I've purchased old and refurbished consoles in the past, and always burn them out.
Burn them out?! How do you manage that?
I've been playing 2600 games for 25+ years and have never burned out a console, not even when I was testing my own poorly-soldered homebrew EPROM carts. You're not deliberately `frying' them are you (flipping the power on & off rapidly, to cause glitches in the game)?
The reason for the lack of a cartridge port on the new console seems to be that it isn't actually 2600-compatible anyway. I've got one of those 10-in-1 Activision console-in-a-controller units, and it's pretty obvious (to a 2600 developer, or even to an observant 2600 gamer) that the games are ported (or possibly emulated). Also, the title screen and menu couldn't be done on real 2600 hardware: they have twice the horizontal resolution. Also, the sound hardware doesn't sound anything like a real Atari.
The Activision 10-in-1 isn't the same thing as what this article's talking about, but it's the same concept... Atari-like games and gameplay on a more capable system.
You know, I hope they don't `fix' the theme music in the release version. I've always liked the original version so much better... and I'm not the only one.
I thought the use of the original music was a nice touch.
Compare the original (1960s/1970s) Dr. Who music to the 1980s versions sometime, see what you think. The newer ones sounds like total cheese to me.. synthesized guitars? yuck. The original uses an analog synth that deliberately sounds unearthly and alien (not fake versions of real Earth musical instruments).
Am looking forward to seeing the finished version of Rose, but it looks like the only way I'll be able to do that is to wait for someone in the UK to rip it and post a torrent. I'm in the US, where the Powers That Be in the TV world don't `get' Dr. Who.
What happens when you're playing a game with this, and you really start to get into the game? You're playing Pole Position, and you're about to run into another car, so you jerk the controller (i.e. the laptop) to the left as hard as you can...
...and the cheap plastic hinges break under the stress. Either your screen quits working entirely, or falls backwards until it's open 180 degrees (which generally breaks other stuff, which makes the screen quit working...)
Game controllers need to be durable. They need to be able to take abuse. This might work OK as a scroll-wheel replacement or such, but as a game controller it sounds like a recipe for destroying your laptop.
Also, as others have pointed out, the weight of the laptop, the possibility of hard drive damage, and the fact that the whole screen moves... all these things sound like showstoppers to me.
I dunno whether I actually agree with it though.
I guess what you meant by every microkernel, kernel, etc. is a piece of shit is that all of
them have their problems. I'd have said that none of them are perfect, not that they're all shit.
Just because something is flawed doesn't make it
shit...
the two "bad experiences" you mention have nothing to do with alignment..
Yeah, I know. I was in nostalgia/horror-story mode when I posted that.
As far as the alignment thing goes... I might have been getting confused. The 1050's track 0 sensor failed on me (on a couple different drives), but that's not related to alignment either. I do distinctly recall taking my 1050 drive to a local guru and him telling me he was going to align it, but I don't remember whether he actually got the drive working again.
Maybe it was only the Commodore 1541 that had to be aligned regularly. I didn't have one of those until later, and didn't use it as much. I remember people complaining about them literally getting knocked out of alignment when formatting and/or reading certain copy-protected disks. Something about the drive software telling the head to seek to some high-numbered track that didn't exist, and the head physically hitting some piece of machinery inside the drive... nothing I ran into personally though.
Bleah, this is way off-topic for an article about a DVHS recorder hack.
> i never had to align my 5.25" or 3.5" floppy drives.
Atari 8-bit, with 1050 drives. Also C=64 with the 1541 drive.
The 1050 drives would keep working if you didn't align them, so long as you kept formatting new disks on the same drive... your old disks would gradually quit working as the alignment drifted, and you'd discover that your friends couldn't read your disks most of the time.
Of course, once you got to this point, realigning the drive would mean you couldn't use disks you'd formatted within the past month or two.
Worst thing that ever happened to one of my drives back then: some genius lubricated his drive with Vaseline, and got some on the R/W head. Every disk he put into the drive after that would fail... and would get Vaseline on it, which meant when I tried them in my drive, I got Vaseline on *my* drive head. His head was toast (the Vaseline broke down the plastic parts), but mine I cleaned in time to save it. Had to throw out all the disks that had been in either drive, too.
Also fun was the time a gnat flew into my drive just as I was closing the door. He got squished between the head & disk, and smeared gnat-guts all over them both. Cleaned the head, no problem, but the disk was toast.
Apparently the newer 3.5" disks are far less reliable than they used to be; this also goes for the drives.
In 1981, a floppy drive was a maintenance item: you had to align it several times over the life of the drive, and clean the heads several times in between alignments. I've often wondered if the modern `floppy drives are unreliable' attitude stems from the fact that nobody *ever* does this any more. At what point did floppy drive technology change so that maintenance was no longer required? My theory is that it didn't... but I use floppies so rarely now that I haven't tested this theory.
> Why wouldn't you just upgrade the amount of RAM in your machine, thus negating the need for a swap file?
