As a matter of fact, they already did that. About 4 or 5 years a company I worked for bought a few Dell servers with RedHat Linux.
We bought them with their PERC SCSI RAID controller. They supported it only on a few RH kernels with binary drivers.
We tried to install debian on one of them, but ended up with a debian system with a Redhat kernel, because it was impossible to compile a kernel with the Dell driver or to ise that driver with anything but the Redhat custom kernel. A year or two later a proper driver appeared..
Regards
There's still room for open source, or free to play games.
Have you seen Planeshift http://www.planeshift.it/ or Eternal-Lands http://www.eternal-lands.com/.
The first one is fully open source, the second has only OS client.
Of course none of them have hundreds of thousands players, but... check them yourself.
Regards
I am sure it varies a lot in different countries.
Here in Poland it is extremally difficult to fire a public university teacher. Even if he/she does something illegal, do not come to lectures etc. It may take sometimes even a few years to fire someone. Really!
It's a lot easier to convince someone to resign.
Regards
Re:They should make their own distribution
on
Linux in Iraq
·
· Score: 1
It's slow as shit.
Only if you run it from CD. I would suggest using knoppix as a linux distribution: boot from CD, install to harddrive and voila - you have linux installed. Very simple.
They should make their own distribution
on
Linux in Iraq
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If Iraqis Linux User Group is going to succeed, they should make their own localized distribution. It could be based on Knoppix or any distribution they like, but should be localized as much as possible and easy to install and use.
I think Knoppix or something similar is the easiest to start with.
AFAIR from earlier slashdot articles and posts there is lack of proper localization for Iraq in Windows so it would be a great advantage for Linux.
My grandmother died of "old age". She was healthy to the end of life.
One day, when she was going to sleep, she told: "It's enough". And never woke up again. She was 91.
I write from memory, haven't checked recently if something changed lately.
The idea is simple. You cannot buy a mainframe with only one processor. Even if you pay for one, the machine has more (AFAIR 4 at least). Some of them are enabled and working, some disabled. There is a special piece of hardware that tracks processor behavior. If something goes wrong, defective processor is switched off and the next free one turned on, taking the work of previous processor. Don't ask me about cached memory, instructions during execution etc. Maybe OS takes care of this, maybe there is another solution.
The Z-series will experience downtime if its power supply is cut and it doesn't have some form of backup power supply that can take over in a matter of nanoseconds.
Even smaller IBM servers (like AS/400) have built in UPS. So unplugging for a short period of time won't hurt it. Besides you can find even PC servers with redundant, hot pluggable power supplies. In mainframe every piece of hardware is hotpluggable including processors.
Play a 640x360 DivX on your machine. Watch the CPU usage.
I did that. My machine is AMD Athlon XP 1800+, 256 MB RAM, nVidia GeForce 4 MX440. And Linux of course.
I played a movie in gmplayer. And watched CPU usage in top.
CPU load never exceeded 1% (!). The IDLE was almost all the time above 99. 99.2 or 99.4 in fact.
And 0.1% goes to top, about 0.2% to Xserver.
I was surprised, but the processor actually do almost nothing to decode video...
After a thought. Data is read from CD. Most of the time processor just waits for data and does nothing more.
My first PC was 286. Bought in local store. After some time I've found out that the chip was from AMD. Next was 386sx. Again it was AMD, just by coincidence. After some time I've jumped to 486dx2. Of course by AMD.
My first (and the last) Intel processor was Pentium (166MHz if I recall corectly). It worked for less then a month. One day it burnt. Literally, with smoke and everything. We couldn't get rid of that terrible smell for a week. After that I replaced it whit AMD K5. And I stayed with AMD. Currently I have Athlon XP.
Probably I had very bad luck, but that Intel processor was the worst experience in my life...
Ok, I wasn't aware of that option. Anyway my point is: if you have sources, you can easily turn off functionality you don't like.
You even don't have to be an experienced programmer. Just basic programming knowledge is necessary in most cases.
Why the author is looking from the Windows point of view?
In 6 years probably Windows will be vanishing. And there will be more Linux or other OS OSes based desktops than Windows.
Enforcing laws stopping users from using some services won't give anything. It's like using robots.txt to stop people from mass downloading. I can easily get wget sources and modify them not to use robots.txt file. In open source world such restrictions does not apply.
Misunderstanding. English is not my first language.
I mean comparing moon to the planet it is orbiting. Not planets among them. Pluto probably could have been some big planet's moon. But it is orbiting Sun, not any other planet, so it is a planet too.
