Anyone who's been a Sun administrator has seen Sun screwup patch packages (breaking something during the fix). This is not news. What is going to happen is that in a week or two (or months, depending on the severity or difficulty to fix), Sun will release yet another patch package that will resolve the issue.
So if you put it in, back it out. Devise your own workarounds if you think its a significant vulnerability. Security is established through design and monitoring. Firewalls, subnets, switches, ssh, checksums, login authentication, log monitoring. You can't rely on vendors to resolve your security issues. Companies can only fix the security holes that they are aware of. You're only screwed when you're stuck with an improperly designed legacy system or policies that can't be defended. But that's not Sun's fault.
The problem with using ext3 in a production system is that is "new". That means its subject to "bugs". Some bugs don't get picked up until many months after its in use. On a filesystem, that means you can get data corruption and lose files/data for months before you realize there is a problem. (And the corruption would be handed down to your backups.) Also, with ext3 being new, it won't have many diagnostic tools or other utilities.
I have heard BAD things about reiserfs. Its a fact that they don't journal the metadata, just the filesystem structures. In certain crashes, you can lose some data while rapidly bringing up the system. But there are other people who swear by it, and perhaps its better than nothing.
Myself, I use XFS. There are people who will grouse endlessly about it, but I've never encountered a problem with it. In any case, the whole point of a journaling filesystem quick restart of the filesystems (no fsck) AND integrity of the data. Competent sysadmins don't use flaky filesystems or new kernels on PRODUCTION machines.
Actually, the server is an emergency backup / mirror server and it has been pretty unreliable for ages.
Aiieeee... How can it be an emergency backup/mirror server if its unreliable? Mind you, its childsplay to use the machine for prototyping and backup merely by adding a harddrive to it, and doing your prototyping work on the second drive. How the heck can they refuse the replace the NIC if its a clunker? Its a lousy $20 bucks. You probably can cannabalize an old machine's NIC for free.
Maybe there was another solution, but anything more than a day per month on that project is seen as lost time for me.
Screwing around for a day because the company is too cheap to spend $20 for a good NIC is ridiculous as well. Its about 1 hour of your salary. I've worked for cheap companies, but that's plain stupid. As does having you mess around with kernels released days ago.
As to you other point, I hope that Linus's feature freeze does not preclude fixes for problems like this making the next stable set of kernels.
The whole point of the feature freeze is to stop incorporating NEW features. Bugfixes are the only thing allowed in a frozen development kernel until release. Its a mistake to think of a stable kernel (2.4) as being bugfree for each release. There were shops that still ran 2.2 kernels, because they didn't like the "instability" of the 2.4 kernels.
And here we're talking about calling the next major release "3.0" while things as important as/the file system/ need to be majorly reworked.
2.4.x is the "stable" kernel. That means its not supposed to incorporate radical changes to its infrastructure. Apparently, the maintainer thought they could add some "safe" changes off of the 2.5.x kernel research to add functionality. The team was wrong. The ideal correction would include a radical change, so its going to be a kludge fix instead.
The file system is getting major rework, IN the development kernel (2.5.x). 2.4 is not 3.0. 2.5 is not 3.0. 3.0 will be out when its ready. Stop judging 3.0 (actually 2.6) based on what's going on in 2.4.
Besides, only an incompetent would use ext3 in a production machine.
What a coincidence. Are you employed? Then what are hell you doing here reading and posting to slashdot? You should be focusing on your job, like those Ph.D candidates. (Do we have to spell it out to you, ITS NOT REAL DOCTORATE WORK!)
Ultimately it's about software; superior processors aren't enough on their own, there must also be a critical mass of software to run on them.
Which could have been mitigated by the use of Linux and open source software. Alphas were meant for the higher-end server market, not to run Windoze for the enduser consumer. Server software at that time was either proprietary or public domain software (a tiny percentage). The point being that DEC/Alpha was running in the same commercial software environment as everyone else.
Until there is, MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC (even in the Mac) et al will only sell into niche markets.
The 64bit CPU arrived 5 years before the marketeers were hyping 64bit computing. What should have happened was that DEC should have pushed Alpha for the server market, and forced Intel to be penetrating Alpha's marketshare today. This could have even been accomplished by Compaq, who was looking to establish a backoffice presence with servers running NT. Alpha had years of production while Itanium was still bumbling in development.
Oh come on, TI hooking academia was the least reason for the demise of the HP. The biggest reason was cost. I could get a crummy TI or Casio for 1/4 the cost of an HP calculator. And even ignoring the pocketbook, having to deal with reverse-infix would have been enough to chase away average consumers.
Private students regurarly get massive financial aid - more than public school students because of higher costs - which is either grant based or in the form of subsidized loans.
Get a grip, you speak as if they're just pissing it away on any schmuck. Nitpicking on subsidized loans is ridiculous. The taxpayer and shylock loses the percentage difference in interest, defaulting loans, and potential investment income from the taxed. As for grants, they're heavily skewed towards the poor, and they require some form of academic performance to maintain the grant. Or they are part of the payment for service in the Armed Forces. On the graduate level, there is much better rate of return from the grant.
They are in fact wasting valuable tax money with this crapola. Plus, these Unversities get tax breaks, research grants, etc.
Its a government investment in its intellectual talent. Bottom line is that we're better off investing in bright poor people to go to college, where we'll see payoff in higher salaries to tax and to fill critical knowlege positions in the future. Grants on the graduate level are quite competitive and they are not being doled out for basket weaving classes. Its surely a better use of tax dollars than bumbling NASA, or initiating an armed conflict in Iraq, or subsidizing agrocorporations.
