Many small tools is the Unix Way. Why lump everything into a bunch of huge, bloated applications that each try to do everything in a very narrow field, when you can have a bunch of small, efficient utilities that each do one thing well, and can operate on a wide range of data?
Integration leads to limitation and redundancy. De-integration leads to flexibility and efficiency.
Hmm. One of the big driving forces behind the conversion from analog to digital television is that it allows them to reclaim bandwidth... the digital signal is more robust than an analog signal, so you can use space in adjacent and harmonic channels that would ordinarily have interfered with each other. Also, thanks to the wonders of compression, it's possible to pack several digital video streams into the same bandwidth that would have contained a single, lower quality analog video stream.
I don't know, really, how radio broadcast differs from television broadcast, but I'd assume that at least some of the same points would apply...
"republicans"... "keeping thier butts out of private lives"...
ROFLMAO!
I'm not going to defend the Democrats, not after a Democratic President signed not one but two different CDAs into law. But remember, it was a Republican Congress that handed those bills to him to sign to begin with. Each of the major parties is exactly as bad as the other one. The differences at this point are nothing more than cosmetic.
Screw 'em all. Vote Unarchist. Next time someone passes a law, stop and ask yourself, "Why am I obeying this law, anyway?" If you're honest about the answer to that question, you may surprise yourself...
Re:Is there any reason to stay with the 2.0.x seri
on
Linux 2.0.37 Released
·
· Score: 1
I upgraded a dozen or more, a couple of which I had to do in stages, but then, I was coming from Slack 3.0... Still, downloading all the necessary tarballs over a 33.6 was the worst part.
Okay. I'm running a 6x86-90+ on an FYI VIA board that I know to be broken - it works well enough that I haven't thrown it away, but not so well that I haven't been tempted to on occasion. The problem is probably just the motherboard, but it's been consistent enough about it that I thought it worth at least asking... consistency from that motherboard is rare.
Anyone else out there having trouble getting 2.0.37 to boot? Especially on a machine with a Cyrix processor and/or VIA motherboard? The machine I tried it out on gets as far as decompressing the kernel... when it finishes that, it spontaneously reboots. It's getting as far as printing the first kernel message, but it doesn't stay on screen long enough to be seen.
The machine in question is known to be defective, so I'm not terribly concerned about it, but it's consistently rebooted 2.0.37 at the same spot every time, where 2.0.36 mostly works and only spontaneously reboots occasionally and erratically.
True, but you still have to have a machine with sound card support to do it, whether it's the same box that's running the httpd or not. My point was that there are legitimate uses for a sound card in a server. Maybe not a "web server", per se, but close enough for government work.
Actually, I can think of some instances in which sound card drivers could be vital for a web server. How about streaming audio over the 'net from a live sound source?
I picked up an NEC 4x4 IDE CD-ROM a little while back, then discovered that the user-space CD control software I had wouldn't change between disks. So I wrote a program that would.
It's pretty straightforward - it's just basically a command line interface to the CDROM_SELECT_DISC ioctl. It currently only works with/dev/cdrom, but even a non-C-programmer should be able to figure out where to change that in the source. The error checking needs some work, too, but it *does* change discs (though it's mildly entertaining seeing it report "ioctl failed : Success" when it does).
It has to be called explicitly at the moment, but I'm working on a wrapper for my MP3 player that will index the CDs in the drive and switch between them as it needs to... it might be possible to generalize that, though multiple simultaneous access to different discs would get really messy and slow...
This guy starts out with a wonderful hypothesis: You shouldn't typecast OSes, you should look at their real capabilities first. Then he abandons that theory and typecasts Linux as a server-only OS.
He criticizes Neal Stephenson for portraying Linux and Be as a tank and a Batmobile, respectively, claiming that Be isn't a Batmobile because you can drive it to the store every day, but, oddly, has no objection to that characterization of Linux.
Well, guess what. I drive my tank to the store every day. I use Linux for all of my ordinary tasks, on both server and workstation. I stopped multi-booting ages ago, because Linux is just a flat-out better desktop OS than Windows.
Is it better than Be? I dunno. I looked into getting a Batmobile, because they do look very cool, but I didn't in the end. I checked the HCL on the Be website and discovered that in order to run Be on any of my machines, I would have had to replace, at the very least, motherboard, CPU, video card, sound card, and mouse.
