How is this Insightful? Bah. I've lost my faith in Slashdot...:(
No, the analogy is more like this:
You live on one side of this fast flowing river and have to get across it each day to get to work. Everybody else uses an expensive ferry, who happens to have a monopoly in the "getting across the river" market. The price might not seem like much, but when you have to use it twice a day to get to work and back, it adds up. Plus, you've talked to the owner and he seems like an arrogant, unethical bastard. Not many people complain because it's futile and they're used to it. And there's the group-think rationalization of "well, everybody has to pay as well. so that's fair".
What WinterKnight is asking is if anybody knows of any alternatives to the expensive, monopolistic ferry. As it turns out, people are recommending other things like canoes and flying-foxes. A couple of groups are even constructing their own smaller ferries.
Tada! I think that's a much better analogy, don't you?
Just one precision: GL != OpenGL. What we're talking about here is OpenGL. GL was an SGI-only library, which is now replaced by the more open (obviously) and cross-platform OpenGL. The syntax is similar, but one of the differences is that OpenGL doesn't manage windows by itself, so it can work for X, Windows,...
Actually, I believe the original SGI library was called IrisGL, since it was made for their Iris line of workstations. It was later adopted by a consortium, named OpenGL, and made slightly more cross-platform and general in nature.
Actually, just south of Sydney is Sutherland and "the shire" residents certainly do think it is the capital of Australia....
Well, whatever. It depends on how far south you go. I just picked the biggest population centre I knew of that was south of Sydney. Give me a break. I'm from Bathurst mostly, and thanks to my "indoors" personality I'm not too hot on geography. Even local stuff I should know:P
Hey, if there's ever an article on/. about Bathurst, I can come on and complain that you all sound like dickheads pronouncing it with a long "urrr" sound! It really pisses us Bathurst-ians off.;)
Rant: Why is it that when there's an article mentioning (eg) Denver, we don't get a geography lesson. Do people just assume that the whole #@$^@#
world knows US geography? Or is it just that you think that US people can't look at an atlas, but the rest of us can.
Well, the internet is still composed mostly of US citizens. And thanks to the US entertainment mega-industry, just about anyone in the world could name about a hundred US cities, towns, and states - and know where alot of them are.
Besides, there have been other nitpicks before. There has been a few corrections on/. about the exact name of a couple of colleges and universities. And I seem to remember something about Carolina vs South Carolina.
I haven't been to the 'gong for a while, but it most definetely is not our nations captial! I thought Canberra was mostly west from Sydney. Where's my map...
Nitpick: *sigh* The only place here in Oz that most people know about is the now cliched "Sydney, Australia". Canberra would be better described as "central NSW, where it's bloody cold and only fat-cat pollie's want to stay":)
I just dl their newest source and i counted 3 switch statements in the entire source.
And they have direct support for the KX133 and KT133 finaly. Cant wait untill i COMPILE this and install it from the SOURCE direct from
ftp://ftp1.detonator.nvidia.com/pub/drivers/englis h/XFree86_40/0.9-5/NVIDIA_kernel-0.9-5.t ar.gz
Bahaha! What's that, the kernel source for their DRI/DRM ripoff? NVidia are most definitely keeping their X/GLX drivers closed. They need to release the kernel source because compiled kernel modules are tied so closely to the kernel version. It's easier just to release source and let people do a little compiling.
It's very simple, actually. Most of the time when you print, the output from the program is either a) postscript or b) text. The Epson printer doesn't
understand either of them. If it's text (or a jpeg, etc) it's converted to postscript, then GhostScript is run with the epson output driver. The CPU load is from
gs rendering to something that your printer understands.
Oh, I didn't mean Ghostscript. Perhaps I wasn't clear. It's the lpr process that has the high CPU usage. Besides, I use the wonderful gimp-print plugin to print photos now. It can take quite a while for it to produce the output data and when it eventually prints, the lpr process has a high CPU usage. For documents, gs doesn't need too much CPU to render text and with my Athlon-750 the printer is the slow part. The gs process stops and starts as the printer eats chunks of data. It doesn't use much at all.