I forgot to mention that, according to this person, you should compress all files on your C drive (smaller files run faster)
Its actually not an implausible idea. Data transfer operations from disk are a magnitude slower than from memory. With CPU performance outstripping disk performance in improvement, there may come a time where the CPU & memory operations to decompress data from disk would be result in more data retrieved in less time than for uncompressed data to be retrieved from disk. Mind you, I don't believe that is currently the case with the current consumer technology, and there is no benefit from extracting data already compressed (like images).
I do suspect that when this scheme first came out (in the MSDOS era), that some machines did not suffer a serious performance hit, because disks performance was THAT slow.
We hate NASA (selfpreserving bureacracy dedicated to increased spending (not increased science research), and eliminate competitors.), we love space. Apparently, you are a/. reader, and not an economist who has analyzed the issue.
My website inherently has a lot of images on it. It isn't the same without them, and I know for a fact that they aren't possible to convey to a blind person. So why should I develop for them?
You shouldn't, the blind have no interest to visit a photography site. But that's not the point. Companies, governments, and specialty information sites hold valuable information on their websites. Its a tragedy that in order to make webpages flashier, or allow lazy, low IQ webpage publishers able to collect a paycheck, they make these information pages inaccessible to the visually impaired.
There was a drive to make public transport more accessible to disabled people. This involved a lot of new buses having lowering decks to allow wheelchairs on. I have never, ever, seen one used by a wheelchair bound person.
My guess would be that London supports some form of subsidized van/taxi service these people can use. If so, that means you're probably paying A LOT more out of your wallet for this, than for wheelchair accessible buses. NYC buses are all wheelchair accessible, and trust me, its used. In fact, to cop to my less humane side, it annoys the crap out of me when I see them used, because its quite time consuming, particularly if I'm there for both entrance & egress or if its crowded. But that doesn't mean I think they should be screwed so that I can save a little time and money. The same precept can be extended to the webpage.
A serious question. OpenOffice started incorporating GTK/GNOME widgets, Mozilla builds support for GTK themes...
Why is it that they all go in for GTK/GNOME not QT/KDE? Are the latter combination more difficult to integrate? Something about the QT license? Better mktg by the GNOME guys?
Anyone has any insights?
For OpenOffice, its simple. Who owns StarOffice? What windowing toolkit did they decide to go with? Not so certain about Mozilla. Also, there may be a license difference between GNOME & QT that might discourage large commercial conglomerates from developing with QT.
If you are a systems administrator and can't make use of a Palm/Visor level PDA, you are a technofeeb and should not be in this line of work. (The blind, handless, MS stricken, etc. are obviously excepted.)
A dead tree dayrunner is not going to beep when you need to be at an appointment, tell you which appointment, or location/directions if its offsite.
The To-Do list is the most awesome organizing tool there is. People bombard you with a bunch of things to do in a day, you scribble them down, and prioritize them. (You can also attach alarms to them, if needed.) What may not occur to users is that one can also use it as a form of task journal. (Create a group called "Done", move the completed todos to "Done". If needed, add a timestamp, and write a perl script to generate billable hours).
You can also use the Todo list as portable documentation library. Keep handy the remote activation sequence to a powered down ES4500 ( ~P ), or a complete listing of OBP commands, Veritas command list, etc. etc. I probably have a hundred cheatsheets in my PDA. (I used to do this exclusively with the Memo feature. But I find Todo groups accomplish the same task, and I can dig up docs quicker.) One can attach "Memos" to the Todos (which then merely become titles or keywords), and use the Organizer program to cut and paste documentation into the Memo.
The phone/address book is obvious in its benefits, as is mail, calculator, or expense tracker. If you work in an international shop, the city time app comes in handy. This merely covers the applications INCLUDED with the PDA.
With Vindigo in a major city, you have the equivalent of an online street map, with a listing of restaurants, ATMs, movie theatres & movie listings. With a program like Secret!, you can keep all your pin codes & passwords to various machine, and it will be encrypted data.
With Avantgo (or plucker), you can read web content offline. (Handy for killing time on the 1 hour subway commute.) With a doc reader, like plucker or iSilo, you can keep HOWTO files and other documentation handy for reading. I keep the entire PERL command reference in my PDA! With iSilo, it organizes the information by its weblinks. When I'm not reading stuff on the PDA, I like to brainstorm and scribble down design notes of systems or programs. (I could even script on the PDA, but I'm pretty tired at the end of the day.) And yes, there are games too.
With a modem or wireless internet accessory, you may even be able to vnc or telnet into your machines if you're at a party and get that *(#$#%^ page.
I don't understand why some techies would have difficulty picking up graffiti. Its all block letter shorthand. You may have to memorize 5 unique strokes for letters, or 15 if you want to do punctuation as well. Take the one day effort to learn. Play the giraffe game. Before I had exposure to the PDA, I thought learning graffiti was going to be onerous. I was SHOCKED to find myself functionally writing with it in 1 hour. (Granted, its difficult to transcribe at lecture speed. Boo hoo, you might not be able to use the PDA for lectures notes.)
Well, I could have said his "New York Jew bigotry" is not much different to Southern White Trash Redneck, but I wasn't sure if the poster was actually from the NYC metro area. In any case, leave it to a pro-zionist to miss the point. To refer to Southerners as "white trash" and redneck is prejudiced and offensive. I'm sure there are even some Southerner white trash rednecks that would be offended at being called anti-semites. If you cannot see the tools of racism and bigotry, and do not condemn their use, you probably will end up using them.
People who think Israel doesn't have the right to exist is basically an anti-semite.
What would that make a Palestinian against the existence of Israel? A self-hating anti-semite?
I do not have a problem with the creation and existence of Israel. That does not mean I condone blowing up a building with children inside in order to get a terrorist, or allowing children in schoolyards to be be blown up because they are too lazy to setup a sniper team. I also don't think such terrorism is justified even when its practiced against the perpetrator. Does that make me an anti-semite?
