This David Zindel fellow sounds like a good writer, but is his work up to the quality of Peter F. Hamilton? The title and trilogy aspects put me in mind of The Naked God (the final 1,000 page book in the trilogy "Night's Dawn"), and the content put me in mind with some of the earlier books in the trilogy. Has anyone read both? Care to share your opinions?
On a side note, it'd be cool is Slashdot would review the books (as I did a quick search and see no reviews). ---
But they still didn't help Linux any. # procs, client, NT > Linux by: "1 Windows 95 1.5 times 4 Windows NT 1.9 times 4 Windows 95 2.7 times"
On 1 proc, Linux should at least be the same as NT for serving NT clients -- but they didn't show that one. Instead, they showed the NT clients when Linux had the 4Proc config (2.2.x SMP is not as good as NT's SMP). This is sneaky -- omitting the best possibly situation.
Besides that, quad-proc systems are, well, rare. Could we get some submissions from real world IT shops that serve ~200 to 2,000 clients, and see what their loads are. Then, test various configurations of NT and Linux to see which serves best? ---
Perhaps we should take the viewpoint that this is good. I know there are some of you out there (myself included) who do not like the idea of "volunteer" conversation checkers, but what if this is usefull?
What if, because of the NSA listening device, they find and stop some terrorists that would've done something like that Oklahoma gov't centre bombing of the mid-1990s? Given that the machines and devices can both scan and flag bad things, it sounds like real people won't be listening in on otherwise private conversations (unless you say "President -- assasinate -- israeli -- mossad" or something;-)).
So given that only machines would listen, and that only recorded conversations with dangerous (to the US, as per NSA charter) implications would be flagged/checked, why should the average person be afraid?
Oh course, they could always scan for things they shouldn't, but it'd kinda hard to get a warrant to arrest someone for calling the US president a poopy-head. ---
As humourous as the idea is...
on
Focus Group Art
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· Score: 1
.. the artists did find an important issue: "It was our idea to visualize this view of the new kind of dictator, because we grow up in a condition of dictatorship - Lenin, Stalin, etc. And when we came to United States, we recognized that another dictator here is the so-called majority."
The so-called majority. Tobacco lobbyists, Microsoft lobbyist, gun lobbyists, etc. Every group with a vested interest in something and a lot of money can basically stuff the ballot box. The great unwashed generally doesn't notice, or care.
Demoncracy works because people make informed decisions, have a variety from which to choose, and because the people chosen to lead have some vision for how the country should be. Remove any of those, and you start to stagnate.
Think Hippopatmi near a lake which is surrounded by decidous forests (!?) with random people and George Washington. Methinks the Hippo Group and Washington Group took away from an OK blue-ish lake painting.:-) ---
From www.transmeta.com: "This web page is not here yet! ...but it is Y2K compliant. "
From Netcraft: www.transmeta.com is running Apache/1.1.1 on Linux
Isn't Apache 1.1.1 a tad, er, non-Y2K compliant? (I know there are several security concerns WRT that ancient a ver of Apache). At least they use Linux:-) ---
Holy war, indeed. Linus himself put out a soundfile on how he pronounces it (Linux pronounced like Linus, the Finnish accent).
The problem is, people either don't want to listen to him, or don't want conceide that they were/are wrong. Makes me shrug, because it's silly. He's clearly pronounced it the right way (if you don't agree, go email Linus -- I'm sure he'll be gentle;-).
Then there are the people that say s-ice-op, instead of sys-op (system operator), or VESA like VISA (not the way you pronounce it, the way it's spelt -- think Bart Simpson) instead of VESA (which is really weird), or I-S-A as "ICE-Ah" (ICE-Ah sounds, uhm, very wrong -- and if it was to be pronounced as spelt, it'd be "Iss-ah"). Either way, there are always people who will mispronounce things, claim they are correct, and then fight about it (this is why the US doesn't talk like the British, and are independant;-).
(humour poke at US citizens) Besides, everyone knows Roof is pronounced "Roo-ffff," not "Ruhff" like some southern US people do! (/humour poke at US citizens)
Communism is about a classless society where people work together, knowing each other, and pool their products. From there, they share out the products as required. IE: "You didn't produce much this week, Billy, but you are ill. Here's some extra medicine from the more well off"
The problem is that the governents setup to aid this change from city/town urban capitalism to town/village communism is/was either 1) founded by people under the guise of communism (a good method) so that they could gain power from the ignorant masses (maybe Mao and/or his succesors), and so will never let them truly be communist or 2) Becomes drunk on power/corrupt and does not relinquish control like they were supposed to (Stalin's Russia, etc).
