny, just because a feature exists doesn't mean you have to use it.
And C++ is well accepted. BeOS uses it as it's primary application development language as does Windows. Until recently C++ was horrible to develop for under Unix because of the poor compiler support, but Egcs has changed that.
Now I don't want to start a language war, but really... is there any real reason why C++ is a bad language or is it because you simply don't understand it?
--
Well it's actually pretty close.
:)
For each packet of data the web browser itself sends, a new stream of data had to be opened.
Since the web browser itself doesn't do ACK's on packets, all data which the web browser sent were requests.
Of course, that doesn't change the fact that they did use the wrong terminology throughout the article
--
FOLDOC sure seems to think so:
(RAM) (Previously "direct-access memory"). A data storage device for which the order of access to different locations does not affect the speed of access. This is in contrast to, say, a magnetic disk, magnetic tape or a mercury delay line where it is very much quicker to access data sequentially because accessing a non-sequential location requires physical movement of the storage medium rather than just
electronic switching.
I tend to trust FOLDOC's since I've never heard of any RAM which couldn't access linearly and randomly at the exact same speed.
I would never call CD-RWs, hard drives, or floppy disks RAM because they all access data linearly faster than randomly.
--
We've been having this discussion on the Berlin mailing list because we wanted to use ILU, which is a great little Unicode library which is under the IBM Public License.
The problem is, IBM PL and GPL don't get along, so we either have to drop ILU or forget about GPL. It's really a tough decision as so much software under Linux and other Unices is under GPL now.
Debian folks are extremely into GPL, so anything not GPL compatible is considered non-free. I find this attitude a bit disappointing.
I think RMS is right though, software should be open. Open software increases quality of software, development speed, and reduces lost productivity.
I just wish GPL was a little more lax about linking against non-GPL compatible libraries so this whole mess could be avoided, because while GPL guarantees open software, it closes a lot of doors as well.
--
I'm confused, I thought RAM stood for random access memory where all accesses to the hardware happen at the exact same speed.
:)
For instance, with RAM you can read the first byte of RAM and then read the last byte of RAM at the same speed as if you were to read the second byte of RAM.
I never quite understood how RAM got the additional meaning of being read-write but still maintain it's acronym as random access memory.
This is why I push for DVD-RW, which has a sane name
--
First, IBM in the past 10 years has become extremely big on open standards.
Next, IBM is not a PC only company, they make a killer Unix system and mainframes. They are very Unix-friendly company and have always been known to make quality products.
As far as IBM making a desperate movie. They are worth 262 billion dollars. Desperation doesn't exactly enter the picture when you are pulling down 35% profit margins and 1.4 billion dollars a quarter (US billions, not UK billions).
There is no hatred towards big companies. Microsoft is hated because of their poor quality products, unethical business tactics, and their obvious need to wipe out every software vendor on the planet by integrating their features into their OS.
--
A few weeks back I was thinking about the ultimate way to get people to switch to IPv6, and then it hit me...
Setup a giant free porn site with only IN AAAA DNS records.
:)
--
Adderall has some nasty side effects. At certain levels, you start to experience ticks, I personally get frigging eye tick at 30 mg. It also kills your appetite (which some people would consider good) and basically prevents sleep while you are using it :)
Dexydrine lasts almost as long (8-10 hours as opposed to 10-12 hours) and doesn't have as many side effects.
They also make a time-release Ritalin which supposedly lasts 8-10 hours as well.
Also, these pills aren't cheap. 10 mg adderall pills run about $1/pill, but they definately help me focus and stay awake. They aren't that strong, I mean if I don't sleep, 10 mg of Adderall isn't going to keep me awake. Some people get perscribed as much as 50 mg doses.
Also, remember these are all amphetamines, which means they are government controlled and regulated. It is not easy to find a doctor which will diagnose you for ADD, I personally had to go to an ADD institute (basically shrinks) which ran $200/visit.
--