I think VRAM wouldn't be of any help there. What you think of Photoshop is what you render on the screen. That's 2D - or, just dumping pixels to the screen. All photoshop rendering and operations are done by the CPU - which is why photoshop will complain about junk like the resolution (too small, not enough colors) but doesn't care about your graphics card (well it doesn't say on the box anyway).
Well that's one nice thing about the windows key, is that it's in a good spot, but no Linux distro really requires it. In KDE I use it to bind all sorts of keyboard shortcuts without needing weird 3+ key kung fu and not worrying about conflicting with application shortcuts - my favorite being binding win+r to the kde run dialog (like windows) so I can launch any application quickly. I'm not to happy with the windows logo, but you can remove it if you're really hardcore.
That's one of the things I don't get about gentoo. Why in the hell does emerge have a --deep argument. I ugraded my system for like 6 months without (sometimes you miss documentation I guess), and it worked fine, but WHY is this hidden. Is there any reason I want to upgrade the packages but not it's dependancies?
I use Win2k with Gentoo, and it works fine. Any problems you'll have will be with grub. That aside, keep in mind that if you have to do a re-install of Win2k, it'll wack your boot sector and you'll have to install grub again.
SuSE is what (finally really) got me onto linux, but I was rather annoyed with it. Deliberatly crippling kaffiene so that it couldn't play DVD's was a big annoyance, and the other major issue was that every update of KDE I tried majorly messed stuff up. The main advice I'd give you is to keep a copy of your xorg.conf somewhere. xorgcfg makes it much easier than it used to be, but it'll eliminate many of your fustrations when setting up X by having the old one handy.
The BSDs do use GPL code, gcc being one of many examples. For the most part, it's the installer we're probably talking about here, thus not part of the base system, so it's probably not so much of an issue if one of the BSDs decided to adopt it.
Not sure if I would want this sort of installation or not, but I think that the BSD projects could benefit from easier installations. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to do it now, but it could be made a bit easier. Right now I'd say the future of BSD installation is the DragonFly installer.
Firefox might not be such a bad benchmark. Go a bunch of Japanese pages with status bar scrollers (in japanese) then open up about 20+ tabs. I do this every day, and the CPU usage on Linux can go up to a sustained 70-90% or more. If gcc is working in the background, the system can really lack responsiveness (and I'm on an AthonXP 3000 with 1Gb of RAM). Out of all the apps I use, Firefox and Mame take the cake in CPU usage.
Which brings up the point of us hitting a limit now. So what do we do? Add another processor. And after a year when that is old hat? Add 2 more? Are we just going to keep adding processors now? If that is the case (which doesn't seem far fetched anymore) then the Cell Processor technology looks even more interesting.
You will always have people who are for the "rebel" cause and against the norm. Some of us like going against the grain with something like Linux because we enjoy using it or messing with it for some reason. But many in society have this opinion that in order for them to "win" someone else has to "lose". With computer technology it's sort of tricky because market share really is important. If web browser market share is 99% IE, then Mozilla becomes literally irrelevent. If Mozilla has 50% market share, then it needs to be supported. Same with Linux to some extent, so Linux gaining market share is important. However some people have the rather misguided view that Linux must destroy Windows for them to "win".
As a BSD person I can't say I'm overly concerned with where Linux goes, but we're all in the same boat more or less. Seriously I don't care as long as the OS continues to improve, and KDE continues to make gains.
Heh, I was going to post the same thing about the licence plate. Generally I doubt you'd be able to use it for the other purposes because you're not going to get a good read from standard devices with the metal ammount in cars, and the fact that you would probably have to have a decent position of the vehicle, and possibly interference by other RFID tags which could also be in the vehicle.
Most people seem to be overlooking the obvious that RFID is a fancy barcode. It's basically a serial number (licence plate), you have to reference a database to get any real information. And if someone has access to that database then there are much bigger problems at hand.
Unless they're talking about uber transmitters that hold all of your information, but that sounds pretty expensive to replace inspection stickers.
My understanding is that this was intended mainly for laptops. I'm not sure how long this has been a part of the standard, but I wouldn't be surprised if many laptops were still being distributed with Windows 98 when this was drawn up. Is it better than encrypting your files? Well of course not, but it doesn't slow down the hardware at all, and it's rather simple.
