For those who don't remember their history, MINIX was a complete UNIX kernel (and environment) developed by Andrew S. Tanenbaum SPECIFICALLY to teach UNIX kernel internals. It was documented in his book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, which includes the ENTIRE source code listing for the kernel.
MINUX was never designed as a real-world system, although it did inspire at least one person, namely Linus Torvalds, to write one...
Cost certainly is no issue... a standalone xterm is really no more expensive than a dumb terminal.
Development time is no issue... it is quicker to design a GUI using a guibuilder than it is to code something in curses.
And even if there were a curses-based guibuilder, why would you want to use it?
Sure, there are certain tasks that are better suited to the keyboard and the command line, but the graphical interface is popular for a reason: when done properly it works, and it works well.
Why anyone would want to give up those advantages is completely beyond me.
The proper way to wire a new house is not to use wire at all. What you want to "wire" your house with is 1.5" flexible drain (low pressure) pipe. This stuff is fairly cheap and easy to work with. You just run one or more tubes from every room
to a central location. You can then fish watever type of wire/cable/fiber comes into vogue over the next 100 years as it becomes available.
I find it quite curious that there is no explaniation of why the BX chipset gave the
best results in the real-world test (kernel compile) while it lagged behind (albeit only slightly) in every feature-specific test.
But what is the difference between a 10-digit number and dialing an area code plus
7 more digits? Perhaps there is a difference on the backend, but to the user it
seems it would be the same. So why all the fuss?
The problem stems way back to the dawn of the phone company. Since there is no "enter" key on a telephone, the length of a phone number must be either fixed or predictable.
The solution chosen was quite a simple one, and I'm amazed that more people have never noticed it. It is thus: The second digit of all area codes is either a zero or a one. Thus, if the second digit dialed in is a zero or a one, the phone switch will wait for 10 digits as opposed to just seven.
Unfortunately, this dramatically limits both the number of area codes and local calling codes. The number of area codes is limited to roughly 160 (8 * 2 * 10)
By forcing 10 digit dialing this restriction can be removed and both the number of local codes and the number of area codes can be increased. In areas like Baltimore/DC (where I live) it is the local codes that are scarce at the moment, which is why we have had 10 digit dialing for the past few years now.
It is important to note that this does not mean that there is a shortage of phone numbers. Well, there is a shortage, but it is a ficticious one, created by the way in which phone numbers are allocated. Phone numbers are allocated in blocks of 1000 consecutive numbers which all go to the same local switch. In many cases, a majority of these numbers are not used and essentially wasted.
The FCC has been getting on the phone company for years now to fix this (by upgrading their software) but they have been very lax to do so.
Careful readers will note that exactly the opposite has been done with the CIDR system on the internet.;-)
With a street price of < $150, there is no way that Sega can make money selling the hardware alone. Selling hardware as a loss leader in order to make a profit on the software is a great idea if (and only if) you have a monoply on the software market. Unfortunately, this hasn't been the case for quite a few years now.
One thing curiously missing from this story is whether the fiber will be delivered directly to the door, that is, completing the "last mile."
Last mile connectivity is the biggest difficulty in getting high-speed connectivity to residential consumers. The cost to switch and deliver fiber to the home is *extremely* expensive and revenue will likely never cover the expense.
However, a hybrid system of fiber to local access points combined with some existing form of "last mile" connectivity can provide all of the benefits at a remarkable reduction in cost. This is certainly not a new idea. In fact, this is the scheme implemented by the cable modems that have been in operation for three years now.
For those unaware, the bandwidth used by cable modems takes up just one channel of the 500 channels that can be encoded on coax. And that one channel provides 30 Mbps for the user on that segment. This, combined with the ability to move the fiber closer and closer to the user provides an incredibly amount of flexability with remarkably little up-front costs.
Love or hate your local cable company or cable modem ISP, the scheme is sheer brilliance on the technical side. If your service sucks, there is no *technical* reason for this. That is to say that even if you had fiber to your door, your service could suck just as hard.
