Fresh from reading Stallman's essays (the Columbus Metropolitan Library bought a GNU/FSF publication!) and The Cathedral and the Bazaar, isn't this bass-ackwards?
Bazaar coding says to publish early and often, the Torvalds way, right? Instead of a small number of mages only releasing the properly groomed and carefully crafted 'release', publish alpha code and patches daily.
This bounty hunt promotes secrecy and Cathedral programming, not Bazaar style hack-o-rama.
Sir, you need to be enlightened. Read the Unix Hater's Handbook. Unix will never be simple. It is a never ending pit of shame and self loathing. Chastise yourself before the One True OS. Hate yourself for not understanding how to use the code snippet in the man page. Stab yourself in the thigh with an X-acto knife when you cannot get functions to pass pointers correctly. And never try to fix the problems in the BUGS section of the man page! The BUGS have been there since 1978, and they are features. Seriously, you will break Unix if you try to fix the bugs. Every program *depends* on those bugs to run... er... feed themselves to the linker...
Unix is worthy of all pages ever manufactured from pulp. Hit yourself between the eyes with the 900 pages! Again!
Buy twelve year old hardware just to run Unix on it! DO IT NOW! Try to make modern software run on original SunOS! The GNU people that dropped support are *weak*! They don't understand their Master.
Keep changing jobs until they let you put Unix on all of their Windows servers! They don't understand. You must do the bidding of your Master. Don't use Nero Burning ROM! Use cdrecord, and sacrifice many cd's to Unix, the One True OS.
Install Unix on every computer you touch. You can just sneak on Zipslack, no one will ever know. But you will. And so will Unix.
Keep typing fgrep in a Windows CMD shell. It will always error, but keep typing it.
Buy as much hardware as you can, and install Unix on it over and over, in as many ways and combinations as you can. Saturate the T1s with every version of every distribution you can find. Keep trying to get Minix to boot. Do incessant CVS checkouts. Clog your mail server with mailing lists. Get time and date stamped commentary on every typo fix to the source!
Funny, I just finished watching it for the 2nd time this week. My girlfriend didn't find it as stupefying as I did...
I think it represents the American Dream of the new millennium! Playing in rock bands, being a starving writer, those things are so passe. But taking over (and later losing) an entire market space by starting with two people and an idea and growing to over 200 employees and $60 mil in less than two years, that's something I would put some effort into...
Some of us daydream differently than others...
I was riveted watching the whole thing play out. LR
"The software you're running on it is likely to be wasting 75% of the CPU cycles it eats."
Yeah, I thought the same thing when I jumped from C64 to 386. Couldn't do much more with it, but code ran faster...
"Today's software is written so poorly that super high-end hardware is needed to make up for lazy/poor programmers. "
I agree with this too, but most shops are stuck with Microsoft on Intel because of existing investments in infrastructure. So you have to buy the new hardware to run the new OS that runs the new applications...
"Look at what these ancient systems can do."
Yeah, multi-tasking! I can wait for a bit to be loaded from the cassette while I wait for a bit to be painted onto the screen...
Ok, I'm not real nostalgic about old systems since I'm currently ready to smash my 68040 Mac because Debian is so unstable and slow on it. Yes, it is amazing what they've done with an 8-bit machine...
I had a P100 laptop running Slackware 7.1 with the latest 2.2 kernel. It swapped hard most of the time with the 24mb ram...
I compiled a 2.4 and it performed much better, or at least stayed responsive under heavy loads...
Never could get emacs with the W3C web browser add-on going, though. It just swallowed the poor machine whole. It would swap for two years before responding to mouse input...
68k Macs only run on 2.2, and the source code is no longer updated in the 2.5 tree. The Motorola 68k Linux port is almost dead. There are too many changes in 2.5 that breaks all of the code that runs stable in 2.2, which has taken all of this time to get to the point where it is stable.
It's a shame, aside from x86 most of the hardware worldwide that could be used to run Linux rather than the factory OS is Apple... The PPC port is alive and well, of course...
