Re:The problem with ANY packaging system....
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Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
And this is my point exactly - the problem is people screwing up and making binary incompatible package versions - asserting that libPease1, version 1.5 is a full and complete replacement for libPease1, version 1.4 when in fact it isn't. And no packaging manager software can fix that - it is incompetence on the part of the package creator.
That is the point I keep trying to make -.debs are superior to.rpms because of the work of Debian maintainers who bash morons who cannot understand that same major version MUST MEAN binary compatible.
Unless we start vet'ing packages for compliance with that simple idea, no package manager created can solve the problem.
Now, I will agree RPM has its warts - I agree that being able to depend upon a FILE, rather than a PACKAGE is a weakness. However, until we get an agreed-upon standard that a given file will ALWAYS be supplied by a given PACKAGE, this is an unavoidable problem - I've seen the same file supplied by completely different packages (e.g. the RPMs supplied by Abiword and the abiword packaged supplied by Ximian).
How would you create a.deb if you needed/usr/bin/foo and it could be supplied by Foo.deb or FooAndNarf.deb? Which package would you tie to?
Again, the solution here lies not within the package system, but rather the package creators - until you get a means to guarantee that package maintainers are "following the rules" you will have these problems, be you Debian, RedHat, or Microsoft.
Perhaps what we need is for a consortium of distro vendors to create a mark of trust. A would-be package creator can sign his packages with a key, and ask to register that key with the Package Police. If the package creator proves he can package something CORRECTLY, his key is marked as trusted. If he starts screwing up, it gets marked as untrusted.
Perhaps we could even create a system by which end users could vote on a given package - positive trust points for good packages, negative trust points for badly packaged libraries. Of course, since there are always people who seek to screw such a system up, we would need people to review the votes those other people cast, and remove the people who abuse the system. Then we would be able to see whose packages were good, and whose were crap. Of course, there would always be the dicks who rushed to be the first to vote on a package....
Re:The problem with ANY packaging system....
on
Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
You misunderstood my statement - the same problem can happen with a package dependancy.
Suppose that Maynard has package libPease.1.4.2.thursday.5-31-41.1-pl3-build6 installed, which is supposed to be back-compatible to package libPease1. When he builds his.debs, he mistakenly builds it with a dependance upon libPease.1.4.2.thursday.5-31-41.1-pl3-build6, rather than libPease1.
Same problem. Only if your packaging system does not allow subversions of a package can you avoid this problem. And if your package does not allow subversions, then if I really do need a feature of libPease.1.4 or later I am screwed - I cannot spell that out in the packaging system, so somebody will install my package when they only have libPease.1.0. Then I have to tell them at runtime they don't have the correct package.
A partial solution would be for every package to supply a list of packages it is backward compatible with, and for the installer to check that list when installing a package. Then, when you install SuperFlyFloobyDust, the install can say "OK, libPease.1.5, can you take the place of libPease.1.4.2.thursday.5-31-41.1-pl3-build6?", and libPease.1.5 would have to be able to answer that question.
This is not a full solution, however - libPease.1.4.2.thursday.5-31-41.1-pl3-build6 could be some bastard version that has a functionality that was not incorporated into libPease.1.5, and libPease.1.5 might not ever have HEARD of it.
Additionally, SuperFlyFloobyDust might NOT really NEED the functions of the bastard version, and so even if libPease.1.5 could correctly state "No, I am not a total replacement for that bastard version", SuperFlyFloobyDust could actually run on libPease.1.5, but due to being packaged by an incompetent boob, the program won't install.
File or package dependancies are the same. Unless you forbid sub-versions, you have this problem. And if you forbid sub-versions, you introduce other problems.
The problem with ANY packaging system....
on
Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 5, Informative
The problem with ANY packaging system is overzelous dependancy definitions.
When Maynard builds his SuperFlyFloobyDust.rpm file, rather than specifying the dependancies as "I need libPease.so", he accepts the default "I need libPease.1.4.2.thursday.5-31-41.1-pl3-build6.so". So, even though any libPease.so would work, you get a dependancy failure.
This is a failing not of any specific package manager - ALL package managers have this problem. You don't see it with.debs not because of any inherent superiority of.deb, but rather because of the hard work of the Debian maintainers to make sure the packages are all set up correctly!
Additionally, there is the problem of library makers not following the fscking standards - libNarf.1.1.so is SUPPOSED to be fully compatible with libNarf.1.0.so - if it isn't, then it should be libNarf.2.0.so! However, you get people making libraries that don't follow this rule, so as a result you have to have libNarf.1.[0-99].so in your system because of programs that depend upon their version of that library.
The solution to this CANNOT reside within the package manager - it resides in the distribution maintainer to refuse to deal with packages that break the rules.
However, all it takes is one person installing one program that breaks the rules, and that installation is screwed.
That is where distros like Debian and the *BSD's have the advantage - they are controlled by folks who won't let that happen. However, how many people install from the unstable branches, and why? Because that's where the latest, greatest, shiniest stuff is!
If you use LILO, you can specify the kernel to reboot by:
lilo -R reboot.
I have an "exp" config in my LILO, for experimental kernels before I move them off probation. So, when I have done my build and install, I just type lilo -R exp && reboot and there I go.
It takes very little signal power to disrupt radio communications.
In radio, you measure signal power in dBm (decibels referenced to 1 mW). A typical narrowband FM receiver, like a cell phone, has a sensitivity of about -120 dBm - in other words, if the phone is getting -120 dBm at the antenna port it will just barely work. -120 dBm is one 10E-12 of 1 milliwatt - or one thousandth of a picowatt.
