Before people get too excited about topics such as SMP, kernel threads, and I/O devices -- it only partially boots
Yeah...the project isn't to the point where it's usable for anything but system hacking yet.
on a mainframe emulator.
If it runs on Hercules, it'll run on the real hardware. Before you pooh-pooh the use of an emulator, consider that Alan Cox uses Hercules for S/390 work (not all of it, but quite a bit).
Hercules does have the ability to emulate multiprocessor 390s. It will use multiple processors on the host system if available to givce increased performance.
the Hercules page claims it runs on Linux and 32-bit Windows, but it can probably be made to run on UNIXes other than Linux as well, assuming it doesn't Just Work out of the box.
As noted, it's in the FreeBSD packages tree. I plan to get it running on MacOS X by the time the next release is out, now that I've got a Mac to run it on. It will run on most Unixoid OSes with tweaking to remove Linux-specific SCSI tape and TUN/TAP code.
Tempest in a teapot
on
ICANN Updates
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Once again, we have much wailing and gnashing of teeth over ICANN and the control of the DNS.
<garfield>Big, fat, hairy deal.</garfield>
Really, who cares? As long as people can register domain names, and have them appear in the DNS servers, the rest is just three-year-olds arguing over a toy.
NAMES ARE NOT THE THINGS THEY NAME!
Fundamentally, it makes no difference what domain name a site has. With the advent of the search engine, it's all moot anyway.
Really, folks...there are a lot of good people putting in lots of time and effort on something that's basically a triviality. Why not work on something that means something?
...for the thundering hordes of folks who still don't get the difference between names and speech to stand up and cheer for the open source types.
I think Vixie and Malamud are good guys and have their hearts in the right place, and would do a very good job of managing.org (for whatever values of "managing" are needed), but giving it to them just because they're open source advocates is a Bad Idea. Give it to them if and only if they're best qualified to do the job.
i'm the maintainer of hercules, an open-source emulator for IBM mainframes that runs on Linux and Windows.
Currently, in addition to source code, Hercules is released in binary form for Windows and Red Hat Linux. I use Red Hat as my primary Linux distribution in large part because I can suck down.iso files and have my own distribution for little cost, not to mention that I've been running Red Hat for years.
I'd be willing to package RPMs (or whatever) for United Linux systems, if I could get my hands on a distribution for little to no cost. I'm not going to pay kilobucks, let alone per-seat license fees, to do United Linux a favor by building Hercules packages for it.
I know that UL is targeted at the business Linux user who wants support and is willing to pay for it...but without other software to run on it, most of which is built and maintained by volunteers, it's not going to get much of anywhere.
I'm not going to argue what's the best comedy/drama/whatever of the past decade. However, there's something pretty fucking ridiculous about a person spending thousands of dollars to make digital copies of consumer-grade analog copies of a TV show (and I'm going to assume that these are probably crap broadcast tapes with commercials, since I don't think they ever released a box set of any of the series you mentioned).
The digital copies don't degrade with use, unlike tapes; doing DVD allows me to put 5 episodes on one disc, with no perceptible loss of quality (at least to me; I'm not a TV engineer); and most of the software cost has gone into getting Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro so I can at least make good-quality discs with reasonable menuing and DVD features. I may not have nice clean video, but at least it won't be any worse than I already have, and will indeed have such things as the commercials cut out.
It must be nice to have so much money to squander.
What else is money for, if not to enjoy? The miser's existence is pretty damned dull.
It is indeed. I occasionally have to stop and shake my head at the thought that even my PIII-500 laptop can run mainframe stuff faster than any of the first 5 or 6 mainframes I worked on.
Thanks a lot, man:) IBM should pay you for maintaining it.
Not just me, by a long shot. There aren't as many contributors as there are to the Linux kernel, but there are more than a few folks who have contributed significant work on the system, and made it a lot better than I could have by myself. Thanks go to them even more than me.
