The difference is that with a microkernel you have fault isolation. A bug in some driver (which is outside the kernel space with microkernels), can't bring down the kernel itself (as long as the microkernel is properly written), whereas any driver in a monolithic kernel can bring it down (as most drivers are in kernel space in monolithic kernels).
So, given the line estimates brought up here now, with a microkernel you have about 10k lines of code that can possibly bring down the kernel, and ~6M lines of code that can't. But with a monolithic kernel you have 6M lines that potentially any of them could bring down the kernel.
Re:/lib was botched, so yes you must port librarie
on
Porting to 64-bit Linux
·
· Score: 2, Informative
We'll have a/lib directory without libraries, and the "/lib64" wart lasting until the end of time
Nah. That's a bit pessimistic outlook. Already today/lib64 is a mere symlink to/lib on current distributions. The symlink may have to be kept around of for a while though until the early nomenclature oopses have been effectively phased out.
There are quite a few properties that can be altered without having to backup, drop and recreate the database. The only sometimes-handy-to-have thing that I can't really see being present is changing the character encoding of an existing database.
True, it wouldn't be much point purchasing a graphics card to use for this kind of purpose, but if one has already a graphics card left over, it could be put into use in this way.
And a gig for $50 USD? I'd love to see such low prices over here in the People's Republic of Sweden... Can't be had for lower than $101 USD currently, after searching for the lowest prices. Sigh.
It will be a scolding hot day in Helheim before this will happen in this kind of puny fourteen year timeframe. Just because some airhead politician vents some far-fetched ideas about this does not mean it is going to happen. By 2050, perhaps. By 2020, very unlikely.
Especially combine this with the ambition to phase-out the nuclear power plants here and you have a receipe for disaster. Currently, nuclear power stands for about half of our electicity production. Where is that going to be replaced with when removing the nuclear power plants? More hydro plants is not really a feasible option since there are only two or so rivers left without any hydro power plants. And oil doesn't seem to be politically feasible either, nor is coal. And wind power is a joke - you'd have to stick those ugly things almost everywhere, and solar power is not very usable at these latitudes.
What Sweden needs is more nuclear power plants, lots of them, to cover up for the increasing needs of electricity. Nuclear power has much less of a footprint than other power sources, and has a very high efficiency, and has
And back to the getting rid of oil issue. Oil is used for so many things, one cannot possibly believe that all those uses can be replaced with alternatives in a mere fourteen years? And many detached houses are heated by oil too. Replacing those heaters is a very expensive undertaking (although given the prices that heating oil has had for the past few years, it would be economically sane to go over to something less hideously expensive, but it does require quite an investment at a time to overhaul the heating system of one's house). And cars. Sure there are cars that can run on alcohol but managing to phase out all petrol driven cars in this timeframe is unlikely to happen.
So no, this is just some unbacked political talk, nothing else.
Folkpartiet (full name: Folkpartiet liberalerna = People's party the liberals) is a social liberal party, in other words a bit different from classical liberalism. Which means there currently is no established "proper" liberal party in Sweden. Only this "slightly less socialist than the social democrats"-liberal party.
There is a libertarian or classic liberal party being started currently - also in the process of gathering the signatures for party designation registration.
So it also remains to see if they manage to lift off ground or not. It would bring a fresh breath of ideology into politics here again, where every party currently in parliament does indeed seem to be nothing but different shades of social democracy.
Depends on the exact country, but for Sweden the procedure is something like this (I'm not a specialist in this area, so some details might not be 100% to the letter accurate)
The Speaker of the Riksdag (the chairman of the parliament) has a conversation with all the party leaders of the parties that got into the parliament (got more than 4% of the votes in the general election to the parliament), hearing their opinion on what they'd do, e.g. coalitions etcetera, if they'd get into power
Based on those discussions, the Speaker of the Riksdag proposes in his opinion the most likely candidate to form a new cabinet/government. Often it is the party that got the most votes that gets this task first
Who got this appointment will then pick together a cabinet (naming a prime minister, foreign minister, finance minister,...), either from just one party if it is big enough, or form a coalition with other parties
Then the parliament gets to vote on the proposed cabinet. If it doesn't get at least 50%, it is back to #2 above, the Speaker of the Riksdag appoints some other person to attempt to form a new cabinet/government. Et cetera ad nauseam.