Well, it isn't very precise, because there is a lot of smaller rocks orbiting Sun, which are not called planets but planetoids or asteroids (sorry, I don't know proper English terminology). And astronomers are not sure, if Pluto should be treated as a planet or asteroid.
But the term moon means a satellite of a planet.
Let's start from planet. Planet is a body orbiting a sun, which do not emit light on its own.
A moon is a body orbiting a planet. It may be just a bigger rock, like Phobos and Deimos around Mars or a big one like our Moon. But of course it must be smaller than a planet.
> This is perhaps Nokia's first attempt to marry mobile phone and PDA in a lightweight and thin formfactor.
AFAIR Nokia was the first cellular phone maker, who introduced combined phone and PDA (Nokia Communicator). It wasn't maybe "lightweight and thin", but the times were different.
> What if the implemented hardware has conviently located logic circuits from the UI keyboard/touchscreen.
That's quite simple. After the user touches the name, he/she votes for, the program requests confirmation, something like: "You vote for X. Is that ok?".
And the place for buttons may be chosen randomly to avoid such tweaks.
> there isn't alot of open-source support of traditionally government apps.
Open source is not meant to help government. Government has enough money to buy whatever needs. But, because we all pay for that from our taxes, we should be able to check whether the government's decisions are correct and the software is bugless.
> And i'd be extremely surprised if anything developed with government money became open source.
But it should. Just because it was developed with government money. And because in democracy people should be able to control government.
> He said that ALL software used by the government should be open source.
Actually, I meant that all software created by or for government should be open source.
I don't care if any government employer works on proprietary operating system or uses closed source office suite.
But it is important to know how systems collecting my personal data work.
For example in Poland Social Insurance Institution forces payers to use MS Windows system whether they like it or not. Open source community fights to release only communication specification, to be able to write alternative program:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/janosik/
I see some misunderstanding here.
Using the best tool, even commercial one, does not prevent you from releasing your sources.
You're only unable to release the tool's sources, but you don't have to. There will allways be enough number of independent developers able to check your work.
The solution is simple: use open source software. Every software in government, which is paid for from citizens taxes, should be open source. So that every citizen (at least the one which is a programmer) could check whether the code is good and fair, especially in elections.
Of course the code actually used in voting machines should be double checked by government professionals, but everyone should have an access to read the code.
> getting 310km using WiFi from ground to a balloon.
Yes. But for normal use ground to balloon connection isn't very usefull. This time it was ground - ground connection. One point was on the mountain at the height of 1400 meters above sealevel, and the other in a distant city on a scyscraper.
Btw. 1400 meters is about 4600 feet.
They have achieved a steady transfer of about 40KB/s (40 kilobytes/second) using normal FTP. The negotiated bandwidth was 1Mb/s.
And the weather conditions were far from perfect:-)
Slashdot Mirror
As a matter of fact, they already did that. About 4 or 5 years a company I worked for bought a few Dell servers with RedHat Linux. We bought them with their PERC SCSI RAID controller. They supported it only on a few RH kernels with binary drivers. We tried to install debian on one of them, but ended up with a debian system with a Redhat kernel, because it was impossible to compile a kernel with the Dell driver or to ise that driver with anything but the Redhat custom kernel. A year or two later a proper driver appeared.. Regards
There's still room for open source, or free to play games. Have you seen Planeshift http://www.planeshift.it/ or Eternal-Lands http://www.eternal-lands.com/. The first one is fully open source, the second has only OS client. Of course none of them have hundreds of thousands players, but... check them yourself. Regards
It's a lot easier to convince someone to resign.
Regards
Only if you run it from CD. I would suggest using knoppix as a linux distribution: boot from CD, install to harddrive and voila - you have linux installed. Very simple.
I think Knoppix or something similar is the easiest to start with. AFAIR from earlier slashdot articles and posts there is lack of proper localization for Iraq in Windows so it would be a great advantage for Linux.
Regards
My grandmother died of "old age". She was healthy to the end of life.
One day, when she was going to sleep, she told: "It's enough". And never woke up again. She was 91.
The one we have is F60 or F70. Well, quite old machine (from 1992 if I remember correctly), but still works :-)
I write from memory, haven't checked recently if something changed lately.
The idea is simple. You cannot buy a mainframe with only one processor. Even if you pay for one, the machine has more (AFAIR 4 at least). Some of them are enabled and working, some disabled. There is a special piece of hardware that tracks processor behavior. If something goes wrong, defective processor is switched off and the next free one turned on, taking the work of previous processor.
Don't ask me about cached memory, instructions during execution etc. Maybe OS takes care of this, maybe there is another solution.