Yup. (Well, and Pinky and the Brain, and Freakazoid!.) I've got 188 episodes of the stuff on VHS tape, and I'd like to archive them to a more permanent medium before the tapes wear out.
I guess it's true what they say about a fool and their money.
I happen to believe that those three series are the best comedy, in any medium, made in the 1990s. I'll happily put them up against the likes of Friends and Seinfeld any day.
Someone pasted me a framegrab from it, and it looked a little grainy.
Must have been the sample menu I built in Photoshop. Yeah, a bit grainy, but the resulting DVD is as good on a TV as the original VHS-SP tape, and that's all I can ask.
Why don't ya just wait for the DVDs, hombre?
WHAT DVDs? If I thought WB was going to put out a complete set, I'd have waited...but their power to screw things up is nearly infinite, and this would be just one more example.
Either that or seek out some SVHS tapes; the analog chain is only as strong as its weakest link!
True. However, I'm not sure that off-air SVHS tapes of broadcast video would be significantly better. Now, if I had SVHS or U-Matic broadcast masters... (Yeah, I'd have to buy an SVHS or U-Matic deck. Next to the computer and software, who'd notice?)
(I'm the maintainer of Hercules, an open source emulator for IBM mainframes that runs on Linux and Windows.)
You've mentioned Hercules in your column a couple of times, both quite favorably. Thanks!
One industry analyst from Germany has claimed repeatedly that IBM is getting ready to slap down Hercules with its lawyers, on the basis of some unspecified violations of their intellectual property rights. He's said that it's not just patent infringement, but refuses to go into exactly what else.
What effect would you think that taking such an action would have on IBM once the open source community finds out?
Sound great. the only problem with my iMac is the tiny screen.
Mine sits where a Sony 17sf monitor used to. It doesn't feel any smaller. I do wish I could run it at 1280x1024, though, like I did the Sony; that's the real restriction.
who said the iMac is not expandable - i'd say 3 USB + 2 firewire ports is expandable. what else you need?
I've got all but one USB port, and both Firewire ports, in use. (I've got the video grabber on a different port from the hard disk, in an attempt to avoid dropping frames during video capture.) A couple more of each would be nice.
But a couple PCMCIA slots would be sweet.
True, but where would they put them? (Actually, Cardbus slots would be nicer...)
the bigger problem to me is the keyboard not having a power button to turn on/off the system. i have to search for it on the base and *then* i have to look at the base. of course, the way i solved this problem is by not powering off the machine.
Yup. The power button is a Bad Design. Mine sits next to a nice 20-inch Trinitron (hooked to an SGI Indigo2), and getting to it is really awkward.
I avoid the necessity: I just put the thing to sleep instead. It hasn't been turned off since I stuck the half-gig of additional RAM in it.
The only people buying new Macs are REALLY extreme computer geeks with disposable income to play with new kit.
<raises hand>
I got mine - and have sunk an additional $4K into more hardware and software - primarily to do one job: archive my Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, and Freakazoid! collection to DVD. It's doing that job quite nicely, and doing so when three prior attempts to do so with Windows-based PCs have foundered on driver quality and Windows NT/2000 compatibility issues. (No way in hell am I going to run 98, no matter how much the video capture manufacturers insist.) The iMac was truly a plug and play solution.
I, too, believe that MacOS was and is uninteresting at levels below OS X. There are still quirks, but it's pretty usable.
It picks up dirt like a hoover so that cleaming white hemisphere that looks pathetic when you take it out of the box becomes a dull grey lump of crap after a few weeks.
Mine's been out of the box for three weeks now, and the gleaming (note the spelling) white base is still gleaming white. Perhaps if you used that Hoover yourself, the dirt wouldn't wind up in your computers.
You can also get a CD-ROM with the OS/360 distribution, as well as the public-domain versions of MVS 3.8, VM/370 r6, and other goodies from the CBT Tape Project.
The current Hercules CVS tree, as well as the about-to-be-released version 2.16, has a better way of working around this bug: there's a configuration statement, IODELAY, that lets you add the delay without having to recompile.