This move is good for non-MS office products as it allows for better interoperability with MS-Office. But for the OpenDocument this can be detrimental since it undermines the main point of it — open document formats. Now the MS-Office document formats will be opened and will have a much larger installed userbase, and will grow to full compliance on non-MS office products as well. And MS seems very reluctant on adding support for OpenDocument on MS-Office so OpenDocument will have grave difficulties expanding the userbase into MS-Office territory.
So instead of clean open document formats we might get stuck with (presumably) relatively cludgy open document formats.
stupid question time... why don't they use html with inline css for a document format?
HTML + CSS is not the most optimal solution to that as HTML lacks semantically quite a whole deal compared to what one would want to have in a word processing document. A word processing document is after all not quite the same thing as online hypertext documents, therefore it is more sane to have an own XML format with semantically descriptive tags for word processing.
And HTML carries with it a great amount of legacy tags along with it. Not even XHTML is currently free from that legacy. It would just complicate things needlessly to try to make a sane document format by building it on top of HTML.
The problem is that one shouldn't have to even try to make it work. A desktop operating system in the form of a desktop oriented Linux distribution should be as painless as possible to set up. Preferably there should not be even the need to have a C compiler present. Shove in the installation CD/DVD and boot it up and the installer should take care of everything hardwareconfiguraitonwise.
With Linux and new hardware this is currently just a distant dream as the drivers simply aren't there when the hardware is new. But after a while after the drivers finally get into the kernel and distributions, the ride gets a whole lot smoother. The problem is that it can take a considerable time for this to happen. First a while for the drivers to appear in the standard kernel, and then a while for that kernel to appear in the various distribution installers.
A binary kernel driver layer could in some regard alleviate these issues, but only if the hardware manufacturers would actually start releasing Linux drivers themselves, and at the same time as the Windows drivers. And then there are the freedom concerns mentioned here already with such a binary layer.
Assuming binary drivers targetted for a binary kernel layer would be available from hardware manufacturers as soon as they release new hardware, one could just put them on a USB storage device or something like that and the Linux installer could just ask during the installation if one would like to load 3rd party drivers from just such a device.
I myself don't have huge problems with having to perform all kinds of dark magic to get things working, but the average user won't cope with most of this. Linux is not just a hacker's plaything anymore. But for it to start gaining ground the installation and hardware configuration must be improved - e.g. it isn't amusing to have the installer not detect any harddrives when there are no drivers for the harddrive controller on the installation disk.
Here in Sweden all passports issued since October 1st this year have an RFID chip containing biometric data. Currently a digital photograph along with digitalized information of all the regular printed information is contained in it, but within a few years fingerprints will be added to it as well.
The harsh feelings amongst the population towards these new passports is not restricted only to the potential integrity issues. The number of police stations where one can get these new passports is less than half compared to where one could get passports before, as the new equipment required for e.g. the photography is so expensive so they didn't get the equipment to every of the old places. Also these new passports cost more, and are only valid five years compared to the ten years of the old passports. So in the long term the queues at the police stations to get a passport will be far worse than it has been, and the queuing has been bad enough already for a long time.
Belgium and Norway are other European countries that have passports containing RFID implemented, and Germany will soon also have these.
Alien is not exactly the ultimate solution for installing RPMs on a DEB system. Lots of bad things can happen, it is not uncommon for the resulting package to have to be forcibly installed (which is never a good thing since it can cause consistency issues with the package management) due to e.g. conflicting files that are already provided by other packages. Basically alien is a hack job to get a package of a foreign format installed.
