1) Why does everything have to be compiled into the kernel. What? Can the kernel not map shared objects into its memory space? And if it can't, why not?
It doesn't. All 2.4 series kernels support compiling things as modules, and using tools like insmod, lsmod, rmmod, and modprobe to manipulate the kernel at runtime.
2) Why don't they establish only standard APIs that device drivers have to implement
They do. ALSA is one such standard, which supercedes OSS... anyway.
(seperate of the kernel and not built into some stupid x-windowing system or something irrelevant to what it does example: sound drivers for KDE)
If it's not in the kernel, how will it talk to the hardware directly? You would need loadable modules.
insert appropriate printer standard, etc.
Like PostScript or PCL? Few consumer-grade printers support them directly, and I would hate to mix printer translation code into the kernel. The current system (kernel provides a character device like/dev/lp0, with GhostScript and your spooler daemon handling talking to the printer) is a better idea.
and make the stupid x-windowing system just another interface that runs on top of OpenGL, jeez
Look at GLX. It's OpenGL over the X protocol; see Evas for an impressive show. Besides which, the X primitives (lines, boxes, etc.) tend to be hardware-accelerated, depending on the drivers.
3) The everything is a file mechanism is really getting outdated. Why are there not object oriented shells yet?
Write one, then.
4) Why do we still use program based architectures? Programs are way too linear. We need objects and an object handling mechanism (like javascript or something similar to it, like a Delphi UI or something) not programs.
OO is one of the most overrated trends in modern CS, but continue.
you could chain them together and do all sorts of neat tricks, that you could never dream of with standard file based shells/programs
Such as? Look into serious shell scripting, including grep, awk, sed, and the other *nix text processing commands.
Lets see: vi, emacs, joe (joe??? what the hell man), yast, lilo, initrd, sh, etc., etc.. Come on guys name your programs something intelligible, and leave the credits in the fscking readme file.
Don't like the name an author gave his program? Grep the source for occurrences, change them, and recompile. Problem solved.
At least if dos had something it had convenient keywords (copy, rename, delete, deltree, EDIT).
Yeah, CoPy, MoVe (since moving is renaming, think about it), ReMove, ReMove -Recursively, etc. As far as edit goes, I find vi far more efficient to use than, say, nano or pico (*nix 'edit' workalikes). Let me use vi if I so choose.
6) Why did anybody think it would be a good idea to integrate the inetd with the x-windowing system (xinetd).
xinetd doesn't use X; I run it on several systems that don't have X installed. Research before you flame.
7) This one is for the distros: quit using the damn graphical installers.
Then use a different distro, like Gentoo, Slackware, or Debian. That's the thing: you have the choice.
And don't say, "One word, man" or "info" those systems are pretty fucked up as it is.
How, exactly? man will tell you pretty much everything, but may refer you to info -- if not, try <program> --help.
9) Standardize the damn locations, follow the LSB biatches
How about FHS? Gentoo already follows this, but not so pedantically so as to make things unnecessarily complicated.
This may sound contradictory to the above, but... abolish the Unix file system layout. I can't stress enough how a simple object persistence/serialization mechanism would be way better than a file system any day.
Design it, submit a kernel patch, as well as patches to glibc and all the GNU tools. Wait for a few years until programs get used to it, or until people realize it has no advantages over the conventional system and abandon it.
The only reason I can think of is to learn it so one can put "Solaris" on the "list of things I know" when looking for a new job...
You see, then, the primary reason there is interest in Solaris on x86. Setting up a Solaris box to play around with was dirt cheap, so Sun got a number of people to get familiar with their operating system and swayed a number of purchases in their favor as a result.
Now, with the fees associated with Solaris/x86, there are few (or zero) reasons to run it. As you said, less hardware support, slow I/O, etc. Furthermore, with Sun destroying the primary purpose for this software (letting people dink around with Solaris for kicks), they only reduce their potential market share.
What, like the same as "it's just a virus" or "it's just a DoS attack"?
Yes, the same. All of which are better than "Kerberos is fundamentally flawed" -- the above can be fixed by changing software instead of inventing new algorithms.
To everyone who particpated: Thank you for helping, and not letting those CPU cycles go to waste. Projects and challenges like these are very important to really, really know what the state of the art is in computation.
Frankly, I don't see how brute-forcing an elliptic curve encryption algorithm is productive in any way. We know it can be broken by scanning the keyspace, and we don't need trillions of CPU cycles to prove it. So, practice has proven mathematics right again. The result was known beforehand, so how does this help anyone?
