It also has more security options -- probably the widest range available to point and click Linux users -- a bunch of cool new games, and default 3-D acceleration support, something Chmouel says is currently offered by no other commercial Linux distribution.
Well, the caveat is that it is not XFree4 acceleration thru DRI. Which, if they're gonna throw in a beta KDE, then why not a beta X system for good measure? Along with a beta kernel to get it working... Your Working Boy,
... The KDE v2 is definitely not 'stable', and they went and changed RedHat's switchdesk mechanism without warning. I think most of the problems I've had are with the KDE subsystem. I've converted to XFce and have been pretty happy, though there are issues there too (placement of icons on and in panels is broken as compared to CDE, which did it right).
Also, I was doing a clobber-upgrade (keep my home,/vol partitions unformatted but clobber the rest and start from scratch on/usr,/var,/, etc..) and ran into lots of little things, like the installer was broken because it failed to format my format-target-designate/usr before allowing me to select other packages and thus limited me to the free space available for all new packages..
I would most definitely not call this a wal-mart-ready distro, unless you go with XFce or one of the more stable desktops. At least they didn't go with an unsupported compiler.. And inetd comes disabled by default, which is IMHO a feature.. Your Working Boy,
After being a student computer lab nerd for 3.5 years, I can easily say that user training and documentation (and enforcement) is more important than selecting a different form of portable media. The floppy should still be fine for regular documents, should only be used for a document at a time, and its contents should only be a clone of something stored on served, backed-up, intranet-accessible disk. I think you should, instead of worrying about this, make sure your network and server infrastructure is sound. Besides, if you put different (which means larger) portable media in, your commuter students will use it to warez, pr0n and napster to it to bring home.
Besides, the university is the place where people learn how to live in the real world, in theory. Maybe losing a critical file and having to retype from the last printout draft is a great way to teach people to SAVE and make tested BACKUPs..
... and I'm surprised it took this long for investors to start demanding results.
My current company has just been hit with some of this. I don't think they're doomed yet, but I am alert to the symptoms that I've seen in several doomed companies to date. The biggest problem I find is the controller freakout; if you can avoid or mitigate that, you will delay the onset of doomedness. For example, my corp had a significant LAN outage (5-7 hours of prime working time) due to an 'organically-grown' network infrastructure that finally melted down into massive cascading switch failures. Conservatively, it probably cost our office $250k in billable hours. A solid network with 400 switched ports (+ VLAN, L3, multigigabit backplane, mgmt software, etc.. See Cisco, Avaya, Foundry, etc..) costs about $90k. What figure is easier for a controller to redline?
I'm thinking that getting insurance against outages (like from Lloyd's or something) would actually help me, since premiums against insuring losses of that magnitude would probably be quite steep, and if you go with a technically-literate insurance firm, I'm sure you'd get discounts for solid switched nets, unix servers, proper backup, security and other procedures..
After a preliminary exam, forensic pathologists state that their deaths were all caused by ruptured lungs. "If I didn't know better, I would think that they would have died laughing", said the pathologist. One of the police experts who determined that the code was in fact Microsoft's also began laughing uncontrollably, and was rushed to a nearby hospital. He remains in serious condition and on heavy sedatives.
Was ist das nurnstuck git und slotermeyer?
(I thought this was outlawed by the Geneva Convention...)
Seriously... 640x480? I guess it's so you can see your 'fashion plate' in action more clearly.. Though that fu??in backfires on my 1024x768 LCD.. Can you say BLOCKY? Feh.
When Rune hits it'll hit pretty darned hard... I just hope the mod community (it uses the Unreal engine/UnrealEd/UnrealScript) starts creating some groovy class/stat/RPG/ addons and hopefully some massive worlds..
I've got the warez gold master and I'm positively hooked.. Gotta love the dwarven work sword..
Warez it for PC, and if I like it, buy the Linux or Mac version...
Deus Ex just flies on my cube..
Your Working Boy,
Re:X wrapper as a 'plugin' for OSX?
on
X On OSX Now Free
·
· Score: 1
Looks very cool, though I'm wondering if any Mac and/or BSD geeks are at work on an OSS version..
Your Working Boy,
Re:X wrapper as a 'plugin' for OSX?
on
X On OSX Now Free
·
· Score: 1
X doesn't natively have widgets - thus QT and GTK.