Re:Quake 4 is out?
on
Quake 4 Linux
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Perhaps they wanted to avoid the kind of anticlimax that Doom 3 had?
I didn't really hear anything about Quake 4 before it was released either, beyond knowing that it was in the makings.
XHTML with the application/xhtml+xml content type is unfortunately still broken in the very same way.
IE 7 seems to be essentially nothing more than IE 6 with a fancier user interface - the two big issues of proper CSS support and this regarding XHTML are still in an as poor condition as ever.
Debian Thunderbird is the debian package derived from Thunderbird, a next generation open-source email, news and rss client made by Mozilla Foundation.
I strongly recommend installing straight to testing ('sarge') using the new Debian-Installer installer.
The current stable ('woody') release (3.0) is way too outdated (over two years old now) for being able to provide an enjoyable desktop/workstation usage experience.
The current testing on the other hand contains up to date versions of software and works very well. It will "soon" become the new stable release (3.1)
My guess would be that it includes CPU model specific definitions for power management and other features that need to be activated in a certain way by the OS for them to function.
This could also explain that the processor clocks it down as certain power management features do that to the processor.
IE supports the 1-bit transparency in 8-bit indexed PNGs. The problem with this transparency method is that it is the same way GIF uses transparency, which results in ugly jaggies in most cases.
Some of the features of the AMD64 processors, such as the 8 additional general purpose registers (R8 - R15) and 8 additonal SIMD registers (XMM8 - XMM15) are only available in the long mode (64-bit mode).
So to be able to take benefit of those additional registers (which are more than welcome due to the register-starved nature of x86) one needs to recompile the application to use the long mode where they are available.
Any browser detection worth its name can identify Opera even when it is identifying itself as MSIE.
Examples:
Opera as MSIE 6.0:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; X11; Linux i686) Opera 7.50 [en]
Opera as Netscape 4:
Mozilla/4.78 (X11; Linux i686; U) Opera 7.50 [en]
Opera as Opera:
Opera/7.50 (X11; Linux i686; U) [en]
As you can see, the string Opera is present always, allowing for identification as Opera, but yet working to fool the old crummy browser detections that only know the existance of Internet Explorer and Netscape 4...
Actually most simple browser detections can be fooled just by adding the string MSIE anywhere in the User-Agent.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is that with a microkernel you have fault isolation. A bug in some driver (which is outside the kernel space with microkernels), can't bring down the kernel itself (as long as the microkernel is properly written), whereas any driver in a monolithic kernel can bring it down (as most drivers are in kernel space in monolithic kernels).
So, given the line estimates brought up here now, with a microkernel you have about 10k lines of code that can possibly bring down the kernel, and ~6M lines of code that can't. But with a monolithic kernel you have 6M lines that potentially any of them could bring down the kernel.
Nah. That's a bit pessimistic outlook. Already today /lib64 is a mere symlink to /lib on current distributions. The symlink may have to be kept around of for a while though until the early nomenclature oopses have been effectively phased out.
There are quite a few properties that can be altered without having to backup, drop and recreate the database. The only sometimes-handy-to-have thing that I can't really see being present is changing the character encoding of an existing database.
True, it wouldn't be much point purchasing a graphics card to use for this kind of purpose, but if one has already a graphics card left over, it could be put into use in this way.
And a gig for $50 USD? I'd love to see such low prices over here in the People's Republic of Sweden... Can't be had for lower than $101 USD currently, after searching for the lowest prices. Sigh.
Well, this still involves to use a graphics card, but in a bit different way.
YMMV with the performance though.
It will be a scolding hot day in Helheim before this will happen in this kind of puny fourteen year timeframe. Just because some airhead politician vents some far-fetched ideas about this does not mean it is going to happen. By 2050, perhaps. By 2020, very unlikely.
