Gecko renders very well but it still has javascript and IE compatibility issues.
Users will yell if something that worked with IE don't work any more.
However, there will be a lot of bug reports, and those will make Mozilla better.
And all these emulations are very fast, because they are hooks to native OS
functions. They aren't 100% emulation, like VMWare. I use Linux binaries
daily on OpenBSD and FreeBSD, and I can hardly find any significant slowdown
between a native BSD application, and the same application compiled for
Linux, and run with emulation.
So can we imagine that Linux binaries could become a de facto standard for
executables?
We would get something similar to Java, but yet more powerful (no tie to a
specific language nor a specific API) . Ok, x86 binaries would only run on
x86, but the same binary could run on 95% of the computers, regardless of
their operating system. Any sort of application, low-level or high-level.
GUI or daemon. And always fast, wrapping native system calls.
The nasty drawback is that people would release more closed-source software.
But OTOH, if you can take all your current applications and easily migrate
to any operating system by just copying everything, including binaries, you
can save a lot of time. You can also develop applications for customers even
if you don't run a similar OS.
Would it be a dream, or a hell?
Times are bad for OSS companies. Progeny is dead, Eazel is also dead, Corel had so pass the Linux baton, SuSE did massive layoffs, Mandrake did an IPO in a hurry to avoid bankrupt, Redhat focuses on services, training and databases because they lose money by working on the distro, Dell has no more interest in Linux, Loki filled chapter 11...
And all these companies did something real. They worked on quality products, they weren't stupid start-ups selling vaporware. But the market wasn't large enough, and they failed.
Now, what about Linux PPC? Macs users are about 4 % of computer users. That's huge.
But now, if companies selling distros and Linux-related products on PC (+ some other architectures) went (or are going) bankrupt, how can a company survive with only 4 % of other's market?
Yellow Dog is a very good distro. I installed it once, and it was very easy, and it ran flawlessly. Plus the name is funny, I love it.
Having Linux vendors for non-Intel architectures is also very important, because portability is a strength of OSS.
But I can't understand how a company can survive by working on a PPC-only distro. This is a niche market.
I really hope the best for Yellog Dog Linux, but after the death of Progeny (an excellent, non-niche distro), I'm really doubtful.
I couldn't get this version compile on a basic Linux system.
Everything seems to go very well, but when time has come to link the mysqld program, an unreferenced symbol in InnoDB cause it to tail.
I tried to disable InnoDB in./configure switches (just to test because I use InnoDB) . Same thing. MySQL 4.0 doesn't build.
I tried various flags, tried a vanilla./configure, etc. Nothing.
Then I copied files from innodb.com (originally for MySQL 3.23, but... who knows...) . Same result, with more errors and undefined symbols.
Has anyone successfully compiled MySQL 4 from the source code?
This new IBM watch is very geeky, but too bloated and finally useless. Not only because you have to load it every 6 hours, but also because it looks very large for a watch.
Nice and useful watches were the Timex Datalink series. They have a light sensor so that you can program them just by lifting them in the front of your monitor (data is transmitted through blinking lines) . And yes, it works on Linux with Watchlink .
Program? Yes, Timex Datalink watches can be programmed in assembly language. There are a lot of applications for it, ranging from games to utilities to do golf scoring, as well as new watch features (better chronographs, multiple repetitive alarms, etc) . Of course you can also fully customize alarm melodies, and synchronize your appointements with Outlook or Ical.
Plus these watches are cheap.
Ehm... were cheap. Timex doesn't sell these good'ol 150 and 150s datalink watches any more. But some local vendors still have stock, so if you can get one, go, go, go!
Not only this is a geek watch, but it's also an useful watch. And it looks like an ordinary watch on your wrist, not like a PDA.
Re:Tucows and GPL?
on
LWN in Trouble
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Tucows has a new "exciting offer", for software authors. They can now get "new customers", watch "competition's software" and "purchase keywords".
Submiting software now means buying one of their "bronze, silver or gold accounts". The more you pay, the more visibility you get.