Communism is great in theory for the same reasons that capitalism is great in theory. In reality, you have to deal with corrupt [communist leaders | politicials | bankers | businessmen]. Canada is a good example of a balance between capitalism (enconomy) and socialism (health care, welfare). There are some abuses, of course, but I'd rather have a safety net than not.
I just hope that the business men in the US and other "free" countries (where they define free as not communist, as opposed to true free speech [Columbine witch hunt]) have not been as much impacted by you by the Pro-US FUD of the past 40ish years ("Now, Billy, fight that Red menace!").
(I'd rant more about how I hate discrimination and prejudice, but this is as OT as I like to get -- and I think most of you understand this already) ---
I *LOVE* Soundgarden! I've personally gone through two tapes and a CD of Superunknown before I MP3ed them:-)
"Sure, Blackhole Sun, Barbie Girl, and We're In This Together are good, but let the CD stand on its own. Play more than the one song, damnit:-)"
This is meant to imply that they should not be hyping *GOOD* bands the same way they hype one hit wonders (Nine Inch Nails, Soungarden are not one hit wonders, and Aqua's Aquarium is a good CD)
What I'd like to get my hands on are some "demo" MP3s of Chris' new work (so I can see if the CD is worth it). ---
I'm a fan of Nine Inch Nails, and Trent's latest release ("The Fragile") is a two CD set. I was able to pick this up for 22$ Canadian (multiplied by.67, puts it just shy of 15$ US).
That's not too bad. Now, for whatever band put out that "Hey now, you're an All Star" song (20 s of it is interesting in the same way a wav clip from the Simpsons is interesting, otherwise it SUCKS) probably has a padded CD that I'd not touch (not that I buy many CDs;-).
The thing is, since about 1994, the record industry has been focusing on One Hit Wonders, instead of REAL bands that do real music. Most of what they produce is formulaic, at best. See: NSync and Backstreet boys (I can't hear a difference). Heh, in the interview with Trent (archived at www.nineinchnails.net), he talks about people asking him for a release because music in the latter half of the 90s SUCKED! (It mostly does).
Basically: I support MP3ing the one song those one hit wonders make because you'll probably only like it a little bit, and probably not listen to it after a year. As for real bands, buy their CDs, encode them, and preserve them. Those CDs are easy to scratch, and might be worth something someday.
As a side note, one thing I really hate is when companies will promote one song on a CD from a good band (selling them using the One Hit Wonder formula). Sure, Blackhole Sun, Barbie Girl, and We're In This Together are good, but let the CD stand on its own. Play more than the one song, damnit:-) (But this would let people decide if they liked the CD before buying, which is a no-no.) ---
Alan Cox (in his daily log) talked about fixing K7 support when his Athlon arrived.
(August 19th entry from this page) "AMD Athlon arrives at last. Its fast, very fast and the kernel is not yet optimised for the K7. The first problem I found is that 2.2.x with MTRR support crashes on boot on the K7. Fixed that with some bits from Linux kernel that had been done without a K7 or docs by someone who guessed very well indeed. "
That's one of the points I was trying to get across. I do love Linux, and love admining it, but I still have to go to my 98Lite install (using Litestep shell) to use Opera! before I can have stable/fast webbrowsing. I tell you this much, I'd give oral sex to an orangutang of dubious personal hygiene while tap dancing on hot coals if it'd give me a good browser for Linux and a good file manager for X (Explorer from Win95 is actually pretty decent -- GNOME's MC is too slow/buggy, and I hate those pixmaped buttons).
"Linux aficionados who are applauding US District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's bitter denunciation of their archrival Microsoft might want to read the fine print first. In the 207-page preliminary ruling, Jackson says that "fringe" operating systems like Linux are destined for continued niche market status."
I'm still applauding. The fact is, Linux does not have what it needs to be a good desktop OS right now. I can't get Opera, or a reasonably stable version of NS under Linux (NS is even more stable under Windows, which is scarey). But Linux does have what I need to use it as my firewall, and to develop for, etc. It's very much a WIP (Work In Progress), but it's only going to get better. And if you do compare the ratio of x86 PCs running Windows to x86 PCs running Linux, then you can also call it a fringe based on that ratio (as would be *BSD, OS/2, and any other x86 OS).
"When Judge Jackson said: "It is unlikely... that a sufficient number of open source developers will commit to developing and continually updating the large variety of applications that an operating system would need to attract in order to present a significant number of users with a viable alternative to Windows," Jackson predicted." (Emphasis mine)
He was right. How many people do you know (remember the intelligence factor applies) that even understand the concept "there are two kinds of files -- executables and data" or that "executables exist to work with data"? Well, if the Good Times Virus has anything to say on the subject, no. These are the blinking 12:00 generation -- people too stupid, tired, or busy to bother with the simplest of things around. These people expect the PC to know instantly what they want to do, or to be very inflexible and only offer them a few choices so they can go ahead and do what few tasks they know they can do on a PC without having to worry about thinking.
