After reading this article, I would rather just set up a standard Slackware system and put in IceWM myself instead of getting a bunch of defaulted KDE cruft. I can't imagine trying out a distribution meant for slow computers on one of my 486's only to find the stupid distro trying to run KDE.
The machines that Vector Linux is supposed to be targetted at are precisely the ones that cannot run KDE or Gnome. What makes this distribution worth anyone's time?
Whatever language they decide for or against, the key to this movie is going to be in the settings and culture of the people. Anglo-Saxon art and ideas are very captivating, and if the directors use this well, they could make a very good movie. If they do not, we will probably end up with another ridiculous movie like Troy.
On a side note, Rohan from the Lord of the Rings books/movies is based on Anglo-Saxon culture. In fact, the Theoden character takes his name from a character in Beowulf, (Th)eoden. Tolkien resented the Norman invasion, and believed that it had destroyed Anglo-Saxon culture. I think that this is reflected in Rohan (Anglo-Saxon) and Gondor (post-Norman), and their roles in the books.
I'm 19, and I used a rotary phone for probably ten years growing up. I'm sure a lot of Slashdotters have if they moved into an older home. The only real drawback to the phones is that there is no way to punch in numbers after connecting. When you hear "Press 1 to...", the phones cannot handle doing that.
I have fond memories of rotary phones, though. The satisfying click click click, the durable construction; they come from a time before phones were $10 pieces of junk. It's the same reason why so many programmers like the IBM Model-M keyboards.
This movie may actually be good, but only if they get away from the same ho-hum material that they used so frequently toward the end of the run (and in the first movie). The same vast alien conspiracy story involving the cigarette-smoking man has been beaten to death. I stopped watching the show because I couldn't deal with the fact that there was no variety.
Part of the thing that made the X-Files nice during the first few seasons was that there was always a new mystery, and a new setting. Most episodes had nothing to do with an alien conspiracy, but rather some other totally unrelated investigation. When the show got away from the ongoing conspiracy storyline and did something new, it was really great.
After all, the X-Files was created to look into unexplained phenomena. Not just little green men.
P.S. Bring back the original suspense! The first movie had no atmosphere!
I do mean NAT/hardware firewall/router thingy. And, yeah, my point was that there are enough unprotected boxes out there that it doesn't make sense to hack through said NAT/firewall device, unless there was sure to be something tempting on the other side, in much the same way that having a deadbolt will protect you from most home breakins.
Yes, but those "thingies" are usually bought by clueless users who have never even changed the default admin password. I would estimate that at least 50% of all home hardware routers out there are running 100% default settings. How's that for secure?
Wouldn't it be nice to carry around a specialized laptop that could act as both a portable display and input device? Does something like this currently exist?
Ah, but it does. Serial Terminal Linux is an ultra minimalist floppy distro that boots up as a serial terminal. You don't have to install a thing, and it will give you easy connectivity because it automatically boots into minicom on one virtual console per serial port.
fake ID's can be low or high cost, depending usually on how good they are. ID's that require holograms, for example, can easily cost $80.
Usually, though, a more professional fake ID is a waste of money. A piece of paper printed off from an inkjet printer and stuck in front of a real ID is fine for almost anything, as long as you aren't required to pull out the ID from your wallet.
If you don't believe me about the printed piece of paper, try using a scanner, editing some of the information in Photoshop or the Gimp. Print it out and put it in front of your usual ID in your wallet. Now try buying beer, getting into bars, etc.
Anyone who has visited Mini-ITX.com has seen this sort of thing many times before. For me this is just another clever mod, and certainly not Slashdot material. In fact, there are better Mini-ITX mods out there. There are ones that are done better, ones that look better, and ones that have better functionality.
Please, Slashdot gods, save the "Oh my god, they put a Mini-ITX board in a [insert object x here]" posts for some other site. If I want to see this sort of thing, I'll go to the site mentioned above.
Who actually plays games and burns DVDs at the same time anyway? You'd have to be some sort of moron. It doesn't matter how many processors ( or processor cores ) you have, if the OS can't allocate sufficient resources to your burning task, you'll make a coaster. I can think of *many* games that seem to lock the system for a couple of seconds while changing from one mode to another, switching to the next level, bringing up an info screen, etc. The in-game music will pause for a couple of seconds, and the screen will also occasionally pause. If you're playing an mp3, that will pause too. And this is all on decent hardware, but it's always been like this.
