You're right about the sub-par/dev managment in Linux. When I first switched to udev from the deprecated devfs (which I never had any trouble with), I couldn't boot properly from my software raid1 volumes because udev needed the root volume mounted to create the mdN device nodes, but the root volume couldn't be mounted until mdadm was pointed to an mdN device node to assemble...
That was about 2-3 years ago. It all seems to work smoothly these days, I think they just patched some work-arounds (guess the major/minor numbers) in the mdadm tool itself. Considering I can do a plain Debian install, arranging things so that / (incl./boot) lives on LVM living on software raid, without hand-tuning a thing is a good sign that things have settled down. Additionally, I can modprobe any driver and have the dev node magically show up in/dev automagically. rmmod removes the driver and also the dev node. So I think things have matured in the/dev side of things over the last few years, even if it isn't as elegant as the way Solaris does it (which I'm not familiar with).
If the/dev management is your only issue, then that says a lot for Linux I think;-)
Actually, I'm in the process of installing rails for a look at the moment, but this thread is a good place to ask - is there anyone here familiar with powerful persistence frameworks who knows how the one in rails fares?
Myself, I'm learning Ruby and Rails. I'm new to web development and was inclined to learn PHP, but got swept away on the Ruby bandwagon. Java and the slew of frameworks I could choose to work with it are complete overkill for my needs. RoR seems nice for the small stuff, with room to grow.
From what I've seen, (only learning Ruby and RoR for myself at the moment), if you don't want to use ActiveRecord's inferencing and reflection features then specifying your DB schema explicitly is no more painful than the conventional methods used in other environments. Ruby also has nifty automated DB migration and integrity verification features and tools.
The point is, the programmer is discouraged from going to all that effort because they will be properly rewarded if they go for the sane, standardised "Ruby way" instead. I don't believe Ruby actually restricts you in the way that you fear, but you _ARE_ rewarded if you do things the "Ruby way". You can program "traditionally" if you like, but it's like using for () loops in Perl when you could use a foreach() instead... silly example perhaps, but you get the point.
Other than that: Ruby provides decent support for integration of C/C++ modules, so if you want to hit the bare metal in the way you described with your VB scenario then that's not really an issue, either.
Disclaimer: I have no actual real-world experience with Ruby... just a hobby for now.
When you pay for open source, you pay for support.
Any company currently using RiscOS, is probably savvy enough to continue their products without paying for support should the OS be open sourced.
We're not talking about Redhat managing corporate networks and selling "solution stacks". If RiscOS's market is embedded systems then the developers aren't going to be needing much paid support, now are they - especially when they can fix things for themselves and fend for themselves.
Exactly what incentive do embedded systems developers have to pay money for something that is open source?
The "Open Source" model has proved successful, because vendors can pick it up and mold stuff into whatever they need - completely by themselves.
That doesn't leave much room for the original creators of RiscOS, or am I missing something in your grand vision of an open RiscOS?
http://www.iyonix.com/:USB2 is now standard on all IYONIX pc models. For upgrades from USB 1 see USB2
Your "shock" that the number of bits (16) in its sound capability (exactly the same as brand new 2005 Macs and PCs), and number of colours (16.7 million/24bit) in its display (exactly the same as brand new 2005 Macs and PCs) still amuses me...
And look at where it stands now ? 16 bit sound? 16million colours? And you think its not deprecated?
16bit sound: The same as all standard PC and macintosh hardware sold even today. Some high-end audio boards have 20 and 24bit DACs but the DSPs behind them, on some creative products, were still 16bit anyway.
16 million colours: That's a 24bit pallette. 16.7 million to be precise. The same as all standard PC and macintosh hardware sold even today. I dare you to find a display with a higher number of colours (hint: to my knowledge, they haven't bothered. The human eye has limitations when it comes to distinguishing between even 16 million colours).
"32 bit" displays have an 8-bit transparency channel. It enables hardware accelerated transparencies. It does not, however, give you more than 16.7 million (24bit) colours.
Now, if you had mentioned a weakness in the GPU's hardware-accelerated features, you may have had a point.
RiscOS is a hobby OS like AmigaOS, except that it has some significant use in embedded (legacy) ARM applications. When that dries up, I imagine from people switching to alternatives like embedded NetBSD and Linux, then they are screwed purely because the "more popular" thing is the best business decision for most companies.
In the embedded space RiscOS has many technical merits making it attractive compared to the free alternatives, it's just that unfortunately prosperity and popularity isn't among them.
Nothing irks me more than the "most popular = best" mentality...
Have you even used VMWare? Servers are headless. As long as you're not doing anything graphically intensive, VMWare performance is quite acceptable. The GUI is still quite responsive. In fact, browsing, word, etc. activities fool the user into thinking it's running native when in full-screen mode. You honestly can't tell until you go to play a movie or a game (movies still work, mostly).
In fact, using VMWare to manage servers is where VMWare excels.
He said he wanted to use it as a server under a Linux host.
And this, along with running servers under Windows hosts, is a _EXACTLY_ what a large portion of VMWare's core business is, apart from being useful for helpdesk operators. Check out their two most expensive products: "server infrastructure". And not that everyone uses GSX/ESX for "server" work either; I'm not the only one who has found VMWare Workstation edition useful in consolidating windows (and *NIX) servers onto one machine.
Even if Microsoft supported VMWare it would not get any faster due to the way it works.