The idea is to make use of an otherwise unused resource. No matter how much system RAM I put in the machine, I have 32MB of video RAM that's mostly unused. These days, I can't buy a new video card with less RAM than that, and even the junk bin full of used cards is starting to have 32M cards in it...
I wouldn't actually buy one of these new 512M cards just for use as swap: you're right, it would be better to spend the money on more RAM. However, I expect that I'll start finding $20 `junk' used video cards with more & more video RAM on them.
Keep in mind, this is all about my workstation at work, which doesn't get used for gaming, multimedia, or anything that could possibly need more than a couple megs of video RAM. I wouldn't buy a $20 used POS for use at home:)
> Monitors that support 1280x1024 are dirt cheap these days. > You need over 5 megabytes of frame buffer to support a display at 1280x1024 with 32 bit color.
Are there people whose eyes are discerning enough to tell the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit* color depth?
If you can't tell, or if your dirt-cheap monitor can't show you a visible difference, you can cut the RAM usage in half (or double the resolution, assuming your eyes and your hardware can take it).
I can't tell 16-bit from 24-bit, even when watching DVDs... but that could be because my eyes are crappy (I already know for a fact I'm nearsighted, I might have other problems.)
* Last I checked `32-bit' color depth still used only 24 bits for color data, with the other 8 bits unused, for alignment reasons: 32-bit CPUs have an easier time dealing with memory in 32-bit chunks. Is this still the case, or do cards exist now that use the other 8 bits for something? (If so, what? Alpha channel? That'd be sweet!)
> The real shame is how hard it is to use all this power for anything but games. > A big part of the problem has been the "one way" AGP bus. It's great for getting data to the card, but its as slow as basic PCI when getting data back. PCI-Express should help change this.
Even a PCI video card with 32M of RAM makes a decent swap device, compared to swapping to disk.
I use 16 of the 32 megs of video RAM in my old TNT card as a fast swap device, on my workstation at work. It was a pain to set up (have to use the slram module in Linux 2.6, and tell it the physical address and size of the chunk of RAM I want to use for swap), but it does work well. Unfortunately I never could figure out how to enable the video RAM in my boot scripts, so I have to let X11 do that for me (startx, then run a little script to load the modules, mkswap, swapon). Probably if I'd spent more than 10 minutes on it I could have worked it out.
I'd love to get my hands on one of these 512M cards for this use. I still would only need 16M of video RAM, since I don't use 3d at all at work, which would give me a big enough RAM-swap device that I could quit using disk swap entirely.
Of course it wouldn't be cost-effective to do this with a brand new top-of-the-line card. I'd have to wait until I could find a used one for $20, and even then the cost-per-byte would be a lot higher than a hard disk partition.
BTW, if you want to do this yourself, make sure you set the priority higher on the RAM-swap than on your disk swap, to make the kernel use the RAM device first.
> I had my fair share of distortion caused by that stupid resolution I want to bash in the skull of whoever thought making 1024 the matching vertical res for 1280 was a good idea.
Agree 100%. 1280x1024 on a 4:3 CRT or LCD is terrible.
However, a lot of the 1280x1024 LCD panels are being made with the correct (5:4) physical aspect ratio these days, even the `cheap' ones ($600 range at Best Buy)
One of the guys I work with bought a 5:4 18" LCD @ 1280x1024, and it looks beautiful. Of course, being at work, he doesn't watch movies on it... but good video playing software lets you manually specify the aspect ratio (-monitoraspect 5:4 would do it in mplayer).
Trouble is, if you're buying online, it's hard to tell what the physical aspect ratio is (it's not generally mentioned in the ad copy, and you can't always trust the pictures not to be stretched/squashed). Your best bet is to bring a ruler with you to Best Buy, measure, pick out a model, then find it online for a decent price:)
AFIAK the way around that problem is to stick in a drive with a working IRIX install, and run a utility as root that would reset that PROM password.
I have a similar problem, a working Indigo (1) that I don't know the password for the OS or the PROM. The only thing I can think of is to slap a SCSI card in my PC and compile SGI filesystem support into a kernel. Then I could rewrie the passwd file. A lot of work for an old system.
I never had to reset the PROM password, but it's definitely possible to reset the root password without support for the filesystem. You still have to stick the drive with the IRIX / partition into your Linux (or whatever) box though. From memory:
You want something like grep -ab "root:.*:0:0"/dev/sda, which will give you the offset (in bytes) of the first line of the/etc/passwd file, from the beginning of the SCSI device. AFAIK, only GNU grep has the -b option (see its man page).
Given the offset, divide by 512 to get the sector number (standard sector size being 512 bytes). If I recall correctly, the file data should begin right at a sector boundary, so the offset should be divisible by 512 already. If not, throw away any remainder...
Then you can use dd if=/dev/sda of=tmpfile bs=512 skip=### count=1 to read just that sector into a file on your Linux filesystem. (Obviously, replace the ### with the sector number you calculated).
Make a copy of tmpfile, in case you screw up and need to recover the original sector.
