They're supposed to be unique, sure. But in practice, at only 48 bits long and with manufacturers usually allocated a 24-bit space, there's only a finite number of them to go around. As long as two network adaptors with the same MAC address are never connected to the same switch, everyone will be happy: the MAC address is only used for routing at this level. In fact, all the network adaptors plugged into a non-switching hub (or on co-ax) can have the same MAC address.
Beside which, you can change a MAC address easily enough. Just use # ifconfig eth0 hw ether 70:57:4e:33:44:21 or similar.
I might not do anything about someone's propensity to emit noxious gas from their butthole in my presence, but that doesn't mean that I have given my 'tacit approval' for them to rip huge farts while standing in the same room with me.
Er, no. Tacit (as in silent) approval is just a lack of protest. By not doing anything about their farting, you have given tacit approval.
The smaller ZyXel routers use a traditional transformer power pack with 12V AC output. Judging by the temperature rise, the on-board regulator is most probably a switched-mode type. I'd guess this would be quite tolerant of power surges, just with the presence of a mains transformer (hefty inductance; doesn't like rapidly-changing current). The "surge suppressor coils" found in cheap, switched-mode power packs are laughable. A well-designed power supply should fail safely and protect the connected equipment, but cheap ones often aren't well-designed.
As for the wireless stuff, well, that's too bad. But your computer already needs one connection to the wall to get its power. Will one more for data kill you?
FM radio sucks, but MW radio sucks worse. Once you get bored of the fact that the digits of the frequencies always add up to 9 (except on TV and in films, for some reason; I can understand using fake phone numbers -- there is no such STD code as 01632 or 01602 -- but fake radio frequencies ? Give me a break..... on a PLL set, you'll only ever be at most 4.5kHz away from the right frequency, and on a continuously-tunable set you can always go straight to it) it really doesn't have a lot going for it. You can pick up MW on a crystal set, because it's amplitude-modulated. But it sounds like crap, because it's amplitude-modulated. Just save it for after the collapse of civilisation, when you can plumb a carbon mic in series with the power supply to a 1MHz crystal oscillator and see if anyone's listening. 1MHz is close enough to 999kHz (which is a real station frequency), if all the PLL sets haven't packed up by then due to EMP / Solar flares / whatever precipitated the doomsday scenario.
No British government has ever liked the BBC. Thatcher and co always called them the Bolshevik Broadcasting Collective. Labour think they suck up to the Tories.
IMHO that's the way it should be. Once a news service begins pandering to the government, you are already too far down the road to 1984.
You've most probably been been buying crap routers. D-link, Belkin, Linksys, Netgear - for chuff's sake, they might as well be branded "Barbie (or Action Man) My First Router". Treat yourself to a nice ZyXel router, and you might forget you even have a router in your network.
I haven't found all the ways to die yet, not for want of trying..... the developers have thought of enough of them..... in fact I'm off to try to find a few more (or maybe not).
Meanwhile, has anybody else set default pet names in their.nethackrc? My dog's name is Piggy (named after a wonderful old lady of a bull terrier, who passed away earlier this year -- imagine the dog in Snatch, but all white and with one ear up and one ear down,/\__/>) and my cat's name is Chico (after my ginger tabby kitten, who has been helping me type this. If pressing keys to give me things to backspace out counts as helping).
Some people don't seem to know a Phillips head from a Posidriv head. There's a well-known chain of hardware stores, based in Nottinghamshire, who stock only Posidriv head screws and only Phillips screwdrivers. One of these days I'll be bothered to write to them and ask them about this.
I personally like those PC case screws that fit into a "naked" multi-driver. Weirdy threads, though..... they're neither BA nor BSM.
..... which would never have happened in the first place, if the law required hardware specs to be published in sufficient detail that any competent programmer could write a driver.
The rightness or wrongness of an act is orthogonal to who does it.
EULAs restricting the publication of benchmarks are wrong, no matter who tries to impose them. And restricting the supply of review samples to publications likely to give favourable reviews is wrong, no matter who does it. Good on Hexus for exposing this fraud.
And pretty soon, if the rumours of Open Source Java are to be believed, you may well have a native Java build which won't depend on Linux binary emulation (which has got to be slowing things down; there are no two ways about it). Interesting Times.
Software Patents will be dead and buried within the next 20 years. A change of government in the USA is likely -- and the new government might decide that software patents are anti-competitive, and annul them all in one fell swoop.
If they ever try to introduce software patents in the EU or UK, where retrospective application of a newly-enacted law is explicitly illegal, every falsely-granted software patent will be null and void -- and the holders will have to reapply for them. Meanwhile, anything that would have infringed those patents ahd they been valid, will now be prior art which can be cited to block the "new" applications.