MS _DOES_ support VMWare. WHQL certified drivers and everything.
If he wanted to use a virtual Windows server, something like Xen is the only choice.
Perhaps you should add a little disclaimer to your comments, something along the lines of "that's what I think, but I don't know because I've never used it, never researched it, and in fact I don't know anything about it all".
You can't have read their product brochures very carefully... a VMWare image is a VMWare image is a VMWare image. Whether you run with Windows or Linux as the host OS. I've taken one VMWare.vmdk image that was running under Windows, and ran it unmodified on Linux.
Yes, it works, and there's a whole slew (if you believe their newsletter) of VMWare consultants who will happily set you up with such a setup.
For me, the "workstation" version suited my "windows server running on Linux" needs, but they do have specific versions for servers and datacentres, that among other things like providing enhanced managment and deployment tools, will even migrate running images between physical machines in a cluster of VMWare ESX hosts. Their "success story" propaganda/examples provide instances where a customer has a set of blades and particular images can be migrated to different blades as the cluster grows/shrinks.
Perhaps I sound like a marketing droid, but seriously, VMWare is one of the few commercial pieces of software I own. Worth every penny. And I'm a full-time Linux weenie. Xen doesn't really achieve the convenience that VMWare does (for example, you must physically partition your resources with Xen and so modifications that affect the resources allocated to your dom0 instance require a reboot (adjusting RAM is my biggest issue).
With VMWare, I notice that even if I allocate 384MiB RAM to the virtual machine, top (1) shows VMWare seems to only request the amount of memory the guest OS actually hits. So on bootup, my virtual machine is only occupying say 196MiB RAM even though it has 384MiB available. Additionally, although it can wire physical disks (sidenote: usb, rs232, lp0 devices too) up to the guest OS, you can create virtual disk files of an almost arbitrary size (as far as guest OS is concerned), but actual disk space usage will be much less and will closely reflect the actual amount of data on the guest OS's filesystem.
Not necessarily a useful feature for servers where accurate dimensioning and predictable performance is required, but overall VMWare feels very "dynamic" and Xen very rigid.
That said, I am very impressed with Xen. a) that it's so powerful, and b) that it's open source. Now, if only I could rig my Debian initrd.img so that it didn't require TLS library support when booting from LVM on software RAID...
True, lack of WPA support is a big deal, but there's nothing wrong with the 11b technology. It peacefully co-exists on an 11g network, and if you really need more than 11b bandwidth for voice data then you've completely b0rk3d your settings.
Last I was researching this, I came across a Cisco phone that supposedly supported WPA after a firmware update. I'm not too fond of Cisco though, their "hardware" has too many software-like licensing issues: I don't like not being able to legally sell my 2nd hand gear I rightfully paid for, not to mention the subscription based costs for some of the plugins (yeah I'd just _LOVE_ to pay money so that one day the client's phones will no longer support a certain codec, or have the call manager software suddenly stop working).
Zyxel sells a range of VoIP and wireless gear. Their P-2000 wireless VoIP handset looked nifty, but supposedly turning on even 40-bit WEP encryption taxed its little CPU too much and so acceptable sound quality required you to run without encryption.
The new P-2000 v2 looks great, resembles a normal mobile phone and I would _imagine_ they would have fixed the quality issues associated with encrypted WiFi (best to read some reviews first).
They've also got this thing, a sort of ADSL/WiFi/VoIP stand-alone box thingy. Not sure what the "VoIP" part does, apart from perhaps doing QoS... and stuff like STUN (NAT traversal for SIP), etc.
This is already the case. Look at the man page for resolv.conf, you can add a list of "search" domains. If you write http://www/ and your local admin has set up your company's domain in the search list I.E.:/etc/resolv.conf nameserver 123.123.123.123 # Company DNS server search mycompany.com # Company's domain
Then "mycompany.com" will automatically get appended to the request for "www" yielding http://www.mycompany.com/ (as long as www doesn't get a valid response from the DNS on the first try).
Additionally, this can be done on the company's DNS server instead of each individual local PC, but you get the idea.
Perhaps he's not saying Ruby should become a new standard
When he posts things like "Why bother - just learn Ruby", it's quite clear that is exactly what he means.
I think I'll write this one off to the "not being a morning person" thing... I read it as: "Why bother to learn the imitation, have a go at the original". Or something along those lines.
People like you like to get stuck in a rut and cling to what you know, forsaking everything else.
Sorry, that doesn't describe me in the slightest. You've taken a couple of comments and decided you know everything about me. You're clueless.
Seems like we've got a bit road-rage happening here... but I'll keep it interesting: you wrote off Ruby quite visciously with what appeared to be little thought... you did a bit of reading about it, along with other languages this very morning, and now I'm clueless because I made an equally whimsical assertion about your learning habits?
How about you step outside your comfort zone, and get some English comprehension skills? Nowhere did I say learning Ruby, or any language, for that matter was bad. I merely said that it wasn't perfect and that any attempt to paint it as such is the attitude of a fool. I'm not the one being extreme here. I'm just disagreeing strongly with the idea that everyone should drop Python development because Ruby exists.
It seemed to me you and the OP were two sides of the same coin. The OP was a little "over-enthusiastic", I didn't sincerely believe that he intended what you think he meant, because it would indeed be a very stupid thing; I'm sorry you seem to have read differently.