I've been using the USB support in the 2.3/2.4 kernels for a while now.
First I got it working for my Kodak DC240 Camera. Downloading all of the pictures from a mostly-full 64M CF card (160 photos?) took about an hour with the serial connection. With the USB connection, it got down to a couple of minutes. i.e about 10 seconds a photo, to around 1.
Second was my Epson Stylus 740 printer. The only problem is that it seems to take up a fair bit of CPU when tranferring data to the printer. I don't know if this is an actual USB problem, or is just something to do with the kernel driver and the way lpr uses it (polling?). I can 'renice' the lpr process so that it doesn't use nearly as much CPU and the print speed doesn't seem to be affected at all.
I've recently splurged on a Logitech keyboard and mouse and a HP scanner, all USB. The keyboard has a 2-port USB hub in it, which is cool. One port for the mouse, the other for my camera. The problem then was that I needed another hub to plug everything into the two USB ports on my computer. The new hub acts strange though. It doesn't initialize properly when I turn my machine on. I have to pull the power and put it back in; then it works. And my camera doesn't work when it's connected to that hub, it times out. That's why it's connected to the KB hub.
Of course, this requires the correct drivers in the kernel. The camera, printer, and scanner are pretty simple drivers to setup. Make sure that the drivers are finding their devices on the USB bus, and reconfigure your apps or redirect symlinks.
The KB and mouse, however, were just a little trickier. The 'input' subsystem had to be compiled into the kernel, along with the KB and mouse drivers. I hope the whole 'input' system goes into the kernel in 2.5, abstracts input devices and interfaces very well. It should make porting and adding new devices even easier, but for the moment it's just handeling USB keyboards, mice and joysticks.
Ok, so it wasn't "user friendly" for me, but I like being on the bleeding edge:).
For anyone who doesn't mind compiling the kernel and mucking about in/dev and/etc, it's not too hard. I imagine that RH has it already setup nicely for new users.
I assume the USB support in RH7 is based on SuSE's backport of the 2.3/2.4 drivers to 2.2 kernels, or something similar. I wonder, is there anything that had to be left out of this backport due to other differences between 2.2 and 2.4? I haven't had to use 2.2 for so long now, and I've lost track of all the differences.
I work for a visual effects company here in Australia, and we still use big SGI's along with NT renderfarms.
We have movies such as The Matrix, Babe and Thin Red Line to our name.
Animal Logic, mate?;)
The best thing about using NT is, the same machines which are used for animating and modelling in the day can be used for rendering in the night. This
to me makes more sense than buying a machine for one specific role.
The same thing could be said about SGI/Irix workstations or anything else that can run both the modeller/animator user apps and the automated network renderer.
And since they have that much power I'm guessing that they need it to keep on schedule. But it would be useful to be able to add the workstations to the renderfarm-pool.
But you could imagine someone inventing
notation like (x:arg1, f:funcName, z:arg3, y:arg2)...
Perl programmers will often create functions (subs) that take a hash-ref as an argument (or one of them). This allows you to explicitly name the arguments.
e.g
&somefunction({id => 3067, name => 'bob', title => 'bossman'});
For a real example , look at DBI. Most (if not all) functions allow various error-handling flags to be set in a hash-ref as a last optional argument.
Ya gotta love perl...:)
(and for extra/. marks, I'll also mention that debian rules:P)
I just checked out Linux System Labs and EverythingLinux for the CDs (they both contribute to debian and are listed as such on the debian web site). Amazingly, LSL has Potato CDR's, and they don't seem to be 'beta' versions either. Someone must at LSL must be on the debian-announce mailing list:)
You don't have to setup a seperate machine to use the firewall support in the Linux kernel. Just apply strict rules on the INPUT chain (? thingy...) and that will protect that box as well.
I'm no expert on this yet, but I'd drop everything except SSH, HTTP, maybe FTP and the basics like echo etc...