"In other words, Jackson needed to rule that Linux has virtually no chance to go mainstream. But he didn't mention RedHat's successful initial public offering, or even popular products, such as Apple Computer's iMac."
Linux going mainstream is still a possibility to many people, that is, people who know how to use a computer. The only other "mainstream" users who will use Linux (for the time being only) will, of course, require a local Linux guru to setup Linux for them before they can start enjoying the benefits of this "fringe" operating systems (this is why we support out local LUG). Jackson ignored this because he doesn't have much direct experience by Linux, besides Microsoft trying to use it as a straw man argument (which may very well have led him to be too harsh on it).
Wired also tried to decry his ruling with other points. The Red Hat IPO was successful because companies use it on workstations, not because of mainstream users.
As for the iMac -- how many people bought the iMac for basic, basic word proc/browser usage (which is the "reason to buy" right now) over PCs just because of the case design? A fair amount, I'd say. The iMac is not a choice of operating systems or hardware, it's a choice of flavours! Most people know NOTHING about the insides of a computer, and telling them that they use different proccessors would just confuse them. Instead, slap a pretty shell on it, and it'll sell alright. The same people (whom I've met and talked with) who bought iMacs, where the same people who bought the new beetle for its looks (over, say, its performance stats). ---
Microsoft's business practices, and consumers ;-)
on
The Post-Microsoft Era
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· Score: 1
*Warning*: Semi OT, and meant as tongue in cheek.
"We here at Microsoft were the first companies to give away cars. True, we're the sole supplier of maintenance and gas for said vehicles, but the cars themselves are free. Thanks to use, whole generations of drivers are on the road, enjoying themselves. It's practically charity.
It's a lot like our free housing project. You come to us, and we give you a house FOR FREE! Imagine that! And, while our utility rates are a tad high, the house itself is free. Now, while you can get free housing from those "Freedom to choose" people, I swear to you as god is my witness that they use rotten wood in the construction, And just try and get utilities for them. Totally untrustworthy.
As a side note, if you do sign up for one of our houses, we reserve the right to come push the big red "DO NOT PRESS OR HOUSE WILL SELF-DESTRUCT" button if we see or hear of you bringing bakes goods, tools, or wood supplies to those free house people. They are not to be tollerated."
Or, from Neal Stephenson's little essay: "The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers' attention to this incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:
Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"
Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"
Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"
Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."
Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"
Big Business (music producers, Hollywood, etc) is always paranoid about loosing power over their consumers. Once they no longer charm us, we are free to go and purchase elsewhere (which, of course, is the kiss of death for them).
I like CDs. They are convienient for getting music on. The only problem I see, is that they are too expensive (so I buy very, very few). I do still buy them, even though I can easily find MP3s for most songs. Why? Ease of purchase;-) Which is just the thing Big Business will never believe because it's a simple answer.
Damnit, I wish I could just have high-quality digital media sold to me at a respectable price. And once I had that media, I was free to do with the content as I please (well, except for blatantly illegal things like reselling copies). ---
That is like PGP. Any simple man in the middle attack will work. Spend some moola, record the conversations. Find the differences. Reverse engineer. It's how the Samba team made their work work w/ MS work;-)
No encryption will work to stop digital data. The only way to stop people from copyring things they want to copy would be to never give them any data in the first place. Otherwise, someone WILL copy it.
Main Entry: 1calendar 2 : a tabular register of days according to a system usually covering one year and referring the days of each month to the days of the week
Main Entry: 1calender 1 : to press (as cloth, rubber, or paper) between rollers or plates in order to smooth and glaze or to thin into sheets Sigh. Hemos is a great example of why piping to ispell just doesn't work.:-) ---
I have a wonderful InfoMagic 4-CD Linux Developer's Resource kit from August 1995 (CD date, I bought it in late 1996). It has what I used first, Slackware 2.3. I then moved to Slackware 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6 over time (experimenting with it). My firewall/IP Masq system started life as 3.6 (then 2.2.x came out, and I upgraded). Lukily, Slackware 3.6 came with most of the userland support 2.2 needed to be good (hooray). Removepkg, installpkg (and now, upgradepkg) mean that Slackware has as much package management as I care to have in a distro;-)
Onto Red Hat, I have a copy of Red Hat Mothers' Day release +0.1 on the same CDROM (but, yes, they still jumped 4 version numbers for no reason).
