Yeah, I considered floppy based linux distros, but I still want log files.
Incidentally, if you still have a 386SX or some other ancient beast kicking around, it isn't completely useless. Just set it up with no networking (the whole point is to have it off the network) and cat the log files from your firewall over to it. Even if a cracker rips through your firewall and deletes all the logs, the intrusion will still be logged on the non-networked PC.
My current firewall is a Dell 486/33 with 24M of RAM (I inherited for free) running Suse 6.4. It still does the job, quietly chugging away under my desk (dusty as hell) and I have a cable modem. Of course I am not running X, and had to strip it down as far as possible.
The I860 did find its niche, when used as intended - a floating point DSP, not a general purpose desktop processor. (It lacked a hardware memory management unit) I saw a lot of dual and quad 3U VME i860 number crunching boards intended for high end signal processing apps, such as radar beam forming, and satellite receivers.
Assembly language will always be needed to optimize certain types of algorithms, that don't translate efficiently into C. Try writing a FFT algorithm on C using a DSP, and compare it to what can be done in native assembly. The difference can be an order of magnitude or more. Some processors have special purpose modulo registers and addressing modes (such as bit reverse) that don't translate well into C, at least not without extending the language. Fixed point arithmatic operations are not supported in ANSI C either, but are a common feature on special purpose processors.
For low power/embedded applications, efficiency makes sense as well. Every CPU cycle wasted chips away at battery power. A more efficient algorithm means a smaller ROM size, and the CPU can either be clocked slower (can use cheaper memory and/or CPU) or put into a halted state when it isn't needed. (longer battery life) Coding small ISRs in assembly makes sense as well, as C compilers often must make worst case assumptions about saving processor context.
That being said, only a fool would try and re-write printf or cout in assembly, if they have a C/C++ compiler handy. Hand optimization is best used as a silver bullet, for the most computationally intensive or critical functions.
You should be able to strip the apps down to something appropriate for the target. I am running SuSE 6.4 on a 486/33 which I use for a firewall. I also have a pentium 2/350 that I would love to upgrade to the latest version of SuSE, but it would be unusable.
What I would like to see on startup is something that allows you to select (or better yet autodetect) your platform, and set the non-power user derfault install options to something appropriate - i.e. a lightweight window manager on a trailing edge system. For more advanced users, they can just highlight packages that are not recommended for the particular target, (i.e. Star Office on Pentium 1) and let you make the choice.
That SCO will be out of business by this time next year, so the problem will be moot. Or they plan to give SCO the bird and let them sue - They are already fighting on a dozen fronts anyway. Nothing like cranking up the burn rate another notch.
Actually, they may well be VERY relevent, depending on what the message contained.
There was a famous trial in the 1920's of a rags to riches hollywood comedian named Fatty Arbuckle, who was accused of raping a young woman with a coke bottle in his bathroom, during a party. He had actually gone to trial 2x on a hung jury, but on the 3rd trial, it was revealed that a star witness for the prosecution (a woman of dubious character) had sent a telegram to an associate a few hours after the alleged incident saying that she had Fatty over a barrel and was going to squeeze him, or something to that effect. He was aquitted on the third trial, although his career was destroyed by that time.
Actually, they didn't win even ONE seat last election, and are just as unlikely to this time around.
Voting is all about compromise. No matter which party I vote for, there is always at least something I don't like about the person or party I vote for when I make my X beside a candidates name. I am sure (no matter what your political stripe) most people feel the same way. And yes, in Canada we do make an 'X'. Voting is something we do the low tech old fashioned way, none of these f*ing Diebold machines or dangling chad. Computers are great for tabulating votes, but I honestly prefer paper ballots. (We still know who won in a matter of hours, so my opinion is don't fix it if it ain't broke. But that is another story...)
Actually, running out of fossil fuels won't happen the (drastic) way most people think.
For instance, the Alberta tar sands contain more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia. http://www.yorku.ca/mearl/energy/tarsand. htm
The problem is that it is very expensive to extract the oil from the gooey tar, not like the Persian gulf where you can just stick a straw into the ground and watch the crude gush out. There are some offshore reserves as well, that are currently too expensive to get at, but as the price rises then extracting it becomes practical. If we must, we can grow our fuel - wheat can be turned into alcohol. At the moment, it is just more expensive to run your car on wheat alcohol than gasoline, but this will change as the oil reserves run short.
