Over populated might be a better word; sure, we're doing a great job of stripping our earth's resources bare at such a rate you'd think future generations are going to think we thought it was just a funny thing to do.
Sorry, it's just I find any talk of "terraforming" a pathetically distant rock, let alone mars, utterly utterly so beyond stupid it makes me think what you've all been smoking.
If we can't even maintain an environment that was _already set up for us_ what hope in HELL do we have of starting from scratch in any remotely usable form? If it's so goddamn easy to terraform a planet, jesus, why don't we just terraform earth back to how it should be?
That's hardly a basis for concluding that we are NOT overpopulated. And it certainly doesn't justify current practices.
Some environmental damage cannot be undone so easily. Even thousands of years won't bring back species hunted to extinction, or huge tracts of fertile land turned arid and desolate, as the delicate balance of vegitation and precipitation is almost permenantly pushed over into a one-way desert situation. And what of the oil reserves, by the time they are replenished we may not even have two arms and legs? Then there's the ozone layer, the greenhouse effect, the fallout from the odd nuclear powerplant or war, city refuse landfills, and let's not forget the most damaging thing of all that NONE of the egyptions etc. had: Bitumen and concrete.
Bitumen and concrete are a brilliant way to abolish usable soil. Cities... the most destructive thing of all. If only they could be relocated somewhere more practical.
I guess the hilarious thing of all is, I'm doing very little about any of this, beyond not owning a vehicle and separating my garbage into recyclables.
Living in the UK, one of the 3 most densely populated countries in the EU, I can walk five miles from practically anywhere outside central London and be in open, empty countryside
This is not what overpopulation means. It relates to agriculture, and being able to feed the population at a sustainable and reasonable cost to the environment.
We are not overpopulated. Look around you, look at the statistics.
Then think of it this way. We are over-agricultured, or at the very least, totally mis-managing our natural resources.
Yes, we could theoretically sustain a much larger population if humanity decided to get their act together and all submit to one all-powerful government who would responsibly divvy up all the land, reloacte CITIES that are sitting on the MOST FERTILE LAND (good plan for self-eradication - let's concrete all over our most productive soil! Yay!), enforce proper farming practices, shut down the utterly devastating fishing practices we have in many places that are doing irreversable damage to fish stocks, so on and so forth, don't even get me started on the pollution aspect.
But it isn't going to happen. We will rape and pillage, contaminate and destroy our natural resources at an outragous rate, thousands of times faster than it needs to be - because humans are inefficient, greedy, and do not consider the future until it bites them in the arse.
We have ever shrinking farmable land in many continents, including China and Australia (I come from a farming family forced off the land that was once very productive 50 years ago). Salinity is a massive problem in Australia. In Victoria, there's the Pyramid Salt Scheme that - and this is very scary - has taken a hopeless salinity situation where a once productive farming land existed - and turned it into a profitable salt mine.
Our current trends are not sustainable. I don't see us changing our trends, do you? It's a simple matter of population × average per unit cost > resources.
Our current rate of destruction per capita to the enviornment would indicate that unless we can all reduce our per capita destruction, then the only way we will have sustainable population is to reduce that population.
As you seem to imply, perhaps per capit destruction WILL decrease naturally, if the 1st world countries with their negative population growth (Australia is still positive, btw) allow a shift of control of natural resources to what is at this point in time the more "efficient" 3rd world nations.
There's survival of the human race, and then there's survival of the earth's eco-systems and environment. I don't believe a solution exists to save both in a reasonable way that both sides would like.
I think it is very odd you can't believe we're still using C in operating systems. What the other language are we going to use for this task?
Are you really going to want to wait 100s of milliseconds for a garbage collector to run at arbitrary intervals in your carefully word aligned DMA transaction code that needs to run within a matter of microseconds? And how exactly is Python, LISP, or any other interpreted/dynamic runtime compiled language going to be used to write a task scheduler or memory managment system worthy of being used in an OS kernel or embedded MCUs with barely 16KiB RAM?
I think you're quite bitter about having to use C for writing applications, which I can perfectly understand. As for what C is actually MEANT for, it does the job quite well. And yes, the preprocessor issues suck, and it would be nice to have Pascal strings, but there really is no alternative to C that I have seen for low-level programming. It makes computer science purists who think everyone should program in Haskell or LISP feel dirty, but it does the job very well. It sure beats writing directly in ASM.
Over at sysinternals.com, there's filemon, and regmon.
These are real-time registry/file activity loggers, will show which processes access which files with the result code (open success/fail/permission denied/disk full/file not found/etc).
These are absolutely invaluable tools, especially when you come across a new virus that your virus scanner doesn't pick up and general bug hunting... sysinternals has the most useful tools that I really miss from the unix world.
You could try VLC, it's a brilliant movie player for mac and seems to support flac, haven't tried flac files myself though (I know it plays ogg).
Alternatively, you could install fink and then xmms, a popular media player on Linux that I know plays flac (with the right plugin). Of course, for this you'll need to startx each time to get a working X11 server and then launch xmms from there... you won't get drag 'n drop with the finder etc. but it might work... I'm not a mac guru, I'm a Linux user who recently bought an iBook...
Admittedly, I'm an EE and not a Software person, but I've been working a lot with FPGA design and this involves the use of a few "functional" programming languages such as the Scheme-like confluence Hardware Description Language (HDL).
These are so far from anything at all like C programming, Haskell in particular for some reason reminds me of that movie Event Horizon, but that's probably just my warped mind thinking irrelevant thoughts again...
I'm told that the Haskell course taught at my University is a source of great frustration to many programmer wannabes who can never get their head around the "functional" programming paradigm and are forever stuck in their Java ways.
