But remember that Britain was very much the declining power at this time and the labour government was cancelling most areospace projects at the time.
Also remember that the early space programmes were the public face of ICBM programmes. It became clear that trident was going to be our nuclear deterent, so there was little point in continuing the rocketry side of things. The deterent we had in the meantime was characteristicly heath-robinson. I'm a huge fan of the 'delta lady' myself - the vulcan, but they have one of each at Duxford
Depending on the circumstances, you might be sent down for a 2 year stretch if you've wiped the key - even if you've done nothing wrong and the data in crypto is wholly innocent.
The same would of course be true for these ABIT IDE controllers.
That would be write to your MP, Yank. Fax is best actually (in my experience).
I find this sort of rabid Linux/GPL/open source zealotry particularly irritating. As far as I'm concerned (as a UK tax payer) I want the government using the correct tool for the job required, using cost as the primary deciding factor. I'm sure time will tell that a UNIX (not necessarily Linux) solution would prove to have a cheaper TCO than an MS Windows platform. Ideally, I think we should also factor in technological independence from foreign powers (all of them, even our allies) wherever possible. These days it's hardly ever possible.
Large government databases often need big boxes to do the required heavy lifting. Linux will not be appropriate in many of these situations. IBM/HP/Fujitsu/Sun boxes (sadly I can't add a UK large scale computer manufacturer here, since ICL bowed out) and the major DB companies provide relatively (relative to writing and supporting it yourself) cheap solutions.
I'm just not ready to sleep after a mere 16 hours. Typically I sleep about 3 - 4 hours per night, feel like absolute crap in the morning, drag all day, and by 8pm I feel fine and am ready to stay up until 3am again. At 3am I force myself to go to bed, although I feel fine, but as soon as I am horizontal I'm out like a light.
Given the link between your bodies sleep cycle and light levels (we use bright light as an adjusting factor to the period of the melatonin/sleep cycle), you might try tinkering with your exposure to light:
* Go for a walk outside first thing in the morning (the yellow face, it burnss us preciouss!) * Turn the brightness down on your monitor as the ambient light in your room fades. Or use a glare shield. * Stop using your computer completely half an hour before you go to bed and turn a few lights off/down.
I currently loose sleep 'synchronization' once every 3 weeks or so (a combination of not having anything to do and abuse of Quake, RtCW, et al.). I find the above method effective in re-regulating it. I take my sleep very seriously as there are links between lack of/too much REM sleep and depression. Of course, my other occaisonal method of getting to sleep (drinking a lot of booze in the hours before I plan to sleep) is also linked with depression. Hmm...
The linux kernel has VFS (Virtual Filesystem Switch) which acts as an abstraction layer allowing you to mount and use many different file systems in the same way. That's pretty original.
No it isn't. The VFS/vnode framework was developed for SunOS 2.0 by Sun Microsystems in 1985.
But SCO had the support for the entire platform including the Veritas FS.
Sun have this approach as well. VxVM and VxFS are optional software packages, though they appear on the Sun price list and are often bundled with storage products. The software sits in the kernel as loadable modules, Sun provides patches against the products on SunSolve alongside Solaris patches and they take support calls from customers as if it were part of Solaris. What this means is that a customer's crash dump arrives at Sun, it's analysed and if it looks like a Veritas problem the call is punted over to them and Sun manages the call until resolution. To the customer it looks like Veritas are not involved.
In practice, Sun punts the call over to Veritas where it disappears into a black hole. The customer starts shouting at Sun, who end up giving away free hardware or discounts in order to placate the customer and keep the business. What do Veritas care? They just fix the problem when they round to it.
Authough (thank god) I've never had the misfortune to use SCO's crap OS, I'm almost certain that it was VxFS that was causing the bug you mention above, not UnixWare. I say that because I've come across much the same thing on Solaris. In my experience Veritas Filesystem has always been a fairly bug-ridden and poorly tested product - once it provided functionality not available in many a core OS, this is largely no longer true. Solaris for one, now provides UFS logging, Direct I/O, snapshot facilities etc.
Veritas has a pisspoor reputation for supporting their products in a timely fashion, it's horrendously expensive on large machines, the arsing about with license keys that it requires is tedious and I'd rather avoid tainting my vendor tested and qualified kernel with third-party clag unless absolutely necessary.