Now, vi tmpfile, and clear the root password (it's between the first 2 colons, and will be an x if shadow passwords are in use, or the encrypted password string if not). Get rid of the password (so you have root::0:0...), and pad the GECOS string (aka the real name) field with the same number of characters (I suggest X's) as you just removed from the password field. This would be 1 letter X if shadow passwords were in use, or however long the encrypted passwd string was, if not. The GECOS field will say something like Super User or System Administrator (I don't have an IRIX box handy to check right now) before you start. Afterwards, it should read XSuper User or XXXXXXSuper User (with the correct number of X's).
Normally, root's entry will be the first thing in/etc/passwd, and files always start at the beginning of a sector, so you shouldn't have to worry about the line you're editing being split across 2 sectors. If it is, you can grab the second sector and edit it, too... but you shouldn't ever have to worry about this.
Make damn sure you edited the file correctly! Make sure (ls -l tmpfile) it's still 512 bytes after your edit. Make sure the edited line of the file is the same number of characters after your edit as it was before (however many characters you removed for the password, add that many X's to the GECOS field). Once you sure you've got it right:
Use the same sector number as in the first dd command. DO NOT forget the seek= parameter, and do not use the wrong offset: you'll damage or destroy the IRIX filesystem, possibly beyond recovery.
If I haven't messed up these directions, and if you haven't messed up following them, you should now be able to stick the drive back in your SGI box, boot it, and log in as root with no password.
I have done this successfully to a drive with IRIX 6.3 installed on xfs partitions. No idea whether it'll work as written with other filesystems, but it should be worth a try.
There should be some sort of disclaimer here about how I'm not responsible for any horrible thing that happens as a result of attempting this process. I'm typing all this from memory and from a couple of quick looks at man pages. You should understand what this will do, and what risks you're taking, before you even think about doing this.
> Turn off Adblock, Adblock will only kill the source of money for most sites.
How does it help anyone make money for me to look at ads for products I have no intention of buying?
If anything, I'm doing them a favor by not wasting their bandwidth by downloading ads that I would ignore anyway.
This reminds me of a/. article I saw once about a TV advertising guy claiming that going to the bathroom during a commercial is the same as stealing (or words to that effect).
> So dont be so selfish and shortsighted and switch Ablock off and click on a few ads from time to time and buy stuff.
Most of us only buy stuff when we want/need it, and when we can afford it. When we do buy stuff, we do it for ourselves, not out of some altruistic desire to help the advertisers.
> You have the technology to go faster than light. You have the energy to take a ship out of a damn deep gravity well w/o sweating and you don't have the technology to breed cattle from embryos and you have to ship it around in a spaceship which is full of forementioned technology.
The yous in those sentences don't all refer to the same entities.
Most of the show takes place in the outer worlds, recently settled and far away from civilisation. Also, there was a civil war (the captain fought on the losing side), and the formerly independent worlds are in a state similar to the Southern states after the US Civil War (the South was not a nice place to live during the Reconstruction).
So yes, in the firefly universe, there is high technology, like FTL travel or cloning, but only the inner worlds have it... and we don't see those worlds often in the series (and when we do, there aren't any cowboys or 1850's tech).
In case you can't tell, I really like the show, looking forward to the movie.
When it was first described to me as a space western, I thought I'd hate it (all I could think of was Battlestar Galactica, which is exactly like a western, basically about a wagon train in space)... but Firefly got my attention in a way that no TV show has since Blake's 7 (which I recommend to anyone who likes Firefly and doesn't mind terrible BBC special effects from the 1970s).
> One final piece to the solution is to get ISPs to act responsibly, and block egress traffic on port 25 for dynamic IP addresses
Some ISPs do this already.
<rant topicality="50%"> That'd be fine, if said ISPs would allow their users to relay mail from addresses other than $user@isp.com... but for various reasons (commercial? political?), they don't.
In other words, I can't send mail via my $50/mo. cable modem at all, unless I want to use the account assigned to me by my ISP (and sold to spammers, no doubt). I prefer to use an address at a domain I personally have registered and for which I personally control the SMTP server. For one thing, my ISP may change: I may decide to get DSL instead of cable, or I may move to an area served by a different cable ISP, or (this has happened to me recently) my cable provider may get bought out by another company, and change the domain name... or any number of other things... but my domain and my SMTP server won't change, so nobody even has to care what ISP I use, and I don't lose legitimate mail due to the address changing.
Unfortunately, my ISP, in its attempt to stop me from sending spam, has restricted me to using only their SMTP server (blocked egress on TCP port 25, as suggested by the parent), but will not allow me to send mail via their own SMTP server using my own (valid) email address (which I do not wish to use for reasons already explained)...
The only solutions here are some sort of VPN to the network where my SMTP server lives (at work), or else ssh to the SMTP server (which is what I actually do, but it's inconvenient).
I've offered to pay my ISP for `business class' cable service, but they *don't offer it*. I've attempted to get DSL, but am too far away from the CO. I'd love to have a choice of ISPs in my area, but cable companies are local monopolies in the country where I live... and thanks to the shakedown in the market, they're getting to be multi-state monopolies. I'd have to move *many* miles before I could get cable internet service from a different provider.