This totally breaks free software rules.
Have a look at
this post .
What authors are now seeing when they want to submit something to Tucows is this page .
By intending to secure IIS, Microsoft is doing the right thing. Unix freaks are laughing at Microsoft freaks because of code red & co. But the point is that flaws in any system is bad for the whole internet. People don't trust internet any more, they don't want to give their credit card number any more, etc. When every host on the internet will be pretty secure, e-commerce may do a real come-back.
The problem with this annouce is that Microsoft will start from the existing IIS product and try to secure it.
Securing something that wasn't initially coded with security in mind is very tricky. Flaws always pass on.
Have a look at bind or sendmail. They are very old servers. They are widely used. Many companies and individual people hardly audited the code. So what? A new flaw was still discovered in sendmail last week, and bind always was one of the favorite toy for kiddies.
On the other hand, software like djbdns and postfix were started later. They were started from scratch with the knowledge of all common security flaws their ancestor had. The result is that they are very secure. More than old software that was audited by hundreds of skilled people.
So while Microsoft's initiative is in the right direction, they won't get a secure product in any case. Just because they didn't rewrite it from scratch.
Don't buy .sex domains! It's not a real TLD!
on
New ICANN TLDs Are Live
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Some registrars are offering ".sex" domain. However :.SEX ISN'T A TLD AND IT PROBABLY NEVER WILL.
When you buy a.sex domain, the registrar send you a little pluging for Internet Explorer. That plugin adds lookups for.sex site on the registrar's name server. So it works. It works for you, it works for whoever installs the plugin.
But it won't work for all the rest of the world. You'll be charged $75 for a domain that nobody will see.
Take care, there are a lot of registrar registering ".sex" domains, saying that "they soon will be available as real TLDs". But that's untrue. Nobody knows whether it will even happen. But your credit card will be billed.
In the DOS-times, managing memory was a hell. It was both a hell for end-users (having to keep different sets of AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to make different programs work) and for programmers.
The good old Borland C only allowed 16 bits segments. It was really lousy.
There was some hacks to avoid this. I wrote some assembly code to enable the flat mode (only one big linear page up to 2 Gb), and Borland C finally could access 32-bits segments. But the page was still 16-bits by default, so all 32-bits operations had to be prefixed.
I wrote some games and demos with this, but Borland's produced code was very bad. On a version of Borland C, while(1) was compiled as mov ax,1 then test ax, compare with zero and jump if 1 != 0. Awesome.
It's why I tried Watcom. Watcom's code was better. Moreover it had specific optimizations for 486 and Pentium-class processors. And with DOS4GW, it was easy to access 32 bits pages. However :
The C-parser was buggy. Some absolutely correct piece of source code were misinterpreted by Watcom. For instance, it refused some "const" pointers that were indeed pointing to constant values.
The compiler was buggy. When some optimizations were turned on, it produced wrong code, sometimes reusing a register while it was still in use by someone else. And it simply ignored the volatile keyword, that was needed for interrupts hooks.
DOS4GW was cool, but sometimes slow. It was way faster to allocate a big memory chunk at startup and then mess in it, than allocating multiple small chunks.
Inserting assembly code used a totally different syntax than Borland C.
So Watcom was an excellent compiler, but it was really, really buggy. I always had to review the assembly code by hand. But I liked the fact that "char" was unsigned by default.
Then, I tried DJGPP. DJGPP is a port of GCC to DOS platforms. It cames with a free DOS4GW-like called PMode.
The resulting code wasn't that bad. For floating-point arithmetic, GCC produced slower code than Watcom (can't remember why, maybe GCC didn't use the arithmetic coprocessor). But it didn't matter, demos always use fixed-point anyway.
