they've got better things to do than write new driver code every time kernel 2.6.287-test1.patch58 comes out.
Huh? First off, a good printer will interpret some common printing language like Postscript or PCLx to render differences between various printer hardware irrelevant, for anything beyond plain text. So really, for these printers, the version of the kernel or even what OS is running the spooler is never going to be an issue as long as the printing app speaks PS or PCL.
In the case of crap printers that can't even print plain text without having the CPU tell it when to move the print head and when to splatter ink from what holes, the kernel version or OS can still be irrelevant as this can be done well outside the kernel. A filter program that accepts Postscript and then converts this into signals that the printer can accept does'nt have to be reliant on a particular kernel version.
Ghostscript compiles on practically any Unix, MS-DOS, Win9x, Winnt, Win2k, OS/2, VMS,... kernel shmernel.
Even if this were something kernel specific, the OEM could simply release a kernel driver for a version of Linux as source code, and then someone(s) would most likely build it into something much better, faster and stable for kernels up to current ones. Witness the history of the SBLive drivers! They started out from Creative quite closed, were buggy and featureless, creative released the code under pressure and now the SBLive is one of the best sound cards supported in the latest Linux kernels.
HELLO, WE DON'T OFTEN OUTPUT TO F*(**CKING LINE PRINTERS MUCH THESE DAYS?
Line printers took text and printed that text, fancy PS and PCL printers also take text and if it is just text, it prints that text just like a line printer would. But it just so happens that to tack on some funky scalable fonts and graphics, a language was added that the printer could interpret and then act on as something much more than just ASCII. As far as lpd is concerned though, it's just the delivery man and could'nt care less what format the job being sent is or what the printer does with it.
My point is, lp does'nt really need to be any more complex with decent (real) printers.
Just one of many reasons no-one in their right mind uses Linux for output to paper.
I just bought a Xerox DocuPrint P8ex laser printer for around $410 au. It's a very nice 600dpi, 8ppm, PCL printer that thinks for itself (ie. has a brain and does'nt need any Megacrap OS to drive it).
I installed Progeny Linux 1.0, and hey what do you know, I was printing from Abiword, Netscape, The GIMP, Gedit and bash just like it was coming from Word, IE, Photoshop, Notepad and command.com. It was a peice of piss.
I could never get my old Lexmark 1100 GDI/WinPrinter going in Linux at the time, including checking Ghostscript. What a slow peice of crap that printer is anyway and why bother! Buying a WinPrinter is about as logical as buying a Win"MODEM", why bother! I personally could'nt care less if crap MODEMS and printers designed to be as cheap as possible to the OEM and encouraged by MS to lock users into their "OSes" are becoming supported in Linux, I won't dare buy another peice of hardware that claims to be something it is not. My CPU is not for modulating or demodulating or telling a stepper motor in a printer to move its dumb arse.
If you want some good stuff, go the extra mile, do the research and buy the good stuff and forget the cheap crap.
Sorry if I misinterpreted your post. Of course I don't beleive anything can be truely perfect. But you say OpenBSD is far from perfect, which sounds a bit extreme when the assumption is that you are speaking about the OS comparatively.
My point here is, that if it is obvious that "nothing in this fucking universe is perfect", then what was the point in stating that OBSD is far from perfect?
Being the best is just a perception? Well, for many people, this may be their "reality". Assuming they base their opinions on assumption, marketing hype, someone elses opinions, etc. But from where I stand, the best tool for the job is, the best tool for the job. Regardless of whether it actually ends up being chosen as the best tool. Many mistakes are made because people think they know what is best, but that does'nt make it the best.
Can you point me to that article? Was he speaking for himself or "most of" the core group? I really doubt that these guys can build, audit and fix OBSD source code so quickly when holes arise, without knowing how to actually make an exploit for their own code. Especially in light of their success in avoiding many holes before they become exploitable.
The [snip] point? I rekon they're more than just anal programmers, they know a bit about network security. Could they write an exploit that overflows a broken buffer with code that will rm -rf/.? Yeah, I rekon they could, if they could be bothered.
Hope your headache is gone... I don't want any points, I don't beleive in any God and my soul is happy enough.
This is not a competition for me, my questions are real questions and I am happy to have my statements corrected if I am wrong. I could'nt care less about Karma.
I can't say I find these benchmarks very credible. Unfortunetly, people will see these "benchmarks" from a college professor and instantly think this is some seriously authoritive info on the comparative performance of various Linux kernels. Bleh.
If they are so authoritive on OS design and performance bottlenecks at such fine grain levels of OS mechanics, perhaps they should put their 4.5 years into improving Linux into where they think it should be performance wise.
But alas, they wait and wait for the next kernel release, run some non real-World benchmarks, and then try to ponder some conclusion from their numbers. Four and a half years and this is all they could come up with?