$4.5m seems like a bargain until you tot up the running costs. Those admiralty drum boilers are thirsty beasts - HMS Belfast (a mere cruiser) had 4 of these, consuming ~26 tons of furnace fuel oil per hour at full steam. Plus of course the wages for your private army of mercenary sailors, uniforms, medals, rum, ex-soviet MiGs, an elaborate escape submarine - it soon adds up. It's not easy being an evil genius these days...
Eighty-Five Conservatives on my Freaks list. wooHOO!
+1. I'm not conservative, I just find your sig irritating.
Is this stuff just a windows problem?
on
Gator Examined
·
· Score: 1
Well, we did all kinda know that gator was obnoxious...
Indeed, I've always found the concept of spyware absolutely revolting and the companies that push these 'products' are worse than slime. But I've also assumed that it's a windows only problem - and one that I can easily avoid since I only play games on my windows partition and I keep the network interface permanently disabled.
Does anyone know if there are any UNIX equivalents that we should be aware of?
for wireless pdas, the ipaq 5455 is really the way to go.
It's likely to take the best part of a year (going on past experience) for HP to get Linux working on this model as well as it does on the 3[68]00s. Also bear in mind that there will probably never be native support for SD cards, though MMC cards do instead.
You really, really want to avoid being stuck with PocketPC for any length of time, trust me.
I love infiltration but I hate playing against humans (they're all better than me, sob). I get a huge amount of enjoyment from playing against the bots, even though they're fairly predictable. I recommend the 'Chasm' map - I can play that for hours on end, with and without the various mutators.
I've heard rumors of touch-screens being used to make headshots.
As a recovering minesweeper addict, a habit I picked up before I discovered UNIX during the windows 3.11 days - and no, GNOME mines won't cut it, I'm starting to twitch.
I already have a pretty good best score (76 on expert, though these days I have trouble getting below 100), a touchscreen coupled with a keyboard binding for both mouse buttons, would be a distinctly unfair advantage! Hmm.:)
Yes, but have you tried to put a PCI sound card in a solaris box lately?
Yes, painful. But then a Solaris box is the wrong tool for this job, try a Mac:) Solaris audio has always been somewhat 'backward', it's clearly not a target market for Sun:).
On the other hand, have you tried getting decent accelerated 3D (or even comparable 2D) support under Linux on a suitably equipped Sun workstation recently? No driver support sadly...
...but UltraSparcs lack variety. Not many linux distros still support Ultra ports well...
That's due to lack of demand, the general public can't afford new Sun hardware (except for the crappy SunBlade workstations and the sub $1000 servers, which are basically PC's anyway) and the enterprise needs proper support. A port of RedHat9 would be almost unusable on older SPARC boxes - it's slow enough on my 1GHz Athlon.
Would you run Linux on a brand new Apple PowerBook, or would you stick to MacOSX? - a nice looking, modern OS which is tuned for the hardware platform, supports all of it's features, comes with a bunch of decent apps and is well supported by the vendor. Ditto Solaris on Sun hardware. Once you get to know it Solaris is a beautifully elegant and technically excellent OS. Even more so on the mid-range and high-end boxes, where it's maturity and scalability really shine.
Linux is maturing into a modern, fully featured UNIX which rivals Solaris in bloat. Lack of bloat was one of it's earlier strengths on low-end SPARC desktop hardware, there seems little point in using it these days, especially since there are so few SPARC/Linux applications.
AAC is no different. Ask your neighbour what AAC is. It's very likely that he's never even heard of it.
The difference is, they probably will soon as commercial ventures (like Apple's song download service) start to take off. Ogg/Vorbis is likely to remain niche (loved by nerds, used in game engines, embedded applications etc.).
Ask your neighbour if he knows what.bmp or.jpg file contains (I suspect he probably will if he owns a digital camera, or has used the web much), now ask him if knows what a.tga, a.xpm or a.wpg contains, I bet he'd be none the wiser even after double-clicking on the file and reading the error message.
...Also, what kind of latency do you think sending data over a network will introduce?