Especially combine this with the ambition to phase-out the nuclear power plants here and you have a receipe for disaster. Currently, nuclear power stands for about half of our electicity production. Where is that going to be replaced with when removing the nuclear power plants? More hydro plants is not really a feasible option since there are only two or so rivers left without any hydro power plants. And oil doesn't seem to be politically feasible either, nor is coal. And wind power is a joke - you'd have to stick those ugly things almost everywhere, and solar power is not very usable at these latitudes.
What Sweden needs is more nuclear power plants, lots of them, to cover up for the increasing needs of electricity. Nuclear power has much less of a footprint than other power sources, and has a very high efficiency, and has
And back to the getting rid of oil issue. Oil is used for so many things, one cannot possibly believe that all those uses can be replaced with alternatives in a mere fourteen years? And many detached houses are heated by oil too. Replacing those heaters is a very expensive undertaking (although given the prices that heating oil has had for the past few years, it would be economically sane to go over to something less hideously expensive, but it does require quite an investment at a time to overhaul the heating system of one's house). And cars. Sure there are cars that can run on alcohol but managing to phase out all petrol driven cars in this timeframe is unlikely to happen.
So no, this is just some unbacked political talk, nothing else.
Folkpartiet (full name: Folkpartiet liberalerna = People's party the liberals) is a social liberal party, in other words a bit different from classical liberalism. Which means there currently is no established "proper" liberal party in Sweden. Only this "slightly less socialist than the social democrats"-liberal party.
There is a libertarian or classic liberal party being started currently - also in the process of gathering the signatures for party designation registration.
So it also remains to see if they manage to lift off ground or not. It would bring a fresh breath of ideology into politics here again, where every party currently in parliament does indeed seem to be nothing but different shades of social democracy.
Depends on the exact country, but for Sweden the procedure is something like this (I'm not a specialist in this area, so some details might not be 100% to the letter accurate)
This move is good for non-MS office products as it allows for better interoperability with MS-Office. But for the OpenDocument this can be detrimental since it undermines the main point of it — open document formats. Now the MS-Office document formats will be opened and will have a much larger installed userbase, and will grow to full compliance on non-MS office products as well. And MS seems very reluctant on adding support for OpenDocument on MS-Office so OpenDocument will have grave difficulties expanding the userbase into MS-Office territory.
So instead of clean open document formats we might get stuck with (presumably) relatively cludgy open document formats.
HTML + CSS is not the most optimal solution to that as HTML lacks semantically quite a whole deal compared to what one would want to have in a word processing document. A word processing document is after all not quite the same thing as online hypertext documents, therefore it is more sane to have an own XML format with semantically descriptive tags for word processing.
And HTML carries with it a great amount of legacy tags along with it. Not even XHTML is currently free from that legacy. It would just complicate things needlessly to try to make a sane document format by building it on top of HTML.
The problem is that one shouldn't have to even try to make it work. A desktop operating system in the form of a desktop oriented Linux distribution should be as painless as possible to set up. Preferably there should not be even the need to have a C compiler present. Shove in the installation CD/DVD and boot it up and the installer should take care of everything hardwareconfiguraitonwise.
With Linux and new hardware this is currently just a distant dream as the drivers simply aren't there when the hardware is new. But after a while after the drivers finally get into the kernel and distributions, the ride gets a whole lot smoother. The problem is that it can take a considerable time for this to happen. First a while for the drivers to appear in the standard kernel, and then a while for that kernel to appear in the various distribution installers.
A binary kernel driver layer could in some regard alleviate these issues, but only if the hardware manufacturers would actually start releasing Linux drivers themselves, and at the same time as the Windows drivers. And then there are the freedom concerns mentioned here already with such a binary layer.
Assuming binary drivers targetted for a binary kernel layer would be available from hardware manufacturers as soon as they release new hardware, one could just put them on a USB storage device or something like that and the Linux installer could just ask during the installation if one would like to load 3rd party drivers from just such a device.