Do drop inetd, but replace it with xinetd. With xinetd you can specify which network interfaces a certain service will respond to. That way your local network (if you have one) doesn't have to suffer because you're limiting the number of ports open to the world.
ObCrackRef: I've got Portsentry running on my box and I get a couple of port scans a month. But this is on a dial-in account down here in.au, with 150 hours a month limit (5h/day). Man, what those script kiddies lack in quality and intelligence they sure make up in quantity!
That's one last tip: get Portsentry (um... look on Freshmeat) and configure it to 'wall' you when a port scan comes in. You'll know the instant someone scans you because wall of your open terminals will beep with the message!
If you pay
attention to the available patches for the kernels you'd know that quite a while ago there were patches to the kernel to support larger files - I think the
name was the Large File Summit or LFS
Summit?! Ah ha ha ha!
Try Large File support.
Besides, it (or something similar) is in 2.4. i.e > 2GB file support on 32-bit machines.
the vast
majority of the population DOESN'T need to know every detail of the operating system they are using. If you think they do, or think the average user
SHOULD know what's going on 'under the hood' take off your geek blinders. Suggesting such is about akin to suggesting everyone who flies in a plane
should know advanced aerodynamics, or anyone who drives a car should be able to rebuild the engine.
just to nit-pick your analogies:
I don't think a person sitting in an aeroplane is really "using" the plane. They've paid their money and are watching the in-flight movie and not much else. The cargo is doing as much interacting with the plane as they are.
The pilot would be more like the user, but a computer user isn't usually responsible for the safety of peoples lives.
Just as a driver doesn't need to know how to rebuild the engine of his/her car, I don't need to know how to know how to make the CPU in my computer. However, the driver should know the basic concepts of how the steering, engine, gearbox, brakes, etc work.
Now, to get back on topic:
Others have mentioned an SMIT tool on AIX that displays the command for the config change you wish to make. I think this sort of thing would be very useful. The new user should be able to start off with something simple and gradually advance. This would allow the person to start with the GUI, and later investigate the command. Lookup the man page and see other options, etc.
> "...I've done it with Debian."
> > eewwww gross!! LIke totally, Debian is a total, > like, GEEK! his eyeglasses even smell bad! imroy > like totally has geek cooties now, I'm soooo > sure!
Ah crap, I was sitting too close to the group of nineth-graders...;)
Does the name "imroy" sound female? oh well... I always play games as female characters anyway:P ....as long as I don't get hit on, OK?
I've done it with Debian. And since the Slashdot gang have a bias for Debian, this should get mod'ed up:)
The Debian installation program didn't like the name for the device (/dev/hdb?). So I pointed it at a then-blank partition on a hard disk and then switched to another VT, unmounted it (it's mounted somewhere special in/) and mounted the LS-120 there instead. The installation program continued on from there.
The only tricky part was getting LiLO (or Grub) to boot from the LS-120. I eventually found instructions on the Linux Router project site. See booting 'Higher' Density formatted disks for info on getting Lilo working. The magic for Lilo was the bios=0x83 (or whatever) parameter. I never got Grub booting it, but it's been a while since I last tried.
It's no speed daemon [sic], but it's quite OK for a rescue disk. I think the LS-120 is meant to be 2X for normal 1.44M floppies, so it spins faster. And it seeks much faster.
I use apt-move with my real installation on the hard disk. So every now and then I boot to the floppy and update packages from the HD. nice:)
Look at the processor speed race. Soon we'll see a 1.4GHz Pentium IV processor, but apart from being able to finish a SETI work unit in 2 hours (I'm guessing)
2 hours? pphhhtt! Look at the platform stats - there are Alpha machines (at DEC/Compaq?) that finish a unit in around an hour. I remember one used to be around 56 minutes, but I can't see it there. And these are probably 600Mhz (650?) 21264 processors. Intel still has a long way to go:)
ObSlashdot: Imagine a beowulf cluster of those! (actually, we don't have to imagine, do we?)
uuum, I'm not sure if this should be flamebait. I have noticed that most of the technical females at my last two employers tended to be of asian origin. Maybe linuxonceleron could have been more tactful in stating this, and spelt better:)
Maybe it's their (or their parents) culture.
