I didn't know, at least until now. I guess I'll never forget.
Re:Yes, but why does Microsoft need a stand...
on
Linuxworld Fun
·
· Score: 1
I have tried to find out, what this stand really has to do with Linux. But seriously I still don't know. Can anybody give us just a single clue about the connection between Linux and this stand?
I did read the article, and the word Linux is not even used in the description of the stand. Sure the term LinuxWorld is obviously used a couple of times. M$ previous criticism of Linux is also mentioned, but I guess that is not what the stand is about. So what is it about?
There is a big fat warning on that page. But if you follow the link and read it, it might be too late. Trust me, it is for your own sake I post a copy of the warning here:
The goatse.cx lawyer has informed us that we need a warning! So.. if you are under the age of 18 or find this photograph offensive, please don't look at it. Thank you!
6 months: most MSIE users have the security update
1 year: most Linux/BSD users get around to updating
I can only think of one reason why most Linux users would wait that long: Very few of them is actually using Konqueror to connect to SSL sites. So those users have no need to upgrade and first get the fix when they are upgrading their complete distro anyway.
There is no reason to believe the avereage user of SSL under IE should upgrade faster than the avereage user of SSL under Konqueror.
I was able to get the page without pictures. That should be just enough to plug the actual text into google and find it in the cache. But the page apears not even to be know by google.
The text on the top of the page said:
A Teenage Apple IIgs Hacker's Notebook
For your very-retro high-school hacker amusement
but plug in enough of the words in google, and you will find nothing.
At first this does sound like a good idea, but systematically doing this might get/. into even more troubles than just linking to sites that just happens to not being able to handle the load.
We would be facing a situation where slashdot systematically uses googles resources for another purpose than what was googles intentions with those resources.
Creating a special/. cache would not introduce the same problem, but it could potentially be a copyright infrigement. (I don't know how google handles that.)
Just linking to the original site is not an attempt to perform a DoS attack./. is merely telling people that there is interesting stuff on that page. Unfortunately a lot of readers will not be able to see that interesting stuff, that is no way the intention of/., it would be nice if the servers were able to serve the pages to all the interested parties.
He did get somebody to explain it in the end.
Meanwhile he just used the fines he would have in his hand two seconds after saying any four letter words.
If they are going to invent two different names, why not make the computers slightly different too, just to avoid confusion. I'd like to see the OS free version come with a real serial port instead of some borken winmodem. (Honestly I don't know if this applies to Dell computers, but it surely does apply to a lot of other computers.)
The answer to that problem is a clever redundant coding of the data. I'd prefer something better than the CDs of today. Only problem is the amount of data you need to read and process to get access to your data.
One solution would be using a 16bit Reed-Solomon encoding. If we want at least a factor three in redundancy we can store every 42KB sector in 1Mbit. Those bits should then be spread over the entire media to prevent loosing too many of them due to a single scratch.
If they cannot do 16bit Reed-Solomon efficiently enough in hardware, another option would be 2D or 3D 8bit Reed-Solomon encoding. Currently CD's are using a 2D 8bit Reed-solomon encoding with only 25% of the capacity being used for redundancy.
Three and a half year ago I wrote to Apple telling them they seemed to have a problem with their mailing list. I got an automated reply telling my mail would be handled within two weeks. I'm waiting....
A good hardware design doesn't have to have any particular OS in mind. What Linux developers wants is not hardware designed with Linux in mind, but rather well documented well designed hardware.
A few small things to remember, that makes the difference between good and bad design are:
The ability to produce interrupts helpfull for the driver.
The ability to lift a little work from the CPU rather than puting unnecesarry load on the CPU.
In case any standards exists, read them and follow them.
Try to keep the interface simple.
Don't make wrong assumptions, that prevent the hardware from working together with other components.
Re:Serial Console (BIOS Redirection)
on
Cheap KVM Over IP?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If the bios already has a basic serial driver
All BIOSes has had that as long as I remember. (Which is more than 10 years.)
why not a specialized tcp/ip stack, vnc, and ethernet driver as well?
They are quite limited in the amount of code it has space for. Originally they could only keep at most 64KB. Today some are manufactured with more, but it can only be used during boot before loading the OS. When the OS gets loaded it switches to the small size, so all drivers must fit into 64KB to be available to the OS.
This is also not an area in which much development is going on. In the days of DOS, the drivers in the BIOS was actually being used all the way. But today every OS has its own drivers, the BIOS is only being used during boot. So as soon as the computer can boot and get the OS into memory, nobody really cares about the BIOS any more. The BIOS API used by DOS and loaders has changed very little in the last years. This API does not include networking, and it probably never will. It has been many years since a new device got available through this API, most changes are just to deal with development in already supported units. Today BIOSes does support harddisks larger than 504MB. The last new device that has been added support for in the BIOS is the ATAPI CDROM, but this is really only suitable for boot, and it actually didn't change the API, it merely emulates a floppy.
