Most of us who run Linux want 64-bit these days, since 64-bit "just works" under Linux, and gives a pretty good performance boost.
I'm curious -- not saying you're wrong -- but do you have any source/benchmark for that "performance boost" statement? My educated guess would be rather the exact opposite, seeing how 64-bit pointers all over the board will increase memory bandwidth usage, cache load (and therefore misses) and possibly even start to cause paging before the equivalent 32-bit system would. All without any obvious reason why anything should become faster.
If what you say is true, then you definitely know something that I don't, and then I still think that I know more about IPv6 than at least most people do. I would think that you confuse either the::/96 or the::ffff:0:0/96 prefix for the IPv4 address space as a "subspace" of the IPv6 space. If you do, neither is true.
::/96 is a method for routing IPv6 traffic over IPv4. In other words, if you send a UDP packet to::1.2.3.4, what is being transmitted onto the wire is an IPv4 packet (src: the address of your system's IPv4 stack, dst: 1.2.3.4), encapsulating an IPv6 header (src: the address of your system's IPv4 stack in the last 32 bits left-padded with zeroes, dst:::1.2.3.4), in turn encapsulating a UDP header. It's a simple way of setting up a SIT tunnel, nothing more. You won't be sending any raw IPv4 packets that way, and neither is any router on the way going to convert it to IPv4 for you.
::ffff:0:0/96 is merely a way of talking to the IPv4 stack in your system, even if the program in question only uses IPv6. It does not work on a system without a working and properly configured IPv4 stack. In fact, I hear that the IETF is starting to work against the::ffff:0:0/96 prefix due to some security issues that I have yet to understand.
In fact, if IPv4 truly were a subspace of IPv6, then what sources address would an IPv4-only host be seeing when it receives such a packet from an IPv6-only host?
It is perfectly possible to use both an IPv4 and an IPv6 stack simultaneously, and there are some NAT-like technologies that run on a router to give IPv4 connectivity to IPv6-only hosts, but you'll still need an IPv4 stack somewhere on your network to access IPv4 content.
Actually, that isn't true. The "New Technology" expansion was created in hindsight, for marketing reasons, and Microsoft has even rejected that meaning now. The only plausible story I've heard for the story behind NT is that the kernel was initially targeted at Intel's i960 RISC CPU, which was codenamed N-10 (N-Ten, NT...).
I don't think it has anything to do with the BIOS, or booting at all. It isn't all that clear from the article, but I would think that this idea is merely that one carries one's home directory on a USB stick, not the entire operating system. Then, when you get to a computer running Windows, you can insert that USB stick and use it to log on, without halting the running system.
I don't really understand the App Folder system either, though. Why not just `ar' those resources together, and put in a separate ELF section of the executable? That way it would be mapped into core as part of the exec call, and the programmer could access the resources through merely a pointer, without even needing to do explicit I/O (though the resources would be demand-loaded by the kernel). It's not as though it would even be hard.
I know OSX doesn't use ELF, but whatever it uses (isn't it COFF?) surely must support the same thing, right?
In this particular (let me repeat that: "this particular") case, though, that seems arguable. Of course, I don't actually know what they are intending to do (no, I haven't RTFA yet:), but I would be guessing that the DRM, in this case, works in the favor of the actual user, against the owner of the computer.
Mind you, of course, that working in the favor of the user isn't enough to make it a good thing. First of all, I would argue that it merely puts the user in a false sense of security, since any DRM system is breakable. Second, it would work against the public in general, seeing how Microsoft is going to use it to lock users into their particular DRM system. Good luck reading that desktop stick of yours on a computer not running Windows. Third, it also works against the public in general, since it might, potentially, be a drive for DRM, which is bad.
To make your post more specific, Trusted Computing isn't not about creating an environment that the user can trust, but rather isn't about creating an environment that the owner of the computer cannot trust. The user and the computer owner aren't always the same person -- which is also why I suspect that corporate purchasers might not come to love DRM either...
Yes they do. Check a little further into CD protection schemes. That's exactly what they do.
Are you really sure? Many people keep saying that, but my experience tells me otherwise -- I have yet to run across a CD that I couldn't just "cat/dev/cdrom >game.iso". Admittedly, I haven't tried that many, but I've certainly tried more than a few, still without finding one that I couldn't do that with.
