He means that KDE has a framework where URL prefixes (like http:// and ftp://) are handled by plugins. For example, with GPhoto2 and a kio slave plugin (sorry, no link) you can access photos stored on a digital camera with the KDE file manager. Even if they're not USB mass storage devices like most cameras nowadays.
RISC designs tend to be far more straightforward and simple. Many computer engineering students implement the MIPS architecture as an exercise.
yep. Been there, done that. Well, almost. Computer Architecture was probably my favourite class in Uni. We didn't implement it ourselves, but that was about 90% of the class lecture and notes. Starting with simple logic gates, we went through how to build registers, latches, ALU's, register files, all the way to pipelining. Fascinating stuff if you can stick through it all and have a great lecturer! It really gives you an appreciation of how the stuff works.
Besides, the much-vaunted new feature of the PPro was the CISC->RISC translator, and it shouldn't take much to rejig that to handle 16-bit mode more effectively if the market (asses that they are) demands it.
I didn't know that. All I knew was that Intel was betting on M$ migrating everyone over to 32-bit software by the time it was released to market. Considering their close deals in the past, I'm sure this was based on information that M$ had given them.
To end this post on a non-anti-MS note, the CISC-RISC converter is software upgradeable. Recent Linux kernels provide a/dev/microcode device so that you can feed it a file (presumably) supplied by Intel. See http://www.urbanmyth.org/microcode/ for more information.
On the other hand, Intel often gives little thought to enhancing performance of old code on new processors. If memory serves me right, Intel's Pentium Pro ran 16-bit code embarrassingly slowly.
No, Intel gave a lot of thought to that. It takes several years to develop a complex CPU like the pentium family. They just thought that Micro$oft would have a 32-bit operating system out by the time the PPro was released. Oops! Windows 95 wasn't completely 32-bit despite all the "32-bit" marketing and hype. And it was so new that everyone was still running a lot of 16-bit windows 3.x software. Of course, performance was much better if you were running a Real Operating System;)
Down here in OZ, Jaycar Electronics is selling "Superbright LED keyring torches". I've got a red one, better for night vision, and it's bloody great. I remember seeing an IR one and even an UV one (apparently good for looking for counterfeight money or something...), but they don't appear in their web catalog. Neat little things. My only complaint is that it's a little hard to push the rubber button to turn it on, and that you have to push on the other side to turn it off. Just a little awkward and easy to get mixed up when going only by feel.
...I wrote a script that accepted signed data and ran it through a perl script (to synchronize bookmarks, if you're curious). So I think passing data to a trusted app is alright, though a sandboxed trusted app would be better. The problem is when the "trusted app" is the MS equivalent of/bin/sh
This is a good example of my point. Your script was already on the machine, you weren't emailing it with the data each time. So, barring any accidental back-doors in your script, an intruder couldn't exploit this email system.
Just because YOU don't want it doesn't mean it's not useful.
I'm not saying it isn't. I'm sure it is very useful for the people that use it. As all these virus reports show, it's simply the wrong solution to the "problem" of office automation.
Email is the wrong medium for scripts. Every time I've read a discription of a company's use of the scripting feature (ok, not that many) I've never seen a problem that needs to be scripted on the client via email. I see this as yet another case of the PC and client centric computing being pushed by MS. These kinds of things really should be done on a central server. If email must be used, only use it to send data, not code. Simple. What's so hard about that? And I thought MS was trying to push into the corporate server market...
The problem with this supposed fix is that I'm sure a lot of users already have a pavlovian response to always clicking "yes" on those confirmation dialog boxes. I know I do, whenever I have the misfortune to be on a windows machine. I mean, almost every significant action seems to have an annoyingly condescending confirmation dialog box. Which is why you'll often hear me talking back to the computer whenever I have to use windows. Something along the lines of:
Yes, I want to f***ing delete the f***ing file, that's why I f***ing hit the f***ing delete key! You stupid, pathetic piece of...
Anyway, you get the idea.
Also, I'm sure the confirmation dialog boxes are just to back-up M$'s long-standing PR spin policy whenever a new virus comes out: "We can't be held responsible for everything the user clicks on! Hey, our software even warns them before it opens the attachment!".
Very well said Schwab. This is what I've been thinking and talking about recently. All these security problems with M$ software aren't simply little "oops, I forgot to check that variable"-level programmer errors. These are BIG design problems. Virus checkers are really a band-aid solution to a problem that needs serious attention.
But what would happens when (notice I didn't say if) MS changes the specs significantly to break the surrent implementation of SAMBA, but before doing this, they release the specs with similar restrictions to what they've just done.
