Obviously MS would never use a rendering engine as unreliable as IE to parse things for security. Why do you think MS have been courting the Moz team so much recently?;)
Actually, XWMC is a funny thing. With as fast of a CPU as you've got, I fully expect XVMC is using up more CPU time than software decoding would (assuming non-highdef material).
I did test it, and there is a small difference. Not big, but there. But you're probably right in that I could happily leave it all to the CPU and not notice anything. Might even save memory bandwidth come to think of it (onboard GFX). And yeah, aside from the odd demo I've tried very little HD content.
The quality has nothing to do with XVMC
Aye, I'm aware of that - I was just pointing out that XVMC is the sole use I have for GFX hardware (short of pumping the image out of the cable, anyway) whereas the tone of the article seems to suggest that using ATI/nVidia proprietary libs is the only way to go if you want "acceptable" quality output, when in fact everyone would get by just as well with onboard GFX and libavcodec. It seems to be whatever the hardware.info equivalent of a slashvertisement is called;)
Why no reviews of any of the many myriad MPEG2 decoders out there? It's like they're saying that the only way you can get super high quality DVD playback is to use a modern GFX card and a specialist decoder library.
My MythTV system uses Xine to play DVD's via an nVidia 6150 chipset straight into the DVI input on my TV. It uses XVMC motion compensation to cut down on CPU usage (not that MPEG2 decoding and filtering uses much CPU at all these days - my AMD64 3500 sits at 1GHz and uses about 15-25% CPU playing back a DVD with postprocessing activated), and the quality blows anything else I've seen out of the water. Similarly, using ffdshow on my workstation in windows mode results in a really good picture.
If you ask me, most people will be more than happy with the default decoder that came with PowerDVD or what have you. It seems silly to do a "PC's vs. DVD players" comparison and leave out what 80& of people are using. Are there any other MPEG2 decoder reviews around?
Why do you think that, given the well-known fact that companies that undergo significant layoffs underperform the market for the next few years?
Unless the 10% they're firing are the same 10% who the other 90% with way too much money hired because there was nothing else they could think to do with it...?
I know it's a popular myth that the Netburst arch was designed by the marketing team and that Intel is a big lumbering behemoth that was caught napping by AMD and the K8, but I wonder how much management and marketing baggage Intel can shed without losing it's competitive edge. Granted, I have no knowledge of their internal structure, but wasn't it a little research outpost in Israel that's made Intel competitive again with the Pentium-M -> Core architecture?
I just hope for Intel's sake that they don't castrate their RnD, for the microprocessor industry as much as the staff.
I'm in total agreement with you on this. My desktop has 256MB swap and 1GB of RAM. The only time Linux has ever touched swap was when I was importing 8GB of Eudora psuedo-MBOX files into KMail (I forget the exact command I was using). At the time I had 2GB of swap (rule of thumb, right?), and the import process swallowed it all up. I didn't notice in time and the system became completely unresponsive; not even a Ctrl-Alt-Backspace worked. I couldn't ssh into the machine either. Eventually the process died, but it took a good 30 minutes.
My MythTV backend with 2GB of RAM touches maybe 5-10MB of it's 2GB swap at the worst of times, even with quite a few memory hungry apps (Opera, amarok, myth transcodes) running as long as the system is up and pre-emptive swapping turned on.
When a process goes nuts, I want it to be killed ASAP. Leaving it to fill up xGB of swap and bring the server to its knees for x minutes is silly. I admit that in machines with less RAM than mine swap is a great idea, but on modern machines the overhead for using virtual RAM seems much higher, and I get no obvious performance increase from it, even with 10k RPM drives. Since the 4GB barrier isn't a problem any more for server at work (64bit Debian, yay!), we just plumped for gobs of RAM instead of new servers every x years (since we don't do much that's CPU limited). Heck, I even have MySQL DB's mounted in tmpfs at home. I don't mean to sound harch, but swap just seems to be a way for those unable to stuff more RAM into their boxes to stretch their budgets a little further...
The crazy thing is that, despite being on a seemingly ancient 90nm process, the AMD chips still seem to consume less power at idle that the core duo, at least according to Anand. That's why I'm currently sticking with my AMD's in my 24x7 boxes, which spend 99% of their time idling away.
I wonder how long before Google gets into the consultancy business...?
Every time I hear of another failed government project (usually distributed databases of which there are alot here in the UK), I wish that someone like Google - a company that's taken the worlds biggest information dump and done a pretty good job of categorising it - would just step up and shout how so-and-so is doing it all wrong.