For what it's worth, it's 11:30PM here in Australia now and I've been up since 6am. If your excuse for comprehension difficulties is because it's too early, then mine is because it's too late.
You can't even distinguish it from Haskell and functional programming
No, I just got the names mixed up. I'm not a morning person and I have other stuff on my mind. Sorry, but your ad hominems aren't applicable in this case.
Yet more evidence that...
yet you seem to think you're qualified to say how "perfect" it isn't
Do you disagree? You think Ruby is perfect?
... impaired comprehension and judgement due to sleep deprivation coupled with a desire to put the world into black and white terms has turned a discussion we may all have agreed upon under different circumstances --- into a flame war.
BTW: Perfect? No. Somewhat unique and worth learning before dismissing it? Yes.
no wonder you're posting AC.
Says somebody known only as "csirac" with no homepage or email address listed. Hypocrite.
Unlike an AC posting, I actually care to a certain degree about the reputation of this handle.
Ruby is far from perfect and declaring that we should drop all development in other languages and immediately switch to it is just plain fucking stupid and lacking in any pragmatism whatsoever.
Perhaps he's not saying Ruby should become a new standard, but that people like you should open your mind just a little, tiny bit, open the door and walk outside - and try a new language for a few hours sometime.
People like you like to get stuck in a rut and cling to what you know, forsaking everything else. For years, all I've ever known is C, 8/16-bit ASM, Perl, a few FPGA HDLs... even if I don't do websites or databases, RoR has inspired me to climb out of my comfort zone and take on something new. Guess what? I've discovered a language which looks to be a new favourite of mine. I'm going to use it now instead of where I would have used Perl.
You can't even distinguish it from Haskell and functional programming, but yet you seem to think you're qualified to say how "perfect" it isn't... no wonder you're posting AC.
The SQL database abstraction layer is an important feature of SQLObject, that Ruby on Rails doesn't currently support -- you have to write database dependent SQL code mixed in with your Ruby code.
Hmm, SQLObject sounds interesting, but I'm confused.
All the Ruby demos I've watched made a point of showing that you didn't have to write SQL statements. You wire Activerecord up to a database you've made (the "wiring" can be as simple as specifying the server/db/table - and it infers the rest so you can build what sound to be something similar to SQLObject).
Tell me - how and where does one start writing SQL when you're using Ruby's Activerecord (which sounds like a building block for making Ruby objects similar to Python's SQLObject but without writing a single line of SQL)?
I imagine the difference is in specifying the data relationships. I haven't got to that part of learning about rails yet, but IIRC you specify the one-to-many, one-to-one, etc. relationships using Activerecord. Does Python's SQLObject do all this for you via inheritence? If so, sounds nifty, but I'm still confused where you would start writing SQL code in Ruby...
I'm an expert at neither: I'm still working through Why's Poignant guide... I intend to start working with Ruby in the next few weeks. I'm curious what people have to say about one vs the other...
Because if it just comes down to a secure and fast browser, MS has much more money and resources to make this come true than FF, I believe, let me know where I'm wrong.
"money and resources" aren't everything. MS can't afford to make radical changes in IE, in fact they've absolutely struggled to make _ANY_ changes at all compared to FF which has ejoyed a fairly nimble development process so far. I will speculate that the reasons include: a crusty code-base which hasn't seen much work since the Netscape war (compared to the Everything Is New (tm) enthusiasm FF developers seem to have), and a fear that any real change will break things in new and horrible ways (crusty code tends to be like this - if IE is "secure" it's only because it has stagnated so much; touching it significantly may result in a whole slew of new holes to plug).
My favorite quote on there is: "Keep in mind that this is not yet part of any W3C or other official standard. At this time it is necessary to bend the rules in order to have full keyboard accessibility." But isn't this what MS did long ago to make the better browser experience over NS?
Both sides were guilty of making up and/or bastardising standards. Most people are angry at MS's "abuse" of standards to achieve standardised functionality in a non-standard way. What you've just described there from the Mozilla page seems to be a new feature that has no standard to go by.
Anyway, I don't mean to trash on FF at all, but I just wonder, who really wants the Standards implemented (I actually do), and then what happens after that? How do we get better dev tools and code to use in our web-apps (the w3 doesn't seem on top of new tech)?
The w3 and other standards bodies for that matter, aren't perfect. For example I've read plenty of threads about SVG (Scaled Vector Graphics) to get the impression that some standards are written before the technology they describe is even useful let alone implemented... standards writers require collaboration with implementors and users (or at least, an understanding of the users). But it does depend on which standards body you're talking about... they're all guilty of something, it seems (ITU, IETF, etc).
The reason is in the EU areas, bandwidth isn't so TIGHTLY restricted. That's why they've got internet connections better than what most of the USA has. Most people I know of in the EU areas pay roughly equivalent to what we do for a 10 mbit down / 2 mbit up connection, if not higher. (These are people on IRC, I wouldn't know about those I know thru IM services)
I think you're really misunderstanding the issue. A DoS by flooding the cell with SMS messages has the chance of working because on-the-wire, (or "on the air", if you will) it uses the exact same portion of the GSM mobile phone protocol as setting up new calls (and other network control messages). As you can see, this has nothing to do with the land-line connectivity the tower uses beyond the airwaves.
We've got, what?? Comcast with 7 mbit (shared) down and 1.5 mbit (dedicated) up, as the "potentially best" service? (Roadrunner offers 10 mbit down, but only 512 kbit up, Speakeasy is 6 mbit down dedicated, 768 kbit up dedicated?)