I'm running 2.2 on my Quadra 610, which is pre-IDE, and the SCSI driver doesn't have DMA and frequently kills the kernel when trying to use anything more than one hard drive (2nd drive, CD-ROM, etc)...
Makes me wonder why the kernel has to change so much between versions if entire ports are getting dropped because the code is broken by new changes...
BTW, the Atari and Amiga ports are in the same tree and are also broken.
Looks like any system with a Motorola 68k will be forever doomed to run only 2.2... LR
Yeah, I ran it until the trial ran out. It was pretty darn nice to use my Win-dependent apps and have a shell...
It all fell down for me when I pulled down the source for links and tried to compile it... They claim that with SFU you can drag "legacy UNIX code" onto your Win server and Presto! Dump that annoyingly easy system administration for our GUI-centric product AND beat your head against the wall trying to get your apps to work!
Needless to say,./configure choked on HOST TYPE. It would take a lot of work to get any app to compile on the damn thing...
Faggetaboutit...
Re:Do they have an installer yet?
on
KDE 3.1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Senor, what do you speak of?
Your distro will handle this, install like you install any other package (or port if you use OpenBSD)...
BTW, It's not available yet in the Slackware-current tree. Since I just installed 3.0.5a yesterday, I guess I'll dump it and try 3.1r5, WTH...
Yes, that's right, your favorite mirror for your distro has 3.1-some-prerelease available under current... Leave the poor KDE site alone, you won't be able to get it to compile and install right anyway...
Quite a coincidence, I was reading a two-year-old Wired yesterday talking about how far ahead the US universities were on what they were calling "moletronics". It seems a lot of people are caught up in the DVD/video aspect, but in the article they were talking about storing a terrabyte in a matchbook-sized piece of fabric and such. Putting a "black box" IN the skin of the airplane every few inches, etcetera. The scoop here for me is, does it mean that Japan has passed us in molecular electronics?
The Wired article was US-centric, and I wondered where Japan fit into this picture.
Does anybody know?
Also you have to remember that speed is a small concern at this point, this is VERY young technology. The main thing is that for $.10 you can make a vial of molecules. That vial of molecules will contain like 6 X 10^23 molecules capable of being used in place of transistors in electronic circuits. Imagine the new Transmeta 14BillionJigaHertz laptop. With the entire internet cached in RAM that only has to refresh power every 8 or 10 seconds, rather than 60ms like DRAM. Power usage, computing power, and storage amounts go through the roof. No moving parts either.
HP is using their redundant self-diagnosing design along with this technology, so that even if there are some reliability issues with the molecular "switches" giving up after a while, the system will be so redundant that it will turn off that bank of switches and continue on.
Anyhow, this topic really struck me yesterday and I was trying to shed some light. Anybody know the current state of affairs on US "moletronic" technology?
P.S. When this happens, they are going to need a LOT of software... Maybe GCC 23.5.1 will get ported...
LR
Re:how to make linux desktop good for masses
on
Ark Linux
·
· Score: 1
GNU/Linux is free software, and these developers can do whatever they want. However... MS has the desktop market tied in knots. How are secretaries and professionals going to convert to Linux? There is no Linux version of Word or Excel. Yeah, I use Abiword and Gnumeric instead, but my boss would never consider it. And then there are my vendors that only sell their pay-for-print queing software for Windows. And our library automation software vendor that only sells a Win32 client. We've almost converted the entire back-end to Linux, and the big Sun boxes will probably be running Linux in the next two years. But I don't think Linux will make it to the desktop in the next decade, and neither does Gartner. The community should stick with the strength of GNU/Linux and take over the low- to mid-range server space and leave the inept end-user to the evil market forces:)
The point is that you can run Mac OSX, Irix, Linux, Solaris, you-name-ix binary precompiled even commercial software on a PPC machine running NetBSD. EVEN machines that don't support OSX, like that iMac 233 or PowerMac 180 that you have sitting around... Sounds useful.