What we will see is a gradual price rise over time, leading to increased use of alternative fuels, and a reluctant shift to more fuel efficient transportation. This may already be happening. It will likely trigger a rather nasty worldwide recession, but not the end of civilization as we know it.
I remember the oil embargo of the 1970's. Luckily, we didn't have to face the odd/even licence plate rationing that occured south of the border. But Americans learned to drive smaller cars. In fact, this gave foreign (chiefly Japanese) automakers their first major break into the US market, as the domestic market for huge gas guzzing land yachts flagged. Eventually, the big three retooled and began to turn out more small cars, but not before Chrysler was driven to the edge of bankruptcy.
As gas became cheap again, the lessons of this time were forgotten. But if prices remain high or spiral upward, America will quickly lose its love affair with the SUV, and by this time next year, dealers will be begging you to take their remaining stock the lot at a substantial loss. Not the end of the world, but a very painful economic disruption.
As for the nukes? Yes, they are the lesser evil. I had read somewhere that coal fired plants spit a heck of a lot of nasty radioactive isotopes up the chimmney, since coal contains a subtantial amout of trans-uranic element in trace amounts.
Great, another self professed expert (probably single) telling me how to handle my kids. No doubt you have never had to deal with three very bored young boys on a long trip. Games of I spy don't work very long, (especially if the oldest thinks it is something for little kids) and they certainly have no appreciation for scenery at that age, even if there was any. Reading makes them (and me) carsick, and stopping on the side of the road to clean up somebody' vomit certainly isn't fun. (Done that several times, yuk)
You need a very long arm to reach the kids in the back of a minivan. Trust me, I know. Instead, I just shut off the power to their video game/DVD player when they start yelling at each other. Warn once, second time the power goes off.
But not on the desktop. A lot of the legacy test code is written to work under DOS. There isn't enough time to develop some needed tools, let alone re-write legacy ones on a more up to date platform. But I suspect at some point it will become very hard to find the necessary device drivers for Win98, so we will be stuck using old PCs, and it will have to be done.
I don't understand why they don't revert to the old faithful LILO. Who really needs a graphical eye candy reboot, when Linux systems don't need to be booted very often anyway? Even Win-XP spends some of its boot time in command line DOS mode.
Actually, I heard that LCCs were in clusters of 5. It took LCC votes to launch, but the board would immediately light up like a christmas tree at the other LCC sites, any of which could flip a switch and abort the launch. There was an old Scientific American article on it that I just happened to remember.
So it took 2 of 5 votes to launch, any one of the 5 could cancel the launch order. At least they had that safeguard in place.
You wouldn't want to be anywhere near the ocean either, when that thing hits. Earth is roughly 3/4 water, and as a consequence, the asteroid is 3/4 likely to land in an ocean. Go watch the movie "Deep Impact" to see the presumed effect of this. Such a huge impact would create monster tsumanis that would ripple around the world, obliterating all costal areas. The movie "Deep Impact" has some nice effects showing what happens if something the size of a mountain hits the ocean at 10 km/s.
(At least mother nature would give you one hell of a show before snuffing you out, and death by a 1 km high tsumani would be instantaneous.)
If you can't be good, be controversial. All this publicity is just going to sell more books.
I remember the controversy that existed over "The Satanic Verses" by Salman Rushdie. The novel was proclaimed as blashphemous to Islam, and a fatwah death sentence was pronounced on the author. Of course, the book sold out as fast as they could print copies. A student friend of mine at the time was proudly showing off his brand new hard copy edition he just bought, even though he could hardly afford his next meal. (He considered this a real prize, as they were selling so fast, it was hard to find a copy anywhere) So I started reading. It was an awful, improbable piece of literature, that undoubtably would have sold no more than a few thousand copies if not for the controversy.
