I do embedded Linux and have done so on several generations of hardware and kernel.
There are a lot of slightly incorrect comments here about the size of the 2.6 kernel vs. 2.4. Once you know what your target hardware platform will is, and which subsystems you need, you can tailor a kernel to be usably small by configuring out the parts that you don't need. Don't need USB, or video4linux? Leave it out. Don't use modules, unless you need to control the load order, set parameters, or want to be able to swap hardware platforms, since they take up space in two places (ram disk and kernel memory).
One of the best reasons that I have for the 2.6 family is the new version of ram disk. You can almost trivially generate a run-time ram disk in the new cpio format, with a tweaked init that doesn't need to go to a disk for root, although some kind of non-volatile storage will certainly be needed.
It will be harder and more expensive to find really small RAM DIMMs for the Atom. Get a size that will be manufactured for a while. Same thing with your non-volatile storage. On a current project using a commercial board (including a GUI, commercial multi-language font set, media player, and a kernel with modules so we can move to other hardware, as needed), we've got a 512MByte DIMM for the Intel chip set with room to spare.
Another great reason for moving on is development. Have you tried to run a 2.4-based distribution on computers that you can buy today? It's doable, but painful. If you want to give your developers a (for example) Ubuntu 8.10 distro, which can be easily guested to freeze your build environment, they can run on the same kernel and libraries you do in the target for initial build and test.
I'm playing Alpha Centauri, Railroad Tycoon II, and Star Craft (WINE) on my Linux box now. I'm not a WoW fan, but I understand it also works under WINE, although I don't know how well.
Unless a game runs either native Linux (preferred) or in WINE, I'm not going to buy it, and I do mean BUY it, since I don't run pirate software, except to escape DRM, and, even then, I buy a copy, if I'm going to use it.
Lack of Linux support means no game sale to me, rather than I will run M$-Windows to play a game.
I used to keep a Win2K machine to play games, but it's very rarely booted these days.
Sony is the company of DRM, and the "no it's not better, but we control both the content and the player" Blu-Ray. The WORLD is not a big enough market for Sony to "give a shit about its customers".
The "holiday season" around the winter solstice and its attendant celebrations pre-date Jesus by thousands of years.
Christmas, unlike Easter, was a minor feast until the Roman Catholic Church decided to do something about all the former pagans who still carried on many of their former traditions, rather than contributing all of their wealth to the Church. Whether many of those older traditions included gift giving is hard to say since the Church's agents tended to destroy pagan writing and other artifacts (except for a very few Greek and Roman texts), so it is possible that that part of the holiday season tradition is mostly (not strictly) Christian. More likely, the whole thing was cooked up by the merchant classes as a way to just make more money and people fell for it.
I need very little from a manger, but those things are needed very much.
Keep upper, and other, management off your team members' backs.
Resources, particularly test resources. Whether, or not, there's a formal QA for your group's output, be sure that they have appropriate, especially correctly scaled, test beds before it goes to QA/production.
Find out what the real desired product is, not the "wish list" of current buzz phrases that is often passed off as a requirements document.
Once in a while, you will need to referee. Software is still much more of a craft than engineering. There may be more than one usable way to solve a problem, and if the team can't reach consensus on its own in a couple of days, then you will have to choose a path to keep things moving.
Schedules: multiply the value by two and raise the units to the next level. "Two hours" is "four days", by the time it is properly done, rather than a "this will bite you in the ass" quick hack.
Keep the long days for a real crisis, not lunatic PHB expectations. If your team is at all competent, you'll get those days when they count. When they happen, provide a late-evening meal on the company's bill.
While there may not be much damage that they can do to the system, with Microsoft's track record, you can be sure that Moonlight will be a complete compromise of the user account in which it is run. I'll bet the EULA for Moonlight gives Microsoft explicit permission to access all of your data, just as all of the OS EULAs have since 2K SP4 (at least; I never tried to load 2K SP3). Novell has already shown their colors by becoming a Microsoft "subsidiary". Why would you install software from either of them on a Linux box?
I suppose you could set up a virtual machine, and allow a very limited user in it to export an X application to your "regular" user root window, but then you have to maintain the guest, too.