I'm not claiming anyone's deliberately conspiring to limit my (or anyone else's) freedoms. I guess what this boils down to is that so many people have pissed in the pool that we've now got on-duty cops as lifeguards... sorry, that's a rotten analogy, best I can do at the moment. </rant>
The new anticipatory scheduler seems to make a much bigger difference than the preempt patch did in 2.4.
My test box is a Duron 750 with 384M of RAM, running Apache 1.3, Tomcat 4.0 (with Sun 1.4 JVM), MySQL 4.0, X11 + Windowmaker, usually running Opera and Mozilla.
With 2.6.0-test1, I can run the load average up to 3.6 or so, and Mozilla is more responsive than it ever was on 2.4, even with a completely idle system. In fact, it's almost as responsive as the ancient Netscape 4.7 on this same system (compare Netscape 4.7 with any Mozilla 1.x release, if you don't know what I mean).
I'm doing all this junk at once:
- Recompiling the kernel in a `while true' loop - Recompiling a 100,000 Java project in a `while true' loop - Playing mp3s with mpg123 - Untarring a kernel tarball, then deleting it, in another loop - Using Mozilla to hit locally-hosted Tomcat servlets, which make heavy use of the local MySQL server, which has pretty large tables (biggest 2 tables are 1.6G and 400M) - Reading/. in Opera:)
I can't make the mp3s skip, and virtual desktop switching is instant. In 2.4, even with the preempt and lowlatency patches, either Mozilla or mpg123 will freeze up, and/or Tomcat/mysql will lag badly (of course, preempt/lowlat isn't supposed to help much with background server daemon processes anyway). 2.6.0-test1's performance under load also beats the 2.5.6x and 2.5.7x kernels I tried on this machine, though most of the 2.5's were an improvement over 2.4.
It helps that all this activity doesn't cause much swap usage (hovering right around 200Kb of swap used).
BTW, if you're already able to run recent 2.5 kernels, you should be able to just throw 2.6.0-test1 in and have it work (no need to upgrade anything you haven't already, to support 2.5).
Executive summary: I'm a happy camper... If you're able to do so, you should try out this kernel on a spare box & see how you like it.
(Posting late, probably nobody will ever read this, but here goes):
Probably the same way the Compute! magazine `Turbodisk' program did it:
The 1541 used a serial interface (syncrhonous, I guess, because it had a clock line). TurboDisk and (probably) the Fast Load cart made the hardware use 2-bit parallel transfers instead.
The only reason this was possible was that the 1541 has a 6507 (basically a 6502 minus the interrupt lines, and minus a few of the upper address lines), and it was possible to download code into the 1541 and run it on the drive (from RAM; flash/EEPROM hadn't yet been invented, or at least wasn't affordable).
I always thought this was a really neat trick, and wished I could do the same sort of thing on the Atari 800 I had... but the 800's disk drive was way too dumb. There were hardware mods to speed it up, by increasing the baud rate and adjusting sector skew, but nothing like TurboDisk, which you could get for the price of an issue of Compute! plus the time it took to type it in... and at that age I had a lot more time than I knew what to do with.
On the other hand, the Atari did have some advantages: its BASIC was nicer, and its drives (I had the 1050 drives) were more reliable because they didn't beat the r/w head against a metal backstop during a format, which the 1541 did... though I suppose that could have been fixed by downloading a new format routine into the 1541 (never heard of anyone doing this).
Damn, it's been a long time since I thought about this stuff.. think I'll go play Jumpman for a while.
Aladdin (maker of GhostScript) has been doing something like the O-STEP license for years: If you want the latest version of GhostScript, it's available under a non-Free license. If you want the Free version, use the 6-month-old one they generously re-licensed under the CPL last week. I don't know anything about Aladdin, but they've stayed in business for a long time now. Does that mean we can take their continued existence as a test case for an O-STEP-like plan?
Also.. the article didn't mention whether each version of a piece of software would be considered a separate product. That's what Aladdin seems to be doing.
So.. if your target is $10,000,000,000, do you have to sell $10,000,000,000 worth of version 1.0 of your product before it becomes open source, or $10,000,000,000 worth of all versions of your product combined? My guess would be the former (which sounds more corporation-friendly to me), but it's only a guess.
---------- Everything below this line is an off-topic nitpick with the wording of the post I'm replying to, so feel free to ignore it if that sort of thing's not your bag:
> And, of course, there are problems with the legality of dissassembling DOS.
Might be illegal for me to disassemble, perhaps add comments, and post on a web site... but how is it illegal to use DEBUG (which comes with DOS) to look at the contents of memory in my own computer?
If the code were somehow encrypted, I guess the DMCA would apply (not fair, but certainly legal). Even then, I could invoke the interoperability clause (I just wanted to get my old PC-DOS 3.0 disk to boot on my new Athlon laptop!)