Don't get me wrong, I think these types of profiling benchmarks have their place, but usually should be used in the pursuit of finding the culprit to performance degradation found in real World benchmarks with a view to actually fixing these smallest yet most significant of bottlenecks.
How do you know most of them cannot craft exploits? Even if they claim they either don't or can't, does'nt necessarily reflect what they like to do when nobody is watching.
The proof is in the pudding. Most people that "can" craft exploits, cannot do so for OpenBSD it would seem.
"Far from perfect", what can be perfect in a World that embraces ill thought out standards? "Better than most", then what would you say is the best if it is only better than most?
It's an OS that does'nt just adhere to very strict programming protocol and it's not just an OS with strong crypto tacked on to give a warm fuzzy feeling either. It has those along with other, real security features added on, a feature that allows logs that not even root can modify/delete?, without being in single user mode and thus actually being logged in locally to the machine.
Perhaps, TDR and the gang could'nt be bothered hacking crap systems because building a system that does'nt suck is so much more fulfilling. I think their Script Kitty kinda shows that they want to be a group that is above all that.
4 years without a remote exploit in the default install, speaks volumes.
You can import music from as many CDs as you want, and (again, unlike the case with the other guys) there are no pre-set limits: iTunes lets you encode as many songs as you want at the quality you want.
Is this a dig at Microsoft and the limits they may impose in XP?
* Shiny new International Space Station: 6 billion dollars.
* Super duper i386's: a couple thou each.
* Shoddy system software on space station: a couple space men (suffocating then burning on re-entry).
* The whole World realizing that Microsoft has changed it's name to "Redacted": PRICELESS!
There are some things money can't buy, for everything else theres Microsoft.
ISS: Ahhh control the NT CD won't boot.
Control: Yeah, thats right, that old 386 BIOS does'nt support CDROM booting but damn it's got some rad rad protection!!. Just run winnt/b to make boot floppies.
ISS: OK, so how do I get to the CDROM?
Control: Well you boot off the MSDOS boot floppy that has CDROM drivers of course.
ISS: OK, done that... ahh control it started copying over that boot disk and is now complaining that it cannot find command.com and is asking me where to find it. It asked me to label these disks 1 to 3 NT something or other, so I'll boot of this first one...
Control: No ISS, that won't work, it actually copies those floppies 3, 2 and then 1 (boot). Do you have another MSDOS boot floppy with CDROM drivers?
ISS: No, but Igor says he has the "Deb-Ian(?)" boot floppies and that I can "ftp install it from his Notebook?!?!????", he rekons that we can install "Lee? Nooks?", do something to the NT CD, create a FAT partition, copy the i386 dir to it, set it bootable with eff-disk and "sys it" from FreeDOS(?), reboot and then install NT from there????
Control: Stand-by ISS, we have MS support on the line, we have been placed in a queue and will be answered by the first available opperator, she's saying something about us being a valuable customer, just a sec... ummm, you guys would'nt happen to have a Visa or Mastercard handy?
There could be full redundancy, but where do you draw the line?
Many ISP's have multiple routers to connect to multiple back bones. Two or more connections to a land backbone and one satelite connection should be pretty redundant! The server you are trying to connect to could actually be more than one physical machine, each possibly with more than one network card, maybe plugged into seperate hubs or switches for redundancy. Perhaps even those switches and hubs have redundant power supplies (along with the servers and routers) and even load sharing/redundant back planes. There could be redundancy even with the routers, with one working and another checking the health of the "live" router periodically, and then assuming it's identity if it dies. And all this, powered by redundant UPS.
The redundancy is there and when it works, you don't know about it. Only when a hosting co, or other site is badly designed that some server cannot be reached and then someone asks, "Whatever Happened to Internet Redundancy?".
99% of the Worlds desktops are going to be blue screening a lot faster.
While, I, with Debian Linux and FreeBSD, will continue to enjoy my 4 years without ever seeing either of these free OS'es crashing in any way.
What's more, there is a killer app, a few in fact... VMWare, Win4Lin, Wine and the likes which enable me to have my cake and eat it too.
And what with CPU and RAM so cheap, I am grinning like the Cheshire Cat because I can watch a Windows session or Netscape crash and this will merely temporarily speed up my X compile before I restart those sessions.
But sadly for you Robert, you have to hit the reset button yet again and allow your laughable OS fuck up your laughable file system and registry, that little bit more, leading to more instability, even more registry rot and work your way towards critical file system corruption...
I've seen UDMA drives that are sustaining 30+ MBytes/sec.
Often, just some proper setting up with hdparm to enable 32bit, multi-sector/interupt, UDMA transfers, etc, are all that is needed to get a drive going from 3-5 MBytes/sec to 20-30+.
My real World tests confirm these results also.
SCSI drives with platters that have the same bit density and rotational speed as an IDE equivalent drive, don't have some magic that gives far greater sequential transfer rates. The differences in protocol overheads are not that great for single sequential transfers. Sure, SCSI handles multiple transfers and multiple drives much faster, and they do tend to use less CPU cycles to get the job done, but a modern UDMA drive, set up properly with hdparm will do admirably in sequential transfers compared with the much more expensive SCSI drives.
