Re:Truly suprising colnclusion, OR NOT!
on
Analysis: x86 Vs PPC
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
... but he does misses one of the major problems with RISC architectures, the fact that RISC
executables are larger that CISC programs (since RISC usually have simpler instructions and
fixed instruction length). Today CPUs are fast, but memory are not. Because of this modern
computers have large caches, 800MHz FSB, dual DDR memory busses, etc, but still the memory is
slow compared to the raw computing power of the CPUs. But since a CISC program is smaller,
the memory pressure is lower on a CISC system, and that's one of the reasons way the RISCs
don't have the (on paper) large advantage compared to the CISCs.
This was not true 10 years ago, since the memory timing back then was in the 25MHz range, and
the CPUs where running 20MHz. Today we have 3.2GHz CPUs and memory at 800 MHz, so program size
matters.
Modern ARM RISC CPUs have worked around this problem by adding an
extra instruction set called arm thumb, to make the
program smaller. Smaller programs = faster execution on the same memory system
>To cut to the chase. Is the source for the Broadcom chipsets included in the Linksys
>source release. Can anyone who has downloaded the code tell us?
I have looked at the kernel source code, and I can't find any drives. The kernel isn't a plain 2.4.5, there seems to be many patches (arch, drivers, net, xfs, mtd, etc). But no Broadcom drivers.
I am sure the negative deflection is due to the low frequency response of the sound card in the PC. As long as the sound card isn't DC coupled (and it usually isn't in any audio equipment since the human ear can't hear very low frequencies), the steady state of the signal will be centered in the signal, exactly as seen on this device.
[whois.pir.org] NOTICE: Access to.ORG WHOIS information is provided to assist persons in determining the contents of a domain name registration record in the PIR registry database. The data in this record is provided by Public Interest Registry for informational purposes only, and PIR does not guarantee its accuracy. This service is intended only for query-based access. You agree that you will use this data only for lawful purposes and that, under no circumstances will you use this data to: (a) allow, enable, or otherwise support the transmission by e-mail, telephone, or facsimile of mass unsolicited, commercial advertising or solicitations to entities other than the data recipient's own existing customers; or (b) enable high volume, automated, electronic processes that send queries or data to the systems of Registry Operator or any ICANN-Accredited Registrar, except as reasonably necessary to register domain names or modify existing registrations. All rights reserved. PIR reserves the right to modify these terms at any time. By submitting this query, you agree to abide by this policy.
Domain ID:D2289308-LROR Domain Name:SLASHDOT.ORG Created On:05-Oct-1997 04:00:00 UTC Last Updated On:15-Jan-2003 01:48:23 UTC Expiration Date:04-Oct-2005 04:00:00 UTC Sponsoring Registrar:R11-LROR Status:OK Registrant ID:11-C Registrant Name:SEE SPONSORING REGISTRAR Registrant Street1:Whois Server:whois.opensrs.net Registrant Street2:Referral URL:www.opensrs.org Registrant City:N/A Registrant Postal Code:N/A Registrant Country:CA Registrant Email:not@available.org Admin ID:11-C Admin Name:SEE SPONSORING REGISTRAR Admin Street1:Whois Server:whois.opensrs.net Admin Street2:Referral URL:www.opensrs.org Admin City:N/A Admin Postal Code:N/A Admin Country:CA Admin Email:not@available.org Billing ID:11-C Billing Name:SEE SPONSORING REGISTRAR Billing Street1:Whois Server:whois.opensrs.net Billing Street2:Referral URL:www.opensrs.org Billing City:N/A Billing Postal Code:N/A Billing Country:CA Billing Email:not@available.org Tech ID:11-C Tech Name:SEE SPONSORING REGISTRAR Tech Street1:Whois Server:whois.opensrs.net Tech Street2:Referral URL:www.opensrs.org Tech City:N/A Tech Postal Code:N/A Tech Country:CA Tech Email:not@available.org Name Server:NS1.VASOFTWARE.COM Name Server:NS2.VASOFTWARE.COM Name Server:NS3.VASOFTWARE.COM
... removed all incentive for developers to create OS/2 native applications. (Score:5, Insightful)
Where is my moderation points when I need them ?
