Surely how do you think my neighbour would react if I told him to buy a TiVo, only, um, it sends a full listing of every show he watched including volume up/down back to TiVo every night. What does "anonymous aggregate" mean to him anyway?
Without actually having read the LSB, I would figure it addresses things like whether it is/etc/init.d or/etc/rc.d/init.d, or whether it is glibc 2.1 or glibc 2.2, or whether bash or csh is the standard shell, whether/sbin is part of your PATH or not, or whether/opt is optional or not, or whether perl lives in/usr/bin/perl or/usr/local/bin/perl or someplace else again.
POSIX is not a standard in the sense that LSB is a standard. Even Windows NT can claim some degree of "POSIX compatibility", which should tell you something.
The makers of the Jasker --
a name derived from family abbreviations -- say it can be built to scale using off-the-shelf components and can power anything that requires a motor.
We had to set up an Oracle database recently. Works like a champ. It seemed pretty solid but big and it's unlikely that a pig like that will ever be totally unbreakable.
While I understand that Palm still has a reasonably strong following in the US, they seem to be losing out big to PocketPC here in Europe (although it varies, e.g. Palm sales are still strong in Germany).
Can't say I'm surprised. I never really understood the tradeoff Palm made between screen size and writing area. Probably cost concerns. That's understandable. You have limited amounts of everything so you may need to market a slightly flawed design. Then you can go back to improve on it later. Instead what Palm did was to write their OS and application software as if their hardware would never need improvement.
I suppose their marketing and influence has been superb. Also I suppose that Linux and Windows CE will have completely supplanted Palm in all its incarnations in ten years time (except perhaps unless AOL buys the Palm brand and starts selling pda's that run Mozilla).
If you can make sizable segments of the Gnutella network switch from one port to another overnight, if you can get that information out there quickly and reliably, then what is preventing ISP's from picking it up?
Chess is fun because we think it says things about people. Conversely, by influencing the person, we can influence the game.
I am your typical paranoid thrillseeker chess player. The fun in chess is to win. The wonderful thing about chess is how it is an occassion where two people may submerge for a while in their own universe, summoning a life's worth of experience with the boredom of concentration, the rigour of analysis, the bravado of denial and the art of annoying people. But where ultimately, all that matters is the pieces on the board and the rules of the game. It's wonderful. I love it.
Let's see how long it takes the cunts to mod this down. Very interesting oppression technique you have, motherfuckers. I suppose you want to scare us into weaselly karma protection mode, but I have no use for your fucking toys and no time for your fucked up network. Next
Seriously, when was the last time that any useful technology, let alone a technological breakthrough, came to the market in this fashion, I mean out of nothing, raising money like there is no tomorrow, and a name like "HyperChip".
This goes squarely into the category of "Ginger" (the human transporter), Exponential (high speed PPC chips) and the Sinclair C5 solar car. Funds to "Commercialize [their] Carrier-class Super Core Router"? So when do they expect to hit the market? And where will the market be at that time?
Not that it's a bad idea to do something like this. Undoubtably a lot of value is being created in a company like HyperChip. But it's not like they hold the key to a better Internet -- the market will catch up with them even if (and that is a big if) their 1000x figure holds up in the real world.
It can know because you might tie the scratch space to a particular virtual console. You might also tie it to a privileged process such as sshd.
The point here is that the OOM killer needs a lot of knowledge to make reasonable decisions. At the same time no matter how clever you make it, it's knowledge will always be incomplete.
The solution is simply to not put this knowledge in the kernel in the first place, and put the decision with the only person who can know, namely the system operator.
1990 is twelve years ago. BeOS wasn't around back then. Neither any kind of graphical QNX. The Amiga, yes, it was fast. But it relied heavily on custom ASICs for its speed, so this has little to do with OS speed. Also the Amiga OS lacked features such as virtual memory or a somewhat coherent UI (which Windows 3.1 got as early as 1992 in Windows). So twelve years ago, a heavily hardware assisted and very minimal OS was faster than Windows on low-end (to match the Ami pricepoint) PC hardware? I'm not convinced.
Stability-wise, NT 3.51 was pretty good. It became a little worse IME with NT 4, but Windows 2000 was better again. Now before I'm quoted as saying "NT 3.51 is stable", that needs some qualifications. The NT series of Windows has always been relatively (more or less) stable, in the sense that it does not crash very often. The rub, however, is that Windows is still not very reliable, because you still need to reboot too often (which means you cannot very well run multiple services on a single machine, which in turn means more machines to take care of).