Yeah, but there's lots of client/server plumbing and X primitives that something like standard xterm would use.. GTK/QT would allow you to in theory compile those apps for use as native Mac apps, which would also be cool, but it wouldn't let you login to a remote server via SSH + X forwarding and spawn back a proctool or gkrellm..
Considering I can do almost anything useful from home with my Mac using Nutscrape + Nifty/SSH, adding X would just be icing on the cake;)
How about, instead of building a fully-fledged monolithic X system, extending the Mac interface to wrapper X functionality? What I'd really rather have is to run in my Mac interface and pop open X apps (using OSX widgets) as appropriate instead of having to throw out the OSX interface (which, let's be honest, is why you buy the damn thing in the first place).
... Seriously, considering that Office sales are down and they're relying on investment jiggery-pokery for their last quarter, I believe we're starting to see the beginning of the decline. Profits from operations are down significantly. And they can't get into the really nice high-margin part of the tech biz, inegration and services consulting, since their customers are that industry and M$ would never survive.. M$ has a >US$300B market cap for what is essentially a one-trick pony (software) and is not diversified across as many lines of business as a traditional corp like GE, IBM, etc. This is fine when everyone needs that one trick, but what happens when it's no longer enough?
Micro$oft is built on a very large strong pillar, but it's only _one_ pillar, and the morlocks are starting to get thru the outer layers, and they're not going to stop. The only question is, how long before the jackhammers are done?
Note also what they're doing with their cash. Buying back stock, while a good thing for the price, is not what a growth company is supposed to do.. It's a sign of maturity, and M$ multiples are based on growth not value.. It means that they can't find a more profitable thing to do with the cash besides let it earn interest.. What's next? Dividends?
Microsoft.NET will be their Rambus, and possibly even their PS/2..
there is a nearly 100% comparable base station from Lucent, called "AP-500", which inside is actually the same as the Airport Base Station.
I hadn't seen it (I deal with 'enterprise' gear mainly;).. A nice thing about the UFO is that it has an integrated modem as well as an ethernet bridge/router.. (mine's setup simply as a bridge to my existing ethernet, works like a champ from base to Cube about 30' away thru a concrete floor)
I have one word for you: ROMP. Well, I suppose it's an acronym.
Hehe, that's a smidge before my time on IBM RISC hardware.. I started with a 7012-340 workstation at about the time the 390 was released.. What a wonderful frankenbeast that was (ripped a sabine adapter out of one system and used it until AIX v4, various 8mm, QIC, HDDs chained off, 16mbps token ring..)..
Though I did work with a dude who was on a team that developed a mainframe-on-a-card for PCs. Not terminal emulators (like Wang cards), but an actual System 370 system that fit into an AT slot used for software development.. PC/370 IIRC..
Note also that once you modify it, it's not a Part-15 device any longer and you should have a license.
That's odd: according to the Lucent site (and my Lucent reps) there's no regulation of these antennas. I ran a couple of directional (Yagi) antennas for a 802.11b p2p link test and I asked about FCC requirements.
Hell, they even list the 24 dBi Parabolic Grid as available for 'FCC and unregulated countries only', which leads me to assume they're FCC-legal..
They have had a long tradition in RISC development
Well, considering that IBM researcher John Cocke invented RISC... (scroll down to 1980). Also do a keyword search on 'Ted Codd'. Guess where he worked?
IBM basically suffered from BigCorpBlah syndrome, which afflicted most big corps during the '50s thru the '90s.. So much cool shit got invented and totally ignored, and left to their inventors to splinter off and start dozens of revolutions..
One has to wonder if Micro$oft R&D is sitting on something interesting that is being smooshed because it doesn't fit into some marketdroid's PowerPoint slide... M$ has the size, hubris, and complacency of a BigCorpBlah victim..
Your Working Boy,
Re:What's wrong with both the HURD and Linux.
on
HURD For 'Big Iron'?
·
· Score: 1
Can any kernel Guru's help me out? I'm under the impression that even if you use Linux modules, you still need a hardcoded stub in the kernel to access it. For example you can't compile a newly released module without recompiling the kernel.
This is false as far as I've seen. I've been able to select additional modules, make dep, then make modules && make modules_install && depmod -a for some time now (all thru 2.4 at least, and probably for 2.2, though it's been awhile since I've built a 2.2 kernel).. There may be some static dependencies for classes of functionality which then allow for particular drivers/functions to be modularized, which would require a kernel rebuild and reboot, but I haven't come across them.
No mention is made of the access points, which are important if you want to easily hook up to your wired LAN.
