I had Mozilla go nuts just yesterday and grab 98% of resources before I killed it. Of course, it was running on a seperate machine (running NetBSD/i386) than this Sparc that I use as my main terminal (dual headed SparcStation 10BSXes rock!), so I was able to telnet over to the offending machine and manually kill the process, even with Mozilla sucking up 98% of the CPU (according to top).
The incidence of the OS itself going unstable is so rare, though, as to be a red letter event. I had a linux machine pop off and quit just once back when I ran Linux.
I like NetBSD and Solaris a lot more, though. The more I learn about Unix, the less I'm really very interested in the wad of code people lump around a Linux kernal and call a 'distribution.'
Part of the problem with any 'inside' Linux journalism (a big part of the reason I finally dropped my sub to Linux Journal magazine) is the 'yay for our team' mentality presented, exemplified in this article.
It reads like a marketing brochure written at Red Hat, not like an independent report. This seems to be a consistent problem with much Linux 'journalism' out there.
Writers have to learn to step out of their personal enthusiasm for the product being written about, or they come off like a proud dad describing Junior's last Little League game. Readers figure this stuff out, and it's not enough to preach to the choir.
Also, and this comes from some direct experience with an embedded OS/2 application that ran on a touch screen machine: metaphors like 'double click' either don't work, or some awful kludge sequence has to be done first.
Cygwin/XFree86 has no window manager, at least by default, so I can't move the windows I create
So install a Window Manager. You can build FVWM or something else of it's type and use that. If you've got a 'standard' port of X, type 'twm &' inside an Xterm, without doing anything more.
If you want decent performance and staggeringly high reliabilty, try to find NOS (new old stock) server grade SCSI drives. The big 5-1/4" full height Seagate drives are built to last forever, and because they have an 'unfashionable' large form factor, you can get them on eBay for $30-50 each in 7-9 gig size. Stick 'em in the back room on an NFS server with a Fast Ethernet card and you've got your reliable storage solution.
Quiet cooling? That big wooden door between you and the big roaring box that contains the drives should suffice.
First you'll have to replicate the significant noise a fast hard drive makes. Also, you'll have to come up with an explanation why the write-cycle life of your 'improved' drive is so poor.
I see an opening here for people interested in writing sabatour trojanware: have your code write to a range of flash addresses a few 100K times, wipe the cells out.
The Joe editor has much of the look and feel of the class-era word processors. The first time I ran it, with that friendly menu taking up about the top four or five lines (visible command options are a MUST for light users) it reminded me a lot of the old Wordstar from CP/M.
As an aside, Sun just published what should be considered the 'Rosetta Stone' for Solaris. If you get into wrestling matches with Sun systems and need a good comprehensive introduction, you need to download this one RIGHT NOW.
I don't see any incentive for IBM, SGI or Sun to extend the life of very old hardware.
Sadly, there doesn't seem to be much support anywhere for extending the life of old hardware. The days of putting free OSes on older hardware to extend their life seems to be fading. The frothy desire of 'leading edge' OSS developers to 'beat Microsoft'- read: all the eye candy bloatware projects.
Examples include:
The end of support of graphic hardware, re: S3 Trio64 cards 'deprecated' in XFree86 (I thought that was a Microsoft trick, dudes...)
The murmurs being heard lately about bugs being ignored in NetBSD/Sparc on early SparcStation hardware.
Does 'close the gap' mean converging on all the existing hardware, and having open support for it all universally?
That would, uh, mean Sun would have to rely on patent protection to protect their features. Rather that the fairly successful 'obfuscation' that's earned them their pay up until now.
An example of 'closing the gap' would be: I am running Solaris right now on this SparcStation 10SX box (a dual headed one to boot!) because XFree just doesn't support the advanced hardware features of it's cgfourteen framebuffer(s) (yes, two of them on this particular SS10SX). Without the Sun X Server, this machine is doomed to be an 8 bit color machine, and that sucks.
Granted, cgfourteen is probably considered obsolete by Sun, but it'd be cool to be able to run NetBSD on this box like I do on most of my other hardware (pkgsrc rules!, and I lost my wrestling match with Zoularis).
Before I drift further off topic: Sun is like Apple: a hardware company that produces a value-add OS to reap the benefits of their expensive hardware. Like it or not if they open everything up they'd become just another Compaq, or be driven out of business.