I really, really wish that someone would start whacking Wired authors with the clue stick...
Granted, the 24 fps used in the cinema does show
signs of jerkiness during action scenes, but most people are surprised to know *just* how slow film still is.
There is never a need to go beyond 75 fps for video because this is the refresh rate for most monitors above 1024x768. Pushing more than that, you will have frames that are rendered, but the scan gun will never pick up the pixels!
Of course, what *really* matters is sustained frame rate under scenes of high complexity, but as long as you can always manage 60-75 fps you'll never see the difference.
I'm not a mandrake user, so I don't know whether to congratulate these people for getting out a new release every month or to deride them for doing so. At the very least, this has got to be driving the retail dealers absolutely crazy.
BTW, how do you Mandrake users upgrade? Do you need to download and burn the ISOs, or can you upgrade your machines over the network a la debian's apt-get update?
What I'd really be interested in is a comparison with the older Pentium-233 based picturebook, which most likely has the same screen and built-in peripheral support. If the TM 5600 can't outperform and outlast (batter life) the much older P233, the TM chips don't stand a chance in the laptop (or sub-laptop) arena. That's not to say they still don't have a purpose for other handheld or embedded devices...
A friend of mine popped the $40 to see that this organization had on him. It came back with every address he had for the past 10 years, who else had the same address at the same time, the names of all his neighbors, how much all of those houses sold for, all the telephone numbers he had, a spurprisingly complete list of relatives, a complete credit history, and much more.
So just remember: you may not want to pop $40 to find out about someone else, but someone else might not have any problems spending $40 to find out about you...
According to the C-Net story, Earthlink has no reservations about installing Carnivore and in fact has already attempted to do so. They only pulled it when they discovered that it was "incompatible with their software."
Although the article does not state as much, it implies that Carnivore will be installed at Earthlink as soon as the bugs are worked out.
GITS was started by Jeff Covey (of freshmeat fame) and is currently supported by the UMBC-LUG. This is something that you can do in your own neighborhood with very little assistance.
As if their incessent CDROMs delivered in cardboard and shrinkwrap weren't bad enough, they are now delivering them in DVD-style boxes. Yes, a CDROM, a plastic DVD box, a 4-color exterior print and a 4-color interior print, and a glossy plastic cover, all covered up in shring-wrap. All this for something that gets thrown away 99% of the time.
I want to start collecting these in the back up my pickup and dump them all on AOLs doorstep some day...
I hope I'm not the only one that is pretty freaking scared that the relatively miniscule output from cell phones can effect the electronics of a commercial passenger airliner.
Kind of makes you wonder what could be done with a much more powerful transmitter easily disguised as a small am/fm radio, or even a land-based directional transmitter...
Ok, first off. These are slides, which are in most cases pretty meaningless by themselves. I'm certain that the real meat of Mr. Pike's presentation is his talk that accompanies them. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be available, so I can only comment on what is presented.
My biggest beef is that he treats Unix (and Linux) as if they were a static entity that never changes, but nothing could be further from the truth. Linux (and most Unices) have embraced the results of all new operating systems research. In fact, most research is actually done using Unix as a base, even thoutgh the technologies are by no means Unix-specific. SMP, threads, IPv6, journaling and global filesystems, real-time extensions, just to name a few.
The point is that Unix is that it is so modular that you can rip out entire pieces of it and replace it with something better. After all, at the core, what really is unix? Do you define it as the V7 system call set? Or do you define it as the implementation by a specific vendor?
What really gets my goat is the statement comparing MS software in 1990 to 2000. That's trivial because MS completely ignored the fruits of the research of the previous 20 years. It wasn't until the advent of NT that they even began to try to do things right. But even then they blew it by integrating the GUI into the core of their OS. Grrr...
The statement of "twenty years ago, students would be exposed many operating systems each with good and bad points" is pretty much bunk for the same reason. Over the past 20 years, Unix has tried to ammend the bad points, and incorporate much of the best. Is this a bad thing?