Anyone got a pointer to a good HOWTO for setting up VMs on Ubuntu 8.10, just so I can see what's involved?
Modern warplanes are connected in a battlefield 'net that allows data, command and control to be passed between the planes (and satellite and ground). This is (obviously) a wireless network. Having a network stack and other interfaces hardened against intrusion makes it less likely that a battlefield adversary could either generate false data (the "magic" display in an F-22 paints the local AWACS as a "bandit", for example, and the pilot launches a missile), snoop data (the "stealthy" F-22s are here, here, here and here, so launch missiles at them), or perform some sort of DOS, degrading the systems capabilities. There are "well-funded and sophisticated attackers" who are likely to have those goals.
If there was a business case, and so many of the developers didn't have, uh, reservations, about using their code in military equipment, the OpenBSD and, maybe, Linux kernel and glibc could be certified (stripped of a few components, probably, and with a few tweaks). With a "trusted" kernel, libraries, and tool chain, you build the rest of system from scratch, anyway. It's not like you're supposed to be browsing the public internet with IE or FF on a B-1's navigation system.
There's no way for M$-Windows to be certified at EAL6+, because its design philosophy (the back doors are built in, not added on) is completely against any sort of security, and I don't think Vista is even EAL4+.
I've carried one for decades. There are still places, like computer labs, where there are "no bars" (although, sometimes, I surely would like a non-non-alcoholic drink). Biggest problem is that so few people can actually communicate with one.
I know what you mean. There are books, music, movies,... that range from "for three-year-olds" to conceptual challenges suitable for a mature adult (not dirty, but with a more depth and breadth) mind, but no games AFAIK.
The producers of Fable II have been touting that it allows you to explore as either a "good" or "bad" guy and shades between. I don't have a copy, but the reviews seem to bear this out. While you're still exploring someone else's idea of good/bad in how they plotted the game, even in books and movies you're really following the writer's exposition. The question, since it's supposed to entertainment, is how much you enjoy the ride.
One of the things I liked about "Alpha Centauri" was how you could choose a faction that suited various "ethic"s, from fundamentalist nut-case to capitalist pig, and the strengths/weaknesses of the ethic had some reflection in the play.
There are a couple of weaknesses in that argument:
"look and speak like" clearly doesn't apply to the gangsters' "soldiers" in urban areas where black-on-black and brown-on-brown violence (and white-on-white in less-urban) is prevalent. Neither does it apply to an army trained in "civilian pacification" (slaughter) where the admission standards have been lowered to allow criminals to join, as in the United States Army.
History has show that US Army soldiers are quite willing to kill anyone, as ordered, in the US. From the Whiskey Rebellion, through the Draft Riots (when Lincoln first enslaved free men to fight his war), through Kent State, with a detour through the forced labor enforced by the US Army on workers at a aircraft plant BEFORE we entered WWII, there is no time when the US Army has refused to employ deadly force on US civilians.
"reasonably" means doing it when traffic is slow enough that lane changing is hard for the cages (cars/SUVs/pickup trucks), and still giving yourself enough time to see the potential change and avoid it. You learn to watch the faces of the drivers in the mirrors and you can see their head movements to give you information about their intent (it's not like anyone signals). It also means no splitting at 80 when they're doing 15 (yes, I have seen the bikes that do it, but that doesn't make it "reasonable", although it is sometimes "evolution in action").
You also learn to watch out for situations that create "holes" in traffic, particularly when it is slowing or speeding up, and avoid being between the hole and someone looking to fill it. In fact, the situations when being between a cage and a gap when NOT lane splitting concern me more than when I'm splitting because the cages' freedom of movement provides more opportunity for them to try to kill me.
The real danger to motorcyclists in stop-and-go traffic is that the driver behind almost never actually sees you and will (nearly always) stop just before his bumper hits the car ahead of him, regardless of the presence of the motorcycle between. We lose a few riders, including law enforcement officers on their "work" bikes, to that every year in Southern California.