As is, 3.x to 4.x was because of a big change (new kernel). 4.x to 7.x is another big change (serveral, actually) -- KDE 1.1.2, October Gnome (Gnome in general, as it wasn't there before), Glibc (big big big change), and stable 2.2.13, XFree 3.3.5, and a bunch of minor changes that should equal a "big" change:-) 3 big changes, 3 major ver numbers, and general version number parity. I like it. ---
I was thinking that perhaps he was a Transmeta insider, giving away info, until he put his name at the end:-)
Listen to this line of thought. We don't have a video proccessor of common VGA and 3D functions in the CPU, as it doesn't make sense for a home system where we might want to upgrade the video card. For the same reason, why not make the module that (on the K6es, at least) translates the CISC instructions into micro-ops & schedules them. Want more Mhz? Replace the micro-op executor (CPU). The company found a problem? (F0 0F, Coma, etc) Replace the module that converts the instructions. Perhaps a newer algo that makes the chips faster w/o needing a faster Mhz core? I'd buy it. A chip on the motherboard that is wired to convert CISC to micro-ops, schedule, and send along to a core would be a very easy way to also enabled multiple instruction sets. This sounds like what Transmeta was doing (their patents).
This will be more important as IA-64 and the K8 (?) will probably have divergent 64-bit instructions. Why miss out on either's programs? Buy a Transmeta super-CPU:-)
Headcrash is a funny little book that takes technology, and extends it logically a bit. At one point, our hero, Pyle, was breaking into the place where he used to work via VR metaphors & the Internet.
It's a good read, anyway. Hopefully people will take some ideas from it, and add it to the Doom. I'd love to be able to manipulate a proccess with goggles & gloves;-) ---
It's amazing how hardware sensitive NT can be. I've seriously abused a few Linux installs, just by using evil hardware that emits magic smoke at times. Still, the system was stable. It was funny. I had two systems, side by side, over drawing both their power supplies. Windows would BSOD, Linux had an uptime of 45 days (then I replaced the CPU fan, sigh). I did fix the power problem.
2. Installing Windows NT where it doesn't belong
Like on my HD! (serious mode on) It's funny how many people will install NT onto a FAT drive (what's this, no security?). I guess they like having world-writeable winnt dirs;-)
3. Choosing the wrong file system
"Note that FAT32 isn't listed here and neither is the High-Performance File System (HPFS), or any other operating system-specific file system."
I would argue that NTFS is indeed OS specific, even though Linux can read it (write support is still experimental). What about FAT32 or HPFS? Linux can read (and write to FAT32, at least) those. How are they "Operating System Specific"? Use Ford gas with Ford cars, I guess is the metaphor. But I like my Linux-mobile which uses all kinds of gas.
4. No emergency repair disk
If you don't have a boot disk, you're screwed.. The NT repair disk is something my NT loving friend uses all the time (tee-hee). I've used Linux boot disks as well, but not as often.
5. Using the wrong Pagefile size
"People make the mistake of letting Windows NT suggest the default Pagefile size for your system. This is the amount of memory in your system plus 12 megabytes. This just isn't sufficient for today's applications. "
That is the sickest statement, next to "use double your ram." I have 128mb of ram in my main system, and 96mb in the local network server. Both use 128mb as the swap partition size, and neither use their swap partitions. Heck, even in Windows (98lite/w Litestep), it uses only 20mb of ram just loaded (little for Windows 98). It never uses its swap file, either;-)
6. Missing a key network component
Well, MS networking. It frightens me. I'd rather have TCP/IP anyday. NFS is good.
7. Forgetting the password
" The best way to avoid this dilemma is to immediately add your personal user account to the administrators local group of the system. This will make your main user account an administrator of the system, sparing you from heartaches and time later."
So set the root password, forget it, then add your account as UID 0!:-) YES!... Uhm, NO!!!! Trojan horses? How hard is it for a bad program that needs to getadmin access, when you're already admin?! Gee, I donna know;-) NT is designed with security in mind, but not its applications.
8. Using older applications
This could be easily solved by Source Of Course OpenSource software:-)
9. Applying service packs unwisely
It's scarey how they have to roll up all these fixes into service packs, and they still don't work as intended. Part of it is, of course, software that runs using misfeatures of windows, but some of it is also lack of testing and documentation. I hope Linux is never like that (although some kernels are bad).
10. Cloning Windows NT
Because, who wants more?:-) I'd rather have something like SSH, which generates a new random key every hour or so.
NT is really a lot of good intentions, wrapped up in a nice Satanic MS wrapper. I wouldn't mind using it, if it wasn't so damned slow on anything less than the latest hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
This David Zindel fellow sounds like a good writer, but is his work up to the quality of Peter F. Hamilton? The title and trilogy aspects put me in mind of The Naked God (the final 1,000 page book in the trilogy "Night's Dawn"), and the content put me in mind with some of the earlier books in the trilogy. Has anyone read both? Care to share your opinions?