Perhaps other/.'ers who've worked in governments can tell me why so many government IT prjects go awry? Is it forever shofting goalposts? Ill defined specs? Incompetent engineers? Corrupt finance director backhanders and lowest-bidderitis?
Remember that (currently) Intel has much higher cache density than AMD, so can fit more cache in the same amount of silicon. AMD are meant to be adopting some new cache spec (sorry, I forget the buzzword involved, ZRAM maybe?) which will allow them a more competitive cache/silicon ratio, but I odn't think this is due out until K8L.
Granted though, I'm amazed how well AMD's chips compare to the C2D's considering their aging design and lith process. A shift to 65nm will make them even more competitive, although C2D will still retain the performance king I think, at least until K8L.
In short - yay for competition! I don't think the CPU market has ever had so many great chips on offer for such low prices. But then I guess you can say that about pretty much everything in computing...
I don't mean to sound like I'm calling you a troll/FUDmongerer, but last time I used amarok (this morning, version 1.41) it supported all of those things. It's available from the amarok website as a package for all the major desktop distros. DAAP is a new addition, as is ATP. I can't vouch for DAAP since I don't use it but once I enabled ATP it worked just fine for me. Does DAAP use zeroconf?
I use the smart playlists thing constantly. They're fantastic.
My only gripes with amarok are the slowness with which it changes tracks when you're skipping through files randomly, and the time it takes to update the context browser. I'm not sure if this is just me however, since I use the inbuilt sqlite DB which is hosted on a rather slow software RAID1 array.
My music collection spans about 61GB and is about 12,000 files worth.
Disclaimer: I do not own an iPod. I also find amarok's interface *much* nicer to use than iTunes. I hate all the scrolling in iTunes, whereas in amarok I just type what I'm looking for and there it is - instantly.
Tell that to the parents of Jean Charles de Menezes. Shot seven times at point blank range in the face.
Half the details provided to the press were false - he wasn't wearing any odd clothing, he didn't have wires hanging out of a rucksack, he didn't jump the ticket barrier. He basically had the misfortune to be a foreigner in an increasingly xeonohpobic country that no longer seems to give a shit about civil rights.
And yet the police officers who shot the guy face no penalties, and the majority of the public here seem to be of the opinion that if gunning down the occasional innocent brown person is all it takes to stop terrorism, then that's fine. War is peace.
Too true. I remember thinking, six months after I bought my first computer, how easy it was to install Mandrake 8.2 as opposed to the windows 2000 reinstall I'd done the previous week. I was a complete computer n00b then, and I can't really believe that Linux hasn't become any easier to install since 2001.
According to the blurb from FTA, the graphical installer supports everything available in the regular curses installer, so yes, support for installing onto LVM and software RAID should work perfectly.
TBH I can't see what all the fuss is about. To my knowledge, Debian has never marketed itself as a general purpose distro for desktops a la Grandma Linux, it's always just been a damned stable system that's particularly suited to servers (it's utterly fantastic to do an apt-get dist upgrade and be 99% certain that nothing will go wrong). Last I heard, Debian were quite content for others to use this as a baseline to extend Debian into the user-friendly market, hence distros like Ubuntu.
Like I keep saying over and over again - there's a place for Debian, just like there's a place for Ubuntu. A corporate server farm doesn't need a GUI installer - they have one of their code-fu's do a single install and then roll out an image to 300 empty boxes via BOOTP. Someone rolling out Debian on the desktop at a company would do much the same thing. If you've wanted a pretty installer that'll make the process easier on the eye, Mandrake, RedHat and SuSE have been on the game for years. Do people decry LFS for not having a GUI installer?
Disclaimer: I like and use Debian at home and at work. I've never had any problems with the text mode installer, but likewise I've never had problems telling someone to use Ubuntu for their first distro rather than Debian. Different strokes.
The fact that our democratically elected government are the ones trying to bring in all of these laws to erase our civil liberties and it's the priveliged Lords that actually make a stand for personal freedom is, to my mind, one of the strangest things in politics.
No wonder Tony and co. have been trying to castrate the House of Lords for the last decade as an "old fashioned, outdated bastion of the Old School Ties", despite the fact that these aging peers seem to have a clue what the House of Commons are actually trying to do.
I'm as much pro-democracy as the next man, but when the UK has to rely on a (primarily) hereditary system to look out for the gov giving itself infinite power, we should start worrying.
It reminds me a little of Zaphod Beeblebrox - the Lords are not elected, and therefore do not have to strive for votes. The MP's in the House of Commons however actually seek their posts instead of being born into them, and therefore must continually strive to retain their positions. Is this just another case of those who seek to posess power being the least capable of wielding it responsibly?