For a wireless LAN card, I think they usually want to see about -76 dBm for a good link - that's 10E-7.6 of a milliwatt being received, or about a twentieth of a nanowatt.
Let's say the lamp is a 5 watt lamp (and from what I understand most of these lights are more like 100 watts excitation energy - these aren't your floor lamp!) Let's say the lamp leaks.01% of its power - that would be half a milliwatt. Assume the leak is an isotropic radiator (radiates equally in all directions). So you have.5 mW (= -6 dBm) into a 0 dBi radiating antenna. Your wireless card is about +30 dBm into a +3dBi antenna - so you would have -6 dBm interference vs. +33 dBm ERP for the wireless transmitter, assuming they were both at the same place. That wouldn't be a problem.
Now, if the lamp is anything like the microwave pumped lamps I used to work with, you are talking about 500 watts or more of excitation energy - that's +20 dB. If the lamp leaks 1% of its signal (still small enough to have no real effect on the light output) that would be another +20 dB of leakage. You now have taken the lamp from -6 dBm ERP to +34 dBm - and you are now just as "loud" as the network card.
Also, these lamps are pumped by magnetron tubes, same as your microwave oven. These aren't nice, single-frequency sources - they spatter over a fair chunk of the band. So you cannot modulate them and use them as network nodes, and you cannot easily skip over the frequencies they use - they don't just impair one channel of a frequency hopping system, the impair many channels.
However, I have to wonder how the efficency of these lamps compares to the new LEDs on the market - it may be a moot point.
I took the Amtrak Southwest Chief from Kansas to LA over Christmas. Being able to stretch out (I'm 6'4") and having a sleeper to nap in, plus a 110V plug for my laptop was great.
Damn well better be great, at $1100 round-trip.
However, keep this in mind: When a plane lands at an airport, that is a minimum of 45 minutes from touchdown to takeoff, and usually more like an hour. The train stops are 5 minutes.
Now, it takes 3 days to get from New York to LA via rail (and a day and a quarter from KS to LA). The fastest the train goes is about 75 MPH (about 125 kph). Most of the trip's legs are pretty long - a TGV would be able to run at top speed for more than 90% of the run. That would pull the time down to less than a day from NY to LA.
Trains are FAR more efficent than planes at moving people, so the cost per seat can be far less. Also, making the train bigger or smaller depending upon load is easy - add cars. You really can't bolt a few extra seats on a plane. You also can make the seats larger on a train for comparitively less cost than a plane.
So, why don't we have this in the US? First, there's the Teamsters - they would much rather see freight move by truck than train, as that employs more Teamsters. Second, when the government cherry-picked the passenger rail from Sante Fe et. al., they really screwed up. SF owns the rail beds, and SF sees no reason to improve the railbeds to allow for fast trains. Amtrak would like faster trains, but with the railbeds in the condition they are, 70MPH is the limit. Also, since Amtrak is forbidden to carry significant freight, they cannot use freight to subsidise passenger service.
It's a shame, since if we had a decent rail service in this country, we would need fewer airports and aircraft (though, living in the Air Capitol of the World, that might be a bad thing) and we could reduce the numbers of trucks and cars on the highways (especially if Amtrak offered more AutoTrain service - I'd love to pull my car on a train in Newton, and pull off in Williams, then drive to the Grand Canyon).
But as long as SF sees no reason for faster freight service, and Amtrak cannot upgrade the lines, we will be stuck with the CF we have now.
For working on audio samples, Audacity is GREAT. I had some old records that are not available on CD that I wished to preserve. The problem is that I've had these since the early 1970's and they are scratched and worn. I sampled them in, fired up Audacity, and used Audacity's noise filter. One of these days I'm going to look over the code for it - it must be some pretty tricky signal processing....
You mark a section of noise, and tell the filter "See that: that's noise. Kill!". The filter will then remove that noise from the signal. The first sample I had the noise went from a "Schoosshh Schooshh" ever rotation to a very faint, high frequency "twinkle". Since the record was speech, I was able to then brick-wall filter that off, and Voila! I had an MP3 that was a pleasure to listen to, rather than a nasty scratchy mess.
Audacity works. Well. Get it. Use it.
(now, if only I could us it to filter out all the crap on the radio... But then I don't listen to the radio....)
We take for granted the enormous amount of data we have by the time we are 5 years old, let alone when we hit our teens. The best way to look at Cyc is as Cliffnotes on reality, plus some code to help enter them.
Will Cyc ever become intelligent? Unlikely in my view. However, what if we had a human level AI right now? Without the data Cyc has, it would STILL fail the Turning test, simply because it would not be able to discuss day to day things intelligently.
There's a book called Alternaties. The premise is the standard "multiple timelines", except that the timelines in question diverged about 50 years ago. One timeline has access to the others, and sends agents over to get technologies that were developed in the other timelines.
One agent's cover is blown because all his briefing said about a major cultural event was "A nuclear incident" - the incident in question was a terrorist attack like Sept. 11, only with a nuke. It changed the whole culture, but he didn't know it.
Like that agent, a machine intellect would be at a loss in our world without some basic information - how would a computer that had never seen water know it was wet otherwise? How would it know skinned knees hurt?
The only other solution is the Infocom "A Mind Forever Voyaging" approach - create your AI as an infant, and simulate the real world around it as it "grows up".
The large ISPs also promote spam. Consider Qwest, Verio, and UUNET just to name a few. These companies are so large they know they cannot be blacklisted, so they just keep on selling the pink contracts and to hell with the rest of us.