Indeed, the latency will suck - badly. It's an unavoidable fact that the speed of light is finite. The greater the distance you put between the nodes, the suckier the latency becomes. This is why Sun campus clusters are limited to just a few Km. when doing remote disk mirroring. On FC-AL direct attach storage over dark fibre, you start hitting the SCSI time-out limit on disk writes and a write-intensive (especially transactional) application will absolutely crawl. This is also (one of) the reasons that the system back-planes are kept as short as possible on the big Sun boxes, and the phrase 'imagine a beowulf cluster of these' is seldom heard among Large Scale Computing and serious finance customers.
you know, I wonder how many of these big F50 companies have to move to Linux on the desktop before we get a 'critical mass' of Linux desktops...
Not very many I suspect. But I seriously doubt this firm will be doing anything like that in the next decade. Believe it or not, they're probably getting a very good deal out of Microsoft, compared with smaller outfits. The software is pretty (if you like that sort of thing), does what it claims to (most of the time) and the end users are familiar with it.
An oil company is not exactly short of ready cash, but they're not stupid, they'll have done a TCO study. The trouble is, these can be made to say whatever you want them to say (believe me, I've made a Solaris only desktop strategy look good on paper:) and they're normally made to say 'we'll carry on doing what we're doing now, thanks'. They've already made a heavy investment in mitigating the effect of viruses, worms etc. and change to Linux would be a massive, painful, time consuming, expensive and arguably avoidable undertaking.
Luckily, I know most of the backoffice heavy lifting is done on Solaris or MVS, so at least the mission-critical data is safe.
Apparently it's affecting few systems, and not every install of SR1a
If you RTFA, you'll notice that it is affecting corporate users running Microsoft Select software. Microsoft Select is a bulk licensing scheme which saves corporations from all that tedious mucking about with license keys (a practical impossibility with this size of user base).
I happen to know the 'global energy company' which is mentioned in The Register article. They pay Microsoft a huge sum of money for their software and this is going to affect their relationship significantly - they are not amused. I expect there will be a significant discount on future licenses, a large penalty payment or a very high profile public relations disaster for Microsoft.
Another tip: SparcStation IPCs make excellent monitor stands and cost less (mine were $5 or so each) than the flimsy plastic junk that is normally sold for that purpose.
I find them (well, an LX) a little too tall, especially with a large monitor. I think the top of the monitor glass should be roughly level with your eyes when sat with a straight back. An old unipack, or JavaStation (almost as useless as the LX) is the perfect height for my desk. You may also find that the rubber feet on your IPC start to decompose into horrid sticky blobs which ruin your desk.
I no longer work for Sun (I left a year and half ago), but that's what we were told at the time (~2 1/2 years ago), as I said - it was apparently an exotic configuration using pre-production kit, and the DoD are notably absent from the 'Success Stories' section of the F15K product page, for whatever reason:). Let me be more precise about what Sun currently offers to customers (all of this publicly available on Sun's website, I checked).
Sun has had Remote Shared Memory products for years (then SCI, just recently Sun Fire Link (codename wildcat)), Sun Cluster 3.0 gives you the shared devices, global filesystem, failure monitoring etc. (either using RSM or DLPI interconnects such as gigabit Ethernet, and uses the ultra low-latency Solaris xdoors IPC mechanism, on a bunch of separate Solaris instances. That stuff is currently being used for commercial HA clustering. HPC customers are using the Sun HPC ClusterTools software which provides the Sun MPI library (good whitepaper here). This is a different programming model from standard SMP, but allows you to use high-speed low-latency RSM, interconnect failover - all that good stuff - on a bunch of servers running separate instances of Solaris.
The Sun Fire Link is an interesting piece of interconnect technology because it plugs directly into the server's crossbar, couple that fact with a lot of new cc-NUMA code in Solaris 9, and much of SunCluster 3's core functionality being built into Solaris and I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to what sort of product announcements might be coming along soon.
Slashdot Mirror
But remember that Britain was very much the declining power at this time and the labour government was cancelling most areospace projects at the time.