I can't speak for the parent, but both my HTPC's use the bundled remotes that came with the Hauppauge Nova-T (a DVB-T card). It's a great little remote and you can pick these cards up for less than £40 in the UK.
You can see a piccy of it here. I know for a fact that, at least with the DVB cards, Linux has full support for all their features. Use any modern kernel (the keycodes for some of the buttons weren't added until 2.6.13 or something IIRC), evdev and lirc and you're laughing.
I can't wait to have Explorer force me to view an ad for ten seconds before I can access the hard drive.
I already have to wait ten seconds for explorer to show me the hard drive, you insensitive clod!
On a more serious note, does anyone know if vista has saner explorer behaviour than its predecessors? I'm sick of having to wait for the CD drive to spin up before I can go into the hard drive.
It's not just the nerds being more Linux minded - AMD has, to some extent, bet the farm on the K8 being the king of the server room, since the entire core was designed from the off to be highly scalable across multiple CPU's. ANd now we're seeing that most of the big advances (new "enterprise" sockets, K8L stuff) are going to benefit the servers before they benefit Joe Public.
AMD knows that, whatever market share it has in the desktop arena, Linux is a major player in the HPC and 2P+ spaces and knows that Linux sysadmins won't tolerate buggy chipsets or flaky binary drivers that may end up being unsupported under kernel 2.8 or whatever. Hopefully AMD has the nouse to do an Intel and make their chipsets open spec across the board a la Intel, enabling excellent support under Linux and any other OS that happens to come along. I know for a fact that sometimes shoddy chipset support under Linux has been a turnoff for me in the past and I've lusted after some of Intel's chipsets on my own A64 systems.
True dat. I've always loved AMD's own line of chipsets - IME they're never the fastest out of the bunch, but they're always rock-solid stable and (naturally) are open spec and so work perfectly in Linux, often before release. Much like Intel and their chipsets in fact.
Contrast with ATI and nVidia chipsets (now that VIA, SiS and ULi are pretty much out of the market) - drivers are always binary blobs. True,you can generally run Linux on an nVidia chipset with open source drivers, even up to the reverse engineered ethernet controller, and suffer a negligible performance decrease over the nVidia code. But every account I've read of people trying to use recent ATI chipsets under Linux have been fraught with tales of lockups, appalling transfers speeds, hardware not functioning, clocks running way too fast, you name it. ATI's answer is "just re-install our driver after every kernel upgrade". Great.
I don't doubt that AMD are capable of running their own chipset division, but they're a much smaller company than Intel especially in terms of fab capacity and until recently were only just keeping up with demand. But will they even entertain the possibility of "enterprise" chipsets any more if they're taken over by our closed source overlords?
And before you bemoan me for bringing up the Linux argument "no-one uses Linux! AMD doesn't care! Open drivers can rot for all they care!" - I'll tell you now that they damn well do care. Opteron and servers are their fastest growing markets, and will most likely continue to be so long as theirs is the only x86 arch that scales to 4, 8 or more CPU's efficiently. Linux and other OSS OS' are a *very* big slice of this market. Maybe we'll be lucky and ATI will allow them to produce an open spec "enterprise" chipset with the exact same functionality as ATI's new UberGamer 733T-XL, only at twice the price of the closed spec part. Yippee.
Call me paranoid, but IMHO this merger (if it is indeed anything more than conjecture) could spell very bad things for AMD and I'm convinced we need AMD to stop Intel pulling another Netburst on us.
Of course, there's always th eossibility of ATI doing cool things like making a skt940 chip that acts as a dedicated H264 encoder or some such stuff, but since the specs are all open they could do that without taking over the company.
To sum up: is there any point to this merger from the customers perspective? Not that I can see. IMHO we don't have enough players in the CPU and GPU market as it is.
Samba has worked flawlessly with Microsoft's SMB implementation for years, and I can add linux to a windows domain, authenticate agains a Microsoft ADS and plugin to Microsft Exchange server with Evolution.
Really? I was under the impression that the public documentation for SMB was a) hugely out of date and b) wrong in many cases. Much of the hard work of projects like Samba has been done by painstaking packet sniffing and reverse engineering. Even now, Samba still can't act as an AD domain controller (unless you count the highly experimental samba 4). Why is this? Are the samba team lazy and stupid? Or maybe perhaps it's because figuring out what Windows 2003/CIFS is doing is damned hard...? We use Samba for a file server at work with AD, and it works great, but it has a *very* long way to go before I'd say it was compatible.