So, if C is classed as "functional" in your books, what would Haskell be?
Surely this is one area where humans are cheaper than robots...
I just moved into a new block of houses (renting) a couple of months ago. 6 months sounds like a *very* long time - I've been here about 7 weeks and the brick homes that were just being started when I moved in are "almost" finished.
It would seem that the finishing is what takes the longest, though... fittings, wiring, plumbing, windows, tiles, carpeting, cabinets, kitchen, etc.
IIRC the frames went up in just days, roof/walls in a few weeks. A big new house was built next to my parents place; being a "kit home" it looked like a mostly finished house on the outside in less than a month...
I think we need a better form & delivery of licensing, not to mention what the license reads.
This has nothing to do with licenses, since they are not following the terms of the license (GNU GPL) offered to them by the copyright holders.
This is copyright infringment, plain and simple.
1) They copied copyrighted works and claim it as their own, in some cases without even removing the orignal author's name and GNU GPL license notice. 2) The only way they can legally use the copyrighted works is by honouring the license under which they authors have released it with 3) They have not honoured the terms of the GNU GPL (Unless they are simultaneously denying the use of GNU GPL'd code and are also providing downloads to said source code). 4) Now we fall back to good old-fashioned copyright law. If you don't have permission, you can't copy it.
Considering the complete lack of evidence of there being even a sliver of their own code in the PPC emulation, apart from doing a "search and replace" for "PearPC"->"CherryOS", then this does in fact need to be taken very seriously.
Ok, so if they follow the gpl, so what?
So what? They wouldn't be breaching international copyright law, that's what.
Contributors to PearPC don't want to work 40hrs a week at their real job and come home to find their pride and joy/hobby being ripped off to profit some wanker who just slapped together a nice VB frontend over a couple of weekends.
Yep. We're a small shop but we have about 4 of our clients using external USB2 HDDs for backup instead of tape.
For the couple that wanted added reliability, they use two external drives on a rotation basis (the drive that gets taken off-site at the end of the day is swapped with the alternate drive that stays for overnight backup).
I had a very bad experience with LSI SCSI RAID in an IBM zSeries.
Between me, customer's software vendor who built/configured the thing, IBM, Microsoft and the local IBM maintenance reps - we couldn't turn off write-back cache. At all. Windows 2000 had "couldn't disable write-back cache" errors spewing all over the system log every 10 seconds until I applied a hotfix so that now it was only once per minute.
The IBM guys actually said "We're not that familiar with LSI RAID". He had a simulator in front of him and still couldn't help me out. They told me to break the mirror and rebuild it - the option should be available when creating the mirror. It wasn't. It takes a long time to ghost 20GB over USB and then back again.
We did BIOS updates, HDD firmware updates, driver updates, windows updates, two hotfixes... after billing around 15 hours (at a discounted rate) IBM said they would handle the case themselves. Apparently they got Microsoft to update the hotfix for them.
I get the feeling the event log errors were spurious, but when asked "does this suppress a spurious error or actually fix something" with the original hotfix, I was told it did actually fix something. Nobody wanted to tell me to just ignore the errors, because it used the words "data corruption may occur". The customer was having data corruption (and other) problems.
I get the feeling that if the customer hadn't been so cheap and actually ran Win2003 which the server was designed for instead of Win2k, it would not have happend.
Funny thing is I had to run the whole show off an el-cheapo single 40GB WD IDE HDD because they couldn't handle any more down time. This "temporary" solution stayed for 5 months until it was fixed properly. That they spent over AUD $7000 for all the big black IBM with SCSI hot-swap RAID and ended up running off AUD $100 HDD anyway...
Yes, software RAID is great (effective, flexible, reliable, comparable in performance to cheap hw RAID) and we use it at our work but never would we deploy it for a customer... You say hardware RAID is a pain to manage? Compared to what? Surely not Linux software RAID! Are you kidding?
When the HDD fails with hardware RAID, you rip the drive out, replace it, and it starts rebuilding.
Linux software RAID only works on a per-partition basis.
When the HDD fails with Linux software RAID, you have to repartition the new drive, manually add it to the array that failed, and tell it to resync.
Not to mention the fact that if you are using software RAID on your/boot partition, you have to reload GRUB. And if you want to be able to boot from your secondary drive in 2xdisk RAID-1 mirror, you'll have to do this to install grub on the secondary disk:
Otherwise, if your primary disk fails, you no longer have a bootable system. This is not good. This is not how hardware RAID would behave, as long as you have all your disks on seperate channels.
I work for a small PC/electronics retail/repair/service shop with ~8 employees and two premises.
Between both shops we have 3 Linux and 2 Windows servers.
Things we do with windows: fileserver, run our CRM, accounting software.
Things we do with linux: run our Asterisk PBX system (with hardware SIP phones and PSTN telephony cards), firewall, transparent web cache, inter-shop VPN link, and a 13 NIC router box that gives each workstation on our workbench isolated ethernet.
I seriously tried for 2 weeks to get the firewall/web cache implemented using Windows Server 2003 with ISA 2004 but ironically, it was so painfully excrutiatingly unreliable and impossible (for me) to get it to work properly we gave up and went to Debian with a couple of NAT rules and Squid for transparent cache... it took me all of 2 days to get to where I wanted.
We're a Microsoft channel partner too. Before I gave up on Server 2003 I had applied two hotfixes and trawled through kb articles and installed all the service packs and updates I could find.