Wasn't there a project to put linux in the bios along with a primitive firewall?
Instead of being the 4th dimension, time could be the 5th dimension.
For some of that, there doesn't have to be more than 4 dimensions. The curving of space could happen in the time dimension, this just would require the curving only to change continuously over time, which seems quite reasonable. It might put some limitations to the geometrical structures of space, and I'm not sure if it would allow for wormholes, but it would still allow black holes to exist. The universe would be like a growing four dimensional ball with Big Bang in the middle at begining of time. Black holes would bend space backwards in time, all the way down to Big Bang. And the attraction in black holes could be coming from Big Bang itself which is presumably quite heavy. Anything entering a black hole could be traveling back in time to the very start of time, where they add to the mass that will in the past explode. (again?)
It might require quite some imagination to understand this, but it surely makes sense to me.
What if the worm accidentially crashes the host systems? It did happen on Nov. 2, 1988. Within a few hours most Sun and VAX systems on the internet was down!
Nice with a demo bootable straight off the CD and no need for using the HD. This can be used to show all this Window$ users, what Linux is without having them repartitioning their harddisk.
But there is a drawback. The CD is not a writable media, so the only writable storage this distribution has is RAM. This is bound to increase the need for RAM to more than what is the case with a HD install. Another problem is the performance, a CD is not as fast as a HD. The performance is going to be better on a HD. Some of the performance decrease can be circumvented by copying stuff to RAM, but this would increase the RAM usage and boot time. And probably you'd rather have the kernels caching handle this anyway.
No matter how they do it, we will have people trying this CD and saying: "Linux boots slower than the OS on my HD, Linux requires more ram than the OS on my HD, and Linux generally perform poor compared to the OS on my HD."
Some people might understand this, if the system on boot tells the user about this fact, but not everybody is going to understand it.
It has actually been that way since 2.5.4, but it is new to the 2.4 series. Now I gotta remember to change the script I use to extract the source and apply a ton of patches.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't know, at least until now. I guess I'll never forget.
I have tried to find out, what this stand really has to do with Linux. But seriously I still don't know. Can anybody give us just a single clue about the connection between Linux and this stand?
I did read the article, and the word Linux is not even used in the description of the stand. Sure the term LinuxWorld is obviously used a couple of times. M$ previous criticism of Linux is also mentioned, but I guess that is not what the stand is about. So what is it about?
There is a big fat warning on that page. But if you follow the link and read it, it might be too late. Trust me, it is for your own sake I post a copy of the warning here:
The goatse.cx lawyer has informed us that we need a warning! So.. if you are under the age of 18 or find this photograph offensive, please don't look at it. Thank you!
6 months: most MSIE users have the security update
1 year: most Linux/BSD users get around to updating
I can only think of one reason why most Linux users would wait that long: Very few of them is actually using Konqueror to connect to SSL sites. So those users have no need to upgrade and first get the fix when they are upgrading their complete distro anyway.
There is no reason to believe the avereage user of SSL under IE should upgrade faster than the avereage user of SSL under Konqueror.
or point to google's cache.
I was able to get the page without pictures. That should be just enough to plug the actual text into google and find it in the cache. But the page apears not even to be know by google.
The text on the top of the page said:
A Teenage Apple IIgs Hacker's Notebook
For your very-retro high-school hacker amusement
but plug in enough of the words in google, and you will find nothing.
or point to google's cache.
/. into even more troubles than just linking to sites that just happens to not being able to handle the load.
/. cache would not introduce the same problem, but it could potentially be a copyright infrigement. (I don't know how google handles that.)
/. is merely telling people that there is interesting stuff on that page. Unfortunately a lot of readers will not be able to see that interesting stuff, that is no way the intention of /., it would be nice if the servers were able to serve the pages to all the interested parties.
At first this does sound like a good idea, but systematically doing this might get
We would be facing a situation where slashdot systematically uses googles resources for another purpose than what was googles intentions with those resources.
Creating a special
Just linking to the original site is not an attempt to perform a DoS attack.
He never did figure it out.
He did get somebody to explain it in the end. Meanwhile he just used the fines he would have in his hand two seconds after saying any four letter words.
without the ability to retreat back to MicroSoft.
While this might worry some customers, it should worry M$ as well.
Sit and have things thrown at them?
They'd better be prepared for that.
If they are going to invent two different names, why not make the computers slightly different too, just to avoid confusion. I'd like to see the OS free version come with a real serial port instead of some borken winmodem. (Honestly I don't know if this applies to Dell computers, but it surely does apply to a lot of other computers.)