OS/2 and QNX and perhaps BeOS may be slightly better than NT where it concerns the number of crashes, but this needs to be contrasted to the sheer number of devices and usage scenarios that are supported under NT.
Finally even if OS/2 is vastly more stable than NT (which I do not think it is), then how much does that really win you on a platform so flakey as x86? Going with OS/2 is more costly than going with Windows because of network effects. While you are spending money, why not forget about x86 altogether and go for some nice IBM or Sun hardware?
So it doesn't add up. The good old days were good. But Windows is better.
I think basically you are saying that when Windows' technical deficiencies disappear (which in itself makes the dubious presupposition that one size might fit all), there is no longer any reason why we should oppose them.
This presupposes that such is the case right now; i.e. that we are opposing Microsoft because their code is supposedly so horrible.
But that's bullshit. I have to admit I don't know myself where all the folklore of lousy Windows performance and lousy Windows stability came from. Sure their software can run slow. But have you looked at GNOME recently? And as for security, granted their track record is very bad. But at least they don't ship with telnet, right? Besides there is nothing like designing security for a piece of software that runs on 95% of the desktops in the world.
So it's all relative. In any case, I'll tell you the real reason why we should oppose Microsoft: because whatever business you are in right now, if you're successfull, it will be Microsoft's business next week. That's why we need to oppose Microsoft.
This is simple to prevent.
Why are their STILL companies that fall victim to buffer overflow holes?!
No, they are simple to fix. Not simple to prevent. The problem is that the cost of fixing a buffer overflow is relatively small. But it is relatively expensive to prevent them, because it is hard to prove a negative. Unless of course you pay the cost upfront, by using a language that does not allow buffer overflows in the first place. However realistically, that has a variety of costs associated with it as well (portability and reliability of the runtime, availability of skilled people, performance and memory footprint, etcetera).
If open source has any validity it is about choice, not compulsion. The cost of software is irrelevant compared to the cost of employing the person who uses it.
More broadly this is what software culture (a sort of blend between software industry and hacker culture) has been doing all along: to drive the cost of software down to zero. You've always had your public domain software, shareware and postcardware. The FSF sometimes acts like they personally invented the concept, but this freedom is also simply in large part inherent to the labour and art of writing software.
What makes software culture so exciting is the deeply entrenched notion that "bits is bits". And because bits can be made and transported very cheaply, everything that's made out of bits becomes very cheap: which means software, but also all the other things.
What's scary about proprietary software in this day and age is that it is trying to root out this notion of the "generic bit" and replace it with a worldview based on their kind of bits.
That sounds like a good idea as a method to potentially help avoid OOM, but I can still invent a scenario where it doesn't work. (For example, say the X-server gets suspended, and therefor the various clients get suspended waiting for the local socket to send an event, leaving only login running on other ttys - not enough memory to exec a new shell, and therefore a useless system.)
But obviously the reason why the X server had to be suspended in the first place is because there is not enough memory. But why is there not enough memory? Because some process has allocated it. Now why the assumption that this process will never release the memory again? Most likely it will. And in the case where it doesn't, why not preallocate a chunk of memory as scratch space, so that it can be guaranteed that there is always enough memory to spawn another shell? You might even make it possible for the operator to selectively grant usage of the scratch space to memory starving processes, allowing them to complete gracefully, thus easing the memory pressure. As the original poster said, how much space is used as scratch space and which processes can access this scratch space could be site specific tunable parameters.
Here's an interesting tidbit by Steve Lord on the linux-xfs mailing list as well:
... [malloc] does not fail can also mean does not return for a VERY long time. Plus
the memory system on Irix has a mechanism where various subsystems which
consume memory can register callouts which the memory system can call
to ask them to release memory. Linux does not have the latter except
for the explicit calls in page_launder or what ever it is called this
week.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely how do you think my neighbour would react if I told him to buy a TiVo, only, um, it sends a full listing of every show he watched including volume up/down back to TiVo every night. What does "anonymous aggregate" mean to him anyway?
POSIX is not a standard in the sense that LSB is a standard. Even Windows NT can claim some degree of "POSIX compatibility", which should tell you something.
All the perishables are in the fridge I suppose.
Correct. I was just bullshitting to get some karma to burn in this thread.
We had to set up an Oracle database recently. Works like a champ. It seemed pretty solid but big and it's unlikely that a pig like that will ever be totally unbreakable.
