Too many applications are hemmorraging memory... Too many applications are just plain huge... Too many applications do plain stupid things... Too many applications link against libraries they don't even use
It appears you're confusing "applications" with "Linux." Please report to your nearest Richard M. Stallman Freedom Facility for re-education.
This is (mostly) fixable, if we just buckle down and realize we have a problem that needs to be fixed.
I'm sure the projects you mentioned would happily accept well-written patches to reduce their startup times and memory footprints.
You're right, politics are the last thing licenses should contain.
Anyone else find it ironic that this "Hacktivismo" outfit promotes "privacy" yet is a part of Cult of the Dead Cow, the fine folks that unleashed BackOrifice upon the world? (Anyone who believes BackOrifice was an "educational tool" or the like can go stand in the corner with the group of loons that think Napster was only used to distribute public domain works and was just misunderstood by the world...)
Or are they using the "the government can screw off while I try to break into your computers" definition of "privacy"?
A Pentium 100 with 64 megs of RAM draped around a frickin' Christmas tree is handling the Slashdot effect where many other sites running on much beefier hardware have failed. Cripes.
The AOL Instant Messenger sounds echoing through the halls, competing for airtime with ICQ's "uhoh." MP3s blaring through speakers with four inch "subwoofers." Limewire icons in everyone's system tray. The idiot downstairs running a packet sniffer and harvesting usernames/passwords because the entire building's on the same Ethernet segment. (Thank $DEITY for ssh.) The idiot upstairs running an FTP server stocked with warez, porn, and MP3s.
I know a bit about geeky 15-year-olds; I've written a book and a number of articles about them.
That's like saying the media knows how the Internet works because they've done stories about how Internet users are nothing but a group of porn-pushing child predators who pirate software and music on the side. We've all seen examples of how that works...
On the other hand, I'm glad to see you only need to know "a bit" about a subject to write a book about it.
Yes, this project shows that idle computer time can be used to tackle complex problems, but when will we see idle computer time used to tackle problems that will result in a significant advancement of one sort or another? Knowing the x'th binary digit of pi is no more than a novelty -- nobody's sitting at NASA going, "Damn, I'm glad those people found that the four quadrillionth binary digit of pi is zero!"
Unfortunately, many of the distributed projects on the Internet are similarly useless. The RSA challenges at distributed.net are particularly useless given that the money wasted to power the computers participating FAR exceeds the prize money. No new advancements are being made, aside from the programmers possibly learning more about optimization for a particular CPU (but even this could be done without dragging thousands of computers into it).
When my spare processor time can be used to help find a cure for cancer, replenish the O-zone, or clean polluted waters, let me know.
Going along with the Toy Story naming scheme, when can we expect the "Stinky Pete" release? (Say what you will about "Stinky Pete," but "Woody" is a release name only a pervert could love...)
I can't comment on LinuxFest 2000 since I didn't attend. Indeed, I didn't even know it was happening.
Obviously, something happened that made LinuxFest a bust. Location? Possibly. Organization (or lack thereof)? Probably. Lack of advertising? I'd say so. But condemning all Linux shows to failure because LinuxFest bombed is silly. People so far have posted comments to the effect of, "There are too many Linux shows!" I don't think that's the problem, however. The 1999 Atlanta Linux Showcase was a huge success, even though the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo drew more fanfare. The ALS was incredibly well-organized, and I'm sure most of the people that attended are planning to come again this year.
Others have suggested folding the Linux trade shows into Comdex or the other big PC trade shows. That's fine, but then you make it difficult or impossible for the "average Joe" without a company expense account to attend.
At the most recent Atlanta Linux Showcase, the LinuxCare folks tossed one of their business-card sized recovery CDs in my bag. (Gotta love freebies.) After the initial guffawing over its size (the usable data area on the CD is only about 3/8" across), I popped it in one of my machines at home and rebooted. It turns out there's only around 32 megs of stuff on the CD, but it's enough to make a pretty usable recovery CD. (For comparison, tomsrtbt crams everything on a specially-formatted 3.5" high-density floppy.)
One problem I had with the CD is that its size and shape makes it prone to "falling through the drive tray" when I use it in one of my SCSI CD-ROM drives. It's just small enough to slide through the slot in the back of the tray if the CD stops spinning at just the right position.
I've been carrying the CD around in my bookbag and using it on campus lab machines. When I need to ssh somewhere, I reboot the machine with the LinuxCare CD in it, run dhcpcd, run the ssh installation script (which pulls a.deb of ssh from a foreign server and installs it on the ramdrive), and ssh as usual.