Unforunately, at this point it look like only a national law will even begin to bring those companies to heel (and a law will only affect companies with a significant business presense in the country that has the law...). I hate saying that - I dislike the "There outta be a law...." types, and any anti-spam law will have severe negative consiquences, but this is the direction we are being driven in.
Let's look at YOUR comments: ...second is storing the hydrogen within another material.... What do you think "zeolite entrainment" is? If you are going to talk about hydrogen power, at least follow the field enough to know the terms. And the problem with zeolite entrainment is you have to heat the zeolite to release the hydrogen. That wastes power.
It can be using solar power.... Solar power is about 1KW/m^2. One horsepower is 745 or so watts. If your solar array is 74% efficient (and if it IS, you are going to be a VERY rich man - the current number are less than 25%), you get 1 horsepower per square meter on a sunny day - call it 5 times that area to allow for weather and night. So, if your car requires 20 HP to run down the road, and you do so for 1 hour a day, you will need 5 * 1m^2 * 20 = 100 m^2 of solar array, or a panel 10*10 meters. Do you have that much space in your backyard?
Screw up your planning? As in, "Let's see. I can go about 400 miles per tank. Here's a hydrogen station. Here's the next one, 300 miles away. OK. Next one's 200 miles away. No problem." Then you find out the first station is closed, as you are pulling up to it. You have 100 miles of fuel. The next fuel station is 200 miles away. Hope you like to walk. And that is an extreme case - you can get into the same boat just tooling around town if you are not careful about watching the fuel gage.
If we skip straight to pure hydrogen as a fuel, then there will be zero pollution. BZZT! Wrong (if you are using an internal combustion engine). The oxides of nitrogen will still be produced - anytime you burn something in air at high temperature, you get NOx. And if you are talking about fuel cells - ever looked at what it takes to make those nice proton exchange membranes at the core of a fuel cell? It's not a very clean process.
Can you imagine the surface area needed to produce enough crops to then extract sufficient energy to then drive all the world's cars? Per my statements above, can YOU imagine the size of solar arrays needed to make the hydrogen?
Besides, you missed the point COMPLETELY: we are both talking about solar power. I'm just using a technique that has been around for a very long time to package it up.
There are other ways to reduce soot output - I've seen systems that used O2 enrichment to improve the combustion (using the fact that O2 is paramagenetic - you basically make a "filter" out of a strong permanent magnetic field that produces an O2 enriched stream and an N2 enriched stream - dump the N2 and keep the O2).
Also, by adding a turbo- or super-charger to the engine, you increase output and decrease unburned fuel.
An WRT to the size of field one needs to grow biodiesel (other posters....) - the question is, what do you need to make H2? Lots of energy coming from *somewhere* - damned if you do, damned if you don't. And I have to wonder if you couldn't tweak a few genes to make something like canola make more oil.
What you want is a plant that makes OIL - not just any carbohydrate, but an OIL. The less reformation you have to do, the higher your yield per acre and the lower your addtional energy input (read: cost).
Good points. However, are the micro-particulates from biodiesel comparable to those from mineral diesel? From what I'd heard, the output from the stacks on a biodiesel are much cleaner than mineral diesel.
Every time the issue of alternative fuel vehicles comes up, I want to find the nearest "eco-friendly" type and beat some sense into them. This is going to be a longish rant, and like all people's rants is largely my opinion....
As I see it, most of the people who push for hydrogren powered vehicles don't want to make clean cars, they want to make expensive cars. They seem to feel that if they can just make it a legal requirement that all cars cost US$100K and US$10/kilometer, then we will all happily stop driving cars and go back to walking.
Why do I feel this way? Because the folks who push hydrogen never seem to consider the facts that make hydrogen a poor fuel choice, and never consider that better alternatives exist.
First, let's consider the goals of alternative fuels:
Use a renewable resource for fuel
Reduce the amount of carbon oxides released into the atmosphere
Reduce the low-altitude pollution (unburned hydrocarbons, ozone, oxides of nitrogen and sulfur, etc.)
Also, let's review the barriers to adoption of any new system:
Cost of the vehicle
Ease of fuel containment
Presence of a distribution infrastructure (this includes both moving bulk fuel around as well as providing fuel to end users)
Cost of fuel
Now, consider hydrogen in light of those requirements:
Hydrogen is hard to contain - you either use expensive cryogenics, or you have to use zeolite entrainment to contain it. It weakens steel containers by diffusing into the container and migrating to the ever-present microfractures and expanding them (hydrogen embrittlement)
You have to make hydrogen from something - you therefor have to have some other energy source. Either that source is burning carbon in some form, or it's splitting atoms. Wind and wave are cool, but not universally available nor do they have the power density to meet all needs (not to say that they shouldn't be harvested....)
There aren't hydrogen stations on every corner. Until there are, anyone driving a hydrogen car will have to plan any long trips very carefully. True, this would correct itself if enough people drive H2 vehicles, but they won't drive them until the stations exists, but the stations won't be built until the cars are bought....
Hydrogen requires a special engine to burn - either a fuel cell, or a modified internal combustion engine. If you DO take a trip and screw up your planning, you are stuck.
Hydrogen engines DO reduce the low-altitude pollution - no unburned hydrocarbons, and fuel cells produce little NOx and no SOx
Fuel cells are expensive right now. They might get cheaper later, however
Now, let us consider biodiesel - made from peanut oil, canola, corn, hemp, or whatnot.
