You probably wouldn't want to run any kind of Windows on a PC/104 system anyway.
Not so... WinCE is a perfect candidate for embedded systems. But that's not even the point. Embedded systems are used as device controllers and data collection. There is typically no GUI. And the GUI's that are written are a single app. But when you want a gui app for your computer controlled lathe, why not use WinCE's toolkits and apis?
Redhat 7 is right out. Far too big.
Far too big for what? To fit in ram? Redhat 7.x, Mandrake 8.x, etal... are just Linux. The way I see it, what you get when you go with a RedHat or a Mandrake is a set of matched packages. Everything is compiled, ready to go, using the same optimizations, and dependancies are checked for you. So, why not use RedHat as a base system? You pick and choose what you want to install on your hard drive when designing the system and then when you're done writing your app you pick the components that are required to run it and copy those onto the DiskOnChip that you plug into the finished system. Of course a complete install of RedHat 7.3 is not going to fit on a 128 MB chip - that's not the intended market. You can, however, easilly fit the kernel, utilities, system libs, and gtk+ for linux-fb on a 32 MB chip and have lots of room to spare for your embedded system app.
OMG... that's the funniest thing I've seen all day! Thanks!
Re:Letting users do things that are otherwise ille
on
GPL's Strength
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· Score: 2
Software and books are used almost identically.
By UK copyright law's logic, as long as I can run the program without loading it into memory it's exactly like a book. Look at the case of a ROM cartridge -- and even Linux can run programs in place from disk. So if I can run the program right from the installation media then I don't need a license? But if I want to do the generally accepted practice (so widely accepted, in fact, that most operating systems don't allow any other method) of loading a program into memory while running it I need a license in the UK. That's crazy.
But beyond the technical, I still can't see how copying a program onto a drive and then into memory is any different than me reading a book, translating the printed text on the page into representative thought and then comprehending that thought into a mental image of what the author was trying to convey to me. And god forbid that I remember what I read and write it down for reference.
Re:Letting users do things that are otherwise ille
on
GPL's Strength
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· Score: 3, Informative
Not really... Think of the "software as a book" metaphore. You don't need a license to read a book, just as you don't need a license to use software. The author of a book does not give up copyright when they sell a million copies of a book --- you didn't agree to a license, yet you cannot photocopy a book and sell it. Licenses are restrictive measures, above and beyond existing copyright law, put in place to dictate how software can be used and distributed.
Only problem with DBI is that even though it abstracts away the API calls needed to talk to the database you still have to follow each DB's SQL quirks. So if you want to be cross db platform, you pretty much have to modularize all your database access and write the custom code for each db you're connecting to. Not that it's a bad thing... I'm all for using a database's strengths and working around its weaknesses to give optimal performance. DBI isn't as cross platform as you imply it is.
BestBuy was just eliminating a competitor when they bought Musicland. They were already one of the largest sellers of cd's in 2001. The real issue behind this is that BestBuy owns a record label (can't remember the name, Red Line Records?) and as such they are indirectly member of the RIAA.
The point is that Lindows is making $99 off every beta release.
But this begs the question... has any individual who spent the $99 asked Lindows for the source to the programs they received? I realize the FSF is asking for it, but did they purchase the product? The GPL does not require that you give away your code for free to anyone who asks for it, only to those who you distributed the binary.
That's not to mention that we don't know which programs have been 'enhanced'. Wine? XFree86? KDE? Who's to say... they might have written completely proprietary code to do all their special Windows-esque things and they won't have to release any of it.
Re:oh, my first chance at seeing the dumb Katz
on
Review: Panic Room
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· Score: 1
ILM aren't as great as they used to be
It's not that ILM aren't just as good as they once were. It's that there are others who are now on par (or better). Some of the best effects in the industry are still produced by ILM - just look at Episode 2.
You only got burned by the bug if you actually saw the problem - like say me. I'm actually the one who reported the reproducable test case for this bug. The bug has been in the system since the introduced WAL in 7.1. And how did I find it? Pg crashed in our production environment and we got duplicate inserts primary keys after it started up again. At least it's fixed now - and going from 7.2.0 to 7.2.1 is _not_ a hard thing: compile, install, stop/start. Couple seconds of downtime?