Also remember that the early space programmes were the public face of ICBM programmes. It became clear that trident was going to be our nuclear deterent, so there was little point in continuing the rocketry side of things. The deterent we had in the meantime was characteristicly heath-robinson. I'm a huge fan of the 'delta lady' myself - the vulcan, but they have one of each at Duxford
I did that using a script - check it out.
Cool, though you ought to be aware of your legal position if the UK Police wanted access to that data. As far as I understand the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) and specifically this section: 'Failure to comply with a notice'
Depending on the circumstances, you might be sent down for a 2 year stretch if you've wiped the key - even if you've done nothing wrong and the data in crypto is wholly innocent.
The same would of course be true for these ABIT IDE controllers.
Is that a desktop or a workstation?
British citizens.
Now is the time to write your MP.
That would be write to your MP, Yank. Fax is best actually (in my experience).
I find this sort of rabid Linux/GPL/open source zealotry particularly irritating. As far as I'm concerned (as a UK tax payer) I want the government using the correct tool for the job required, using cost as the primary deciding factor. I'm sure time will tell that a UNIX (not necessarily Linux) solution would prove to have a cheaper TCO than an MS Windows platform. Ideally, I think we should also factor in technological independence from foreign powers (all of them, even our allies) wherever possible. These days it's hardly ever possible.
Large government databases often need big boxes to do the required heavy lifting. Linux will not be appropriate in many of these situations. IBM/HP/Fujitsu/Sun boxes (sadly I can't add a UK large scale computer manufacturer here, since ICL bowed out) and the major DB companies provide relatively (relative to writing and supporting it yourself) cheap solutions.
I'm just not ready to sleep after a mere 16 hours. Typically I sleep about 3 - 4 hours per night, feel like absolute crap in the morning, drag all day, and by 8pm I feel fine and am ready to stay up until 3am again. At 3am I force myself to go to bed, although I feel fine, but as soon as I am horizontal I'm out like a light.
Given the link between your bodies sleep cycle and light levels (we use bright light as an adjusting factor to the period of the melatonin/sleep cycle), you might try tinkering with your exposure to light:
* Go for a walk outside first thing in the morning (the yellow face, it burnss us preciouss!)
* Turn the brightness down on your monitor as the ambient light in your room fades. Or use a glare shield.
* Stop using your computer completely half an hour before you go to bed and turn a few lights off/down.
I currently loose sleep 'synchronization' once every 3 weeks or so (a combination of not having anything to do and abuse of Quake, RtCW, et al.). I find the above method effective in re-regulating it. I take my sleep very seriously as there are links between lack of/too much REM sleep and depression. Of course, my other occaisonal method of getting to sleep (drinking a lot of booze in the hours before I plan to sleep) is also linked with depression. Hmm...
The linux kernel has VFS (Virtual Filesystem Switch) which acts as an abstraction layer allowing you to mount and use many different file systems in the same way. That's pretty original.
No it isn't. The VFS/vnode framework was developed for SunOS 2.0 by Sun Microsystems in 1985.
I wonder what Bill's name would be if he appeared in one of Flynt's works?
Billy Longhorn.
But SCO had the support for the entire platform including the Veritas FS.
Sun have this approach as well. VxVM and VxFS are optional software packages, though they appear on the Sun price list and are often bundled with storage products. The software sits in the kernel as loadable modules, Sun provides patches against the products on SunSolve alongside Solaris patches and they take support calls from customers as if it were part of Solaris. What this means is that a customer's crash dump arrives at Sun, it's analysed and if it looks like a Veritas problem the call is punted over to them and Sun manages the call until resolution. To the customer it looks like Veritas are not involved.
In practice, Sun punts the call over to Veritas where it disappears into a black hole. The customer starts shouting at Sun, who end up giving away free hardware or discounts in order to placate the customer and keep the business. What do Veritas care? They just fix the problem when they round to it.
Authough (thank god) I've never had the misfortune to use SCO's crap OS, I'm almost certain that it was VxFS that was causing the bug you mention above, not UnixWare. I say that because I've come across much the same thing on Solaris. In my experience Veritas Filesystem has always been a fairly bug-ridden and poorly tested product - once it provided functionality not available in many a core OS, this is largely no longer true. Solaris for one, now provides UFS logging, Direct I/O, snapshot facilities etc.