The net carbon released is zero to negative - the plants PULL CO2 from the air when they grow, and the fuel releases CO2 when burned. If anything is left of the plant after making the fuel, then you have a carbon sink. (This is why the hemp fans have a good idea - grow hemp, make fuel and paper, and you have a dandy carbon sink).
The energy to make the fuel comes from that big fusion reactor 93 million miles away. And unlike methanol, the energy requirements to turn a canola plant into biodiesel are pretty small - you end up with an energy surplus. Methanol requires you to get rid of most of the water, which takes a lot of energy.
Biodiesel contains little sulphur, and when it burns it burns more completely since it already contains some oxygen, unlike mineral diesel. So you reduce unburned hydrocarbons. I don't know what the NOx emissions of a diesel engine are relative to a gasoline engine, however
Containing biodiesel is easy. If you have a decently stocked kitchen, you have some already - cooking oil. Also, biodiesel is considerably less toxic than mineral diesel.
Because it is easy to contain, shipping it around and dispensing it to end users is easy.
IIRC, an engine that can run on biodiesel can also run on mineral diesel without modification. As a result, if you drive you biodiesel car to the Grand Canyon, and you need fuel at the rim, you have mineral diesel. Also, a station can start pumping biodiesel whenever - no special equipment needed. This decouples the support network from the vehicle uptake, allowing each to grow on their own merits.
Diesel engines are a known quantity, and are already being mass produced relatively cheaply.
The only issue is the cost of biodiesel relative to mineral diesel. Compared to hydrogen, biodiesel is MUCH cheaper.
So, if your goal is to reduce pollution and dependance on a non-renewable resource, you logically would be pressing for biodiesel. So why do so many of these people push for hydrogen? I believe it is because they want cars to be expensive in the mistaken belief that this will push us toward their utopian ideal of us all living in bark houses, wearing bushes and eating bugs.
This is a GeoCities site, and looks like it is already being hammered, so you may not be able to get to it directly, so go here for the Google cache.
Basically, this poor schmoe got a cable modem, without cable TV. Due to a snafu of military proportions, the cable company didn't block his TV, and the cable TV company brought charges against him.
I'm sure you were just being funny, but you wouldn't normally try to burn something like this onto an ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) - you'd compile the VHDL and load it into a big hoggin' FPGA (field programmable gate array).
An ASIC is a chip you have MADE in a foundary - once it's fabbed, it is no more reprogrammable than any other chip. An FPGA is a collection of omni-purpose gates that are controlled by SRAM or flash - you can reprogram it to do what you want just be hitting the reset line and loading a new image into it. At work, we (obdisclaimer - what I post on/. is my opinion, not my employers) use FPGAs to do a lot of signal processing.
The bad thing is that an FPGA big enough for a decent accelerator would be about a $700-$1500 part.
Now, what I can see it somebody doing enough devel on this to make a viable part, then getting it burned down to an ASIC and made avaible to the community. Yeah, that worked really well with IBM/Moto's CHIRP PowerPC boards.
But what could happen is this chip could find its way into the next generation TiVo, or some other set top box. In that market, a synthesizable core that was royalty-free would RULE.
I agree with some of the other posters, though - ditch the damn VGA compatibility layer, and just make a Linux (and *BSD) kernel console driver for it, an XFree driver, and a very basic BIOS driver for it. The BIOS driver can be stupid - just enough support to set modes, and print text. The kernel driver can take over once the system boots. Don't waste silicon making the framebuffer compatible with VGA (and thus EGA (and thus CGA)) - that design is a flat-out nightmare kludge. Go for a simple, clean, legacy-free design.
And while you are at it, make sure the DMA path is secure - make sure you can program the chip so that a vertex list entry cannot corrupt system memory. I lurk on the DRI mailing list, and the lengths to which they have to go to keep the graphics chip from being an exploit are ludicuous. It slows down the DRI drivers relative to other so-called operating systems that don't concern themselves with security.
I had used this very chip as an example of the problems of searching with Google in a prevous/. post - I was trying to find electronic forms of the datasheet, and was using it as an example of why I felt Google needed boolean searches.
The really funny thing is, that while this created a bit of a message thread on/., I can find that thread with neither/.'s built-in search nor with Google.
Making fake releases is a tradition many organizations (and/.;>) follow - go read QST, for example. Why, I even heard Microsoft is getting into the act - they released a fake news release about focusing on security and reviewing their code, but I think they jumped the gun by a couple of months....
Do you have a good pointer to a page on re-installing Irix? I have an Indy that came with 6.2 installed, and 6.5 CDs. After upgrading, the thing locks solid 50% of the time you access the video capture system - it now has the dubious distinction of being less stable than Windows. I've also tried putting Gnome on it (because I hate 4DWM), and Gnome will hard lock.
I'd like to do a from-scratch re-install of 6.5, but I've never installed a *nix other than Linux before.
And I suppose that is one of the problems with commercial *nixes - you get the hardware at a flea market, and the OS costs eat you alive. Not unlike Windows....
Oh give me a break, Rob! If YOU want a party near your home, why don't YOU organize one?
Unlike most people, you have the forum to get the interest in and you can write it off as a business expense!
Seriously - if you want to see a party nearby, MAKE ONE!
(of course, one wonders about the sort of people who would go to a Mozilla release party... will there be many "wimmin of the female persuasion" as a certain squint-eyed sailor might ask...)
Just what we need - more ego stroking for Mafiaboy. Doesn't anybody understand that articles like this are what drives these assholes into making these attacks? They do this for the egobo - "Look at me! All these major news outlets are talking about me! Aren't I wonderful?"