Keep in mind you can use your linux/*bsd system as such a router (bridge, actually, unless your entire infrastructure is wireless, but I'm just being persnickety) by installing a PCI 802.11b board. Lucent sells these as a combo PCI PCMCIA adapter board + PCMCIA adapter, so your server will also need PCMCIA drivers (most servers I build do not have PCMCIA drivers even as modules)..
oops. sorry, bad form to reply to my own posts, but when I read a little more, I find that the wavelan driver was hacked to support the airport/cards/, not the base.
Yeah,
The _really_ cheap solution, if you run a home PCI-based system as a router/firewall/gateway, is to drop in a PCI 802.11 card. You end up not having to buy a 10bt and modem if you don't need 'em. Any card can be setup as a base station, it's the host that handles the routing/bridging.. I'd have done it, but the UFO is a pretty neat drop-in solution IMHO and getting from unpacking the boxes to fully-working-networked Cube was literally 20 minutes. Nothing to sneeze at, it took a lot of smart people a lot of time and effort to get there.
The software that comes with it is Mac-only, but there is a Java application on the net that manages it. The management protocol is SNMP, so a native Linux application to manage it would be easy enough.
IIRC the card inside is WaveLAN, so you might be able to use the Lucent WaveLAN tools on it.. Also, I've heard if you are interested in cracking the case you can stick a nice 14dB amplified omni antenna on it and get mega range.. I'm thinking of doing that to mine so I can get data out on the porch;)
Apple really nailed it on that one. No PC vendor comes close, and a comparable base station from Lucent or Cisco costs waay more..
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's not true...masterbation is pretty easy, but that's about it.
Wait a few years...
Your Working Boy,
Yeah, but the current DRM code supports my G400 (I know, I was running it before I decided to do a 'spring cleaning' on my box).
Your Working Boy,
It also has more security options -- probably the widest range available to point and click Linux users -- a bunch of cool new games, and default 3-D acceleration support, something Chmouel says is currently offered by no other commercial Linux distribution.
Well, the caveat is that it is not XFree4 acceleration thru DRI. Which, if they're gonna throw in a beta KDE, then why not a beta X system for good measure? Along with a beta kernel to get it working...
Your Working Boy,
... The KDE v2 is definitely not 'stable', and they went and changed RedHat's switchdesk mechanism without warning. I think most of the problems I've had are with the KDE subsystem. I've converted to XFce and have been pretty happy, though there are issues there too (placement of icons on and in panels is broken as compared to CDE, which did it right).
/vol partitions unformatted but clobber the rest and start from scratch on /usr, /var, /, etc..) and ran into lots of little things, like the installer was broken because it failed to format my format-target-designate /usr before allowing me to select other packages and thus limited me to the free space available for all new packages..
Also, I was doing a clobber-upgrade (keep my home,
I would most definitely not call this a wal-mart-ready distro, unless you go with XFce or one of the more stable desktops. At least they didn't go with an unsupported compiler.. And inetd comes disabled by default, which is IMHO a feature..
Your Working Boy,
.... Not April Fools day..
Good for a laugh though..
Your Working Boy,
After being a student computer lab nerd for 3.5 years, I can easily say that user training and documentation (and enforcement) is more important than selecting a different form of portable media. The floppy should still be fine for regular documents, should only be used for a document at a time, and its contents should only be a clone of something stored on served, backed-up, intranet-accessible disk. I think you should, instead of worrying about this, make sure your network and server infrastructure is sound. Besides, if you put different (which means larger) portable media in, your commuter students will use it to warez, pr0n and napster to it to bring home.
Besides, the university is the place where people learn how to live in the real world, in theory. Maybe losing a critical file and having to retype from the last printout draft is a great way to teach people to SAVE and make tested BACKUPs..
Your Working Boy,
... and I'm surprised it took this long for investors to start demanding results.
My current company has just been hit with some of this. I don't think they're doomed yet, but I am alert to the symptoms that I've seen in several doomed companies to date. The biggest problem I find is the controller freakout; if you can avoid or mitigate that, you will delay the onset of doomedness. For example, my corp had a significant LAN outage (5-7 hours of prime working time) due to an 'organically-grown' network infrastructure that finally melted down into massive cascading switch failures. Conservatively, it probably cost our office $250k in billable hours. A solid network with 400 switched ports (+ VLAN, L3, multigigabit backplane, mgmt software, etc.. See Cisco, Avaya, Foundry, etc..) costs about $90k. What figure is easier for a controller to redline?