I was looking at that...What do those patents claim, and is it possible to implement CIFS without them? If not, then M$ has something with which to hit Samba over the head...
They're both pretty much the same thing:
US5265261: Method and system for network communications using raw mode protocols
US5437013: Method and system for network communications using raw mode protocols
Right, and likewise you can get more than one note at a time on a violin by playing more than one string at a time (is the physical limit 2 or 3 notes?), and then of course there's some resonance - which while not the same as a sustain, helps make it possible to get the sound of chords. My example was probably a bit oversimplified.
What's interesting too, tying all of this back together, is that the first typewriter was designed based on the piano.
Another example of this is the different between the violin and the piano. While you can certainly produce lots of notes at a high rate on a violin, you're (pretty much) stuck making one at a time. With a piano you can make up to 10 notes at once. You just get a higher throughput - that's what enables a single person to sound more like a symphony by playing a single keyboard. You could never do that with a single violin.
/. math: 50 Karma, +2 Funny, -2 Overrated, = 49 Karma. It just ain't right.
That's too funny, gotta love the karma cap. Instead of a cap they should just expire the points away when the story is archived. Then the karma whore's would really have to work to keep their +2 bonus:-)
The best any program can do is hide the passwords if they want to allow auto-login. It just can't be done any other way. You can get auto-login passwords MSN, AOL, and ICQ all by going through the registry or configuration files. Trillian could encrypt the files, but then you need to enter a password when Trillian starts. Maybe that's a small price to pay for a little bit of added security, maybe it it's not worth it to most people.
I encrypt my Trillian directory and run it as a user that has the ability to read those files. And likewise I run all file sharing programs as a user that has no permissions at all except for their own directories. Windows 2000/XP aren't so bad:-) at least they give you a process model that's similar to *nix.
Re:Not as bad as all that
on
Google Juice
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· Score: 2, Funny
Right, so if in every post I make to Slashdot I linked to Scientology Home Page or Bunch of Nutcases. Then those search strings could potentially rise higher up since they are links coming from an 'important site' like Slashdot. It's really an interesting idea if you have an agenda to push.
Yeah, I probably should have mentioned the difference between then and now in the content of the story. This really is a huge milestone for them - going forward they no longer need any Microsoft tools. C# is a great language, it's fast and flexible - it fills the gap between C and Perl nicely. And while it may be the bastard cousin of Java, I think it's got a much more polished feel to it. Being developed under Microsoft's wing wasn't the best, but at least now it's an ECMA standard, not owned by any company - much less Sun whose position on open source sways like trees in the wind.
I used qmail for a couple years after prying myself away from sendmail because I wanted maildir. I love maildir - when you have mbox files that are over a gig, you'll love maildir too - but it's the only part of qmail that's worth a damn. Honestly, qmail is the most complicated software product I've ever worked with. There's no centralized configuration, it uses environment variables and 'list files' - meaning that rather than a section in a config file, qmail has a directory with multiple files inside it, each file has an attribute or a list of attributes. Sure it makes writing shell scripts to manage everything a little easier -- but you *have* to write the shell scripts, because there's way too much to remember if you don't. Administering qmail is no better than administering sendmail.
My MTA of choice these days is Courier, it's written by Sam Varshavchik (aka Mr. Sam) who at one point seemed to be a disciple of DJB, having written gobs of other software that goes with qmail maildirs. Courier is a complete mail server, not just a sendmail replacement. Built in POP3/IMAP both supporting SSL/TLS. Web and/or standard config file based administration. Supports LDAP, PgSQL, and MySQL for authentication. Mail Filtering, List management, and even a webmail server. Even group calendaring. Who needs anything else? It's all integrated so there's no obscure set of howto's to search for when you want to get an imap server or an LDAP authentication service running. Oh and it's GPL'd... something you can't even begin to say about DJB's bizzare pseudo-opensource license. It's had a quarter of a million downloads off SourceForge, that's gotta say something.