I am a moron by your definition because I just made a full system backup to DVD's while playing emulated PlayStation games muted, and listening to an MP3. The games didn't skip frames, and neither did the music. I had Firefox, Thunderbird, and 4 xterm's open on other workspaces. This is with an Athlon 2500, 512MB RAM, and an 8× DVD burner.
Maybe the problem is a bloated operating system running bloated programs, and not that a CPU cannot handle two functions at the same time. Of course, people will continue to upgrade Windows and their applications as they upgrade to new CPU's, and the same poor situation will continue...
Ah, the usual Slashdot "Eh, why don't they just use a dozen awk scripts and sed filters, glued together with some perl programs?"
These same people always seem to express endless frustration when people stay on Windows or Mac instead of Linux. And why shouldn't they when the sort of software they rely on isn't available?
I'm happy on Debian or Slackware writing my own PHP, but I'm the first to admit that this is not for the average folks. There are a lot of web developers who are more "web designers" (these people were often art majors, and don't know a lick of HTML) who focus on artistic design, and for them a WYSIWYG editor is a must.
8700 packages for Debian GNU/Linux? Great. New installer? Nice. If I buy a small server, though, I can't even get a stable version that ships with SATA support. Debian may be a wonderful community project, but it is becoming too bloated to move forward like it used to.
Only the minimal low-level core of the system should be based on C ; the rest should be developed in a modern, high-level language.
I agree entirely with you, but the design of *nix could hold that idea back. It is not a very hierarchical system, meaning that deciding which system programs should be written in C would prove very difficult. For instance, a *nix program such as true would be silly to not program in C. However, what about a robust GNU program such as bash?
I have settled on the idea that at least graphical user-level applications should be programmed in a safer language. In addition, the number of system utilities should not be superfluous, and systems should have safe, minimalist defaults.
"You're just a young kid. What are you doin' here? You oughta be out in a convertible, why...bird-doggin' chicks and bangin' beaver. What are ya doin' here, for Christ's sake?"
On a side note, how many kids are going to start learning C just for the heck of it? Most (normal) kids won't even understand why they would want to.
Being a recent high school graduate, what usually worked at my school was encouraging kids to take computer courses in networking and programming by showcasing some of our work.
Re:Quique: NetBSD 2.0 Released
on
NetBSD 2.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's sort of ironic that a story about a dead operating system was submitted by someone with whose user name comes from a dead language...
Is it? Maybe I'm not laughing because I just don't understand the constant need to disrespect everyone else's favorite Linux/BSD distro.
For many architectures there is no other modern operating system available, let alone a powerful open source Unix-like system. I think that NetBSD, although it has a relatively small user base, plays an important part in the open source community in this respect. Can't we all appreciate the fact that such a ported and portable open source operating system like NetBSD exists?
I wonder what sort of insecurities you have about your own operating system fuel your need to trash a such a benign project.
Also, I ask you this-- In my junior and senior engineering courses why in the world should I be forced to work out the time consuming calculus or algebra part by hand when that's not even the concept being taught? It wastes my time, and the instructor's time, and greatly increases the chance of missing an answer due to a mistake somewhere.
As soon as you stop doing math by hand, you will gradually forget basic concepts. I struggled through math in high school until I ditched my calculator. Even though I could use my calculator to get answers, I really did not understand what it was that I was doing. As a result, story problems in particular were very difficult. Without real concepts behind mathematics, it loses its practical meaning.
When I began taking Calculus courses, I heard repeatedly from my professors that more errors in calculus problems are really algebra mistakes. I ditched my calculator as a result of hearing that. As I did work by hand, I began to re-learn the algebra and trigonometry that I had forgotten.
Perhaps a calculator will not hurt you in the short run, but in a few years will you remember the things that you are skipping over now?
However, I think that for Joe Regular to buy it, it would perhaps need to be a *little* cheaper - US $5,000 or so.
Please, I've been living in a cardboard house for years. It's not as big or fancy as this one, but it didn't cost me anything either. The trick is to watch for the really nice refrigerator and television boxes. A utility knife and duct tape is all you need to make a beautiful home.