IPv6 has been ``next year'' for the last ten years. It's still no-where. What'sdriving it now that wasn't driving it five years ago?
What's driving it is what has always been driving it: a NAT-free internet. Many protocols would be more than happy with that, not least the various P2P protocols, where clients actually connect to each other. SIP also springs to mind. There's no shortage of usage for IPv6. I do agree that it was stupid to mandate IPsec, though.
The more relevant question is probably what has been holding it back, and it should be no secret that the answer is, as always, Windows. Since Windows hasn't, until Vista, shipped with IPv6 enabled, ISPs have had virtually no reason to implement it (I've been lucky enough that my ISP (BBB, in Sweden) operates an anycast 6to4 router, so I've been able to use my 6to4/48 address space). Now that Vista does ship with IPv6 enabled out of the box, that may well be likely to change. That is the sole reason why I'm hoping people will switch to Vista.
I've configured IPv6 (again over 6to4) for the friends of mine whose computers I often deal with, and it has been very helpful, since it has been allowing me to bypass our NAT routers. I, for one, definitely hope that IPv6 will saturate the Internet sooner rather than later, so that I can do the same with everyone.
Last, I should admit that there's probably one more thing holding IPv6 back, namely the fact that there's no agreed-on protocol to detect local DNS servers using only IPv6's autoconfiguration. Since the autoconfiguration is another highly anticipated feature of IPv6, but still offers no standard way to detect DNS servers, it makes it uncertain how IPv6 should be deployed. Personally, I don't really understand why they can't just allocate an anycast address to the meaning of "any reachable DNS server" (or even just use mDNS). With DNSSEC, there shouldn't be any security problems with it anyway.
That was quite interesting. Just in case someone wants to see it, I made a picture (it ain't pretty) featuring that sequence of colors (though you had mistyped the next to last one;). It is available here.
Maybe a more artistic person than me could make something more interesting with these colors? Remember, you'd have to make their ordering significant as well, not just the colors.
Text is only universal because we've made it universal.
Not quite. Text is universal by virtue of it being a stream of bytes, and byte streams are universal in that almost all current computer architectures, networks, storage devices and other devices handle byte streams. In that regard, text isn't just universal in that all programs that you can pipe together in a shell can handle it, but also since you can read it from disk, store it to disk, send/receive it over a network or even send it over an RS232 link, if you so wish.
There is, however, no universally agreed syntax for "objects". Sure, there have been attempts, but I doubt any of them will succeed, maybe ever. Different systems have so vastly different opinions of what an object is, and I believe that is how it should be, because if all systems would have to have the same idea of an object, you would be locking them into a predefined design pattern, and innovation might decrease. I don't know if maybe people said the same thing about bytes in the 50s and 60s, so I wouldn't bet my prediction will turn out to be correct, though.
Of course, this is perfect for Microsoft. They don't want other systems, anyway. As long as anyone can agree on the.NET definition of an "object", Microsoft will be happy. However, even then, the fact remains that not every.NET object is serializable -- you can't just take an arbitrary object and squirt (pun intended) it over the network or store it on disk. As long as you wish to communicate with anything outside your own VM, text (or at least a byte stream) is necessary.
And text isn't "human-readable"
Heh, that's one of the weirder statements I've seen as of late. Kind of like saying that you can't "speak" in a telephone, it's just a PCM stream anyway. Call me weird, but I'd argue that text is human readable by definition. I do (kind of) see your point, though, but I don't agree. Text is always human readable, because it has such an internal structure that makes it human readable with an extremely simple and universally standardized (except for charset) algorithm. If you just have an "object", though, there's no universal algorithm for turning it into a visual structure. Usually, each object class even has its own such algorithm, which isn't usually reversible (unlike text), and not every class even does. To begin with, there is, as I wrote above, no guarantee of any sort that an object is even slightly serializable.
Not that I think that you're wrong in every possible way. I definitely think that an object-oriented shell may have its virtues, but it's never going to work outside its own VM. Text is universal, since you can send it anywhere and receive it from anywhere. That "anywhere" includes a human, too.
I've never understood Ballmer, and I doubt I ever will. Seriously, every single thing that guy does or says in public really makes him seem retarded. Sure, not everything he does looks this stupid, but for sure I've never heard him say anything which seems quite wise or insightful.