On a side note, it'd be cool is Slashdot would review the books (as I did a quick search and see no reviews).
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Just go to Slackware.com's forum. It's fun to hang around, help people, learn things, and even ask your own questions :-)
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But they still didn't help Linux any.
# procs, client, NT > Linux by:
"1 Windows 95 1.5 times
4 Windows NT 1.9 times
4 Windows 95 2.7 times"
On 1 proc, Linux should at least be the same as NT for serving NT clients -- but they didn't show that one. Instead, they showed the NT clients when Linux had the 4Proc config (2.2.x SMP is not as good as NT's SMP). This is sneaky -- omitting the best possibly situation.
Besides that, quad-proc systems are, well, rare.
Could we get some submissions from real world IT shops that serve ~200 to 2,000 clients, and see what their loads are. Then, test various configurations of NT and Linux to see which serves best?
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Perhaps we should take the viewpoint that this is good. I know there are some of you out there (myself included) who do not like the idea of "volunteer" conversation checkers, but what if this is usefull?
;-)).
What if, because of the NSA listening device, they find and stop some terrorists that would've done something like that Oklahoma gov't centre bombing of the mid-1990s? Given that the machines and devices can both scan and flag bad things, it sounds like real people won't be listening in on otherwise private conversations (unless you say "President -- assasinate -- israeli -- mossad" or something
So given that only machines would listen, and that only recorded conversations with dangerous (to the US, as per NSA charter) implications would be flagged/checked, why should the average person be afraid?
Oh course, they could always scan for things they shouldn't, but it'd kinda hard to get a warrant to arrest someone for calling the US president a poopy-head.
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.. the artists did find an important issue:
:-)
"It was our idea to visualize this view of the new kind of dictator, because we grow up in a condition of dictatorship - Lenin, Stalin, etc. And when we came to United States, we recognized that another dictator here is the so-called majority."
The so-called majority. Tobacco lobbyists, Microsoft lobbyist, gun lobbyists, etc. Every group with a vested interest in something and a lot of money can basically stuff the ballot box. The great unwashed generally doesn't notice, or care.
Demoncracy works because people make informed decisions, have a variety from which to choose, and because the people chosen to lead have some vision for how the country should be. Remove any of those, and you start to stagnate.
Think Hippopatmi near a lake which is surrounded by decidous forests (!?) with random people and George Washington. Methinks the Hippo Group and Washington Group took away from an OK blue-ish lake painting.
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Don't you mean clipit? Just click the X, it learns to F-off :-)
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From www.transmeta.com:
...but it is Y2K compliant. "
:-)
"This web page is not here yet!
From Netcraft:
www.transmeta.com is running Apache/1.1.1 on Linux
Isn't Apache 1.1.1 a tad, er, non-Y2K compliant? (I know there are several security concerns WRT that ancient a ver of Apache). At least they use Linux
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Holy war, indeed. Linus himself put out a soundfile on how he pronounces it (Linux pronounced like Linus, the Finnish accent).
;-).
;-).
The problem is, people either don't want to listen to him, or don't want conceide that they were/are wrong. Makes me shrug, because it's silly. He's clearly pronounced it the right way (if you don't agree, go email Linus -- I'm sure he'll be gentle
Then there are the people that say s-ice-op, instead of sys-op (system operator), or VESA like VISA (not the way you pronounce it, the way it's spelt -- think Bart Simpson) instead of VESA (which is really weird), or I-S-A as "ICE-Ah" (ICE-Ah sounds, uhm, very wrong -- and if it was to be pronounced as spelt, it'd be "Iss-ah"). Either way, there are always people who will mispronounce things, claim they are correct, and then fight about it (this is why the US doesn't talk like the British, and are independant
(humour poke at US citizens) Besides, everyone knows Roof is pronounced "Roo-ffff," not "Ruhff" like some southern US people do! (/humour poke at US citizens)
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No, it isn't.
Communism is about a classless society where people work together, knowing each other, and pool their products. From there, they share out the products as required. IE: "You didn't produce much this week, Billy, but you are ill. Here's some extra medicine from the more well off"
The problem is that the governents setup to aid this change from city/town urban capitalism to town/village communism is/was either
1) founded by people under the guise of communism (a good method) so that they could gain power from the ignorant masses (maybe Mao and/or his succesors), and so will never let them truly be communist or
2) Becomes drunk on power/corrupt and does not relinquish control like they were supposed to (Stalin's Russia, etc).
Communism is great in theory for the same reasons that capitalism is great in theory. In reality, you have to deal with corrupt [communist leaders | politicials | bankers | businessmen]. Canada is a good example of a balance between capitalism (enconomy) and socialism (health care, welfare). There are some abuses, of course, but I'd rather have a safety net than not.