It's still possible that the "last-mile" providers in the USA simply don't feel the need to upgrade their DSLAMs or even make full use of the stuff that _IS_ installed at the exchange until absolutely necessary so they still have a low-cost path of remaining competitive as the market demands and expectations change.
Perhaps, as you say, the telecomms backbone doesn't have sufficient capacity to provide everyone with services of higher speeds but simply comparing the end-user DSL service speeds in each country doesn't give you this information, it's not the full picture. For example, it's possible the EU providers upgraded their "last mile" infrastructure first and are upgrading their backbones concurrently, or later.
You might be interested to know that in rural Australia, they usually "skip" a generation or two of technology; I remember when I was a kid that by the time touch-tone phone service became available in 1988 in my tiny home-town, it was replacing a human-operated exchange and that plenty of larger municipalities were still stuck with pulse-only exchanges. Perhaps what you're seeing in some parts of the EU is a refreshing of old infrastructure with the highest tech available, because they don't get to do it very often (upgrades, that is).
We've got, what?? Comcast with 7 mbit (shared) down and 1.5 mbit (dedicated) up, as the "potentially best" service? (Roadrunner offers 10 mbit down, but only 512 kbit up, Speakeasy is 6 mbit down dedicated, 768 kbit up dedicated?)
Of course, the USA is the centre of the universe...
Not a Python programmer myself (learning ruby, scheme and know ISO-C, Handel-C and Perl), but saying that you're trying to make "macros" in a language where there's no up-front strong typing like with Python indicates you don't understand the language...
Macros are incredibly useful in a strongly-typed language like C, but have pretty much no place at all in weakly typed languages like Perl and Scheme. Python is still "strongly-typed" (or so I understand it), it just defers the actual checking until the latest possible time at run-time. Or something. Like I said, I'm no expert...
If you are really missing macros, perhaps it's because you want to "abuse" it to write code that writes code.
Which is exactly what Scheme (and functional programming in general) is all about. Ruby, Scheme, and AFAIK Python all support "higher order functions", where you plug in functions or even anonymous code to other functions, and the result is a program that does something completely different expressed with almost mathematical precision and conciseness.
C's preprocessor "macro" language is totally barbaric, by comparison, and one of the fascinating things about Handel-C is its support for "macros written with C syntax" - having used Handel-C a lot, I really think the world would be a better place if ISO-C had the same macro language Handel does instead of the poor excuse for sanity we have now.
* accessfs: permission filesystem
* AFS FAQ
* AutoFS
* AVFS: A Virtual File System
* AVFS: A Virtual Filesystem
* BeFS for Linux2.4
* BeOS filesystem for Linux
* BFS UnixWare, Linux Implementation of
* CDfs
* CIFS
* Cluster File Systems Home
* Coda File System
* Crypto HOWTO
* convertfs: convert Linux filesystems
* DAFS: Direct Access File System
* Devfs (Device File System) FAQ
* efslook: read/debug EFS filesystems (ported to Linux & x86) {new}
* Enhanced Loopback (for XFS)
* E2fsprogs: Ext2 Filesystem Utilities
* E2fsprogs: Ext2 FS Utilities
* Ext2 Compression Extension
* FSDEXT2: ext2 filesystem for Win95
* ext2fsnt: Linux Ext2 filesystem for Windows NT driver
* ext2 fs resize utilities
* ext2 online growth patch (adilger)
* Explore2fs
* FHS: Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
* FHS Test Suite
* Filesystems HOWTO
* FiST: File System Translator
* FreeVXFS
* fsv: 3D File System Visualizer
* Global File System (Sistina)
* GNU ext2resize: ext2 filesystem resizer
* HFS+ filesystem
* HFS+ filesystem #2
* InterMezzo FS
* JFFS (axis.com)
* Journaling Flash File System, v2
* JFS for Linux (IBM)
* journal_fs report (OSDL)
* Kragen's Amazing List of Filesystems
* Large File Support in Linux
* Large File Summit (LFS) stuff
* Large File / File System Support
* Linux EXT2 salvage utility
* Linux Ext2fs Undeletion mini-HOWTO
* Linux FAT-32 support
* Linux filesystem redundancy
* Linux Links: File Systems
* Linux NFS FAQ
* Linux RAID Solutions
* LUFS: Linux Userland File System
* Lustre & Lustre Light filesystems
* NFS project
* NFSv4 for Linux 2.4
* Linux NTFS file system support
* loop-aes cryptoloop device
The solution shown does not mention usage of the NX bit (which is i86 specific).
Actually, x86 is one of the last into town with "NX bit" functionality. POWER (and PPC I guess), PA-RISC, Sparc, Alpha, etc. on the big-iron has had this feature as a standard part of their architecture (along with the OSes that run on them) for bloody ages now... on those CPUs, even Linux has had hardware support since before whenever x86 got NX support.
Although this can stop execution of arbitrary code in areas of memory that aren't meant for it, you're still going to be vulnerable to corruption of memory and make the software behave in unintended ways. The problem is that the Operating System can't tell the difference between a memory pointer that has stepped outside the malloc'd space it was intended to address and into an adjacent one, or two legitimate pointers behaving nicely.
Adding the guard space will definately help, as will unmapping memory. OpenBSD hasn't exactly been known for its high performance; people use it for security and peace of mind. Additionally, they made mmap() return random addresses, which is very cool indeed.
doesn't anyone think that it is time to stop using C? C is not used for building web apps, so what are you talking about?