Even smaller IBM servers (like AS/400) have built in UPS. So unplugging for a short period of time won't hurt it.
Besides you can find even PC servers with redundant, hot pluggable power supplies. In mainframe every piece of hardware is hotpluggable including processors.
I did that. My machine is AMD Athlon XP 1800+, 256 MB RAM, nVidia GeForce 4 MX440. And Linux of course.
I played a movie in gmplayer. And watched CPU usage in top.
CPU load never exceeded 1% (!). The IDLE was almost all the time above 99. 99.2 or 99.4 in fact.
And 0.1% goes to top, about 0.2% to Xserver.
I was surprised, but the processor actually do almost nothing to decode video...
After a thought. Data is read from CD. Most of the time processor just waits for data and does nothing more.
My first PC was 286. Bought in local store. After some time I've found out that the chip was from AMD. Next was 386sx. Again it was AMD, just by coincidence. After some time I've jumped to 486dx2. Of course by AMD.
My first (and the last) Intel processor was Pentium (166MHz if I recall corectly). It worked for less then a month. One day it burnt. Literally, with smoke and everything. We couldn't get rid of that terrible smell for a week. After that I replaced it whit AMD K5. And I stayed with AMD. Currently I have Athlon XP.
Probably I had very bad luck, but that Intel processor was the worst experience in my life...
Regards
Ok, I wasn't aware of that option. Anyway my point is: if you have sources, you can easily turn off functionality you don't like.
You even don't have to be an experienced programmer. Just basic programming knowledge is necessary in most cases.
In 6 years probably Windows will be vanishing. And there will be more Linux or other OS OSes based desktops than Windows.
Enforcing laws stopping users from using some services won't give anything. It's like using robots.txt to stop people from mass downloading. I can easily get wget sources and modify them not to use robots.txt file. In open source world such restrictions does not apply.
Regards
If you need better performance it may be another reason to switch to linux
Only Microsoft didn't catch up, but who cares ;-)
Regards
No. ISS has an escape capsule docked. So astronauts can go home any time they need.
I mean comparing moon to the planet it is orbiting. Not planets among them. Pluto probably could have been some big planet's moon. But it is orbiting Sun, not any other planet, so it is a planet too.
Well, it isn't very precise, because there is a lot of smaller rocks orbiting Sun, which are not called planets but planetoids or asteroids (sorry, I don't know proper English terminology). And astronomers are not sure, if Pluto should be treated as a planet or asteroid.
But the term moon means a satellite of a planet.
Regards
Let's start from planet. Planet is a body orbiting a sun, which do not emit light on its own.
A moon is a body orbiting a planet. It may be just a bigger rock, like Phobos and Deimos around Mars or a big one like our Moon. But of course it must be smaller than a planet.
This is not a formal definition of course :-)
Regards
AFAIR Nokia was the first cellular phone maker, who introduced combined phone and PDA (Nokia Communicator). It wasn't maybe "lightweight and thin", but the times were different.
Regards
That's quite simple. After the user touches the name, he/she votes for, the program requests confirmation, something like: "You vote for X. Is that ok?".
And the place for buttons may be chosen randomly to avoid such tweaks.
Regards
Open source is not meant to help government. Government has enough money to buy whatever needs. But, because we all pay for that from our taxes, we should be able to check whether the government's decisions are correct and the software is bugless.
> And i'd be extremely surprised if anything developed with government money became open source.
But it should. Just because it was developed with government money. And because in democracy people should be able to control government.
Regards
Actually, I meant that all software created by or for government should be open source.
I don't care if any government employer works on proprietary operating system or uses closed source office suite.
But it is important to know how systems collecting my personal data work.
For example in Poland Social Insurance Institution forces payers to use MS Windows system whether they like it or not. Open source community fights to release only communication specification, to be able to write alternative program: http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/janosik/
Regards
I see some misunderstanding here.
Using the best tool, even commercial one, does not prevent you from releasing your sources.
You're only unable to release the tool's sources, but you don't have to.
There will allways be enough number of independent developers able to check your work.
Regards
Every software in government, which is paid for from citizens taxes, should be open source. So that every citizen (at least the one which is a programmer) could check whether the code is good and fair, especially in elections.
Of course the code actually used in voting machines should be double checked by government professionals, but everyone should have an access to read the code.
Yes. But for normal use ground to balloon connection isn't very usefull.
This time it was ground - ground connection. One point was on the mountain at the height of 1400 meters above sealevel, and the other in a distant city on a scyscraper.
Btw. 1400 meters is about 4600 feet.
The negotiated bandwidth was 1Mb/s.
And the weather conditions were far from perfect
Regards