So 99% (to use the number he apparently pulled out of his butt) of Linux users don't use the source. Well, that means the other 1% do. 1% of a few million is a fscking lot. And, thanks to free source, all those people can (and do) write drivers. That's why Be has (woefully short) lists of the hardware it works with, and Linux has (amazingly short) lists of the hardware it *doesn't* work with...
Be has my vote for becoming the OS/2 of the next decade. Technically elegant, theoretically excellent, and practically doomed by a lack of third-party support.
I'm actually doing that... I find at to be handier than cron, however, because I don't always get up at the same time... meetings and such'll require me to get in to work earlier some days, and there's no regular schedule to them... and then there's three-day weekends... Those aren't a problem with at, but I do have to remember to set it every night.
I've got a script (alarm) set up that kicks up the volume and starts splay on shuffle-play through my all my MP3s... I'm thinking I should restrict it to a subset of the collection, though, because Steppenwolf or Republica are likely to get me out of bed much faster than Jethro Tull or Concrete Blonde...:)
cybil:~$ at 0830 /home/jcampbel/bin/alarm ^D cybil:~$
Annoying, yes, but if that's the _most_ annoying thing you've seen on the web, you need to get out more...:)
My vote for most annoying goes to an Intel banner ad done in Java (not Javascript, _Java_) that was about a 500k download and prevented the rest of the page from rendering until it was loaded.
I've seen a couple of home pages that were much more annoying in and of themselves... heavy use of animated GIFs, Shockwave, huge JPEGs, bad MIDI music in the background, horribly clashing flourescent colors, BLINK and MARQUEE tags to annoy those of either major browseral preference, text forced into no-wrap and all on one incredibly long line, incorrectly done frames too small for their content and with no scroll bars, broken IMGs everywhere, pop-up windows with useless Javascript crap in them, unclosed quotes forcing chunks of text to appear inside HREFs... and that's all on _one page_.
The Intel banner gets my vote, though, because it was actually preventing me from seeing something worth seeing, whereas the other stuff was a general offense against good taste, but didn't limit access to anything worthwhile...
I wrote Borland off the day they changed their name, anyway, for pretty much the same reasons I don't expect to hear anything more about "Tru64 Unix"...
I personally have Linux running on four different 386es.
There's eddi, a 386SX-25 with 4M of RAM and an 80M disk, which is my laptop. Not a blazing fast machine, but she was cheap ($20), she's portable, and she's sufficient for carrying work around with me. You don't need a lot of space or processing power for writing code, or even for compiling small projects. She's currently running 1.2.13, because she hasn't got enough disk space to compile a 2.0 kernel.
There's deliah, a 386SX-16 with 8M of RAM and no disk. She boots a 2.2.5 kernel off a floppy disk, then configures her ethernet and mounts her filesystem using BOOTP and NFS. I use her as a not-entirely-dumb-but-not-very-smart terminal for my faster machines.
There's gabrielle, a 386DX-40 with 20M of RAM, a 120M disk, and a 1.0G disk. She runs X, and I use her as an X terminal. Mostly I run stuff on other machines with the display redirected, because she hasn't got enough horsepower to handle X and, say, Netscape at the same time. I also use her as my guinea-pig machine. Because she doesn't do anything mission critical, I use her as a test bed for new kernels, new libc installs, and such things. If I screw her up, no big deal... I could wipe the system and reinstall it without losing anything important (I haven't had to do so much as a floppy-rescue yet... which is fortunate; gabi's got no floppy drives). She's currently running 2.3.5, and if I get sufficently bored today, I may download 2.3.6pre1 and compile it. Sure, it takes four hours, but there's no reason I have to sit around and wait for it.
The last one is leviathan, a 386SX-25 with 8M of RAM and a 120M disk that I'm planning on embedding in my dashboard as a CD player and radio as soon as I get the power supply for it built. It's currently up and running in a caseless heap on my card table.
I'm not even going to get started on the 486es I'm running Linux on...
Not bad... I only caught a few technical inaccuracies.
NTFS support is read only.
2.2 includes an experimental read/write NTFS driver.
DSL and cable modems are mostly unsupported.
Every DSL or cable modem I've ever seen has been an Ethernet device, and Linux works fine with them. If they're talking about phone/cable company support for Linux, that may be another story, but that's a PHB issue, not a technical problem.