Its called paranoid schitzophrenia [295.30 DSM-IV]. One of Bobby Fischer chess contemporaries, Reuben Fine, was a psychologist, and noted symptomatic behavior when Fischer was a teenager. It also explains a lot of odd behavior Fischer has exhibited throughout his life. Its sad, really.
BTW, southern white trash redneck anti-semitism is not much different than your pro-zionist prejudice.
No, war is not good for any economy. Its a myth perpetuated by the military-industrial complex. It destroys assets, disrupts trade, and creates a big tax load which sucks capital away from fledgling businesses and consumption. The only possibility that war could be a good thing would be during a great depression, when you have a flatlined economy. And there are economists that argue the US economy was recovering even without WWII.
Congratulations, you are another warmongerer who needs to be beaten with a cluebat. Apropos that you don't have the stones to stand by your ignorant statements. I don't have the energy to rip to shreds every incredibly incorrect statement you have made. I'll just point out that the China statement shows how clueless you are. No, we would not agitate China while we are taking over the world's oil. China would see that our military resources are mired in the Middle East. That means China would see an opportunity to finally bring its renegade province back into control. (Help! I'm an American voter surrounded by too many idiots.)
Typical prolectariat mindset. The lineworkers are what makes the product, the rest are bit players. Move to Cuba, communista.
No, a company is an organism or an army. Its job is to dominate their economic niche. That requires good management as well as good workers. They are all valuable, including the shareholders which provide the capital to grow. Ford's epiphany was relevant to his industry and his era. Oracle does not expect their employees to become their customers, nor does Boeing or Northrup/Grumman.
The problem is not the "scumbags" like Welch (which BTW, I do not consider him worthy of the top ten corporate robber barons). The scumbags are maximizing their bank account; they merely are in a better position to do it than the line worker.
No, the problem is the lineworker, because he/she are f**king morons. So stupid, they do not understand that Welch cannot get his perks, high salary, or move factories without his job, which is in the hands of the Company's Board, who's officers he helps appoint. That guys like Skilling cannot "bust-out" companies like Enron without the criminal complicity of the accounting company which he hired.
There is a weapon that the lineworker has to make sure that these Mafiosa CEOs cannot subvert the regulatory mechanisms in place to prevent workers from losing their jobs and 401Ks. And last week, they elected people who will continue to aid the CEO in their fraud and oppression of the worker. (Unbelievable!) Don't believe me? Who was the Chairman of the SEC, and who currently is?
How will putting Republicans in control of both legislative houses encourage hearings to expose economic corruption from the people who spend billions to get them in that position? What is the significance of these questions?
Life does not have the obligation to make the dumbasses' life easier or more fair. The only reason you think otherwise was that your dumbass parents told you so. Here's a clue, stop being a dumbass.
And what were the major military actions during the Clinton administration? A small military incursion in Sommalia, some bombing in Iraq, some bombing in Serbia leading to another small military incursion in the Balkans, and some missles lobbed out in Afganistan.
What really kills me is that people don't realize that a smaller military is encouraged to avoid military interventions AND THAT IS GOOD. Military actions are EXPENSIVE. If you intelligently pick your fights, and use diplomacy to avoid or manage conflicts, you don't need to have the largest standing army in the world.
Its cheaper to hire slightly more bodies and not do anything with them. The military is an insurance policy. You have to sink resources into it in order to be prepared for an crisis, but you only want to spend enough to make sure that they can effectively respond to the (theoretical) crisis.
Now look at what Bush does. With that same sized military, he has a major military engagement in Afganistan, and is moving to start another one in Iraq. Where was the proof that Saddam has WMD and their use was imminent? Where was the proof that Saddam was running Al Queda? Why the hell do we pump in a billion dollars into Israel if we're expected to do all the fighting anyway?
The USA may be the remaining "superpower" of this era, but that does not mean we are the "world's policeman". If the US thinks that its job to put patriotic Americans into body bags, you can forget about economic prosperity. The dollars for the economy will be coverted to tax dollars to pay for military actions. Since it looks like the Bush administration does not know where to pick its fights, the Taiwanese should get ready to unite with the mainland a lot sooner than they originally planned.
Have you ever heard about Debian GNU/Hurd [debian.org]? [...] Maybe next time before you post something like this download Debian GNU/Hurd ISOs, burn them, install the system, count how many packages there are, and then post your opinion about it.
Yes, I did. I installed it when Debian first made its distribution public last year. I threw it out shortly after the first crash. I did not bother to count the number of packages, and it won't change the fact that xBSD will get more package support than HURD. Perhaps you could support your argument by providing a link to where those HURD application packages can be obtained. (Its not at the links you provided.)
Only a clueless academic regurgitator such as yourself will think that when HURD gets a couple MORE of years of development under its belt, that it will run more quickly than the linux kernel. After all, expending more CPU time creating superfluous interprocess communication somehow makes kernels more efficient. Or HURD will run more stably with all those system and application threads competing with each other to get work done. Oh, people will be running on top of each other to run a slower, buggier OS. And people love to spend their free time developing for obscure platforms like xBSD, QNX, and BeOS
Look, maybe in your world RMS is God, and believe everyone should run their lives by his dogma. But if I see the emperor is naked, I'm going to call him on it. You take one of my statements, misconstrue it, and conclude everything I say is a lie. But you and your smelly, unwashed zealots missed the whole point of my exposition.
No commercial entity is going to run their webservers or databases on HURD in this decade (if ever). They will chose a commmercial product or chose the OS with the faster, more stable kernel (it will not be HURD). The same goes for people who use their computers to websurf, write documents, and handle email. These are applications used by the "real world".