I just hope that the business men in the US and other "free" countries (where they define free as not communist, as opposed to true free speech [Columbine witch hunt]) have not been as much impacted by you by the Pro-US FUD of the past 40ish years ("Now, Billy, fight that Red menace!").
(I'd rant more about how I hate discrimination and prejudice, but this is as OT as I like to get -- and I think most of you understand this already)
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I *LOVE* Soundgarden! I've personally gone through two tapes and a CD of Superunknown before I MP3ed them :-)
:-)"
"Sure, Blackhole Sun, Barbie Girl, and We're In This Together are good, but let the CD stand on its own. Play more than the one song, damnit
This is meant to imply that they should not be hyping *GOOD* bands the same way they hype one hit wonders (Nine Inch Nails, Soungarden are not one hit wonders, and Aqua's Aquarium is a good CD)
What I'd like to get my hands on are some "demo" MP3s of Chris' new work (so I can see if the CD is worth it).
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I'm a fan of Nine Inch Nails, and Trent's latest release ("The Fragile") is a two CD set. I was able to pick this up for 22$ Canadian (multiplied by .67, puts it just shy of 15$ US).
;-).
:-) (But this would let people decide if they liked the CD before buying, which is a no-no.)
That's not too bad. Now, for whatever band put out that "Hey now, you're an All Star" song (20 s of it is interesting in the same way a wav clip from the Simpsons is interesting, otherwise it SUCKS) probably has a padded CD that I'd not touch (not that I buy many CDs
The thing is, since about 1994, the record industry has been focusing on One Hit Wonders, instead of REAL bands that do real music. Most of what they produce is formulaic, at best. See: NSync and Backstreet boys (I can't hear a difference). Heh, in the interview with Trent (archived at www.nineinchnails.net), he talks about people asking him for a release because music in the latter half of the 90s SUCKED! (It mostly does).
Basically: I support MP3ing the one song those one hit wonders make because you'll probably only like it a little bit, and probably not listen to it after a year. As for real bands, buy their CDs, encode them, and preserve them. Those CDs are easy to scratch, and might be worth something someday.
As a side note, one thing I really hate is when companies will promote one song on a CD from a good band (selling them using the One Hit Wonder formula). Sure, Blackhole Sun, Barbie Girl, and We're In This Together are good, but let the CD stand on its own. Play more than the one song, damnit
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Alan Cox (in his daily log) talked about fixing K7 support when his Athlon arrived.
:-)
(August 19th entry from this page) "AMD Athlon arrives at last. Its fast, very fast and the kernel is not yet optimised for the K7. The first problem I found is that 2.2.x with MTRR support crashes on boot on the K7. Fixed that with some bits from Linux kernel that had been done without a K7 or docs by someone who guessed very well indeed. "
So get 2.2.13, it should work
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That's one of the points I was trying to get across. I do love Linux, and love admining it, but I still have to go to my 98Lite install (using Litestep shell) to use Opera! before I can have stable/fast webbrowsing. I tell you this much, I'd give oral sex to an orangutang of dubious personal hygiene while tap dancing on hot coals if it'd give me a good browser for Linux and a good file manager for X (Explorer from Win95 is actually pretty decent -- GNOME's MC is too slow/buggy, and I hate those pixmaped buttons).
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"Linux aficionados who are applauding US District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's bitter denunciation of their archrival Microsoft might want to read the fine print first. In the 207-page preliminary ruling, Jackson says that "fringe" operating systems like Linux are destined for continued niche market status."
... that a sufficient number of open source developers will commit to developing and continually updating the large variety of applications that an operating system would need to attract in order to present a significant number of users with a viable alternative to Windows," Jackson predicted." (Emphasis mine)
I'm still applauding. The fact is, Linux does not have what it needs to be a good desktop OS right now. I can't get Opera, or a reasonably stable version of NS under Linux (NS is even more stable under Windows, which is scarey). But Linux does have what I need to use it as my firewall, and to develop for, etc. It's very much a WIP (Work In Progress), but it's only going to get better. And if you do compare the ratio of x86 PCs running Windows to x86 PCs running Linux, then you can also call it a fringe based on that ratio (as would be *BSD, OS/2, and any other x86 OS).
"When Judge Jackson said: "It is unlikely
He was right. How many people do you know (remember the intelligence factor applies) that even understand the concept "there are two kinds of files -- executables and data" or that "executables exist to work with data"? Well, if the Good Times Virus has anything to say on the subject, no. These are the blinking 12:00 generation -- people too stupid, tired, or busy to bother with the simplest of things around. These people expect the PC to know instantly what they want to do, or to be very inflexible and only offer them a few choices so they can go ahead and do what few tasks they know they can do on a PC without having to worry about thinking.