They state that SMB is a networking protocol, like IPX, rather than a network filesystem, like NFS.
They missed a couple of ports and a couple of filesystems, but, hell, I can never remember all of them, either...
And they didn't include Slackware in the list of distributions.
> Tell me, just how does varying the load of your CPU reduce the KWPH that your computer consumes?
> Last time I checked, never on a conventional PC.
Actually, real OSes (e.g., Linux) issue HLT instructions when the CPU is idle, which basically shut the CPU down. Windows (9x, anyway... not sure about NT) doesn't do this, so if by "conventional PC", you mean "Windows PC", you're correct. Otherwise, reducing CPU load will reduce power consumption and waste heat (which is why there are overclocking utilities for Windows... they do the HLT thing to reduce the heat produced by the CPU).
Technical points aside, I think the original poster has failed to multiply his "calculated" odds of a planet having intelligent life by the sheer number of planets in the galaxy... I find it inconceivable that only one planet in a mindboggling big universe would have life. Whether we have any nearby neighbors radiating on a frequency we're watching strongly enough for us to detect it and for long enough for the signals to have reached us is another question, and one we can't know the answer to until we look - which is what SETI is supposed to do.
If it's just the difference between digital and analog, there was an article in Discover a couple months back about some guys who were working with analog neural nets in silicon.
They'd had some success getting the neural nets to perform complex tasks, but ran into the problem that once they'd trained a circuit to do what they wanted, they couldn't build working duplicates of it. Also, some of the nets were apparently using the components they were attached to as part of their circuit in some undiscernable manner, so they'd stop functioning if they hooked them to a different circuit that theoretically looked the same from the outputs.
No leeches were harmed in the processing of this post.
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Many small tools is the Unix Way. Why lump everything into a bunch of huge, bloated applications that each try to do everything in a very narrow field, when you can have a bunch of small, efficient utilities that each do one thing well, and can operate on a wide range of data?
Integration leads to limitation and redundancy. De-integration leads to flexibility and efficiency.
Hmm. One of the big driving forces behind the conversion from analog to digital television is that it allows them to reclaim bandwidth... the digital signal is more robust than an analog signal, so you can use space in adjacent and harmonic channels that would ordinarily have interfered with each other. Also, thanks to the wonders of compression, it's possible to pack several digital video streams into the same bandwidth that would have contained a single, lower quality analog video stream.
I don't know, really, how radio broadcast differs from television broadcast, but I'd assume that at least some of the same points would apply...
First incorrect assumption: That legality and morality necessarily have something to do with each other.
"republicans" ... "keeping thier butts out of private lives"...
ROFLMAO!
I'm not going to defend the Democrats, not after a Democratic President signed not one but two different CDAs into law. But remember, it was a Republican Congress that handed those bills to him to sign to begin with. Each of the major parties is exactly as bad as the other one. The differences at this point are nothing more than cosmetic.
Screw 'em all. Vote Unarchist. Next time someone passes a law, stop and ask yourself, "Why am I obeying this law, anyway?" If you're honest about the answer to that question, you may surprise yourself...
I upgraded a dozen or more, a couple of which I had to do in stages, but then, I was coming from Slack 3.0... Still, downloading all the necessary tarballs over a 33.6 was the worst part.
Okay. I'm running a 6x86-90+ on an FYI VIA board that I know to be broken - it works well enough that I haven't thrown it away, but not so well that I haven't been tempted to on occasion. The problem is probably just the motherboard, but it's been consistent enough about it that I thought it worth at least asking... consistency from that motherboard is rare.
Anyone else out there having trouble getting 2.0.37 to boot? Especially on a machine with a Cyrix processor and/or VIA motherboard? The machine I tried it out on gets as far as decompressing the kernel... when it finishes that, it spontaneously reboots. It's getting as far as printing the first kernel message, but it doesn't stay on screen long enough to be seen.
The machine in question is known to be defective, so I'm not terribly concerned about it, but it's consistently rebooted 2.0.37 at the same spot every time, where 2.0.36 mostly works and only spontaneously reboots occasionally and erratically.
True, but you still have to have a machine with sound card support to do it, whether it's the same box that's running the httpd or not. My point was that there are legitimate uses for a sound card in a server. Maybe not a "web server", per se, but close enough for government work.