My guess would be that Samba would do what they've been doing already for the last x years: reverse engineer it. You don't honestly think that the Samba team has been working from M$ docs all these years? I heard there was even one incident where M$ asked the Samba team for their docs because M$ didn't have any.
Yeah, nice try, troll. I belieive IE4 had a "hand" from a friend called "Windows 98". Why spend an hour downloading a browser (that most new users wouldn't even know about), when one is included with your system?
Do you think this even compares to a $3k hardware encoder? A real-time software encoder is cutting corners everywhere: integer math (probably in the form of MMX), fixed "one size fits all" lookup tables, and little if any motion detection. You know, it's easy to make a real-time MPEG encoder if you only use I frames, but then you basically have motion-JPEG. The real compression payoff in MPEG comes from motion detection with P (predicted) and B (bi-directional predicted) frames. Simply put, the real-time software encoders will produce crap output. That may be acceptable for your PVR-knockoff (I know, I've been using VCR with DiVX under Linux for abouta year now), but it isn't for DVD production. And that's what this card is for.
Erm, I thought it was e^(-pi*i)+1=0, but maybe my memory is failing me at the old age of 25:P.
Not only does it contain the 5 most important constants in math (0, 1, pi, e, i) but also the 5 most important operations in math - addition, subtraction (or at least negation), multiplication, raising power, and finally equality.
What I mean is "window managment" (meaning the positioning, decoration, moving, resizing, etc) of windows, should be part of the toolkit . The window border is no different than a button or anything elss. All sane people (there are some exceptions here) know that the drawing of the button should be up to the appliation or the shared libraries it decides to load, so why not the window borders?
I'll give you a good reason: because then all the window manipulations (moving, resizing, max/minimising) is dependent on the applications' process. Better dedicate a thread to handling those events, otherwise the window won't move or anything until the application isn't busy. Oh, and if the process hangs, the window(s) will be stuck on the desktop.
If you've use MS-Windows heavily, you'll have noticed these two problems with it. I know I do. At a previous employer we had to use an application to build documents, with the data files over the network. I'm not sure where the bottle neck was, but it was damn slow - it wasn't taking up much CPU, but the application was bogged down with something (network I/O?) and it would bog down the rest of the GUI waiting for it to get around to respond to events. At least minimizing the window would get it out of the way and allow everything else to operate normally, but it still took around 20 seconds for the window/application to respond to the minimize event.
No thanks, I appreciate the use of a seperate window manager. I think you way overestimate the overhead or inefficiencies of this system and don't understand the advantages it provides.
I believe the term you want is "fields". PAL TV has 50 interlaced *fields* or 25 frames per second. Because of the combination of some weird refresh frequencies (I'm guessing) NTSC actually has 29.97 fps, not 30. So NTSC has 59.94 interlaced fields per second.
BTW, LotR was filmed in New Zealand, not Australia. Australia has a relationship with New Zealand not unlike that which the United States has with Canada: for all intents and purposes, we're pretty much the same, but we give each other hell over it.
I like to think of our relationship as being like sibling rivalry. Considering that many of us aussies have relatives in NZ (and vise versa), it's probably a rather accurate description alot of the time. When it really comes down to it, we're mates, but we still take pride in beating the other in sports (cricket, rugby, anything really) and rib them about their accent (much like Canadians, eh?) and something about sheep;)
So, once that happens I would expect a clocking standard that would give us more than the 28 bits of addressing we have now.
We already have that. It's called ATAPI. It's already used by non-harddisk IDE devices like CDROM, DVD, and CDR/RW drives, removable drives (Zip, Jaz, Orb, LS-120...), and tape drives. From what I understand, ATAPI uses SCSI-II commands sent over the physical IDE channel. So you don't get over the mater-slave limitation of IDE, but you get more reasonable block addressing. BTW, this is the reason you almost must use the ide-scsi driver to use CDR/RW drives under Linux. I've also found that my DVD drive works much better with the SCSI CDROM and ide-scsi drivers than the IDE CDROM driver.
This was bound to happen soon. You can only go so far with 28 bits, or whatever the original IDE has. LBA gave us some time, but harddisks must now go to ATAPI.
Isoroku Yamamoto spent a lot of time playing poker with Yanks during his years in the States, smoking like a chimney to deaden the scent of their appalling aftershave. The Yanks are laughably rude and uncultured, of course; this hardly constitutes a sharp observation. Yamamoto, by contrast, attained some genuine insight as a side-effect of being robbed blind by Yanks at the poker table, realizing that the big freckled louts could be dreadfully cunning. Crude and stupid would be okay - Perfectly understandable, in fact.