I'm also thinking it's to do with the images of "beautiful" women in magazines, TV and movies; almost nothing but anglo/european women. I'm sure they feel left out, and don't feel the 'need' to live up to these 'perfect' examples of beauty. So they're more likely to persue (sp?) higher education than HS, and get into more technical fields.
Doesn't a similar thing happen to use geek guys? We're shunned in school because we're not confident or not popular. So we look to "less popular" activities that we can do away from the people who harass us.
So us geeks *tend* to be shy "nerdy" guys and asian girls. At least, in my part of the world. YMMV:)
Re:Aussies: Is this what they use on Good News Wee
on
Lightning On Demand
·
· Score: 1
It took me a second to figure out what you were refering to, but no. I imagine the lightning in "Buzzers of death" is a post-production effect. Everything below this line is a lie
If you read his page correctly, you would have noticed he used a known exploit in the cron daemon. An exploit that was fixed by one of the RedHat updates. Everything below this line is a lie
Slashdot Mirror
How is this Insightful? Bah. I've lost my faith in Slashdot... :(
No, the analogy is more like this:
You live on one side of this fast flowing river and have to get across it each day to get to work. Everybody else uses an expensive ferry, who happens to have a monopoly in the "getting across the river" market. The price might not seem like much, but when you have to use it twice a day to get to work and back, it adds up. Plus, you've talked to the owner and he seems like an arrogant, unethical bastard. Not many people complain because it's futile and they're used to it. And there's the group-think rationalization of "well, everybody has to pay as well. so that's fair".
What WinterKnight is asking is if anybody knows of any alternatives to the expensive, monopolistic ferry. As it turns out, people are recommending other things like canoes and flying-foxes. A couple of groups are even constructing their own smaller ferries.
Tada! I think that's a much better analogy, don't you?
Actually, I believe the original SGI library was called IrisGL, since it was made for their Iris line of workstations. It was later adopted by a consortium, named OpenGL, and made slightly more cross-platform and general in nature.
Well, whatever. It depends on how far south you go. I just picked the biggest population centre I knew of that was south of Sydney. Give me a break. I'm from Bathurst mostly, and thanks to my "indoors" personality I'm not too hot on geography. Even local stuff I should know :P /. about Bathurst, I can come on and complain that you all sound like dickheads pronouncing it with a long "urrr" sound! It really pisses us Bathurst-ians off. ;)
Hey, if there's ever an article on
Well, the internet is still composed mostly of US citizens. And thanks to the US entertainment mega-industry, just about anyone in the world could name about a hundred US cities, towns, and states - and know where alot of them are.
Besides, there have been other nitpicks before. There has been a few corrections on /. about the exact name of a couple of colleges and universities. And I seem to remember something about Carolina vs South Carolina.
Just south of Sydney is.....Wollongong!
I haven't been to the 'gong for a while, but it most definetely is not our nations captial! I thought Canberra was mostly west from Sydney. Where's my map...
Nitpick: *sigh* The only place here in Oz that most people know about is the now cliched "Sydney, Australia". Canberra would be better described as "central NSW, where it's bloody cold and only fat-cat pollie's want to stay" :)
Bahaha! What's that, the kernel source for their DRI/DRM ripoff? NVidia are most definitely keeping their X/GLX drivers closed. They need to release the kernel source because compiled kernel modules are tied so closely to the kernel version. It's easier just to release source and let people do a little compiling.
Oh, I didn't mean Ghostscript. Perhaps I wasn't clear. It's the lpr process that has the high CPU usage. Besides, I use the wonderful gimp-print plugin to print photos now. It can take quite a while for it to produce the output data and when it eventually prints, the lpr process has a high CPU usage. For documents, gs doesn't need too much CPU to render text and with my Athlon-750 the printer is the slow part. The gs process stops and starts as the printer eats chunks of data. It doesn't use much at all.