But, yes- you can only run PPC binaries. M68k or x86 will not work.
i was a proud borrower of 'unix system administrator's bible' and own 'red hat linux bible'. the s.a.b. covered almost exclusively command line work and came with freebsd 2.something. over 1000 pages of unix command line tutorials, you can learn from such a thing. the r.h.l.b. came with red hat 5.2 for 7 dollars used. it was very useful to study in preparation for my new job as an i.t. manager. i carried it around all summer in my car, and if i ended up resting under a tree at the race track or something i could study it and take notes. i don't see how a book can have 'too much information' unless you're talking about professional wrestling or johnny knoxville or something... these books make good long-time companions and are good for reference for a long time imho... ok, links -g still doesn't understand my shift keys, i'll get to it someday...
lr
Re:Better the second time around, eh?
on
Build Your Own Mac
·
· Score: 1
The "article" consists of links to manufacturers. No comment as to whether it runs OSX...
I'd rather go somewhere local so the person I buy from has to look me in the eye when I come back in with a problem...
i wanted to smack you, but it's christmas... the manufacturers won't let us have the good driver code, all we have is the community's reverse-engineered driver code... there will never be one desktop interface, who cares and why would we. i use fvwm, if you tried to make me use kde you might get hurt. you have some interesting ideas though, better start coding, and let me know when the cvs tree is up on your server...
lr
Re:If RedHat used honest version numbers...
on
New Red Hat Beta
·
· Score: 1
we use 7.2 on our database server because the vendor, raining data, has only tested and supports 7.2. i was unhappy to see that redhat does not allow a custom kernel during install, which is something that most unix-like os's do... made the install take two days instead of one... i swear p4 optimizations were worth the recompile though...
Not sure why I'm not being modded up, but the link details all of the technical specs of OS and hardware, as well as the code and networking info. Shines quite a bit of light on the story... Surprised the original poster didn't look this far...
The technical paper is on the SpaceDev website. They are using VxWorks, PSOS, OS-9, and Linux. Looks like VxWorks is what will be running on the satellite, with less than 20 lines of code in the actual communication routines...
i agree, go to www.linuxdoc.org, or burn off an iso and print the key docs off of it. the 'dos-win-to-linux-howto' and the 'installation-how-to' should get you going. a bunch of screw-ups and do-overs later, and you'll be off and running. i printed out those two docs and absorbed them for a week before even trying an install. three or four weeks later and i was on the internet running netscape, but not until after i had tried two different pc's, three hard drives and two modems. what can i say, it was all user error. i later had linux running on both pc's using all the hard drives and modems... i would recommend using a book once you get tired of 'ok, now i can install gnu/linux, run df and ls, and connect to the internet and run netscape'. when you're ready to learn how to think about all of the elements of the system better, and really tear into things, pick up a book. the old 'unix system administrator's bible' was a great book too. it used to come with freebsd on cd circa '95, then slackware later on, i don't know if there is a new version in print... i have the 'redhat linux unleashed' book, and i read the whole thing before starting my current job as an it manager. it really helped me get my head in the game, but the sysadmin bible was more thorough along those lines... btw, links-gui doesn't understand my shift keys right now, my.02, lr
you must be a mainstream, kissass corporate stooge. you're down with the company line... using intel is like sucking on the matrix teat... motorola 68040 forever man...
my browser doesn't understand the shift key yet...
I hear ya on the bloated distros problem, and if you can run a BSD, then why not? I have to admit, though, that when on a Linux box, darn near anything is download-and-compile, which is not always the case in the BSDs...
Of course, you can always tweak your Linux install to pare it down. I tried Mandrake after using Slackware forever, and at first I HATED it, but once I got it set up properly, it ran great and the newer apps libraries etcetera were quite nice.
If you like BSD, use it. I have to agree on the kernel compile too.
Slashdot Mirror
Fresh from reading Stallman's essays (the Columbus Metropolitan Library bought a GNU/FSF publication!) and The Cathedral and the Bazaar, isn't this bass-ackwards?
Bazaar coding says to publish early and often, the Torvalds way, right? Instead of a small number of mages only releasing the properly groomed and carefully crafted 'release', publish alpha code and patches daily.