To this day I still don't know how to get static routes to work when ISA is installed. Exactly what the fuck does a "route relationship" do to your ACTUAL ROUTING TABLE?! It completely renders RRAS useless - I cannot see any feasible way to specify a route path from one subnet to another using just the "route relationship" alone, and with RRAS rendered useless, cannot see any other method of adding static routes (using the route command in cmd didn't help either).
I use splint for my static code analysis, and it is quite laborious (for me). All it does is try to formalise your code, enforce sensible restrictions in your code, and at the end of the day - if your code passes through splint with fairly strict checking, you know your code is free from 99% of common C traps.
It won't magically detect improper use of registers or incorrect interrupt handling etc. for a device that has no documentation and has been entirely reverse engineered as a "black box".
There's no magic wand in writing drivers. You really do need the specs.
By the way, even if VC _did_ compile linux (the very thought of it is quite amusing) - I had read that VC had a EULA that specifically forbade the creation of GNU GPL software? Though that is probably heresy...
I know this is completely off topic, I just wish you used an example that didn't involve drivers.
This is a rant about drivers in Linux so make what you will of it:-)
Yet here at work, I can't even insmod a damn module for 10 Gb Ethernet in my SuSE distro
Hate to be a troll, but would the equivilent drivers in Windows XP have been reverse engineered by a Polish University Student in his free time? Even if, in the unlikely case that the driver was made in-house or even sponsored by the manufacturer, would the Windows drivers have been written as an after-thought using programmer/QA resources that are just a fraction of the size used in the mainstream drivers?
If Windows XP only crashed due to driver problems, I'd be out of a job. As it is, I clear about 8-12 jobs a day at a MS-based PC/server support shop. Of all actual faults (BSOD, freezing, resets, explorer crash, hanging apps) - I'd say less than 25% are due to defective drivers/firmware (that's being quite conservative) and less than 25% are due to defective hardware.
Not to mention the pain in the arse it is to diagnose a driver fault, if there is one: Linux in my experience has been a LOT more verbose in helping me diagnose WHICH driver is at fault. In Windows, sometimes, I can use pstat, driver verifier, and dumpchk all day long and still not have a farking clue what the hell is going on. If I have an elusive intermittent fault I have to play the time-consuming, frustrating "process of elimination" game. Did removing NAV fix it? I don't know. Was it the ACPI updates in the BIOS I just flashed? I don't know. Was it the drivers I just tried? I don't know. Was it the windows updates I did? I don't know. Was it the hotfix I got? I don't know. You just can't. Even a simple failing HDD controller can bring Server 2003 to its knees without so much as another cryptic BSOD code and yet in Linux, on that same machine, I can check dmesg and see a whole lot of "IDE reset timeout" messages for a clue.
You're used to drivers that "just work" in Windows. Considering most manufacturers release their windows driver and leave it at that, I am continuously amazed that so much stuff works at all in Linux. The dedication required by an unsupported outsider to perform to the tedious and boring task of developing unsupported drivers for a piece of (possibly unsupported) hardware on an unsupported operating system is incredible. Especially if documentation is unavailable and reverse-engineering is involved.
Anyway. Drivers suck. I fix far more MS-based stuff than Linux, but IMHO Linux either works or it doesn't.
Perhaps this is because the user-hacked, reverse-engineered drivers are written more defensively in a much cleaner driver API than windows (speaking as someone who wrote a USB device driver in Linux but couldn't even get started with the Windows DDK).
On the other hand it could be that vendor supplied Windows drivers take full (or any) advantage of advanced accelerated features which are more prone to faults in "slightly" defective machines that otherwise workin Linux or are simply more prone to bugs due to the more complex nature of the driver.
It's really quite fascinating how some Christians (haven't had a theological debate with a non-Christian faith) simply can't comprehend that a godless, souless person could possibly have similar values and morals as their own.
For some reason it seems to scare them. Or perhaps that godless people aren't entitled to them; that perhaps these are supposed to be exclusive to believers.
Does this attitude arise because it simply makes it harder to demonize and differentiate non-believers, or is it something more complex - and frightening - that perhaps, for example, these people fear that without god in their life they'd become some sort of monster?
I know several people that have lost their faith (as strictly defined by the good book anyway; thanks to weird "church" groups/cults), and vice versa.
In both sides of both directions in these transitions, these people were not monsters.
Some people are quite impressionable, and are easily swayed into adopting a particular set of values, beliefs and morals (good or bad).
Most people are capable of holding any set of beliefs and morals ("good" and "bad"), irrespective of faith.
Our shop split into two buildings - the old one (sales) and another round the corner across a highway (service).
Using a wireless link (w/IPSec for security on top of WPA, since we have some "intranet" app thingies too), two Debian GNU/Linux boxes with a Digium TDM400 card in each one, we can now: 1) Make internal calls for free as much as we like 2) Dial out using a collective line pool of 7 PSTN lines between both shops 3) Transfer calls from one shop to the other 4) Answer with voicemail after hours 5) Music on hold! 6) Watch caller ID to decide if we want to answer the call (or perhaps transfer them to the MOH test extension, BWHAHA) 7) Use Areski CDR searchable call history/stats database. In fact, my boss(es) have been so completely impressed with this one app it would be very hard for them to do without. We can track: who has rang, who we've rang, when, from which phone, on which line, for how long. The stats we've gathered have been phenominal - hours spent on the phone per day - we never would have imagined. We can also now say which is the busiest day of the week for calls.
All this for the cost of our original commander system which was 8 phones.
We use a mix of Budge-Tone 100s and Snom 190s. If someone could point me in the right direction to make distinctive ring on the Snom190 work, that'd really make my day:-)
33.6Kbps IS the maximum you can pump through analogue POTS. As the previous poster said, 56Kbps is an infrastructure limitation designed-in to traditional POTS hardware at the exchange.