Lambasting gcc and emacs in favour of Visual Studio? I'll stick with my current tools, thank-you-very-much! VS may look pretty, but what does it really do that I haven't been able to do with my current tools for the past 10 years? Ok, except lock me into a one very specific platform that I cannot customize. And what's this cor to do with operating system research in the first place?
Statements like Linux's [GUI] interface isn't even as good as Windows are what really get my goat. Rob, what were you thinking when you wrote this? Surely you know that the only interaction with Linux is by system calls to the kernel. What is the GUI? Well, in most cases that would be a glob of X/Windows, and a desktop package running on top of that. But gee, take a look... People are developing all sorts of new interface paradigms that do not use X or look anything like what is currently being used. And where do the run? Yes! Linux and other Unix platforms.
Yeah, sure, I'll agree that the number of OS research breakthroughs has been dwindling on the past decade, but that's the be expected. Much of the easy, obvious, and general stuff has been well researched and documented. What's left is the really hard esoteric stuff; the stuff that most people just do not have enough background to understand.
Maybe Unix (or Windows, or the presentation to the user of each) has become like the automobile of the transportation industy. Most automobiles are pretty similar. Mostly they have four wheels and are powered by an internal combustion engine. In fact, in most general respects, they are remarkably similar to the machines produced at the turn of the century. Does this mean that they have reached the pinnacle of design? Or maybe it just means that the concept has reached a fundamentally usable point.
Now, let's take the automobile analogy to the next level. Most people can learn to drive a car in about an hour. Most cars will run for years with little to no service. Can the same be said of computers? Of course not. Does the user really care that billions of dollars of research have gone into making the car 10% more efficient? Not really.
Are computer's as usable by the general population? Hardly. I'd make a strong case that what is under the hood is pretty much irrelevant at this point if most people can't figure out how to take the machine out of the garage.
And this statement applies equally well regardless of whether you prefer Windows or Linux or anything else.
-p.
(sorry for the ramble... too busy even to be writing this...)
Perhaps this was already answered in the original discussions about NetPD, but how do programs like this get around Napster's use policy which, iirc, explicitly bans bots like this, or really, bots of any kind?
Well duh... the bots get arround the policy the same way that the people offering copyrighted material get arround it. The point is that Napster really just doesn't care.
I've really got to say that I'm beginning to get a little bored of all the Napster press. Napster is just a silly lame-ass protocol and what it does is no different than a web hosting service. The people that should be sued are the people offering the files. Simple as that.
And what makes matters worse is that Napster is just a pain in the butt to use. You need to spend hours just to find a particular song, and then hope that it was ripped and encoded properly. For the time it takes to find anything, it would be cheaper to get a job and buy the frickin' CD.
OBTW, there has been a Perl module that does Napster searching for quite some time now. Took me all of 15 minutes to learn how to write a script that uses it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Learning to live on half your salary while working twice as hard"
For those who don't remember their history, MINIX was a complete UNIX kernel (and environment) developed by Andrew S. Tanenbaum SPECIFICALLY to teach UNIX kernel internals. It was documented in his book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, which includes the ENTIRE source code listing for the kernel.
MINUX was never designed as a real-world system, although it did inspire at least one person, namely Linus Torvalds, to write one...
-p.
http://www.utilikilts.com/Workman.htm 'nuff said.
Development time is no issue... it is quicker to design a GUI using a guibuilder than it is to code something in curses.
And even if there were a curses-based guibuilder, why would you want to use it?
Sure, there are certain tasks that are better suited to the keyboard and the command line, but the graphical interface is popular for a reason: when done properly it works, and it works well.
Why anyone would want to give up those advantages is completely beyond me.
-p.
-p.
Kinda funny that no one noticed the great big OSDN banner at the top of every page on the site.
Can you say cross promotion?
I knew you could...