Everybody knows C is the right tool for some jobs, Java/Perl/Ruby/etc for others.
In the right hands C can be just as secure and has the potential to be much faster than most of the alternatives.
He was trying to say that windows's "DEP" stuff isn't anything new. It's been around on the big iron in the form of IBM's POWER, HP's PA-RISC, MIPS, Sun's Sparc, DEC's Alpha etc. CPUs for a very long time (as a hardware, not software implementation) and hence has been supported by most OSes for those architectures for an equally long time as well (including Linux).
Slashdot Mirror
You're right about the sub-par /dev managment in Linux. When I first switched to udev from the deprecated devfs (which I never had any trouble with), I couldn't boot properly from my software raid1 volumes because udev needed the root volume mounted to create the mdN device nodes, but the root volume couldn't be mounted until mdadm was pointed to an mdN device node to assemble...
/boot) lives on LVM living on software raid, without hand-tuning a thing is a good sign that things have settled down. Additionally, I can modprobe any driver and have the dev node magically show up in /dev automagically. rmmod removes the driver and also the dev node. So I think things have matured in the /dev side of things over the last few years, even if it isn't as elegant as the way Solaris does it (which I'm not familiar with).
/dev management is your only issue, then that says a lot for Linux I think ;-)
That was about 2-3 years ago. It all seems to work smoothly these days, I think they just patched some work-arounds (guess the major/minor numbers) in the mdadm tool itself. Considering I can do a plain Debian install, arranging things so that / (incl.
If the
Actually, I'm in the process of installing rails for a look at the moment, but this thread is a good place to ask - is there anyone here familiar with powerful persistence frameworks who knows how the one in rails fares?
? l=RailsHibernate
No, I'm not qualified to comment, but here's an interesting article comparing RoR and Java/Hibernate: http://www.theserverside.com/articles/article.tss
Myself, I'm learning Ruby and Rails. I'm new to web development and was inclined to learn PHP, but got swept away on the Ruby bandwagon. Java and the slew of frameworks I could choose to work with it are complete overkill for my needs. RoR seems nice for the small stuff, with room to grow.
From what I've seen, (only learning Ruby and RoR for myself at the moment), if you don't want to use ActiveRecord's inferencing and reflection features then specifying your DB schema explicitly is no more painful than the conventional methods used in other environments. Ruby also has nifty automated DB migration and integrity verification features and tools.
The point is, the programmer is discouraged from going to all that effort because they will be properly rewarded if they go for the sane, standardised "Ruby way" instead. I don't believe Ruby actually restricts you in the way that you fear, but you _ARE_ rewarded if you do things the "Ruby way". You can program "traditionally" if you like, but it's like using for () loops in Perl when you could use a foreach() instead... silly example perhaps, but you get the point.
Other than that: Ruby provides decent support for integration of C/C++ modules, so if you want to hit the bare metal in the way you described with your VB scenario then that's not really an issue, either.
Disclaimer: I have no actual real-world experience with Ruby... just a hobby for now.
They are based on the current Intel XScale chips.
They're only "behind the times" if you try and play Doom 3 and BF1942 on them.
Their main applications has been as workstations and embedded stuff. As far as I know. Which admittedly isn't much.
Everyone always seems to compare niche OSes like RiscOS to their own Linux/Wintel desktops... apples and oranges.
When you pay for open source, you pay for support.
Any company currently using RiscOS, is probably savvy enough to continue their products without paying for support should the OS be open sourced.
We're not talking about Redhat managing corporate networks and selling "solution stacks". If RiscOS's market is embedded systems then the developers aren't going to be needing much paid support, now are they - especially when they can fix things for themselves and fend for themselves.
Exactly what incentive do embedded systems developers have to pay money for something that is open source?
The "Open Source" model has proved successful, because vendors can pick it up and mold stuff into whatever they need - completely by themselves.
That doesn't leave much room for the original creators of RiscOS, or am I missing something in your grand vision of an open RiscOS?
http://www.iyonix.com/ :USB2 is now standard on all IYONIX pc models. For upgrades from USB 1 see USB2
Your "shock" that the number of bits (16) in its sound capability (exactly the same as brand new 2005 Macs and PCs), and number of colours (16.7 million/24bit) in its display (exactly the same as brand new 2005 Macs and PCs) still amuses me...
And look at where it stands now ? 16 bit sound? 16million colours? And you think its not deprecated?
16bit sound: The same as all standard PC and macintosh hardware sold even today. Some high-end audio boards have 20 and 24bit DACs but the DSPs behind them, on some creative products, were still 16bit anyway.
16 million colours: That's a 24bit pallette. 16.7 million to be precise. The same as all standard PC and macintosh hardware sold even today. I dare you to find a display with a higher number of colours (hint: to my knowledge, they haven't bothered. The human eye has limitations when it comes to distinguishing between even 16 million colours).
"32 bit" displays have an 8-bit transparency channel. It enables hardware accelerated transparencies. It does not, however, give you more than 16.7 million (24bit) colours.
Now, if you had mentioned a weakness in the GPU's hardware-accelerated features, you may have had a point.
RiscOS is a hobby OS like AmigaOS, except that it has some significant use in embedded (legacy) ARM applications. When that dries up, I imagine from people switching to alternatives like embedded NetBSD and Linux, then they are screwed purely because the "more popular" thing is the best business decision for most companies.