I was looking at that...What do those patents claim, and is it possible to implement CIFS without them? If not, then M$ has something with which to hit Samba over the head...
Personally, I think it's hypocritical as hell for GPV advocates to bash M$ for doing exactly what they claim in the first place: license their code as they wish.
And no, I'm not an M$ toady, either. I've been arguing against the GPV for over 12 years now. If you want to give your work away, then do so. If not, then don't. Don't restrict it and claim you're giving it away.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah...the project isn't to the point where it's usable for anything but system hacking yet.
on a mainframe emulator.
If it runs on Hercules, it'll run on the real hardware. Before you pooh-pooh the use of an emulator, consider that Alan Cox uses Hercules for S/390 work (not all of it, but quite a bit).
Hercules does have the ability to emulate multiprocessor 390s. It will use multiple processors on the host system if available to givce increased performance.
Baloney. There are 58 ports of NetBSD. Linux can't even come close.
the Hercules page claims it runs on Linux and 32-bit Windows, but it can probably be made to run on UNIXes other than Linux as well, assuming it doesn't Just Work out of the box.
As noted, it's in the FreeBSD packages tree. I plan to get it running on MacOS X by the time the next release is out, now that I've got a Mac to run it on. It will run on most Unixoid OSes with tweaking to remove Linux-specific SCSI tape and TUN/TAP code.
<garfield>Big, fat, hairy deal.</garfield>
Really, who cares? As long as people can register domain names, and have them appear in the DNS servers, the rest is just three-year-olds arguing over a toy.
NAMES ARE NOT THE THINGS THEY NAME!
Fundamentally, it makes no difference what domain name a site has. With the advent of the search engine, it's all moot anyway.
Really, folks...there are a lot of good people putting in lots of time and effort on something that's basically a triviality. Why not work on something that means something?
I think Vixie and Malamud are good guys and have their hearts in the right place, and would do a very good job of managing
Currently, in addition to source code, Hercules is released in binary form for Windows and Red Hat Linux. I use Red Hat as my primary Linux distribution in large part because I can suck down
I'd be willing to package RPMs (or whatever) for United Linux systems, if I could get my hands on a distribution for little to no cost. I'm not going to pay kilobucks, let alone per-seat license fees, to do United Linux a favor by building Hercules packages for it.
I know that UL is targeted at the business Linux user who wants support and is willing to pay for it...but without other software to run on it, most of which is built and maintained by volunteers, it's not going to get much of anywhere.
Damned right. I'm a geek and proud of it. I've worked hard for years to reach this level of geekiness, and I'm damned well going to enjoy it.
with shitloads of disposable income.
It's more that I've got low overhead than that I've got a huge income...and it's all a matter of priorities anyway.
The digital copies don't degrade with use, unlike tapes; doing DVD allows me to put 5 episodes on one disc, with no perceptible loss of quality (at least to me; I'm not a TV engineer); and most of the software cost has gone into getting Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro so I can at least make good-quality discs with reasonable menuing and DVD features. I may not have nice clean video, but at least it won't be any worse than I already have, and will indeed have such things as the commercials cut out.
It must be nice to have so much money to squander.
What else is money for, if not to enjoy? The miser's existence is pretty damned dull.
It is indeed. I occasionally have to stop and shake my head at the thought that even my PIII-500 laptop can run mainframe stuff faster than any of the first 5 or 6 mainframes I worked on.
Thanks a lot, man
Not just me, by a long shot. There aren't as many contributors as there are to the Linux kernel, but there are more than a few folks who have contributed significant work on the system, and made it a lot better than I could have by myself. Thanks go to them even more than me.
Yup. (Well, and Pinky and the Brain, and Freakazoid!.) I've got 188 episodes of the stuff on VHS tape, and I'd like to archive them to a more permanent medium before the tapes wear out.
I guess it's true what they say about a fool and their money.
I happen to believe that those three series are the best comedy, in any medium, made in the 1990s. I'll happily put them up against the likes of Friends and Seinfeld any day.