But how safe is encrypting your files? What algorithm does it use? Is it implemented properly? Even if you know for sure, someone can read the data off the drive use a brute force attack (impractical but possible). With the ata password you can't (easily) read anything off the drive short of a raw read off of the platters, so I wouldn't say it's that bad of an idea.
I'm just sort of curious how this would affect ATA RAID controllers. Would it pass such a command through, or just ignore it?
1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty;
Gentoo does not require you compile anything, you can use precompiled packages. There is also the Gentoo project for OSX which as far as I know doesn't mess with the base system at all.
Besides which this is aready somewhat possible. The NetBSD pkgsrc system (also derrived from FreeBSD ports) can run on Iterix (a.k.a Windows Services for Unix). The driver support and such is of course bullshit, but it's quite possible that we could one day see some form of gentoo on NT.
I think the origonal story was about a university where it actually was drywalled.
But as your story states, I don't think it's all that uncommon. I was brought into a lawfirm where I was supposed to evaluate replacing a server that was having problems. So I looked at a client machine and saw Netware was installed, but I assumed someone had just installed it for no reason. But then ooking at the drive mapping for the file server I noticed that combined, the files were pretty close to 500Mb and the problem was it was running out of space all the time. So I asked how old the server was. "Pretty old". What kind is it? No one knew. Does it run Netware? No one knew. Where is it? No one knew.
They have no IT person or even a consultant so apperently it was set up a long time ago "somewhere" and since then the traditions of installing netware had been handed down like from some caveman tribe on how to connect to it. We never did find it either. Well about this time they all started bickering over other stuff and never really made a decision if they even wanted me to replace it. One guy expressed is concern that the server was on its last leg. I told him not to worry. Aside from running out of space, it'll probably run for another 10 years with no problems.
Umm... you weren't seriously going to deploy that today were you? Servers up today are still secure so there's no immidiate rush. There are more than enough insane people who try to install it immidiatly to know what to look out for, so it's best to wait a week or so.
That's what really sucks about the windows registration proceedure. You can't just throw a copy on a machine install the SP to see if it blows up or not. With Win2k I do this regularly and it's saved me a couple times. I'm certainly not paying MS an extra $800 so I can test their shit to see if it breaks my machine.
It's way too easy to accidentally screw the system up
Heh, you state that it's an accident, but what did YOU do to screw the system up? Like me you probably did nothing, it's just that Gentoo managed to fuck shit up itself. Basically it's a Linux problem. It's pretty rare to see an install that's screwed up by default. But it's the updates that kill. With Gentoo you end up with constant fustration of little small things that break here and there on a regular basis - usually easily fixed, but annoying none the less. Other distros that have a fixed release schedule often tend to have MAJOR problems during an update due to the nature of them upgrading everything at the same time. It's something Linux will hopefully iron out as it matures.
I think the Gentoo handbook could use a more intuitive format and documentation, but maybe that's just me. I went for months just doing emerge -u world, but eventually someone pointed out that you should use the deep option every now and then as well (emerge -vup --deep world). Not surprising I had a lot of dependancies that were way out of date. Then stuff like revdep-rebuild, and emerge --depclean don't seem to be well explained. Well now that I found out about dispatch-conf at least I won't be faced with config over-write explosions
I watched my girlfriend play it before she got her licence. She seemed to have a huge problem keeping the car on the road and for some reason the vehicle would have a tendancy to spin off the road and mow down people for no good reason. When I'd play I'd give the controller to her so I could go to the bathroom, I'd come back and she'd already have about 2-3 stars and cops all over the place - usually because she had run more people over.
Needless to say I didn't let her learn to drive in my car =P
If you're running a P133 you should look into NetBSD. My first computer is a P133 stuffed with 96Mb RAM and it's sort of a hobby of mine to keep it going. Basically you are going to get nowhere with a 300Mb drive.
You might consider giving this a try.
Take a fast computer (AtlhonXP or whatever) with the target hard drive (I'd recommend at least 500-1000Mb), install NetBSD then stuff it into the old machine. Now that sounds easy, but I've never gotten it to work with linux. After that you should be able to use NFS for the pkgsrc (like portage) files, to compile the software you need. Acually with NFS you probably CAN get away with 300Mb drives on client machines, and possibly one Uber server with say... a Pentium Pro and a 8Gb drive.
shouldn't you be running RELEASE on servers? (Just nitpicking) =)
They don't run gentoo, but run FreeBSD (close enough).