But crude and clever is intolerable; this is what makes those red-headed ape-men extra double super loathsome. Yamamoto is still trying to drill the notion into the heads of his partners in the big Nipponese scheme to conquer everything between Karachi and Denver. He wishes that they would get the message.
To state the obvious, the US is going to strike back with terrible force. I just worry about the innocent casualties that are inevitable.
And finally, just a big giant Holy poop on a stick!
I'm much too young to have seen humans walk on the moon, but I saw the WTC towers hit by two planes and collapse on themselves. This will stay with us forever. Shocking.
Re:EMU10K1 fixes, still no ice1712/envy24 :-(
on
Linux 2.4.8 is Out
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· Score: 1
: an ALSA driver that does not work...
Sorry? The ALSA driver has worked flawlessly with my SB Live! Platinum ever since I got it almost 6 months ago. Ok, the mixer settings for the Live! Drive II panel aren't all that obvious, but I've hardly used that panel anyway. What problems did you have? I'd be willing to help you out. Email me.
Ok, it's not 31337, but it keeps me happy and lets me play around with all sorts of fun things.
Yes, even the SparcStation runs Linux:) Debian [GNU/]Linux to be exact. Makes everything nice and uniform. Just use apt-get everywhere!
Oh, and it's all in my bedroom here. So I guess I get extra geek points for that...
I thought that patch-int-2.4.3.1 was breaking before 2.4.5 for me, so I'm surprised you were OK with that version.
The only problem I've had is that something's changed in the toplevel Makefile and patch rejects some of the changes to that file. Check in Makefile.rej. Notably, 'crypto' has to be added to the end of the SUBDIRS variable and CRYPTO has to be defined as well. Just pull those lines out of the reject file. It's pretty simple.
There's probably variation among Germans, but at least some Germans do write a "1" as an upside-down V.
yes, I quickly noticed this when I spent a short time in Germany a few years ago. Sort of a very tall and skinny v, I'd say. Looked kinda like a greek letter I thought, but I can't remember which. need sleep...
I agree, the complex is impressive, but winter 2000 when I was there (read: july 2000:-) the restaurant had a sign saying that it was closed forever and the museum didn't have any information really related to this complex.
I happened to visit the Parks radio telescope sometime around November 1999 if I remember correctly. The visitors centre was pretty pathetic: it looked like it hadn't changed since the 60's or 70's. But my dad tells me they've just recently put up a brand new visitors centre. They're bound to get alot more interest now because of the movie and I wonder if that influenced the need for a new centre. I'll have to check it out again some time.
They probably still don't give rides on the dish like in the movie though...:(
The theory is you boot one of these computers, during the boot up you press F8, you are prompted for a user name & password, then the an OS image is TFTPed to the local machine.
Gee, that sounds alot like my experience installing Debian GNU/Linux on a 9 year-old Sun Sparcstation LX. I just had to setup bootp and tftp, download the tftp image and a couple others from the debian site. It started up, got its ip address, sucked down the boot image and booted it. Then it kept me up till after 5am in the morning while it downloaded packages through the masqueraded internet connection. It took me a couple of times to get the TFTP image to load (wrong name), but everything else went very smoothly.
Oh how I now wish that PCs had something like the OpenBoot Prompt. The BIOS's in current PCs are downright primitive. Very little has changed in the last 15-odd years. It's pathetic.
I wonder how long until M$ trumpets this as their next great "innovation"...
No, I understand this a real reaction. For an interesting application of this, read Larry Nivens A gift from Earth.
In A gift from Earth, the main character has the subconcious ability to make people become uninterested in him by making their pupils contract. It happened whenever he was scared, so he ended up as a twenty-something virgin (just to bring this back on topic!). i.e he would chicken out at the last minute and the girl would take an interest in *anything* but him.
Anyway, by the end of the book he not only learns how to control this ability (kinda), but how to do the reverse. i.e make a person fixate on him by dilating their pupils. But he's already gotten laid by that point:)
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He means that KDE has a framework where URL prefixes (like http:// and ftp://) are handled by plugins. For example, with GPhoto2 and a kio slave plugin (sorry, no link) you can access photos stored on a digital camera with the KDE file manager. Even if they're not USB mass storage devices like most cameras nowadays.
yep. Been there, done that. Well, almost. Computer Architecture was probably my favourite class in Uni. We didn't implement it ourselves, but that was about 90% of the class lecture and notes. Starting with simple logic gates, we went through how to build registers, latches, ALU's, register files, all the way to pipelining. Fascinating stuff if you can stick through it all and have a great lecturer! It really gives you an appreciation of how the stuff works.