It's amazing what people will do for a buck. Give me a few refrigerator boxes and a utility knife, and I could build you a cardboard castle for $35,000.
They very well may not market them using the IBM name and logo, but rather simply market them as IBM's desktop solution. After all, IBM did scrapped its NetVista thin client line and started selling thin clients from Neoware. It's been done before.
I wonder, since the only place left for Intel chips at IBM will likely be in low-end servers, will IBM create a low-end PowerPC chip to compete with Wintel at some point?
We all got agendas, Bunky. I have one. America and Iran have one.
Yes, but America has put Iran into the agenda that it is in right now. By helping install the Shah as an American-friendly dictator, we alienated the Iranian people. When they rose up in a peaceful revolution, we condemned it and put sanctions on their country.
You clearly have one.
You are right, but it isn't political in nature. My agenda is applying basic ethical guidelines to what I see in the world. You seem incapable of doing that, as you compare an American-placed administration with the current Iranian government. Where do the thousands of lives that would be lost fit into all of this? Where would the ravaged cities come into place?
So much of the problematic relationship that we have with many Middle Easterners stems from the foreign policy decisions we have made in Lebanon, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Contrary to what George Bush says, they do not hate us because we "love freedom" or because we are westerners or Christians. They hate us because we have injured their countries in very real and tangible ways with our foreign policy decisions during the Cold War.
P.S. I don't care what is popular or not. I will never support invasions by, as you call them, "right-wing lunatics" who have nuclear weapons. When we do that, we end up invading a country for no real reason, with estimates of up to 100,000 indigenous people dead and over 1000 of our own troops dead.
In the short term that may be a good thing, but in the long term it means that the United States is even more powerful militarily than it has been before. Will technology like this make America more bold? Would attacking other countries such as Iran be an easier choice to make without the threat of American casualties to sway the public?
Nobody wants to see more people die in war, but even fewer want to see a lone superpower with even less hesitancy to enforce its agenda around the world. In the end, things like this could cause more deaths than they save.
That's OK. You'll soon be able to choose Linux or Solaris (x86, AMD64 or SPARC) to run JDS upon.
And my quote will still be valid, that JDS will most almost certainly not stray far from Sun customers, as Sun does not have a great history of marketing operating systems on x86.
In regard to your citing of a "community response" written by a single admittedly-tired nerd, I don't think many people other than yourself are interested in hearing one more geek bitch about an exec trashing the opposing company's Unix.
This may not be a big step for Linux as a whole, but it is a huge step toward a Linux that is viable for corporate desktop users. In the past, Linux vendors seemed to believe that a full Linux install (everything but the kitchen sink) was fitting for any sort of desktop install. Increasingly, though, we see the sort of features like real manageability and simplicity that are necessary for large deployments.
Red Hat started moving in this direction, but their corporate desktop distro, Red Hat Desktop, was very (IMO) half-assed both in implementation and the way they marketed it (or failed to market it).
Sun's JDS is a nice corporate desktop Linux distro, but it will most likely only find a home with current Sun customers, unfortunately (or fortunately, if you have a beef with Sun's treatment of Linux like I do).
Is it? My first filesystem tests showed almost par. ext3 is much slower on some tests than UFS, Reiser is a little bit faster.
I didn't know that a filesystem benchmark was a comprehensive test of hardware support. What about basic sound cards? Available accelerated video drivers? The fact of the matter is that the Linux kernel has more drivers available in it for x86 hardware than Solaris will likely ever have. It is not easy to get the same sort of hardware support for x86 that Linux has gotten over the past 13 years, and hardware autodetection is always getting better for it.
The GUI (JDS3) feels much more responsive than a Gnome desktop on Linux. Maybe the reason for that is the "interactive" process class of solaris, which Linux lacks. BTW: Windows has such a class, too.
JDS is also available for Linux and it runs Gnome. "A Gnome desktop on Linux" is very vague, but I will assume that you were running a workstation install of a very robust distribution such as one from Red Hat or SuSe. The extra efficiency you are likely noticing is probably due to the fact that it is a true desktop distribution, which is necessarily simple and manageable, and thus fewer running processes. Even if your opinion involved comparing Linux JDS to the Solaris JDS add-on, I would not be convinced that performance was anything more than a difference in distribution setups.