Oh, and want to see what is "state of the art computation"? See here.
The government should not be allowed to arbitrarily prevent press coverage by drawing a security line.
Why not? If it's a government building, the government can tell the media where they are and are not allowed.
Sure, it's a "government for the people", but that doesn't mean the people can go anywhere they want. The government has secrets -- not because it doesn't want the people to know, but because they don't want their enemies to know. Why should they not be allowed to protect them?
I recently bought a 430-watt Antec power supply, and it is a beast. It has two temperature-sensitive fans, gold plated connectors, and weighs about four or five times more than the one it was replacing. It was well worth the money, especially given the system it powers -- two CPUs, a GeForce 4 Ti, two optical drives, and a handful of modern hard disks.
On the plus side, my system is more stable, runs cooler, and is quieter than it was before. I greatly favor my premium power supply over the one that came with my case, and I strongly recommend anyone with a downed PSU to pay the extra dollar.
OL2K is more than an email prog, it's got a lot of cool things going for it. You've got the calendar, the todo list, the sticky notes, and contact list. This may not seem all that interesting until you synch up with an device such as a PDA.
Or, until you hook it up to an Exchange server in a company with a few hundred employees. Most corporations that use Outlook do so not for the e-mail capability, but rather the groupware capability -- scheduling appointments collectively, meeting requests, delegatation, etc. As it stands, there are few products that can match Outlook's rather full feature set.
Outlook is actually a decent program with far fewer vulnerabilities than Outlook Express. Also, since a corporate deployment of Outlook is in a controlled environment, server-side antivirus solutions are possible and make a whole lot of sense. Properly set up, Outlook can be a good solution to an office communication problem.
(Of course, I still hate Exchange, but the users don't seem to mind...)
My personal favorite, from my current kernel source tree:
drivers/char/lp.c:257: printk(KERN_INFO "lp%d on fire\n", minor);
Apparently some printers fill the log files with this when they run out of ink. I hear it's pretty effective at getting people to examine their printer.
The maps are digitized from their original, hard-copy form. That produces a raster image, and it would be entirely useless to attempt to make an inaccurate vector represenetation of it.
So, does that mean that in time, the blackhole will swallow up the star?
Maybe, maybe not.
Comets can orbit the sun for a really long time; some smack into an object (like the sun, for instance), some escape their orbit, and some just keep orbiting. There's nothing that guarantees the star will get sucked in; it all depends on the orbital path, really. It may experience a slingshot effect and leave the black hole altogether.
a gigabit ethernet card running at full bore (wire speed) can max out many machines both on bus bandwidth and CPU utilization... Ethernet consumes too many resources
Wait -- if gigabit maxes out the bus bandwidth and CPU of a machine, how is that consuming too many resources? If my system bus can only transmit data at, say, 100 MB/s, and that goes directly to the gigabit card, why is that a bad thing?
Isn't that a limitation of the computer, not a limitation of gigabit Ethernet?
a massive robot truck of the future... running embedded Linux with 802.11b ethernet
So, wait, we have a massive robot truck controlled by 802.11b? Sounds like a great plan. After all, 802.11b sports Wired Equivalent Privacy, which we all know lives up to its name.
Yes, verified by md5sums of the source tarballs. Basically, my point boils down to the fact that binary distros may or may not check their sources at build time.
What am I missing? Are you saying the md5 checksum is being spoofed too?
What I'm saying is this. Even if the binary matches the binary your distro gives you, nothing proves the distro got clean sources. Yes, they can check the md5sum on their source tarball, but that's another window for error.
Gentoo goes for the sources directly, and verifies they are correct before doing anything with them.
apt-get also validates MD5 checksums before installing a package.
Yeah, sure, you can validate md5sums on binaries. But, no one can quite be sure that the binary is built from the official, non-trojaned source, even if they give the offical checksum for the distro.
Gentoo neatly gets around this problem by using the source directly, and since a lot of projects list md5sums of the source archives (such as sendmail 8.12.6), Portage can make sure that it gets the correct tarball.
So, Gentoo had the right one on file all along. And, of course, Portage won't unpack files with the wrong md5sum, meaning Gentoo users were completely immune to this.
That's the same md5sum as the correct one listed in the CERT advisory, and that's the md5sum Portage looks for before proceeding to unpack. So, no, Portage won't let you be trojaned.
Slashdot Mirror
They do. ALSA is one such standard, which supercedes OSS... anyway.
If it's not in the kernel, how will it talk to the hardware directly? You would need loadable modules.