Same goes for Exchange - the protocols are poorly documented and obfuscated to hell and back, and pretty much the only way to get things to talk to it reliably is to use MS API's. Either that or you have to pony up dosh to have a peek at the protocol under a breathe-a-word-of-this-and-we-kill-you NDA. Why does Evolution even need a plugin? Why can't it talk to Exchange directly? I've been itching to dump Exchange at work but I just can't find a competing product that does what Exchange does without horrific things like Outlook plugins.
It's these secret formats and protocols that mean we can't apt-get install courier-exchange samba-ad_dc, and it's because of this hostility to developers of non-MS platforms that half of this case came about in the first place.
Disclaimer: I'm a Linux guy through and through, but I actually think MS can write some damned fine software when they want to. I just feel the company as a whole is evil.
Bingo, thanks for rooting that out for me. I do wish the eds would link to stuff like this instead of press releases the whole time...
10 years data retention with no power = incredible. Three out of four hard drives I've seen refuse to spin up if they're left spun down for more than five years, and consumer grade optical media is just as bad if not worse.
Anyhoo, glad to see MRAM out of the larval vapourware stage. The wikipedia page makes it sounds damned impressive.
Personally, I don't give a rats arse about bootup time.
What I do want, however, is good rewritable storage with NO MOVING PARTS! It'll make things like under-the-TV HTPC's much, much more feasible - you have a small ~10GB boot drive for the core OS components, and a big ol' hard drive that spends much of it's time spun down. On top of that, you could have almost instant resume from hibernate
Corporate users would also gain colossal benefits; I know that by far the most common failure I see at work is a dead or dying hard drive, which are a pain to replace in OEM machines which tend to be built so that only people with advanvced degrees it WTF Ergonomics and How To Wire Like A Spider On Drugs can open them. Replace that with a solid state unit with no moving parts and the problem is more or less instantly solved. Heck, depending on its overall reliabilty we might even be able to dump things like RAID in the mid to long term.
Does anyone have any non-fluff stuff about wha power consumption, max transfer and the like is? Since it's MRAM I expect that it'll only need to use power when reading or writing to disc, right? Hence I'd expect power usage to be practically zero - another huge boon for corporate users. Colossal possible bandwidth and low latency are the icing on the cake.
Disclaimer: I know little about MRAM other than what I've read in fluff pieces before. Time to visit Wikipedia...
Don't even boter with that. If they refuse to comply with the rulings, seize MS's European assets. All of a sudden all that IP laying in the EU domain becomes the property of the EU.
Whilst I'm not so totallly naive to assume that some folks in the Euro pariliament won't try and make a fast buck by flogging the IP to the highest bidders (who will, in turn, try and flog it so OSS projects for ridiculous fees), it would be enough to completely destablise MS's European market - which is, lest we forget, bigger and more profitable (IIRC) than that of the US.
As long as the EU still ahs the balls to follow this through to the bitter end, MS is in a lose-lose situation. It's just a question of which is the least worse scenario - 1) opening up their protocols, 2) losing the European market, or 3) paying a fortune in fines only to be forced to choose between 1) and 2) somewhere else down the line. And, lest we forget, 1) and 2) will both lead to colossal gains for alternative software *worldwide*.
UNIX has been a multi user OS since the year dot. I'm no computer historian, but it seems to me that every version of UNIX I've seen places system configs in/etc and user configs in ~/.appname (or localised equivalents). THis has been around for donkeys ages, with the result that pretty much any app written in the last 25 years knows to put user configs in ~/.appname, since filesystem permissions meant that users would either have to run everything as root (equivalent to telling a qmail admin that he has to convert to sendmail within a week - likely to result in an explosion), chmod -R 777/etc or end up with unconfigurable programs.
By contrast, Windows only got the concept of multiple users circa a decade ago, and lack of coercion of third party devs by MS has still left a boatload of programs expecting to be able to write to Program Files, HKLM, c:\windows\system32 and all the rest of them. In recent years even some of MS's own products (there were a few games that would only run as admin IIRC) are guilty of said offence. Even Winamp only got multiuser support very recently. And there are still a million and one stupid shareware apps used by J Random User everywhere that haven't been updated since the days of 9x.
As an aside, does XP's legacy compatability option redirect any reads/writes from program files, HKLM, etc to user-writable areas? That would have seemed like th esensible thing to do.
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Obviously MS would never use a rendering engine as unreliable as IE to parse things for security. Why do you think MS have been courting the Moz team so much recently? ;)
Actually, XWMC is a funny thing. With as fast of a CPU as you've got, I fully expect XVMC is using up more CPU time than software decoding would (assuming non-highdef material).