I'm thinking that getting insurance against outages (like from Lloyd's or something) would actually help me, since premiums against insuring losses of that magnitude would probably be quite steep, and if you go with a technically-literate insurance firm, I'm sure you'd get discounts for solid switched nets, unix servers, proper backup, security and other procedures..
Or not.
Your Working Boy,
After a preliminary exam, forensic pathologists state that their deaths were all caused by ruptured lungs. "If I didn't know better, I would think that they would have died laughing", said the pathologist. One of the police experts who determined that the code was in fact Microsoft's also began laughing uncontrollably, and was rushed to a nearby hospital. He remains in serious condition and on heavy sedatives.
Was ist das nurnstuck git und slotermeyer?
(I thought this was outlawed by the Geneva Convention...)
Your Working Boy,
Seriously... 640x480? I guess it's so you can see your 'fashion plate' in action more clearly.. Though that fu??in backfires on my 1024x768 LCD.. Can you say BLOCKY? Feh.
When Rune hits it'll hit pretty darned hard... I just hope the mod community (it uses the Unreal engine/UnrealEd/UnrealScript) starts creating some groovy class/stat/RPG/ addons and hopefully some massive worlds..
I've got the warez gold master and I'm positively hooked.. Gotta love the dwarven work sword..
Your Working Boy,
My policy:
Warez it for PC, and if I like it, buy the Linux or Mac version...
Deus Ex just flies on my cube..
Your Working Boy,
Looks very cool, though I'm wondering if any Mac and/or BSD geeks are at work on an OSS version..
Your Working Boy,
X doesn't natively have widgets - thus QT and GTK.
;)
Yeah, but there's lots of client/server plumbing and X primitives that something like standard xterm would use.. GTK/QT would allow you to in theory compile those apps for use as native Mac apps, which would also be cool, but it wouldn't let you login to a remote server via SSH + X forwarding and spawn back a proctool or gkrellm..
Considering I can do almost anything useful from home with my Mac using Nutscrape + Nifty/SSH, adding X would just be icing on the cake
Your Working Boy,
How about, instead of building a fully-fledged monolithic X system, extending the Mac interface to wrapper X functionality? What I'd really rather have is to run in my Mac interface and pop open X apps (using OSX widgets) as appropriate instead of having to throw out the OSX interface (which, let's be honest, is why you buy the damn thing in the first place).
I wonder how well the basic widgets map..
Your Working Boy,
... Seriously, considering that Office sales are down and they're relying on investment jiggery-pokery for their last quarter, I believe we're starting to see the beginning of the decline. Profits from operations are down significantly. And they can't get into the really nice high-margin part of the tech biz, inegration and services consulting, since their customers are that industry and M$ would never survive.. M$ has a >US$300B market cap for what is essentially a one-trick pony (software) and is not diversified across as many lines of business as a traditional corp like GE, IBM, etc. This is fine when everyone needs that one trick, but what happens when it's no longer enough?
.NET will be their Rambus, and possibly even their PS/2..
Micro$oft is built on a very large strong pillar, but it's only _one_ pillar, and the morlocks are starting to get thru the outer layers, and they're not going to stop. The only question is, how long before the jackhammers are done?
Note also what they're doing with their cash. Buying back stock, while a good thing for the price, is not what a growth company is supposed to do.. It's a sign of maturity, and M$ multiples are based on growth not value.. It means that they can't find a more profitable thing to do with the cash besides let it earn interest.. What's next? Dividends?
Microsoft
Your Working Boy,
Looks like all they need now is an injection that can prevent water from freezing...
;)
Looks like Dr. Forrester might have had something there when he swapped Frank's blood for antifreeze..
Sure.. They called him mad.. but THEY'LL BE SORRY!!!
(2 karma for the episode in question..
Your Working Boy,
I'm wondering,
:p)
What if this was all that was left after some kind of apocalypse?
Or, even stranger...
What if the religion we have now was all that was left after some past apocalypse in a similar way?
Woooooo... Read the book..
(time to go home now
Your Working Boy,
there is a nearly 100% comparable base station from Lucent, called "AP-500", which inside is actually the same as the Airport Base Station.