GCC didn't produce buggy code like Watcom. And the code was...logical. Have a look at Ping for instance. It's a smooth pong-like game with carebears, bonuses, funny sounds, etc. I wrote that game with DJGPP, but if you look at the source code, you'll see that it looks a lot a assembly code. It's designed in a way that the compiler can translate one line of C in one line of assembler, and everything is pre-optimized. GCC respected this. I tried to recompile important parts of the code (sprite routines) with Watcom. The result was illogical. It tried to reorder some stuff, but this only gave slower code.
The first releases of PMode were buggy, too. They worked very bad with Qemm. But then, it got better and finally was an excellent drop-in replacement for DOS4GW. But once and again, allocating a big page was faster than multiple pages.
Why Watcom was cool : fast compiler (gcc was sooo sllooowww to compile), good optimizations for floating-point operations.
Why DJGPP was better : free, comes with emulation of many Unix system calls, gives optimized code if the source code is already optimized. And GNU-assembler syntax is way better than TASM-like syntax.
An alternative to vi(m) and (x)emacs
on
VIM 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 2, Offtopic
I've always used Jed .
It can emulate most features of emacs, but it's a lot smaller a faster. Functions are programmed in Slang, a very simple language. Slang looks like interpreted C language with a lot of handy hooks for strings manipulation and text display.
Also, Jed works on a lot of platforms, including all variants of Unix, VMS and Windows.
I still can't understand why people are trying to create complex protections to avoid copying CDs.
Support that finally an "unbreakable" method has been found. So what does prevent anyone from plugging the line output of his cd player into a DAT recorder, a minidisc, a sound card, etc? Once this is copied, you can duplicate it at will. So what's the point here?
As far as you can *hear* the sound, you can record it. The only way to avoid that would be to encrypt CDs and to put secret decryption chips into speakers. But this will never happen. It'd mean that effect racks, mixing consoles, etc. wouldn't work any more.
VA Linux owns Slashdot and Thinkgeek, but also Sourceforge. Sourceforge is supposed to be a major source of profit.
But is it, really? Sure, Sourceforge is a wonderful framework for developpers and users.
But how many companies really *need* this instead of just installing a CVS server + a discussion board + a public FTP server?
Out of these companies, how many really will *buy* this? Especially since Sourceforge is also an Opensource project?
Not a lot IMHO. On the other hand, Slashdot and Sourceforge requires a lot of bandwidth and computers. Plus employees. That's expensive. Surely a lot much that incoming revenues.
So, will Sourceforge survive?
Sourceforge has already tons of unresolved bugs. All his mailing-lists are archived by Geocrawler that explicitely states that "Geocrawler is not longer being maintained" (check the "about" button in the home page) .
If VA fires unique people like Mesa's leader, is it also the beginning of the end of Sourceforge?
Sony Vaio notebooks are really neat, especially the super-slim ones.
Newer models can receive a landing station, with a DVD/CD burner, and everything you need to make it a full featured computer.
In all Vaios, upgrading the memory is trivial, because the slot can be easily accessed by removing some screws. This operation is also documented by Sony.
And as we're talking about memory, the Memory Stick cards are also excellent to store private data like SSH keys. They can be used in any operating system, because they are seen as regular drives, FAT-formatted. Plug the card, mount it, and it works. Excellent.
But some times ago, I decided to upgrade the internal hard drive. First surprise : on the Sony web site, Sony says that this operation is impossible. Damn! Changing the hard drive, impossible? What the hell?
In fact, it's possible, but it's a very delicate operation.
I did it on a PCG Z600 RE laptop.
First, you have to remove all screws. Easy. Then, you have to remove the plastic protections on the left and on the right of the screen (at the extremity of the power supply) . It's hard to do without breaking them. Moreover the speakers are at the same place, and they are very fragile. So you have to remove the plastic protection with extreme care to avoid ripping the speakers.
Finally, you can remove the keyboard, to discover new screws that have to be removed. Once removed, you can lift the mainboard and.... too late! The mainboard and the base of the notebook case are linked by tiny ribbon cables. If you lift the mainboard too much, these ribbon cables are going out, and plugging them back is very difficult. So, lift the mainboard, but carefully.