It is NOT, as the previous poster suggested, due to the DACs - in fact, if you have a DAC between you and your ISP then the MOST you will be able to get is 33.6kbps, which is the FASTEST you can go on traditional POTS using analogue signalling methods (AFAIK).
Rather, 56kbps is an artifact of the designed-in 4kHz bandwidth allocation per voice channel. In order to get faster than 33.6, however, your data path between you and your ISP must be entirely digital. To go faster than 33.6, the modem goes "all digital" on the wire. And you can't do that if your line has an analoguedigital conversion in there somewhere, because you lose signal detail in the conversion process. You can't escape Shannon's law.
The quotes you have cited regarding 9600 as being an upper limit; if you have ever studied the topic, things start getting very complex very quickly beyond this when you only have a noisy, non-linear 4KHz of bandwidth. It requires DSP technology that just wasn't economical at the times these statements were made.
And finally, please look up the definition of baud:
"The maximum baud rate (signalling state transitions per second) on an analogue phone line is 2400"
For example, 9600 bits per second on POTS lines is implemented using a 2400 baud signalling scheme with four possible states per transition.
And to think I nearly failed comms:-)
Moral of the story: Don't use ignorance to pass judgment on others. Some very smart people, smarter than you and myself, knew exactly what they were doing in designing these standards.
Selection and failover (possibly using multiples) of different mirrors, automatically. I would rather not have to manage the source.list and I am quite sure no newb wants to, even from synaptic.
All you do is add more than one source in sources.list. apt works through them in order until it hits a source without errors. Isn't that simple enough?
Settings up bittorrent trackers or gnuttella networks for this might be worthwhile as well.
A nice thought, but more open to tampering of the packages. I'm sure it wouldn't too hard to hack in (as far as challenges go), but statements like this are easily said by those not doing the code:-)
Besides, as a user and admin, I see absolutely nothing wrong with the current distribution system. As a mirror operator, it's probably a lot of data to keep in sync but I don't know.
Dependency resolution has started to see some cracks. Virtual packages that force you to choose one manually and so on so forth.
This is utterly deliberate, in fact it is a feature. Why should Debian choose for you? How would they decide? Have they got the right to decide? Not saying there's no room for improvement, but I'm interested in how you would propose to improve the current dependancy system.
More cryptography signing and verification for packages.
This I agree with. It would be nice to know that the whatever mirror I'm using hasn't been compromised and packages tampered; at the moment when you do apt-get update you get a list of md5sums for every package and if they don't match once downloaded, there's an error.
Of course, an attacker could modify the md5sum string in the package lists to match his tampered package - on the other hand, I guess with rsync the lifetime of the tampared file can only last until the next rsync, and some mirrors do this up to 6 times a day.
An easier way to search for available packages based upon filename, title, description, man pages provided so on so forth.
Use: apt-cache search for searching package names/descriptions, and apt-file to not only find what package owns a file on your HDD, but also list files contained within a package. Not sure what you mean about searching by man pages provided, do you mean by searching the contents of the man page? I'm pretty sure there's nothing in a package's man page that's not in the searchable description that would stop you from finding the package.
mode whereby you can safely schedule apt-get upgrade to run from cron. Currently thats not completely safe to do without any human interaction. Call it apt-get computer-upgrade.
It's called cron-apt, and I think this is a good time to show an example bash session:
csirac@singularity-0:~$ apt-cache search apt cron cron-apt - Automatic update of packages using apt debarchiver - Tool to handle debian package archives mini-dinstall - daemon for updating Debian packages in a repository csirac@singularity-0:~$ apt-cache show cron-apt Package: cron-apt Priority: optional Section: admin Installed-Size: 80 Maintainer: Ola Lundqvist <opal@debian.org> Architecture: all Version: 0.1.1 Depends: apt, bash (>= 2.03-6), mailx, debianutils (>= 1.7) Recommends: liblockfile1 Filename: pool/main/c/cron-apt/cron-apt_0.1.1_all.deb Size: 18558 MD5sum: dc06ddd83eb7828995f39ec189cef95a Description: Automatic update of packages using apt
This package contains a tool that is run by a cron job
at regular intervals. By default it just updates the package list and
download new packages without installing. You can instruct it to run
anything that you can do with apt-get. .
It also sends mail (configurable) to the system administrator on
errors. .
Observe that this tool is a security risk, so you should not set it
to do more than necessary
We're replacing our knackered commander system (15 years old) with a bunch of VOIP phones (Snom 190). Also we're splitting our shop into two premises; using a WiFi link (with WEP/MAC filtering/IPSec/L2LTP etc for security).
Using VOIP on our local LAN/WAN, we can share the same PSTN line pool (about 20 lines total) between both shops. If someone dials one shop but wants to speak to someone in the other, we can transfer that call. Very useful, not to mention the other possibilities with Asterisk (caller ID, call logging, stats, voicemail, extensions, music on hold, etc).
As for actually using a VOIP carrier for outgoing call... no, not yet.
We're setting up with Asterisk and Digium TDM400 cards with FXO modules.
Standard x86 servers, Linux, Asterisk, Digium and Snom phones add up to a LOT less than the integrated turnkey solution we were looking to get from Siemens.
God, this crap, and the guy who said, "just switch to Linux,"
I'm in a similar situation as you, and I too had to chuckle at the "just install linux" attitude.
Even though I have Linux and _only_ linux at home, all my work is Windows NT4/Server 2000/Server 2003.
It was hard enough to convince the bosses into using a Linux box to run the new PABX system, can't imagine what sort of drugs I'd have to use to convert the desktops and exchange servers!