Still, I can't believe that the collective intelligence of Microsoft would appoint him president and CEO for no good reason -- there are many other execs at Microsoft who I'm sure would love the chance instead of him. Not just "without" a good reason either; they appointed him CEO knowing how he is, and all I've seen of him just seems to be reason not to want him running your company.
He has to have some good qualities that makes him suitable for the position, no? I'm almost starting to believe that he's just acting retarded in public to make people think that he's much less of a man than he really is. Call me paranoid, but I almost think that explanation (though he'd have to be a good actor) makes more sense than that he really is retarded and got to be CEO in spite of it.
I've seen people make that point many times, but I disagree. Does it really matter if, say, sendmail or CUPS haven't yet started up completely when you've logged in? It's not as if you're usually going to print or mail something immediately anyway. Rather, the earlier you can log in, the earlier you can be productive. I don't mind if apache, mysql or cron is still starting up, as long as I can get an emacs running in the meantime. Or, for that matter, just type in my login name and password.
Another one of my favorite pet peeves is having to wait for dhcpcd to complete its sequence before the boot sequence is allowed to continue. Ubuntu finally fixed that in 7.04 with NetworkManager, though.
For that reason, I was quite happy when the Fedora Project announced their "Early GDM" project, to get GDM started up as early in the boot sequence as humanly possible. Not much has come of it yet, though, and it was announced even for FC4...
Anyway, it isn't just an impression. You actually are logged in faster, and can, thus, get to work faster, just as long as you don't depend on any of the services that are still booting up -- and usually, you don't.
I don't know what happened in 2.6.17, but in 2.6.19 (I think) they added libata support for PATA drives (so that even PATA goes through the same SCSI layer that SATA does). If you old, not-libata drivers stopped working in 2.6.17, then maybe you can try 2.6.19 and see if the new, libata-based drivers work instead?
It may not be necessary, but I would still argue that it is good. I wouldn't be the first Slashdot reader to state that the best thing with Slashdot isn't the news itself, but the discussions that they generate. A question added by the editors, polarizing and/or stupid or not, does often serve as a bit of initiating flamebait for discussions.
Right, not being able to add a Samba user seems like a real showstopper for Joe Average.
I'd say that, while it is true that Linux may indeed have some catching-up to do, it isn't exactly wrong to say that the consumers will have to catch up, either, only if one thinks of it with a less obvious meaning. The problem for Linux isn't really so much that it isn't up to par for the average user, nor that the average user isn't up to anything but Windows, but rather that the average user isn't ready for a non-homogenous market.
Many people still just don't understand that it could be possible for anyone not to be able to read their Word document, nor that a wallpaper CD they bought from X-mart wouldn't work on their computer just because it depends on a Windows craplet. Microsoft has just saturated the world with Win32 to the point where it's taken for granted, by users and developers alike. What is needed for Linux to succeed as a desktop platform for average users probably isn't anything technical anymore, but rather just for it to succeed enough. Or anything but Windows to succeed enough, be it Mac or BeOS or even Plan9 for that matter. Once the market becomes heterogenous, the mental threshold that blocks anything but Win32 will be gone.
And to be honest, it's not as if the market is becoming less heterogenous, at least. Win32 still leads by far, and it isn't exactly disappearing quickly, but I have only seen statistics showing it to decrease, not anyone showing an increase in Win32 penetration. If just average users begin grokking that there is such a concept as different operating systems, the problem will be solved.
And to be honest, that's all I'm hoping for. I don't really care if someone wants to run Windows on their own computer -- after all, that's their problem (as long as I don't get called over to fix it, and even then it's mostly their problem, since I won't be able to fix it as well as I would an operating system that actually is fixable..). All I want is that people stop assuming that anyone will be able to read their Word documents or malformed, flash-ridden web pages.
It's pretty much up to the module in question, but most wireless (and wired) NIC driver modules that I've been dealing physically turn off the transceiver hardware when you ifdown the interface. I'm fairly sure (though I wouldn't bet it) that madwifi does that too.