The hard disk is screwed in a metallic slot. But to remove it you have to remove the screws. 4 screws, 2 easily accessible (on the front), 2 difficult to unscrew (on the back) . Use a screwdriver that attracts metal, to avoid losing screws. And have someone help you to lift the mainboard while you are unscrewing the drive.
It took me 4 hours to change the drive. So it's not impossible as sony states, but it's long and stressing.
For everything else, I enjoy this laptop a lot. BeOS, QNX, OpenBSD, Linux and Windows installs properly on it. The "jog dial" rotative button is recognized on Linux, hibernation works with all operating systems, the built-in network card is a standard EEPRO 100 chipset (so no compatibility problem), and I've no problem with the sound chip, either.
Can you remember the V2 Operating System? It was also posted on Slashdot some times ago. It was very promizing, written in full asm, had a nice GUI, a nice shell, a nice debugging console, etc. A very similar project.
Does anyone know what V2 OS has become nowadays ?
I just love these funny languages. Nobody will ever use them, but after reading this, you don't feel like programming any more. The C language looks so crude, so cryptic, so non-human friendly after that...
There's a similar project for Perl called Lingua::Romana::Perligata
. This is an awesome module written by Damian Conway, that let you program in Latin. Totally crazy.
QT and GTK can already work without X (frame-buffer) . So it may be worth trying to port them to the Berlin architecture too.
Berlin is an excellent framework. But an excellent framework is totally useless without any application.
If QT and GTK were ported, there would be a lot of applications already ready for it. Basically, all Gnome and KDE apps could run on it, and X-Window could be dropped.
> "It doesn't really do anything to make the basic Unix permissions any more fine grained than the currently are."
Grsecurity includes LIDS that does exactly this.
Actually, I'm very satistied with Grsecurity, a nice kernel patch to enhance the security of a linux kernel.
What would be the benefit of switching to NSA (but more complexity to admin) ?
Slashdot Mirror
Gecko renders very well but it still has javascript and IE compatibility issues.
Users will yell if something that worked with IE don't work any more.
However, there will be a lot of bug reports, and those will make Mozilla better.
And all these emulations are very fast, because they are hooks to native OS functions. They aren't 100% emulation, like VMWare. I use Linux binaries daily on OpenBSD and FreeBSD, and I can hardly find any significant slowdown between a native BSD application, and the same application compiled for Linux, and run with emulation.
So can we imagine that Linux binaries could become a de facto standard for executables?
We would get something similar to Java, but yet more powerful (no tie to a specific language nor a specific API) . Ok, x86 binaries would only run on x86, but the same binary could run on 95% of the computers, regardless of their operating system. Any sort of application, low-level or high-level. GUI or daemon. And always fast, wrapping native system calls.
The nasty drawback is that people would release more closed-source software.
But OTOH, if you can take all your current applications and easily migrate to any operating system by just copying everything, including binaries, you can save a lot of time. You can also develop applications for customers even if you don't run a similar OS.
Would it be a dream, or a hell?
Times are bad for OSS companies. Progeny is dead, Eazel is also dead, Corel had so pass the Linux baton, SuSE did massive layoffs, Mandrake did an IPO in a hurry to avoid bankrupt, Redhat focuses on services, training and databases because they lose money by working on the distro, Dell has no more interest in Linux, Loki filled chapter 11...
And all these companies did something real. They worked on quality products, they weren't stupid start-ups selling vaporware. But the market wasn't large enough, and they failed.
Now, what about Linux PPC? Macs users are about 4 % of computer users. That's huge.
But now, if companies selling distros and Linux-related products on PC (+ some other architectures) went (or are going) bankrupt, how can a company survive with only 4 % of other's market?
Yellow Dog is a very good distro. I installed it once, and it was very easy, and it ran flawlessly. Plus the name is funny, I love it.
Having Linux vendors for non-Intel architectures is also very important, because portability is a strength of OSS.
But I can't understand how a company can survive by working on a PPC-only distro. This is a niche market.