Point's moot, anyway, the purpose of trying to make DOS open-source would be mainly to port it to other architectures... having x86 assembly source would make the job slightly easier than a total reverse-engineered rewrite, but not enough easier to be worth the potential legal risks. And I think the FreeDOS project is already trying to port their OS to the Sparc architecture:)
We now return you to your regularly scheduled on-topic discussion. ----------
Slashdot Mirror
Burn them out?! How do you manage that?
I've been playing 2600 games for 25+ years and have never burned out a console, not even when I was testing my own poorly-soldered homebrew EPROM carts. You're not deliberately `frying' them are you (flipping the power on & off rapidly, to cause glitches in the game)?
The reason for the lack of a cartridge port on the new console seems to be that it isn't actually 2600-compatible anyway. I've got one of those 10-in-1 Activision console-in-a-controller units, and it's pretty obvious (to a 2600 developer, or even to an observant 2600 gamer) that the games are ported (or possibly emulated). Also, the title screen and menu couldn't be done on real 2600 hardware: they have twice the horizontal resolution. Also, the sound hardware doesn't sound anything like a real Atari.
The Activision 10-in-1 isn't the same thing as what this article's talking about, but it's the same concept... Atari-like games and gameplay on a more capable system.
So you're saying that in this worst-case scenario, the GPL degrades into the BSD license? Interesting...
I thought the use of the original music was a nice touch.
Compare the original (1960s/1970s) Dr. Who music to the 1980s versions sometime, see what you think. The newer ones sounds like total cheese to me.. synthesized guitars? yuck. The original uses an analog synth that deliberately sounds unearthly and alien (not fake versions of real Earth musical instruments).
Am looking forward to seeing the finished version of Rose, but it looks like the only way I'll be able to do that is to wait for someone in the UK to rip it and post a torrent. I'm in the US, where the Powers That Be in the TV world don't `get' Dr. Who.
Game controllers need to be durable. They need to be able to take abuse. This might work OK as a scroll-wheel replacement or such, but as a game controller it sounds like a recipe for destroying your laptop.
Also, as others have pointed out, the weight of the laptop, the possibility of hard drive damage, and the fact that the whole screen moves... all these things sound like showstoppers to me.
on Wednesday March 09, @12:49PM (#11890548)
Actually, it's "90% of Wikipedia articles are crap"... shit, I mean "crud."
Haha, excellent! Mind if I borrow that sometime?
Normally I don't reply to sigs, but yours is relevant to your post.
The quote is 90% of everything is crud, and it's Ted, not Fred.
I dunno whether I actually agree with it though. I guess what you meant by every microkernel, kernel, etc. is a piece of shit is that all of them have their problems. I'd have said that none of them are perfect, not that they're all shit. Just because something is flawed doesn't make it shit...
Yeah, I know. I was in nostalgia/horror-story mode when I posted that.
As far as the alignment thing goes... I might have been getting confused. The 1050's track 0 sensor failed on me (on a couple different drives), but that's not related to alignment either. I do distinctly recall taking my 1050 drive to a local guru and him telling me he was going to align it, but I don't remember whether he actually got the drive working again.
Maybe it was only the Commodore 1541 that had to be aligned regularly. I didn't have one of those until later, and didn't use it as much. I remember people complaining about them literally getting knocked out of alignment when formatting and/or reading certain copy-protected disks. Something about the drive software telling the head to seek to some high-numbered track that didn't exist, and the head physically hitting some piece of machinery inside the drive... nothing I ran into personally though.
Bleah, this is way off-topic for an article about a DVHS recorder hack.
Atari 8-bit, with 1050 drives. Also C=64 with the 1541 drive.
The 1050 drives would keep working if you didn't align them, so long as you kept formatting new disks on the same drive... your old disks would gradually quit working as the alignment drifted, and you'd discover that your friends couldn't read your disks most of the time.
Of course, once you got to this point, realigning the drive would mean you couldn't use disks you'd formatted within the past month or two.
Worst thing that ever happened to one of my drives back then: some genius lubricated his drive with Vaseline, and got some on the R/W head. Every disk he put into the drive after that would fail... and would get Vaseline on it, which meant when I tried them in my drive, I got Vaseline on *my* drive head. His head was toast (the Vaseline broke down the plastic parts), but mine I cleaned in time to save it. Had to throw out all the disks that had been in either drive, too.
Also fun was the time a gnat flew into my drive just as I was closing the door. He got squished between the head & disk, and smeared gnat-guts all over them both. Cleaned the head, no problem, but the disk was toast.
In 1981, a floppy drive was a maintenance item: you had to align it several times over the life of the drive, and clean the heads several times in between alignments. I've often wondered if the modern `floppy drives are unreliable' attitude stems from the fact that nobody *ever* does this any more. At what point did floppy drive technology change so that maintenance was no longer required? My theory is that it didn't... but I use floppies so rarely now that I haven't tested this theory.
> Why wouldn't you just upgrade the amount of RAM in your machine, thus negating the need for a swap file?
:)
The idea is to make use of an otherwise unused resource. No matter how much system RAM I put in the machine, I have 32MB of video RAM that's mostly unused. These days, I can't buy a new video card with less RAM than that, and even the junk bin full of used cards is starting to have 32M cards in it...
