In fact, pick any commerical hardware product that is running any specialized or 'embedded' form of Linux or *nix and show me where I can buy the software without the hardware.
Hmm.. That would be my Linksys WRT54GS router. Except you can't buy it. It's available for free, due to Linksys having used GPL'ed software, and therefore needing to release their firmware under the same terms. I think the original post about buying was mainly because one would not expect it to be available for free.
I think there are several issues concerning Windows vs Linux on different hardware.
1) Linux runs on a lot of different architectures - Windows does not (anymore). This is normally what people think about when they say Linux runs on anything. I don't think I would get as good a result trying to stuff Windows (any version including CE) on my Linksys WRT54GS router.
2) Linux is extremely configurable in terms of what services you want to run, and how advanced a deamon you choose. For lesser hardware, you might want to consider a smaller application to provide some service. Perhaps it dosn't have the same functionality as the grand solution, but if it gets the job done with less resources, it has fullfilled its job.
3) If we a just concerned with legacy hardware, I assume we are talking x86. In this case, it is mostly an issue of the overhead of running Windows vs some Linux distribution. About 7-8 years ago I helped manage the network in the dorm where I lived, and we had a P133 Linux-box with 96MB RAM taking care of DNS, DHCP, Mail and being gateway/router (with a 100MBPS connection through the university) for the entire dorm. Although this was before the day of P2P so the outbound traffic was lower on that account, we did have a great deal of traffic, since we were also connected to 5-7 other dorms with 100MBPS. Yust for reference, the dorm had about 300 rooms, and about 200 users on the network. I really wouldn't want to try this with windows.
4) Hardware compatibility. The point where Linux is still lagging behind (due to some hardware vendors not supporting anything but Windows). I think this is getting a little off-topic now, since this is basically only an issue with new hardware, while the article is concerned with legacy hardware. Otherwise I would agree that this is in fact an issue when comparing Windows to Linux, but you should just buy hardware that is known to work with the operating system you want to run, since this is basically only relevant when buying the newest hardware.
I have some more examples of things I have done with Linux, which I don't think would be possible with Windows: * A file-server about 7 years ago with 120GB disk, being able to sustain 5-5.5 MB/s with Samba. The processor was a P133 without MMX. 6 IDE harddrives in software stripe.
* Taking a standard distribution (RedHat 6.2 i think it was) and stripping it down to 20MB to run off a flash-drive for a mobile robot.
To sum it up, the versatility of Linux is simply amazing. It allows the system to be scaled to run optimally on anything from embedded systems and PDAs to an S390 mainframe. And the ability to strip out the unneeded stuff (such as the GUI on a server) takes this much further. If we try to focus on legacy hardware, I think a comparison between Windows XP and a full-blown Linux desktop distro will probably prove that they are equally slow. But if you choose a Linux distribution specifically created to run on a 486 or early pentium, there is no f***ing way Windows will be able to do anything useful.
Just my opinion. If you don't like it, you shouldn't have read it.
So, if KDE runs on Mac, does it also support a mouse with more than one button? Or is that a hardware limitations. Come to think of it, if Mac mice only have one button, do they not have scroll-wheels? Or is it just me who haven't been following anything in the Mac hardware world for years.
Well, interresingly enough, the weblogs of my site (which has some Linux-information, but nothing on Windows) shows me that while Windows accounts for about 60% of the hits, more than 50% use Firefox. I was actually quite surprised to see this.
If you say, "but the Bonebiter doesn't even exist," I'll say it exists in exactly the same way that the songs and software I download off Bittorrent exist. And yet stealing them is a crime. The only difference is that when I steal a song, nobody else is deprived of the song. When that guy stole John's Bonebiter, he was left unarmed and forced to go find a replacement. That theft actually hurts more, not less.
"Stealing" digital music is illegal because you break the copyright-law, which is quite different from stealing a physical object in the real world. I would therefore say that this comparison is pretty bad.
But concerning theft of virtual objects in a virtual world, it would be perfectly OK if it was punishable in the virtual world. If not, why would it even be possible to steal objects in the virtual world? Or to kill someone? In a similar sense, if you think that someone did you injustice in a computer-game, wasn't it actually because he played by the rules of the game, and you do not think that those rules are fair. Then perhaps you should find another game.
To sum it up: Killing a virtual character in a game to get revenge is nothing new, but trying to revenge injustice in a game by acting in the real world makes no sense to me.
I used to recommend assembly, then scheme, just so all the people who entered thinking they were programmer hotshots because they knew BASIC, VB or C or something would find themselves in deep water and having to learn something new.
But I suspect that's a bit overly hostile. Depends on the environment of course. Still might be a good idea for people going to a hard-to-get-into technical school to knock them down a peg or two and convince them that there's stuff they don't know.