I really hope the best for Yellog Dog Linux, but after the death of Progeny (an excellent, non-niche distro), I'm really doubtful.
GCC is *not* the culprit. Code that doesn't compile on GCC 3 is broken code, that violates the basics of the C language.
../innobase/page/libpage.a(page0page.o): In function `page_validate':
page0page.o(.text+0x2f0d): undefined reference to `page_dir_slot_check'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[3]: *** [mysqld] Error 1
make[3]: Leaving directory `/tmp/mysql-4.0.0-alpha/sql'
make[2]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/tmp/mysql-4.0.0-alpha/sql'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/mysql-4.0.0-alpha'
make: *** [all-recursive-am] Error 2
I tried to do exactly your commands... same result.
Linux 2.4.12, GCC 3.0.1, SusE 7.0.
I couldn't get this version compile on a basic Linux system. ./configure switches (just to test because I use InnoDB) . Same thing. MySQL 4.0 doesn't build.
./configure, etc. Nothing.
Everything seems to go very well, but when time has come to link the mysqld program, an unreferenced symbol in InnoDB cause it to tail.
I tried to disable InnoDB in
I tried various flags, tried a vanilla
Then I copied files from innodb.com (originally for MySQL 3.23, but... who knows...) . Same result, with more errors and undefined symbols.
Has anyone successfully compiled MySQL 4 from the source code?
This new IBM watch is very geeky, but too bloated and finally useless. Not only because you have to load it every 6 hours, but also because it looks very large for a watch.
Nice and useful watches were the Timex Datalink series. They have a light sensor so that you can program them just by lifting them in the front of your monitor (data is transmitted through blinking lines) . And yes, it works on Linux with Watchlink .
Program? Yes, Timex Datalink watches can be programmed in assembly language. There are a lot of applications for it, ranging from games to utilities to do golf scoring, as well as new watch features (better chronographs, multiple repetitive alarms, etc) . Of course you can also fully customize alarm melodies, and synchronize your appointements with Outlook or Ical.
Plus these watches are cheap.
Ehm... were cheap. Timex doesn't sell these good'ol 150 and 150s datalink watches any more. But some local vendors still have stock, so if you can get one, go, go, go!
Not only this is a geek watch, but it's also an useful watch. And it looks like an ordinary watch on your wrist, not like a PDA.
Tucows has a new "exciting offer", for software authors. They can now get "new customers", watch "competition's software" and "purchase keywords". Submiting software now means buying one of their "bronze, silver or gold accounts". The more you pay, the more visibility you get.
This totally breaks free software rules.
Have a look at this post .
What authors are now seeing when they want to submit something to Tucows is this page .
But what's the best MySQL type of (transaction-enabled) tables :
Or something else, new to MySQL 4?
Anyone has experience or benchmarks with these different types of tables?
This man is totally crazy. But how many time will this network stays up before local authorities stop it?
By intending to secure IIS, Microsoft is doing the right thing. Unix freaks are laughing at Microsoft freaks because of code red & co. But the point is that flaws in any system is bad for the whole internet. People don't trust internet any more, they don't want to give their credit card number any more, etc. When every host on the internet will be pretty secure, e-commerce may do a real come-back.
The problem with this annouce is that Microsoft will start from the existing IIS product and try to secure it.
Securing something that wasn't initially coded with security in mind is very tricky. Flaws always pass on.
Have a look at bind or sendmail. They are very old servers. They are widely used. Many companies and individual people hardly audited the code. So what? A new flaw was still discovered in sendmail last week, and bind always was one of the favorite toy for kiddies.
On the other hand, software like djbdns and postfix were started later. They were started from scratch with the knowledge of all common security flaws their ancestor had. The result is that they are very secure. More than old software that was audited by hundreds of skilled people.
So while Microsoft's initiative is in the right direction, they won't get a secure product in any case. Just because they didn't rewrite it from scratch.
Some registrars are offering ".sex" domain. However : .SEX ISN'T A TLD AND IT PROBABLY NEVER WILL.