I'll grant you three of five, but "lane splitting" (legal in California under a large range of circumstances) really IS the best method of getting around Southern California. It doesn't add to the danger, if done reasonably, and the time savings are enormous. I've cut some trip times in half that way (90 min by car to 45 min on the bike), without speeding.
As far as 80 MPH, there are times and places on the highways where riding less than that is more dangerous because you are exposed to a "rear-ender" by a driver who cannot see a motorcycle that is right in front of him. A better line might be to say that exceeding the pace of traffic so much that you have to constantly change lanes isn't very safe.
In fact, the "warning" is more likely to distract even those few who might have seen you, by leading them to look inside the car, rather than outside.
This is a REALLY, REALLY bad idea.
I've been riding for a few decades myself and have used exactly the same "system". When they "try" to kill me, I'm already a step ahead and out of the way.
All of my LAN party friends have the hardest firewalls we can on our systems. When we play, they're in the way, so we drop them, and compensate by taking the internet router/firewall off-line. In theory, we expose our systems to each others', but that's never been a problem.
Without true local LAN play, SC2 is useless for us.
One of the "new" pressures on humans is the change from clans to towns to cities. Humans that adapt to crowds better will have more children, in general, than those who don't. Other traits that were selected against are now not. How many women that would have died in their first child birth, possibly with the baby, are now having C-sections and passing along what used to be a genetic failure? Simple prosthetics like glasses allow many of us who could not have successfully hunted, gathered, or fought to mate.
There's a gene that controls the relationship of our body clock to the sun. Some of us are later than "norm" and some earlier. As a clan on the veldt, it might have been useful for some members to stay up a bit later and watch for leopards and some to get up earlier and watch for lions (or whatever), but modern industrial society (and the idiocy of "daylight savings/summer" time) are killing some of us significantly outside the norm with stress and accidents, slowly reducing those alleles.
Evolution is still happening, whether we like where it goes, or not.
In the USofA, EVERY other entity involved in any sort of automatic debit is out to pillage your account, totally disregarding actual amounts due and due dates. The banks, in particular, are doing everything that they can to generate fees for overdrafts, so they refuse to provide any protection for bizarre debits. Payments may be disputed, but resolution takes months.
The "free" services are making money from the "float" and may, or may not, make the payment on time, and you have no recourse for the late fees.
Payments by dedicated credit card make some sense, since you have a chance to dispute the charges before payment (unless you've got a debit payment option on the CC).
Personally, only one institution has an authorized debit from my account, and that's because my credit union has never let me down pulling the payments on a specialized low-limit "net only" credit card it has issued.
BTW, did you know that banks always pay debit demands from other banks without checking for your authorization?
The "equal gravitational pull" location is L1 (Lagrange Point 1) between the Earth and its moon. There is another between the Earth and Sol. Objects in L1s are susceptible to small forces however. L4s and L5s are much more stable, but are still orbits, so not clear of the primary's (Earth, Sol,...) significant gravity well.
There was already some Perl in it because it used an easily modifiable bit of existing code. Rather than add the burden of yet another interpreter, I use Perl to manipulate text files that are a bit too clumsy in bash/sed/awk.
As for Java, there are some problems that lend themselves to class/... solutions (and, yes, I have read my copy of "Design Patterns"), but there are a LOT of small text utilities, among other things, needed in an autonomous Linux box that are a royal pain to code in OO, utterly unmaintainable when hammered into that model, and bulkier, when all of the libraries are added, than even Perl.
Pick a language that solves the problem. Sometimes, maybe even frequently, that language is Perl.
Slashdot Mirror
OpenBSD, at least on your firewall and until they make it illegal to run anything but M$-Windows.
The latter is NOT a joke, but a prediction, given how "in bed" the UK government is with Microsoft.
I do embedded Linux and have done so on several generations of hardware and kernel.
There are a lot of slightly incorrect comments here about the size of the 2.6 kernel vs. 2.4. Once you know what your target hardware platform will is, and which subsystems you need, you can tailor a kernel to be usably small by configuring out the parts that you don't need. Don't need USB, or video4linux? Leave it out. Don't use modules, unless you need to control the load order, set parameters, or want to be able to swap hardware platforms, since they take up space in two places (ram disk and kernel memory).