I didn't know that. All I knew was that Intel was betting on M$ migrating everyone over to 32-bit software by the time it was released to market. Considering their close deals in the past, I'm sure this was based on information that M$ had given them.
To end this post on a non-anti-MS note, the CISC-RISC converter is software upgradeable. Recent Linux kernels provide a /dev/microcode device so that you can feed it a file (presumably) supplied by Intel. See http://www.urbanmyth.org/microcode/ for more information.
No, Intel gave a lot of thought to that. It takes several years to develop a complex CPU like the pentium family. They just thought that Micro$oft would have a 32-bit operating system out by the time the PPro was released. Oops! Windows 95 wasn't completely 32-bit despite all the "32-bit" marketing and hype. And it was so new that everyone was still running a lot of 16-bit windows 3.x software. Of course, performance was much better if you were running a Real Operating System ;)
Down here in OZ, Jaycar Electronics is selling "Superbright LED keyring torches". I've got a red one, better for night vision, and it's bloody great. I remember seeing an IR one and even an UV one (apparently good for looking for counterfeight money or something...), but they don't appear in their web catalog. Neat little things. My only complaint is that it's a little hard to push the rubber button to turn it on, and that you have to push on the other side to turn it off. Just a little awkward and easy to get mixed up when going only by feel.
This is a good example of my point. Your script was already on the machine, you weren't emailing it with the data each time. So, barring any accidental back-doors in your script, an intruder couldn't exploit this email system.
I'm not saying it isn't. I'm sure it is very useful for the people that use it. As all these virus reports show, it's simply the wrong solution to the "problem" of office automation.
Email is the wrong medium for scripts. Every time I've read a discription of a company's use of the scripting feature (ok, not that many) I've never seen a problem that needs to be scripted on the client via email. I see this as yet another case of the PC and client centric computing being pushed by MS. These kinds of things really should be done on a central server. If email must be used, only use it to send data, not code. Simple. What's so hard about that? And I thought MS was trying to push into the corporate server market...
The problem with this supposed fix is that I'm sure a lot of users already have a pavlovian response to always clicking "yes" on those confirmation dialog boxes. I know I do, whenever I have the misfortune to be on a windows machine. I mean, almost every significant action seems to have an annoyingly condescending confirmation dialog box. Which is why you'll often hear me talking back to the computer whenever I have to use windows. Something along the lines of:
Anyway, you get the idea.
Also, I'm sure the confirmation dialog boxes are just to back-up M$'s long-standing PR spin policy whenever a new virus comes out: "We can't be held responsible for everything the user clicks on! Hey, our software even warns them before it opens the attachment!".
Very well said Schwab. This is what I've been thinking and talking about recently. All these security problems with M$ software aren't simply little "oops, I forgot to check that variable"-level programmer errors. These are BIG design problems. Virus checkers are really a band-aid solution to a problem that needs serious attention.
My guess would be that Samba would do what they've been doing already for the last x years: reverse engineer it. You don't honestly think that the Samba team has been working from M$ docs all these years? I heard there was even one incident where M$ asked the Samba team for their docs because M$ didn't have any.
Yeah, nice try, troll. I belieive IE4 had a "hand" from a friend called "Windows 98". Why spend an hour downloading a browser (that most new users wouldn't even know about), when one is included with your system?
Yeah, I've tried FFMpeg too.
Do you think this even compares to a $3k hardware encoder? A real-time software encoder is cutting corners everywhere: integer math (probably in the form of MMX), fixed "one size fits all" lookup tables, and little if any motion detection. You know, it's easy to make a real-time MPEG encoder if you only use I frames, but then you basically have motion-JPEG. The real compression payoff in MPEG comes from motion detection with P (predicted) and B (bi-directional predicted) frames. Simply put, the real-time software encoders will produce crap output. That may be acceptable for your PVR-knockoff (I know, I've been using VCR with DiVX under Linux for abouta year now), but it isn't for DVD production. And that's what this card is for.
Erm, I thought it was e^(-pi*i)+1=0, but maybe my memory is failing me at the old age of 25 :P.
Not only does it contain the 5 most important constants in math (0, 1, pi, e, i) but also the 5 most important operations in math - addition, subtraction (or at least negation), multiplication, raising power, and finally equality.
I'll give you a good reason: because then all the window manipulations (moving, resizing, max/minimising) is dependent on the applications' process. Better dedicate a thread to handling those events, otherwise the window won't move or anything until the application isn't busy. Oh, and if the process hangs, the window(s) will be stuck on the desktop.