Re:Trusted Solaris 8 / SELinux
on
Sun-isms Debunked
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The NSA itself says that it's NOT one, so on its own SELinux is not good enough for secure US government work, despite its being developed by the NSA.
If SELinux is not good enough for secure U.S. government work, then why was it developed? Of course it is not a trusted operating system. It is not an operating system at all, but rather a set of kernel patches and user-space programs. Operating systems are typically put through the expensive rigors of trusted operating system testing for commercial benefit, and thus the NSA would have no need for such official tests. I am sure that the NSA has its own version or revision of Linux that it has cleared for its own use with the SELinux extensions.
MAC (Mandatory Access Controls) are a big change from the normal user-group-other permissions that Linux has had for years, but it appears that Red Hat is very interested in adding SELinux, as it has shown with its integration of SELinux into Fedora.
Slashdot Mirror
Because, as we all know, video cards never have had more than 256MB of memory before...
3Dlabs Realizm 800 with 640MB memory.
After reading this article, I would rather just set up a standard Slackware system and put in IceWM myself instead of getting a bunch of defaulted KDE cruft. I can't imagine trying out a distribution meant for slow computers on one of my 486's only to find the stupid distro trying to run KDE.
The machines that Vector Linux is supposed to be targetted at are precisely the ones that cannot run KDE or Gnome. What makes this distribution worth anyone's time?
Whatever language they decide for or against, the key to this movie is going to be in the settings and culture of the people. Anglo-Saxon art and ideas are very captivating, and if the directors use this well, they could make a very good movie. If they do not, we will probably end up with another ridiculous movie like Troy.
On a side note, Rohan from the Lord of the Rings books/movies is based on Anglo-Saxon culture. In fact, the Theoden character takes his name from a character in Beowulf, (Th)eoden. Tolkien resented the Norman invasion, and believed that it had destroyed Anglo-Saxon culture. I think that this is reflected in Rohan (Anglo-Saxon) and Gondor (post-Norman), and their roles in the books.
I'm 19, and I used a rotary phone for probably ten years growing up. I'm sure a lot of Slashdotters have if they moved into an older home. The only real drawback to the phones is that there is no way to punch in numbers after connecting. When you hear "Press 1 to ...", the phones cannot handle doing that.
I have fond memories of rotary phones, though. The satisfying click click click, the durable construction; they come from a time before phones were $10 pieces of junk. It's the same reason why so many programmers like the IBM Model-M keyboards.
This movie may actually be good, but only if they get away from the same ho-hum material that they used so frequently toward the end of the run (and in the first movie). The same vast alien conspiracy story involving the cigarette-smoking man has been beaten to death. I stopped watching the show because I couldn't deal with the fact that there was no variety.
Part of the thing that made the X-Files nice during the first few seasons was that there was always a new mystery, and a new setting. Most episodes had nothing to do with an alien conspiracy, but rather some other totally unrelated investigation. When the show got away from the ongoing conspiracy storyline and did something new, it was really great.
After all, the X-Files was created to look into unexplained phenomena. Not just little green men.
P.S. Bring back the original suspense! The first movie had no atmosphere!
Yes, but those "thingies" are usually bought by clueless users who have never even changed the default admin password. I would estimate that at least 50% of all home hardware routers out there are running 100% default settings. How's that for secure?
Ah, but it does. Serial Terminal Linux is an ultra minimalist floppy distro that boots up as a serial terminal. You don't have to install a thing, and it will give you easy connectivity because it automatically boots into minicom on one virtual console per serial port.
fake ID's can be low or high cost, depending usually on how good they are. ID's that require holograms, for example, can easily cost $80.
Usually, though, a more professional fake ID is a waste of money. A piece of paper printed off from an inkjet printer and stuck in front of a real ID is fine for almost anything, as long as you aren't required to pull out the ID from your wallet.
If you don't believe me about the printed piece of paper, try using a scanner, editing some of the information in Photoshop or the Gimp. Print it out and put it in front of your usual ID in your wallet. Now try buying beer, getting into bars, etc.