A bzip2 version would be nice ...
on
Gzip on a PCI card
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I try to avoid bzip2 because it is so slow, even on modern hardware. bzip2 compresses very well, much better than gzip. A bzip2 version of this card makes sense....
The web site is down at the moment but you can see the Freshmeat
project page. The shell script is quite small, and easy to understand (at least I understood it, the last time I was looking at it....).
We have used SquirrelMail for som time now, and our users are very happy. Stay with open standards (IMAP/SMTP/LDAP), and you can replace components in a system (eg. Exchange) without changing everything.
SquirrelMail is a standards-based webmail package written in PHP4. It includes built-in pure PHP support for the IMAP and SMTP protocols, and all pages render in pure HTML 4.0 (with no Javascript) for maximum compatibility across browsers. It has very few requirements and is very easy to configure and install. SquirrelMail has a all the functionality you would want from an email client, including strong MIME support, address books, and folder manipulation.
RPM and APT/DPKG depends on too many external tools.
The package manager does most of the install/uninstall tasks
by itself such as copying the file to the correct location,
but to do the final install many packages depends
on a preinstall and postintall scripts (and ditto for uninstall).
The necessities of these scripts shows that the built in mechanisms
of the package manager are not sufficient for all packages, so
the package maintainer writes a script to add the missing pieces.
These scripts can be a mess, usually written as a Bourne script
or bash script, and depends on many tools such as sed, awk, perl,
python, grep, ++++. Remove awk and many packages will fail during
installation.
To list all scripts on a RPM based system try:
rpm -qa --triggers --scripts
Almost every time I have seen a problem with a RPM package, it has
been a bug or a missing tool in one of these scripts. I have been
told that the same goes for DPKG (can someone confirm this ?)
A better package manager should have very strong mechanisms for
doing all sorts of things (such as installing an info page,
removing old log files, or editing a configuration file). Look
trough the scripts to get an idea of what is necessary. Then
use one (and only one) script language without any external
dependencies to write the remaining scripts (perl or python comes
to mind, but an even purer solution would be to build in a small
and powerful script language into the package manager).
sulli wrote:
I have SpamAssassin at my isp (Verio) and it kicks ass. Probably a false positive per week (...), and a false negative every 3-4 days.
How do you know, do you read all the spam to see if there are any false positives? If you can't trust your spam filter, the filter is useless. I can't afford to lose one real email a week. I really want to install a spam filter on my mail
server, but I don't dare....
Sivar wrote:
"Generally Recognised as Safe... bind, and sendmail."
I'm all for Unix server software, but BIND and Sendmail?
Don't mix old Bind and Bind 9, Bind 9 is an entirely new code base written from scratch with security as a basic premise. Version 9 is not susceptible to the same issues found in earlier versions of the Bind DNS server.
The track record for Bind 9 is *much* better than it used to be....
I want a feature list containing all the geeky details
Frequency range.
Bandwidth (do you want to sample the whole FM band (or GSM/GPS/CB/ham bands),
or just a single channel/station).
Sample frequency and depth (ie, fast and few bits, and do decimation in
software or slow and many bits with less CPU overhead)
Necessary spurious free dynamic range, or some other dynamic range specification.
Interface to the PC (PCI, firewire, USB...).
Antenna connector (OK, I know that one: BNC)
Radio design is about trading features against each other, eg. if you want a
large frequency range, you will usually end up with noisy oscillators giving
you poor large signal handling, and low selectivity (ability to listen to
weak stations close (in frequency) to a strong one. If you want good sensitivity,
you loose large signal handling. If you want narrow filters, you get lower
sensitivity (ok, this is a software radio, so you can do extra filtering in
software, so this might not apply). You get the idea. Always compromises.