Thats not to say that I would'nt like a bunch of 15k SCSI drives in my machine. ; )
What is burst rotation speed? Last time I checked, my HDD's platter rotational speed was regulated closely to 7,200rpm as long as I did'nt spin them down in some power saving quest.
IDE drives are fast, but not real smart. An IDE drive of the same rotational speed and bit density could theoretically pull data off it's platters for a single sequential request just as quickly as the SCSI equivalent drive, and the same goes for how quickly it could move it's heads.
The merits of SCSI over IDE come in to play in tasks that are mainly required from server type applications. Using multiple disks, sending many read and write requests to the same disk or volume, are scenarios where IDE would bog down and SCSI shine. Reason being that IDE can only work with one command at a time and thus could not automatically re-order requests to achieve higher throughput and also IDE switching from master to slave on the same channel is nowhere near as quick as SCSI being able to take advantage of it's proper drive id address scheme, with data flying on that SCSI bus reaching each drive simultaneously yet only being acted on by the correct drive.
When you look at the typical home environment, with a single user using a single app or switching between multiple apps much slower than the disks can handle, then you will see that the merits of SCSI are largely wasted on that user.
SCSI drives tend to be on a higher R&D rung, have higher rotational speeds and support these advanced features because they are actually required by business who are willing to pay up for the speed.
Apparently Sun has decided that unless the machine is destined for server-use and the associated barrage of disk access, it isn't worth the more expensive disk and much more expensive controller.
Apparently, Sun knows what they're doing. I'll take 512Mb RAM and UDMA over 128Mb RAM and SCSI any day. Having said that, I have a SCSI adapter for my CDWR drive because every IDE burner I have experienced or heard experiences of, have been of coaster makers. My Yamaha CDWR has yet to make a coaster, after 50+ CDRs.
What really pisses me off, is seeing these cheap 1U servers with heaps of CPU power and RAM, and then some IDE drives. They could hold everything up if what is obviously going to some day be a server, is going to rely on a db that resides on an IDE disk or array, that is going to crawl thanks to a single command, slow switching, simple interface design.
I would like SCSI on my workstation, but not at the cost. SCSI has it's place, and with the added cost factored in, it is obviously not on the desktop for most desktop users.
Re:wtf should he need to be a "big fan" of that Po
on
The Art Of The Matrix
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Define "most advanced" and then realise that the brain is not necessarily the most advanced computer in the World.
The brain tends to be more of a conceptual, artistic machine than a machine built for logic accuracy and speed. A CPU could ray trace a 3D scene, going through millions of complex math problems in minutes with extreme accuracy, yet the human would have little chance of attempting this with accuracy. On the flip side, the human could instantly recognise the rendered scene and make conclusions from it, but to the electrical computer, this would be sheer guesswork thanks to some some humans program, which manages to slow that computer right down to achieve laughable recognition from the emotionless machine.
Try to remember a picture from your family photo album that you have'nt seen in a long while, but feel that you know well... describe it to yourself in the greatest detail you feel you can, and then go and look at it. You possibly remembered it seemingly in detail right? But not picture perfect. You remembered objects, characters and their colours in the photo, as concepts but not perfectly? You might have got one of the characters wrong and did'nt notice the small bottle top on the ground off in the background for example which was of little interest anyway, but the computer scan of it held them true to shape and colour, even if they are just 3 byte pixels.
The real power is the effective combination of man and machine. (Go Unix!)
I agree that the brain is the most intelligent tool in existence, but only the most advanced for certain applications. Interface a human brain to an F117 stealth bomber, in place of it's stabilization computer and then watch it crash immediately after take off and then try to get some sympathy from that flight computer on the ground which was programmed to "see".
It will probably drive out of the ring, into the car park and onto the highway, get lost and all the while arguing with itself about metric vs. imperial.
My point was twofold. First, you do have options, just not with the big OEMs.
Exactly, MS targets the big OEM's with reward/punishment tactics, because the OEM's are big and thus a powerful tool for the MS monopoly machine. I am about to buy a Dell Inspiron 8000 G1000U and I have no option on their web site to avoid MS.
Now before you say that this is excusable on Dells part due to the fact that they should not have to support loads of minority OSes as well as providing the Worlds most popular OS which they are better equiped to support, you should be made aware that I also have no option of avoiding an MS Office suite either via their online store.
I don't want an MS OS on this new notebook of mine and I will also not want any other MS software. It will be running Debian Linux and FreeBSD and I will stop at nothing to make sure I get the refund that I am entitled to.