;)
I did test it, and there is a small difference. Not big, but there. But you're probably right in that I could happily leave it all to the CPU and not notice anything. Might even save memory bandwidth come to think of it (onboard GFX). And yeah, aside from the odd demo I've tried very little HD content.
The quality has nothing to do with XVMC
Aye, I'm aware of that - I was just pointing out that XVMC is the sole use I have for GFX hardware (short of pumping the image out of the cable, anyway) whereas the tone of the article seems to suggest that using ATI/nVidia proprietary libs is the only way to go if you want "acceptable" quality output, when in fact everyone would get by just as well with onboard GFX and libavcodec. It seems to be whatever the hardware.info equivalent of a slashvertisement is called
Why no reviews of any of the many myriad MPEG2 decoders out there? It's like they're saying that the only way you can get super high quality DVD playback is to use a modern GFX card and a specialist decoder library.
My MythTV system uses Xine to play DVD's via an nVidia 6150 chipset straight into the DVI input on my TV. It uses XVMC motion compensation to cut down on CPU usage (not that MPEG2 decoding and filtering uses much CPU at all these days - my AMD64 3500 sits at 1GHz and uses about 15-25% CPU playing back a DVD with postprocessing activated), and the quality blows anything else I've seen out of the water. Similarly, using ffdshow on my workstation in windows mode results in a really good picture.
If you ask me, most people will be more than happy with the default decoder that came with PowerDVD or what have you. It seems silly to do a "PC's vs. DVD players" comparison and leave out what 80& of people are using. Are there any other MPEG2 decoder reviews around?
Why do you think that, given the well-known fact that companies that undergo significant layoffs underperform the market for the next few years?
Unless the 10% they're firing are the same 10% who the other 90% with way too much money hired because there was nothing else they could think to do with it...?
I know it's a popular myth that the Netburst arch was designed by the marketing team and that Intel is a big lumbering behemoth that was caught napping by AMD and the K8, but I wonder how much management and marketing baggage Intel can shed without losing it's competitive edge. Granted, I have no knowledge of their internal structure, but wasn't it a little research outpost in Israel that's made Intel competitive again with the Pentium-M -> Core architecture?
I just hope for Intel's sake that they don't castrate their RnD, for the microprocessor industry as much as the staff.
Surely you forgot:
;)
5. Profit!!!!
6. GOTO 4
I'm in total agreement with you on this. My desktop has 256MB swap and 1GB of RAM. The only time Linux has ever touched swap was when I was importing 8GB of Eudora psuedo-MBOX files into KMail (I forget the exact command I was using). At the time I had 2GB of swap (rule of thumb, right?), and the import process swallowed it all up. I didn't notice in time and the system became completely unresponsive; not even a Ctrl-Alt-Backspace worked. I couldn't ssh into the machine either. Eventually the process died, but it took a good 30 minutes.
My MythTV backend with 2GB of RAM touches maybe 5-10MB of it's 2GB swap at the worst of times, even with quite a few memory hungry apps (Opera, amarok, myth transcodes) running as long as the system is up and pre-emptive swapping turned on.
When a process goes nuts, I want it to be killed ASAP. Leaving it to fill up xGB of swap and bring the server to its knees for x minutes is silly. I admit that in machines with less RAM than mine swap is a great idea, but on modern machines the overhead for using virtual RAM seems much higher, and I get no obvious performance increase from it, even with 10k RPM drives. Since the 4GB barrier isn't a problem any more for server at work (64bit Debian, yay!), we just plumped for gobs of RAM instead of new servers every x years (since we don't do much that's CPU limited). Heck, I even have MySQL DB's mounted in tmpfs at home. I don't mean to sound harch, but swap just seems to be a way for those unable to stuff more RAM into their boxes to stretch their budgets a little further...
The crazy thing is that, despite being on a seemingly ancient 90nm process, the AMD chips still seem to consume less power at idle that the core duo, at least according to Anand. That's why I'm currently sticking with my AMD's in my 24x7 boxes, which spend 99% of their time idling away.
I wonder how long before Google gets into the consultancy business...?
/.'ers who've worked in governments can tell me why so many government IT prjects go awry? Is it forever shofting goalposts? Ill defined specs? Incompetent engineers? Corrupt finance director backhanders and lowest-bidderitis?
Every time I hear of another failed government project (usually distributed databases of which there are alot here in the UK), I wish that someone like Google - a company that's taken the worlds biggest information dump and done a pretty good job of categorising it - would just step up and shout how so-and-so is doing it all wrong.