This bounty hunt promotes secrecy and Cathedral programming, not Bazaar style hack-o-rama.
Lincoln
You probably laugh at car accidents too. Beware, it could happen to YOU.
Is there a cure? Please tell me there is! HELP.
Ok, must go back to doing Unix stuff now.
-Lincoln
Sir, you need to be enlightened. Read the Unix Hater's Handbook. Unix will never be simple. It is a never ending pit of shame and self loathing. Chastise yourself before the One True OS. Hate yourself for not understanding how to use the code snippet in the man page. Stab yourself in the thigh with an X-acto knife when you cannot get functions to pass pointers correctly. And never try to fix the problems in the BUGS section of the man page! The BUGS have been there since 1978, and they are features. Seriously, you will break Unix if you try to fix the bugs. Every program *depends* on those bugs to run... er... feed themselves to the linker...
Unix is worthy of all pages ever manufactured from pulp. Hit yourself between the eyes with the 900 pages! Again!
Buy twelve year old hardware just to run Unix on it! DO IT NOW! Try to make modern software run on original SunOS! The GNU people that dropped support are *weak*! They don't understand their Master.
Keep changing jobs until they let you put Unix on all of their Windows servers! They don't understand. You must do the bidding of your Master. Don't use Nero Burning ROM! Use cdrecord, and sacrifice many cd's to Unix, the One True OS.
Install Unix on every computer you touch. You can just sneak on Zipslack, no one will ever know. But you will. And so will Unix.
Keep typing fgrep in a Windows CMD shell. It will always error, but keep typing it.
Buy as much hardware as you can, and install Unix on it over and over, in as many ways and combinations as you can. Saturate the T1s with every version of every distribution you can find. Keep trying to get Minix to boot. Do incessant CVS checkouts. Clog your mail server with mailing lists. Get time and date stamped commentary on every typo fix to the source!
Hit yourself with the 900 pages again!
The question wasn't about underappreciated operating systems, but rather movies. Try to stay on topic.
:)
LR
Funny, I just finished watching it for the 2nd time this week. My girlfriend didn't find it as stupefying as I did...
I think it represents the American Dream of the new millennium! Playing in rock bands, being a starving writer, those things are so passe. But taking over (and later losing) an entire market space by starting with two people and an idea and growing to over 200 employees and $60 mil in less than two years, that's something I would put some effort into...
Some of us daydream differently than others...
I was riveted watching the whole thing play out.
LR
"The software you're running on it is likely to be wasting 75% of the CPU cycles it eats."
Yeah, I thought the same thing when I jumped from C64 to 386. Couldn't do much more with it, but code ran faster...
"Today's software is written so poorly that super high-end hardware is needed to make up for lazy/poor programmers. "
I agree with this too, but most shops are stuck with Microsoft on Intel because of existing investments in infrastructure. So you have to buy the new hardware to run the new OS that runs the new applications...
"Look at what these ancient systems can do."
Yeah, multi-tasking! I can wait for a bit to be loaded from the cassette while I wait for a bit to be painted onto the screen...
Ok, I'm not real nostalgic about old systems since I'm currently ready to smash my 68040 Mac because Debian is so unstable and slow on it. Yes, it is amazing what they've done with an 8-bit machine...
LR
I had a P100 laptop running Slackware 7.1 with the latest 2.2 kernel. It swapped hard most of the time with the 24mb ram...
I compiled a 2.4 and it performed much better, or at least stayed responsive under heavy loads...
Never could get emacs with the W3C web browser add-on going, though. It just swallowed the poor machine whole. It would swap for two years before responding to mouse input...
LR
68k Macs only run on 2.2, and the source code is no longer updated in the 2.5 tree. The Motorola 68k Linux port is almost dead. There are too many changes in 2.5 that breaks all of the code that runs stable in 2.2, which has taken all of this time to get to the point where it is stable.
It's a shame, aside from x86 most of the hardware worldwide that could be used to run Linux rather than the factory OS is Apple... The PPC port is alive and well, of course...