I've been using the USB support in the 2.3/2.4 kernels for a while now.
First I got it working for my Kodak DC240 Camera. Downloading all of the pictures from a mostly-full 64M CF card (160 photos?) took about an hour with the serial connection. With the USB connection, it got down to a couple of minutes. i.e about 10 seconds a photo, to around 1.
Second was my Epson Stylus 740 printer. The only problem is that it seems to take up a fair bit of CPU when tranferring data to the printer. I don't know if this is an actual USB problem, or is just something to do with the kernel driver and the way lpr uses it (polling?). I can 'renice' the lpr process so that it doesn't use nearly as much CPU and the print speed doesn't seem to be affected at all.
I've recently splurged on a Logitech keyboard and mouse and a HP scanner, all USB. The keyboard has a 2-port USB hub in it, which is cool. One port for the mouse, the other for my camera. The problem then was that I needed another hub to plug everything into the two USB ports on my computer. The new hub acts strange though. It doesn't initialize properly when I turn my machine on. I have to pull the power and put it back in; then it works. And my camera doesn't work when it's connected to that hub, it times out. That's why it's connected to the KB hub.
Of course, this requires the correct drivers in the kernel. The camera, printer, and scanner are pretty simple drivers to setup. Make sure that the drivers are finding their devices on the USB bus, and reconfigure your apps or redirect symlinks.
The KB and mouse, however, were just a little trickier. The 'input' subsystem had to be compiled into the kernel, along with the KB and mouse drivers. I hope the whole 'input' system goes into the kernel in 2.5, abstracts input devices and interfaces very well. It should make porting and adding new devices even easier, but for the moment it's just handeling USB keyboards, mice and joysticks.
Ok, so it wasn't "user friendly" for me, but I like being on the bleeding edge :). /dev and /etc, it's not too hard. I imagine that RH has it already setup nicely for new users.
For anyone who doesn't mind compiling the kernel and mucking about in
I assume the USB support in RH7 is based on SuSE's backport of the 2.3/2.4 drivers to 2.2 kernels, or something similar. I wonder, is there anything that had to be left out of this backport due to other differences between 2.2 and 2.4? I haven't had to use 2.2 for so long now, and I've lost track of all the differences.
Troll? How is this a troll?
Which part is the troll? The penguin pee or linus' announcement part?
geez, I'm being called a troll by someone with a use id # that's 10x mine!
I just like Linus' humurous announcements. He's a cool guy and all. You know?
Cool, that means that Linus officially blessed it with the Holy penguin pee! :)
Where's Linus' announcement?
Animal Logic, mate? ;)
The same thing could be said about SGI/Irix workstations or anything else that can run both the modeller/animator user apps and the automated network renderer.
And since they have that much power I'm guessing that they need it to keep on schedule. But it would be useful to be able to add the workstations to the renderfarm-pool.
I can just imagine this giving Zen Buddhism a big boost in most western countries ;)
Perl programmers will often create functions (subs) that take a hash-ref as an argument (or one of them). This allows you to explicitly name the arguments.
e.g
&somefunction({id => 3067, name => 'bob', title => 'bossman'});For a real example , look at DBI. Most (if not all) functions allow various error-handling flags to be set in a hash-ref as a last optional argument.
Ya gotta love perl... :) /. marks, I'll also mention that debian rules :P)
(and for extra
I just checked out Linux System Labs and EverythingLinux for the CDs (they both contribute to debian and are listed as such on the debian web site). Amazingly, LSL has Potato CDR's, and they don't seem to be 'beta' versions either. Someone must at LSL must be on the debian-announce mailing list :)
Here - Debian 2.2 (Official final release) CDs from LSL
You don't have to setup a seperate machine to use the firewall support in the Linux kernel. Just apply strict rules on the INPUT chain (? thingy...) and that will protect that box as well.
I'm no expert on this yet, but I'd drop everything except SSH, HTTP, maybe FTP and the basics like echo etc...