Second, the reason for this is that 90%+ of consumers prefer Windows to the alternatives,
Most people that use MS software do so because they feel they have to. Argue this all you like, but the fact is that MS has been constantly stealing, cheating and moving goal posts to kill thier opposition and remain far on top, the consequence is that if you want your business to work well, you have to "play the game" by using what everyone else plays the game with, to remain compatible. "everyone else" are playing that game for the same reasons as you, and your addition to that tail chasing game just further adds to the disease that is Microsoft.
If you don't play by thier rules, and decide to work outside the MS wares, you better be prepared for MS to break your systems when they move the goal posts again. You systems may be stable, but what good will that be when Microsoft removes the interoperability from you? Will your business fold or will you cave in to joining the long list of people and businesses suffering with unstable, unsecure Microsoft systems in the name of "compatibility" and "efficiency"?
I hope that everyone on the anti-Microsoft is a stupid fuck like this idiot I'm responding to,
I've been using Linux and some of the free BSD's for almost 4 years now, in that time I have never ever experienced them crash, I've gotten plenty of stuff done with flexibility unheard of in the MS World and I've been watching them get more and more feature packed and easy, soon to be helping to cater for more than just the geeks. I go back to MS systems daily because I have to support them and constantly get frustrated by the lack of stability, flexibility and security in MS OSes and apps, so does this make me an idiot?
as that will make it easier for Microsoft to get a fair outcome.
Everyone deserves a fair trial, but what do you consider to be a fair outcome?
Does anyone know of any timelines of Microsofts shady business practices? Can anyone suggest a source that perhaps even keeps short documentation and/or links for each monopolistic event in the history of MS? No matter how small or large, stuff like the MS-DOS 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 6.21, 6.22 debacles of theft? The Caldera lawsuit, etc, Kerberos prostitution, paid reviews, MS online FUD, etc.
I would like to make a graphical timeline highlighting Microsofts questionable business practices, thefts, goal post moves, "innovation", etc. With links to MS position and opposing positions, articles, reviews, etc. Assuming there is not already a good timeline like this?
For the people who have either bad memories or selective memories, for those that "hear only what they want to hear and know only what they've heard".
Alas, I fear that some of Microsoft's critics are a bit more intelligent and are capable of coming up with some semblance of a rational argument.
Do you actually think that a company that has become so hated, got there for no good reason?
The bullies try to look cool in front of their peers at the expense of another kids image who is also trying to be cool and liked.
Push comes to shove, guns are easily available in the US, then the little kid opens fire on the big kid and all the other kids who sided with the bully because they were too scared of becoming the bullies next target.
I know, I carried a butterfly knife to school because I could not handle much more bullying. I wanted to kill this other kid. Lucky I never had access to guns, and lucky my teacher found out I was carrying and confiscated my knife.
These kids that "go crazy" are not necessarily all bad, they're just pushed and pushed beyond their limits at a time in their life when things are stressful enough without that shit.
3D displays like these are old and how practical are they? I saw one of these like 10 years ago on Beyond 2000. Why move around a display to look around an object when you could just move around virtually with a mouse?
Nice for advertising, to catch peoples attention, but what else?
The Apple Newton never recovered from the over hyped negative journalism of the initial units. The negativity was founded, for the first units, but further journalism and public opinion for the mature product was completely ignorant.
It developed into a fantastic technology that barely got a second look past the teething problems.
So I hope bluetooth quickly gets beyond the teething problems before people form an opinion on something that is apparently not be complete yet.
How is it evil of a distribution to fix security problems?
What on Earth are you talking about?
They provide OS'es that have been pretty flakey lately and now expect people to pay for their auto-update service to easily fix this shite?
In defence of them, perhaps they need a bit of funding to keep a service like that going (since it is so damn busy with people trying to fix their crap).
But Debian and OpenBSD are doing a far better job for me and don't demand my cash for such services which are rarely needed anyway with such high quality OS'es.
Red Hat was starting to show some of the hallmarks of Microsoft. Lots of security announcements, overly money hungry, etc.
Debian and OpenBSD are so quick to fix problems, and have awesome system update mechanisms, not to mention the stability and in OpenBSD's case the extreme security (not that Debian can't be secured).
I have Red Hat to thank for holding my hand while I got into Linux (though it was'nt a very firm grip with RH5.0!), I could'nt imagine EVER going back to them.
The sad thing is, a flood of stories in the media along the lines of "Linux not "free" any more!" are bound to be coming from journo's that either are clueless, are paid to cast Linux in a bad light or are simply afraid of the very technology they write about.
Slashdot Mirror
they've got better things to do than write new driver code every time kernel 2.6.287-test1.patch58 comes out.
Huh? First off, a good printer will interpret some common printing language like Postscript or PCLx to render differences between various printer hardware irrelevant, for anything beyond plain text. So really, for these printers, the version of the kernel or even what OS is running the spooler is never going to be an issue as long as the printing app speaks PS or PCL.