Veritas has a pisspoor reputation for supporting their products in a timely fashion, it's horrendously expensive on large machines, the arsing about with license keys that it requires is tedious and I'd rather avoid tainting my vendor tested and qualified kernel with third-party clag unless absolutely necessary.
$4.5m seems like a bargain until you tot up the running costs. Those admiralty drum boilers are thirsty beasts - HMS Belfast (a mere cruiser) had 4 of these, consuming ~26 tons of furnace fuel oil per hour at full steam. Plus of course the wages for your private army of mercenary sailors, uniforms, medals, rum, ex-soviet MiGs, an elaborate escape submarine - it soon adds up. It's not easy being an evil genius these days...
Eighty-Five Conservatives on my Freaks list. wooHOO!
+1. I'm not conservative, I just find your sig irritating.
Well, we did all kinda know that gator was obnoxious...
Indeed, I've always found the concept of spyware absolutely revolting and the companies that push these 'products' are worse than slime. But I've also assumed that it's a windows only problem - and one that I can easily avoid since I only play games on my windows partition and I keep the network interface permanently disabled.
Does anyone know if there are any UNIX equivalents that we should be aware of?
for wireless pdas, the ipaq 5455 is really the way to go.
It's likely to take the best part of a year (going on past experience) for HP to get Linux working on this model as well as it does on the 3[68]00s. Also bear in mind that there will probably never be native support for SD cards, though MMC cards do instead.
You really, really want to avoid being stuck with PocketPC for any length of time, trust me.
I love infiltration but I hate playing against humans (they're all better than me, sob). I get a huge amount of enjoyment from playing against the bots, even though they're fairly predictable. I recommend the 'Chasm' map - I can play that for hours on end, with and without the various mutators.
I've heard rumors of touch-screens being used to make headshots.
:)
As a recovering minesweeper addict, a habit I picked up before I discovered UNIX during the windows 3.11 days - and no, GNOME mines won't cut it, I'm starting to twitch.
I already have a pretty good best score (76 on expert, though these days I have trouble getting below 100), a touchscreen coupled with a keyboard binding for both mouse buttons, would be a distinctly unfair advantage! Hmm.
Ah, a fellow Solaris Domestic Engineer. There aren't all that many of us about. :)
Yes, but have you tried to put a PCI sound card in a solaris box lately?
:) Solaris audio has always been somewhat 'backward', it's clearly not a target market for Sun :).
Yes, painful. But then a Solaris box is the wrong tool for this job, try a Mac
On the other hand, have you tried getting decent accelerated 3D (or even comparable 2D) support under Linux on a suitably equipped Sun workstation recently? No driver support sadly...
...but UltraSparcs lack variety. Not many linux distros still support Ultra ports well...
That's due to lack of demand, the general public can't afford new Sun hardware (except for the crappy SunBlade workstations and the sub $1000 servers, which are basically PC's anyway) and the enterprise needs proper support. A port of RedHat9 would be almost unusable on older SPARC boxes - it's slow enough on my 1GHz Athlon.
Would you run Linux on a brand new Apple PowerBook, or would you stick to MacOSX? - a nice looking, modern OS which is tuned for the hardware platform, supports all of it's features, comes with a bunch of decent apps and is well supported by the vendor. Ditto Solaris on Sun hardware. Once you get to know it Solaris is a beautifully elegant and technically excellent OS. Even more so on the mid-range and high-end boxes, where it's maturity and scalability really shine.
Linux is maturing into a modern, fully featured UNIX which rivals Solaris in bloat. Lack of bloat was one of it's earlier strengths on low-end SPARC desktop hardware, there seems little point in using it these days, especially since there are so few SPARC/Linux applications.
AAC is no different. Ask your neighbour what AAC is. It's very likely that he's never even heard of it.
.bmp or .jpg file contains (I suspect he probably will if he owns a digital camera, or has used the web much), now ask him if knows what a .tga, a .xpm or a .wpg contains, I bet he'd be none the wiser even after double-clicking on the file and reading the error message.
The difference is, they probably will soon as commercial ventures (like Apple's song download service) start to take off. Ogg/Vorbis is likely to remain niche (loved by nerds, used in game engines, embedded applications etc.).