Do drop inetd, but replace it with xinetd. With xinetd you can specify which network interfaces a certain service will respond to. That way your local network (if you have one) doesn't have to suffer because you're limiting the number of ports open to the world.
ObCrackRef: I've got Portsentry running on my box and I get a couple of port scans a month. But this is on a dial-in account down here in .au, with 150 hours a month limit (5h/day). Man, what those script kiddies lack in quality and intelligence they sure make up in quantity!
That's one last tip: get Portsentry (um... look on Freshmeat) and configure it to 'wall' you when a port scan comes in. You'll know the instant someone scans you because wall of your open terminals will beep with the message!
Summit?! Ah ha ha ha!
Try Large File support.
Besides, it (or something similar) is in 2.4. i.e > 2GB file support on 32-bit machines.
just to nit-pick your analogies:
The pilot would be more like the user, but a computer user isn't usually responsible for the safety of peoples lives.
Now, to get back on topic:
Others have mentioned an SMIT tool on AIX that displays the command for the config change you wish to make. I think this sort of thing would be very useful. The new user should be able to start off with something simple and gradually advance. This would allow the person to start with the GUI, and later investigate the command. Lookup the man page and see other options, etc.
Ah crap, I was sitting too close to the group of nineth-graders... ;)
Does the name "imroy" sound female? :P
....as long as I don't get hit on, OK?
oh well... I always play games as female characters anyway
I've done it with Debian. And since the Slashdot gang have a bias for Debian, this should get mod'ed up :)
The Debian installation program didn't like the name for the device (/dev/hdb?). So I pointed it at a then-blank partition on a hard disk and then switched to another VT, unmounted it (it's mounted somewhere special in /) and mounted the LS-120 there instead. The installation program continued on from there.
The only tricky part was getting LiLO (or Grub) to boot from the LS-120. I eventually found instructions on the Linux Router project site. See booting 'Higher' Density formatted disks for info on getting Lilo working. The magic for Lilo was the bios=0x83 (or whatever) parameter. I never got Grub booting it, but it's been a while since I last tried.
It's no speed daemon [sic], but it's quite OK for a rescue disk. I think the LS-120 is meant to be 2X for normal 1.44M floppies, so it spins faster. And it seeks much faster.
I use apt-move with my real installation on the hard disk. So every now and then I boot to the floppy and update packages from the HD. nice :)
Look at the processor speed race. Soon we'll see a 1.4GHz Pentium IV processor, but apart from being able to finish a SETI work unit in 2 hours (I'm guessing)
2 hours? pphhhtt! :)
Look at the platform stats - there are Alpha machines (at DEC/Compaq?) that finish a unit in around an hour. I remember one used to be around 56 minutes, but I can't see it there. And these are probably 600Mhz (650?) 21264 processors. Intel still has a long way to go
ObSlashdot: Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
(actually, we don't have to imagine, do we?)
uuum, I'm not sure if this should be flamebait. I have noticed that most of the technical females at my last two employers tended to be of asian origin. Maybe linuxonceleron could have been more tactful in stating this, and spelt better :)
:)
Maybe it's their (or their parents) culture.
I'm also thinking it's to do with the images of "beautiful" women in magazines, TV and movies; almost nothing but anglo/european women. I'm sure they feel left out, and don't feel the 'need' to live up to these 'perfect' examples of beauty. So they're more likely to persue (sp?) higher education than HS, and get into more technical fields.
Doesn't a similar thing happen to use geek guys? We're shunned in school because we're not confident or not popular. So we look to "less popular" activities that we can do away from the people who harass us.
So us geeks *tend* to be shy "nerdy" guys and asian girls. At least, in my part of the world. YMMV
It took me a second to figure out what you were refering to, but no. I imagine the lightning in "Buzzers of death" is a post-production effect.
Everything below this line is a lie
If you read his page correctly, you would have noticed he used a known exploit in the cron daemon. An exploit that was fixed by one of the RedHat updates.
Everything below this line is a lie