;).. A nice thing about the UFO is that it has an integrated modem as well as an ethernet bridge/router.. (mine's setup simply as a bridge to my existing ethernet, works like a champ from base to Cube about 30' away thru a concrete floor)
I hadn't seen it (I deal with 'enterprise' gear mainly
Your Working Boy,
I have one word for you: ROMP. Well, I suppose it's an acronym.
Hehe, that's a smidge before my time on IBM RISC hardware.. I started with a 7012-340 workstation at about the time the 390 was released.. What a wonderful frankenbeast that was (ripped a sabine adapter out of one system and used it until AIX v4, various 8mm, QIC, HDDs chained off, 16mbps token ring..)..
Though I did work with a dude who was on a team that developed a mainframe-on-a-card for PCs. Not terminal emulators (like Wang cards), but an actual System 370 system that fit into an AT slot used for software development.. PC/370 IIRC..
Your Working Boy,
Note also that once you modify it, it's not a Part-15 device any longer and you should have a license.
That's odd: according to the Lucent site (and my Lucent reps) there's no regulation of these antennas. I ran a couple of directional (Yagi) antennas for a 802.11b p2p link test and I asked about FCC requirements.
Hell, they even list the 24 dBi Parabolic Grid as available for 'FCC and unregulated countries only', which leads me to assume they're FCC-legal..
(check out their product site.. Very cool..)
Your Working Boy,
I would hate for Apple to have to give up on AltiVec.
Yeah, it seems to work very well with MP3 ripping.. My 500MHz Cube can do 128kbps VBR normal-stereo at between 2.5x and 5x realtime..
Your Working Boy,
They have had a long tradition in RISC development
Well, considering that IBM researcher John Cocke invented RISC... (scroll down to 1980). Also do a keyword search on 'Ted Codd'. Guess where he worked?
IBM basically suffered from BigCorpBlah syndrome, which afflicted most big corps during the '50s thru the '90s.. So much cool shit got invented and totally ignored, and left to their inventors to splinter off and start dozens of revolutions..
One has to wonder if Micro$oft R&D is sitting on something interesting that is being smooshed because it doesn't fit into some marketdroid's PowerPoint slide... M$ has the size, hubris, and complacency of a BigCorpBlah victim..
Your Working Boy,
Can any kernel Guru's help me out? I'm under the impression that even if you use Linux modules, you still need a hardcoded stub in the kernel to access it. For example you can't compile a newly released module without recompiling the kernel.
This is false as far as I've seen. I've been able to select additional modules, make dep, then make modules && make modules_install && depmod -a for some time now (all thru 2.4 at least, and probably for 2.2, though it's been awhile since I've built a 2.2 kernel).. There may be some static dependencies for classes of functionality which then allow for particular drivers/functions to be modularized, which would require a kernel rebuild and reboot, but I haven't come across them.
Your Working Boy,
No mention is made of the access points, which are important if you want to easily hook up to your wired LAN.
Keep in mind you can use your linux/*bsd system as such a router (bridge, actually, unless your entire infrastructure is wireless, but I'm just being persnickety) by installing a PCI 802.11b board. Lucent sells these as a combo PCI PCMCIA adapter board + PCMCIA adapter, so your server will also need PCMCIA drivers (most servers I build do not have PCMCIA drivers even as modules)..
Should work fine tho..
Your Working Boy,
oops. sorry, bad form to reply to my own posts, but when I read a little more, I find that the wavelan driver was hacked to support the airport /cards/, not the base.
Yeah,
The _really_ cheap solution, if you run a home PCI-based system as a router/firewall/gateway, is to drop in a PCI 802.11 card. You end up not having to buy a 10bt and modem if you don't need 'em. Any card can be setup as a base station, it's the host that handles the routing/bridging.. I'd have done it, but the UFO is a pretty neat drop-in solution IMHO and getting from unpacking the boxes to fully-working-networked Cube was literally 20 minutes. Nothing to sneeze at, it took a lot of smart people a lot of time and effort to get there.
Good luck!
Your Working Boy,
The software that comes with it is Mac-only, but there is a Java application on the net that manages it. The management protocol is SNMP, so a native Linux application to manage it would be easy enough.
;)
IIRC the card inside is WaveLAN, so you might be able to use the Lucent WaveLAN tools on it.. Also, I've heard if you are interested in cracking the case you can stick a nice 14dB amplified omni antenna on it and get mega range.. I'm thinking of doing that to mine so I can get data out on the porch
Apple really nailed it on that one. No PC vendor comes close, and a comparable base station from Lucent or Cisco costs waay more..
Your Working Boy,