Slashdot Mirror
our overcrowded Earth
Right, except that with the majority of our earth at well below 50 people per square kilometer, we're hardly falling over each other.
Over populated might be a better word; sure, we're doing a great job of stripping our earth's resources bare at such a rate you'd think future generations are going to think we thought it was just a funny thing to do.
Sorry, it's just I find any talk of "terraforming" a pathetically distant rock, let alone mars, utterly utterly so beyond stupid it makes me think what you've all been smoking.
If we can't even maintain an environment that was _already set up for us_ what hope in HELL do we have of starting from scratch in any remotely usable form? If it's so goddamn easy to terraform a planet, jesus, why don't we just terraform earth back to how it should be?
Hah.
That's hardly a basis for concluding that we are NOT overpopulated. And it certainly doesn't justify current practices.
Some environmental damage cannot be undone so easily. Even thousands of years won't bring back species hunted to extinction, or huge tracts of fertile land turned arid and desolate, as the delicate balance of vegitation and precipitation is almost permenantly pushed over into a one-way desert situation. And what of the oil reserves, by the time they are replenished we may not even have two arms and legs? Then there's the ozone layer, the greenhouse effect, the fallout from the odd nuclear powerplant or war, city refuse landfills, and let's not forget the most damaging thing of all that NONE of the egyptions etc. had: Bitumen and concrete.
Bitumen and concrete are a brilliant way to abolish usable soil. Cities... the most destructive thing of all. If only they could be relocated somewhere more practical.
I guess the hilarious thing of all is, I'm doing very little about any of this, beyond not owning a vehicle and separating my garbage into recyclables.
Living in the UK, one of the 3 most densely populated countries in the EU, I can walk five miles from practically anywhere outside central London and be in open, empty countryside
This is not what overpopulation means. It relates to agriculture, and being able to feed the population at a sustainable and reasonable cost to the environment.
We are not overpopulated. Look around you, look at the statistics.
Then think of it this way. We are over-agricultured, or at the very least, totally mis-managing our natural resources.
Yes, we could theoretically sustain a much larger population if humanity decided to get their act together and all submit to one all-powerful government who would responsibly divvy up all the land, reloacte CITIES that are sitting on the MOST FERTILE LAND (good plan for self-eradication - let's concrete all over our most productive soil! Yay!), enforce proper farming practices, shut down the utterly devastating fishing practices we have in many places that are doing irreversable damage to fish stocks, so on and so forth, don't even get me started on the pollution aspect.
But it isn't going to happen. We will rape and pillage, contaminate and destroy our natural resources at an outragous rate, thousands of times faster than it needs to be - because humans are inefficient, greedy, and do not consider the future until it bites them in the arse.
We have ever shrinking farmable land in many continents, including China and Australia (I come from a farming family forced off the land that was once very productive 50 years ago). Salinity is a massive problem in Australia. In Victoria, there's the Pyramid Salt Scheme that - and this is very scary - has taken a hopeless salinity situation where a once productive farming land existed - and turned it into a profitable salt mine.
Our current trends are not sustainable. I don't see us changing our trends, do you? It's a simple matter of population × average per unit cost > resources.
Our current rate of destruction per capita to the enviornment would indicate that unless we can all reduce our per capita destruction, then the only way we will have sustainable population is to reduce that population.
As you seem to imply, perhaps per capit destruction WILL decrease naturally, if the 1st world countries with their negative population growth (Australia is still positive, btw) allow a shift of control of natural resources to what is at this point in time the more "efficient" 3rd world nations.
There's survival of the human race, and then there's survival of the earth's eco-systems and environment. I don't believe a solution exists to save both in a reasonable way that both sides would like.
I think it is very odd you can't believe we're still using C in operating systems. What the other language are we going to use for this task?
Are you really going to want to wait 100s of milliseconds for a garbage collector to run at arbitrary intervals in your carefully word aligned DMA transaction code that needs to run within a matter of microseconds? And how exactly is Python, LISP, or any other interpreted/dynamic runtime compiled language going to be used to write a task scheduler or memory managment system worthy of being used in an OS kernel or embedded MCUs with barely 16KiB RAM?
I think you're quite bitter about having to use C for writing applications, which I can perfectly understand. As for what C is actually MEANT for, it does the job quite well. And yes, the preprocessor issues suck, and it would be nice to have Pascal strings, but there really is no alternative to C that I have seen for low-level programming. It makes computer science purists who think everyone should program in Haskell or LISP feel dirty, but it does the job very well. It sure beats writing directly in ASM.
Easy-to-use C++ IDE with integrated edit-and-continue debugging.
Anjuta.
I think it's funny that you say: ... create developer dependency on the .NET development platform ...
.NET Wiki summary says: ... focused on ... platform independence ...
And then the
Funny stuff.
Over at sysinternals.com, there's filemon, and regmon. These are real-time registry/file activity loggers, will show which processes access which files with the result code (open success/fail/permission denied/disk full/file not found/etc). These are absolutely invaluable tools, especially when you come across a new virus that your virus scanner doesn't pick up and general bug hunting... sysinternals has the most useful tools that I really miss from the unix world.
There's a few options.
You could try VLC, it's a brilliant movie player for mac and seems to support flac, haven't tried flac files myself though (I know it plays ogg).
Alternatively, you could install fink and then xmms, a popular media player on Linux that I know plays flac (with the right plugin). Of course, for this you'll need to startx each time to get a working X11 server and then launch xmms from there... you won't get drag 'n drop with the finder etc. but it might work... I'm not a mac guru, I'm a Linux user who recently bought an iBook...
Like Welchia?