In the embedded space RiscOS has many technical merits making it attractive compared to the free alternatives, it's just that unfortunately prosperity and popularity isn't among them.
Nothing irks me more than the "most popular = best" mentality...
Because VMWare is way too slow.
Have you even used VMWare? Servers are headless. As long as you're not doing anything graphically intensive, VMWare performance is quite acceptable. The GUI is still quite responsive. In fact, browsing, word, etc. activities fool the user into thinking it's running native when in full-screen mode. You honestly can't tell until you go to play a movie or a game (movies still work, mostly).
In fact, using VMWare to manage servers is where VMWare excels.
He said he wanted to use it as a server under a Linux host.
And this, along with running servers under Windows hosts, is a _EXACTLY_ what a large portion of VMWare's core business is, apart from being useful for helpdesk operators. Check out their two most expensive products: "server infrastructure". And not that everyone uses GSX/ESX for "server" work either; I'm not the only one who has found VMWare Workstation edition useful in consolidating windows (and *NIX) servers onto one machine.
Even if Microsoft supported VMWare it would not get any faster due to the way it works.
MS _DOES_ support VMWare. WHQL certified drivers and everything.
If he wanted to use a virtual Windows server, something like Xen is the only choice.
Perhaps you should add a little disclaimer to your comments, something along the lines of "that's what I think, but I don't know because I've never used it, never researched it, and in fact I don't know anything about it all".
See my other post in this thread.
You can't have read their product brochures very carefully... a VMWare image is a VMWare image is a VMWare image. Whether you run with Windows or Linux as the host OS. I've taken one VMWare .vmdk image that was running under Windows, and ran it unmodified on Linux.
Yes, it works, and there's a whole slew (if you believe their newsletter) of VMWare consultants who will happily set you up with such a setup.
For me, the "workstation" version suited my "windows server running on Linux" needs, but they do have specific versions for servers and datacentres, that among other things like providing enhanced managment and deployment tools, will even migrate running images between physical machines in a cluster of VMWare ESX hosts. Their "success story" propaganda/examples provide instances where a customer has a set of blades and particular images can be migrated to different blades as the cluster grows/shrinks.
Perhaps I sound like a marketing droid, but seriously, VMWare is one of the few commercial pieces of software I own. Worth every penny. And I'm a full-time Linux weenie. Xen doesn't really achieve the convenience that VMWare does (for example, you must physically partition your resources with Xen and so modifications that affect the resources allocated to your dom0 instance require a reboot (adjusting RAM is my biggest issue).
With VMWare, I notice that even if I allocate 384MiB RAM to the virtual machine, top (1) shows VMWare seems to only request the amount of memory the guest OS actually hits. So on bootup, my virtual machine is only occupying say 196MiB RAM even though it has 384MiB available. Additionally, although it can wire physical disks (sidenote: usb, rs232, lp0 devices too) up to the guest OS, you can create virtual disk files of an almost arbitrary size (as far as guest OS is concerned), but actual disk space usage will be much less and will closely reflect the actual amount of data on the guest OS's filesystem.
Not necessarily a useful feature for servers where accurate dimensioning and predictable performance is required, but overall VMWare feels very "dynamic" and Xen very rigid.
That said, I am very impressed with Xen. a) that it's so powerful, and b) that it's open source. Now, if only I could rig my Debian initrd.img so that it didn't require TLS library support when booting from LVM on software RAID...
True, lack of WPA support is a big deal, but there's nothing wrong with the 11b technology. It peacefully co-exists on an 11g network, and if you really need more than 11b bandwidth for voice data then you've completely b0rk3d your settings.
Last I was researching this, I came across a Cisco phone that supposedly supported WPA after a firmware update. I'm not too fond of Cisco though, their "hardware" has too many software-like licensing issues: I don't like not being able to legally sell my 2nd hand gear I rightfully paid for, not to mention the subscription based costs for some of the plugins (yeah I'd just _LOVE_ to pay money so that one day the client's phones will no longer support a certain codec, or have the call manager software suddenly stop working).
Zyxel sells a range of VoIP and wireless gear. Their P-2000 wireless VoIP handset looked nifty, but supposedly turning on even 40-bit WEP encryption taxed its little CPU too much and so acceptable sound quality required you to run without encryption.
The new P-2000 v2 looks great, resembles a normal mobile phone and I would _imagine_ they would have fixed the quality issues associated with encrypted WiFi (best to read some reviews first).
They've also got this thing, a sort of ADSL/WiFi/VoIP stand-alone box thingy. Not sure what the "VoIP" part does, apart from perhaps doing QoS... and stuff like STUN (NAT traversal for SIP), etc.
This is already the case. Look at the man page for resolv.conf, you can add a list of "search" domains. If you write http://www/ and your local admin has set up your company's domain in the search list I.E.: /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 123.123.123.123 # Company DNS server
search mycompany.com # Company's domain
Then "mycompany.com" will automatically get appended to the request for "www" yielding http://www.mycompany.com/ (as long as www doesn't get a valid response from the DNS on the first try).
Additionally, this can be done on the company's DNS server instead of each individual local PC, but you get the idea.
Perhaps I should use parenthesis in my written english to make it clearer? Like so:
I think I'll write this one off to the "not being a morning person" thing... I read it as: "Why bother to learn the imitation, have a go at the original". Or something along those lines.