Ask your neighbour if he knows what
...Also, what kind of latency do you think sending data over a network will introduce?
Indeed, the latency will suck - badly. It's an unavoidable fact that the speed of light is finite. The greater the distance you put between the nodes, the suckier the latency becomes. This is why Sun campus clusters are limited to just a few Km. when doing remote disk mirroring. On FC-AL direct attach storage over dark fibre, you start hitting the SCSI time-out limit on disk writes and a write-intensive (especially transactional) application will absolutely crawl. This is also (one of) the reasons that the system back-planes are kept as short as possible on the big Sun boxes, and the phrase 'imagine a beowulf cluster of these' is seldom heard among Large Scale Computing and serious finance customers.
you know, I wonder how many of these big F50 companies have to move to Linux on the desktop before we get a 'critical mass' of Linux desktops...
:) and they're normally made to say 'we'll carry on doing what we're doing now, thanks'. They've already made a heavy investment in mitigating the effect of viruses, worms etc. and change to Linux would be a massive, painful, time consuming, expensive and arguably avoidable undertaking.
Not very many I suspect. But I seriously doubt this firm will be doing anything like that in the next decade. Believe it or not, they're probably getting a very good deal out of Microsoft, compared with smaller outfits. The software is pretty (if you like that sort of thing), does what it claims to (most of the time) and the end users are familiar with it.
An oil company is not exactly short of ready cash, but they're not stupid, they'll have done a TCO study. The trouble is, these can be made to say whatever you want them to say (believe me, I've made a Solaris only desktop strategy look good on paper
Luckily, I know most of the backoffice heavy lifting is done on Solaris or MVS, so at least the mission-critical data is safe.
Apparently it's affecting few systems, and not every install of SR1a
If you RTFA, you'll notice that it is affecting corporate users running Microsoft Select software. Microsoft Select is a bulk licensing scheme which saves corporations from all that tedious mucking about with license keys (a practical impossibility with this size of user base).
I happen to know the 'global energy company' which is mentioned in The Register article. They pay Microsoft a huge sum of money for their software and this is going to affect their relationship significantly - they are not amused. I expect there will be a significant discount on future licenses, a large penalty payment or a very high profile public relations disaster for Microsoft.
Another tip: SparcStation IPCs make excellent monitor stands and cost less (mine were $5 or so each) than the flimsy plastic junk that is normally sold for that purpose.
I find them (well, an LX) a little too tall, especially with a large monitor. I think the top of the monitor glass should be roughly level with your eyes when sat with a straight back. An old unipack, or JavaStation (almost as useless as the LX) is the perfect height for my desk. You may also find that the rubber feet on your IPC start to decompose into horrid sticky blobs which ruin your desk.
I no longer work for Sun (I left a year and half ago), but that's what we were told at the time (~2 1/2 years ago), as I said - it was apparently an exotic configuration using pre-production kit, and the DoD are notably absent from the 'Success Stories' section of the F15K product page, for whatever reason :). Let me be more precise about what Sun currently offers to customers (all of this publicly available on Sun's website, I checked).
Sun has had Remote Shared Memory products for years (then SCI, just recently Sun Fire Link (codename wildcat)), Sun Cluster 3.0 gives you the shared devices, global filesystem, failure monitoring etc. (either using RSM or DLPI interconnects such as gigabit Ethernet, and uses the ultra low-latency Solaris xdoors IPC mechanism, on a bunch of separate Solaris instances. That stuff is currently being used for commercial HA clustering. HPC customers are using the Sun HPC ClusterTools software which provides the Sun MPI library (good whitepaper here). This is a different programming model from standard SMP, but allows you to use high-speed low-latency RSM, interconnect failover - all that good stuff - on a bunch of servers running separate instances of Solaris.
The Sun Fire Link is an interesting piece of interconnect technology because it plugs directly into the server's crossbar, couple that fact with a lot of new cc-NUMA code in Solaris 9, and much of SunCluster 3's core functionality being built into Solaris and I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to what sort of product announcements might be coming along soon.
But I'm just a pundit these days...
...The metal ones are 1.77"...
Wow, that's enormous. I meant 0.177" of course. It's an air rifle, not an elephant gun.