As for availability, I doubt you'll find these things outside of computer shows. (Why not start a project to create a similar recovery CD?) As for its shape, look at www.shapecd.com for all the weird shapes you can have CDs cut. As for size, it's only slightly taller than a business card but not as wide.
Re:Why is LISP superior?
on
RMS The Coder
·
· Score: 1
I would suggest actuallty trying to write some code in raw Scheme, not emacs LISP, that does some sort of interesting data structure manipulation, preferably recursively. Maybe pick up a copy of SICP, The Little Schemer or The Seasoned Schemer.
Remove LILO. To remove the LILO, type fdisk/mbr at the command prompt, and then press ENTER.
Well, no. Since you booted from a Linux disk, assuming that you did that from the shell, you'd get:
# fdisk/mbr
Unable to open/mbr
I found the above error most distressing after reading the Microsoft document.
In my Technical Writing course at Western Carolina University (not exactly an academic mecca), "test, test, test again, make someone else test it, test it some more" was drilled into our heads when dealing with step-by-step documents we had written.
Nevermind the lack of research before writing the document -- it's obvious that Microsoft didn't even test their own procedure!
I've found that zsh's usefulness outweighs any excessive memory usage it may have. Little things like being able to change directories without using cd make it almost unbearable to go back to bash or [t]csh.
After surviving an afternoon at the show floor of the Atlanta Linux Showcase, I figured this would be as good a place as any to post a few thoughts about what I saw...
THE GOOD
LinuxCare's little bootable Linux recovery CD kicks ass. No bigger than a business card, it fits in the 3" diameter groove in CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive trays and has the potential to save your butt when lilo eats itself. They also had some Linux stickers that now adorn the case of my 386... (Yes, it runs Linux.)
IBM had a presence. Although certainly not the largest or flashiest booth in the show, Quake 3 on a rather large plasma display attracted lots of attention. Dual PII-400 Intellistation + Voodoo 3 3000 + large plasma display. Mmmmmm. Thanks to the guys there for letting me get some game time on that mammoth thang...
O'Reilly also had a presence, and their trade show pricing kicks much booty. Picked up a few books for 20% off list and got a shirt to boot...
Mad props to VA Linux Systems for not only having a cool booth and giving away lots of stuff but for supplying the machines used for public Internet access. Their Debian boxed set is pretty cool and sports Learning Debian GNU/Linux from O'Reilly. (Yes, I was one of the people who stood around in line for ten or fifteen minutes to win this...)
Thanks to the Sun and Rave Systems folks for all the free stuff. Learn to play Quake 2 without cheating before next year's show...:-) (Now where's my complimentary Sparc 5?)
THE BAD
None of the shirts I got fit. None. Zero. Zip. Zilch. I'm 6-foot-3-inches tall and weigh 295 pounds. Show me the big-assed shirts!
The IBM guys told me that the Showcase had a T-1 connection to the 'Net. I couldn't verify -- the packet loss and latency was horrible on the connection. I'm hoping this is only because lots of geeks were pounding on the connection like a pack of wild monkeys...
Food choices were few, and lines were long. Within the Galleria, your choices were Subway, some cafe whose name I don't remember, Ruby Tuesday's, and Chick-Fil-A. If you were bold, you could go to the movie theater downstairs and buy a big tub of popcorn. The group I was with walked across the street to another mall and ate at Arby's. Yum... I think.
THE UGLY
Where the hell were the Slackware people? I wanted Slackware apparel... Hmmph.
Linux merchandise places came out of the woodworks to hock their goods. Yay capitalism...
Don't eat at Shoney's. Our group waited over an hour for food before giving up and leaving.
THE REST
The andover.net/freshmeat.net/slashdot.org booth was smack dab next to the linux.com booth. Taken together, it looked like one big congregation of slackers with laptops. All things considered, however, I wouldn't have minded flopping down on the couch for a rest after walking around for a few hours...
I will seek revenge against the guy in the Debian shirt who shot me in the arm with a Nerf dart... muahahahaha
The Debian folks had a Sun Ultra 5 running XaoS, Netscape, and some Tetris clone in separate windows. Just for kicks, I maximized the XaoS window. Can we say slideshow?
I had nothing interesting enough to trade with the lady at the VA Linux booth, so I didn't get one of those nifty enlightenment shirts. Dammit.
Overall, it was a pretty cool show, but I wish I didn't have the 2-1/2 hour drive. It was put on very professionally and appeared to be very well organized. I was only slightly disappointed that the show wasn't any bigger... The nifty canvas bag attendees got and the included CD made up for that, though.