.sex domain, the registrar send you a little pluging for Internet Explorer. That plugin adds lookups for .sex site on the registrar's name server. So it works. It works for you, it works for whoever installs the plugin.
When you buy a
But it won't work for all the rest of the world. You'll be charged $75 for a domain that nobody will see.
Take care, there are a lot of registrar registering ".sex" domains, saying that "they soon will be available as real TLDs". But that's untrue. Nobody knows whether it will even happen. But your credit card will be billed.
The good old Borland C only allowed 16 bits segments. It was really lousy.
There was some hacks to avoid this. I wrote some assembly code to enable the flat mode (only one big linear page up to 2 Gb), and Borland C finally could access 32-bits segments. But the page was still 16-bits by default, so all 32-bits operations had to be prefixed.
I wrote some games and demos with this, but Borland's produced code was very bad. On a version of Borland C, while(1) was compiled as mov ax,1 then test ax, compare with zero and jump if 1 != 0. Awesome.
It's why I tried Watcom. Watcom's code was better. Moreover it had specific optimizations for 486 and Pentium-class processors. And with DOS4GW, it was easy to access 32 bits pages. However :
So Watcom was an excellent compiler, but it was really, really buggy. I always had to review the assembly code by hand. But I liked the fact that "char" was unsigned by default.
Then, I tried DJGPP. DJGPP is a port of GCC to DOS platforms. It cames with a free DOS4GW-like called PMode.
The resulting code wasn't that bad. For floating-point arithmetic, GCC produced slower code than Watcom (can't remember why, maybe GCC didn't use the arithmetic coprocessor). But it didn't matter, demos always use fixed-point anyway.
GCC didn't produce buggy code like Watcom. And the code was...logical. Have a look at Ping for instance. It's a smooth pong-like game with carebears, bonuses, funny sounds, etc. I wrote that game with DJGPP, but if you look at the source code, you'll see that it looks a lot a assembly code. It's designed in a way that the compiler can translate one line of C in one line of assembler, and everything is pre-optimized. GCC respected this. I tried to recompile important parts of the code (sprite routines) with Watcom. The result was illogical. It tried to reorder some stuff, but this only gave slower code.
The first releases of PMode were buggy, too. They worked very bad with Qemm. But then, it got better and finally was an excellent drop-in replacement for DOS4GW. But once and again, allocating a big page was faster than multiple pages.
Why Watcom was cool : fast compiler (gcc was sooo sllooowww to compile), good optimizations for floating-point operations.
Why DJGPP was better : free, comes with emulation of many Unix system calls, gives optimized code if the source code is already optimized. And GNU-assembler syntax is way better than TASM-like syntax.
I've always used Jed .
It can emulate most features of emacs, but it's a lot smaller a faster. Functions are programmed in Slang, a very simple language. Slang looks like interpreted C language with a lot of handy hooks for strings manipulation and text display.
Also, Jed works on a lot of platforms, including all variants of Unix, VMS and Windows.
I still can't understand why people are trying to create complex protections to avoid copying CDs.
Support that finally an "unbreakable" method has been found. So what does prevent anyone from plugging the line output of his cd player into a DAT recorder, a minidisc, a sound card, etc? Once this is copied, you can duplicate it at will. So what's the point here?
As far as you can *hear* the sound, you can record it. The only way to avoid that would be to encrypt CDs and to put secret decryption chips into speakers. But this will never happen. It'd mean that effect racks, mixing consoles, etc. wouldn't work any more.
VA Linux owns Slashdot and Thinkgeek, but also Sourceforge. Sourceforge is supposed to be a major source of profit.
But is it, really? Sure, Sourceforge is a wonderful framework for developpers and users.
But how many companies really *need* this instead of just installing a CVS server + a discussion board + a public FTP server?
Out of these companies, how many really will *buy* this? Especially since Sourceforge is also an Opensource project?
Not a lot IMHO. On the other hand, Slashdot and Sourceforge requires a lot of bandwidth and computers. Plus employees. That's expensive. Surely a lot much that incoming revenues.