The value of HURD is not as a viable alternative to Linux. HURD as valdidation of RMS communist theories is only of value to RMS. HURD will not experience widespread adoption once it can create a disk partition greater than 1 GB. HURD has tremendous potential as a platform which can construct new computer paradigms we cannot implement with our current OSs. But it needs to work, and it needs to work efficiently enough for people to discount the performance hit due to its design. Porting web servers, other popular applications, or obscure device drivers to a platform that currently does not meet minimal requirements in performance and stability is a freaking waste of time. Judging HURD as valueless because it is not a viable Linux alternative is equally clueless.
And who runs device drivers that crash the OS??? How many drivers in the stable version of Linux that crash the operating system have been kept??? Its a theoretical selling point. Right now, current distributions of HURD cannot match the uptime of Linux.
HURD is not the operating system choice of "hackers" or slashdotters. Hackers want to run computer applications (reliably and speedily). That is not what HURD is about. Its the utopian platform for computer science geeks; people who want to go beyond the current paradigm of UNIX, classic sequential computing, etc. . By abstracting the ukernel to a couple of critical operations (time slicing, memory allocation, and IPC), and moving every other operation to user mode, you have a tool that can be used to implement new concepts in computer operating systems.
Its not an alternative to Linux. Its an orange to Linux's apple. It will suck as an alternative to Linux. It will run slower than Linux (especially if they stick with Mach). It will not run more stablely than Linux (given its increased complexity). It may be a better platform for multiple CPU configurations, be we won't know that for sure until its ukernel design is complete, and an implementation of HURD actually proves it to be faster. Very few people will want to port useful packages to HURD; they'll go to Linux for reliability and performance. HURD's purpose is not a platform to run applications. Its a platform for computer science research.
That is the reason why I do not wish death on HURD and rejoice when there is good news for it. It does not really compete with Linux for mindshare. If it proves to be a superior platform for MP processing, only then will it have a mundane use.
I have massive contempt for its project management. Its currently looking like the OS that will never get released. And it does not deserve a serious look until it gets a quality ukernel, like L4 (which itself is unfinished). MACH will not cut it, or its UKS(?) version.
Presumably the homosexual male would not be aroused by the hetero female. I figure that would delay the coital act.
Seriously - to repeat my earlier post: the biologist I talked to claimed that even if homosexuals had 99% as many children as heterosexuals did, it would not be enough to save the 'gay gene', in the long run, according to computer models. Are you claiming that (a) the model in question is flawed,
I would be inclined to think so. If you consider certain fatal genetic diseases or mortality vectors as equivalent to homosexuality (they both prevent the passing of genetic material to the next generation), a 1% less likelihood of passing offspring would not weed out any specific gene. Hell, what that statement implies is that "geeks" are doomed to be weeded out the gene pool.
or (b) on average, homosexuals have (or had, historically) at least as many children as heterosexuals do? I find (b) more than a little hard to believe. Maybe "its" [sic] just my "crippled, atropied [sic] critical thinking skills".
No, I don't believe that homosexuals produce as much offspring as heterosexuals. But I am starting to question your critical thinking skills.
(The other choices: (c) there is at least one other factor at work, cf. the shaman theory, or (d) homosexuality does not have a significant genetic factor after all.)
(c) is plausible, (d) is not as plausible, and you forget (e) you made a distinct error in either listening, understanding, or representing what the biologist was trying to say.
Its the our crippled, atropied critical thinking skills, unable to perceive things outside of our cultural context, that prevents us from making obvious conclusions.
Did anyone ever tell you intellectual snobbery is unattractive?
Didn't you notice I used the pronoun our in that statement. Its hardly snobbery when the snob is including himself in the masses of the weak thinking.
Actually, if I end up with the "blessing" of children, I will probably go out of my way to get my children (older than 3 years old) infected with chicken pox. Screw the vaccine, which could potentially have all sorts of contaminants or manufacturing flaws. No CHILD is going to suffer death or disfigurement from getting chicken pox. Contracting chicken pox as an adult can be fatal.
I used to be similarly confused as to how genetic homosexuality could exist with natural selection, but the answer is quite obvious. Answer: You don't have to lust over the act of procreation in order to procreate. Many homosexuals have the desire to have offspring. Boffing the hetero is nothing more than a 30 minute task. In fact, there are quite a few closet, married homosexual males (mostly to hetero females, or vice versa) with kids. Also, it would easier to pass homosexual genes back in the era of arranged marriages (which existed in the western culture 100 years ago, and still exists today around the world). Its the our crippled, atropied critical thinking skills, unable to perceive things outside of our cultural context, that prevents us from making obvious conclusions.
Can't it be said that many countries will remain poor and on the back burner for many years because they have little natural resources and a small population? Don't you need a somewhat large population and a good supply of materiel to get things done?
The answer is no. The counter examples are Hong Kong and Singapore. They are basically city-states which attained their economic position through careful investment and development of their niche industries. Slightly larger examples which still fall under small population and limited natural resources would be South Korea and Taiwan. An example of a foundering country with a large population and plentiful natural resources would be Indonesia (and maybe Congo/Zaire).
I realize that this isn't exactly in line with IP, but I don't think that's a pressing issue for a subsistance farmer thousands of miles from most of us.
Neither is population control or education, but they are all critical issues to the economic well-being of a nation. IP doesn't affect the individual farmer or (most) individual citizens. But it does affect a nation's wealth (and thus power and economic development) and thus consequently affects those farmers and citizens. Implying that if a small, poor country should be resigned to its economic fate, and thus IP is not a contributor to its situation is fallacious.