Actually, I can think of some instances in which sound card drivers could be vital for a web server. How about streaming audio over the 'net from a live sound source?
I picked up an NEC 4x4 IDE CD-ROM a little while back, then discovered that the user-space CD control software I had wouldn't change between disks. So I wrote a program that would.
/dev/cdrom, but even a non-C-programmer should be able to figure out where to change that in the source. The error checking needs some work, too, but it *does* change discs (though it's mildly entertaining seeing it report "ioctl failed : Success" when it does).
It's pretty straightforward - it's just basically a command line interface to the CDROM_SELECT_DISC ioctl. It currently only works with
It has to be called explicitly at the moment, but I'm working on a wrapper for my MP3 player that will index the CDs in the drive and switch between them as it needs to... it might be possible to generalize that, though multiple simultaneous access to different discs would get really messy and slow...
This guy starts out with a wonderful hypothesis: You shouldn't typecast OSes, you should look at their real capabilities first. Then he abandons that theory and typecasts Linux as a server-only OS.
He criticizes Neal Stephenson for portraying Linux and Be as a tank and a Batmobile, respectively, claiming that Be isn't a Batmobile because you can drive it to the store every day, but, oddly, has no objection to that characterization of Linux.
Well, guess what. I drive my tank to the store every day. I use Linux for all of my ordinary tasks, on both server and workstation. I stopped multi-booting ages ago, because Linux is just a flat-out better desktop OS than Windows.
Is it better than Be? I dunno. I looked into getting a Batmobile, because they do look very cool, but I didn't in the end. I checked the HCL on the Be website and discovered that in order to run Be on any of my machines, I would have had to replace, at the very least, motherboard, CPU, video card, sound card, and mouse.
So 99% (to use the number he apparently pulled out of his butt) of Linux users don't use the source. Well, that means the other 1% do. 1% of a few million is a fscking lot. And, thanks to free source, all those people can (and do) write drivers. That's why Be has (woefully short) lists of the hardware it works with, and Linux has (amazingly short) lists of the hardware it *doesn't* work with...
Be has my vote for becoming the OS/2 of the next decade. Technically elegant, theoretically excellent, and practically doomed by a lack of third-party support.
I'm actually doing that... I find at to be handier than cron, however, because I don't always get up at the same time... meetings and such'll require me to get in to work earlier some days, and there's no regular schedule to them... and then there's three-day weekends... Those aren't a problem with at, but I do have to remember to set it every night.
:)
I've got a script (alarm) set up that kicks up the volume and starts splay on shuffle-play through my all my MP3s... I'm thinking I should restrict it to a subset of the collection, though, because Steppenwolf or Republica are likely to get me out of bed much faster than Jethro Tull or Concrete Blonde...
cybil:~$ at 0830
/home/jcampbel/bin/alarm
^D
cybil:~$
Annoying, yes, but if that's the _most_ annoying thing you've seen on the web, you need to get out more... :)
My vote for most annoying goes to an Intel banner ad done in Java (not Javascript, _Java_) that was about a 500k download and prevented the rest of the page from rendering until it was loaded.
I've seen a couple of home pages that were much more annoying in and of themselves... heavy use of animated GIFs, Shockwave, huge JPEGs, bad MIDI music in the background, horribly clashing flourescent colors, BLINK and MARQUEE tags to annoy those of either major browseral preference, text forced into no-wrap and all on one incredibly long line, incorrectly done frames too small for their content and with no scroll bars, broken IMGs everywhere, pop-up windows with useless Javascript crap in them, unclosed quotes forcing chunks of text to appear inside HREFs... and that's all on _one page_.
The Intel banner gets my vote, though, because it was actually preventing me from seeing something worth seeing, whereas the other stuff was a general offense against good taste, but didn't limit access to anything worthwhile...
I believe the term you're looking for is "geek".
Audio is exactly as easy as Linux - at least it is for me, because I'm doing my audio with Linux... I can ssh to my stereo... :)
/me sings:
The speaker's connected to the amplifier
The amplifier's connected to the sound card
The sound card's connected to the 4*4x CD-ROM drive...
Hmm. Okay. I won't quit my day job.
ObTransmeta: This post has no tyops.
Heehee... I run RC5 on all of my boxen, too... the 386-16 gets about 5000 keys/s. That's about 1 2^28 block a day...