It's all a mess, and there is only one way out of it: no software patents.
Although there were electronically-similar computers, there were few enough examples of a particular kind -- and even then existed in diverse enough configurations which would have to be accounted for at compile-time -- that software had to be a lot more generic, therefore was distributed in source form.
You do raise a valid point though, that in the very early days Open Source was all there was. The first computer users were the first hacking club. The 8-bit home micro scene of the late 1970s - early 1980s was a joyous reworking of those days (remember magazines with type-in listings and "conversion clues" for savvy programmers to get, say, a Dragon program running on a Beeb? I ported Gordon Mills' Apple ][ PILOT interpreter to the BBC and made some improvements into the bargain (neatened the structure with PROCs instead of GOSUBs, and added some features to the interpreter to make it more "Beeb-like"). The following month, GMM's own port was published in my favourite Beeb mag. Missing all of my improvements.)
Oh, it was all better in the old days. These young 'uns don't know they're born. I remember when a pack of crisps was 8p. EIGHT pence. You could go the shops with fifty pence in your pocket and come home with a full belly and change. Them were t' days.....
Politicians are pretty clueless about most things, really. The fact that they're clueless on technological matters is noticed on/. because we're on the whole a tech-savvy bunch. If you look in any single-issue forum, you'll find people slagging off politicians for their detachment from the real world.
I think it's getting worse, not better; because as politicians lose touch with reality, real people won't want to have anything to do with politics.
Re:Oracle certified on most linuxes....
on
Oracle Linux Explored
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
They don't certify it on $RANDOM_DISTRO because it's a proprietary, closed-source product, and there's simply no way to ensure that it will work with every possible configuration when there are so many variables over which they don't have control; paths, library versions &c.
Back in the day, even proprietary software used to be semi-open source. You actually got the source to compile (almost no two computers were similar enough to be binary-compatible, which was why C was invented in the first place) and tweak if necessary; you just weren't allowed to distribute copies.
Why not just use Postgres instead? That works flawlessly on most Linux flavours. You even get the source code (so you can hire a programmer to make it do exactly what you want), and you don't have to pay for it -- not even by giving back improvements made by your hired programmer for the benefit of the Community. In fact, it's probably right there on your distro CDs already.
Meanwhile, the BPAA (Bakery Products Association of America) launched a new campaign against home breadmakers, claiming that their users were robbing bakers of their livelihood. A hard-hitting video showed small independent village bakeries closing up their shops. Interestingly, no mention was made of the proportion of bread purchased from BPAA-affiliated supermarkets.
Congresswoman Evan Smurr (D) tried to defuse the situation by proposing a levy on the sale of instant dried yeast, which would be collected and distributed amongst the bakeries to compensate for the loss of revenue. This was immediately attacked by a consortium of non-baking yeast users. It was also pointed out that people would simply buy their yeast from supermarkets in Canada and Mexico.
Welcome to the New American Dream: Find a way to charge people money for something they had already been doing every day for free up to now, then sit on your fat ass and count the money coming in.
So here's an idea for you all: The Pet Name Registry. Wouldn't it be great if somebody had to pay you money if they wanted to call their pet dog Rover, or their pet rat Basil?
When a major record label hold the rights to a band's songs to ransom, demanding a number of solo albums by each member if the band split and ever want to perform their old songs again in their new guises, I'd call that piracy. When a major record label hold their customers to ransom, demanding more money for the same song as they already paid for once but playable on a new device, I'd call that piracy. When a cartel of major record labels buy laws limiting the usefulness of recording hardware, I'd call that piracy.
What exactly is the difference between Open Source and Free Software? I mean, apart from the Free Software movement being a bunch of smelly communist carrot-munching hippies looking for ideological purity and the Open Source movement being a bunch of tight-fisted grasping breadheads looking for a free ride on the hard work of others.
Is it possible to have Free Software that isn't also Open Source? Is it possible to have Open Source software that isn't also Free software? Or is the distinction between the labels more to do with what each camp thinks of the other camp? Is the in-fighting reaching the point where it becomes counter-productive?
Which is why I came up with a self-parallelising architecture on the back of an envelope. I got the instruction length down to 16 bits (usually - some instructions are 80 bits), so allowing 4 instructions to be packed into a 64-bit word. And those four could all be executed in parallel, so long as none of them depends on an answer from a previous instruction (for an operand, or in its condition field) and at most two of them require a bus access (one in each direction; all reads are done on the tick and all writes on the tock). It should be possible to optimise in the pipeline, even accounting for conditionals that won't actually be executed. In practice I expect most instructions will execute always, and a fair number will be Last Successful or Last Failed.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when did "interesting" mean "shills for my favourite product" ?