I wouldn't actually buy one of these new 512M cards just for use as swap: you're right, it would be better to spend the money on more RAM. However, I expect that I'll start finding $20 `junk' used video cards with more & more video RAM on them.
Keep in mind, this is all about my workstation at work, which doesn't get used for gaming, multimedia, or anything that could possibly need more than a couple megs of video RAM. I wouldn't buy a $20 used POS for use at home
> Monitors that support 1280x1024 are dirt cheap these days.
> You need over 5 megabytes of frame buffer to support a display at 1280x1024 with 32 bit color.
Are there people whose eyes are discerning enough to tell the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit* color depth?
If you can't tell, or if your dirt-cheap monitor can't show you a visible difference, you can cut the RAM usage in half (or double the resolution, assuming your eyes and your hardware can take it).
I can't tell 16-bit from 24-bit, even when watching DVDs... but that could be because my eyes are crappy (I already know for a fact I'm nearsighted, I might have other problems.)
* Last I checked `32-bit' color depth still used only 24 bits for color data, with the other 8 bits unused, for alignment reasons: 32-bit CPUs have an easier time dealing with memory in 32-bit chunks. Is this still the case, or do cards exist now that use the other 8 bits for something? (If so, what? Alpha channel? That'd be sweet!)
> The real shame is how hard it is to use all this power for anything but games.
> A big part of the problem has been the "one way" AGP bus. It's great for getting data to the card, but its as slow as basic PCI when getting data back. PCI-Express should help change this.
Even a PCI video card with 32M of RAM makes a decent swap device, compared to swapping to disk.
I use 16 of the 32 megs of video RAM in my old TNT card as a fast swap device, on my workstation at work. It was a pain to set up (have to use the slram module in Linux 2.6, and tell it the physical address and size of the chunk of RAM I want to use for swap), but it does work well. Unfortunately I never could figure out how to enable the video RAM in my boot scripts, so I have to let X11 do that for me (startx, then run a little script to load the modules, mkswap, swapon). Probably if I'd spent more than 10 minutes on it I could have worked it out.
I'd love to get my hands on one of these 512M cards for this use. I still would only need 16M of video RAM, since I don't use 3d at all at work, which would give me a big enough RAM-swap device that I could quit using disk swap entirely.
Of course it wouldn't be cost-effective to do this with a brand new top-of-the-line card. I'd have to wait until I could find a used one for $20, and even then the cost-per-byte would be a lot higher than a hard disk partition.
BTW, if you want to do this yourself, make sure you set the priority higher on the RAM-swap than on your disk swap, to make the kernel use the RAM device first.
> They didn't say that the 7800 doesn't play 2600 games.
Woops, you're right. I must learn to tell numbers apart...
Funny, yes... but not strictly accurate
> Also the 7800 is 5200 + 2600, even though the 7800 didn't play 5200 games.
Minor nitpick: the 7800 does play 2600 games. It's the 5200 that doesn't.
Agree 100%. 1280x1024 on a 4:3 CRT or LCD is terrible.
However, a lot of the 1280x1024 LCD panels are being made with the correct (5:4) physical aspect ratio these days, even the `cheap' ones ($600 range at Best Buy)
One of the guys I work with bought a 5:4 18" LCD @ 1280x1024, and it looks beautiful. Of course, being at work, he doesn't watch movies on it... but good video playing software lets you manually specify the aspect ratio (-monitoraspect 5:4 would do it in mplayer).
Trouble is, if you're buying online, it's hard to tell what the physical aspect ratio is (it's not generally mentioned in the ad copy, and you can't always trust the pictures not to be stretched/squashed). Your best bet is to bring a ruler with you to Best Buy, measure, pick out a model, then find it online for a decent price :)
Too bad there's no (-1, Kdaptist) moderation...
I never had to reset the PROM password, but it's definitely possible to reset the root password without support for the filesystem. You still have to stick the drive with the IRIX / partition into your Linux (or whatever) box though. From memory:
You want something like grep -ab "root:.*:0:0" /dev/sda, which will give you the offset (in bytes) of the first line of the /etc/passwd file, from the beginning of the SCSI device. AFAIK, only GNU grep has the -b option (see its man page).
Given the offset, divide by 512 to get the sector number (standard sector size being 512 bytes). If I recall correctly, the file data should begin right at a sector boundary, so the offset should be divisible by 512 already. If not, throw away any remainder...
Then you can use dd if=/dev/sda of=tmpfile bs=512 skip=### count=1 to read just that sector into a file on your Linux filesystem. (Obviously, replace the ### with the sector number you calculated).
Make a copy of tmpfile, in case you screw up and need to recover the original sector.