Does it come with a video camera and wireless video receiver?
:-)
If it did I'd be the next to mention my birthday comming up.
Just imagine if you scratched it
The answer to that problem is a clever redundant coding of the data. I'd prefer something better than the CDs of today. Only problem is the amount of data you need to read and process to get access to your data.
One solution would be using a 16bit Reed-Solomon encoding. If we want at least a factor three in redundancy we can store every 42KB sector in 1Mbit. Those bits should then be spread over the entire media to prevent loosing too many of them due to a single scratch.
If they cannot do 16bit Reed-Solomon efficiently enough in hardware, another option would be 2D or 3D 8bit Reed-Solomon encoding. Currently CD's are using a 2D 8bit Reed-solomon encoding with only 25% of the capacity being used for redundancy.
ever received spam from IBM?
No, but I have received spam from Apple and Sun.
Three and a half year ago I wrote to Apple telling them they seemed to have a problem with their mailing list. I got an automated reply telling my mail would be handled within two weeks. I'm waiting....
A few small things to remember, that makes the difference between good and bad design are:
If the bios already has a basic serial driver
All BIOSes has had that as long as I remember. (Which is more than 10 years.)
why not a specialized tcp/ip stack, vnc, and ethernet driver as well?
They are quite limited in the amount of code it has space for. Originally they could only keep at most 64KB. Today some are manufactured with more, but it can only be used during boot before loading the OS. When the OS gets loaded it switches to the small size, so all drivers must fit into 64KB to be available to the OS.
This is also not an area in which much development is going on. In the days of DOS, the drivers in the BIOS was actually being used all the way. But today every OS has its own drivers, the BIOS is only being used during boot. So as soon as the computer can boot and get the OS into memory, nobody really cares about the BIOS any more. The BIOS API used by DOS and loaders has changed very little in the last years. This API does not include networking, and it probably never will. It has been many years since a new device got available through this API, most changes are just to deal with development in already supported units. Today BIOSes does support harddisks larger than 504MB. The last new device that has been added support for in the BIOS is the ATAPI CDROM, but this is really only suitable for boot, and it actually didn't change the API, it merely emulates a floppy.
Wasn't there a project to put linux in the bios along with a primitive firewall?
Yes.
Instead of being the 4th dimension, time could be the 5th dimension.
For some of that, there doesn't have to be more than 4 dimensions. The curving of space could happen in the time dimension, this just would require the curving only to change continuously over time, which seems quite reasonable. It might put some limitations to the geometrical structures of space, and I'm not sure if it would allow for wormholes, but it would still allow black holes to exist. The universe would be like a growing four dimensional ball with Big Bang in the middle at begining of time. Black holes would bend space backwards in time, all the way down to Big Bang. And the attraction in black holes could be coming from Big Bang itself which is presumably quite heavy. Anything entering a black hole could be traveling back in time to the very start of time, where they add to the mass that will in the past explode. (again?)
It might require quite some imagination to understand this, but it surely makes sense to me.
What if the worm accidentially crashes the host systems? It did happen on Nov. 2, 1988. Within a few hours most Sun and VAX systems on the internet was down!
Gues who had an advertisement on the page when I saw it?
Nice with a demo bootable straight off the CD and no need for using the HD. This can be used to show all this Window$ users, what Linux is without having them repartitioning their harddisk.
But there is a drawback. The CD is not a writable media, so the only writable storage this distribution has is RAM. This is bound to increase the need for RAM to more than what is the case with a HD install. Another problem is the performance, a CD is not as fast as a HD. The performance is going to be better on a HD. Some of the performance decrease can be circumvented by copying stuff to RAM, but this would increase the RAM usage and boot time. And probably you'd rather have the kernels caching handle this anyway.
No matter how they do it, we will have people trying this CD and saying: "Linux boots slower than the OS on my HD, Linux requires more ram than the OS on my HD, and Linux generally perform poor compared to the OS on my HD."
Some people might understand this, if the system on boot tells the user about this fact, but not everybody is going to understand it.
Seriously, when do you envision fiber to the home?
Maybe 5 years, maybe 10 years, who knows? Only time will show, but it will come, unless something even better is invented.
It has actually been that way since 2.5.4, but it is new to the 2.4 series. Now I gotta remember to change the script I use to extract the source and apply a ton of patches.
If you outlaw spam. Only criminals will have spam?!
Gotta be somebody else's problem.
GNU/EULA
Something is wrong here. GNU GPL is not aimed at end users, in fact end users are explicitly not covered by GNU GPL.
also abbreviated GNULA.
That is better, at least we got the end out of it.