One of the best reasons that I have for the 2.6 family is the new version of ram disk. You can almost trivially generate a run-time ram disk in the new cpio format, with a tweaked init that doesn't need to go to a disk for root, although some kind of non-volatile storage will certainly be needed.
It will be harder and more expensive to find really small RAM DIMMs for the Atom. Get a size that will be manufactured for a while. Same thing with your non-volatile storage. On a current project using a commercial board (including a GUI, commercial multi-language font set, media player, and a kernel with modules so we can move to other hardware, as needed), we've got a 512MByte DIMM for the Intel chip set with room to spare.
Another great reason for moving on is development. Have you tried to run a 2.4-based distribution on computers that you can buy today? It's doable, but painful. If you want to give your developers a (for example) Ubuntu 8.10 distro, which can be easily guested to freeze your build environment, they can run on the same kernel and libraries you do in the target for initial build and test.
I'm playing Alpha Centauri, Railroad Tycoon II, and Star Craft (WINE) on my Linux box now. I'm not a WoW fan, but I understand it also works under WINE, although I don't know how well.
Unless a game runs either native Linux (preferred) or in WINE, I'm not going to buy it, and I do mean BUY it, since I don't run pirate software, except to escape DRM, and, even then, I buy a copy, if I'm going to use it.
Lack of Linux support means no game sale to me, rather than I will run M$-Windows to play a game.
I used to keep a Win2K machine to play games, but it's very rarely booted these days.
Sony is the company of DRM, and the "no it's not better, but we control both the content and the player" Blu-Ray. The WORLD is not a big enough market for Sony to "give a shit about its customers".
The "holiday season" around the winter solstice and its attendant celebrations pre-date Jesus by thousands of years.
Christmas, unlike Easter, was a minor feast until the Roman Catholic Church decided to do something about all the former pagans who still carried on many of their former traditions, rather than contributing all of their wealth to the Church. Whether many of those older traditions included gift giving is hard to say since the Church's agents tended to destroy pagan writing and other artifacts (except for a very few Greek and Roman texts), so it is possible that that part of the holiday season tradition is mostly (not strictly) Christian. More likely, the whole thing was cooked up by the merchant classes as a way to just make more money and people fell for it.
Samsung 19s (one of which I bought for my wife) and, probably, their larger ones did the best job of non-native resolution.
All-in-all, though, just get a Mac mini (as I type this from a Fedora box).
I need very little from a manger, but those things are needed very much.
Keep upper, and other, management off your team members' backs.
Resources, particularly test resources. Whether, or not, there's a formal QA for your group's output, be sure that they have appropriate, especially correctly scaled, test beds before it goes to QA/production.
Find out what the real desired product is, not the "wish list" of current buzz phrases that is often passed off as a requirements document.
Once in a while, you will need to referee. Software is still much more of a craft than engineering. There may be more than one usable way to solve a problem, and if the team can't reach consensus on its own in a couple of days, then you will have to choose a path to keep things moving.
Schedules: multiply the value by two and raise the units to the next level. "Two hours" is "four days", by the time it is properly done, rather than a "this will bite you in the ass" quick hack.
Keep the long days for a real crisis, not lunatic PHB expectations. If your team is at all competent, you'll get those days when they count. When they happen, provide a late-evening meal on the company's bill.
While there may not be much damage that they can do to the system, with Microsoft's track record, you can be sure that Moonlight will be a complete compromise of the user account in which it is run. I'll bet the EULA for Moonlight gives Microsoft explicit permission to access all of your data, just as all of the OS EULAs have since 2K SP4 (at least; I never tried to load 2K SP3). Novell has already shown their colors by becoming a Microsoft "subsidiary". Why would you install software from either of them on a Linux box?
I suppose you could set up a virtual machine, and allow a very limited user in it to export an X application to your "regular" user root window, but then you have to maintain the guest, too.