Like PostScript or PCL? Few consumer-grade printers support them directly, and I would hate to mix printer translation code into the kernel. The current system (kernel provides a character device like
Look at GLX. It's OpenGL over the X protocol; see Evas for an impressive show. Besides which, the X primitives (lines, boxes, etc.) tend to be hardware-accelerated, depending on the drivers.
Write one, then.
OO is one of the most overrated trends in modern CS, but continue.
Such as? Look into serious shell scripting, including grep, awk, sed, and the other *nix text processing commands.
Don't like the name an author gave his program? Grep the source for occurrences, change them, and recompile. Problem solved.
Yeah, CoPy, MoVe (since moving is renaming, think about it), ReMove, ReMove -Recursively, etc. As far as edit goes, I find vi far more efficient to use than, say, nano or pico (*nix 'edit' workalikes). Let me use vi if I so choose.
xinetd doesn't use X; I run it on several systems that don't have X installed. Research before you flame.
Then use a different distro, like Gentoo, Slackware, or Debian. That's the thing: you have the choice.
How, exactly? man will tell you pretty much everything, but may refer you to info -- if not, try <program> --help.
How about FHS? Gentoo already follows this, but not so pedantically so as to make things unnecessarily complicated.
Design it, submit a kernel patch, as well as patches to glibc and all the GNU tools. Wait for a few years until programs get used to it, or until people realize it has no advantages over the conventional system and abandon it.
4.0 milliseconds for 64 bytes across the loopback is really freaking slow!
Gentoo Linux has had a similar guide for months, without coverage on the front page of Slashdot. (And, if I may say so, the Gentoo way is cleaner.)
Maybe I'm missing something, but why/how is this news?
Now, with the fees associated with Solaris/x86, there are few (or zero) reasons to run it. As you said, less hardware support, slow I/O, etc. Furthermore, with Sun destroying the primary purpose for this software (letting people dink around with Solaris for kicks), they only reduce their potential market share.
All in all, a bad move. (IMO, at least.)
What, another one?
Breathe... breathe... it's just a buffer overflow...
Oh, and want to see what is "state of the art computation"? See here.
Sure, it's a "government for the people", but that doesn't mean the people can go anywhere they want. The government has secrets -- not because it doesn't want the people to know, but because they don't want their enemies to know. Why should they not be allowed to protect them?
I recently bought a 430-watt Antec power supply, and it is a beast. It has two temperature-sensitive fans, gold plated connectors, and weighs about four or five times more than the one it was replacing. It was well worth the money, especially given the system it powers -- two CPUs, a GeForce 4 Ti, two optical drives, and a handful of modern hard disks.
On the plus side, my system is more stable, runs cooler, and is quieter than it was before. I greatly favor my premium power supply over the one that came with my case, and I strongly recommend anyone with a downed PSU to pay the extra dollar.
Outlook is actually a decent program with far fewer vulnerabilities than Outlook Express. Also, since a corporate deployment of Outlook is in a controlled environment, server-side antivirus solutions are possible and make a whole lot of sense. Properly set up, Outlook can be a good solution to an office communication problem.
(Of course, I still hate Exchange, but the users don't seem to mind...)
The maps are digitized from their original, hard-copy form. That produces a raster image, and it would be entirely useless to attempt to make an inaccurate vector represenetation of it.
Really now, it's just a jet engine, not an Athlon.
Comets can orbit the sun for a really long time; some smack into an object (like the sun, for instance), some escape their orbit, and some just keep orbiting. There's nothing that guarantees the star will get sucked in; it all depends on the orbital path, really. It may experience a slingshot effect and leave the black hole altogether.
Isn't that a limitation of the computer, not a limitation of gigabit Ethernet?
</biting-sarcasm>
Yes, verified by md5sums of the source tarballs. Basically, my point boils down to the fact that binary distros may or may not check their sources at build time.
Gentoo goes for the sources directly, and verifies they are correct before doing anything with them.
Formatted text and all images are now live on the mirror.
;-)
No movies, though.
I'm starting an image mirror here:
http://www.visi.com/~rwglynn/mirror/
Gentoo neatly gets around this problem by using the source directly, and since a lot of projects list md5sums of the source archives (such as sendmail 8.12.6), Portage can make sure that it gets the correct tarball.
Oh, and by the way:So, Gentoo had the right one on file all along. And, of course, Portage won't unpack files with the wrong md5sum, meaning Gentoo users were completely immune to this.
Gentoo Linux validates checksums on every package before unpacking; doing this pedantically prevented the BitchX trojan as well as many other things.
Just another plus for the distro, I suppose.