If you'd read the story behind it you'd know that he found the case after it had been completely gutted and tossed on a dumpster. So what else was he going to do with it?
Webmin really doesn't do a good enough job. Really -- try using webmin against the latest version of most software and you'll be sorely disappointed. The problem is that the people who release the webmin modules are NOT the people who release the software that webmin is configuring.
What we need is exactly what the author is proposing. A generalized configuration system that works off meta data that the software developers supply.
All the possible configuration options in logical groupings
descriptions of each option
default values
validations on input values
being able to label options as 'experimental', etc...
and of course option dependencies - that is if this option is turned on, then enable these 5 other options.
To do it right you'd ultimately you'd probably need to have a very light scripting language with flow control and variables.
But the important thing is to get a workable standard in place, one that the majority of developers can rally around and will be happy to develop configuration scripts for their applications. Most developers wouldn't even have to change the way their application reads the config files - documenting everything in a form that this 'configuration manager' can use would be enough. It's already been too long - we shouldn't wait any longer to get this process moving forward.
Slashdot Mirror
Not so... WinCE is a perfect candidate for embedded systems. But that's not even the point. Embedded systems are used as device controllers and data collection. There is typically no GUI. And the GUI's that are written are a single app. But when you want a gui app for your computer controlled lathe, why not use WinCE's toolkits and apis?
Redhat 7 is right out. Far too big.
Far too big for what? To fit in ram? Redhat 7.x, Mandrake 8.x, etal... are just Linux. The way I see it, what you get when you go with a RedHat or a Mandrake is a set of matched packages. Everything is compiled, ready to go, using the same optimizations, and dependancies are checked for you. So, why not use RedHat as a base system? You pick and choose what you want to install on your hard drive when designing the system and then when you're done writing your app you pick the components that are required to run it and copy those onto the DiskOnChip that you plug into the finished system. Of course a complete install of RedHat 7.3 is not going to fit on a 128 MB chip - that's not the intended market. You can, however, easilly fit the kernel, utilities, system libs, and gtk+ for linux-fb on a 32 MB chip and have lots of room to spare for your embedded system app.
OMG... that's the funniest thing I've seen all day! Thanks!
But beyond the technical, I still can't see how copying a program onto a drive and then into memory is any different than me reading a book, translating the printed text on the page into representative thought and then comprehending that thought into a mental image of what the author was trying to convey to me. And god forbid that I remember what I read and write it down for reference.
Not really... Think of the "software as a book" metaphore. You don't need a license to read a book, just as you don't need a license to use software. The author of a book does not give up copyright when they sell a million copies of a book --- you didn't agree to a license, yet you cannot photocopy a book and sell it. Licenses are restrictive measures, above and beyond existing copyright law, put in place to dictate how software can be used and distributed.
Only problem with DBI is that even though it abstracts away the API calls needed to talk to the database you still have to follow each DB's SQL quirks. So if you want to be cross db platform, you pretty much have to modularize all your database access and write the custom code for each db you're connecting to. Not that it's a bad thing... I'm all for using a database's strengths and working around its weaknesses to give optimal performance. DBI isn't as cross platform as you imply it is.
Hah - you're absolutely right it does 'raise' not 'beg' the question. Thanks for correcting me :-)
Yeah, here it is -- Redline Entertainment.
BestBuy was just eliminating a competitor when they bought Musicland. They were already one of the largest sellers of cd's in 2001. The real issue behind this is that BestBuy owns a record label (can't remember the name, Red Line Records?) and as such they are indirectly member of the RIAA.
But this begs the question... has any individual who spent the $99 asked Lindows for the source to the programs they received? I realize the FSF is asking for it, but did they purchase the product? The GPL does not require that you give away your code for free to anyone who asks for it, only to those who you distributed the binary.
That's not to mention that we don't know which programs have been 'enhanced'. Wine? XFree86? KDE? Who's to say... they might have written completely proprietary code to do all their special Windows-esque things and they won't have to release any of it.