I'm running 2.2 on my Quadra 610, which is pre-IDE, and the SCSI driver doesn't have DMA and frequently kills the kernel when trying to use anything more than one hard drive (2nd drive, CD-ROM, etc)...
Makes me wonder why the kernel has to change so much between versions if entire ports are getting dropped because the code is broken by new changes...
BTW, the Atari and Amiga ports are in the same tree and are also broken.
Looks like any system with a Motorola 68k will be forever doomed to run only 2.2...
LR
Yeah, I ran it until the trial ran out. It was pretty darn nice to use my Win-dependent apps and have a shell...
./configure choked on HOST TYPE. It would take a lot of work to get any app to compile on the damn thing...
It all fell down for me when I pulled down the source for links and tried to compile it... They claim that with SFU you can drag "legacy UNIX code" onto your Win server and Presto! Dump that annoyingly easy system administration for our GUI-centric product AND beat your head against the wall trying to get your apps to work!
Needless to say,
Faggetaboutit...
Senor, what do you speak of?
Your distro will handle this, install like you install any other package (or port if you use OpenBSD)...
BTW, It's not available yet in the Slackware-current tree. Since I just installed 3.0.5a yesterday, I guess I'll dump it and try 3.1r5, WTH...
Yes, that's right, your favorite mirror for your distro has 3.1-some-prerelease available under current... Leave the poor KDE site alone, you won't be able to get it to compile and install right anyway...
lr
Quite a coincidence, I was reading a two-year-old Wired yesterday talking about how far ahead the US universities were on what they were calling "moletronics". It seems a lot of people are caught up in the DVD/video aspect, but in the article they were talking about storing a terrabyte in a matchbook-sized piece of fabric and such. Putting a "black box" IN the skin of the airplane every few inches, etcetera. The scoop here for me is, does it mean that Japan has passed us in molecular electronics?
The Wired article was US-centric, and I wondered where Japan fit into this picture.
Does anybody know?
Also you have to remember that speed is a small concern at this point, this is VERY young technology. The main thing is that for $.10 you can make a vial of molecules. That vial of molecules will contain like 6 X 10^23 molecules capable of being used in place of transistors in electronic circuits. Imagine the new Transmeta 14BillionJigaHertz laptop. With the entire internet cached in RAM that only has to refresh power every 8 or 10 seconds, rather than 60ms like DRAM. Power usage, computing power, and storage amounts go through the roof. No moving parts either.
HP is using their redundant self-diagnosing design along with this technology, so that even if there are some reliability issues with the molecular "switches" giving up after a while, the system will be so redundant that it will turn off that bank of switches and continue on.
Anyhow, this topic really struck me yesterday and I was trying to shed some light. Anybody know the current state of affairs on US "moletronic" technology?
P.S. When this happens, they are going to need a LOT of software... Maybe GCC 23.5.1 will get ported...
LR
GNU/Linux is free software, and these developers can do whatever they want. However... :)
MS has the desktop market tied in knots. How are secretaries and professionals going to convert to Linux? There is no Linux version of Word or Excel. Yeah, I use Abiword and Gnumeric instead, but my boss would never consider it.
And then there are my vendors that only sell their pay-for-print queing software for Windows. And our library automation software vendor that only sells a Win32 client.
We've almost converted the entire back-end to Linux, and the big Sun boxes will probably be running Linux in the next two years. But I don't think Linux will make it to the desktop in the next decade, and neither does Gartner.
The community should stick with the strength of GNU/Linux and take over the low- to mid-range server space and leave the inept end-user to the evil market forces
Enjoy,
Linc
The point is that you can run Mac OSX, Irix, Linux, Solaris, you-name-ix binary precompiled even commercial software on a PPC machine running NetBSD. EVEN machines that don't support OSX, like that iMac 233 or PowerMac 180 that you have sitting around... Sounds useful.
But, yes- you can only run PPC binaries. M68k or x86 will not work.
lr
It CAN be taken too far though...
For example my "money pit" 25MHz Mac...
I can't stop buying more parts for it, and you can't even run a GUI browser on it (under Debian)...