Microsoft has a long history of patenting things to prevent other people from patenting them, and then not enforcing the patents against other entities.
They've been doing so for years. However, stating this here is saying something good about Microsoft. My bad.
There is no difference between an internet browser, an email program, and a chat program, to a lot of people. They use AOL which wraps it all up in one piece. And isn't there now some MSN abomination that does that same thing??
That brings back visions of the olden days, when I got ahold of a big 330 meg hard drive, for my '286 running DOS.... The old 32 MB partition limit and all that...
people pirate MS Office, and don't care to try out less expensive office suites.
I'm mailing my mom a copy of OpenOffice on CD this week. People are willing to try out alternatives (she asked me for 'Word' awhile ago) if you encourage it.
The sad thing, for someone like me who was a big fan of Micrografx Designer, was that Corel bought out Micrografx about a year ago, it seems primarily to extinguish them. I remember back in the day that the lighter-weight people used Corel Draw and the rest of us used Designer. (not that either was ever 'heavy weight' software- it ran on Windows 3 for gawds sake!)
A guy at work was talking a few months ago about someone he knows at a flea market who 'can get you whatever CD you want, just make your request' for a few dollars. On CDR media, of course.
The mainstream view of 'pirates' is Not that they are fair-use freedom fighters. This is a point that people inside the 'hacker' subculture need to accept, and get over ranting about.
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I had Mozilla go nuts just yesterday and grab 98% of resources before I killed it. Of course, it was running on a seperate machine (running NetBSD/i386) than this Sparc that I use as my main terminal (dual headed SparcStation 10BSXes rock!), so I was able to telnet over to the offending machine and manually kill the process, even with Mozilla sucking up 98% of the CPU (according to top).
The incidence of the OS itself going unstable is so rare, though, as to be a red letter event. I had a linux machine pop off and quit just once back when I ran Linux.
I like NetBSD and Solaris a lot more, though. The more I learn about Unix, the less I'm really very interested in the wad of code people lump around a Linux kernal and call a 'distribution.'
I don't know that we were all that guy.
There might be some people from Sun Microsystems here.
Scot McNeely at Sun is/was a hockey player, and he keeps that sort of guys around him.
He was the guy who slammed you up against the lockers.
though wouldn't have been so much fun as testbench was 70-80mhz, while watch ran at something like 17mhz (these numbers might be off)
If it runs at 17 millihertz, it's not practical for use as a watch. Maybe as a calendar, but probably not one with day or week resolution.
Part of the problem with any 'inside' Linux journalism (a big part of the reason I finally dropped my sub to Linux Journal magazine) is the 'yay for our team' mentality presented, exemplified in this article.
It reads like a marketing brochure written at Red Hat, not like an independent report. This seems to be a consistent problem with much Linux 'journalism' out there.
Writers have to learn to step out of their personal enthusiasm for the product being written about, or they come off like a proud dad describing Junior's last Little League game. Readers figure this stuff out, and it's not enough to preach to the choir.
It turns out the problem wasn't that they used a tape recorder.
The mistake was that they selected a metric tape recorder.
Who the hell knows where parts can be obtained for a metric tape recorder???
I used to telnet into work on a palm device running a telnet app, to a Windows NT machine running Hummingbird inetd.
Believe me, it was creepy and slow. I'd be scared to try running a graphical interface that same way.
Also, and this comes from some direct experience with an embedded OS/2 application that ran on a touch screen machine: metaphors like 'double click' either don't work, or some awful kludge sequence has to be done first.
On a SparcStation, it even easier. Two fingers:
hold down [stop] and press the 'a' key.
Boom, the whole thing comes to a halt.
(try this on your production server)
Ummm, yes. You came up with something more tiresome.
Here's your cookie!
Cygwin/XFree86 has no window manager, at least by default, so I can't move the windows I create
So install a Window Manager. You can build FVWM or something else of it's type and use that. If you've got a 'standard' port of X, type 'twm &' inside an Xterm, without doing anything more.