This was exactly what happened when I started at the Technical University of Denmark in 97. During the first semester we were taught a great deal of programming, all in Standard-ML, which being a functional language really set the scores even for people with and without previous programming experience. This was certainly good, but failed miserably when the rest of the courses expected that you already knew some other languages, but none of these were being taught. So everything was back to a state where those who knew some language were a lot better off.
At this point I think they dropped the SML in favor of teaching Java in the initial courses and sticking with that through the entire education (unless you decide to learn another language yourself). I really don't think this is the best way, since I believe understanding the concepts of programming is easier when you try applying it to different languages.
Python (through the use of forced whitespace) forces them to learn to write more readable code
Hmm. Forced whitespace makes code more readable? I thought it was about the oposite.
On a more serious note: Allthough I have been programming for many years and in many different languages, and only breifly started with Python, I would agree that Python is one that can actually be recommended for students with no prior programming experience.
Sorry, I wasn't referring to the percentage of your logs coming from slashdot, but the percentage of slashdot-readers that clicked through to your site, and whether their distribution of browsers and OS's were representative for the general distribution on slashdot.
Say I wrote an article on setting up some obscure feature on a particular Linux-distro, and it was linked from slashdot. The percentage interrested in my article would likely be somewhat interested in Linux, so measuring only those interested in my article would most likely skew the results. Now, if the results would show a prevailence of Windows and IE even with an article on Linux,
I guess that would actually prove something. (Although I'm not entirely sure what?);-)/Spiff
This is quite true. Most slashdotters don't actually use Linux. Read the "Operating Systems" portion.
Well, apart from the "reading/. at work on Windows" mentioned by other posters, there is also the question whether this is actually a representative percentage of the slashdot readers that followed a link to rianjs.net. I do not know what kind of articles they have there, but I think an even distribution of any parameter
(such as operating system or browser) is highly unlikely. The only real way to get the meassure would be analyzing slashdots log. If there is one. Was this ever done and published??
I heard about the movie from my parents then after I saw it, I recommended it to all my friends and they saw it. If everyone who see it does it - it is quite a few people..
If I watched it and then recommended it to all my friends, that would be one more ticket.. I don't have any friends you insensitive clod;-)
The Golden Rule: Whoever has the gold makes the rules.
Ekahau did this as well, but better.
on
Forget GPS, Hello WPS
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I have been working with a commercial localization system called Ehahau Positioning Engine which we have acquired a license for at the Technical University of Denmark. This system uses the signal strengths of available access points to determine the position. The client is a piece of software running either on a laptop or PDA (they also have some nifty tags that can be used).
The client software running on the tracked device measures the signal strength of the access points, forwards the data to the server which calculates the position. The big-brother scenario is avoided as long as you still have to install the client yourself.
The major drawback of the system is that it needs extensive calibration, since they are using not only the available access points, but also the signal strength of these. Normally they suggest calibration in a 5x5m (15x15ft) grid. More calibration points yield a more accurate result.
And now the piece of information you have all been waiting for: accuracy. With a good calibration this can yield accuracies of arround 1m. In my tests (indoor) the accuracies fluctuate a bit, but is at least better than 3m 95% of the time.
Just as the system described in the original post, Ekahau requires no extra hardware (we already have 2-300 APs on campus).
Although it suggests UltraCade is merely trying to limit the (indirect) for-profit distribution of ROMs (most of which would be a copyright violation), I really cannot see how this can be achieved by trademarking the MAME logo and name.
Taking a look at the MAME-site regarding the logo http://www.mame.net/features.html one would think that UltraCade cannot use the logo for this purpose: "The MAME logo was designed by chemical and cleaned up by Exodus3D... The usage is free for non-commercial purposes (such as websites), for any commercial purpose (includes use in magazines), please ask a permission from the webmaster.
I wonder if there is an agreement between the MAME developers and UltraCade about the trademarking. As such I agree that the people earning money on building a mame cabinet and selling it for profit are either commiting a crime, or at least suggesting the buyers to commit one. And apart from the copyright violation, this is in direct conflict with the MAME-license.
On the other hand, a lot of people built their own cabinets, and since the ROMs cannot be acquired legally, they too are committing a crime when downloading a romset. In some sense I would consider it a lesser crime since nobody is making money in this case. And since it is not possible to legally acquire these ROMs, I can't see any way of thinking about lost revenue.
But in my opinion this is just another example of a world that is not strictly black and white (or as I like to think of it: a scenario where a single bit is not enough to hold the needed information).
Why is this necessary when some networks and/or aggregators are already allowing content providers to send content via the 3G cellular network?
Well, it may provide a slightly better service using a 3G network, but as the original posting explains, the licence for broadcasting in this band is aparently a lot cheaper. Of course this means that phones have to support two different networks, but if the licences are cheaper, using the service could be cheaper as well, benefitting the customers.