Anyone got a pointer to a good HOWTO for setting up VMs on Ubuntu 8.10, just so I can see what's involved?
besides /vertising for Green Hills:
Modern warplanes are connected in a battlefield 'net that allows data, command and control to be passed between the planes (and satellite and ground). This is (obviously) a wireless network. Having a network stack and other interfaces hardened against intrusion makes it less likely that a battlefield adversary could either generate false data (the "magic" display in an F-22 paints the local AWACS as a "bandit", for example, and the pilot launches a missile), snoop data (the "stealthy" F-22s are here, here, here and here, so launch missiles at them), or perform some sort of DOS, degrading the systems capabilities. There are "well-funded and sophisticated attackers" who are likely to have those goals.
If there was a business case, and so many of the developers didn't have, uh, reservations, about using their code in military equipment, the OpenBSD and, maybe, Linux kernel and glibc could be certified (stripped of a few components, probably, and with a few tweaks). With a "trusted" kernel, libraries, and tool chain, you build the rest of system from scratch, anyway. It's not like you're supposed to be browsing the public internet with IE or FF on a B-1's navigation system.
There's no way for M$-Windows to be certified at EAL6+, because its design philosophy (the back doors are built in, not added on) is completely against any sort of security, and I don't think Vista is even EAL4+.
I've carried one for decades. There are still places, like computer labs, where there are "no bars" (although, sometimes, I surely would like a non-non-alcoholic drink). Biggest problem is that so few people can actually communicate with one.
http://www.americanmessaging.net/paging/index.asp
You don't need that much power to play StarCraft.
What else can you play at a "LAN" party (no external servers) that needs the oomph?
I know what you mean. There are books, music, movies, ... that range from "for three-year-olds" to conceptual challenges suitable for a mature adult (not dirty, but with a more depth and breadth) mind, but no games AFAIK.
The producers of Fable II have been touting that it allows you to explore as either a "good" or "bad" guy and shades between. I don't have a copy, but the reviews seem to bear this out. While you're still exploring someone else's idea of good/bad in how they plotted the game, even in books and movies you're really following the writer's exposition. The question, since it's supposed to entertainment, is how much you enjoy the ride.
One of the things I liked about "Alpha Centauri" was how you could choose a faction that suited various "ethic"s, from fundamentalist nut-case to capitalist pig, and the strengths/weaknesses of the ethic had some reflection in the play.
Very long ago, on a 3B clone running System V:
Cleaning out the junk .* files in /tmp with rm -rf .* followed very quickly, but too late (obviously), by a ^C.
If you don't get it, .* includes .. and .. precedes all .[0-9A-Za-z] files.
Only once and, yes, I had backups (monthly, weekly, and daily, with copies off-site of the weekly), plus it was early in the work day.
There are a couple of weaknesses in that argument:
"look and speak like" clearly doesn't apply to the gangsters' "soldiers" in urban areas where black-on-black and brown-on-brown violence (and white-on-white in less-urban) is prevalent. Neither does it apply to an army trained in "civilian pacification" (slaughter) where the admission standards have been lowered to allow criminals to join, as in the United States Army.
History has show that US Army soldiers are quite willing to kill anyone, as ordered, in the US. From the Whiskey Rebellion, through the Draft Riots (when Lincoln first enslaved free men to fight his war), through Kent State, with a detour through the forced labor enforced by the US Army on workers at a aircraft plant BEFORE we entered WWII, there is no time when the US Army has refused to employ deadly force on US civilians.
"reasonably" means doing it when traffic is slow enough that lane changing is hard for the cages (cars/SUVs/pickup trucks), and still giving yourself enough time to see the potential change and avoid it. You learn to watch the faces of the drivers in the mirrors and you can see their head movements to give you information about their intent (it's not like anyone signals). It also means no splitting at 80 when they're doing 15 (yes, I have seen the bikes that do it, but that doesn't make it "reasonable", although it is sometimes "evolution in action").
You also learn to watch out for situations that create "holes" in traffic, particularly when it is slowing or speeding up, and avoid being between the hole and someone looking to fill it. In fact, the situations when being between a cage and a gap when NOT lane splitting concern me more than when I'm splitting because the cages' freedom of movement provides more opportunity for them to try to kill me.