It's not that ILM aren't just as good as they once were. It's that there are others who are now on par (or better). Some of the best effects in the industry are still produced by ILM - just look at Episode 2.
You only got burned by the bug if you actually saw the problem - like say me. I'm actually the one who reported the reproducable test case for this bug. The bug has been in the system since the introduced WAL in 7.1. And how did I find it? Pg crashed in our production environment and we got duplicate inserts primary keys after it started up again. At least it's fixed now - and going from 7.2.0 to 7.2.1 is _not_ a hard thing: compile, install, stop/start. Couple seconds of downtime?
They're both pretty much the same thing:
US5265261: Method and system for network communications using raw mode protocols
US5437013: Method and system for network communications using raw mode protocols
The second one is just newer....
What's interesting too, tying all of this back together, is that the first typewriter was designed based on the piano.
Another example of this is the different between the violin and the piano. While you can certainly produce lots of notes at a high rate on a violin, you're (pretty much) stuck making one at a time. With a piano you can make up to 10 notes at once. You just get a higher throughput - that's what enables a single person to sound more like a symphony by playing a single keyboard. You could never do that with a single violin.
That's too funny, gotta love the karma cap. Instead of a cap they should just expire the points away when the story is archived. Then the karma whore's would really have to work to keep their +2 bonus :-)
He meant that the next two movies in the Lord of the Rings series will have chances to win for best director, picture....
What's bullshit? Look at how unix does what?
I encrypt my Trillian directory and run it as a user that has the ability to read those files. And likewise I run all file sharing programs as a user that has no permissions at all except for their own directories. Windows 2000/XP aren't so bad :-) at least they give you a process model that's similar to *nix.
Right, so if in every post I make to Slashdot I linked to Scientology Home Page or Bunch of Nutcases. Then those search strings could potentially rise higher up since they are links coming from an 'important site' like Slashdot. It's really an interesting idea if you have an agenda to push.
Yeah, I probably should have mentioned the difference between then and now in the content of the story. This really is a huge milestone for them - going forward they no longer need any Microsoft tools. C# is a great language, it's fast and flexible - it fills the gap between C and Perl nicely. And while it may be the bastard cousin of Java, I think it's got a much more polished feel to it. Being developed under Microsoft's wing wasn't the best, but at least now it's an ECMA standard, not owned by any company - much less Sun whose position on open source sways like trees in the wind.
My MTA of choice these days is Courier, it's written by Sam Varshavchik (aka Mr. Sam) who at one point seemed to be a disciple of DJB, having written gobs of other software that goes with qmail maildirs. Courier is a complete mail server, not just a sendmail replacement. Built in POP3/IMAP both supporting SSL/TLS. Web and/or standard config file based administration. Supports LDAP, PgSQL, and MySQL for authentication. Mail Filtering, List management, and even a webmail server. Even group calendaring. Who needs anything else? It's all integrated so there's no obscure set of howto's to search for when you want to get an imap server or an LDAP authentication service running. Oh and it's GPL'd... something you can't even begin to say about DJB's bizzare pseudo-opensource license. It's had a quarter of a million downloads off SourceForge, that's gotta say something.
If you'd read the story behind it you'd know that he found the case after it had been completely gutted and tossed on a dumpster. So what else was he going to do with it?
What we need is exactly what the author is proposing. A generalized configuration system that works off meta data that the software developers supply.
- All the possible configuration options in logical groupings
- descriptions of each option
- default values
- validations on input values
- being able to label options as 'experimental', etc...
- and of course option dependencies - that is if this option is turned on, then enable these 5 other options.
To do it right you'd ultimately you'd probably need to have a very light scripting language with flow control and variables.But the important thing is to get a workable standard in place, one that the majority of developers can rally around and will be happy to develop configuration scripts for their applications. Most developers wouldn't even have to change the way their application reads the config files - documenting everything in a form that this 'configuration manager' can use would be enough. It's already been too long - we shouldn't wait any longer to get this process moving forward.
LOL - too funny!
Nope, there's at least 1 time near the end where the film 'melts'.