I don't quite get it. When you speak of "extended register range", you refer to the fact that the registers are 64 bits wide, right? In that case, how would he benefit from that? Unless he's running computational code that regularly deals with integers >= 2^32 (which I don't think one does on a MacBook), I really don't see how his software would become smoother by 64-bit registers. Rather, one could claim the opposite, since every int and pointer becomes twice as large as before, and therefore requires twice the memory transactions and twice the memory space, the latter of which could quite potentially lead to more swapping, and definitely exhausting the CPU caches quicker.
Maybe I just don't get it, but in that case I'd really appreciate an explanation.
Can it not be argued, then, that program authors cannot be sued for patent infringement? They only write programs "in the abstract", they don't combine it with any device, neither explicitly nor implicitly. That's done by the end user at the time of running the program. Of course, as such, such an argument wouldn't protect the end user, but is a programmer really vulnerable to software patents?
Re: Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
on
The End is Nigh for XP
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· Score: 1
Actually the winner of the update debate will be who can hide the updates being done form Joe User. [...] some distros are better off but not truly automatic.
Actually, Fedora can do this, but it's not set up to do so by default. I guess that they don't want to be going behind the user's back to update the system. I installed FC6 on my sister's computer, though, and I turned it on, and it seems to be working pretty much perfectly. If you want to do so, just edit/etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf and set "do_download", "do_download_deps" and "do_update" to "yes".
I agree that the CPU wars have gotten interesting again, but does there really need to be so much in-fighting? Does Intel truly think that AMD's new platform is so horrible that they, too, really just cannot use it? I haven't read that very much about these new architectures, but from what I have read (mostly Wikipedia), it seems that Torrenza is a pretty generic platform, with HyperTransport interconnects and everything.
Then I read that Intel is going to come up with their own, competing and completely incompatible platform. Do they really have to, or is it just a case of extreme NIH syndrome? It would be so nice if we could buy motherboards that would be compatible with both AMD and Intel CPUs, but that prospect isn't all that they seem hellbent on destroying. Doesn't this integration of GPUs into the architecture also mean that I'll have to choose between a GPU for AMD or a GPU from Intel, and won't be able to move it between AMD and Intel computers?
Sure, the CPU wars have gotten interesting, but can't they just fight over the CPUs? Do they have to fight over the platform as well?
I couldn't agree more. If the user isn't looking at the address bar already, then this isn't likely to make them start. I've always wondered what kind of people actually come up with these ideas and actually expect them to work.
To begin with, I never really understood who came up with the stupid idea of putting banking services on the web, with all the obvious security problems (web authentication being very hard to protect, web browsers themselves being more insecure than even Windows, etc.). The only solution I can think of is to use a standardized, open protocol to do banking instead -- especially when HBCI and FinTS even exist! That way, much stronger authentication could be used, and we could also use client applications that are both more secure, due to not trying to be half-assed application platforms, and ten times as fast as a web interface, due to not having to carry out an entire HTTP request for every single action done by the user. The banks could even write their own client applications that they could audit for security problems.
At the very least, if they're going to use a web interface, who was the person responsible for not using TLS and client certificates with the passphrase-protected private key on a smart card for authentication? Anything less than that just seems so obvious that it would be cracked, when it is for something as sensitive as banking. I have yet to come across a bank that uses an authentication method that isn't obviously vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.
I just tried Vista briefly during the Beta period -- even I will have to support it for friends and family sooner or later, though I use Gentoo for all my personal needs -- so I'm not sure about this, but if memory serves, you can click each path element in the address bar to go directly to the corresponding directory. I guess that would be the replacement for the up button.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, if IPv4 truly were a subspace of IPv6, then what sources address would an IPv4-only host be seeing when it receives such a packet from an IPv6-only host?
It is perfectly possible to use both an IPv4 and an IPv6 stack simultaneously, and there are some NAT-like technologies that run on a router to give IPv4 connectivity to IPv6-only hosts, but you'll still need an IPv4 stack somewhere on your network to access IPv4 content.
Actually, that isn't true. The "New Technology" expansion was created in hindsight, for marketing reasons, and Microsoft has even rejected that meaning now. The only plausible story I've heard for the story behind NT is that the kernel was initially targeted at Intel's i960 RISC CPU, which was codenamed N-10 (N-Ten, NT...).