If you're into the hurricane stuff, check out the homepage of the local (to Wilmington, NC, USA) NBC affiliate, WECT. They link to three area webcams: one on the Wilmington waterfront and two at Wrightsville Beach. (Click the "WECT live cams" link.)
All I've got to say is that I'm glad I'm at college in the mountains and not at home in Wilmington...
Must we go through this entire discussion of seti vs rc5 vs something else more useful yet again?
Isn't re-hashing these stale arguments a waste of cpu/bandwidth/time also?
I don't really care what people do with their computers (unless it affects me or my computer), but it scares me to think of all the people now leaving their computers on all the time just to run the RC5 client, SETI client, Mersenne prime client, etc.
Running it on a machine that stays up 24/7 anyway? Hey, great, all the power to ya.
Running it on your home computer that normally gets one hour of use a day? Blah... Turn that thing off when you're not using it and save some money on your electric bill.
Still, the hacked client thing is a bit of a problem. How do you tell whether the client at the other end of a net connection is legit? Too hard for me, Jimmy.
Trust is an important thing in distributed computing efforts. Without trust in the computers (and their operators) used in the effort, your results may be invalid.
In the case of Internet-wide computing efforts, most projects are of the needle-in-a-haystack variety. The server sends the client a portion of the haystack to check, and the client returns whether it found what was being sought in its portion of the stack. If the client returns a positive response (meaning it found what it was looking for), the server can usually quickly verify whether the client is telling the truth or not. This makes the risk of false positives near-zero.
On the other hand, the risk of false negatives is huge. If a rogue client (or hardware malfunction) returns a negative response for the portion of the haystack it was given, the server usually cannot verify that the results were indeed negative. By doing so, it would duplicate all of the client's work -- it mightaswell have done the work itself in the first place. The risk of false negatives is huge, meaning you may miss that needle in the haystack.
If you want 100% accuracy, you want 100% trusted machines running 100% trusted programs. The general populous of the Internet just doesn't fit the bill...
I bought the Logitech Cordless Desktop back in December 1998. Got it back to the dorm, unpacked the box, plugged it in, installed the NT drivers, and away I went. Three days later, I turned my machine on and found the mouse was dead. I changed batteries, mashed the Connect button more than I probably should have, and ultimately got frustrated. One of my friends had an older version of the Cordless Desktop, so I borrowed his wireless mouse. It worked with my receiver. I then took my mouse to his receiver -- no dice.
Off to the store for a return...
So, I return it, find I had bought the last one three days earlier, get a refund, and buy another from a different store.
Get it back to my room, plug it all up, everything's peachy. Three months later in March, the mouse goes dead. Same situation -- my friend's mouse works on my receiver, but my mouse doesn't work on his receiver (or mine, of course). Since it was way past the time period I could've returned the stuff to the store, I'd have to deal with Logitech directly. Great. I still haven't contacted them about warranty service... Anyway, enough of that. Some important things to note about the Cordless Desktop:
It eats batteries for lunch. Don't even think about using rechargable NiCad AA batteries -- they last me a whopping two or three days between charges.
Keys randomly "stick," which makes playing Quake or any other game that uses the keyboard hell.
It sometimes eats keystrokes, especially when the batteries are low.
If the batteries start dying and you don't have spare batteries, you're screwed. I had my keyboard die while I was finishing off a rather lengthy English paper at 3:30am, and I ended up having to plug my roommate's keyboard into my computer so I could finish it.
I will admit, though, that the Logitech cordless stuff is a thousand times better than the infrared-based wireless crap. With the Cordless Desktop, you don't need line-of-sight to the receiver or anything, and I get a good nine foot range with it. (Expect a range of just under three meters outside of the US...)
As for checking the battery levels with Linux or a non-Windows OS: The receiver has four LEDs on it. The standard caps/num/scroll lock LEDs and a "Connected" LED. When the battery level in an "attached" device gets low, the Connected LED will start blinking. While it would certainly be nicer to have a program to graphically show the battery levels like the Mouse/Keyboard Control Panels in Windows, at least the flashing Connected LED will tell you when batteries are low...
Slashdot Mirror
It appears you're confusing "applications" with "Linux." Please report to your nearest Richard M. Stallman Freedom Facility for re-education.
I'm sure the projects you mentioned would happily accept well-written patches to reduce their startup times and memory footprints.
You're right, politics are the last thing licenses should contain.