Not sure how much of a bargain. She's spending years of her life where she could be a practicing doctor doing training instead. At least 5 years lost for the Phd and the fellowship. Actually, it kind of irks me that she's taking this program yet her primary career goal will not be medical research. Oh well, glad I'm not a Texan taxpayer.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who's been a Sun administrator has seen Sun screwup patch packages (breaking something during the fix). This is not news. What is going to happen is that in a week or two (or months, depending on the severity or difficulty to fix), Sun will release yet another patch package that will resolve the issue.
So if you put it in, back it out. Devise your own workarounds if you think its a significant vulnerability. Security is established through design and monitoring. Firewalls, subnets, switches, ssh, checksums, login authentication, log monitoring. You can't rely on vendors to resolve your security issues. Companies can only fix the security holes that they are aware of. You're only screwed when you're stuck with an improperly designed legacy system or policies that can't be defended. But that's not Sun's fault.
The problem with using ext3 in a production system is that is "new". That means its subject to "bugs". Some bugs don't get picked up until many months after its in use. On a filesystem, that means you can get data corruption and lose files/data for months before you realize there is a problem. (And the corruption would be handed down to your backups.) Also, with ext3 being new, it won't have many diagnostic tools or other utilities.
I have heard BAD things about reiserfs. Its a fact that they don't journal the metadata, just the filesystem structures. In certain crashes, you can lose some data while rapidly bringing up the system. But there are other people who swear by it, and perhaps its better than nothing.
Myself, I use XFS. There are people who will grouse endlessly about it, but I've never encountered a problem with it. In any case, the whole point of a journaling filesystem quick restart of the filesystems (no fsck) AND integrity of the data. Competent sysadmins don't use flaky filesystems or new kernels on PRODUCTION machines.
Actually, the server is an emergency backup / mirror server and it has been pretty unreliable for ages.
Aiieeee... How can it be an emergency backup/mirror server if its unreliable? Mind you, its childsplay to use the machine for prototyping and backup merely by adding a harddrive to it, and doing your prototyping work on the second drive. How the heck can they refuse the replace the NIC if its a clunker? Its a lousy $20 bucks. You probably can cannabalize an old machine's NIC for free.
Maybe there was another solution, but anything more than a day per month on that project is seen as lost time for me.
Screwing around for a day because the company is too cheap to spend $20 for a good NIC is ridiculous as well. Its about 1 hour of your salary. I've worked for cheap companies, but that's plain stupid. As does having you mess around with kernels released days ago.
As to you other point, I hope that Linus's feature freeze does not preclude fixes for problems like this making the next stable set of kernels.
The whole point of the feature freeze is to stop incorporating NEW features. Bugfixes are the only thing allowed in a frozen development kernel until release. Its a mistake to think of a stable kernel (2.4) as being bugfree for each release. There were shops that still ran 2.2 kernels, because they didn't like the "instability" of the 2.4 kernels.
And here we're talking about calling the next major release "3.0" while things as important as /the file system/ need to be majorly reworked.
2.4.x is the "stable" kernel. That means its not supposed to incorporate radical changes to its infrastructure. Apparently, the maintainer thought they could add some "safe" changes off of the 2.5.x kernel research to add functionality. The team was wrong. The ideal correction would include a radical change, so its going to be a kludge fix instead.
The file system is getting major rework, IN the development kernel (2.5.x). 2.4 is not 3.0. 2.5 is not 3.0. 3.0 will be out when its ready. Stop judging 3.0 (actually 2.6) based on what's going on in 2.4.
Besides, only an incompetent would use ext3 in a production machine.
What a coincidence. Are you employed? Then what are hell you doing here reading and posting to slashdot? You should be focusing on your job, like those Ph.D candidates. (Do we have to spell it out to you, ITS NOT REAL DOCTORATE WORK!)
Ultimately it's about software; superior processors aren't enough on their own, there must also be a critical mass of software to run on them.
Which could have been mitigated by the use of Linux and open source software. Alphas were meant for the higher-end server market, not to run Windoze for the enduser consumer. Server software at that time was either proprietary or public domain software (a tiny percentage). The point being that DEC/Alpha was running in the same commercial software environment as everyone else.
Until there is, MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC (even in the Mac) et al will only sell into niche markets.
The 64bit CPU arrived 5 years before the marketeers were hyping 64bit computing. What should have happened was that DEC should have pushed Alpha for the server market, and forced Intel to be penetrating Alpha's marketshare today. This could have even been accomplished by Compaq, who was looking to establish a backoffice presence with servers running NT. Alpha had years of production while Itanium was still bumbling in development.
The lesson here is Carpe Diem
Oh come on, TI hooking academia was the least reason for the demise of the HP. The biggest reason was cost. I could get a crummy TI or Casio for 1/4 the cost of an HP calculator. And even ignoring the pocketbook, having to deal with reverse-infix would have been enough to chase away average consumers.
False.
Well, technically you're correct.
Private students regurarly get massive financial aid - more than public school students because of higher costs - which is either grant based or in the form of subsidized loans.
Get a grip, you speak as if they're just pissing it away on any schmuck. Nitpicking on subsidized loans is ridiculous. The taxpayer and shylock loses the percentage difference in interest, defaulting loans, and potential investment income from the taxed. As for grants, they're heavily skewed towards the poor, and they require some form of academic performance to maintain the grant. Or they are part of the payment for service in the Armed Forces. On the graduate level, there is much better rate of return from the grant.
They are in fact wasting valuable tax money with this crapola. Plus, these Unversities get tax breaks, research grants, etc.
Its a government investment in its intellectual talent. Bottom line is that we're better off investing in bright poor people to go to college, where we'll see payoff in higher salaries to tax and to fill critical knowlege positions in the future. Grants on the graduate level are quite competitive and they are not being doled out for basket weaving classes. Its surely a better use of tax dollars than bumbling NASA, or initiating an armed conflict in Iraq, or subsidizing agrocorporations.