Must have been the sample menu I built in Photoshop. Yeah, a bit grainy, but the resulting DVD is as good on a TV as the original VHS-SP tape, and that's all I can ask.
Why don't ya just wait for the DVDs, hombre?
WHAT DVDs? If I thought WB was going to put out a complete set, I'd have waited...but their power to screw things up is nearly infinite, and this would be just one more example.
Either that or seek out some SVHS tapes; the analog chain is only as strong as its weakest link!
True. However, I'm not sure that off-air SVHS tapes of broadcast video would be significantly better. Now, if I had SVHS or U-Matic broadcast masters... (Yeah, I'd have to buy an SVHS or U-Matic deck. Next to the computer and software, who'd notice?)
You've mentioned Hercules in your column a couple of times, both quite favorably. Thanks!
One industry analyst from Germany has claimed repeatedly that IBM is getting ready to slap down Hercules with its lawyers, on the basis of some unspecified violations of their intellectual property rights. He's said that it's not just patent infringement, but refuses to go into exactly what else.
What effect would you think that taking such an action would have on IBM once the open source community finds out?
Mine sits where a Sony 17sf monitor used to. It doesn't feel any smaller. I do wish I could run it at 1280x1024, though, like I did the Sony; that's the real restriction.
who said the iMac is not expandable - i'd say 3 USB + 2 firewire ports is expandable. what else you need?
I've got all but one USB port, and both Firewire ports, in use. (I've got the video grabber on a different port from the hard disk, in an attempt to avoid dropping frames during video capture.) A couple more of each would be nice.
But a couple PCMCIA slots would be sweet.
True, but where would they put them? (Actually, Cardbus slots would be nicer...)
Yup. The power button is a Bad Design. Mine sits next to a nice 20-inch Trinitron (hooked to an SGI Indigo2), and getting to it is really awkward.
I avoid the necessity: I just put the thing to sleep instead. It hasn't been turned off since I stuck the half-gig of additional RAM in it.
<raises hand>
I got mine - and have sunk an additional $4K into more hardware and software - primarily to do one job: archive my Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, and Freakazoid! collection to DVD. It's doing that job quite nicely, and doing so when three prior attempts to do so with Windows-based PCs have foundered on driver quality and Windows NT/2000 compatibility issues. (No way in hell am I going to run 98, no matter how much the video capture manufacturers insist.) The iMac was truly a plug and play solution.
I, too, believe that MacOS was and is uninteresting at levels below OS X. There are still quirks, but it's pretty usable.
It picks up dirt like a hoover so that cleaming white hemisphere that looks pathetic when you take it out of the box becomes a dull grey lump of crap after a few weeks.
Mine's been out of the box for three weeks now, and the gleaming (note the spelling) white base is still gleaming white. Perhaps if you used that Hoover yourself, the dirt wouldn't wind up in your computers.
I submitted this story this time last night, and got rejected.
There's a mention at the bottom of the links page.
You can also get a CD-ROM with the OS/360 distribution, as well as the public-domain versions of MVS 3.8, VM/370 r6, and other goodies from the CBT Tape Project.
The current Hercules CVS tree, as well as the about-to-be-released version 2.16, has a better way of working around this bug: there's a configuration statement, IODELAY, that lets you add the delay without having to recompile.
He should have used an Olympus OM-2 and a 250-exposure film back so he didn't have to change rolls as often. Take that, Canon weenies! :-)
Personally, I think it's hypocritical as hell for GPV advocates to bash M$ for doing exactly what they claim in the first place: license their code as they wish.
And no, I'm not an M$ toady, either. I've been arguing against the GPV for over 12 years now. If you want to give your work away, then do so. If not, then don't. Don't restrict it and claim you're giving it away.
(that's for you Raymond, and you 34 million $ shares in VA).
ESR's stock in VA is no longer worth $34 million, or even $1 million.
...for the question to which HDTV is the answer - or at least an answer which I want, instead of which the MPAA et al want.