Anyone else find it ironic that this "Hacktivismo" outfit promotes "privacy" yet is a part of Cult of the Dead Cow, the fine folks that unleashed BackOrifice upon the world? (Anyone who believes BackOrifice was an "educational tool" or the like can go stand in the corner with the group of loons that think Napster was only used to distribute public domain works and was just misunderstood by the world...)
Or are they using the "the government can screw off while I try to break into your computers" definition of "privacy"?
Wow, I can become eternally young using just magnets and duct tape? Rednecks everywhere rejoice!
A Pentium 100 with 64 megs of RAM draped around a frickin' Christmas tree is handling the Slashdot effect where many other sites running on much beefier hardware have failed. Cripes.
Make a half sarcastic, half joking comment and get moderated down to "-1, Troll" within 90 seconds. Gotta love slashdot's crack team of moderators...
...that Google won't have "f1rst postz!!!!11" and trolls.
The AOL Instant Messenger sounds echoing through the halls, competing for airtime with ICQ's "uhoh." MP3s blaring through speakers with four inch "subwoofers." Limewire icons in everyone's system tray. The idiot downstairs running a packet sniffer and harvesting usernames/passwords because the entire building's on the same Ethernet segment. (Thank $DEITY for ssh.) The idiot upstairs running an FTP server stocked with warez, porn, and MP3s.
I'll miss college so. (Hah!)
On the other hand, I'm glad to see you only need to know "a bit" about a subject to write a book about it.
I'm surprised slashdot ran the story considering the guy has patents on it. Intellectual property, patents, evil, un-American, blah blah blah, etc.
These post-modernistic bathroom stall scrawlings have got to stop... Can't you folks go back to unobtrusive, one-line trolls?
"Doh! What the hell were we thinking?" an anonymous Akamai executive told reporters.
Couldn't they have had someone edit their phony press release before throwing it on a Web site?
Wait, who am I kidding? Editing and Web site in the same sentence? hahahaha
Unfortunately, many of the distributed projects on the Internet are similarly useless. The RSA challenges at distributed.net are particularly useless given that the money wasted to power the computers participating FAR exceeds the prize money. No new advancements are being made, aside from the programmers possibly learning more about optimization for a particular CPU (but even this could be done without dragging thousands of computers into it).
When my spare processor time can be used to help find a cure for cancer, replenish the O-zone, or clean polluted waters, let me know.
Going along with the Toy Story naming scheme, when can we expect the "Stinky Pete" release? (Say what you will about "Stinky Pete," but "Woody" is a release name only a pervert could love...)
I can't comment on LinuxFest 2000 since I didn't attend. Indeed, I didn't even know it was happening.
Obviously, something happened that made LinuxFest a bust. Location? Possibly. Organization (or lack thereof)? Probably. Lack of advertising? I'd say so. But condemning all Linux shows to failure because LinuxFest bombed is silly. People so far have posted comments to the effect of, "There are too many Linux shows!" I don't think that's the problem, however. The 1999 Atlanta Linux Showcase was a huge success, even though the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo drew more fanfare. The ALS was incredibly well-organized, and I'm sure most of the people that attended are planning to come again this year.
Others have suggested folding the Linux trade shows into Comdex or the other big PC trade shows. That's fine, but then you make it difficult or impossible for the "average Joe" without a company expense account to attend.
One problem I had with the CD is that its size and shape makes it prone to "falling through the drive tray" when I use it in one of my SCSI CD-ROM drives. It's just small enough to slide through the slot in the back of the tray if the CD stops spinning at just the right position.
I've been carrying the CD around in my bookbag and using it on campus lab machines. When I need to ssh somewhere, I reboot the machine with the LinuxCare CD in it, run dhcpcd, run the ssh installation script (which pulls a .deb of ssh from a foreign server and installs it on the ramdrive), and ssh as usual.
As for availability, I doubt you'll find these things outside of computer shows. (Why not start a project to create a similar recovery CD?) As for its shape, look at www.shapecd.com for all the weird shapes you can have CDs cut. As for size, it's only slightly taller than a business card but not as wide.
In my Technical Writing course at Western Carolina University (not exactly an academic mecca), "test, test, test again, make someone else test it, test it some more" was drilled into our heads when dealing with step-by-step documents we had written.
Nevermind the lack of research before writing the document -- it's obvious that Microsoft didn't even test their own procedure!