I think one of the single best ways we could discourage this crap would be to take anybody we catch doing this, and cane them on national TV. Show the piss running down their legs, show them crying for their mommies. Then follow up on them in prison - ask them how many times they've been the woman. Make sure they look as uncool as possible. That way, when the other would-be script kiddies see this, they won't think it's cool - they will think it's most uncool.
(/me continues to whack hornets' nest known as Slashdot) There was a good reason for punishments like the stocks - it made everyone in the community see that breaking the rules was BAD, and that BAD things happened to those who broke the rules. Yes, it was cruel to the individuals in the stocks. News flash - IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE! It tended to make even the lowest miscreant reconsider his actions. I'm sorry if it offends you, but who better to suffer the consequences of negative actions but the moron who committed them!
Look - if somebody makes an honest mistake, cut them some slack - I'm not for throwing somebody into the stocks because they missed a stop sign, or because they accidentally didn't secure their computer. But if somebody with malice aforethought commits an act against the community, I say "Nuke them 'till they glow, shoot them in the dark, and let $deity sort 'em out".
Slashdot Mirror
And this is my point exactly - the problem is people screwing up and making binary incompatible package versions - asserting that libPease1, version 1.5 is a full and complete replacement for libPease1, version 1.4 when in fact it isn't. And no packaging manager software can fix that - it is incompetence on the part of the package creator.
.debs are superior to .rpms because of the work of Debian maintainers who bash morons who cannot understand that same major version MUST MEAN binary compatible.
.deb if you needed /usr/bin/foo and it could be supplied by Foo.deb or FooAndNarf.deb? Which package would you tie to?
That is the point I keep trying to make -
Unless we start vet'ing packages for compliance with that simple idea, no package manager created can solve the problem.
Now, I will agree RPM has its warts - I agree that being able to depend upon a FILE, rather than a PACKAGE is a weakness. However, until we get an agreed-upon standard that a given file will ALWAYS be supplied by a given PACKAGE, this is an unavoidable problem - I've seen the same file supplied by completely different packages (e.g. the RPMs supplied by Abiword and the abiword packaged supplied by Ximian).
How would you create a
Again, the solution here lies not within the package system, but rather the package creators - until you get a means to guarantee that package maintainers are "following the rules" you will have these problems, be you Debian, RedHat, or Microsoft.
Perhaps what we need is for a consortium of distro vendors to create a mark of trust. A would-be package creator can sign his packages with a key, and ask to register that key with the Package Police. If the package creator proves he can package something CORRECTLY, his key is marked as trusted. If he starts screwing up, it gets marked as untrusted.
Perhaps we could even create a system by which end users could vote on a given package - positive trust points for good packages, negative trust points for badly packaged libraries. Of course, since there are always people who seek to screw such a system up, we would need people to review the votes those other people cast, and remove the people who abuse the system. Then we would be able to see whose packages were good, and whose were crap. Of course, there would always be the dicks who rushed to be the first to vote on a package....
You misunderstood my statement - the same problem can happen with a package dependancy.
.debs, he mistakenly builds it with a dependance upon libPease.1.4.2.thursday.5-31-41.1-pl3-build6, rather than libPease1.
Suppose that Maynard has package libPease.1.4.2.thursday.5-31-41.1-pl3-build6 installed, which is supposed to be back-compatible to package libPease1. When he builds his
Same problem. Only if your packaging system does not allow subversions of a package can you avoid this problem. And if your package does not allow subversions, then if I really do need a feature of libPease.1.4 or later I am screwed - I cannot spell that out in the packaging system, so somebody will install my package when they only have libPease.1.0. Then I have to tell them at runtime they don't have the correct package.
A partial solution would be for every package to supply a list of packages it is backward compatible with, and for the installer to check that list when installing a package. Then, when you install SuperFlyFloobyDust, the install can say "OK, libPease.1.5, can you take the place of libPease.1.4.2.thursday.5-31-41.1-pl3-build6?", and libPease.1.5 would have to be able to answer that question.
This is not a full solution, however - libPease.1.4.2.thursday.5-31-41.1-pl3-build6 could be some bastard version that has a functionality that was not incorporated into libPease.1.5, and libPease.1.5 might not ever have HEARD of it.
Additionally, SuperFlyFloobyDust might NOT really NEED the functions of the bastard version, and so even if libPease.1.5 could correctly state "No, I am not a total replacement for that bastard version", SuperFlyFloobyDust could actually run on libPease.1.5, but due to being packaged by an incompetent boob, the program won't install.
File or package dependancies are the same. Unless you forbid sub-versions, you have this problem. And if you forbid sub-versions, you introduce other problems.
The problem with ANY packaging system is overzelous dependancy definitions.
.debs not because of any inherent superiority of .deb, but rather because of the hard work of the Debian maintainers to make sure the packages are all set up correctly!
When Maynard builds his SuperFlyFloobyDust.rpm file, rather than specifying the dependancies as "I need libPease.so", he accepts the default "I need libPease.1.4.2.thursday.5-31-41.1-pl3-build6.so". So, even though any libPease.so would work, you get a dependancy failure.
This is a failing not of any specific package manager - ALL package managers have this problem. You don't see it with
Additionally, there is the problem of library makers not following the fscking standards - libNarf.1.1.so is SUPPOSED to be fully compatible with libNarf.1.0.so - if it isn't, then it should be libNarf.2.0.so! However, you get people making libraries that don't follow this rule, so as a result you have to have libNarf.1.[0-99].so in your system because of programs that depend upon their version of that library.