The real danger to motorcyclists in stop-and-go traffic is that the driver behind almost never actually sees you and will (nearly always) stop just before his bumper hits the car ahead of him, regardless of the presence of the motorcycle between. We lose a few riders, including law enforcement officers on their "work" bikes, to that every year in Southern California.
I'll grant you three of five, but "lane splitting" (legal in California under a large range of circumstances) really IS the best method of getting around Southern California. It doesn't add to the danger, if done reasonably, and the time savings are enormous. I've cut some trip times in half that way (90 min by car to 45 min on the bike), without speeding.
As far as 80 MPH, there are times and places on the highways where riding less than that is more dangerous because you are exposed to a "rear-ender" by a driver who cannot see a motorcycle that is right in front of him. A better line might be to say that exceeding the pace of traffic so much that you have to constantly change lanes isn't very safe.
In fact, the "warning" is more likely to distract even those few who might have seen you, by leading them to look inside the car, rather than outside.
This is a REALLY, REALLY bad idea.
I've been riding for a few decades myself and have used exactly the same "system". When they "try" to kill me, I'm already a step ahead and out of the way.
I don't work for them, but I have bought a custom calendar:
http://www.despair.com/
In particular:
http://www.despair.com/ambition.html
All of my LAN party friends have the hardest firewalls we can on our systems. When we play, they're in the way, so we drop them, and compensate by taking the internet router/firewall off-line. In theory, we expose our systems to each others', but that's never been a problem.
Without true local LAN play, SC2 is useless for us.
One of the "new" pressures on humans is the change from clans to towns to cities. Humans that adapt to crowds better will have more children, in general, than those who don't. Other traits that were selected against are now not. How many women that would have died in their first child birth, possibly with the baby, are now having C-sections and passing along what used to be a genetic failure? Simple prosthetics like glasses allow many of us who could not have successfully hunted, gathered, or fought to mate.
There's a gene that controls the relationship of our body clock to the sun. Some of us are later than "norm" and some earlier. As a clan on the veldt, it might have been useful for some members to stay up a bit later and watch for leopards and some to get up earlier and watch for lions (or whatever), but modern industrial society (and the idiocy of "daylight savings/summer" time) are killing some of us significantly outside the norm with stress and accidents, slowly reducing those alleles.
Evolution is still happening, whether we like where it goes, or not.
Absurdist humor fans should really check this out, if they have it.
Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe.
If it plays on my Linux box, I want the set.
In the USofA, EVERY other entity involved in any sort of automatic debit is out to pillage your account, totally disregarding actual amounts due and due dates. The banks, in particular, are doing everything that they can to generate fees for overdrafts, so they refuse to provide any protection for bizarre debits. Payments may be disputed, but resolution takes months.
The "free" services are making money from the "float" and may, or may not, make the payment on time, and you have no recourse for the late fees.
Payments by dedicated credit card make some sense, since you have a chance to dispute the charges before payment (unless you've got a debit payment option on the CC).
Personally, only one institution has an authorized debit from my account, and that's because my credit union has never let me down pulling the payments on a specialized low-limit "net only" credit card it has issued.
BTW, did you know that banks always pay debit demands from other banks without checking for your authorization?
The "equal gravitational pull" location is L1 (Lagrange Point 1) between the Earth and its moon. There is another between the Earth and Sol. Objects in L1s are susceptible to small forces however. L4s and L5s are much more stable, but are still orbits, so not clear of the primary's (Earth, Sol, ...) significant gravity well.
Embedded system with a very small footprint.
There was already some Perl in it because it used an easily modifiable bit of existing code. Rather than add the burden of yet another interpreter, I use Perl to manipulate text files that are a bit too clumsy in bash/sed/awk.
As for Java, there are some problems that lend themselves to class/... solutions (and, yes, I have read my copy of "Design Patterns"), but there are a LOT of small text utilities, among other things, needed in an autonomous Linux box that are a royal pain to code in OO, utterly unmaintainable when hammered into that model, and bulkier, when all of the libraries are added, than even Perl.
Pick a language that solves the problem. Sometimes, maybe even frequently, that language is Perl.
Particularly if you use the "brown noise" at high volume. That would give additional meaning to "garbage in, garbage out".