Seems like we've got a bit road-rage happening here... but I'll keep it interesting: you wrote off Ruby quite visciously with what appeared to be little thought... you did a bit of reading about it, along with other languages this very morning, and now I'm clueless because I made an equally whimsical assertion about your learning habits?
It seemed to me you and the OP were two sides of the same coin. The OP was a little "over-enthusiastic", I didn't sincerely believe that he intended what you think he meant, because it would indeed be a very stupid thing; I'm sorry you seem to have read differently.
For what it's worth, it's 11:30PM here in Australia now and I've been up since 6am. If your excuse for comprehension difficulties is because it's too early, then mine is because it's too late.
Yet more evidence that...
BTW: Perfect? No. Somewhat unique and worth learning before dismissing it? Yes.
Unlike an AC posting, I actually care to a certain degree about the reputation of this handle.
Ruby is far from perfect and declaring that we should drop all development in other languages and immediately switch to it is just plain fucking stupid and lacking in any pragmatism whatsoever.
Perhaps he's not saying Ruby should become a new standard, but that people like you should open your mind just a little, tiny bit, open the door and walk outside - and try a new language for a few hours sometime.
People like you like to get stuck in a rut and cling to what you know, forsaking everything else. For years, all I've ever known is C, 8/16-bit ASM, Perl, a few FPGA HDLs... even if I don't do websites or databases, RoR has inspired me to climb out of my comfort zone and take on something new. Guess what? I've discovered a language which looks to be a new favourite of mine. I'm going to use it now instead of where I would have used Perl.
You can't even distinguish it from Haskell and functional programming, but yet you seem to think you're qualified to say how "perfect" it isn't... no wonder you're posting AC.
The SQL database abstraction layer is an important feature of SQLObject, that Ruby on Rails doesn't currently support -- you have to write database dependent SQL code mixed in with your Ruby code.
Hmm, SQLObject sounds interesting, but I'm confused.
All the Ruby demos I've watched made a point of showing that you didn't have to write SQL statements. You wire Activerecord up to a database you've made (the "wiring" can be as simple as specifying the server/db/table - and it infers the rest so you can build what sound to be something similar to SQLObject).
Tell me - how and where does one start writing SQL when you're using Ruby's Activerecord (which sounds like a building block for making Ruby objects similar to Python's SQLObject but without writing a single line of SQL)?
I imagine the difference is in specifying the data relationships. I haven't got to that part of learning about rails yet, but IIRC you specify the one-to-many, one-to-one, etc. relationships using Activerecord. Does Python's SQLObject do all this for you via inheritence? If so, sounds nifty, but I'm still confused where you would start writing SQL code in Ruby...
I'm an expert at neither: I'm still working through Why's Poignant guide... I intend to start working with Ruby in the next few weeks. I'm curious what people have to say about one vs the other...
Nobody ever got screwed for working with IBM.
Haha, etc.
"money and resources" aren't everything. MS can't afford to make radical changes in IE, in fact they've absolutely struggled to make _ANY_ changes at all compared to FF which has ejoyed a fairly nimble development process so far. I will speculate that the reasons include: a crusty code-base which hasn't seen much work since the Netscape war (compared to the Everything Is New (tm) enthusiasm FF developers seem to have), and a fear that any real change will break things in new and horrible ways (crusty code tends to be like this - if IE is "secure" it's only because it has stagnated so much; touching it significantly may result in a whole slew of new holes to plug).
Both sides were guilty of making up and/or bastardising standards. Most people are angry at MS's "abuse" of standards to achieve standardised functionality in a non-standard way. What you've just described there from the Mozilla page seems to be a new feature that has no standard to go by.
The w3 and other standards bodies for that matter, aren't perfect. For example I've read plenty of threads about SVG (Scaled Vector Graphics) to get the impression that some standards are written before the technology they describe is even useful let alone implemented... standards writers require collaboration with implementors and users (or at least, an understanding of the users). But it does depend on which standards body you're talking about... they're all guilty of something, it seems (ITU, IETF, etc).
I think you're really misunderstanding the issue. A DoS by flooding the cell with SMS messages has the chance of working because on-the-wire, (or "on the air", if you will) it uses the exact same portion of the GSM mobile phone protocol as setting up new calls (and other network control messages). As you can see, this has nothing to do with the land-line connectivity the tower uses beyond the airwaves.
It's still possible that the "last-mile" providers in the USA simply don't feel the need to upgrade their DSLAMs or even make full use of the stuff that _IS_ installed at the exchange until absolutely necessary so they still have a low-cost path of remaining competitive as the market demands and expectations change.
Perhaps, as you say, the telecomms backbone doesn't have sufficient capacity to provide everyone with services of higher speeds but simply comparing the end-user DSL service speeds in each country doesn't give you this information, it's not the full picture. For example, it's possible the EU providers upgraded their "last mile" infrastructure first and are upgrading their backbones concurrently, or later.
You might be interested to know that in rural Australia, they usually "skip" a generation or two of technology; I remember when I was a kid that by the time touch-tone phone service became available in 1988 in my tiny home-town, it was replacing a human-operated exchange and that plenty of larger municipalities were still stuck with pulse-only exchanges. Perhaps what you're seeing in some parts of the EU is a refreshing of old infrastructure with the highest tech available, because they don't get to do it very often (upgrades, that is).