WWV operates in the high frequency (HF) portion of the radio spectrum. The station radiates
10,000 W on 5, 10, and 15 MHz; and 2500 W on 2.5 and 20 MHz.
The signals broadcast by WWV use double sideband amplitude modulation. The modulation level is 50
percent for the steady tones, 50 percent for the BCD time code, 100 percent for the second pulses
and the minute and hour markers, and 75 percent for the voice announcements.
Basically, the transmitter is AM modulated, which means that it is sending a continuous
signal with varying strength (this is called modulation) on each frequency. The receiver is
supposed to track the variation in power level (this is called demodulation), and send the
variations to the speaker as sound (eg. if the signal strength varies 2000 times each second,
create a 2kHz tone in the speaker). But guess what, the signal strength is so large because of
the proximity to the high power transmitter, that the receiver can't see any variations in the signal
strength at all. It detects only a VERY STRONG signal. This is called reciver overload.
Put the receiver inside
a metal box (the trunk of a car ?), to attenuate the signal and remove the antenna (if it is possible), and it
should works again.
We have just started to use a wiki for this purpose, and it looks good. We use MoinMoin, a wiki written in python which does versioning, and can send email notifications when a page is updated. People are documeting much more than before.
I have not tried it myself, but I have heard very good words
about subversion,
a version control system which is in heavy development right now. The developers have looked at various
existing version control systems, and found their pros
and cons. Then they designed a sane system, something between CVS and Perforce. Then they started coding.
Subversion is not finished yet, but according to others, it is
quite usable already, and the subversion developers are using it themselves.
Vecna! wrote:
> If you bill a customer's credit card, you are required to keep that credit card information on file so
> that you can reverse the charges and/or provide information on charge traces that may be requested > by the customer.
In that case, send the credit card information to an old fashion line printer, in a closed room.
Many sysadmins understand that they need to put their servers
behind a firewall, protecting the servers from malicious
inbound traffic from the internet. Now is the time to educate these
sysadmins that they need to configure the firewalls to also
block outbound access from the servers to the internet.
For instance, a web server don't need outbound access to
the internet at all, you are not going to use the server to browse
the internet, so please block all outbound traffic from the web server.
If this server get infected by a new worm, the worm can't spread to
other hosts trough http. Simple.
I have read a lot about firewalls lately, most focus on securing the
inbound traffic, a few talks about egress filtering to stop address
spoofing, but none writes about blocking outbound access from the
servers, to stop worms from spreading from your server.
Slashdot Mirror
... but he does misses one of the major problems with RISC architectures, the fact that RISC executables are larger that CISC programs (since RISC usually have simpler instructions and fixed instruction length). Today CPUs are fast, but memory are not. Because of this modern computers have large caches, 800MHz FSB, dual DDR memory busses, etc, but still the memory is slow compared to the raw computing power of the CPUs. But since a CISC program is smaller, the memory pressure is lower on a CISC system, and that's one of the reasons way the RISCs don't have the (on paper) large advantage compared to the CISCs.
This was not true 10 years ago, since the memory timing back then was in the 25MHz range, and the CPUs where running 20MHz. Today we have 3.2GHz CPUs and memory at 800 MHz, so program size matters.
Modern ARM RISC CPUs have worked around this problem by adding an extra instruction set called arm thumb, to make the program smaller. Smaller programs = faster execution on the same memory system
>To cut to the chase. Is the source for the Broadcom chipsets included in the Linksys
>source release. Can anyone who has downloaded the code tell us?
I have looked at the kernel source code, and I can't find any drives. The kernel isn't a plain 2.4.5, there seems to be many patches (arch, drivers, net, xfs, mtd, etc). But no Broadcom drivers.
It was built using the latest binutils (2.13.2.1)
Too late, binutils 2.14 is released ....
It looks like SCO might have stolen code from Linux, according to this post on the linux kernel mailing list
The Sprint Press Release states that they are going to use ATM, not IP.