In the case of crap printers that can't even print plain text without having the CPU tell it when to move the print head and when to splatter ink from what holes, the kernel version or OS can still be irrelevant as this can be done well outside the kernel. A filter program that accepts Postscript and then converts this into signals that the printer can accept does'nt have to be reliant on a particular kernel version.
Ghostscript compiles on practically any Unix, MS-DOS, Win9x, Winnt, Win2k, OS/2, VMS,... kernel shmernel.
Even if this were something kernel specific, the OEM could simply release a kernel driver for a version of Linux as source code, and then someone(s) would most likely build it into something much better, faster and stable for kernels up to current ones. Witness the history of the SBLive drivers! They started out from Creative quite closed, were buggy and featureless, creative released the code under pressure and now the SBLive is one of the best sound cards supported in the latest Linux kernels.
HELLO, WE DON'T OFTEN OUTPUT TO F*(**CKING LINE PRINTERS MUCH THESE DAYS?
Line printers took text and printed that text, fancy PS and PCL printers also take text and if it is just text, it prints that text just like a line printer would. But it just so happens that to tack on some funky scalable fonts and graphics, a language was added that the printer could interpret and then act on as something much more than just ASCII. As far as lpd is concerned though, it's just the delivery man and could'nt care less what format the job being sent is or what the printer does with it.
My point is, lp does'nt really need to be any more complex with decent (real) printers.
Just one of many reasons no-one in their right mind uses Linux for output to paper.
I just bought a Xerox DocuPrint P8ex laser printer for around $410 au. It's a very nice 600dpi, 8ppm, PCL printer that thinks for itself (ie. has a brain and does'nt need any Megacrap OS to drive it).
I installed Progeny Linux 1.0, and hey what do you know, I was printing from Abiword, Netscape, The GIMP, Gedit and bash just like it was coming from Word, IE, Photoshop, Notepad and command.com. It was a peice of piss.
I could never get my old Lexmark 1100 GDI/WinPrinter going in Linux at the time, including checking Ghostscript. What a slow peice of crap that printer is anyway and why bother! Buying a WinPrinter is about as logical as buying a Win"MODEM", why bother! I personally could'nt care less if crap MODEMS and printers designed to be as cheap as possible to the OEM and encouraged by MS to lock users into their "OSes" are becoming supported in Linux, I won't dare buy another peice of hardware that claims to be something it is not. My CPU is not for modulating or demodulating or telling a stepper motor in a printer to move its dumb arse.
If you want some good stuff, go the extra mile, do the research and buy the good stuff and forget the cheap crap.
http://www.tpp.org/CiscoPrint/
Cisco rekons Linux printing is pretty cool.
Sorry if I misinterpreted your post. Of course I don't beleive anything can be truely perfect. But you say OpenBSD is far from perfect, which sounds a bit extreme when the assumption is that you are speaking about the OS comparatively.
/.? Yeah, I rekon they could, if they could be bothered.
My point here is, that if it is obvious that "nothing in this fucking universe is perfect", then what was the point in stating that OBSD is far from perfect?
Being the best is just a perception? Well, for many people, this may be their "reality". Assuming they base their opinions on assumption, marketing hype, someone elses opinions, etc. But from where I stand, the best tool for the job is, the best tool for the job. Regardless of whether it actually ends up being chosen as the best tool. Many mistakes are made because people think they know what is best, but that does'nt make it the best.
Can you point me to that article? Was he speaking for himself or "most of" the core group? I really doubt that these guys can build, audit and fix OBSD source code so quickly when holes arise, without knowing how to actually make an exploit for their own code. Especially in light of their success in avoiding many holes before they become exploitable.
The [snip] point? I rekon they're more than just anal programmers, they know a bit about network security. Could they write an exploit that overflows a broken buffer with code that will rm -rf
Hope your headache is gone... I don't want any points, I don't beleive in any God and my soul is happy enough.
This is not a competition for me, my questions are real questions and I am happy to have my statements corrected if I am wrong. I could'nt care less about Karma.
Exactly what I was thinking!
I can't say I find these benchmarks very credible. Unfortunetly, people will see these "benchmarks" from a college professor and instantly think this is some seriously authoritive info on the comparative performance of various Linux kernels. Bleh.
If they are so authoritive on OS design and performance bottlenecks at such fine grain levels of OS mechanics, perhaps they should put their 4.5 years into improving Linux into where they think it should be performance wise.
But alas, they wait and wait for the next kernel release, run some non real-World benchmarks, and then try to ponder some conclusion from their numbers. Four and a half years and this is all they could come up with?
Don't get me wrong, I think these types of profiling benchmarks have their place, but usually should be used in the pursuit of finding the culprit to performance degradation found in real World benchmarks with a view to actually fixing these smallest yet most significant of bottlenecks.
How do you know most of them cannot craft exploits? Even if they claim they either don't or can't, does'nt necessarily reflect what they like to do when nobody is watching.
The proof is in the pudding. Most people that "can" craft exploits, cannot do so for OpenBSD it would seem.