"In other words, Jackson needed to rule that Linux has virtually no chance to go mainstream. But he didn't mention RedHat's successful initial public offering, or even popular products, such as Apple Computer's iMac."
Linux going mainstream is still a possibility to many people, that is, people who know how to use a computer. The only other "mainstream" users who will use Linux (for the time being only) will, of course, require a local Linux guru to setup Linux for them before they can start enjoying the benefits of this "fringe" operating systems (this is why we support out local LUG). Jackson ignored this because he doesn't have much direct experience by Linux, besides Microsoft trying to use it as a straw man argument (which may very well have led him to be too harsh on it).
Wired also tried to decry his ruling with other points. The Red Hat IPO was successful because companies use it on workstations, not because of mainstream users.
As for the iMac -- how many people bought the iMac for basic, basic word proc/browser usage (which is the "reason to buy" right now) over PCs just because of the case design? A fair amount, I'd say. The iMac is not a choice of operating systems or hardware, it's a choice of flavours! Most people know NOTHING about the insides of a computer, and telling them that they use different proccessors would just confuse them. Instead, slap a pretty shell on it, and it'll sell alright. The same people (whom I've met and talked with) who bought iMacs, where the same people who bought the new beetle for its looks (over, say, its performance stats).
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*Warning*: Semi OT, and meant as tongue in cheek.
"We here at Microsoft were the first companies to
give away cars. True, we're the sole supplier of maintenance and gas for said vehicles, but the cars themselves are free. Thanks to use, whole generations of drivers are on the road, enjoying themselves. It's practically charity.
It's a lot like our free housing project. You come to us, and we give you a house FOR FREE! Imagine that! And, while our utility rates are a tad high, the house itself is free. Now, while you can get free housing from those "Freedom to choose" people, I swear to you as god is my witness that they use rotten wood in the construction, And just try and get utilities for them. Totally untrustworthy.
As a side note, if you do sign up for one of our houses, we reserve the right to come push the big red "DO NOT PRESS OR HOUSE WILL SELF-DESTRUCT" button if we see or hear of you bringing bakes goods, tools, or wood supplies to those free house people. They are not to be tollerated."
Or, from Neal Stephenson's little essay:
"The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers' attention to this incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:
Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"
Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"
Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"
Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."
Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"
Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!""
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Big Business (music producers, Hollywood, etc) is always paranoid about loosing power over their consumers. Once they no longer charm us, we are free to go and purchase elsewhere (which, of course, is the kiss of death for them).
;-) Which is just the thing Big Business will never believe because it's a simple answer.
I like CDs. They are convienient for getting music on. The only problem I see, is that they are too expensive (so I buy very, very few). I do still buy them, even though I can easily find MP3s for most songs. Why? Ease of purchase
Damnit, I wish I could just have high-quality digital media sold to me at a respectable price. And once I had that media, I was free to do with the content as I please (well, except for blatantly illegal things like reselling copies).
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LOL
;-)
That is like PGP. Any simple man in the middle attack will work. Spend some moola, record the conversations. Find the differences. Reverse engineer. It's how the Samba team made their work work w/ MS work
No encryption will work to stop digital data. The only way to stop people from copyring things they want to copy would be to never give them any data in the first place. Otherwise, someone WILL copy it.
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Main Entry: 1calendar 2 : a tabular register of days according to a system usually covering one year and referring the days of each month to the days of the week
:-)
Main Entry: 1calender 1 : to press (as cloth, rubber, or paper) between rollers or plates in order to smooth and glaze or to thin into sheets
Sigh. Hemos is a great example of why piping to ispell just doesn't work.
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I have a wonderful InfoMagic 4-CD Linux Developer's Resource kit from August 1995 (CD date, I bought it in late 1996). It has what I used first, Slackware 2.3. I then moved to Slackware 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6 over time (experimenting with it). My firewall/IP Masq system started life as 3.6 (then 2.2.x came out, and I upgraded). Lukily, Slackware 3.6 came with most of the userland support 2.2 needed to be good (hooray). Removepkg, installpkg (and now, upgradepkg) mean that Slackware has as much package management as I care to have in a distro ;-)
:-) 3 big changes, 3 major ver numbers, and general version number parity. I like it.
Onto Red Hat, I have a copy of Red Hat Mothers' Day release +0.1 on the same CDROM (but, yes, they still jumped 4 version numbers for no reason).
As is, 3.x to 4.x was because of a big change (new kernel). 4.x to 7.x is another big change (serveral, actually) -- KDE 1.1.2, October Gnome (Gnome in general, as it wasn't there before), Glibc (big big big change), and stable 2.2.13, XFree 3.3.5, and a bunch of minor changes that should equal a "big" change
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Looks like they haven't read "Trademark infringement for Dummies."