If you want decent performance and staggeringly high reliabilty, try to find NOS (new old stock) server grade SCSI drives. The big 5-1/4" full height Seagate drives are built to last forever, and because they have an 'unfashionable' large form factor, you can get them on eBay for $30-50 each in 7-9 gig size. Stick 'em in the back room on an NFS server with a Fast Ethernet card and you've got your reliable storage solution.
Quiet cooling? That big wooden door between you and the big roaring box that contains the drives should suffice.
First you'll have to replicate the significant noise a fast hard drive makes. Also, you'll have to come up with an explanation why the write-cycle life of your 'improved' drive is so poor.
I see an opening here for people interested in writing sabatour trojanware: have your code write to a range of flash addresses a few 100K times, wipe the cells out.
The Joe editor has much of the look and feel of the class-era word processors. The first time I ran it, with that friendly menu taking up about the top four or five lines (visible command options are a MUST for light users) it reminded me a lot of the old Wordstar from CP/M.
As an aside, Sun just published what should be considered the 'Rosetta Stone' for Solaris. If you get into wrestling matches with Sun systems and need a good comprehensive introduction, you need to download this one RIGHT NOW.
I don't see any incentive for IBM, SGI or Sun to extend the life of very old hardware.
Sadly, there doesn't seem to be much support anywhere for extending the life of old hardware. The days of putting free OSes on older hardware to extend their life seems to be fading. The frothy desire of 'leading edge' OSS developers to 'beat Microsoft'- read: all the eye candy bloatware projects.
Examples include:
The end of support of graphic hardware, re: S3 Trio64 cards 'deprecated' in XFree86 (I thought that was a Microsoft trick, dudes...)
The murmurs being heard lately about bugs being ignored in NetBSD/Sparc on early SparcStation hardware.
There's nothing like a whole big pack of self-denial fetishists getting together to watch some cartoons, eh?
Does 'close the gap' mean converging on all the existing hardware, and having open support for it all universally?
That would, uh, mean Sun would have to rely on patent protection to protect their features. Rather that the fairly successful 'obfuscation' that's earned them their pay up until now.
An example of 'closing the gap' would be: I am running Solaris right now on this SparcStation 10SX box (a dual headed one to boot!) because XFree just doesn't support the advanced hardware features of it's cgfourteen framebuffer(s) (yes, two of them on this particular SS10SX). Without the Sun X Server, this machine is doomed to be an 8 bit color machine, and that sucks.
Granted, cgfourteen is probably considered obsolete by Sun, but it'd be cool to be able to run NetBSD on this box like I do on most of my other hardware (pkgsrc rules!, and I lost my wrestling match with Zoularis).
Before I drift further off topic: Sun is like Apple: a hardware company that produces a value-add OS to reap the benefits of their expensive hardware. Like it or not if they open everything up they'd become just another Compaq, or be driven out of business.
Microsoft has a long history of patenting things to prevent other people from patenting them, and then not enforcing the patents against other entities.
They've been doing so for years. However, stating this here is saying something good about Microsoft. My bad.
There is no difference between an internet browser, an email program, and a chat program, to a lot of people. They use AOL which wraps it all up in one piece. And isn't there now some MSN abomination that does that same thing??
That brings back visions of the olden days, when I got ahold of a big 330 meg hard drive, for my '286 running DOS.... The old 32 MB partition limit and all that...
P100??
The HURD is targeted at VAX hardware, dude. (they finally gave up trying to get parts for that old PDP-11)
people pirate MS Office, and don't care to try out less expensive office suites.
I'm mailing my mom a copy of OpenOffice on CD this week. People are willing to try out alternatives (she asked me for 'Word' awhile ago) if you encourage it.
The sad thing, for someone like me who was a big fan of Micrografx Designer, was that Corel bought out Micrografx about a year ago, it seems primarily to extinguish them. I remember back in the day that the lighter-weight people used Corel Draw and the rest of us used Designer. (not that either was ever 'heavy weight' software- it ran on Windows 3 for gawds sake!)
Well, ummm, if you check sales volumes, downloads, mp3s, and from small independent outlets are a tiny slice of the overall market.
A guy at work was talking a few months ago about someone he knows at a flea market who 'can get you whatever CD you want, just make your request' for a few dollars. On CDR media, of course.
The mainstream view of 'pirates' is Not that they are fair-use freedom fighters. This is a point that people inside the 'hacker' subculture need to accept, and get over ranting about.