I also remember a story about a US art dealer who was tasked with unloading several thousand prints of a sitting nude from an obsure french painter nobody had heard of. So he displayed the original painting in the front of the store, secretly paid some children a few coins to stand and gawk at it, while calling up the leader of the then equivalent of the "moral majority" with an anonymous tip. He got himself arrested for displaying indecent material, and beat the rap in a high profile trial. Of course the prints all sold out quickly, and the original painting fetched a sizable fortune at auction.
Basic stuff that needs some manual intervention like deleting the wire holding the flying stunt man is farmed out to contractors with normal Macs and PCs.
It is up to the farmers to make the call on this one, but they are the ones with the leverage, if they choose to pull together. Collectively boycott all Monsato products in favour of their nearest direct competitor. If the bulk of western farmers support this guy and refuse to use their products, the boycott will hurt so bad it won't matter what the courts decided, and Monsato will quickly cave in.
On the other hand, (I heard that there were some farmers testifying on both sides) they are largely split on the issue or just don't care, (hard to believe, but possible) then that is their choice as well.
We need to drive home that the idea of open source or free software destroying economic value is based on a false economy. Customers that don't have to pay for software licences can spend their money elsewhere. Companies can afford to expand, lower the cost of their products, and perhaps hire additional staff with the money they save. And as a software/hardware developer I don't believe closed source equates to job security. You can still be outsourced, and there is little incentive to improve software products if the customer is locked in, so arguably they would be hiring fewer, not more developers.
What they propose is analogous to shutting off the town water supply and throwing arsenic into the local river, in order to support the bottled water industry. This is the message that needs to get out.
They didn't buy enough licences from me! My business is failing because they conspired against me! They won't pay me what I want! Waaaaah, call my lawyer!
(Can we vote on this in the next slashdot poll, and Fed-ex the trophy to the winning company's head office?)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I considered floppy based linux distros, but I still want log files.
Incidentally, if you still have a 386SX or some other ancient beast kicking around, it isn't completely useless. Just set it up with no networking (the whole point is to have it off the network) and cat the log files from your firewall over to it. Even if a cracker rips through your firewall and deletes all the logs, the intrusion will still be logged on the non-networked PC.
My current firewall is a Dell 486/33 with 24M of RAM (I inherited for free) running Suse 6.4. It still does the job, quietly chugging away under my desk (dusty as hell) and I have a cable modem. Of course I am not running X, and had to strip it down as far as possible.
The I860 did find its niche, when used as intended - a floating point DSP, not a general purpose desktop processor. (It lacked a hardware memory management unit) I saw a lot of dual and quad 3U VME i860 number crunching boards intended for high end signal processing apps, such as radar beam forming, and satellite receivers.
Assembly language will always be needed to optimize certain types of algorithms, that don't translate efficiently into C. Try writing a FFT algorithm on C using a DSP, and compare it to what can be done in native assembly. The difference can be an order of magnitude or more. Some processors have special purpose modulo registers and addressing modes (such as bit reverse) that don't translate well into C, at least not without extending the language. Fixed point arithmatic operations are not supported in ANSI C either, but are a common feature on special purpose processors.
For low power/embedded applications, efficiency makes sense as well. Every CPU cycle wasted chips away at battery power. A more efficient algorithm means a smaller ROM size, and the CPU can either be clocked slower (can use cheaper memory and/or CPU) or put into a halted state when it isn't needed. (longer battery life) Coding small ISRs in assembly makes sense as well, as C compilers often must make worst case assumptions about saving processor context.
That being said, only a fool would try and re-write printf or cout in assembly, if they have a C/C++ compiler handy. Hand optimization is best used as a silver bullet, for the most computationally intensive or critical functions.
You should be able to strip the apps down to something appropriate for the target. I am running SuSE 6.4 on a 486/33 which I use for a firewall. I also have a pentium 2/350 that I would love to upgrade to the latest version of SuSE, but it would be unusable.
What I would like to see on startup is something that allows you to select (or better yet autodetect) your platform, and set the non-power user derfault install options to something appropriate - i.e. a lightweight window manager on a trailing edge system. For more advanced users, they can just highlight packages that are not recommended for the particular target, (i.e. Star Office on Pentium 1) and let you make the choice.