Actually I think you sort of get off track there. Gentoo and FreeBSD are similar but very different in the way they operate. The FreeBSD base (for most people) operates on a tested release schedule. FreeBSD CURRENT lets you live closer to the edge than any other Linux distro ever does, which is why it's sort of crazy to use IMO. But FreeBSD has the base system, and allows you access to software with ports. They are too separate entities. Gentoo being Linux uses portage to update everything including the kernel. FreeBSD doesn't have an unstable version of ports, although you can use bleeding edge versions of some of them.
To me Free/Net BSD is sort of like having your cake and eating it too. A stable base operating system, and software that is kept up to date.
If you don't want to bother installing it (or risk messing up something in your system) you can check it out using Knoppix. Just boot using "knoppix desktop=xfce" You'll never use Knoppix with KDE again =)
Exactly what I was going to post. Where I work I've converted the browser on most machines to firefox (after significant virus/spyware problems). Either they like the browser or they're too chicken to tell me what kind of web sites don't work in Firefox, but I've had no complaints.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually USE the neat features in firefox. The google toolbar, tabbed browsing... seriously most people just don't care. Which is sort of fustrating that this is a real battle for the web where independance from any one company, and real web standards are being fought for - but the determining factor is market share by a bunch of people who will use whatever you put in front of them =/
Oracle is in a bind here. For one thing Oracle runs pretty well on Linux. What Oracle is afraid of is what tends to come with most Linux distributions: MySQL and Postgresql. At least on Windows you have to pay for SQL Server. For most Linux distros you just click a box or type a command and MySQL/Postgresql install themselves for free. I'd be a bit concerned about that as well if I were Oracle.
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I think VRAM wouldn't be of any help there. What you think of Photoshop is what you render on the screen. That's 2D - or, just dumping pixels to the screen. All photoshop rendering and operations are done by the CPU - which is why photoshop will complain about junk like the resolution (too small, not enough colors) but doesn't care about your graphics card (well it doesn't say on the box anyway).
But I don't really know either =P
Well that's one nice thing about the windows key, is that it's in a good spot, but no Linux distro really requires it. In KDE I use it to bind all sorts of keyboard shortcuts without needing weird 3+ key kung fu and not worrying about conflicting with application shortcuts - my favorite being binding win+r to the kde run dialog (like windows) so I can launch any application quickly. I'm not to happy with the windows logo, but you can remove it if you're really hardcore.
That's one of the things I don't get about gentoo. Why in the hell does emerge have a --deep argument. I ugraded my system for like 6 months without (sometimes you miss documentation I guess), and it worked fine, but WHY is this hidden. Is there any reason I want to upgrade the packages but not it's dependancies?
I use Win2k with Gentoo, and it works fine. Any problems you'll have will be with grub. That aside, keep in mind that if you have to do a re-install of Win2k, it'll wack your boot sector and you'll have to install grub again.
SuSE is what (finally really) got me onto linux, but I was rather annoyed with it. Deliberatly crippling kaffiene so that it couldn't play DVD's was a big annoyance, and the other major issue was that every update of KDE I tried majorly messed stuff up. The main advice I'd give you is to keep a copy of your xorg.conf somewhere. xorgcfg makes it much easier than it used to be, but it'll eliminate many of your fustrations when setting up X by having the old one handy.
The BSDs do use GPL code, gcc being one of many examples. For the most part, it's the installer we're probably talking about here, thus not part of the base system, so it's probably not so much of an issue if one of the BSDs decided to adopt it.
Not sure if I would want this sort of installation or not, but I think that the BSD projects could benefit from easier installations. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to do it now, but it could be made a bit easier. Right now I'd say the future of BSD installation is the DragonFly installer.
Firefox might not be such a bad benchmark. Go a bunch of Japanese pages with status bar scrollers (in japanese) then open up about 20+ tabs. I do this every day, and the CPU usage on Linux can go up to a sustained 70-90% or more. If gcc is working in the background, the system can really lack responsiveness (and I'm on an AthonXP 3000 with 1Gb of RAM). Out of all the apps I use, Firefox and Mame take the cake in CPU usage.