They're supposed to be unique, sure. But in practice, at only 48 bits long and with manufacturers usually allocated a 24-bit space, there's only a finite number of them to go around. As long as two network adaptors with the same MAC address are never connected to the same switch, everyone will be happy: the MAC address is only used for routing at this level. In fact, all the network adaptors plugged into a non-switching hub (or on co-ax) can have the same MAC address.
Beside which, you can change a MAC address easily enough. Just use # ifconfig eth0 hw ether 70:57:4e:33:44:21 or similar.
The smaller ZyXel routers use a traditional transformer power pack with 12V AC output. Judging by the temperature rise, the on-board regulator is most probably a switched-mode type. I'd guess this would be quite tolerant of power surges, just with the presence of a mains transformer (hefty inductance; doesn't like rapidly-changing current). The "surge suppressor coils" found in cheap, switched-mode power packs are laughable. A well-designed power supply should fail safely and protect the connected equipment, but cheap ones often aren't well-designed.
As for the wireless stuff, well, that's too bad. But your computer already needs one connection to the wall to get its power. Will one more for data kill you?
FM radio sucks, but MW radio sucks worse. Once you get bored of the fact that the digits of the frequencies always add up to 9 (except on TV and in films, for some reason; I can understand using fake phone numbers -- there is no such STD code as 01632 or 01602 -- but fake radio frequencies ? Give me a break ..... on a PLL set, you'll only ever be at most 4.5kHz away from the right frequency, and on a continuously-tunable set you can always go straight to it) it really doesn't have a lot going for it. You can pick up MW on a crystal set, because it's amplitude-modulated. But it sounds like crap, because it's amplitude-modulated. Just save it for after the collapse of civilisation, when you can plumb a carbon mic in series with the power supply to a 1MHz crystal oscillator and see if anyone's listening. 1MHz is close enough to 999kHz (which is a real station frequency), if all the PLL sets haven't packed up by then due to EMP / Solar flares / whatever precipitated the doomsday scenario.
No British government has ever liked the BBC. Thatcher and co always called them the Bolshevik Broadcasting Collective. Labour think they suck up to the Tories.
IMHO that's the way it should be. Once a news service begins pandering to the government, you are already too far down the road to 1984.
You've most probably been been buying crap routers. D-link, Belkin, Linksys, Netgear - for chuff's sake, they might as well be branded "Barbie (or Action Man) My First Router". Treat yourself to a nice ZyXel router, and you might forget you even have a router in your network.
I haven't found all the ways to die yet, not for want of trying ..... the developers have thought of enough of them ..... in fact I'm off to try to find a few more (or maybe not).
.nethackrc? My dog's name is Piggy (named after a wonderful old lady of a bull terrier, who passed away earlier this year -- imagine the dog in Snatch, but all white and with one ear up and one ear down, /\__/>) and my cat's name is Chico (after my ginger tabby kitten, who has been helping me type this. If pressing keys to give me things to backspace out counts as helping).
Meanwhile, has anybody else set default pet names in their
"Alienware" is the name of a company. Therefore, it is correct to treat it as a plural.
Some people don't seem to know a Phillips head from a Posidriv head. There's a well-known chain of hardware stores, based in Nottinghamshire, who stock only Posidriv head screws and only Phillips screwdrivers. One of these days I'll be bothered to write to them and ask them about this.
..... they're neither BA nor BSM.
I personally like those PC case screws that fit into a "naked" multi-driver. Weirdy threads, though
..... which would never have happened in the first place, if the law required hardware specs to be published in sufficient detail that any competent programmer could write a driver.
The rightness or wrongness of an act is orthogonal to who does it.
EULAs restricting the publication of benchmarks are wrong, no matter who tries to impose them. And restricting the supply of review samples to publications likely to give favourable reviews is wrong, no matter who does it. Good on Hexus for exposing this fraud.
And pretty soon, if the rumours of Open Source Java are to be believed, you may well have a native Java build which won't depend on Linux binary emulation (which has got to be slowing things down; there are no two ways about it). Interesting Times.
Software Patents will be dead and buried within the next 20 years. A change of government in the USA is likely -- and the new government might decide that software patents are anti-competitive, and annul them all in one fell swoop.
If they ever try to introduce software patents in the EU or UK, where retrospective application of a newly-enacted law is explicitly illegal, every falsely-granted software patent will be null and void -- and the holders will have to reapply for them. Meanwhile, anything that would have infringed those patents ahd they been valid, will now be prior art which can be cited to block the "new" applications.
It's all a mess, and there is only one way out of it: no software patents.