Please, Slashdot gods, save the "Oh my god, they put a Mini-ITX board in a [insert object x here]" posts for some other site. If I want to see this sort of thing, I'll go to the site mentioned above.
I am a moron by your definition because I just made a full system backup to DVD's while playing emulated PlayStation games muted, and listening to an MP3. The games didn't skip frames, and neither did the music. I had Firefox, Thunderbird, and 4 xterm's open on other workspaces. This is with an Athlon 2500, 512MB RAM, and an 8× DVD burner.
Maybe the problem is a bloated operating system running bloated programs, and not that a CPU cannot handle two functions at the same time. Of course, people will continue to upgrade Windows and their applications as they upgrade to new CPU's, and the same poor situation will continue...
Ah, the usual Slashdot "Eh, why don't they just use a dozen awk scripts and sed filters, glued together with some perl programs?"
These same people always seem to express endless frustration when people stay on Windows or Mac instead of Linux. And why shouldn't they when the sort of software they rely on isn't available?
I'm happy on Debian or Slackware writing my own PHP, but I'm the first to admit that this is not for the average folks. There are a lot of web developers who are more "web designers" (these people were often art majors, and don't know a lick of HTML) who focus on artistic design, and for them a WYSIWYG editor is a must.
8700 packages for Debian GNU/Linux? Great. New installer? Nice. If I buy a small server, though, I can't even get a stable version that ships with SATA support. Debian may be a wonderful community project, but it is becoming too bloated to move forward like it used to.
I agree entirely with you, but the design of *nix could hold that idea back. It is not a very hierarchical system, meaning that deciding which system programs should be written in C would prove very difficult. For instance, a *nix program such as true would be silly to not program in C. However, what about a robust GNU program such as bash?
I have settled on the idea that at least graphical user-level applications should be programmed in a safer language. In addition, the number of system utilities should not be superfluous, and systems should have safe, minimalist defaults.
Yeah, Novell/Suse and Red Hat couldn't possibly sell Linux and OSS for money!
Quote from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest:
On a side note, how many kids are going to start learning C just for the heck of it? Most (normal) kids won't even understand why they would want to.
Being a recent high school graduate, what usually worked at my school was encouraging kids to take computer courses in networking and programming by showcasing some of our work.
It's sort of ironic that a story about a dead operating system was submitted by someone with whose user name comes from a dead language...
Is it? Maybe I'm not laughing because I just don't understand the constant need to disrespect everyone else's favorite Linux/BSD distro.
For many architectures there is no other modern operating system available, let alone a powerful open source Unix-like system. I think that NetBSD, although it has a relatively small user base, plays an important part in the open source community in this respect. Can't we all appreciate the fact that such a ported and portable open source operating system like NetBSD exists?
I wonder what sort of insecurities you have about your own operating system fuel your need to trash a such a benign project.
Also, I ask you this-- In my junior and senior engineering courses why in the world should I be forced to work out the time consuming calculus or algebra part by hand when that's not even the concept being taught? It wastes my time, and the instructor's time, and greatly increases the chance of missing an answer due to a mistake somewhere.
As soon as you stop doing math by hand, you will gradually forget basic concepts. I struggled through math in high school until I ditched my calculator. Even though I could use my calculator to get answers, I really did not understand what it was that I was doing. As a result, story problems in particular were very difficult. Without real concepts behind mathematics, it loses its practical meaning.
When I began taking Calculus courses, I heard repeatedly from my professors that more errors in calculus problems are really algebra mistakes. I ditched my calculator as a result of hearing that. As I did work by hand, I began to re-learn the algebra and trigonometry that I had forgotten.
Perhaps a calculator will not hurt you in the short run, but in a few years will you remember the things that you are skipping over now?
However, I think that for Joe Regular to buy it, it would perhaps need to be a *little* cheaper - US $5,000 or so.
Please, I've been living in a cardboard house for years. It's not as big or fancy as this one, but it didn't cost me anything either. The trick is to watch for the really nice refrigerator and television boxes. A utility knife and duct tape is all you need to make a beautiful home.
It's amazing what people will do for a buck. Give me a few refrigerator boxes and a utility knife, and I could build you a cardboard castle for $35,000.