My Celeron, meanwhile, will rip through a 2^28 block in five minutes...
I wrote Borland off the day they changed their name, anyway, for pretty much the same reasons I don't expect to hear anything more about "Tru64 Unix"...
I personally have Linux running on four different 386es.
There's eddi, a 386SX-25 with 4M of RAM and an 80M disk, which is my laptop. Not a blazing fast machine, but she was cheap ($20), she's portable, and she's sufficient for carrying work around with me. You don't need a lot of space or processing power for writing code, or even for compiling small projects. She's currently running 1.2.13, because she hasn't got enough disk space to compile a 2.0 kernel.
There's deliah, a 386SX-16 with 8M of RAM and no disk. She boots a 2.2.5 kernel off a floppy disk, then configures her ethernet and mounts her filesystem using BOOTP and NFS. I use her as a not-entirely-dumb-but-not-very-smart terminal for my faster machines.
There's gabrielle, a 386DX-40 with 20M of RAM, a 120M disk, and a 1.0G disk. She runs X, and I use her as an X terminal. Mostly I run stuff on other machines with the display redirected, because she hasn't got enough horsepower to handle X and, say, Netscape at the same time. I also use her as my guinea-pig machine. Because she doesn't do anything mission critical, I use her as a test bed for new kernels, new libc installs, and such things. If I screw her up, no big deal... I could wipe the system and reinstall it without losing anything important (I haven't had to do so much as a floppy-rescue yet... which is fortunate; gabi's got no floppy drives). She's currently running 2.3.5, and if I get sufficently bored today, I may download 2.3.6pre1 and compile it. Sure, it takes four hours, but there's no reason I have to sit around and wait for it.
The last one is leviathan, a 386SX-25 with 8M of RAM and a 120M disk that I'm planning on embedding in my dashboard as a CD player and radio as soon as I get the power supply for it built. It's currently up and running in a caseless heap on my card table.
I'm not even going to get started on the 486es I'm running Linux on...
Not bad... I only caught a few technical inaccuracies.
NTFS support is read only.
2.2 includes an experimental read/write NTFS driver.
DSL and cable modems are mostly unsupported.
Every DSL or cable modem I've ever seen has been an Ethernet device, and Linux works fine with them. If they're talking about phone/cable company support for Linux, that may be another story, but that's a PHB issue, not a technical problem.
They state that SMB is a networking protocol, like IPX, rather than a network filesystem, like NFS.
They missed a couple of ports and a couple of filesystems, but, hell, I can never remember all of them, either...
And they didn't include Slackware in the list of distributions.
> Tell me, just how does varying the load of your CPU reduce the KWPH that your computer consumes?
> Last time I checked, never on a conventional PC.
Actually, real OSes (e.g., Linux) issue HLT instructions when the CPU is idle, which basically shut the CPU down. Windows (9x, anyway... not sure about NT) doesn't do this, so if by "conventional PC", you mean "Windows PC", you're correct. Otherwise, reducing CPU load will reduce power consumption and waste heat (which is why there are overclocking utilities for Windows... they do the HLT thing to reduce the heat produced by the CPU).
Technical points aside, I think the original poster has failed to multiply his "calculated" odds of a planet having intelligent life by the sheer number of planets in the galaxy... I find it inconceivable that only one planet in a mindboggling big universe would have life. Whether we have any nearby neighbors radiating on a frequency we're watching strongly enough for us to detect it and for long enough for the signals to have reached us is another question, and one we can't know the answer to until we look - which is what SETI is supposed to do.
Netscape (4.06 and 4.51, anyway) does save font sizes, just like it does all the other preferences. Maybe you've got a permissions problem?
"Big computers can model complex problems."
And this is supposed to be news?
If it's just the difference between digital and analog, there was an article in Discover a couple months back about some guys who were working with analog neural nets in silicon.
They'd had some success getting the neural nets to perform complex tasks, but ran into the problem that once they'd trained a circuit to do what they wanted, they couldn't build working duplicates of it. Also, some of the nets were apparently using the components they were attached to as part of their circuit in some undiscernable manner, so they'd stop functioning if they hooked them to a different circuit that theoretically looked the same from the outputs.
No leeches were harmed in the processing of this post.
Other than the... er... providence of the components, how is this different than a silicon neural net?
The new 2.2.10pre2 patch includes this fix.