Which brings up the point of us hitting a limit now. So what do we do? Add another processor. And after a year when that is old hat? Add 2 more? Are we just going to keep adding processors now? If that is the case (which doesn't seem far fetched anymore) then the Cell Processor technology looks even more interesting.
You will always have people who are for the "rebel" cause and against the norm. Some of us like going against the grain with something like Linux because we enjoy using it or messing with it for some reason. But many in society have this opinion that in order for them to "win" someone else has to "lose". With computer technology it's sort of tricky because market share really is important. If web browser market share is 99% IE, then Mozilla becomes literally irrelevent. If Mozilla has 50% market share, then it needs to be supported. Same with Linux to some extent, so Linux gaining market share is important. However some people have the rather misguided view that Linux must destroy Windows for them to "win".
As a BSD person I can't say I'm overly concerned with where Linux goes, but we're all in the same boat more or less. Seriously I don't care as long as the OS continues to improve, and KDE continues to make gains.
Heh, I was going to post the same thing about the licence plate. Generally I doubt you'd be able to use it for the other purposes because you're not going to get a good read from standard devices with the metal ammount in cars, and the fact that you would probably have to have a decent position of the vehicle, and possibly interference by other RFID tags which could also be in the vehicle.
Most people seem to be overlooking the obvious that RFID is a fancy barcode. It's basically a serial number (licence plate), you have to reference a database to get any real information. And if someone has access to that database then there are much bigger problems at hand.
Unless they're talking about uber transmitters that hold all of your information, but that sounds pretty expensive to replace inspection stickers.
My understanding is that this was intended mainly for laptops. I'm not sure how long this has been a part of the standard, but I wouldn't be surprised if many laptops were still being distributed with Windows 98 when this was drawn up. Is it better than encrypting your files? Well of course not, but it doesn't slow down the hardware at all, and it's rather simple.
But how safe is encrypting your files? What algorithm does it use? Is it implemented properly? Even if you know for sure, someone can read the data off the drive use a brute force attack (impractical but possible). With the ata password you can't (easily) read anything off the drive short of a raw read off of the platters, so I wouldn't say it's that bad of an idea.
I'm just sort of curious how this would affect ATA RAID controllers. Would it pass such a command through, or just ignore it?
Wouldn't that violate the gpl?
1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty;
Gentoo does not require you compile anything, you can use precompiled packages. There is also the Gentoo project for OSX which as far as I know doesn't mess with the base system at all.
Besides which this is aready somewhat possible. The NetBSD pkgsrc system (also derrived from FreeBSD ports) can run on Iterix (a.k.a Windows Services for Unix). The driver support and such is of course bullshit, but it's quite possible that we could one day see some form of gentoo on NT.
I think the origonal story was about a university where it actually was drywalled.
But as your story states, I don't think it's all that uncommon. I was brought into a lawfirm where I was supposed to evaluate replacing a server that was having problems. So I looked at a client machine and saw Netware was installed, but I assumed someone had just installed it for no reason. But then ooking at the drive mapping for the file server I noticed that combined, the files were pretty close to 500Mb and the problem was it was running out of space all the time. So I asked how old the server was. "Pretty old". What kind is it? No one knew. Does it run Netware? No one knew. Where is it? No one knew.
They have no IT person or even a consultant so apperently it was set up a long time ago "somewhere" and since then the traditions of installing netware had been handed down like from some caveman tribe on how to connect to it. We never did find it either. Well about this time they all started bickering over other stuff and never really made a decision if they even wanted me to replace it. One guy expressed is concern that the server was on its last leg. I told him not to worry. Aside from running out of space, it'll probably run for another 10 years with no problems.
Umm... you weren't seriously going to deploy that today were you? Servers up today are still secure so there's no immidiate rush. There are more than enough insane people who try to install it immidiatly to know what to look out for, so it's best to wait a week or so.
That's what really sucks about the windows registration proceedure. You can't just throw a copy on a machine install the SP to see if it blows up or not. With Win2k I do this regularly and it's saved me a couple times. I'm certainly not paying MS an extra $800 so I can test their shit to see if it breaks my machine.