That SCO will be out of business by this time next year, so the problem will be moot. Or they plan to give SCO the bird and let them sue - They are already fighting on a dozen fronts anyway. Nothing like cranking up the burn rate another notch.
Actually, they may well be VERY relevent, depending on what the message contained.
There was a famous trial in the 1920's of a rags to riches hollywood comedian named Fatty Arbuckle, who was accused of raping a young woman with a coke bottle in his bathroom, during a party. He had actually gone to trial 2x on a hung jury, but on the 3rd trial, it was revealed that a star witness for the prosecution (a woman of dubious character) had sent a telegram to an associate a few hours after the alleged incident saying that she had Fatty over a barrel and was going to squeeze him, or something to that effect. He was aquitted on the third trial, although his career was destroyed by that time.
http://ms.essortment.com/arbucklefatty_rams.htm
Actually, they didn't win even ONE seat last election, and are just as unlikely to this time around.
Voting is all about compromise. No matter which party I vote for, there is always at least something I don't like about the person or party I vote for when I make my X beside a candidates name. I am sure (no matter what your political stripe) most people feel the same way. And yes, in Canada we do make an 'X'. Voting is something we do the low tech old fashioned way, none of these f*ing Diebold machines or dangling chad. Computers are great for tabulating votes, but I honestly prefer paper ballots. (We still know who won in a matter of hours, so my opinion is don't fix it if it ain't broke. But that is another story...)
If it approximates "being there", you could make some mind blowing 3D movies with this technology!
Actually, running out of fossil fuels won't happen the (drastic) way most people think.
. htm
For instance, the Alberta tar sands contain more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia.
http://www.yorku.ca/mearl/energy/tarsand
The problem is that it is very expensive to extract the oil from the gooey tar, not like the Persian gulf where you can just stick a straw into the ground and watch the crude gush out. There are some offshore reserves as well, that are currently too expensive to get at, but as the price rises then extracting it becomes practical. If we must, we can grow our fuel - wheat can be turned into alcohol. At the moment, it is just more expensive to run your car on wheat alcohol than gasoline, but this will change as the oil reserves run short.
What we will see is a gradual price rise over time, leading to increased use of alternative fuels, and a reluctant shift to more fuel efficient transportation. This may already be happening. It will likely trigger a rather nasty worldwide recession, but not the end of civilization as we know it.
I remember the oil embargo of the 1970's. Luckily, we didn't have to face the odd/even licence plate rationing that occured south of the border. But Americans learned to drive smaller cars. In fact, this gave foreign (chiefly Japanese) automakers their first major break into the US market, as the domestic market for huge gas guzzing land yachts flagged. Eventually, the big three retooled and began to turn out more small cars, but not before Chrysler was driven to the edge of bankruptcy.
As gas became cheap again, the lessons of this time were forgotten. But if prices remain high or spiral upward, America will quickly lose its love affair with the SUV, and by this time next year, dealers will be begging you to take their remaining stock the lot at a substantial loss. Not the end of the world, but a very painful economic disruption.
As for the nukes? Yes, they are the lesser evil. I had read somewhere that coal fired plants spit a heck of a lot of nasty radioactive isotopes up the chimmney, since coal contains a subtantial amout of trans-uranic element in trace amounts.
Great, another self professed expert (probably single) telling me how to handle my kids. No doubt you have never had to deal with three very bored young boys on a long trip. Games of I spy don't work very long, (especially if the oldest thinks it is something for little kids) and they certainly have no appreciation for scenery at that age, even if there was any. Reading makes them (and me) carsick, and stopping on the side of the road to clean up somebody' vomit certainly isn't fun. (Done that several times, yuk)
As long as their competitors must play by the same rules, it shouldn't matter, right? (But they probably will fight it tooth and nail anyway)
You need a very long arm to reach the kids in the back of a minivan. Trust me, I know. Instead, I just shut off the power to their video game/DVD player when they start yelling at each other. Warn once, second time the power goes off.