Admittedly, I'm an EE and not a Software person, but I've been working a lot with FPGA design and this involves the use of a few "functional" programming languages such as the Scheme-like confluence Hardware Description Language (HDL).
ANSI and ISO C are imperative, sequential, PROCEDURAL languages.
From my (possibly wrong) understanding, languages such as Haskell (Wikipedia) and Scheme (Wikipedia) are "functional".
These are so far from anything at all like C programming, Haskell in particular for some reason reminds me of that movie Event Horizon, but that's probably just my warped mind thinking irrelevant thoughts again...
I'm told that the Haskell course taught at my University is a source of great frustration to many programmer wannabes who can never get their head around the "functional" programming paradigm and are forever stuck in their Java ways.
So, if C is classed as "functional" in your books, what would Haskell be?
Surely this is one area where humans are cheaper than robots...
I just moved into a new block of houses (renting) a couple of months ago. 6 months sounds like a *very* long time - I've been here about 7 weeks and the brick homes that were just being started when I moved in are "almost" finished.
It would seem that the finishing is what takes the longest, though... fittings, wiring, plumbing, windows, tiles, carpeting, cabinets, kitchen, etc.
IIRC the frames went up in just days, roof/walls in a few weeks. A big new house was built next to my parents place; being a "kit home" it looked like a mostly finished house on the outside in less than a month...
I think we need a better form & delivery of licensing, not to mention what the license reads.
This has nothing to do with licenses, since they are not following the terms of the license (GNU GPL) offered to them by the copyright holders.
This is copyright infringment, plain and simple.
1) They copied copyrighted works and claim it as their own, in some cases without even removing the orignal author's name and GNU GPL license notice.
2) The only way they can legally use the copyrighted works is by honouring the license under which they authors have released it with
3) They have not honoured the terms of the GNU GPL (Unless they are simultaneously denying the use of GNU GPL'd code and are also providing downloads to said source code).
4) Now we fall back to good old-fashioned copyright law. If you don't have permission, you can't copy it.
Considering the complete lack of evidence of there being even a sliver of their own code in the PPC emulation, apart from doing a "search and replace" for "PearPC"->"CherryOS", then this does in fact need to be taken very seriously.
Ok, so if they follow the gpl, so what?
So what? They wouldn't be breaching international copyright law, that's what.
Contributors to PearPC don't want to work 40hrs a week at their real job and come home to find their pride and joy/hobby being ripped off to profit some wanker who just slapped together a nice VB frontend over a couple of weekends.
Yep. We're a small shop but we have about 4 of our clients using external USB2 HDDs for backup instead of tape.
For the couple that wanted added reliability, they use two external drives on a rotation basis (the drive that gets taken off-site at the end of the day is swapped with the alternate drive that stays for overnight backup).
I had a very bad experience with LSI SCSI RAID in an IBM zSeries.
Between me, customer's software vendor who built/configured the thing, IBM, Microsoft and the local IBM maintenance reps - we couldn't turn off write-back cache. At all. Windows 2000 had "couldn't disable write-back cache" errors spewing all over the system log every 10 seconds until I applied a hotfix so that now it was only once per minute.
The IBM guys actually said "We're not that familiar with LSI RAID". He had a simulator in front of him and still couldn't help me out. They told me to break the mirror and rebuild it - the option should be available when creating the mirror. It wasn't. It takes a long time to ghost 20GB over USB and then back again.
We did BIOS updates, HDD firmware updates, driver updates, windows updates, two hotfixes... after billing around 15 hours (at a discounted rate) IBM said they would handle the case themselves. Apparently they got Microsoft to update the hotfix for them.
I get the feeling the event log errors were spurious, but when asked "does this suppress a spurious error or actually fix something" with the original hotfix, I was told it did actually fix something. Nobody wanted to tell me to just ignore the errors, because it used the words "data corruption may occur". The customer was having data corruption (and other) problems.
I get the feeling that if the customer hadn't been so cheap and actually ran Win2003 which the server was designed for instead of Win2k, it would not have happend.
Funny thing is I had to run the whole show off an el-cheapo single 40GB WD IDE HDD because they couldn't handle any more down time. This "temporary" solution stayed for 5 months until it was fixed properly. That they spent over AUD $7000 for all the big black IBM with SCSI hot-swap RAID and ended up running off AUD $100 HDD anyway...
Yes, software RAID is great (effective, flexible, reliable, comparable in performance to cheap hw RAID) and we use it at our work but never would we deploy it for a customer... You say hardware RAID is a pain to manage? Compared to what? Surely not Linux software RAID! Are you kidding?
/boot partition, you have to reload GRUB. And if you want to be able to boot from your secondary drive in 2xdisk RAID-1 mirror, you'll have to do this to install grub on the secondary disk:
/dev/hdc
When the HDD fails with hardware RAID, you rip the drive out, replace it, and it starts rebuilding.
Linux software RAID only works on a per-partition basis.
When the HDD fails with Linux software RAID, you have to repartition the new drive, manually add it to the array that failed, and tell it to resync.
Not to mention the fact that if you are using software RAID on your
grub
grub>device (hd0)
grub>root (hd0,0)
grub>setup (hd0)
Otherwise, if your primary disk fails, you no longer have a bootable system. This is not good. This is not how hardware RAID would behave, as long as you have all your disks on seperate channels.
The software RAID HOWTO: Booting on RAID
Not so cool. A lot more hassle, overhead and oppurtunity for mistakes than hardware RAID.
So you're back to the old problem: cheap, good, fast, pick any two.
I work for a small PC/electronics retail/repair/service shop with ~8 employees and two premises.
Between both shops we have 3 Linux and 2 Windows servers.