>Passwords are reset to "IForgotMyPasswordXXWeeksStr8" where XX is the number of weeks on the whiteboard.
Remember not to do this with old-style crypted (DES-based) passwords, since only the first 8 characters (and only 7LSB of these characters) are used, so "IForgotM" will work too.;-)
>How will illness, age, drunkenness, absenth and other drugs effect the painting style of a artist?
This software will is actually being modified to meassure the alcohol level of the artist at the time of the painting. The new version will also include drug testing, so the next time you are asked to do an oil painting at a job interview (you know, this actually happens all the time), you should really consider if it's worth it;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm.. That would be my Linksys WRT54GS router. Except you can't buy it. It's available for free, due to Linksys having used GPL'ed software, and therefore needing to release their firmware under the same terms. I think the original post about buying was mainly because one would not expect it to be available for free.
I think there are several issues concerning Windows vs Linux on different hardware.
1) Linux runs on a lot of different architectures - Windows does not (anymore). This is normally what people think about when they say Linux runs on anything. I don't think I would get as good a result trying to stuff Windows (any version including CE) on my Linksys WRT54GS router.
2) Linux is extremely configurable in terms of what services you want to run, and how advanced a deamon you choose. For lesser hardware, you might want to consider a smaller application to provide some service. Perhaps it dosn't have the same functionality as the grand solution, but if it gets the job done with less resources, it has fullfilled its job.
3) If we a just concerned with legacy hardware, I assume we are talking x86. In this case, it is mostly an issue of the overhead of running Windows vs some Linux distribution. About 7-8 years ago I helped manage the network in the dorm where I lived, and we had a P133 Linux-box with 96MB RAM taking care of DNS, DHCP, Mail and being gateway/router (with a 100MBPS connection through the university) for the entire dorm. Although this was before the day of P2P so the outbound traffic was lower on that account, we did have a great deal of traffic, since we were also connected to 5-7 other dorms with 100MBPS. Yust for reference, the dorm had about 300 rooms, and about 200 users on the network. I really wouldn't want to try this with windows.
4) Hardware compatibility. The point where Linux is still lagging behind (due to some hardware vendors not supporting anything but Windows). I think this is getting a little off-topic now, since this is basically only an issue with new hardware, while the article is concerned with legacy hardware. Otherwise I would agree that this is in fact an issue when comparing Windows to Linux, but you should just buy hardware that is known to work with the operating system you want to run, since this is basically only relevant when buying the newest hardware.
I have some more examples of things I have done with Linux, which I don't think would be possible with Windows:
* A file-server about 7 years ago with 120GB disk, being able to sustain 5-5.5 MB/s with Samba. The processor was a P133 without MMX. 6 IDE harddrives in software stripe.
* Taking a standard distribution (RedHat 6.2 i think it was) and stripping it down to 20MB to run off a flash-drive for a mobile robot.
To sum it up, the versatility of Linux is simply amazing. It allows the system to be scaled to run optimally on anything from embedded systems and PDAs to an S390 mainframe. And the ability to strip out the unneeded stuff (such as the GUI on a server) takes this much further. If we try to focus on legacy hardware, I think a comparison between Windows XP and a full-blown Linux desktop distro will probably prove that they are equally slow. But if you choose a Linux distribution specifically created to run on a 486 or early pentium, there is no f***ing way Windows will be able to do anything useful.
Just my opinion. If you don't like it, you shouldn't have read it.
-Spiff
I first thought that was why there were no articles: Someone actually filtered out the dupes. :-P
Well. So does FAT, except it is called a crosslink, and aparently scandisk and various disk defragmentation tools do not handle it correctly ;-)
What's next? Microsoft?
Naah... What makes you think Microsoft would ever become popular or mainstream? ;-)
If you say, "but the Bonebiter doesn't even exist," I'll say it exists in exactly the same way that the songs and software I download off Bittorrent exist. And yet stealing them is a crime. The only difference is that when I steal a song, nobody else is deprived of the song. When that guy stole John's Bonebiter, he was left unarmed and forced to go find a replacement. That theft actually hurts more, not less.
"Stealing" digital music is illegal because you break the copyright-law, which is quite different from stealing a physical object in the real world. I would therefore say that this comparison is pretty bad.
But concerning theft of virtual objects in a virtual world, it would be perfectly OK if it was punishable in the virtual world. If not, why would it even be possible to steal objects in the virtual world? Or to kill someone? In a similar sense, if you think that someone did you injustice in a computer-game, wasn't it actually because he played by the rules of the game, and you do not think that those rules are fair. Then perhaps you should find another game.
To sum it up: Killing a virtual character in a game to get revenge is nothing new, but trying to revenge injustice in a game by acting in the real world makes no sense to me.