"Far from perfect", what can be perfect in a World that embraces ill thought out standards? "Better than most", then what would you say is the best if it is only better than most?
It's an OS that does'nt just adhere to very strict programming protocol and it's not just an OS with strong crypto tacked on to give a warm fuzzy feeling either. It has those along with other, real security features added on, a feature that allows logs that not even root can modify/delete?, without being in single user mode and thus actually being logged in locally to the machine.
Perhaps, TDR and the gang could'nt be bothered hacking crap systems because building a system that does'nt suck is so much more fulfilling. I think their Script Kitty kinda shows that they want to be a group that is above all that.
4 years without a remote exploit in the default install, speaks volumes.
You can import music from as many CDs as you want, and (again, unlike the case with the other guys) there are no pre-set limits: iTunes lets you encode as many songs as you want at the quality you want.
Is this a dig at Microsoft and the limits they may impose in XP?
* Shiny new International Space Station: 6 billion dollars.
* Super duper i386's: a couple thou each.
* Shoddy system software on space station: a couple space men (suffocating then burning on re-entry).
* The whole World realizing that Microsoft has changed it's name to "Redacted": PRICELESS!
There are some things money can't buy, for everything else theres Microsoft.
ISS: Ahhh control the NT CD won't boot. /b to make boot floppies.
Control: Yeah, thats right, that old 386 BIOS does'nt support CDROM booting but damn it's got some rad rad protection!!. Just run winnt
ISS: OK, so how do I get to the CDROM?
Control: Well you boot off the MSDOS boot floppy that has CDROM drivers of course.
ISS: OK, done that... ahh control it started copying over that boot disk and is now complaining that it cannot find command.com and is asking me where to find it. It asked me to label these disks 1 to 3 NT something or other, so I'll boot of this first one...
Control: No ISS, that won't work, it actually copies those floppies 3, 2 and then 1 (boot). Do you have another MSDOS boot floppy with CDROM drivers?
ISS: No, but Igor says he has the "Deb-Ian(?)" boot floppies and that I can "ftp install it from his Notebook?!?!????", he rekons that we can install "Lee? Nooks?", do something to the NT CD, create a FAT partition, copy the i386 dir to it, set it bootable with eff-disk and "sys it" from FreeDOS(?), reboot and then install NT from there????
Control: Stand-by ISS, we have MS support on the line, we have been placed in a queue and will be answered by the first available opperator, she's saying something about us being a valuable customer, just a sec... ummm, you guys would'nt happen to have a Visa or Mastercard handy?
There could be full redundancy, but where do you draw the line?
Many ISP's have multiple routers to connect to multiple back bones. Two or more connections to a land backbone and one satelite connection should be pretty redundant! The server you are trying to connect to could actually be more than one physical machine, each possibly with more than one network card, maybe plugged into seperate hubs or switches for redundancy. Perhaps even those switches and hubs have redundant power supplies (along with the servers and routers) and even load sharing/redundant back planes. There could be redundancy even with the routers, with one working and another checking the health of the "live" router periodically, and then assuming it's identity if it dies. And all this, powered by redundant UPS.
The redundancy is there and when it works, you don't know about it. Only when a hosting co, or other site is badly designed that some server cannot be reached and then someone asks, "Whatever Happened to Internet Redundancy?".
99% of the Worlds desktops are going to be blue screening a lot faster.
While, I, with Debian Linux and FreeBSD, will continue to enjoy my 4 years without ever seeing either of these free OS'es crashing in any way.
What's more, there is a killer app, a few in fact... VMWare, Win4Lin, Wine and the likes which enable me to have my cake and eat it too.
And what with CPU and RAM so cheap, I am grinning like the Cheshire Cat because I can watch a Windows session or Netscape crash and this will merely temporarily speed up my X compile before I restart those sessions.
But sadly for you Robert, you have to hit the reset button yet again and allow your laughable OS fuck up your laughable file system and registry, that little bit more, leading to more instability, even more registry rot and work your way towards critical file system corruption...
Enjoy!
hdparm reports Mega Bytes per second with -t (device) and -T (cache).
If you don't believe the figures, test how long something large takes to load for the first time. Communicator 4.75 is around 13Mb.
My Seagate UDMA Barracudas are giving around 18-22 sustained M Bytes per second, depending on which area of the disks are being read from.
I've seen UDMA drives that are sustaining 30+ MBytes/sec.
Often, just some proper setting up with hdparm to enable 32bit, multi-sector/interupt, UDMA transfers, etc, are all that is needed to get a drive going from 3-5 MBytes/sec to 20-30+.
My real World tests confirm these results also.
SCSI drives with platters that have the same bit density and rotational speed as an IDE equivalent drive, don't have some magic that gives far greater sequential transfer rates. The differences in protocol overheads are not that great for single sequential transfers. Sure, SCSI handles multiple transfers and multiple drives much faster, and they do tend to use less CPU cycles to get the job done, but a modern UDMA drive, set up properly with hdparm will do admirably in sequential transfers compared with the much more expensive SCSI drives.
