I checked it out and the Asus EEE has the Marvell 8388 wireless chipset. This is supported in the vanilla Linux kernel since 2.6.22 (July 2007). Sooner or later this will work in almost every distro.
I've gotta say, this is one lovely machine. Full Linux installation etc. What irritated me was the comment that 'you can install Windows XP, for those of us who don't have beards'.
OK the app is used in-house... Interesting situation. Well, there doesn't seem a lot you can do. Maybe Apache's mod_deflate, or else you could put some work in streamlining the output of the web app. I.e. add paginating instead of laaarge pages. Remove images. Put stylesheets and javascript outside of the pages so the browser caches them.
Well, I actually doubt it. You could say 'those vector processors are used for matrix calculations and are wildly different from general purpose CPUs' and you'd be right.
However, I could see a point in time where hybrids like the Cell (one scalar processor and eight vector processors) will become so cheap that the number of vector machines will decline even more.
The idea will never die of course, I mean, hardware is so flexible nowadays that a good student could make a vector processor at home, if he had a development board with a fast Xilinx FPGA on it. But I think the decline will continue if hybrids will be used more often.
It's a very nice speed, especially it being symmetrical, but the question is: is this still consumer-grade stuff? Is it best-effort quality, i.e. may drop out any time? No redundancy whatsoever?
Or can we expect some guarantee concerning the uptime of the line? Looking at the price it's probably a best-effort thing so that makes it useless to host servers on such a line.
Wow that is some seriously interesting stuff you've got going there. Basically you offer scalability-in-a-box? As far as I'm concerned this is taking it one step further (not just different). That's because virtualized servers are nice but can still drop off without notice. It won't help you there but your setup will.
OK I see, but how did mail for the helpdesk get delivered then? I assume you didn't send emails using your personal mail address john@uni.edu otherwise when you had a holiday or called in sick, you'd get unanswered problems stackin up, right?
I can't imagine _any_ tech support job going through e-mail, that would me completely unmanageable (unless said e-mails are just notifications that a ticket was added/edited in the ticket database).
Actually the jobs that get the most mail are probably management jobs, or something administrative like HR.
I'm a software developer and on average I get maybe 2 e-mails per day. Who the fuck needs to mail me? Project manager just walks by, colleagues sit at the next desk and the hardware guys are in the next room.
I don't fear this too much. Suppose this actually happens, i.e. one CPU manufacturer sells CPUs with a "backdoor". Whatever this may be, it allows some level of remote control over the PC.
This is almost certainly discovered. Let's suppose we can't choose for the competitor, because they're in a big conspiracy.
Making CPUs isn't that hard. It's making them the fastest and the cheapest that's hard. There are open source processor designs available, like the LEON core. There are lots of producers of FPGAs on which the LEON core can be synthesized. There are a number of Linux distro's which run on the resulting CPU.
So, when the going gets tough, the tough synthesize their own CPU.:-)
Actually, no. I'm a unix guy and the companies I worked at, engineers were in control of the toolstack. So I "missed" the chance to work with ClearCase and other commercial version control tools. I had a very short project using the Java client of Perforce, though....
You might think that I'm a bit overdoing with the engineers vs. management, however in my experience managers have lost the experience to see through a learning curve and see stability, robustness etc. What is done then is that the tool with the nicest GUI is picked up. That's where the commercial version control tools shine, as a (admittedly very rough) rule.
I still get impatient with all this overhead to this day, but I know everyone prefers it this way. It's better, but it's definitely less 'Fun'.
It's funny but I actually like version control. I'm a "tools" kind of guy, during college I picked up using CVS and have always liked using it. When SVN came along, I picked that up too.
For some people, this distracts from coding. For me, besides the initial learning curve, it doesn't. What distracts me most is pointless meetings, traveling to the other office, etc. With travelling and testing, sometimes a week goes by without touching any code.
Actually, the Dutch government is one of the easier wiretappers in Europe. Thanks to a few years of economic depression and costs crackdown in the police department, police were forced to use more wiretapping. And now it's very commonplace.
Incidentally, if you're living in NL then don't forget to come to Utrecht this Monday.
The difference is in how package repositories are maintained and standards for creating packages. The Debian based distros inherit Debian's outstanding efforts at this
I totally agree that Debian (and derivatives) have got it right on this point, however, I can't really point out any differences nowadays between 'apt' and 'yum' in this regard.
According to Intel, a laptop its harddisk plus DVD uses about 10% of the total power usage, so I'm having a hard time believing that your battery life is so much better thanks to the SSD storage. I'd more readily attribute the long battery life to a good bunch of batteries. Besides a 9 cell battery pack, the Dell D430 can pack an additional 6 cell as well.
This is a moderately scary security issue -- a few of these per year and the current virtualizing trend might start to unravel.
You're quite right; funny thing is, this is described as "less critical" by Secunia because they say it's not a remote exploit. You have to be in a virtualized machine to start with and they don't call this 'remote'.
Cool to see this on Slashdot. The guy who found the vulnerability is actually a customer of mine. I recently started a business in hosted Virtual Private Servers. Joris van Rantwijk, the bug reporter, was interested to become a customer and I said why don't you try it out for a few weeks?
As a plus point, I let them boot their own kernels (I trust my custommers). Next thing I know, he tells me to check my/root directory ON MY PHYSICAL MACHINE (i.e. domain 0 in Xen speak) where I find a file describing the exploit...