Now, vi tmpfile, and clear the root password (it's between the first 2 colons, and will be an x if shadow passwords are in use, or the encrypted password string if not). Get rid of the password (so you have root::0:0...), and pad the GECOS string (aka the real name) field with the same number of characters (I suggest X's) as you just removed from the password field. This would be 1 letter X if shadow passwords were in use, or however long the encrypted passwd string was, if not. The GECOS field will say something like Super User or System Administrator (I don't have an IRIX box handy to check right now) before you start. Afterwards, it should read XSuper User or XXXXXXSuper User (with the correct number of X's).
Normally, root's entry will be the first thing in /etc/passwd, and files always start at the beginning of a sector, so you shouldn't have to worry about the line you're editing being split across 2 sectors. If it is, you can grab the second sector and edit it, too... but you shouldn't ever have to worry about this.
Make damn sure you edited the file correctly! Make sure (ls -l tmpfile) it's still 512 bytes after your edit. Make sure the edited line of the file is the same number of characters after your edit as it was before (however many characters you removed for the password, add that many X's to the GECOS field). Once you sure you've got it right:
dd if=tmpfile of=/dev/sda bs=512 seek=### conv=notrunc
Use the same sector number as in the first dd command. DO NOT forget the seek= parameter, and do not use the wrong offset: you'll damage or destroy the IRIX filesystem, possibly beyond recovery.
If I haven't messed up these directions, and if you haven't messed up following them, you should now be able to stick the drive back in your SGI box, boot it, and log in as root with no password.
I have done this successfully to a drive with IRIX 6.3 installed on xfs partitions. No idea whether it'll work as written with other filesystems, but it should be worth a try.
There should be some sort of disclaimer here about how I'm not responsible for any horrible thing that happens as a result of attempting this process. I'm typing all this from memory and from a couple of quick looks at man pages. You should understand what this will do, and what risks you're taking, before you even think about doing this.
The only other useful piece of info
> Turn off Adblock, Adblock will only kill the source of money for most sites.
/. article I saw once about a TV advertising guy claiming that going to the bathroom during a commercial is the same as stealing (or words to that effect).
How does it help anyone make money for me to look at ads for products I have no intention of buying?
If anything, I'm doing them a favor by not wasting their bandwidth by downloading ads that I would ignore anyway.
This reminds me of a
> So dont be so selfish and shortsighted and switch Ablock off and click on a few ads from time to time and buy stuff.
Most of us only buy stuff when we want/need it, and when we can afford it. When we do buy stuff, we do it for ourselves, not out of some altruistic desire to help the advertisers.
The yous in those sentences don't all refer to the same entities.
Most of the show takes place in the outer worlds, recently settled and far away from civilisation. Also, there was a civil war (the captain fought on the losing side), and the formerly independent worlds are in a state similar to the Southern states after the US Civil War (the South was not a nice place to live during the Reconstruction).
So yes, in the firefly universe, there is high technology, like FTL travel or cloning, but only the inner worlds have it... and we don't see those worlds often in the series (and when we do, there aren't any cowboys or 1850's tech).
In case you can't tell, I really like the show, looking forward to the movie.
When it was first described to me as a space western, I thought I'd hate it (all I could think of was Battlestar Galactica, which is exactly like a western, basically about a wagon train in space)... but Firefly got my attention in a way that no TV show has since Blake's 7 (which I recommend to anyone who likes Firefly and doesn't mind terrible BBC special effects from the 1970s).
> One final piece to the solution is to get ISPs to act responsibly, and block egress traffic on port 25 for dynamic IP addresses
Some ISPs do this already.
<rant topicality="50%">
That'd be fine, if said ISPs would allow their users to relay mail from addresses other than $user@isp.com... but for various reasons (commercial? political?), they don't.
In other words, I can't send mail via my $50/mo. cable modem at all, unless I want to use the account assigned to me by my ISP (and sold to spammers, no doubt). I prefer to use an address at a domain I personally have registered and for which I personally control the SMTP server. For one thing, my ISP may change: I may decide to get DSL instead of cable, or I may move to an area served by a different cable ISP, or (this has happened to me recently) my cable provider may get bought out by another company, and change the domain name... or any number of other things... but my domain and my SMTP server won't change, so nobody even has to care what ISP I use, and I don't lose legitimate mail due to the address changing.
Unfortunately, my ISP, in its attempt to stop me from sending spam, has restricted me to using only their SMTP server (blocked egress on TCP port 25, as suggested by the parent), but will not allow me to send mail via their own SMTP server using my own (valid) email address (which I do not wish to use for reasons already explained)...
The only solutions here are some sort of VPN to the network where my SMTP server lives (at work), or else ssh to the SMTP server (which is what I actually do, but it's inconvenient).
I've offered to pay my ISP for `business class' cable service, but they *don't offer it*. I've attempted to get DSL, but am too far away from the CO. I'd love to have a choice of ISPs in my area, but cable companies are local monopolies in the country where I live... and thanks to the shakedown in the market, they're getting to be multi-state monopolies. I'd have to move *many* miles before I could get cable internet service from a different provider.
I'm not claiming anyone's deliberately conspiring to limit my (or anyone else's) freedoms. I guess what this boils down to is that so many people have pissed in the pool that we've now got on-duty cops as lifeguards... sorry, that's a rotten analogy, best I can do at the moment.