The solution to this CANNOT reside within the package manager - it resides in the distribution maintainer to refuse to deal with packages that break the rules.
However, all it takes is one person installing one program that breaks the rules, and that installation is screwed.
That is where distros like Debian and the *BSD's have the advantage - they are controlled by folks who won't let that happen. However, how many people install from the unstable branches, and why? Because that's where the latest, greatest, shiniest stuff is!
If you use LILO, you can specify the kernel to reboot by:
lilo -R
reboot.
I have an "exp" config in my LILO, for experimental kernels before I move them off probation. So, when I have done my build and install, I just type
lilo -R exp && reboot
and there I go.
I don't know if Grub has anything similar.
It takes very little signal power to disrupt radio communications.
.01% of its power - that would be half a milliwatt. Assume the leak is an isotropic radiator (radiates equally in all directions). So you have .5 mW (= -6 dBm) into a 0 dBi radiating antenna. Your wireless card is about +30 dBm into a +3dBi antenna - so you would have -6 dBm interference vs. +33 dBm ERP for the wireless transmitter, assuming they were both at the same place. That wouldn't be a problem.
In radio, you measure signal power in dBm (decibels referenced to 1 mW). A typical narrowband FM receiver, like a cell phone, has a sensitivity of about -120 dBm - in other words, if the phone is getting -120 dBm at the antenna port it will just barely work. -120 dBm is one 10E-12 of 1 milliwatt - or one thousandth of a picowatt.
For a wireless LAN card, I think they usually want to see about -76 dBm for a good link - that's 10E-7.6 of a milliwatt being received, or about a twentieth of a nanowatt.
Let's say the lamp is a 5 watt lamp (and from what I understand most of these lights are more like 100 watts excitation energy - these aren't your floor lamp!) Let's say the lamp leaks
Now, if the lamp is anything like the microwave pumped lamps I used to work with, you are talking about 500 watts or more of excitation energy - that's +20 dB. If the lamp leaks 1% of its signal (still small enough to have no real effect on the light output) that would be another +20 dB of leakage. You now have taken the lamp from -6 dBm ERP to +34 dBm - and you are now just as "loud" as the network card.
Also, these lamps are pumped by magnetron tubes, same as your microwave oven. These aren't nice, single-frequency sources - they spatter over a fair chunk of the band. So you cannot modulate them and use them as network nodes, and you cannot easily skip over the frequencies they use - they don't just impair one channel of a frequency hopping system, the impair many channels.
However, I have to wonder how the efficency of these lamps compares to the new LEDs on the market - it may be a moot point.
I took the Amtrak Southwest Chief from Kansas to LA over Christmas. Being able to stretch out (I'm 6'4") and having a sleeper to nap in, plus a 110V plug for my laptop was great.
Damn well better be great, at $1100 round-trip.
However, keep this in mind: When a plane lands at an airport, that is a minimum of 45 minutes from touchdown to takeoff, and usually more like an hour. The train stops are 5 minutes.
Now, it takes 3 days to get from New York to LA via rail (and a day and a quarter from KS to LA). The fastest the train goes is about 75 MPH (about 125 kph). Most of the trip's legs are pretty long - a TGV would be able to run at top speed for more than 90% of the run. That would pull the time down to less than a day from NY to LA.
Trains are FAR more efficent than planes at moving people, so the cost per seat can be far less. Also, making the train bigger or smaller depending upon load is easy - add cars. You really can't bolt a few extra seats on a plane. You also can make the seats larger on a train for comparitively less cost than a plane.
So, why don't we have this in the US? First, there's the Teamsters - they would much rather see freight move by truck than train, as that employs more Teamsters. Second, when the government cherry-picked the passenger rail from Sante Fe et. al., they really screwed up. SF owns the rail beds, and SF sees no reason to improve the railbeds to allow for fast trains. Amtrak would like faster trains, but with the railbeds in the condition they are, 70MPH is the limit. Also, since Amtrak is forbidden to carry significant freight, they cannot use freight to subsidise passenger service.
It's a shame, since if we had a decent rail service in this country, we would need fewer airports and aircraft (though, living in the Air Capitol of the World, that might be a bad thing) and we could reduce the numbers of trucks and cars on the highways (especially if Amtrak offered more AutoTrain service - I'd love to pull my car on a train in Newton, and pull off in Williams, then drive to the Grand Canyon).
But as long as SF sees no reason for faster freight service, and Amtrak cannot upgrade the lines, we will be stuck with the CF we have now.
You may use my comments, for what little good it will do.
For working on audio samples, Audacity is GREAT. I had some old records that are not available on CD that I wished to preserve. The problem is that I've had these since the early 1970's and they are scratched and worn. I sampled them in, fired up Audacity, and used Audacity's noise filter. One of these days I'm going to look over the code for it - it must be some pretty tricky signal processing....
You mark a section of noise, and tell the filter "See that: that's noise. Kill!". The filter will then remove that noise from the signal. The first sample I had the noise went from a "Schoosshh Schooshh" ever rotation to a very faint, high frequency "twinkle". Since the record was speech, I was able to then brick-wall filter that off, and Voila! I had an MP3 that was a pleasure to listen to, rather than a nasty scratchy mess.
Audacity works. Well. Get it. Use it.
(now, if only I could us it to filter out all the crap on the radio... But then I don't listen to the radio....)