I am sure the negative deflection is due to the low frequency response of the sound card in the PC. As long as the sound card isn't DC coupled (and it usually isn't in any audio equipment since the human ear can't hear very low frequencies), the steady state of the signal will be centered in the signal, exactly as seen on this device.
Use the right whois server:
.ORG WHOIS information is provided to assist persons in
whois -h whois.pir.org slashdot.org
[whois.pir.org]
NOTICE: Access to
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accuracy. This service is intended only for query-based access. You agree
that you will use this data only for lawful purposes and that, under no
circumstances will you use this data to: (a) allow, enable, or otherwise
support the transmission by e-mail, telephone, or facsimile of mass
unsolicited, commercial advertising or solicitations to entities other than
the data recipient's own existing customers; or (b) enable high volume,
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Registry Operator or any ICANN-Accredited Registrar, except as reasonably
necessary to register domain names or modify existing registrations. All
rights reserved. PIR reserves the right to modify these terms at any
time. By submitting this query, you agree to abide by this policy.
Domain ID:D2289308-LROR
Domain Name:SLASHDOT.ORG
Created On:05-Oct-1997 04:00:00 UTC
Last Updated On:15-Jan-2003 01:48:23 UTC
Expiration Date:04-Oct-2005 04:00:00 UTC
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Tech ID:11-C
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Tech Country:CA
Tech Email:not@available.org
Name Server:NS1.VASOFTWARE.COM
Name Server:NS2.VASOFTWARE.COM
Name Server:NS3.VASOFTWARE.COM
Where is my moderation points when I need them ?
I try to avoid bzip2 because it is so slow, even on modern hardware. bzip2 compresses very well, much better than gzip. A bzip2 version of this card makes sense ....
The web site is down at the moment but you can see the Freshmeat project page. The shell script is quite small, and easy to understand (at least I understood it, the last time I was looking at it ....).
We have used SquirrelMail for som time now, and our users are very happy. Stay with open standards (IMAP/SMTP/LDAP), and you can replace components in a system (eg. Exchange) without changing everything.
From http://www.squirrelmail.org/:What is SquirrelMail?
SquirrelMail is a standards-based webmail package written in PHP4. It includes built-in pure PHP support for the IMAP and SMTP protocols, and all pages render in pure HTML 4.0 (with no Javascript) for maximum compatibility across browsers. It has very few requirements and is very easy to configure and install. SquirrelMail has a all the functionality you would want from an email client, including strong MIME support, address books, and folder manipulation.
RPM and APT/DPKG depends on too many external tools.
The package manager does most of the install/uninstall tasks by itself such as copying the file to the correct location, but to do the final install many packages depends on a preinstall and postintall scripts (and ditto for uninstall).
The necessities of these scripts shows that the built in mechanisms of the package manager are not sufficient for all packages, so the package maintainer writes a script to add the missing pieces.
These scripts can be a mess, usually written as a Bourne script or bash script, and depends on many tools such as sed, awk, perl, python, grep, ++++. Remove awk and many packages will fail during installation.
To list all scripts on a RPM based system try:
rpm -qa --triggers --scripts
Almost every time I have seen a problem with a RPM package, it has been a bug or a missing tool in one of these scripts. I have been told that the same goes for DPKG (can someone confirm this ?)
A better package manager should have very strong mechanisms for doing all sorts of things (such as installing an info page, removing old log files, or editing a configuration file). Look trough the scripts to get an idea of what is necessary. Then use one (and only one) script language without any external dependencies to write the remaining scripts (perl or python comes to mind, but an even purer solution would be to build in a small and powerful script language into the package manager).
sulli wrote:
I have SpamAssassin at my isp (Verio) and it kicks ass. Probably a false positive per week (...), and a false negative every 3-4 days.
How do you know, do you read all the spam to see if there are any false positives? If you can't trust your spam filter, the filter is useless. I can't afford to lose one real email a week. I really want to install a spam filter on my mail server, but I don't dare ....
What's the point ?