They very well may not market them using the IBM name and logo, but rather simply market them as IBM's desktop solution. After all, IBM did scrapped its NetVista thin client line and started selling thin clients from Neoware. It's been done before.
I wonder, since the only place left for Intel chips at IBM will likely be in low-end servers, will IBM create a low-end PowerPC chip to compete with Wintel at some point?
Yes, but America has put Iran into the agenda that it is in right now. By helping install the Shah as an American-friendly dictator, we alienated the Iranian people. When they rose up in a peaceful revolution, we condemned it and put sanctions on their country.
You clearly have one.You are right, but it isn't political in nature. My agenda is applying basic ethical guidelines to what I see in the world. You seem incapable of doing that, as you compare an American-placed administration with the current Iranian government. Where do the thousands of lives that would be lost fit into all of this? Where would the ravaged cities come into place?
So much of the problematic relationship that we have with many Middle Easterners stems from the foreign policy decisions we have made in Lebanon, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Contrary to what George Bush says, they do not hate us because we "love freedom" or because we are westerners or Christians. They hate us because we have injured their countries in very real and tangible ways with our foreign policy decisions during the Cold War.
P.S. I don't care what is popular or not. I will never support invasions by, as you call them, "right-wing lunatics" who have nuclear weapons. When we do that, we end up invading a country for no real reason, with estimates of up to 100,000 indigenous people dead and over 1000 of our own troops dead.
In the short term that may be a good thing, but in the long term it means that the United States is even more powerful militarily than it has been before. Will technology like this make America more bold? Would attacking other countries such as Iran be an easier choice to make without the threat of American casualties to sway the public?
Nobody wants to see more people die in war, but even fewer want to see a lone superpower with even less hesitancy to enforce its agenda around the world. In the end, things like this could cause more deaths than they save.
And my quote will still be valid, that JDS will most almost certainly not stray far from Sun customers, as Sun does not have a great history of marketing operating systems on x86.
In regard to your citing of a "community response" written by a single admittedly-tired nerd, I don't think many people other than yourself are interested in hearing one more geek bitch about an exec trashing the opposing company's Unix.
This may not be a big step for Linux as a whole, but it is a huge step toward a Linux that is viable for corporate desktop users. In the past, Linux vendors seemed to believe that a full Linux install (everything but the kitchen sink) was fitting for any sort of desktop install. Increasingly, though, we see the sort of features like real manageability and simplicity that are necessary for large deployments.
Red Hat started moving in this direction, but their corporate desktop distro, Red Hat Desktop, was very (IMO) half-assed both in implementation and the way they marketed it (or failed to market it).
Sun's JDS is a nice corporate desktop Linux distro, but it will most likely only find a home with current Sun customers, unfortunately (or fortunately, if you have a beef with Sun's treatment of Linux like I do).
I didn't know that a filesystem benchmark was a comprehensive test of hardware support. What about basic sound cards? Available accelerated video drivers? The fact of the matter is that the Linux kernel has more drivers available in it for x86 hardware than Solaris will likely ever have. It is not easy to get the same sort of hardware support for x86 that Linux has gotten over the past 13 years, and hardware autodetection is always getting better for it.
JDS is also available for Linux and it runs Gnome. "A Gnome desktop on Linux" is very vague, but I will assume that you were running a workstation install of a very robust distribution such as one from Red Hat or SuSe. The extra efficiency you are likely noticing is probably due to the fact that it is a true desktop distribution, which is necessarily simple and manageable, and thus fewer running processes. Even if your opinion involved comparing Linux JDS to the Solaris JDS add-on, I would not be convinced that performance was anything more than a difference in distribution setups.
If SELinux is not good enough for secure U.S. government work, then why was it developed? Of course it is not a trusted operating system. It is not an operating system at all, but rather a set of kernel patches and user-space programs. Operating systems are typically put through the expensive rigors of trusted operating system testing for commercial benefit, and thus the NSA would have no need for such official tests. I am sure that the NSA has its own version or revision of Linux that it has cleared for its own use with the SELinux extensions.
MAC (Mandatory Access Controls) are a big change from the normal user-group-other permissions that Linux has had for years, but it appears that Red Hat is very interested in adding SELinux, as it has shown with its integration of SELinux into Fedora.