Perhaps other
Remember that (currently) Intel has much higher cache density than AMD, so can fit more cache in the same amount of silicon. AMD are meant to be adopting some new cache spec (sorry, I forget the buzzword involved, ZRAM maybe?) which will allow them a more competitive cache/silicon ratio, but I odn't think this is due out until K8L.
Granted though, I'm amazed how well AMD's chips compare to the C2D's considering their aging design and lith process. A shift to 65nm will make them even more competitive, although C2D will still retain the performance king I think, at least until K8L.
In short - yay for competition! I don't think the CPU market has ever had so many great chips on offer for such low prices. But then I guess you can say that about pretty much everything in computing...
I don't mean to sound like I'm calling you a troll/FUDmongerer, but last time I used amarok (this morning, version 1.41) it supported all of those things. It's available from the amarok website as a package for all the major desktop distros. DAAP is a new addition, as is ATP. I can't vouch for DAAP since I don't use it but once I enabled ATP it worked just fine for me. Does DAAP use zeroconf?
I use the smart playlists thing constantly. They're fantastic.
My only gripes with amarok are the slowness with which it changes tracks when you're skipping through files randomly, and the time it takes to update the context browser. I'm not sure if this is just me however, since I use the inbuilt sqlite DB which is hosted on a rather slow software RAID1 array.
My music collection spans about 61GB and is about 12,000 files worth.
Disclaimer: I do not own an iPod. I also find amarok's interface *much* nicer to use than iTunes. I hate all the scrolling in iTunes, whereas in amarok I just type what I'm looking for and there it is - instantly.
Tell that to the parents of Jean Charles de Menezes. Shot seven times at point blank range in the face.
Half the details provided to the press were false - he wasn't wearing any odd clothing, he didn't have wires hanging out of a rucksack, he didn't jump the ticket barrier. He basically had the misfortune to be a foreigner in an increasingly xeonohpobic country that no longer seems to give a shit about civil rights.
And yet the police officers who shot the guy face no penalties, and the majority of the public here seem to be of the opinion that if gunning down the occasional innocent brown person is all it takes to stop terrorism, then that's fine. War is peace.
What can I say? The prospect of a new Debian stable gets me all in a tizzy and causes me to... er... maybe I've said too much already.
Too true. I remember thinking, six months after I bought my first computer, how easy it was to install Mandrake 8.2 as opposed to the windows 2000 reinstall I'd done the previous week. I was a complete computer n00b then, and I can't really believe that Linux hasn't become any easier to install since 2001.
According to the blurb from FTA, the graphical installer supports everything available in the regular curses installer, so yes, support for installing onto LVM and software RAID should work perfectly.
TBH I can't see what all the fuss is about. To my knowledge, Debian has never marketed itself as a general purpose distro for desktops a la Grandma Linux, it's always just been a damned stable system that's particularly suited to servers (it's utterly fantastic to do an apt-get dist upgrade and be 99% certain that nothing will go wrong). Last I heard, Debian were quite content for others to use this as a baseline to extend Debian into the user-friendly market, hence distros like Ubuntu.
Like I keep saying over and over again - there's a place for Debian, just like there's a place for Ubuntu. A corporate server farm doesn't need a GUI installer - they have one of their code-fu's do a single install and then roll out an image to 300 empty boxes via BOOTP. Someone rolling out Debian on the desktop at a company would do much the same thing. If you've wanted a pretty installer that'll make the process easier on the eye, Mandrake, RedHat and SuSE have been on the game for years. Do people decry LFS for not having a GUI installer?
Disclaimer: I like and use Debian at home and at work. I've never had any problems with the text mode installer, but likewise I've never had problems telling someone to use Ubuntu for their first distro rather than Debian. Different strokes.
£0.02
I'm glad someone else thinks this.
The fact that our democratically elected government are the ones trying to bring in all of these laws to erase our civil liberties and it's the priveliged Lords that actually make a stand for personal freedom is, to my mind, one of the strangest things in politics.
No wonder Tony and co. have been trying to castrate the House of Lords for the last decade as an "old fashioned, outdated bastion of the Old School Ties", despite the fact that these aging peers seem to have a clue what the House of Commons are actually trying to do.
I'm as much pro-democracy as the next man, but when the UK has to rely on a (primarily) hereditary system to look out for the gov giving itself infinite power, we should start worrying.