It's way too easy to accidentally screw the system up
Heh, you state that it's an accident, but what did YOU do to screw the system up? Like me you probably did nothing, it's just that Gentoo managed to fuck shit up itself. Basically it's a Linux problem. It's pretty rare to see an install that's screwed up by default. But it's the updates that kill. With Gentoo you end up with constant fustration of little small things that break here and there on a regular basis - usually easily fixed, but annoying none the less. Other distros that have a fixed release schedule often tend to have MAJOR problems during an update due to the nature of them upgrading everything at the same time. It's something Linux will hopefully iron out as it matures.
I think the Gentoo handbook could use a more intuitive format and documentation, but maybe that's just me. I went for months just doing emerge -u world, but eventually someone pointed out that you should use the deep option every now and then as well (emerge -vup --deep world). Not surprising I had a lot of dependancies that were way out of date. Then stuff like revdep-rebuild, and emerge --depclean don't seem to be well explained. Well now that I found out about dispatch-conf at least I won't be faced with config over-write explosions
I watched my girlfriend play it before she got her licence. She seemed to have a huge problem keeping the car on the road and for some reason the vehicle would have a tendancy to spin off the road and mow down people for no good reason. When I'd play I'd give the controller to her so I could go to the bathroom, I'd come back and she'd already have about 2-3 stars and cops all over the place - usually because she had run more people over.
Needless to say I didn't let her learn to drive in my car =P
So, how does one get set up to give the classes to teach the young pups how to ace this "test"?
Hmm... set up a class where you continually berate people to RTFM? I'd think that would be the ultimate BSD course!
If you're running a P133 you should look into NetBSD. My first computer is a P133 stuffed with 96Mb RAM and it's sort of a hobby of mine to keep it going. Basically you are going to get nowhere with a 300Mb drive.
You might consider giving this a try.
Take a fast computer (AtlhonXP or whatever) with the target hard drive (I'd recommend at least 500-1000Mb), install NetBSD then stuff it into the old machine. Now that sounds easy, but I've never gotten it to work with linux. After that you should be able to use NFS for the pkgsrc (like portage) files, to compile the software you need. Acually with NFS you probably CAN get away with 300Mb drives on client machines, and possibly one Uber server with say... a Pentium Pro and a 8Gb drive.
shouldn't you be running RELEASE on servers? (Just nitpicking) =)
They don't run gentoo, but run FreeBSD (close enough).
Actually I think you sort of get off track there. Gentoo and FreeBSD are similar but very different in the way they operate. The FreeBSD base (for most people) operates on a tested release schedule. FreeBSD CURRENT lets you live closer to the edge than any other Linux distro ever does, which is why it's sort of crazy to use IMO. But FreeBSD has the base system, and allows you access to software with ports. They are too separate entities. Gentoo being Linux uses portage to update everything including the kernel. FreeBSD doesn't have an unstable version of ports, although you can use bleeding edge versions of some of them.
To me Free/Net BSD is sort of like having your cake and eating it too. A stable base operating system, and software that is kept up to date.
If you don't want to bother installing it (or risk messing up something in your system) you can check it out using Knoppix. Just boot using "knoppix desktop=xfce" You'll never use Knoppix with KDE again =)
Funny... All those chinese guys named Wang don't look like porn starts.
I wonder if we keep submitting the EXACT same articles over and over if this would force the "editors" to pay attention.
Exactly what I was going to post. Where I work I've converted the browser on most machines to firefox (after significant virus/spyware problems). Either they like the browser or they're too chicken to tell me what kind of web sites don't work in Firefox, but I've had no complaints.
... seriously most people just don't care. Which is sort of fustrating that this is a real battle for the web where independance from any one company, and real web standards are being fought for - but the determining factor is market share by a bunch of people who will use whatever you put in front of them =/
I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually USE the neat features in firefox. The google toolbar, tabbed browsing
On all the laptops that come in I remove the MS stickers on it. All the garbage cans in my office say "Made for Windows XP" =)
Oracle is in a bind here. For one thing Oracle runs pretty well on Linux. What Oracle is afraid of is what tends to come with most Linux distributions: MySQL and Postgresql. At least on Windows you have to pay for SQL Server. For most Linux distros you just click a box or type a command and MySQL/Postgresql install themselves for free. I'd be a bit concerned about that as well if I were Oracle.