Things we do with windows: fileserver, run our CRM, accounting software.
Things we do with linux: run our Asterisk PBX system (with hardware SIP phones and PSTN telephony cards), firewall, transparent web cache, inter-shop VPN link, and a 13 NIC router box that gives each workstation on our workbench isolated ethernet.
I seriously tried for 2 weeks to get the firewall/web cache implemented using Windows Server 2003 with ISA 2004 but ironically, it was so painfully excrutiatingly unreliable and impossible (for me) to get it to work properly we gave up and went to Debian with a couple of NAT rules and Squid for transparent cache... it took me all of 2 days to get to where I wanted.
We're a Microsoft channel partner too. Before I gave up on Server 2003 I had applied two hotfixes and trawled through kb articles and installed all the service packs and updates I could find.
To this day I still don't know how to get static routes to work when ISA is installed. Exactly what the fuck does a "route relationship" do to your ACTUAL ROUTING TABLE?! It completely renders RRAS useless - I cannot see any feasible way to specify a route path from one subnet to another using just the "route relationship" alone, and with RRAS rendered useless, cannot see any other method of adding static routes (using the route command in cmd didn't help either).
I use splint for my static code analysis, and it is quite laborious (for me). All it does is try to formalise your code, enforce sensible restrictions in your code, and at the end of the day - if your code passes through splint with fairly strict checking, you know your code is free from 99% of common C traps.
It won't magically detect improper use of registers or incorrect interrupt handling etc. for a device that has no documentation and has been entirely reverse engineered as a "black box".
There's no magic wand in writing drivers. You really do need the specs.
By the way, even if VC _did_ compile linux (the very thought of it is quite amusing) - I had read that VC had a EULA that specifically forbade the creation of GNU GPL software? Though that is probably heresy...
I know this is completely off topic, I just wish you used an example that didn't involve drivers.
:-)
This is a rant about drivers in Linux so make what you will of it
Yet here at work, I can't even insmod a damn module for 10 Gb Ethernet in my SuSE distro
Hate to be a troll, but would the equivilent drivers in Windows XP have been reverse engineered by a Polish University Student in his free time? Even if, in the unlikely case that the driver was made in-house or even sponsored by the manufacturer, would the Windows drivers have been written as an after-thought using programmer/QA resources that are just a fraction of the size used in the mainstream drivers?
If Windows XP only crashed due to driver problems, I'd be out of a job. As it is, I clear about 8-12 jobs a day at a MS-based PC/server support shop. Of all actual faults (BSOD, freezing, resets, explorer crash, hanging apps) - I'd say less than 25% are due to defective drivers/firmware (that's being quite conservative) and less than 25% are due to defective hardware.
Not to mention the pain in the arse it is to diagnose a driver fault, if there is one: Linux in my experience has been a LOT more verbose in helping me diagnose WHICH driver is at fault. In Windows, sometimes, I can use pstat, driver verifier, and dumpchk all day long and still not have a farking clue what the hell is going on. If I have an elusive intermittent fault I have to play the time-consuming, frustrating "process of elimination" game. Did removing NAV fix it? I don't know. Was it the ACPI updates in the BIOS I just flashed? I don't know. Was it the drivers I just tried? I don't know. Was it the windows updates I did? I don't know. Was it the hotfix I got? I don't know. You just can't. Even a simple failing HDD controller can bring Server 2003 to its knees without so much as another cryptic BSOD code and yet in Linux, on that same machine, I can check dmesg and see a whole lot of "IDE reset timeout" messages for a clue.
You're used to drivers that "just work" in Windows. Considering most manufacturers release their windows driver and leave it at that, I am continuously amazed that so much stuff works at all in Linux. The dedication required by an unsupported outsider to perform to the tedious and boring task of developing unsupported drivers for a piece of (possibly unsupported) hardware on an unsupported operating system is incredible. Especially if documentation is unavailable and reverse-engineering is involved.
Anyway. Drivers suck. I fix far more MS-based stuff than Linux, but IMHO Linux either works or it doesn't.
Perhaps this is because the user-hacked, reverse-engineered drivers are written more defensively in a much cleaner driver API than windows (speaking as someone who wrote a USB device driver in Linux but couldn't even get started with the Windows DDK).
On the other hand it could be that vendor supplied Windows drivers take full (or any) advantage of advanced accelerated features which are more prone to faults in "slightly" defective machines that otherwise workin Linux or are simply more prone to bugs due to the more complex nature of the driver.
It's really quite fascinating how some Christians (haven't had a theological debate with a non-Christian faith) simply can't comprehend that a godless, souless person could possibly have similar values and morals as their own.
For some reason it seems to scare them. Or perhaps that godless people aren't entitled to them; that perhaps these are supposed to be exclusive to believers.
Does this attitude arise because it simply makes it harder to demonize and differentiate non-believers, or is it something more complex - and frightening - that perhaps, for example, these people fear that without god in their life they'd become some sort of monster?
I know several people that have lost their faith (as strictly defined by the good book anyway; thanks to weird "church" groups/cults), and vice versa.
In both sides of both directions in these transitions, these people were not monsters.
Some people are quite impressionable, and are easily swayed into adopting a particular set of values, beliefs and morals (good or bad).
Most people are capable of holding any set of beliefs and morals ("good" and "bad"), irrespective of faith.
Remarkable. I'll never understand humans.
Yep,
:-)
Our shop split into two buildings - the old one (sales) and another round the corner across a highway (service).