If you've use MS-Windows heavily, you'll have noticed these two problems with it. I know I do. At a previous employer we had to use an application to build documents, with the data files over the network. I'm not sure where the bottle neck was, but it was damn slow - it wasn't taking up much CPU, but the application was bogged down with something (network I/O?) and it would bog down the rest of the GUI waiting for it to get around to respond to events. At least minimizing the window would get it out of the way and allow everything else to operate normally, but it still took around 20 seconds for the window/application to respond to the minimize event.
No thanks, I appreciate the use of a seperate window manager. I think you way overestimate the overhead or inefficiencies of this system and don't understand the advantages it provides.
I never thought I'd be nitpicking German, but that should be "Ich nin ein Linuxbenutzer".
I believe the term you want is "fields". PAL TV has 50 interlaced *fields* or 25 frames per second. Because of the combination of some weird refresh frequencies (I'm guessing) NTSC actually has 29.97 fps, not 30. So NTSC has 59.94 interlaced fields per second.
I like to think of our relationship as being like sibling rivalry. Considering that many of us aussies have relatives in NZ (and vise versa), it's probably a rather accurate description alot of the time. When it really comes down to it, we're mates, but we still take pride in beating the other in sports (cricket, rugby, anything really) and rib them about their accent (much like Canadians, eh?) and something about sheep ;)
Stephenson puts it well in Cryptonomicron:
To state the obvious, the US is going to strike back with terrible force. I just worry about the innocent casualties that are inevitable.
And finally, just a big giant Holy poop on a stick!
I'm much too young to have seen humans walk on the moon, but I saw the WTC towers hit by two planes and collapse on themselves. This will stay with us forever. Shocking.
Sorry? The ALSA driver has worked flawlessly with my SB Live! Platinum ever since I got it almost 6 months ago. Ok, the mixer settings for the Live! Drive II panel aren't all that obvious, but I've hardly used that panel anyway. What problems did you have? I'd be willing to help you out. Email me.
*not* run Linux? What's the point of that? ;)
What's the point of having a computer environment that you own, yet don't have complete control of?
Anyway, to give this post at least some substance I'll describe my comfy little computer setup:
Ok, it's not 31337, but it keeps me happy and lets me play around with all sorts of fun things. Yes, even the SparcStation runs Linux :) Debian [GNU/]Linux to be exact. Makes everything nice and uniform. Just use apt-get everywhere!
Oh, and it's all in my bedroom here. So I guess I get extra geek points for that...
I thought that patch-int-2.4.3.1 was breaking before 2.4.5 for me, so I'm surprised you were OK with that version.
The only problem I've had is that something's changed in the toplevel Makefile and patch rejects some of the changes to that file. Check in Makefile.rej. Notably, 'crypto' has to be added to the end of the SUBDIRS variable and CRYPTO has to be defined as well. Just pull those lines out of the reject file. It's pretty simple.
yes, I quickly noticed this when I spent a short time in Germany a few years ago. Sort of a very tall and skinny v, I'd say. Looked kinda like a greek letter I thought, but I can't remember which. need sleep...
I happened to visit the Parks radio telescope sometime around November 1999 if I remember correctly. The visitors centre was pretty pathetic: it looked like it hadn't changed since the 60's or 70's. But my dad tells me they've just recently put up a brand new visitors centre. They're bound to get alot more interest now because of the movie and I wonder if that influenced the need for a new centre. I'll have to check it out again some time.
They probably still don't give rides on the dish like in the movie though... :(
Gee, that sounds alot like my experience installing Debian GNU/Linux on a 9 year-old Sun Sparcstation LX. I just had to setup bootp and tftp, download the tftp image and a couple others from the debian site. It started up, got its ip address, sucked down the boot image and booted it. Then it kept me up till after 5am in the morning while it downloaded packages through the masqueraded internet connection. It took me a couple of times to get the TFTP image to load (wrong name), but everything else went very smoothly.
Oh how I now wish that PCs had something like the OpenBoot Prompt. The BIOS's in current PCs are downright primitive. Very little has changed in the last 15-odd years. It's pathetic.
I wonder how long until M$ trumpets this as their next great "innovation"...
No, I understand this a real reaction. For an interesting application of this, read Larry Nivens A gift from Earth.
In A gift from Earth, the main character has the subconcious ability to make people become uninterested in him by making their pupils contract. It happened whenever he was scared, so he ended up as a twenty-something virgin (just to bring this back on topic!). i.e he would chicken out at the last minute and the girl would take an interest in *anything* but him.
Anyway, by the end of the book he not only learns how to control this ability (kinda), but how to do the reverse. i.e make a person fixate on him by dilating their pupils. But he's already gotten laid by that point :)