I had thought of saying the same thing, but decided I'd stay focused on my point. Thank you for voicing my thoughts for me.... ;)
We take for granted the enormous amount of data we have by the time we are 5 years old, let alone when we hit our teens. The best way to look at Cyc is as Cliffnotes on reality, plus some code to help enter them.
Will Cyc ever become intelligent? Unlikely in my view. However, what if we had a human level AI right now? Without the data Cyc has, it would STILL fail the Turning test, simply because it would not be able to discuss day to day things intelligently.
There's a book called Alternaties. The premise is the standard "multiple timelines", except that the timelines in question diverged about 50 years ago. One timeline has access to the others, and sends agents over to get technologies that were developed in the other timelines.
One agent's cover is blown because all his briefing said about a major cultural event was "A nuclear incident" - the incident in question was a terrorist attack like Sept. 11, only with a nuke. It changed the whole culture, but he didn't know it.
Like that agent, a machine intellect would be at a loss in our world without some basic information - how would a computer that had never seen water know it was wet otherwise? How would it know skinned knees hurt?
The only other solution is the Infocom "A Mind Forever Voyaging" approach - create your AI as an infant, and simulate the real world around it as it "grows up".
The large ISPs also promote spam. Consider Qwest, Verio, and UUNET just to name a few. These companies are so large they know they cannot be blacklisted, so they just keep on selling the pink contracts and to hell with the rest of us.
Unforunately, at this point it look like only a national law will even begin to bring those companies to heel (and a law will only affect companies with a significant business presense in the country that has the law...). I hate saying that - I dislike the "There outta be a law...." types, and any anti-spam law will have severe negative consiquences, but this is the direction we are being driven in.
Let's look at YOUR comments:
...second is storing the hydrogen within another material....
What do you think "zeolite entrainment" is? If you are going to talk about hydrogen power, at least follow the field enough to know the terms. And the problem with zeolite entrainment is you have to heat the zeolite to release the hydrogen. That wastes power.
It can be using solar power....
Solar power is about 1KW/m^2. One horsepower is 745 or so watts. If your solar array is 74% efficient (and if it IS, you are going to be a VERY rich man - the current number are less than 25%), you get 1 horsepower per square meter on a sunny day - call it 5 times that area to allow for weather and night. So, if your car requires 20 HP to run down the road, and you do so for 1 hour a day, you will need 5 * 1m^2 * 20 = 100 m^2 of solar array, or a panel 10*10 meters. Do you have that much space in your backyard?
Screw up your planning?
As in, "Let's see. I can go about 400 miles per tank. Here's a hydrogen station. Here's the next one, 300 miles away. OK. Next one's 200 miles away. No problem." Then you find out the first station is closed, as you are pulling up to it. You have 100 miles of fuel. The next fuel station is 200 miles away. Hope you like to walk. And that is an extreme case - you can get into the same boat just tooling around town if you are not careful about watching the fuel gage.
If we skip straight to pure hydrogen as a fuel, then there will be zero pollution.
BZZT! Wrong (if you are using an internal combustion engine). The oxides of nitrogen will still be produced - anytime you burn something in air at high temperature, you get NOx.
And if you are talking about fuel cells - ever looked at what it takes to make those nice proton exchange membranes at the core of a fuel cell? It's not a very clean process.
Can you imagine the surface area needed to produce enough crops to then extract sufficient energy to then drive all the world's cars?
Per my statements above, can YOU imagine the size of solar arrays needed to make the hydrogen?
Besides, you missed the point COMPLETELY: we are both talking about solar power. I'm just using a technique that has been around for a very long time to package it up.
Excuse me, but TV is non-line of sight, and moves a lot of data (precious little INFORMATION, but that's another rant).
You fall into the trap many farmers fall into - that farming MUST use fertilizer. That's another thing that's wrong with what we do.
Farming is harvesting sunlight. Anything you do that raises the cost of that is foolish. Excessive use of fertilizers falls into that catagory.
Furthurmore, if you use the right crops for biodiesel, you FIX nitrogen in the soil.
There are other ways to reduce soot output - I've seen systems that used O2 enrichment to improve the combustion (using the fact that O2 is paramagenetic - you basically make a "filter" out of a strong permanent magnetic field that produces an O2 enriched stream and an N2 enriched stream - dump the N2 and keep the O2).
Also, by adding a turbo- or super-charger to the engine, you increase output and decrease unburned fuel.
An WRT to the size of field one needs to grow biodiesel (other posters....) - the question is, what do you need to make H2? Lots of energy coming from *somewhere* - damned if you do, damned if you don't. And I have to wonder if you couldn't tweak a few genes to make something like canola make more oil.
What you want is a plant that makes OIL - not just any carbohydrate, but an OIL. The less reformation you have to do, the higher your yield per acre and the lower your addtional energy input (read: cost).
Good points. However, are the micro-particulates from biodiesel comparable to those from mineral diesel? From what I'd heard, the output from the stacks on a biodiesel are much cleaner than mineral diesel.
As I see it, most of the people who push for hydrogren powered vehicles don't want to make clean cars, they want to make expensive cars. They seem to feel that if they can just make it a legal requirement that all cars cost US$100K and US$10/kilometer, then we will all happily stop driving cars and go back to walking.
Why do I feel this way? Because the folks who push hydrogen never seem to consider the facts that make hydrogen a poor fuel choice, and never consider that better alternatives exist.
First, let's consider the goals of alternative fuels:
Also, let's review the barriers to adoption of any new system:
Now, consider hydrogen in light of those requirements:
Now, let us consider biodiesel - made from peanut oil, canola, corn, hemp, or whatnot.