I forgot to mention that, according to this person, you should compress all files on your C drive (smaller files run faster)
Its actually not an implausible idea. Data transfer operations from disk are a magnitude slower than from memory. With CPU performance outstripping disk performance in improvement, there may come a time where the CPU & memory operations to decompress data from disk would be result in more data retrieved in less time than for uncompressed data to be retrieved from disk. Mind you, I don't believe that is currently the case with the current consumer technology, and there is no benefit from extracting data already compressed (like images).
I do suspect that when this scheme first came out (in the MSDOS era), that some machines did not suffer a serious performance hit, because disks performance was THAT slow.
We hate NASA (selfpreserving bureacracy dedicated to increased spending (not increased science research), and eliminate competitors.), we love space. Apparently, you are a /. reader, and not an economist who has analyzed the issue.
My website inherently has a lot of images on it. It isn't the same without them, and I know for a fact that they aren't possible to convey to a blind person. So why should I develop for them?
You shouldn't, the blind have no interest to visit a photography site. But that's not the point. Companies, governments, and specialty information sites hold valuable information on their websites. Its a tragedy that in order to make webpages flashier, or allow lazy, low IQ webpage publishers able to collect a paycheck, they make these information pages inaccessible to the visually impaired.
There was a drive to make public transport more accessible to disabled people. This involved a lot of new buses having lowering decks to allow wheelchairs on. I have never, ever, seen one used by a wheelchair bound person.
My guess would be that London supports some form of subsidized van/taxi service these people can use. If so, that means you're probably paying A LOT more out of your wallet for this, than for wheelchair accessible buses. NYC buses are all wheelchair accessible, and trust me, its used. In fact, to cop to my less humane side, it annoys the crap out of me when I see them used, because its quite time consuming, particularly if I'm there for both entrance & egress or if its crowded. But that doesn't mean I think they should be screwed so that I can save a little time and money. The same precept can be extended to the webpage.
A serious question. OpenOffice started incorporating GTK/GNOME widgets, Mozilla builds support for GTK themes... Why is it that they all go in for GTK/GNOME not QT/KDE? Are the latter combination more difficult to integrate? Something about the QT license? Better mktg by the GNOME guys? Anyone has any insights?
For OpenOffice, its simple. Who owns StarOffice? What windowing toolkit did they decide to go with? Not so certain about Mozilla. Also, there may be a license difference between GNOME & QT that might discourage large commercial conglomerates from developing with QT.
If you are a systems administrator and can't make use of a Palm/Visor level PDA, you are a technofeeb and should not be in this line of work. (The blind, handless, MS stricken, etc. are obviously excepted.)
A dead tree dayrunner is not going to beep when you need to be at an appointment, tell you which appointment, or location/directions if its offsite.
The To-Do list is the most awesome organizing tool there is. People bombard you with a bunch of things to do in a day, you scribble them down, and prioritize them. (You can also attach alarms to them, if needed.) What may not occur to users is that one can also use it as a form of task journal. (Create a group called "Done", move the completed todos to "Done". If needed, add a timestamp, and write a perl script to generate billable hours).
You can also use the Todo list as portable documentation library. Keep handy the remote activation sequence to a powered down ES4500 ( ~P ), or a complete listing of OBP commands, Veritas command list, etc. etc. I probably have a hundred cheatsheets in my PDA. (I used to do this exclusively with the Memo feature. But I find Todo groups accomplish the same task, and I can dig up docs quicker.) One can attach "Memos" to the Todos (which then merely become titles or keywords), and use the Organizer program to cut and paste documentation into the Memo.
The phone/address book is obvious in its benefits, as is mail, calculator, or expense tracker. If you work in an international shop, the city time app comes in handy. This merely covers the applications INCLUDED with the PDA.
With Vindigo in a major city, you have the equivalent of an online street map, with a listing of restaurants, ATMs, movie theatres & movie listings. With a program like Secret!, you can keep all your pin codes & passwords to various machine, and it will be encrypted data.
With Avantgo (or plucker), you can read web content offline. (Handy for killing time on the 1 hour subway commute.) With a doc reader, like plucker or iSilo, you can keep HOWTO files and other documentation handy for reading. I keep the entire PERL command reference in my PDA! With iSilo, it organizes the information by its weblinks. When I'm not reading stuff on the PDA, I like to brainstorm and scribble down design notes of systems or programs. (I could even script on the PDA, but I'm pretty tired at the end of the day.) And yes, there are games too.
With a modem or wireless internet accessory, you may even be able to vnc or telnet into your machines if you're at a party and get that *(#$#%^ page.
I don't understand why some techies would have difficulty picking up graffiti. Its all block letter shorthand. You may have to memorize 5 unique strokes for letters, or 15 if you want to do punctuation as well. Take the one day effort to learn. Play the giraffe game. Before I had exposure to the PDA, I thought learning graffiti was going to be onerous. I was SHOCKED to find myself functionally writing with it in 1 hour. (Granted, its difficult to transcribe at lecture speed. Boo hoo, you might not be able to use the PDA for lectures notes.)
Its an awesome device for system administrators.
Well, I could have said his "New York Jew bigotry" is not much different to Southern White Trash Redneck, but I wasn't sure if the poster was actually from the NYC metro area. In any case, leave it to a pro-zionist to miss the point. To refer to Southerners as "white trash" and redneck is prejudiced and offensive. I'm sure there are even some Southerner white trash rednecks that would be offended at being called anti-semites. If you cannot see the tools of racism and bigotry, and do not condemn their use, you probably will end up using them.
People who think Israel doesn't have the right to exist is basically an anti-semite.
What would that make a Palestinian against the existence of Israel? A self-hating anti-semite? I do not have a problem with the creation and existence of Israel. That does not mean I condone blowing up a building with children inside in order to get a terrorist, or allowing children in schoolyards to be be blown up because they are too lazy to setup a sniper team. I also don't think such terrorism is justified even when its practiced against the perpetrator. Does that make me an anti-semite?