Thats not to say that I would'nt like a bunch of 15k SCSI drives in my machine. ; )
burst rotation speed
What is burst rotation speed? Last time I checked, my HDD's platter rotational speed was regulated closely to 7,200rpm as long as I did'nt spin them down in some power saving quest.
IDE drives are fast, but not real smart. An IDE drive of the same rotational speed and bit density could theoretically pull data off it's platters for a single sequential request just as quickly as the SCSI equivalent drive, and the same goes for how quickly it could move it's heads.
The merits of SCSI over IDE come in to play in tasks that are mainly required from server type applications. Using multiple disks, sending many read and write requests to the same disk or volume, are scenarios where IDE would bog down and SCSI shine. Reason being that IDE can only work with one command at a time and thus could not automatically re-order requests to achieve higher throughput and also IDE switching from master to slave on the same channel is nowhere near as quick as SCSI being able to take advantage of it's proper drive id address scheme, with data flying on that SCSI bus reaching each drive simultaneously yet only being acted on by the correct drive.
When you look at the typical home environment, with a single user using a single app or switching between multiple apps much slower than the disks can handle, then you will see that the merits of SCSI are largely wasted on that user.
SCSI drives tend to be on a higher R&D rung, have higher rotational speeds and support these advanced features because they are actually required by business who are willing to pay up for the speed.
Apparently Sun has decided that unless the machine is destined for server-use and the associated barrage of disk access, it isn't worth the more expensive disk and much more expensive controller.
Apparently, Sun knows what they're doing. I'll take 512Mb RAM and UDMA over 128Mb RAM and SCSI any day. Having said that, I have a SCSI adapter for my CDWR drive because every IDE burner I have experienced or heard experiences of, have been of coaster makers. My Yamaha CDWR has yet to make a coaster, after 50+ CDRs.
What really pisses me off, is seeing these cheap 1U servers with heaps of CPU power and RAM, and then some IDE drives. They could hold everything up if what is obviously going to some day be a server, is going to rely on a db that resides on an IDE disk or array, that is going to crawl thanks to a single command, slow switching, simple interface design.
I would like SCSI on my workstation, but not at the cost. SCSI has it's place, and with the added cost factored in, it is obviously not on the desktop for most desktop users.
Define "most advanced" and then realise that the brain is not necessarily the most advanced computer in the World.
The brain tends to be more of a conceptual, artistic machine than a machine built for logic accuracy and speed. A CPU could ray trace a 3D scene, going through millions of complex math problems in minutes with extreme accuracy, yet the human would have little chance of attempting this with accuracy. On the flip side, the human could instantly recognise the rendered scene and make conclusions from it, but to the electrical computer, this would be sheer guesswork thanks to some some humans program, which manages to slow that computer right down to achieve laughable recognition from the emotionless machine.
Try to remember a picture from your family photo album that you have'nt seen in a long while, but feel that you know well... describe it to yourself in the greatest detail you feel you can, and then go and look at it. You possibly remembered it seemingly in detail right? But not picture perfect. You remembered objects, characters and their colours in the photo, as concepts but not perfectly? You might have got one of the characters wrong and did'nt notice the small bottle top on the ground off in the background for example which was of little interest anyway, but the computer scan of it held them true to shape and colour, even if they are just 3 byte pixels.
The real power is the effective combination of man and machine. (Go Unix!)
I agree that the brain is the most intelligent tool in existence, but only the most advanced for certain applications. Interface a human brain to an F117 stealth bomber, in place of it's stabilization computer and then watch it crash immediately after take off and then try to get some sympathy from that flight computer on the ground which was programmed to "see".
It will probably drive out of the ring, into the car park and onto the highway, get lost and all the while arguing with itself about metric vs. imperial.
My point was twofold. First, you do have options, just not with the big OEMs.
Exactly, MS targets the big OEM's with reward/punishment tactics, because the OEM's are big and thus a powerful tool for the MS monopoly machine. I am about to buy a Dell Inspiron 8000 G1000U and I have no option on their web site to avoid MS.
Now before you say that this is excusable on Dells part due to the fact that they should not have to support loads of minority OSes as well as providing the Worlds most popular OS which they are better equiped to support, you should be made aware that I also have no option of avoiding an MS Office suite either via their online store.
I don't want an MS OS on this new notebook of mine and I will also not want any other MS software. It will be running Debian Linux and FreeBSD and I will stop at nothing to make sure I get the refund that I am entitled to.
Second, the reason for this is that 90%+ of consumers prefer Windows to the alternatives,
Most people that use MS software do so because they feel they have to. Argue this all you like, but the fact is that MS has been constantly stealing, cheating and moving goal posts to kill thier opposition and remain far on top, the consequence is that if you want your business to work well, you have to "play the game" by using what everyone else plays the game with, to remain compatible. "everyone else" are playing that game for the same reasons as you, and your addition to that tail chasing game just further adds to the disease that is Microsoft.