Can't say I'm surprised. I never really understood the tradeoff Palm made between screen size and writing area. Probably cost concerns. That's understandable. You have limited amounts of everything so you may need to market a slightly flawed design. Then you can go back to improve on it later. Instead what Palm did was to write their OS and application software as if their hardware would never need improvement.
I suppose their marketing and influence has been superb. Also I suppose that Linux and Windows CE will have completely supplanted Palm in all its incarnations in ten years time (except perhaps unless AOL buys the Palm brand and starts selling pda's that run Mozilla).
All servers run on port X.
ISP blocks port X.
"Few" servers start running on port Y.
Explain to me how does this help the servers still running on port X?
If you can make sizable segments of the Gnutella network switch from one port to another overnight, if you can get that information out there quickly and reliably, then what is preventing ISP's from picking it up?
Right, like using pig latin to get around Napster filtering. Look at how well that worked.
Why do people keep saying this? All that needs to happen is for the ISP's to block the proper port ranges. DEADBEEF
I am your typical paranoid thrillseeker chess player. The fun in chess is to win. The wonderful thing about chess is how it is an occassion where two people may submerge for a while in their own universe, summoning a life's worth of experience with the boredom of concentration, the rigour of analysis, the bravado of denial and the art of annoying people. But where ultimately, all that matters is the pieces on the board and the rules of the game. It's wonderful. I love it.
Let's see how long it takes the cunts to mod this down. Very interesting oppression technique you have, motherfuckers. I suppose you want to scare us into weaselly karma protection mode, but I have no use for your fucking toys and no time for your fucked up network. Next
fp
This goes squarely into the category of "Ginger" (the human transporter), Exponential (high speed PPC chips) and the Sinclair C5 solar car. Funds to "Commercialize [their] Carrier-class Super Core Router"? So when do they expect to hit the market? And where will the market be at that time?
Not that it's a bad idea to do something like this. Undoubtably a lot of value is being created in a company like HyperChip. But it's not like they hold the key to a better Internet -- the market will catch up with them even if (and that is a big if) their 1000x figure holds up in the real world.
What proof do we have that this alleged decryption actually took place?
It's also wrong to kill a man. What does theory have to do with any of this?
Maxpublic, I will remember you as an argument in favour of euthanasia.
The point here is that the OOM killer needs a lot of knowledge to make reasonable decisions. At the same time no matter how clever you make it, it's knowledge will always be incomplete.
The solution is simply to not put this knowledge in the kernel in the first place, and put the decision with the only person who can know, namely the system operator.
Stability-wise, NT 3.51 was pretty good. It became a little worse IME with NT 4, but Windows 2000 was better again. Now before I'm quoted as saying "NT 3.51 is stable", that needs some qualifications. The NT series of Windows has always been relatively (more or less) stable, in the sense that it does not crash very often. The rub, however, is that Windows is still not very reliable, because you still need to reboot too often (which means you cannot very well run multiple services on a single machine, which in turn means more machines to take care of).
OS/2 and QNX and perhaps BeOS may be slightly better than NT where it concerns the number of crashes, but this needs to be contrasted to the sheer number of devices and usage scenarios that are supported under NT.
Finally even if OS/2 is vastly more stable than NT (which I do not think it is), then how much does that really win you on a platform so flakey as x86? Going with OS/2 is more costly than going with Windows because of network effects. While you are spending money, why not forget about x86 altogether and go for some nice IBM or Sun hardware?
So it doesn't add up. The good old days were good. But Windows is better.
I think basically you are saying that when Windows' technical deficiencies disappear (which in itself makes the dubious presupposition that one size might fit all), there is no longer any reason why we should oppose them.
This presupposes that such is the case right now; i.e. that we are opposing Microsoft because their code is supposedly so horrible.
But that's bullshit. I have to admit I don't know myself where all the folklore of lousy Windows performance and lousy Windows stability came from. Sure their software can run slow. But have you looked at GNOME recently? And as for security, granted their track record is very bad. But at least they don't ship with telnet, right? Besides there is nothing like designing security for a piece of software that runs on 95% of the desktops in the world.
So it's all relative. In any case, I'll tell you the real reason why we should oppose Microsoft: because whatever business you are in right now, if you're successfull, it will be Microsoft's business next week. That's why we need to oppose Microsoft.
What makes software culture so exciting is the deeply entrenched notion that "bits is bits". And because bits can be made and transported very cheaply, everything that's made out of bits becomes very cheap: which means software, but also all the other things.
What's scary about proprietary software in this day and age is that it is trying to root out this notion of the "generic bit" and replace it with a worldview based on their kind of bits.