How did that dude get so fucked up.
Its called paranoid schitzophrenia [295.30 DSM-IV]. One of Bobby Fischer chess contemporaries, Reuben Fine, was a psychologist, and noted symptomatic behavior when Fischer was a teenager. It also explains a lot of odd behavior Fischer has exhibited throughout his life. Its sad, really.
BTW, southern white trash redneck anti-semitism is not much different than your pro-zionist prejudice.
No, war is not good for any economy. Its a myth perpetuated by the military-industrial complex. It destroys assets, disrupts trade, and creates a big tax load which sucks capital away from fledgling businesses and consumption. The only possibility that war could be a good thing would be during a great depression, when you have a flatlined economy. And there are economists that argue the US economy was recovering even without WWII.
Congratulations, you are another warmongerer who needs to be beaten with a cluebat. Apropos that you don't have the stones to stand by your ignorant statements. I don't have the energy to rip to shreds every incredibly incorrect statement you have made. I'll just point out that the China statement shows how clueless you are. No, we would not agitate China while we are taking over the world's oil. China would see that our military resources are mired in the Middle East. That means China would see an opportunity to finally bring its renegade province back into control. (Help! I'm an American voter surrounded by too many idiots.)
Typical prolectariat mindset. The lineworkers are what makes the product, the rest are bit players. Move to Cuba, communista. No, a company is an organism or an army. Its job is to dominate their economic niche. That requires good management as well as good workers. They are all valuable, including the shareholders which provide the capital to grow. Ford's epiphany was relevant to his industry and his era. Oracle does not expect their employees to become their customers, nor does Boeing or Northrup/Grumman. The problem is not the "scumbags" like Welch (which BTW, I do not consider him worthy of the top ten corporate robber barons). The scumbags are maximizing their bank account; they merely are in a better position to do it than the line worker. No, the problem is the lineworker, because he/she are f**king morons. So stupid, they do not understand that Welch cannot get his perks, high salary, or move factories without his job, which is in the hands of the Company's Board, who's officers he helps appoint. That guys like Skilling cannot "bust-out" companies like Enron without the criminal complicity of the accounting company which he hired. There is a weapon that the lineworker has to make sure that these Mafiosa CEOs cannot subvert the regulatory mechanisms in place to prevent workers from losing their jobs and 401Ks. And last week, they elected people who will continue to aid the CEO in their fraud and oppression of the worker. (Unbelievable!) Don't believe me? Who was the Chairman of the SEC, and who currently is? How will putting Republicans in control of both legislative houses encourage hearings to expose economic corruption from the people who spend billions to get them in that position? What is the significance of these questions? Life does not have the obligation to make the dumbasses' life easier or more fair. The only reason you think otherwise was that your dumbass parents told you so. Here's a clue, stop being a dumbass.
And what were the major military actions during the Clinton administration? A small military incursion in Sommalia, some bombing in Iraq, some bombing in Serbia leading to another small military incursion in the Balkans, and some missles lobbed out in Afganistan.
What really kills me is that people don't realize that a smaller military is encouraged to avoid military interventions AND THAT IS GOOD. Military actions are EXPENSIVE. If you intelligently pick your fights, and use diplomacy to avoid or manage conflicts, you don't need to have the largest standing army in the world.
Its cheaper to hire slightly more bodies and not do anything with them. The military is an insurance policy. You have to sink resources into it in order to be prepared for an crisis, but you only want to spend enough to make sure that they can effectively respond to the (theoretical) crisis.
Now look at what Bush does. With that same sized military, he has a major military engagement in Afganistan, and is moving to start another one in Iraq. Where was the proof that Saddam has WMD and their use was imminent? Where was the proof that Saddam was running Al Queda? Why the hell do we pump in a billion dollars into Israel if we're expected to do all the fighting anyway?
The USA may be the remaining "superpower" of this era, but that does not mean we are the "world's policeman". If the US thinks that its job to put patriotic Americans into body bags, you can forget about economic prosperity. The dollars for the economy will be coverted to tax dollars to pay for military actions. Since it looks like the Bush administration does not know where to pick its fights, the Taiwanese should get ready to unite with the mainland a lot sooner than they originally planned.
Yes, I did. I installed it when Debian first made its distribution public last year. I threw it out shortly after the first crash. I did not bother to count the number of packages, and it won't change the fact that xBSD will get more package support than HURD. Perhaps you could support your argument by providing a link to where those HURD application packages can be obtained. (Its not at the links you provided.)
Only a clueless academic regurgitator such as yourself will think that when HURD gets a couple MORE of years of development under its belt, that it will run more quickly than the linux kernel. After all, expending more CPU time creating superfluous interprocess communication somehow makes kernels more efficient. Or HURD will run more stably with all those system and application threads competing with each other to get work done. Oh, people will be running on top of each other to run a slower, buggier OS. And people love to spend their free time developing for obscure platforms like xBSD, QNX, and BeOS
Look, maybe in your world RMS is God, and believe everyone should run their lives by his dogma. But if I see the emperor is naked, I'm going to call him on it. You take one of my statements, misconstrue it, and conclude everything I say is a lie. But you and your smelly, unwashed zealots missed the whole point of my exposition.
No commercial entity is going to run their webservers or databases on HURD in this decade (if ever). They will chose a commmercial product or chose the OS with the faster, more stable kernel (it will not be HURD). The same goes for people who use their computers to websurf, write documents, and handle email. These are applications used by the "real world".