(except on slashdot, of course. ;-)
I find it quite curious that there is no explaniation of why the BX chipset gave the best results in the real-world test (kernel compile) while it lagged behind (albeit only slightly) in every feature-specific test.
... that what goes up must come down. Somewhere.
But what is the difference between a 10-digit number and dialing an area code plus 7 more digits? Perhaps there is a difference on the backend, but to the user it seems it would be the same. So why all the fuss?
The problem stems way back to the dawn of the phone company. Since there is no "enter" key on a telephone, the length of a phone number must be either fixed or predictable.
The solution chosen was quite a simple one, and I'm amazed that more people have never noticed it. It is thus: The second digit of all area codes is either a zero or a one. Thus, if the second digit dialed in is a zero or a one, the phone switch will wait for 10 digits as opposed to just seven.
Unfortunately, this dramatically limits both the number of area codes and local calling codes. The number of area codes is limited to roughly 160 (8 * 2 * 10)
By forcing 10 digit dialing this restriction can be removed and both the number of local codes and the number of area codes can be increased. In areas like Baltimore/DC (where I live) it is the local codes that are scarce at the moment, which is why we have had 10 digit dialing for the past few years now.
It is important to note that this does not mean that there is a shortage of phone numbers. Well, there is a shortage, but it is a ficticious one, created by the way in which phone numbers are allocated. Phone numbers are allocated in blocks of 1000 consecutive numbers which all go to the same local switch. In many cases, a majority of these numbers are not used and essentially wasted. The FCC has been getting on the phone company for years now to fix this (by upgrading their software) but they have been very lax to do so. Careful readers will note that exactly the opposite has been done with the CIDR system on the internet. ;-)
-p.
-p.
Last mile connectivity is the biggest difficulty in getting high-speed connectivity to residential consumers. The cost to switch and deliver fiber to the home is *extremely* expensive and revenue will likely never cover the expense.
However, a hybrid system of fiber to local access points combined with some existing form of "last mile" connectivity can provide all of the benefits at a remarkable reduction in cost. This is certainly not a new idea. In fact, this is the scheme implemented by the cable modems that have been in operation for three years now.
For those unaware, the bandwidth used by cable modems takes up just one channel of the 500 channels that can be encoded on coax. And that one channel provides 30 Mbps for the user on that segment. This, combined with the ability to move the fiber closer and closer to the user provides an incredibly amount of flexability with remarkably little up-front costs.
Love or hate your local cable company or cable modem ISP, the scheme is sheer brilliance on the technical side. If your service sucks, there is no *technical* reason for this. That is to say that even if you had fiber to your door, your service could suck just as hard.
I really, really wish that someone would start whacking Wired authors with the clue stick...
-p.
There is never a need to go beyond 75 fps for video because this is the refresh rate for most monitors above 1024x768. Pushing more than that, you will have frames that are rendered, but the scan gun will never pick up the pixels!
Of course, what *really* matters is sustained frame rate under scenes of high complexity, but as long as you can always manage 60-75 fps you'll never see the difference.
-p.
BTW, how do you Mandrake users upgrade? Do you need to download and burn the ISOs, or can you upgrade your machines over the network a la debian's apt-get update?
-p.
-p.
So just remember: you may not want to pop $40 to find out about someone else, but someone else might not have any problems spending $40 to find out about you...
-p.
Although the article does not state as much, it implies that Carnivore will be installed at Earthlink as soon as the bugs are worked out.
-p.
Check out:
Geeks Into The Streets
and
The GITS Agape House Project
To see what you can do in your own neighborhood.
GITS was started by Jeff Covey (of freshmeat fame) and is currently supported by the UMBC-LUG. This is something that you can do in your own neighborhood with very little assistance.
-p.
-p.
This was in memepool several days ago.
-p.
I want to start collecting these in the back up my pickup and dump them all on AOLs doorstep some day...
-p.
Kind of makes you wonder what could be done with a much more powerful transmitter easily disguised as a small am/fm radio, or even a land-based directional transmitter...