It reminds me a little of Zaphod Beeblebrox - the Lords are not elected, and therefore do not have to strive for votes. The MP's in the House of Commons however actually seek their posts instead of being born into them, and therefore must continually strive to retain their positions. Is this just another case of those who seek to posess power being the least capable of wielding it responsibly?
Can I interest you in a Lurker Trouser Press? Only £599, see page 94.
I can't speak for the parent, but both my HTPC's use the bundled remotes that came with the Hauppauge Nova-T (a DVB-T card). It's a great little remote and you can pick these cards up for less than £40 in the UK.
You can see a piccy of it here. I know for a fact that, at least with the DVB cards, Linux has full support for all their features. Use any modern kernel (the keycodes for some of the buttons weren't added until 2.6.13 or something IIRC), evdev and lirc and you're laughing.
I can't wait to have Explorer force me to view an ad for ten seconds before I can access the hard drive.
I already have to wait ten seconds for explorer to show me the hard drive, you insensitive clod!
On a more serious note, does anyone know if vista has saner explorer behaviour than its predecessors? I'm sick of having to wait for the CD drive to spin up before I can go into the hard drive.
It's not just the nerds being more Linux minded - AMD has, to some extent, bet the farm on the K8 being the king of the server room, since the entire core was designed from the off to be highly scalable across multiple CPU's. ANd now we're seeing that most of the big advances (new "enterprise" sockets, K8L stuff) are going to benefit the servers before they benefit Joe Public.
AMD knows that, whatever market share it has in the desktop arena, Linux is a major player in the HPC and 2P+ spaces and knows that Linux sysadmins won't tolerate buggy chipsets or flaky binary drivers that may end up being unsupported under kernel 2.8 or whatever. Hopefully AMD has the nouse to do an Intel and make their chipsets open spec across the board a la Intel, enabling excellent support under Linux and any other OS that happens to come along. I know for a fact that sometimes shoddy chipset support under Linux has been a turnoff for me in the past and I've lusted after some of Intel's chipsets on my own A64 systems.
True dat. I've always loved AMD's own line of chipsets - IME they're never the fastest out of the bunch, but they're always rock-solid stable and (naturally) are open spec and so work perfectly in Linux, often before release. Much like Intel and their chipsets in fact.
Contrast with ATI and nVidia chipsets (now that VIA, SiS and ULi are pretty much out of the market) - drivers are always binary blobs. True,you can generally run Linux on an nVidia chipset with open source drivers, even up to the reverse engineered ethernet controller, and suffer a negligible performance decrease over the nVidia code. But every account I've read of people trying to use recent ATI chipsets under Linux have been fraught with tales of lockups, appalling transfers speeds, hardware not functioning, clocks running way too fast, you name it. ATI's answer is "just re-install our driver after every kernel upgrade". Great.
I don't doubt that AMD are capable of running their own chipset division, but they're a much smaller company than Intel especially in terms of fab capacity and until recently were only just keeping up with demand. But will they even entertain the possibility of "enterprise" chipsets any more if they're taken over by our closed source overlords?
And before you bemoan me for bringing up the Linux argument "no-one uses Linux! AMD doesn't care! Open drivers can rot for all they care!" - I'll tell you now that they damn well do care. Opteron and servers are their fastest growing markets, and will most likely continue to be so long as theirs is the only x86 arch that scales to 4, 8 or more CPU's efficiently. Linux and other OSS OS' are a *very* big slice of this market. Maybe we'll be lucky and ATI will allow them to produce an open spec "enterprise" chipset with the exact same functionality as ATI's new UberGamer 733T-XL, only at twice the price of the closed spec part. Yippee.
Call me paranoid, but IMHO this merger (if it is indeed anything more than conjecture) could spell very bad things for AMD and I'm convinced we need AMD to stop Intel pulling another Netburst on us.
Of course, there's always th eossibility of ATI doing cool things like making a skt940 chip that acts as a dedicated H264 encoder or some such stuff, but since the specs are all open they could do that without taking over the company.
To sum up: is there any point to this merger from the customers perspective? Not that I can see. IMHO we don't have enough players in the CPU and GPU market as it is.
Samba has worked flawlessly with Microsoft's SMB implementation for years, and I can add linux to a windows domain, authenticate agains a Microsoft ADS and plugin to Microsft Exchange server with Evolution.
Really? I was under the impression that the public documentation for SMB was a) hugely out of date and b) wrong in many cases. Much of the hard work of projects like Samba has been done by painstaking packet sniffing and reverse engineering. Even now, Samba still can't act as an AD domain controller (unless you count the highly experimental samba 4). Why is this? Are the samba team lazy and stupid? Or maybe perhaps it's because figuring out what Windows 2003/CIFS is doing is damned hard...? We use Samba for a file server at work with AD, and it works great, but it has a *very* long way to go before I'd say it was compatible.