If you don't play by thier rules, and decide to work outside the MS wares, you better be prepared for MS to break your systems when they move the goal posts again. You systems may be stable, but what good will that be when Microsoft removes the interoperability from you? Will your business fold or will you cave in to joining the long list of people and businesses suffering with unstable, unsecure Microsoft systems in the name of "compatibility" and "efficiency"?
I hope that everyone on the anti-Microsoft is a stupid fuck like this idiot I'm responding to,
I've been using Linux and some of the free BSD's for almost 4 years now, in that time I have never ever experienced them crash, I've gotten plenty of stuff done with flexibility unheard of in the MS World and I've been watching them get more and more feature packed and easy, soon to be helping to cater for more than just the geeks. I go back to MS systems daily because I have to support them and constantly get frustrated by the lack of stability, flexibility and security in MS OSes and apps, so does this make me an idiot?
as that will make it easier for Microsoft to get a fair outcome.
Everyone deserves a fair trial, but what do you consider to be a fair outcome?
Does anyone know of any timelines of Microsofts shady business practices? Can anyone suggest a source that perhaps even keeps short documentation and/or links for each monopolistic event in the history of MS? No matter how small or large, stuff like the MS-DOS 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 6.21, 6.22 debacles of theft? The Caldera lawsuit, etc, Kerberos prostitution, paid reviews, MS online FUD, etc.
I would like to make a graphical timeline highlighting Microsofts questionable business practices, thefts, goal post moves, "innovation", etc. With links to MS position and opposing positions, articles, reviews, etc. Assuming there is not already a good timeline like this?
For the people who have either bad memories or selective memories, for those that "hear only what they want to hear and know only what they've heard".
Alas, I fear that some of Microsoft's critics are a bit more intelligent and are capable of coming up with some semblance of a rational argument.
Do you actually think that a company that has become so hated, got there for no good reason?
Exactly, what systems do.
But then, how many MS fans actually read the...
Thats why kids are hurting each other.
The bullies try to look cool in front of their peers at the expense of another kids image who is also trying to be cool and liked.
Push comes to shove, guns are easily available in the US, then the little kid opens fire on the big kid and all the other kids who sided with the bully because they were too scared of becoming the bullies next target.
I know, I carried a butterfly knife to school because I could not handle much more bullying. I wanted to kill this other kid. Lucky I never had access to guns, and lucky my teacher found out I was carrying and confiscated my knife.
These kids that "go crazy" are not necessarily all bad, they're just pushed and pushed beyond their limits at a time in their life when things are stressful enough without that shit.
How about sharpness?
With a display like this, you need to forego either display sharpness or number of steps around the Z axis.
More steps, less sharp, as the previous and next image interfers with the current image that the user is looking at.
It was a problem 10 years ago, and looking at those pictures, would appear to still be a problem.
Keep dreaming guys. This is not the technology to high quality 3D displays.
3D displays like these are old and how practical are they? I saw one of these like 10 years ago on Beyond 2000. Why move around a display to look around an object when you could just move around virtually with a mouse?
Nice for advertising, to catch peoples attention, but what else?
That dot is OBVIOUSLY to avoid spam. It's obvious to me and every other person that emails me.
If you are my worst nightmare, then email me.
The Apple Newton never recovered from the over hyped negative journalism of the initial units. The negativity was founded, for the first units, but further journalism and public opinion for the mature product was completely ignorant.
It developed into a fantastic technology that barely got a second look past the teething problems.
So I hope bluetooth quickly gets beyond the teething problems before people form an opinion on something that is apparently not be complete yet.
How is it evil of a distribution to fix security problems?
What on Earth are you talking about?
They provide OS'es that have been pretty flakey lately and now expect people to pay for their auto-update service to easily fix this shite?
In defence of them, perhaps they need a bit of funding to keep a service like that going (since it is so damn busy with people trying to fix their crap).
But Debian and OpenBSD are doing a far better job for me and don't demand my cash for such services which are rarely needed anyway with such high quality OS'es.
True true.
for Debian.
Red Hat was starting to show some of the hallmarks of Microsoft. Lots of security announcements, overly money hungry, etc.
Debian and OpenBSD are so quick to fix problems, and have awesome system update mechanisms, not to mention the stability and in OpenBSD's case the extreme security (not that Debian can't be secured).
I have Red Hat to thank for holding my hand while I got into Linux (though it was'nt a very firm grip with RH5.0!), I could'nt imagine EVER going back to them.
The sad thing is, a flood of stories in the media along the lines of "Linux not "free" any more!" are bound to be coming from journo's that either are clueless, are paid to cast Linux in a bad light or are simply afraid of the very technology they write about.