Either way, it's best summed up as this little piece of art.
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I was thinking that perhaps he was a Transmeta insider, giving away info, until he put his name at the end :-)
:-)
Listen to this line of thought. We don't have a video proccessor of common VGA and 3D functions in the CPU, as it doesn't make sense for a home system where we might want to upgrade the video card. For the same reason, why not make the module that (on the K6es, at least) translates the CISC instructions into micro-ops & schedules them. Want more Mhz? Replace the micro-op executor (CPU). The company found a problem? (F0 0F, Coma, etc) Replace the module that converts the instructions. Perhaps a newer algo that makes the chips faster w/o needing a faster Mhz core? I'd buy it. A chip on the motherboard that is wired to convert CISC to micro-ops, schedule, and send along to a core would be a very easy way to also enabled multiple instruction sets. This sounds like what Transmeta was doing (their patents).
This will be more important as IA-64 and the K8 (?) will probably have divergent 64-bit instructions. Why miss out on either's programs? Buy a Transmeta super-CPU
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Headcrash is a funny little book that takes technology, and extends it logically a bit. At one point, our hero, Pyle, was breaking into the place where he used to work via VR metaphors & the Internet.
;-)
Amazon listing of the book.
It's a good read, anyway. Hopefully people will take some ideas from it, and add it to the Doom. I'd love to be able to manipulate a proccess with goggles & gloves
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1. Using the wrong hardware
;-)
/w Litestep), it uses only 20mb of ram just loaded (little for Windows 98). It never uses its swap file, either ;-)
:-) YES! ... Uhm, NO!!!! Trojan horses? How hard is it for a bad program that needs to getadmin access, when you're already admin?! Gee, I donna know ;-) NT is designed with security in mind, but not its applications.
:-)
:-)
It's amazing how hardware sensitive NT can be. I've seriously abused a few Linux installs, just by using evil hardware that emits magic smoke at times. Still, the system was stable. It was funny. I had two systems, side by side, over drawing both their power supplies. Windows would BSOD, Linux had an uptime of 45 days (then I replaced the CPU fan, sigh). I did fix the power problem.
2. Installing Windows NT where it doesn't belong
Like on my HD!
(serious mode on)
It's funny how many people will install NT onto a FAT drive (what's this, no security?). I guess they like having world-writeable winnt dirs
3. Choosing the wrong file system
"Note that FAT32 isn't listed here and neither is the High-Performance File System (HPFS), or any other operating system-specific file system."
I would argue that NTFS is indeed OS specific, even though Linux can read it (write support is still experimental). What about FAT32 or HPFS? Linux can read (and write to FAT32, at least) those. How are they "Operating System Specific"?
Use Ford gas with Ford cars, I guess is the metaphor. But I like my Linux-mobile which uses all kinds of gas.
4. No emergency repair disk
If you don't have a boot disk, you're screwed.. The NT repair disk is something my NT loving friend uses all the time (tee-hee). I've used Linux boot disks as well, but not as often.
5. Using the wrong Pagefile size
"People make the mistake of letting Windows NT suggest the default Pagefile size for your system. This is the amount of memory in your system plus 12 megabytes. This just isn't sufficient for today's applications. "
That is the sickest statement, next to "use double your ram." I have 128mb of ram in my main system, and 96mb in the local network server. Both use 128mb as the swap partition size, and neither use their swap partitions. Heck, even in Windows (98lite
6. Missing a key network component
Well, MS networking. It frightens me. I'd rather have TCP/IP anyday. NFS is good.
7. Forgetting the password
" The best way to avoid this dilemma is to immediately add your personal user account to the administrators local group of the system. This will make your main user account an administrator of the system, sparing you from heartaches and time later."
So set the root password, forget it, then add your account as UID 0!
8. Using older applications
This could be easily solved by Source Of Course OpenSource software
9. Applying service packs unwisely
It's scarey how they have to roll up all these fixes into service packs, and they still don't work as intended. Part of it is, of course, software that runs using misfeatures of windows, but some of it is also lack of testing and documentation. I hope Linux is never like that (although some kernels are bad).
10. Cloning Windows NT
Because, who wants more?
I'd rather have something like SSH, which generates a new random key every hour or so.
NT is really a lot of good intentions, wrapped up in a nice Satanic MS wrapper. I wouldn't mind using it, if it wasn't so damned slow on anything less than the latest hardware.
Have fun.
/ is the root directory. Everything branches out from the root.
:-) ... unless it meant root partition.
/var
/usr
/lib
/bin
/sbin
All are off of the root directory..
I'm not sure why Disk Drake would offer you to change your /
Saturday October 09
Mozilla M10 Released (166)
This from the main page, a mere few hundred pixels from the this story!