The only thing it's good for is running Links and bidding on more old Mac parts on eBay!
A machine with 100 times the processing power is starting to sound pretty good...
lr
i was a proud borrower of 'unix system administrator's bible' and own 'red hat linux bible'. the s.a.b. covered almost exclusively command line work and came with freebsd 2.something. over 1000 pages of unix command line tutorials, you can learn from such a thing.
the r.h.l.b. came with red hat 5.2 for 7 dollars used. it was very useful to study in preparation for my new job as an i.t. manager. i carried it around all summer in my car, and if i ended up resting under a tree at the race track or something i could study it and take notes.
i don't see how a book can have 'too much information' unless you're talking about professional wrestling or johnny knoxville or something...
these books make good long-time companions and are good for reference for a long time imho...
ok, links -g still doesn't understand my shift keys, i'll get to it someday...
lr
The "article" consists of links to manufacturers. No comment as to whether it runs OSX...
I'd rather go somewhere local so the person I buy from has to look me in the eye when I come back in with a problem...
Stupid.
But can you build a 68040 machine from scratch?
LR
i wanted to smack you, but it's christmas...
the manufacturers won't let us have the good driver code, all we have is the community's reverse-engineered driver code...
there will never be one desktop interface, who cares and why would we. i use fvwm, if you tried to make me use kde you might get hurt.
you have some interesting ideas though, better start coding, and let me know when the cvs tree is up on your server...
lr
we use 7.2 on our database server because the vendor, raining data, has only tested and supports 7.2. i was unhappy to see that redhat does not allow a custom kernel during install, which is something that most unix-like os's do...
made the install take two days instead of one...
i swear p4 optimizations were worth the recompile though...
Not sure why I'm not being modded up, but the link details all of the technical specs of OS and hardware, as well as the code and networking info. Shines quite a bit of light on the story... Surprised the original poster didn't look this far...
LR
The technical paper is on the SpaceDev website.
They are using VxWorks, PSOS, OS-9, and Linux. Looks like VxWorks is what will be running on the satellite, with less than 20 lines of code in the actual communication routines...
LR
In Soviet Russia, CEO gets bobble-head doll of YOU. :) LR
In Soviet Russia, CEO gets bobble-head doll of YOU.
Sorry, the Soviet Russia jokes kill me. I still laugh at the "your mama" stuff...
LR
i agree, go to www.linuxdoc.org, or burn off an iso and print the key docs off of it. the 'dos-win-to-linux-howto' and the 'installation-how-to' should get you going. a bunch of screw-ups and do-overs later, and you'll be off and running. i printed out those two docs and absorbed them for a week before even trying an install. three or four weeks later and i was on the internet running netscape, but not until after i had tried two different pc's, three hard drives and two modems. what can i say, it was all user error. i later had linux running on both pc's using all the hard drives and modems... .02, lr
i would recommend using a book once you get tired of 'ok, now i can install gnu/linux, run df and ls, and connect to the internet and run netscape'. when you're ready to learn how to think about all of the elements of the system better, and really tear into things, pick up a book.
the old 'unix system administrator's bible' was a great book too. it used to come with freebsd on cd circa '95, then slackware later on, i don't know if there is a new version in print...
i have the 'redhat linux unleashed' book, and i read the whole thing before starting my current job as an it manager. it really helped me get my head in the game, but the sysadmin bible was more thorough along those lines...
btw, links-gui doesn't understand my shift keys right now,
my
you must be a mainstream, kissass corporate stooge. you're down with the company line...
using intel is like sucking on the matrix teat...
motorola 68040 forever man...
my browser doesn't understand the shift key yet...
I hear ya on the bloated distros problem, and if you can run a BSD, then why not? I have to admit, though, that when on a Linux box, darn near anything is download-and-compile, which is not always the case in the BSDs...
Of course, you can always tweak your Linux install to pare it down. I tried Mandrake after using Slackware forever, and at first I HATED it, but once I got it set up properly, it ran great and the newer apps libraries etcetera were quite nice.
If you like BSD, use it. I have to agree on the kernel compile too.