I don't think it has anything to do with the BIOS, or booting at all. It isn't all that clear from the article, but I would think that this idea is merely that one carries one's home directory on a USB stick, not the entire operating system. Then, when you get to a computer running Windows, you can insert that USB stick and use it to log on, without halting the running system.
I know OSX doesn't use ELF, but whatever it uses (isn't it COFF?) surely must support the same thing, right?
Mind you, of course, that working in the favor of the user isn't enough to make it a good thing. First of all, I would argue that it merely puts the user in a false sense of security, since any DRM system is breakable. Second, it would work against the public in general, seeing how Microsoft is going to use it to lock users into their particular DRM system. Good luck reading that desktop stick of yours on a computer not running Windows. Third, it also works against the public in general, since it might, potentially, be a drive for DRM, which is bad.
To make your post more specific, Trusted Computing isn't not about creating an environment that the user can trust, but rather isn't about creating an environment that the owner of the computer cannot trust. The user and the computer owner aren't always the same person -- which is also why I suspect that corporate purchasers might not come to love DRM either...
Maybe a more artistic person than me could make something more interesting with these colors? Remember, you'd have to make their ordering significant as well, not just the colors.
There is, however, no universally agreed syntax for "objects". Sure, there have been attempts, but I doubt any of them will succeed, maybe ever. Different systems have so vastly different opinions of what an object is, and I believe that is how it should be, because if all systems would have to have the same idea of an object, you would be locking them into a predefined design pattern, and innovation might decrease. I don't know if maybe people said the same thing about bytes in the 50s and 60s, so I wouldn't bet my prediction will turn out to be correct, though.
Of course, this is perfect for Microsoft. They don't want other systems, anyway. As long as anyone can agree on the .NET definition of an "object", Microsoft will be happy. However, even then, the fact remains that not every .NET object is serializable -- you can't just take an arbitrary object and squirt (pun intended) it over the network or store it on disk. As long as you wish to communicate with anything outside your own VM, text (or at least a byte stream) is necessary.
Heh, that's one of the weirder statements I've seen as of late. Kind of like saying that you can't "speak" in a telephone, it's just a PCM stream anyway. Call me weird, but I'd argue that text is human readable by definition. I do (kind of) see your point, though, but I don't agree. Text is always human readable, because it has such an internal structure that makes it human readable with an extremely simple and universally standardized (except for charset) algorithm. If you just have an "object", though, there's no universal algorithm for turning it into a visual structure. Usually, each object class even has its own such algorithm, which isn't usually reversible (unlike text), and not every class even does. To begin with, there is, as I wrote above, no guarantee of any sort that an object is even slightly serializable.Not that I think that you're wrong in every possible way. I definitely think that an object-oriented shell may have its virtues, but it's never going to work outside its own VM. Text is universal, since you can send it anywhere and receive it from anywhere. That "anywhere" includes a human, too.
Still, I can't believe that the collective intelligence of Microsoft would appoint him president and CEO for no good reason -- there are many other execs at Microsoft who I'm sure would love the chance instead of him. Not just "without" a good reason either; they appointed him CEO knowing how he is, and all I've seen of him just seems to be reason not to want him running your company.
He has to have some good qualities that makes him suitable for the position, no? I'm almost starting to believe that he's just acting retarded in public to make people think that he's much less of a man than he really is. Call me paranoid, but I almost think that explanation (though he'd have to be a good actor) makes more sense than that he really is retarded and got to be CEO in spite of it.
Another one of my favorite pet peeves is having to wait for dhcpcd to complete its sequence before the boot sequence is allowed to continue. Ubuntu finally fixed that in 7.04 with NetworkManager, though.
For that reason, I was quite happy when the Fedora Project announced their "Early GDM" project, to get GDM started up as early in the boot sequence as humanly possible. Not much has come of it yet, though, and it was announced even for FC4...
Anyway, it isn't just an impression. You actually are logged in faster, and can, thus, get to work faster, just as long as you don't depend on any of the services that are still booting up -- and usually, you don't.
I don't know what happened in 2.6.17, but in 2.6.19 (I think) they added libata support for PATA drives (so that even PATA goes through the same SCSI layer that SATA does). If you old, not-libata drivers stopped working in 2.6.17, then maybe you can try 2.6.19 and see if the new, libata-based drivers work instead?