I myself don't have huge problems with having to perform all kinds of dark magic to get things working, but the average user won't cope with most of this. Linux is not just a hacker's plaything anymore. But for it to start gaining ground the installation and hardware configuration must be improved - e.g. it isn't amusing to have the installer not detect any harddrives when there are no drivers for the harddrive controller on the installation disk.
What happens when your hardware changes and that nice Java Runtime Environment isn't available for your new hardware?
Here in Sweden all passports issued since October 1st this year have an RFID chip containing biometric data. Currently a digital photograph along with digitalized information of all the regular printed information is contained in it, but within a few years fingerprints will be added to it as well.
The harsh feelings amongst the population towards these new passports is not restricted only to the potential integrity issues. The number of police stations where one can get these new passports is less than half compared to where one could get passports before, as the new equipment required for e.g. the photography is so expensive so they didn't get the equipment to every of the old places. Also these new passports cost more, and are only valid five years compared to the ten years of the old passports. So in the long term the queues at the police stations to get a passport will be far worse than it has been, and the queuing has been bad enough already for a long time.
Belgium and Norway are other European countries that have passports containing RFID implemented, and Germany will soon also have these.
Alien is not exactly the ultimate solution for installing RPMs on a DEB system. Lots of bad things can happen, it is not uncommon for the resulting package to have to be forcibly installed (which is never a good thing since it can cause consistency issues with the package management) due to e.g. conflicting files that are already provided by other packages. Basically alien is a hack job to get a package of a foreign format installed.
Perhaps they wanted to avoid the kind of anticlimax that Doom 3 had?
I didn't really hear anything about Quake 4 before it was released either, beyond knowing that it was in the makings.
XHTML with the application/xhtml+xml content type is unfortunately still broken in the very same way.
IE 7 seems to be essentially nothing more than IE 6 with a fancier user interface - the two big issues of proper CSS support and this regarding XHTML are still in an as poor condition as ever.
Doesn't seem to be working. Tested with Wine 20050524 and Cedega 4.3. Barfs at the installer already.
Debian does this already with Thunderbird.
And that is a problem how?
NUMA aware OSes on x86/AMD64 are available from all kinds of directions nowadays.
Linux has NUMA support since 2.6, Windows has NUMA in Windows XP (since SP2) and Windows 2003 Server, to mention a few.
I strongly recommend installing straight to testing ('sarge') using the new Debian-Installer installer.
The current stable ('woody') release (3.0) is way too outdated (over two years old now) for being able to provide an enjoyable desktop/workstation usage experience.
The current testing on the other hand contains up to date versions of software and works very well. It will "soon" become the new stable release (3.1)
My guess would be that it includes CPU model specific definitions for power management and other features that need to be activated in a certain way by the OS for them to function.
This could also explain that the processor clocks it down as certain power management features do that to the processor.
See for yourselves.
IE supports the 1-bit transparency in 8-bit indexed PNGs. The problem with this transparency method is that it is the same way GIF uses transparency, which results in ugly jaggies in most cases.
IE does not support the alpha-channel transparency in 32-bit RGBA PNGs without using the fugly proprietary CSS mess that invokes some DirectX stuff to make the transparency work.
Some of the features of the AMD64 processors, such as the 8 additional general purpose registers (R8 - R15) and 8 additonal SIMD registers (XMM8 - XMM15) are only available in the long mode (64-bit mode).
So to be able to take benefit of those additional registers (which are more than welcome due to the register-starved nature of x86) one needs to recompile the application to use the long mode where they are available.
Any browser detection worth its name can identify Opera even when it is identifying itself as MSIE.
Examples:
Opera as MSIE 6.0: Opera as Netscape 4: Opera as Opera:As you can see, the string Opera is present always, allowing for identification as Opera, but yet working to fool the old crummy browser detections that only know the existance of Internet Explorer and Netscape 4...
Actually most simple browser detections can be fooled just by adding the string MSIE anywhere in the User-Agent.