</rant>
OK, I feel better now, sorry about that.
The new anticipatory scheduler seems to make a much bigger difference than the preempt patch did in 2.4.
/. in Opera :)
My test box is a Duron 750 with 384M of RAM, running Apache 1.3, Tomcat 4.0 (with Sun 1.4 JVM), MySQL 4.0, X11 + Windowmaker, usually running Opera and Mozilla.
With 2.6.0-test1, I can run the load average up to 3.6 or so, and Mozilla is more responsive than it ever was on 2.4, even with a completely idle system. In fact, it's almost as responsive as the ancient Netscape 4.7 on this same system (compare Netscape 4.7 with any Mozilla 1.x release, if you don't know what I mean).
I'm doing all this junk at once:
- Recompiling the kernel in a `while true' loop
- Recompiling a 100,000 Java project in a `while true' loop
- Playing mp3s with mpg123
- Untarring a kernel tarball, then deleting it, in another loop
- Using Mozilla to hit locally-hosted Tomcat servlets, which make heavy use of the local MySQL server, which has pretty large tables (biggest 2 tables are 1.6G and 400M)
- Reading
I can't make the mp3s skip, and virtual desktop switching is instant. In 2.4, even with the preempt and lowlatency patches, either Mozilla or mpg123 will freeze up, and/or Tomcat/mysql will lag badly (of course, preempt/lowlat isn't supposed to help much with background server daemon processes anyway). 2.6.0-test1's performance under load also beats the 2.5.6x and 2.5.7x kernels I tried on this machine, though most of the 2.5's were an improvement over 2.4.
It helps that all this activity doesn't cause much swap usage (hovering right around 200Kb of swap used).
BTW, if you're already able to run recent 2.5 kernels, you should be able to just throw 2.6.0-test1 in and have it work (no need to upgrade anything you haven't already, to support 2.5).
Executive summary: I'm a happy camper... If you're able to do so, you should try out this kernel on a spare box & see how you like it.
(Posting late, probably nobody will ever read this, but here goes):
Probably the same way the Compute! magazine `Turbodisk' program did it:
The 1541 used a serial interface (syncrhonous, I guess, because it had a clock line). TurboDisk and (probably) the Fast Load cart made the hardware use 2-bit parallel transfers instead.
The only reason this was possible was that the 1541 has a 6507 (basically a 6502 minus the interrupt lines, and minus a few of the upper address lines), and it was possible to download code into the 1541 and run it on the drive (from RAM; flash/EEPROM hadn't yet been invented, or at least wasn't affordable).
I always thought this was a really neat trick, and wished I could do the same sort of thing on the Atari 800 I had... but the 800's disk drive was way too dumb. There were hardware mods to speed it up, by increasing the baud rate and adjusting sector skew, but nothing like TurboDisk, which you could get for the price of an issue of Compute! plus the time it took to type it in... and at that age I had a lot more time than I knew what to do with.
On the other hand, the Atari did have some advantages: its BASIC was nicer, and its drives (I had the 1050 drives) were more reliable because they didn't beat the r/w head against a metal backstop during a format, which the 1541 did... though I suppose that could have been fixed by downloading a new format routine into the 1541 (never heard of anyone doing this).
Damn, it's been a long time since I thought about this stuff.. think I'll go play Jumpman for a while.
Aladdin (maker of GhostScript) has been doing something like the O-STEP license for years: If you want the latest version of GhostScript, it's available under a non-Free license. If you want the Free version, use the 6-month-old one they generously re-licensed under the CPL last week. I don't know anything about Aladdin, but they've stayed in business for a long time now. Does that mean we can take their continued existence as a test case for an O-STEP-like plan?
:)
Also.. the article didn't mention whether each version of a piece of software would be considered a separate product. That's what Aladdin seems to be doing.
So.. if your target is $10,000,000,000, do you have to sell $10,000,000,000 worth of version 1.0 of your product before it becomes open source, or $10,000,000,000 worth of all versions of your product combined? My guess would be the former (which sounds more corporation-friendly to me), but it's only a guess.
----------
Everything below this line is an off-topic nitpick with the wording of the post I'm replying to, so feel free to ignore it if that sort of thing's not your bag:
> And, of course, there are problems with the legality of dissassembling DOS.
Might be illegal for me to disassemble, perhaps add comments, and post on a web site... but how is it illegal to use DEBUG (which comes with DOS) to look at the contents of memory in my own computer?
If the code were somehow encrypted, I guess the DMCA would apply (not fair, but certainly legal). Even then, I could invoke the interoperability clause (I just wanted to get my old PC-DOS 3.0 disk to boot on my new Athlon laptop!)
Point's moot, anyway, the purpose of trying to make DOS open-source would be mainly to port it to other architectures... having x86 assembly source would make the job slightly easier than a total reverse-engineered rewrite, but not enough easier to be worth the potential legal risks. And I think the FreeDOS project is already trying to port their OS to the Sparc architecture
We now return you to your regularly scheduled on-topic discussion.
----------