63132 /bin/ash /bin/bash /bin/ksh /bin/tcsh /bin/zsh
373176
166544
262184
340548
(executable sizes)
According to ps, memory usage among tcsh/bash/zsh is pretty close. ksh and ash have considerably smaller footprints.
rwg 17543 0.0 0.1 1116 372 pts/7 S 01:14 0:00 ash
rwg 17544 0.0 0.3 1680 896 pts/7 S 01:14 0:00 bash
rwg 17545 0.0 0.1 1236 488 pts/7 S 01:14 0:00 ksh
rwg 17546 0.0 0.4 1948 1068 pts/7 S 01:14 0:00 -csh
rwg 17626 1.0 0.3 1700 956 pts/7 S 01:15 0:00 zsh
I've found that zsh's usefulness outweighs any excessive memory usage it may have. Little things like being able to change directories without using cd make it almost unbearable to go back to bash or [t]csh.
THE GOOD
THE BAD
THE UGLY
THE REST
Overall, it was a pretty cool show, but I wish I didn't have the 2-1/2 hour drive. It was put on very professionally and appeared to be very well organized. I was only slightly disappointed that the show wasn't any bigger... The nifty canvas bag attendees got and the included CD made up for that, though.
All I've got to say is that I'm glad I'm at college in the mountains and not at home in Wilmington...
I don't really care what people do with their computers (unless it affects me or my computer), but it scares me to think of all the people now leaving their computers on all the time just to run the RC5 client, SETI client, Mersenne prime client, etc.
Running it on a machine that stays up 24/7 anyway? Hey, great, all the power to ya.
Running it on your home computer that normally gets one hour of use a day? Blah... Turn that thing off when you're not using it and save some money on your electric bill.
Trust is an important thing in distributed computing efforts. Without trust in the computers (and their operators) used in the effort, your results may be invalid.
In the case of Internet-wide computing efforts, most projects are of the needle-in-a-haystack variety. The server sends the client a portion of the haystack to check, and the client returns whether it found what was being sought in its portion of the stack. If the client returns a positive response (meaning it found what it was looking for), the server can usually quickly verify whether the client is telling the truth or not. This makes the risk of false positives near-zero.
On the other hand, the risk of false negatives is huge. If a rogue client (or hardware malfunction) returns a negative response for the portion of the haystack it was given, the server usually cannot verify that the results were indeed negative. By doing so, it would duplicate all of the client's work -- it mightaswell have done the work itself in the first place. The risk of false negatives is huge, meaning you may miss that needle in the haystack.
If you want 100% accuracy, you want 100% trusted machines running 100% trusted programs. The general populous of the Internet just doesn't fit the bill...
Here's my Cordless Desktop story:
I bought the Logitech Cordless Desktop back in December 1998. Got it back to the dorm, unpacked the box, plugged it in, installed the NT drivers, and away I went. Three days later, I turned my machine on and found the mouse was dead. I changed batteries, mashed the Connect button more than I probably should have, and ultimately got frustrated. One of my friends had an older version of the Cordless Desktop, so I borrowed his wireless mouse. It worked with my receiver. I then took my mouse to his receiver -- no dice.
Off to the store for a return...
So, I return it, find I had bought the last one three days earlier, get a refund, and buy another from a different store.
Get it back to my room, plug it all up, everything's peachy. Three months later in March, the mouse goes dead. Same situation -- my friend's mouse works on my receiver, but my mouse doesn't work on his receiver (or mine, of course). Since it was way past the time period I could've returned the stuff to the store, I'd have to deal with Logitech directly. Great. I still haven't contacted them about warranty service... Anyway, enough of that. Some important things to note about the Cordless Desktop:
- It eats batteries for lunch. Don't even think about using rechargable NiCad AA batteries -- they last me a whopping two or three days between charges.
- Keys randomly "stick," which makes playing Quake or any other game that uses the keyboard hell.
- It sometimes eats keystrokes, especially when the batteries are low.
- If the batteries start dying and you don't have spare batteries, you're screwed. I had my keyboard die while I was finishing off a rather lengthy English paper at 3:30am, and I ended up having to plug my roommate's keyboard into my computer so I could finish it.
- I will admit, though, that the Logitech cordless stuff is a thousand times better than the infrared-based wireless crap. With the Cordless Desktop, you don't need line-of-sight to the receiver or anything, and I get a good nine foot range with it. (Expect a range of just under three meters outside of the US...)
As for checking the battery levels with Linux or a non-Windows OS: The receiver has four LEDs on it. The standard caps/num/scroll lock LEDs and a "Connected" LED. When the battery level in an "attached" device gets low, the Connected LED will start blinking. While it would certainly be nicer to have a program to graphically show the battery levels like the Mouse/Keyboard Control Panels in Windows, at least the flashing Connected LED will tell you when batteries are low...