The value of HURD is not as a viable alternative to Linux. HURD as valdidation of RMS communist theories is only of value to RMS. HURD will not experience widespread adoption once it can create a disk partition greater than 1 GB. HURD has tremendous potential as a platform which can construct new computer paradigms we cannot implement with our current OSs. But it needs to work, and it needs to work efficiently enough for people to discount the performance hit due to its design. Porting web servers, other popular applications, or obscure device drivers to a platform that currently does not meet minimal requirements in performance and stability is a freaking waste of time. Judging HURD as valueless because it is not a viable Linux alternative is equally clueless.
And who runs device drivers that crash the OS??? How many drivers in the stable version of Linux that crash the operating system have been kept??? Its a theoretical selling point. Right now, current distributions of HURD cannot match the uptime of Linux.
HURD is not the operating system choice of "hackers" or slashdotters. Hackers want to run computer applications (reliably and speedily). That is not what HURD is about. Its the utopian platform for computer science geeks; people who want to go beyond the current paradigm of UNIX, classic sequential computing, etc. . By abstracting the ukernel to a couple of critical operations (time slicing, memory allocation, and IPC), and moving every other operation to user mode, you have a tool that can be used to implement new concepts in computer operating systems.
Its not an alternative to Linux. Its an orange to Linux's apple. It will suck as an alternative to Linux. It will run slower than Linux (especially if they stick with Mach). It will not run more stablely than Linux (given its increased complexity). It may be a better platform for multiple CPU configurations, be we won't know that for sure until its ukernel design is complete, and an implementation of HURD actually proves it to be faster. Very few people will want to port useful packages to HURD; they'll go to Linux for reliability and performance. HURD's purpose is not a platform to run applications. Its a platform for computer science research.
That is the reason why I do not wish death on HURD and rejoice when there is good news for it. It does not really compete with Linux for mindshare. If it proves to be a superior platform for MP processing, only then will it have a mundane use.
I have massive contempt for its project management. Its currently looking like the OS that will never get released. And it does not deserve a serious look until it gets a quality ukernel, like L4 (which itself is unfinished). MACH will not cut it, or its UKS(?) version.
How do you make it last 30 minutes? (:
Presumably the homosexual male would not be aroused by the hetero female. I figure that would delay the coital act.
Seriously - to repeat my earlier post: the biologist I talked to claimed that even if homosexuals had 99% as many children as heterosexuals did, it would not be enough to save the 'gay gene', in the long run, according to computer models. Are you claiming that (a) the model in question is flawed,
I would be inclined to think so. If you consider certain fatal genetic diseases or mortality vectors as equivalent to homosexuality (they both prevent the passing of genetic material to the next generation), a 1% less likelihood of passing offspring would not weed out any specific gene. Hell, what that statement implies is that "geeks" are doomed to be weeded out the gene pool.
or (b) on average, homosexuals have (or had, historically) at least as many children as heterosexuals do? I find (b) more than a little hard to believe. Maybe "its" [sic] just my "crippled, atropied [sic] critical thinking skills".
No, I don't believe that homosexuals produce as much offspring as heterosexuals. But I am starting to question your critical thinking skills.
(The other choices: (c) there is at least one other factor at work, cf. the shaman theory, or (d) homosexuality does not have a significant genetic factor after all.)
(c) is plausible, (d) is not as plausible, and you forget (e) you made a distinct error in either listening, understanding, or representing what the biologist was trying to say.
Its the our crippled, atropied critical thinking skills, unable to perceive things outside of our cultural context, that prevents us from making obvious conclusions.
Did anyone ever tell you intellectual snobbery is unattractive?
Didn't you notice I used the pronoun our in that statement. Its hardly snobbery when the snob is including himself in the masses of the weak thinking.
Actually, if I end up with the "blessing" of children, I will probably go out of my way to get my children (older than 3 years old) infected with chicken pox. Screw the vaccine, which could potentially have all sorts of contaminants or manufacturing flaws. No CHILD is going to suffer death or disfigurement from getting chicken pox. Contracting chicken pox as an adult can be fatal.
I used to be similarly confused as to how genetic homosexuality could exist with natural selection, but the answer is quite obvious. Answer: You don't have to lust over the act of procreation in order to procreate. Many homosexuals have the desire to have offspring. Boffing the hetero is nothing more than a 30 minute task. In fact, there are quite a few closet, married homosexual males (mostly to hetero females, or vice versa) with kids. Also, it would easier to pass homosexual genes back in the era of arranged marriages (which existed in the western culture 100 years ago, and still exists today around the world). Its the our crippled, atropied critical thinking skills, unable to perceive things outside of our cultural context, that prevents us from making obvious conclusions.
Can't it be said that many countries will remain poor and on the back burner for many years because they have little natural resources and a small population? Don't you need a somewhat large population and a good supply of materiel to get things done?
The answer is no. The counter examples are Hong Kong and Singapore. They are basically city-states which attained their economic position through careful investment and development of their niche industries. Slightly larger examples which still fall under small population and limited natural resources would be South Korea and Taiwan. An example of a foundering country with a large population and plentiful natural resources would be Indonesia (and maybe Congo/Zaire).
I realize that this isn't exactly in line with IP, but I don't think that's a pressing issue for a subsistance farmer thousands of miles from most of us.
Neither is population control or education, but they are all critical issues to the economic well-being of a nation. IP doesn't affect the individual farmer or (most) individual citizens. But it does affect a nation's wealth (and thus power and economic development) and thus consequently affects those farmers and citizens. Implying that if a small, poor country should be resigned to its economic fate, and thus IP is not a contributor to its situation is fallacious.
Not sure how much of a bargain. She's spending years of her life where she could be a practicing doctor doing training instead. At least 5 years lost for the Phd and the fellowship. Actually, it kind of irks me that she's taking this program yet her primary career goal will not be medical research. Oh well, glad I'm not a Texan taxpayer.