Same goes for Exchange - the protocols are poorly documented and obfuscated to hell and back, and pretty much the only way to get things to talk to it reliably is to use MS API's. Either that or you have to pony up dosh to have a peek at the protocol under a breathe-a-word-of-this-and-we-kill-you NDA. Why does Evolution even need a plugin? Why can't it talk to Exchange directly? I've been itching to dump Exchange at work but I just can't find a competing product that does what Exchange does without horrific things like Outlook plugins.
It's these secret formats and protocols that mean we can't apt-get install courier-exchange samba-ad_dc, and it's because of this hostility to developers of non-MS platforms that half of this case came about in the first place.
Disclaimer: I'm a Linux guy through and through, but I actually think MS can write some damned fine software when they want to. I just feel the company as a whole is evil.
Bingo, thanks for rooting that out for me. I do wish the eds would link to stuff like this instead of press releases the whole time...
10 years data retention with no power = incredible. Three out of four hard drives I've seen refuse to spin up if they're left spun down for more than five years, and consumer grade optical media is just as bad if not worse.
Anyhoo, glad to see MRAM out of the larval vapourware stage. The wikipedia page makes it sounds damned impressive.
Personally, I don't give a rats arse about bootup time.
What I do want, however, is good rewritable storage with NO MOVING PARTS! It'll make things like under-the-TV HTPC's much, much more feasible - you have a small ~10GB boot drive for the core OS components, and a big ol' hard drive that spends much of it's time spun down. On top of that, you could have almost instant resume from hibernate
Corporate users would also gain colossal benefits; I know that by far the most common failure I see at work is a dead or dying hard drive, which are a pain to replace in OEM machines which tend to be built so that only people with advanvced degrees it WTF Ergonomics and How To Wire Like A Spider On Drugs can open them. Replace that with a solid state unit with no moving parts and the problem is more or less instantly solved. Heck, depending on its overall reliabilty we might even be able to dump things like RAID in the mid to long term.
Does anyone have any non-fluff stuff about wha power consumption, max transfer and the like is? Since it's MRAM I expect that it'll only need to use power when reading or writing to disc, right? Hence I'd expect power usage to be practically zero - another huge boon for corporate users. Colossal possible bandwidth and low latency are the icing on the cake.
Disclaimer: I know little about MRAM other than what I've read in fluff pieces before. Time to visit Wikipedia...
Don't even boter with that. If they refuse to comply with the rulings, seize MS's European assets. All of a sudden all that IP laying in the EU domain becomes the property of the EU.
Whilst I'm not so totallly naive to assume that some folks in the Euro pariliament won't try and make a fast buck by flogging the IP to the highest bidders (who will, in turn, try and flog it so OSS projects for ridiculous fees), it would be enough to completely destablise MS's European market - which is, lest we forget, bigger and more profitable (IIRC) than that of the US.
As long as the EU still ahs the balls to follow this through to the bitter end, MS is in a lose-lose situation. It's just a question of which is the least worse scenario - 1) opening up their protocols, 2) losing the European market, or 3) paying a fortune in fines only to be forced to choose between 1) and 2) somewhere else down the line. And, lest we forget, 1) and 2) will both lead to colossal gains for alternative software *worldwide*.
UNIX has been a multi user OS since the year dot. I'm no computer historian, but it seems to me that every version of UNIX I've seen places system configs in /etc and user configs in ~/.appname (or localised equivalents). THis has been around for donkeys ages, with the result that pretty much any app written in the last 25 years knows to put user configs in ~/.appname, since filesystem permissions meant that users would either have to run everything as root (equivalent to telling a qmail admin that he has to convert to sendmail within a week - likely to result in an explosion), chmod -R 777 /etc or end up with unconfigurable programs.
By contrast, Windows only got the concept of multiple users circa a decade ago, and lack of coercion of third party devs by MS has still left a boatload of programs expecting to be able to write to Program Files, HKLM, c:\windows\system32 and all the rest of them. In recent years even some of MS's own products (there were a few games that would only run as admin IIRC) are guilty of said offence. Even Winamp only got multiuser support very recently. And there are still a million and one stupid shareware apps used by J Random User everywhere that haven't been updated since the days of 9x.
As an aside, does XP's legacy compatability option redirect any reads/writes from program files, HKLM, etc to user-writable areas? That would have seemed like th esensible thing to do.