So, will Sourceforge survive?
Sourceforge has already tons of unresolved bugs. All his mailing-lists are archived by Geocrawler that explicitely states that "Geocrawler is not longer being maintained" (check the "about" button in the home page) .
If VA fires unique people like Mesa's leader, is it also the beginning of the end of Sourceforge?
Sony Vaio notebooks are really neat, especially the super-slim ones.
Newer models can receive a landing station, with a DVD/CD burner, and everything you need to make it a full featured computer.
In all Vaios, upgrading the memory is trivial, because the slot can be easily accessed by removing some screws. This operation is also documented by Sony.
And as we're talking about memory, the Memory Stick cards are also excellent to store private data like SSH keys. They can be used in any operating system, because they are seen as regular drives, FAT-formatted. Plug the card, mount it, and it works. Excellent.
But some times ago, I decided to upgrade the internal hard drive. First surprise : on the Sony web site, Sony says that this operation is impossible. Damn! Changing the hard drive, impossible? What the hell?
In fact, it's possible, but it's a very delicate operation. I did it on a PCG Z600 RE laptop. First, you have to remove all screws. Easy. Then, you have to remove the plastic protections on the left and on the right of the screen (at the extremity of the power supply) . It's hard to do without breaking them. Moreover the speakers are at the same place, and they are very fragile. So you have to remove the plastic protection with extreme care to avoid ripping the speakers.
Finally, you can remove the keyboard, to discover new screws that have to be removed. Once removed, you can lift the mainboard and.... too late! The mainboard and the base of the notebook case are linked by tiny ribbon cables. If you lift the mainboard too much, these ribbon cables are going out, and plugging them back is very difficult. So, lift the mainboard, but carefully.
The hard disk is screwed in a metallic slot. But to remove it you have to remove the screws. 4 screws, 2 easily accessible (on the front), 2 difficult to unscrew (on the back) . Use a screwdriver that attracts metal, to avoid losing screws. And have someone help you to lift the mainboard while you are unscrewing the drive.
It took me 4 hours to change the drive. So it's not impossible as sony states, but it's long and stressing.
For everything else, I enjoy this laptop a lot. BeOS, QNX, OpenBSD, Linux and Windows installs properly on it. The "jog dial" rotative button is recognized on Linux, hibernation works with all operating systems, the built-in network card is a standard EEPRO 100 chipset (so no compatibility problem), and I've no problem with the sound chip, either.
Is it possible to install Linux or NetBSD on these? They could definitely be good as tiny servers, just like Cobalt Cube boxes.
Where is the bugtraq advisory regarding this security flaw?
Can you remember the V2 Operating System? It was also posted on Slashdot some times ago. It was very promizing, written in full asm, had a nice GUI, a nice shell, a nice debugging console, etc. A very similar project.
Does anyone know what V2 OS has become nowadays ?
I just love these funny languages. Nobody will ever use them, but after reading this, you don't feel like programming any more. The C language looks so crude, so cryptic, so non-human friendly after that...
There's a similar project for Perl called Lingua::Romana::Perligata . This is an awesome module written by Damian Conway, that let you program in Latin. Totally crazy.
QT and GTK can already work without X (frame-buffer) . So it may be worth trying to port them to the Berlin architecture too.
Berlin is an excellent framework. But an excellent framework is totally useless without any application.
If QT and GTK were ported, there would be a lot of applications already ready for it. Basically, all Gnome and KDE apps could run on it, and X-Window could be dropped.
How does the Xbox compare with Gamecube, PS2, etc ?
Is it possible to install Linux or BSD on a Xbox ?
> "It doesn't really do anything to make the basic Unix permissions any more fine grained than the currently are."
Grsecurity includes LIDS that does exactly this.
Actually, I'm very satistied with Grsecurity, a nice kernel patch to enhance the security of a linux kernel.
What would be the benefit of switching to NSA (but more complexity to admin) ?