It may not be necessary, but I would still argue that it is good. I wouldn't be the first Slashdot reader to state that the best thing with Slashdot isn't the news itself, but the discussions that they generate. A question added by the editors, polarizing and/or stupid or not, does often serve as a bit of initiating flamebait for discussions.
I'd say that, while it is true that Linux may indeed have some catching-up to do, it isn't exactly wrong to say that the consumers will have to catch up, either, only if one thinks of it with a less obvious meaning. The problem for Linux isn't really so much that it isn't up to par for the average user, nor that the average user isn't up to anything but Windows, but rather that the average user isn't ready for a non-homogenous market.
Many people still just don't understand that it could be possible for anyone not to be able to read their Word document, nor that a wallpaper CD they bought from X-mart wouldn't work on their computer just because it depends on a Windows craplet. Microsoft has just saturated the world with Win32 to the point where it's taken for granted, by users and developers alike. What is needed for Linux to succeed as a desktop platform for average users probably isn't anything technical anymore, but rather just for it to succeed enough. Or anything but Windows to succeed enough, be it Mac or BeOS or even Plan9 for that matter. Once the market becomes heterogenous, the mental threshold that blocks anything but Win32 will be gone.
And to be honest, it's not as if the market is becoming less heterogenous, at least. Win32 still leads by far, and it isn't exactly disappearing quickly, but I have only seen statistics showing it to decrease, not anyone showing an increase in Win32 penetration. If just average users begin grokking that there is such a concept as different operating systems, the problem will be solved.
And to be honest, that's all I'm hoping for. I don't really care if someone wants to run Windows on their own computer -- after all, that's their problem (as long as I don't get called over to fix it, and even then it's mostly their problem, since I won't be able to fix it as well as I would an operating system that actually is fixable..). All I want is that people stop assuming that anyone will be able to read their Word documents or malformed, flash-ridden web pages.
Are you implying that this is something which should not naturally be complained about unless one follows Slashdot groupthink?
It's pretty much up to the module in question, but most wireless (and wired) NIC driver modules that I've been dealing physically turn off the transceiver hardware when you ifdown the interface. I'm fairly sure (though I wouldn't bet it) that madwifi does that too.
Maybe I just don't get it, but in that case I'd really appreciate an explanation.
Can it not be argued, then, that program authors cannot be sued for patent infringement? They only write programs "in the abstract", they don't combine it with any device, neither explicitly nor implicitly. That's done by the end user at the time of running the program. Of course, as such, such an argument wouldn't protect the end user, but is a programmer really vulnerable to software patents?
Then I read that Intel is going to come up with their own, competing and completely incompatible platform. Do they really have to, or is it just a case of extreme NIH syndrome? It would be so nice if we could buy motherboards that would be compatible with both AMD and Intel CPUs, but that prospect isn't all that they seem hellbent on destroying. Doesn't this integration of GPUs into the architecture also mean that I'll have to choose between a GPU for AMD or a GPU from Intel, and won't be able to move it between AMD and Intel computers?
Sure, the CPU wars have gotten interesting, but can't they just fight over the CPUs? Do they have to fight over the platform as well?
To begin with, I never really understood who came up with the stupid idea of putting banking services on the web, with all the obvious security problems (web authentication being very hard to protect, web browsers themselves being more insecure than even Windows, etc.). The only solution I can think of is to use a standardized, open protocol to do banking instead -- especially when HBCI and FinTS even exist! That way, much stronger authentication could be used, and we could also use client applications that are both more secure, due to not trying to be half-assed application platforms, and ten times as fast as a web interface, due to not having to carry out an entire HTTP request for every single action done by the user. The banks could even write their own client applications that they could audit for security problems.
At the very least, if they're going to use a web interface, who was the person responsible for not using TLS and client certificates with the passphrase-protected private key on a smart card for authentication? Anything less than that just seems so obvious that it would be cracked, when it is for something as sensitive as banking. I have yet to come across a bank that uses an authentication method that isn't obviously vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.
Since when was .fin taken? The root servers claim not to know about it, at least.
I just tried Vista briefly during the Beta period -- even I will have to support it for friends and family sooner or later, though I use Gentoo for all my personal needs -- so I'm not sure about this, but if memory serves, you can click each path element in the address bar to go directly to the corresponding directory. I guess that would be the replacement for the up button.