But I suspect that's a bit overly hostile. Depends on the environment of course. Still might be a good idea for people going to a hard-to-get-into technical school to knock them down a peg or two and convince them that there's stuff they don't know.
This was exactly what happened when I started at the Technical University of Denmark in 97. During the first semester we were taught a great deal of programming, all in Standard-ML, which being a functional language really set the scores even for people with and without previous programming experience. This was certainly good, but failed miserably when the rest of the courses expected that you already knew some other languages, but none of these were being taught. So everything was back to a state where those who knew some language were a lot better off.
At this point I think they dropped the SML in favor of teaching Java in the initial courses and sticking with that through the entire education (unless you decide to learn another language yourself). I really don't think this is the best way, since I believe understanding the concepts of programming is easier when you try applying it to different languages.
Hmm. Forced whitespace makes code more readable? I thought it was about the oposite.
On a more serious note: Allthough I have been programming for many years and in many different languages, and only breifly started with Python, I would agree that Python is one that can actually be recommended for students with no prior programming experience.
Say I wrote an article on setting up some obscure feature on a particular Linux-distro, and it was linked from slashdot. The percentage interrested in my article would likely be somewhat interested in Linux, so measuring only those interested in my article would most likely skew the results. Now, if the results would show a prevailence of Windows and IE even with an article on Linux, I guess that would actually prove something. (Although I'm not entirely sure what?) ;-) /Spiff
Well, apart from the "reading /. at work on Windows" mentioned by other posters, there is also the question whether this is actually a representative percentage of the slashdot readers that followed a link to rianjs.net. I do not know what kind of articles they have there, but I think an even distribution of any parameter
(such as operating system or browser) is highly unlikely. The only real way to get the meassure would be analyzing slashdots log. If there is one. Was this ever done and published??
If I watched it and then recommended it to all my friends, that would be one more ticket.. I don't have any friends you insensitive clod ;-)
Yes, thats the way it works:
The Golden Rule: Whoever has the gold makes the rules.
The client software running on the tracked device measures the signal strength of the access points, forwards the data to the server which calculates the position. The big-brother scenario is avoided as long as you still have to install the client yourself.
The major drawback of the system is that it needs extensive calibration, since they are using not only the available access points, but also the signal strength of these. Normally they suggest calibration in a 5x5m (15x15ft) grid. More calibration points yield a more accurate result.
And now the piece of information you have all been waiting for: accuracy. With a good calibration this can yield accuracies of arround 1m. In my tests (indoor) the accuracies fluctuate a bit, but is at least better than 3m 95% of the time.
Just as the system described in the original post, Ekahau requires no extra hardware (we already have 2-300 APs on campus).
But my guess is you need bigger weaponry to beat a royal straight flush.
Microsoft has plenty of prior art on this issue, and they have the funding for the patent lawyers to get such a patent revoked.
Although it suggests UltraCade is merely trying to limit the (indirect) for-profit distribution of ROMs (most of which would be a copyright violation), I really cannot see how this can be achieved by trademarking the MAME logo and name.
Taking a look at the MAME-site regarding the logo http://www.mame.net/features.html one would think that UltraCade cannot use the logo for this purpose: "The MAME logo was designed by chemical and cleaned up by Exodus3D... The usage is free for non-commercial purposes (such as websites), for any commercial purpose (includes use in magazines), please ask a permission from the webmaster.
I wonder if there is an agreement between the MAME developers and UltraCade about the trademarking. As such I agree that the people earning money on building a mame cabinet and selling it for profit are either commiting a crime, or at least suggesting the buyers to commit one. And apart from the copyright violation, this is in direct conflict with the MAME-license.
On the other hand, a lot of people built their own cabinets, and since the ROMs cannot be acquired legally, they too are committing a crime when downloading a romset. In some sense I would consider it a lesser crime since nobody is making money in this case. And since it is not possible to legally acquire these ROMs, I can't see any way of thinking about lost revenue.
But in my opinion this is just another example of a world that is not strictly black and white (or as I like to think of it: a scenario where a single bit is not enough to hold the needed information).
Well, it may provide a slightly better service using a 3G network, but as the original posting explains, the licence for broadcasting in this band is aparently a lot cheaper. Of course this means that phones have to support two different networks, but if the licences are cheaper, using the service could be cheaper as well, benefitting the customers.
Who ever has the gold makes the rules.
Remember not to do this with old-style crypted (DES-based) passwords, since only the first 8 characters (and only 7LSB of these characters) are used, so "IForgotM" will work too. ;-)
This software will is actually being modified to meassure the alcohol level of the artist at the time of the painting. The new version will also include drug testing, so the next time you are asked to do an oil painting at a job interview (you know, this actually happens all the time), you should really consider if it's worth it ;-)
No, you are thinking about booble.com ;-)