-p.
My biggest beef is that he treats Unix (and Linux) as if they were a static entity that never changes, but nothing could be further from the truth. Linux (and most Unices) have embraced the results of all new operating systems research. In fact, most research is actually done using Unix as a base, even thoutgh the technologies are by no means Unix-specific. SMP, threads, IPv6, journaling and global filesystems, real-time extensions, just to name a few.
The point is that Unix is that it is so modular that you can rip out entire pieces of it and replace it with something better. After all, at the core, what really is unix? Do you define it as the V7 system call set? Or do you define it as the implementation by a specific vendor?
What really gets my goat is the statement comparing MS software in 1990 to 2000. That's trivial because MS completely ignored the fruits of the research of the previous 20 years. It wasn't until the advent of NT that they even began to try to do things right. But even then they blew it by integrating the GUI into the core of their OS. Grrr...
The statement of "twenty years ago, students would be exposed many operating systems each with good and bad points" is pretty much bunk for the same reason. Over the past 20 years, Unix has tried to ammend the bad points, and incorporate much of the best. Is this a bad thing?
Lambasting gcc and emacs in favour of Visual Studio? I'll stick with my current tools, thank-you-very-much! VS may look pretty, but what does it really do that I haven't been able to do with my current tools for the past 10 years? Ok, except lock me into a one very specific platform that I cannot customize. And what's this cor to do with operating system research in the first place?
Statements like Linux's [GUI] interface isn't even as good as Windows are what really get my goat. Rob, what were you thinking when you wrote this? Surely you know that the only interaction with Linux is by system calls to the kernel. What is the GUI? Well, in most cases that would be a glob of X/Windows, and a desktop package running on top of that. But gee, take a look... People are developing all sorts of new interface paradigms that do not use X or look anything like what is currently being used. And where do the run? Yes! Linux and other Unix platforms.
Yeah, sure, I'll agree that the number of OS research breakthroughs has been dwindling on the past decade, but that's the be expected. Much of the easy, obvious, and general stuff has been well researched and documented. What's left is the really hard esoteric stuff; the stuff that most people just do not have enough background to understand.
Maybe Unix (or Windows, or the presentation to the user of each) has become like the automobile of the transportation industy. Most automobiles are pretty similar. Mostly they have four wheels and are powered by an internal combustion engine. In fact, in most general respects, they are remarkably similar to the machines produced at the turn of the century. Does this mean that they have reached the pinnacle of design? Or maybe it just means that the concept has reached a fundamentally usable point.
Now, let's take the automobile analogy to the next level. Most people can learn to drive a car in about an hour. Most cars will run for years with little to no service. Can the same be said of computers? Of course not. Does the user really care that billions of dollars of research have gone into making the car 10% more efficient? Not really.
Are computer's as usable by the general population? Hardly. I'd make a strong case that what is under the hood is pretty much irrelevant at this point if most people can't figure out how to take the machine out of the garage.
And this statement applies equally well regardless of whether you prefer Windows or Linux or anything else.
-p.
(sorry for the ramble... too busy even to be writing this...)
Perhaps this was already answered in the original discussions about NetPD, but how do programs like this get around Napster's use policy which, iirc, explicitly bans bots like this, or really, bots of any kind?
Well duh... the bots get arround the policy the same way that the people offering copyrighted material get arround it. The point is that Napster really just doesn't care.
I've really got to say that I'm beginning to get a little bored of all the Napster press. Napster is just a silly lame-ass protocol and what it does is no different than a web hosting service. The people that should be sued are the people offering the files. Simple as that.
And what makes matters worse is that Napster is just a pain in the butt to use. You need to spend hours just to find a particular song, and then hope that it was ripped and encoded properly. For the time it takes to find anything, it would be cheaper to get a job and buy the frickin' CD.
OBTW, there has been a Perl module that does Napster searching for quite some time now. Took me all of 15 minutes to learn how to write a script that uses it.
-p.