Although there were electronically-similar computers, there were few enough examples of a particular kind -- and even then existed in diverse enough configurations which would have to be accounted for at compile-time -- that software had to be a lot more generic, therefore was distributed in source form.
.....
You do raise a valid point though, that in the very early days Open Source was all there was. The first computer users were the first hacking club. The 8-bit home micro scene of the late 1970s - early 1980s was a joyous reworking of those days (remember magazines with type-in listings and "conversion clues" for savvy programmers to get, say, a Dragon program running on a Beeb? I ported Gordon Mills' Apple ][ PILOT interpreter to the BBC and made some improvements into the bargain (neatened the structure with PROCs instead of GOSUBs, and added some features to the interpreter to make it more "Beeb-like"). The following month, GMM's own port was published in my favourite Beeb mag. Missing all of my improvements.)
Oh, it was all better in the old days. These young 'uns don't know they're born. I remember when a pack of crisps was 8p. EIGHT pence. You could go the shops with fifty pence in your pocket and come home with a full belly and change. Them were t' days
Politicians are pretty clueless about most things, really. The fact that they're clueless on technological matters is noticed on /. because we're on the whole a tech-savvy bunch. If you look in any single-issue forum, you'll find people slagging off politicians for their detachment from the real world.
I think it's getting worse, not better; because as politicians lose touch with reality, real people won't want to have anything to do with politics.
They don't certify it on $RANDOM_DISTRO because it's a proprietary, closed-source product, and there's simply no way to ensure that it will work with every possible configuration when there are so many variables over which they don't have control; paths, library versions &c.
Back in the day, even proprietary software used to be semi-open source. You actually got the source to compile (almost no two computers were similar enough to be binary-compatible, which was why C was invented in the first place) and tweak if necessary; you just weren't allowed to distribute copies.
Why not just use Postgres instead? That works flawlessly on most Linux flavours. You even get the source code (so you can hire a programmer to make it do exactly what you want), and you don't have to pay for it -- not even by giving back improvements made by your hired programmer for the benefit of the Community. In fact, it's probably right there on your distro CDs already.
Meanwhile, the BPAA (Bakery Products Association of America) launched a new campaign against home breadmakers, claiming that their users were robbing bakers of their livelihood. A hard-hitting video showed small independent village bakeries closing up their shops. Interestingly, no mention was made of the proportion of bread purchased from BPAA-affiliated supermarkets.
.....
Congresswoman Evan Smurr (D) tried to defuse the situation by proposing a levy on the sale of instant dried yeast, which would be collected and distributed amongst the bakeries to compensate for the loss of revenue. This was immediately attacked by a consortium of non-baking yeast users. It was also pointed out that people would simply buy their yeast from supermarkets in Canada and Mexico.
To be continued
That really doesn't explain much; only that there are two different definitions (Richard Stallman's Four Freedoms, and Bruce Perens' guidelines).
Have you an example of a licence which meets one definition but not the other?
Welcome to the New American Dream: Find a way to charge people money for something they had already been doing every day for free up to now, then sit on your fat ass and count the money coming in.
So here's an idea for you all: The Pet Name Registry. Wouldn't it be great if somebody had to pay you money if they wanted to call their pet dog Rover, or their pet rat Basil?
Yes there is.
When a major record label hold the rights to a band's songs to ransom, demanding a number of solo albums by each member if the band split and ever want to perform their old songs again in their new guises, I'd call that piracy. When a major record label hold their customers to ransom, demanding more money for the same song as they already paid for once but playable on a new device, I'd call that piracy. When a cartel of major record labels buy laws limiting the usefulness of recording hardware, I'd call that piracy.
What exactly is the difference between Open Source and Free Software? I mean, apart from the Free Software movement being a bunch of smelly communist carrot-munching hippies looking for ideological purity and the Open Source movement being a bunch of tight-fisted grasping breadheads looking for a free ride on the hard work of others.
Is it possible to have Free Software that isn't also Open Source? Is it possible to have Open Source software that isn't also Free software? Or is the distinction between the labels more to do with what each camp thinks of the other camp? Is the in-fighting reaching the point where it becomes counter-productive?
Perhaps Debian can call their Java fork "Rosie" ?
Which is why I came up with a self-parallelising architecture on the back of an envelope. I got the instruction length down to 16 bits (usually - some instructions are 80 bits), so allowing 4 instructions to be packed into a 64-bit word. And those four could all be executed in parallel, so long as none of them depends on an answer from a previous instruction (for an operand, or in its condition field) and at most two of them require a bus access (one in each direction; all reads are done on the tick and all writes on the tock). It should be possible to optimise in the pipeline, even accounting for conditionals that won't actually be executed. In practice I expect most instructions will execute always, and a fair number will be Last Successful or Last Failed.