Oh don't bother to check out my business' website, it's not translated yet in English... (I'm Dutch).
Slashdot Mirror
I checked it out and the Asus EEE has the Marvell 8388 wireless chipset. This is supported in the vanilla Linux kernel since 2.6.22 (July 2007). Sooner or later this will work in almost every distro.
Here's a .
And if it's slow, here's the coral cache: pic1
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I've gotta say, this is one lovely machine. Full Linux installation etc. What irritated me was the comment that 'you can install Windows XP, for those of us who don't have beards'.
Ha. Ha. Ha. It's funny. Laugh.
OK the app is used in-house... Interesting situation. Well, there doesn't seem a lot you can do. Maybe Apache's mod_deflate, or else you could put some work in streamlining the output of the web app. I.e. add paginating instead of laaarge pages. Remove images. Put stylesheets and javascript outside of the pages so the browser caches them.
- It's cheaper because your datacenter buys energy and connectivity wholesale
- The connectivity gives you lots more headroom when the going gets tough
So... what traffic is passing between the datacenter and your company?However, I could see a point in time where hybrids like the Cell (one scalar processor and eight vector processors) will become so cheap that the number of vector machines will decline even more.
The idea will never die of course, I mean, hardware is so flexible nowadays that a good student could make a vector processor at home, if he had a development board with a fast Xilinx FPGA on it. But I think the decline will continue if hybrids will be used more often.
This only happens on Windows XP, when you have either Office 2007 or Windows Live Photo gallery installed.
Not saying it's OK, just mentioning the facts.
It's a very nice speed, especially it being symmetrical, but the question is: is this still consumer-grade stuff? Is it best-effort quality, i.e. may drop out any time? No redundancy whatsoever?
Or can we expect some guarantee concerning the uptime of the line? Looking at the price it's probably a best-effort thing so that makes it useless to host servers on such a line.
Basically Kerberos does this. RedHat and Fedora have Kerberos enabled in many clients (ssh, ftp, telnet). No passwords ever cross the network.
Wow that is some seriously interesting stuff you've got going there. Basically you offer scalability-in-a-box? As far as I'm concerned this is taking it one step further (not just different). That's because virtualized servers are nice but can still drop off without notice. It won't help you there but your setup will.
OK I see, but how did mail for the helpdesk get delivered then? I assume you didn't send emails using your personal mail address john@uni.edu otherwise when you had a holiday or called in sick, you'd get unanswered problems stackin up, right?
I can't imagine _any_ tech support job going through e-mail, that would me completely unmanageable (unless said e-mails are just notifications that a ticket was added/edited in the ticket database).
Actually the jobs that get the most mail are probably management jobs, or something administrative like HR. I'm a software developer and on average I get maybe 2 e-mails per day. Who the fuck needs to mail me? Project manager just walks by, colleagues sit at the next desk and the hardware guys are in the next room.
I don't fear this too much. Suppose this actually happens, i.e. one CPU manufacturer sells CPUs with a "backdoor". Whatever this may be, it allows some level of remote control over the PC.
:-)
This is almost certainly discovered. Let's suppose we can't choose for the competitor, because they're in a big conspiracy.
Making CPUs isn't that hard. It's making them the fastest and the cheapest that's hard. There are open source processor designs available, like the LEON core. There are lots of producers of FPGAs on which the LEON core can be synthesized. There are a number of Linux distro's which run on the resulting CPU.
So, when the going gets tough, the tough synthesize their own CPU.
Actually, no. I'm a unix guy and the companies I worked at, engineers were in control of the toolstack. So I "missed" the chance to work with ClearCase and other commercial version control tools. I had a very short project using the Java client of Perforce, though....
You might think that I'm a bit overdoing with the engineers vs. management, however in my experience managers have lost the experience to see through a learning curve and see stability, robustness etc. What is done then is that the tool with the nicest GUI is picked up. That's where the commercial version control tools shine, as a (admittedly very rough) rule.
For some people, this distracts from coding. For me, besides the initial learning curve, it doesn't. What distracts me most is pointless meetings, traveling to the other office, etc. With travelling and testing, sometimes a week goes by without touching any code.
Actually, the Dutch government is one of the easier wiretappers in Europe. Thanks to a few years of economic depression and costs crackdown in the police department, police were forced to use more wiretapping. And now it's very commonplace.
Incidentally, if you're living in NL then don't forget to come to Utrecht this Monday.
According to Intel, a laptop its harddisk plus DVD uses about 10% of the total power usage, so I'm having a hard time believing that your battery life is so much better thanks to the SSD storage. I'd more readily attribute the long battery life to a good bunch of batteries. Besides a 9 cell battery pack, the Dell D430 can pack an additional 6 cell as well.
Cool to see this on Slashdot. The guy who found the vulnerability is actually a customer of mine. I recently started a business in hosted Virtual Private Servers. Joris van Rantwijk, the bug reporter, was interested to become a customer and I said why don't you try it out for a few weeks?
/root directory ON MY PHYSICAL MACHINE (i.e. domain 0 in Xen speak) where I find a file describing the exploit...
As a plus point, I let them boot their own kernels (I trust my custommers). Next thing I know, he tells me to check my
Oh don't bother to check out my business' website, it's not translated yet in English... (I'm Dutch).