Of course, the USA is the centre of the universe...
Not a Python programmer myself (learning ruby, scheme and know ISO-C, Handel-C and Perl), but saying that you're trying to make "macros" in a language where there's no up-front strong typing like with Python indicates you don't understand the language...
Macros are incredibly useful in a strongly-typed language like C, but have pretty much no place at all in weakly typed languages like Perl and Scheme. Python is still "strongly-typed" (or so I understand it), it just defers the actual checking until the latest possible time at run-time. Or something. Like I said, I'm no expert...
If you are really missing macros, perhaps it's because you want to "abuse" it to write code that writes code.
Which is exactly what Scheme (and functional programming in general) is all about. Ruby, Scheme, and AFAIK Python all support "higher order functions", where you plug in functions or even anonymous code to other functions, and the result is a program that does something completely different expressed with almost mathematical precision and conciseness.
C's preprocessor "macro" language is totally barbaric, by comparison, and one of the fascinating things about Handel-C is its support for "macros written with C syntax" - having used Handel-C a lot, I really think the world would be a better place if ISO-C had the same macro language Handel does instead of the poor excuse for sanity we have now.
In short... "Python? Macros? What the...?"
So what are the choices? ext2/ext3 which are slow, reiserfs which sucks ass when it breaks..
Apart from the big (production quality) alternatives like IBM's JFS (which I use myself) and SGI's XFS (and Reiser - "Reiser sucks when it breaks" is so 1999) Linux additionally supports the following filesystems (from http://www.xenotime.net/linux/linux-fs.html, also try http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Filesystems-HOWTO.html):
* accessfs: permission filesystem
* AFS FAQ
* AutoFS
* AVFS: A Virtual File System
* AVFS: A Virtual Filesystem
* BeFS for Linux2.4
* BeOS filesystem for Linux
* BFS UnixWare, Linux Implementation of
* CDfs
* CIFS
* Cluster File Systems Home
* Coda File System
* Crypto HOWTO
* convertfs: convert Linux filesystems
* DAFS: Direct Access File System
* Devfs (Device File System) FAQ
* efslook: read/debug EFS filesystems (ported to Linux & x86) {new}
* Enhanced Loopback (for XFS)
* E2fsprogs: Ext2 Filesystem Utilities
* E2fsprogs: Ext2 FS Utilities
* Ext2 Compression Extension
* FSDEXT2: ext2 filesystem for Win95
* ext2fsnt: Linux Ext2 filesystem for Windows NT driver
* ext2 fs resize utilities
* ext2 online growth patch (adilger)
* Explore2fs
* FHS: Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
* FHS Test Suite
* Filesystems HOWTO
* FiST: File System Translator
* FreeVXFS
* fsv: 3D File System Visualizer
* Global File System (Sistina)
* GNU ext2resize: ext2 filesystem resizer
* HFS+ filesystem
* HFS+ filesystem #2
* InterMezzo FS
* JFFS (axis.com)
* Journaling Flash File System, v2
* JFS for Linux (IBM)
* journal_fs report (OSDL)
* Kragen's Amazing List of Filesystems
* Large File Support in Linux
* Large File Summit (LFS) stuff
* Large File / File System Support
* Linux EXT2 salvage utility
* Linux Ext2fs Undeletion mini-HOWTO
* Linux FAT-32 support
* Linux filesystem redundancy
* Linux Links: File Systems
* Linux NFS FAQ
* Linux RAID Solutions
* LUFS: Linux Userland File System
* Lustre & Lustre Light filesystems
* NFS project
* NFSv4 for Linux 2.4
* Linux NTFS file system support
* loop-aes cryptoloop device
Hmm, perhaps he/she meant ytree: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/ytree
The solution shown does not mention usage of the NX bit (which is i86 specific).
Actually, x86 is one of the last into town with "NX bit" functionality. POWER (and PPC I guess), PA-RISC, Sparc, Alpha, etc. on the big-iron has had this feature as a standard part of their architecture (along with the OSes that run on them) for bloody ages now... on those CPUs, even Linux has had hardware support since before whenever x86 got NX support.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_bit
Although this can stop execution of arbitrary code in areas of memory that aren't meant for it, you're still going to be vulnerable to corruption of memory and make the software behave in unintended ways. The problem is that the Operating System can't tell the difference between a memory pointer that has stepped outside the malloc'd space it was intended to address and into an adjacent one, or two legitimate pointers behaving nicely.
Adding the guard space will definately help, as will unmapping memory. OpenBSD hasn't exactly been known for its high performance; people use it for security and peace of mind. Additionally, they made mmap() return random addresses, which is very cool indeed.
doesn't anyone think that it is time to stop using C?
C is not used for building web apps, so what are you talking about?
Everybody knows C is the right tool for some jobs, Java/Perl/Ruby/etc for others.
In the right hands C can be just as secure and has the potential to be much faster than most of the alternatives.
He was trying to say that windows's "DEP" stuff isn't anything new. It's been around on the big iron in the form of IBM's POWER, HP's PA-RISC, MIPS, Sun's Sparc, DEC's Alpha etc. CPUs for a very long time (as a hardware, not software implementation) and hence has been supported by most OSes for those architectures for an equally long time as well (including Linux).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_bit
Agh! You forgot the bestest free one there is, http://www.cutepdf.com/!
Creates a virtual printer you print to, then the print driver asks for a filename for the resulting pdf. Brilliant stuff.