So, if your goal is to reduce pollution and dependance on a non-renewable resource, you logically would be pressing for biodiesel. So why do so many of these people push for hydrogen? I believe it is because they want cars to be expensive in the mistaken belief that this will push us toward their utopian ideal of us all living in bark houses, wearing bushes and eating bugs.
Err.. her, not him. To quote Daffy, "Aha! Pronoun trouble!" Caught it about .5 second after I clicked Submit...
The following link:
Get a cable modem, go to jail
details what can happen when you do something like this.
This is a GeoCities site, and looks like it is already being hammered, so you may not be able to get to it directly, so go here
for the Google cache.
Basically, this poor schmoe got a cable modem, without cable TV. Due to a snafu of military proportions, the cable company didn't block his TV, and the cable TV company brought charges against him.
I'm sure you were just being funny, but you wouldn't normally try to burn something like this onto an ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) - you'd compile the VHDL and load it into a big hoggin' FPGA (field programmable gate array).
/. is my opinion, not my employers) use FPGAs to do a lot of signal processing.
An ASIC is a chip you have MADE in a foundary - once it's fabbed, it is no more reprogrammable than any other chip. An FPGA is a collection of omni-purpose gates that are controlled by SRAM or flash - you can reprogram it to do what you want just be hitting the reset line and loading a new image into it. At work, we (obdisclaimer - what I post on
The bad thing is that an FPGA big enough for a decent accelerator would be about a $700-$1500 part.
Now, what I can see it somebody doing enough devel on this to make a viable part, then getting it burned down to an ASIC and made avaible to the community. Yeah, that worked really well with IBM/Moto's CHIRP PowerPC boards.
But what could happen is this chip could find its way into the next generation TiVo, or some other set top box. In that market, a synthesizable core that was royalty-free would RULE.
I agree with some of the other posters, though - ditch the damn VGA compatibility layer, and just make a Linux (and *BSD) kernel console driver for it, an XFree driver, and a very basic BIOS driver for it. The BIOS driver can be stupid - just enough support to set modes, and print text. The kernel driver can take over once the system boots. Don't waste silicon making the framebuffer compatible with VGA (and thus EGA (and thus CGA)) - that design is a flat-out nightmare kludge. Go for a simple, clean, legacy-free design.
And while you are at it, make sure the DMA path is secure - make sure you can program the chip so that a vertex list entry cannot corrupt system memory. I lurk on the DRI mailing list, and the lengths to which they have to go to keep the graphics chip from being an exploit are ludicuous. It slows down the DRI drivers relative to other so-called operating systems that don't concern themselves with security.
I had used this very chip as an example of the problems of searching with Google in a prevous /. post - I was trying to find electronic forms of the datasheet, and was using it as an example of why I felt Google needed boolean searches.
/., I can find that thread with neither /.'s built-in search nor with Google.
/. ;>) follow - go read QST, for example. Why, I even heard Microsoft is getting into the act - they released a fake news release about focusing on security and reviewing their code, but I think they jumped the gun by a couple of months....
The really funny thing is, that while this created a bit of a message thread on
Making fake releases is a tradition many organizations (and
Do you have a good pointer to a page on re-installing Irix? I have an Indy that came with 6.2 installed, and 6.5 CDs. After upgrading, the thing locks solid 50% of the time you access the video capture system - it now has the dubious distinction of being less stable than Windows. I've also tried putting Gnome on it (because I hate 4DWM), and Gnome will hard lock.
I'd like to do a from-scratch re-install of 6.5, but I've never installed a *nix other than Linux before.
And I suppose that is one of the problems with commercial *nixes - you get the hardware at a flea market, and the OS costs eat you alive. Not unlike Windows....
Oh give me a break, Rob! If YOU want a party near your home, why don't YOU organize one?
Unlike most people, you have the forum to get the interest in and you can write it off as a business expense!
Seriously - if you want to see a party nearby, MAKE ONE!
(of course, one wonders about the sort of people who would go to a Mozilla release party... will there be many "wimmin of the female persuasion" as a certain squint-eyed sailor might ask...)
Just what we need - more ego stroking for Mafiaboy. Doesn't anybody understand that articles like this are what drives these assholes into making these attacks? They do this for the egobo - "Look at me! All these major news outlets are talking about me! Aren't I wonderful?"
I think one of the single best ways we could discourage this crap would be to take anybody we catch doing this, and cane them on national TV. Show the piss running down their legs, show them crying for their mommies. Then follow up on them in prison - ask them how many times they've been the woman. Make sure they look as uncool as possible. That way, when the other would-be script kiddies see this, they won't think it's cool - they will think it's most uncool.
(/me continues to whack hornets' nest known as Slashdot)
There was a good reason for punishments like the stocks - it made everyone in the community see that breaking the rules was BAD, and that BAD things happened to those who broke the rules. Yes, it was cruel to the individuals in the stocks. News flash - IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE! It tended to make even the lowest miscreant reconsider his actions. I'm sorry if it offends you, but who better to suffer the consequences of negative actions but the moron who committed them!
Look - if somebody makes an honest mistake, cut them some slack - I'm not for throwing somebody into the stocks because they missed a stop sign, or because they accidentally didn't secure their computer. But if somebody with malice aforethought commits an act against the community, I say "Nuke them 'till they glow, shoot them in the dark, and let $deity sort 'em out".
Yes, they are indeed saying "You cannot run this under WinXP" - they are explicitly testing for XP and refusing to run if they detect it.
True, you could remove the test and make your own version, but the average Windows user won't be able to do this.