But not on the desktop. A lot of the legacy test code is written to work under DOS. There isn't enough time to develop some needed tools, let alone re-write legacy ones on a more up to date platform. But I suspect at some point it will become very hard to find the necessary device drivers for Win98, so we will be stuck using old PCs, and it will have to be done.
I don't understand why they don't revert to the old faithful LILO. Who really needs a graphical eye candy reboot, when Linux systems don't need to be booted very often anyway? Even Win-XP spends some of its boot time in command line DOS mode.
Actually, I heard that LCCs were in clusters of 5. It took LCC votes to launch, but the board would immediately light up like a christmas tree at the other LCC sites, any of which could flip a switch and abort the launch. There was an old Scientific American article on it that I just happened to remember.
So it took 2 of 5 votes to launch, any one of the 5 could cancel the launch order. At least they had that safeguard in place.
You wouldn't want to be anywhere near the ocean either, when that thing hits. Earth is roughly 3/4 water, and as a consequence, the asteroid is 3/4 likely to land in an ocean. Go watch the movie "Deep Impact" to see the presumed effect of this. Such a huge impact would create monster tsumanis that would ripple around the world, obliterating all costal areas. The movie "Deep Impact" has some nice effects showing what happens if something the size of a mountain hits the ocean at 10 km/s.
(At least mother nature would give you one hell of a show before snuffing you out, and death by a 1 km high tsumani would be instantaneous.)
If you can't be good, be controversial. All this publicity is just going to sell more books.
I remember the controversy that existed over "The Satanic Verses" by Salman Rushdie. The novel was proclaimed as blashphemous to Islam, and a fatwah death sentence was pronounced on the author. Of course, the book sold out as fast as they could print copies. A student friend of mine at the time was proudly showing off his brand new hard copy edition he just bought, even though he could hardly afford his next meal. (He considered this a real prize, as they were selling so fast, it was hard to find a copy anywhere) So I started reading. It was an awful, improbable piece of literature, that undoubtably would have sold no more than a few thousand copies if not for the controversy.
I also remember a story about a US art dealer who was tasked with unloading several thousand prints of a sitting nude from an obsure french painter nobody had heard of. So he displayed the original painting in the front of the store, secretly paid some children a few coins to stand and gawk at it, while calling up the leader of the then equivalent of the "moral majority" with an anonymous tip. He got himself arrested for displaying indecent material, and beat the rap in a high profile trial. Of course the prints all sold out quickly, and the original painting fetched a sizable fortune at auction.
Basic stuff that needs some manual intervention like deleting the wire holding the flying stunt man is farmed out to contractors with normal Macs and PCs.
Behind the Strategic Defence Initiative missile shield. A giant magnifying glass in space, to burn incoming missiles, or enemy cities.
It is up to the farmers to make the call on this one, but they are the ones with the leverage, if they choose to pull together. Collectively boycott all Monsato products in favour of their nearest direct competitor. If the bulk of western farmers support this guy and refuse to use their products, the boycott will hurt so bad it won't matter what the courts decided, and Monsato will quickly cave in.
On the other hand, (I heard that there were some farmers testifying on both sides) they are largely split on the issue or just don't care, (hard to believe, but possible) then that is their choice as well.
To bend fold and multilate paper with surprising regularity.
About needing to receive the "Mark of the Beast" in order to conduct business?
:-P
I wonder if the RFID implants have the digits "666" on them anywhere
We need to drive home that the idea of open source or free software destroying economic value is based on a false economy. Customers that don't have to pay for software licences can spend their money elsewhere. Companies can afford to expand, lower the cost of their products, and perhaps hire additional staff with the money they save. And as a software/hardware developer I don't believe closed source equates to job security. You can still be outsourced, and there is little incentive to improve software products if the customer is locked in, so arguably they would be hiring fewer, not more developers.
What they propose is analogous to shutting off the town water supply and throwing arsenic into the local river, in order to support the bottled water industry. This is the message that needs to get out.
Leading candidates are SCO and Rambus
They didn't buy enough licences from me! My business is failing because they conspired against me! They won't pay me what I want! Waaaaah, call my lawyer!
(Can we vote on this in the next slashdot poll, and Fed-ex the trophy to the winning company's head office?)