Let the user install OpenOffice instead, no need for a plugin ....
by Robi Polikar is here: http://engineering.rowan.edu/~polikar/WAVELETS/WTt utorial.html
Sivar wrote: ... bind, and sendmail."
"Generally Recognised as Safe
I'm all for Unix server software, but BIND and Sendmail?
Don't mix old Bind and Bind 9, Bind 9 is an entirely new code base written from scratch with security as a basic premise. Version 9 is not susceptible to the same issues found in earlier versions of the Bind DNS server.
The track record for Bind 9 is *much* better than it used to be ....
I want a feature list containing all the geeky details
Radio design is about trading features against each other, eg. if you want a large frequency range, you will usually end up with noisy oscillators giving you poor large signal handling, and low selectivity (ability to listen to weak stations close (in frequency) to a strong one. If you want good sensitivity, you loose large signal handling. If you want narrow filters, you get lower sensitivity (ok, this is a software radio, so you can do extra filtering in software, so this might not apply). You get the idea. Always compromises.
Ntpd supports many GPS reference clocks directly, so you don't need any special software to "pull out the time, and then feed it to an NTP server".
From http://www.boulder.nist.gov/timefreq/stations/wwv. html:
WWV operates in the high frequency (HF) portion of the radio spectrum. The station radiates 10,000 W on 5, 10, and 15 MHz; and 2500 W on 2.5 and 20 MHz.
The signals broadcast by WWV use double sideband amplitude modulation. The modulation level is 50 percent for the steady tones, 50 percent for the BCD time code, 100 percent for the second pulses and the minute and hour markers, and 75 percent for the voice announcements.
Basically, the transmitter is AM modulated, which means that it is sending a continuous signal with varying strength (this is called modulation) on each frequency. The receiver is supposed to track the variation in power level (this is called demodulation), and send the variations to the speaker as sound (eg. if the signal strength varies 2000 times each second, create a 2kHz tone in the speaker). But guess what, the signal strength is so large because of the proximity to the high power transmitter, that the receiver can't see any variations in the signal strength at all. It detects only a VERY STRONG signal. This is called reciver overload.
Put the receiver inside a metal box (the trunk of a car ?), to attenuate the signal and remove the antenna (if it is possible), and it should works again.
We have just started to use a wiki for this purpose, and it looks good. We use MoinMoin, a wiki written in python which does versioning, and can send email notifications when a page is updated. People are documeting much more than before.
I have not tried it myself, but I have heard very good words about subversion, a version control system which is in heavy development right now. The developers have looked at various existing version control systems, and found their pros and cons. Then they designed a sane system, something between CVS and Perforce. Then they started coding.
Subversion is not finished yet, but according to others, it is quite usable already, and the subversion developers are using it themselves.
There was an article in Linux Journal about subversion i February.
Vecna! wrote:
> If you bill a customer's credit card, you are required to keep that credit card information on file so
> that you can reverse the charges and/or provide information on charge traces that may be requested
> by the customer.
In that case, send the credit card information to an old fashion line printer, in a closed room.
The obvious solution:
Many sysadmins understand that they need to put their servers behind a firewall, protecting the servers from malicious inbound traffic from the internet. Now is the time to educate these sysadmins that they need to configure the firewalls to also block outbound access from the servers to the internet.
For instance, a web server don't need outbound access to the internet at all, you are not going to use the server to browse the internet, so please block all outbound traffic from the web server. If this server get infected by a new worm, the worm can't spread to other hosts trough http. Simple.
I have read a lot about firewalls lately, most focus on securing the inbound traffic, a few talks about egress filtering to stop address spoofing, but none writes about blocking outbound access from the servers, to stop worms from spreading from your server.
I use a command line client with the horrible name cadaver. Cadaver can run WebDAV over SSL (https) for secure remote operation.
Cadaver is a part of Redhat (at least on 7.3), runs on MAC OS X, and a cygwin port is available for Windows.
Deep space = No air -> No sound
( in case you didn't know