Using a wireless link (w/IPSec for security on top of WPA, since we have some "intranet" app thingies too), two Debian GNU/Linux boxes with a Digium TDM400 card in each one, we can now:
1) Make internal calls for free as much as we like
2) Dial out using a collective line pool of 7 PSTN lines between both shops
3) Transfer calls from one shop to the other
4) Answer with voicemail after hours
5) Music on hold!
6) Watch caller ID to decide if we want to answer the call (or perhaps transfer them to the MOH test extension, BWHAHA)
7) Use Areski CDR searchable call history/stats database. In fact, my boss(es) have been so completely impressed with this one app it would be very hard for them to do without. We can track: who has rang, who we've rang, when, from which phone, on which line, for how long. The stats we've gathered have been phenominal - hours spent on the phone per day - we never would have imagined. We can also now say which is the busiest day of the week for calls.
All this for the cost of our original commander system which was 8 phones.
We use a mix of Budge-Tone 100s and Snom 190s. If someone could point me in the right direction to make distinctive ring on the Snom190 work, that'd really make my day
33.6Kbps IS the maximum you can pump through analogue POTS. As the previous poster said, 56Kbps is an infrastructure limitation designed-in to traditional POTS hardware at the exchange.
:-)
It is NOT, as the previous poster suggested, due to the DACs - in fact, if you have a DAC between you and your ISP then the MOST you will be able to get is 33.6kbps, which is the FASTEST you can go on traditional POTS using analogue signalling methods (AFAIK).
Rather, 56kbps is an artifact of the designed-in 4kHz bandwidth allocation per voice channel. In order to get faster than 33.6, however, your data path between you and your ISP must be entirely digital. To go faster than 33.6, the modem goes "all digital" on the wire. And you can't do that if your line has an analoguedigital conversion in there somewhere, because you lose signal detail in the conversion process. You can't escape Shannon's law.
The quotes you have cited regarding 9600 as being an upper limit; if you have ever studied the topic, things start getting very complex very quickly beyond this when you only have a noisy, non-linear 4KHz of bandwidth. It requires DSP technology that just wasn't economical at the times these statements were made.
And finally, please look up the definition of baud:
"The maximum baud rate (signalling state transitions per second) on an analogue phone line is 2400"
For example, 9600 bits per second on POTS lines is implemented using a 2400 baud signalling scheme with four possible states per transition.
And to think I nearly failed comms
Moral of the story: Don't use ignorance to pass judgment on others. Some very smart people, smarter than you and myself, knew exactly what they were doing in designing these standards.
All you do is add more than one source in sources.list. apt works through them in order until it hits a source without errors. Isn't that simple enough?
Settings up bittorrent trackers or gnuttella networks for this might be worthwhile as well.
A nice thought, but more open to tampering of the packages. I'm sure it wouldn't too hard to hack in (as far as challenges go), but statements like this are easily said by those not doing the code
Besides, as a user and admin, I see absolutely nothing wrong with the current distribution system. As a mirror operator, it's probably a lot of data to keep in sync but I don't know.
Dependency resolution has started to see some cracks. Virtual packages that force you to choose one manually and so on so forth.
This is utterly deliberate, in fact it is a feature. Why should Debian choose for you? How would they decide? Have they got the right to decide? Not saying there's no room for improvement, but I'm interested in how you would propose to improve the current dependancy system.
More cryptography signing and verification for packages.
This I agree with. It would be nice to know that the whatever mirror I'm using hasn't been compromised and packages tampered; at the moment when you do apt-get update you get a list of md5sums for every package and if they don't match once downloaded, there's an error.
Of course, an attacker could modify the md5sum string in the package lists to match his tampered package - on the other hand, I guess with rsync the lifetime of the tampared file can only last until the next rsync, and some mirrors do this up to 6 times a day.
An easier way to search for available packages based upon filename, title, description, man pages provided so on so forth.
Use: apt-cache search for searching package names/descriptions, and apt-file to not only find what package owns a file on your HDD, but also list files contained within a package. Not sure what you mean about searching by man pages provided, do you mean by searching the contents of the man page? I'm pretty sure there's nothing in a package's man page that's not in the searchable description that would stop you from finding the package.
mode whereby you can safely schedule apt-get upgrade to run from cron. Currently thats not completely safe to do without any human interaction. Call it apt-get computer-upgrade.
It's called cron-apt, and I think this is a good time to show an example bash session:
Now, if you want a platform that doesn't have viruses, I suggest you look into Amiga OS 4.0 PR :P.. At least, not yet.
But isn't OS4 meant to run legacy m68k AmigaOS 3.x code?
We're replacing our knackered commander system (15 years old) with a bunch of VOIP phones (Snom 190). Also we're splitting our shop into two premises; using a WiFi link (with WEP/MAC filtering/IPSec/L2LTP etc for security).
Using VOIP on our local LAN/WAN, we can share the same PSTN line pool (about 20 lines total) between both shops. If someone dials one shop but wants to speak to someone in the other, we can transfer that call. Very useful, not to mention the other possibilities with Asterisk (caller ID, call logging, stats, voicemail, extensions, music on hold, etc).
As for actually using a VOIP carrier for outgoing call... no, not yet.
We're setting up with Asterisk and Digium TDM400 cards with FXO modules.
Standard x86 servers, Linux, Asterisk, Digium and Snom phones add up to a LOT less than the integrated turnkey solution we were looking to get from Siemens.
God, this crap, and the guy who said, "just switch to Linux,"
I'm in a similar situation as you, and I too had to chuckle at the "just install linux" attitude.
Even though I have Linux and _only_ linux at home, all my work is Windows NT4/Server 2000/Server 2003.
It was hard enough to convince the bosses into using a Linux box to run the new PABX system, can't imagine what sort of drugs I'd have to use to convert the desktops and exchange servers!