BSD is not one entity, but actually a family of different dying operating systems. NETBSD is a dying OS that seeks to run on as many platforms as possible. OpenBSD is another, variant, dying OS, that seeks to be as secure as possible, whereas FreeBSD is yet another dying OS that hopes to follow in the footsteps of Linux and have a lot of momentum and developer interest. BSD/OS is a dying commercial OS which even those of us that follow dying OS'es don't really care about anymore. I hope this makes things clearer for you.;-)
I started out, in high school, on an Altair 8080. It did not have the "front panel switches", but the model before it did. The machine booted from an 8 inch floppy and we had several teletypes. One was equipped with a tape reader which I used to back up my (rather simple) programs. We also had a DEC printing terminal. (MUCH faster than the teletypes!) And even a couple of CRT's which a friend of mine kicked up to 9600 baud one day and blew us all away! Ahhh. Those were the days!
In the wake of reports that "Terminator 3" star Arnold Schwartzenager experienced a mild heart attack this morning, Paramount Pictures has announced that he will be replaced on the set by William Shatner...;-)
Yes. Sadly, I must agree. Gnome is losing blood right and left; red writing flows like a river of hands. You don't have to be a Kreskin to see the walls...;-)
This reminds me of Popular Science articles on harnessing the power of ocean waves.
I mean, first there were water beds. Then people wanted water beds with baffles to damp the waves. The next logical step is to use the power of the waves to, I don't know, power the electric blanket, or the electric vibrator, or whatever. Obviously, some sort of limiter would be necessary to prevent catastophic positive feedback loops with *certain* appliances.
When I was young, I was always a bit surprised about those little generator kits that run against your bicycle tire and power the little headlight. I mean, it's just powering that little flashlight bulb. Why does it make it *so* much harder to pedal? Inefficiencies? Or is our energy output really so pathetic. "Luminous Beings are we!" Yoda said in 'The Empire Strikes Back'. Well, maybe Hercules...;-)
Simple. Pedal all the way down is full throttle. Pedal in the middle coasts. Pedal all the way up is full braking. (Note that a car like this would no doubt have anti-lock brakes as well;-) Modulate your braking by holding the pedal down x% where x is less than 50%. Being an advocate of 2-3 button mice, however, I hope nobody ever gets this past the DOT (in the US) or whatever your local automotive standards body happens to be.;-) -----------------
I don't know what the question is, but the answer is 42.
The Torvalds quote seems a bit odd to me. Linus is not really given to being quoted in press releases and it's hard to imagine him saying things like "This is a historical day for blah blah blah". The thing that seems really odd, though, is the implication that complexity is good. My perception of his philosophy is that complexity is bad. A certain amount is necessary to perform a given function, but to imply that "complexity" and "powerful" go hand in hand just doesn't sound, well, Linus-like.
That said, applications are always welcome. Go SGI!;-)
Hmmmm. Very "Insightful" and rather "Interesting". Given that SlashDot does not allow moderators to reveal their true identities, and the fact that your algorithm mimics reality as faithfully as it does, I find myself wondering if/. moderators are not, in fact, scripts. I would guess that the "moderators" include more random() calls so as not to be so obvious. Also, I suspect that moderation is multithreaded. That way you can be a "Troll" the first time the page is viewed, "Insightful" the next, "Funny" the next, "Over-rated" the next, and "Off-topic" the next...
--- P.S. I'll refrain from making any comments about pouring Beowulf clusters of grits down Natalie's HotPants... (I'll be moderated down for this...);-)
This will show you all the system calls (like requests to open files.) It is normal to see some errors opening files as anytime the binary is searching the path it will try to open files that are not there. This may give you a hint as to what is going on.
My hangup, BTW, was Hexen II. It was a great game with great artistry, but I made the "desktop jump" and nuked my Win95 partition in 1996 and although I can't say I never missed it, I can say that I've never had any regrets.
Just go to their site and order the free versions. I believe you pay ( a surprisingly large fee ) for shipping, handling and media.
I have worked with Open Server and it's predecessors for many years. SCO is rock solid for character based apps over serial connections. Unfortunately, their networking is unstable. MAC addresses mysteriously vanishing from the ARP cache, never being refreshed. No support for NAT (masquerading). A broken ppp implementation, with no intent to fix it. That sort of thing.... But Linux/FreeBSD is as stable in non-networked situations and much more capable and stable on networks. Why bother with SCO?
The *fact* is that they were all trading at insane prices. (RedHat had a higher market cap than AMR, American Airlines' holding company!) The valuations are just starting to look reasonable now. Things may well fall some more before leveling out. After that I would exect to see prices rising steadily over the next few years, at least for well managed companies. The recent drops *had* to occur. *Any* reasonable person *had* to have seen them as inevitable from day one. I certainly did.
I think you are being a bit overly sensitive on this one. There have been many times that I have seen a question that made me wonder if the poster is really asking the *right* question. The only way to find out is to supply some info and ask if this is perhaps *really* what was meant by the original question. To direct someone to the right question can be far more helpful than having an outright answer.
It's kind of like "The Hitchhikers's Guide". We all know that the answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is '42'. The problem is that none of us seem to know what the actual question is...:-)
On the other hand, the poster may be asking *exactly* the right question. In which case, I'm rather curious as to just what it is he *is* working on.
Sincerely, Steve Bergman
Re:Get libc6 version of Netscape--problem solved.
on
RedHat 6.2 - RSN
·
· Score: 1
My guess is that it is related to the fact that the netscape code base is a house of cards built upon Netscape 1.0 and never really rewritten. This is why the Mozilla project finally gave up on the whole thing and started mostly from scratch.
But tell me, is Java Plugin 1.2.2 rc4 usable with Mozilla/Linux? I have been waiting for this for some time and thought that it would be a long time before it was even close to ready. Did I just miss reading about it?
I must say I have never really found a use for that icon box. Taskbars and the like suit my taste perfectly. In the interest of full disclosure, I did use Windows95 as my primary home OS for about a year around 1996;-).
I do like the flexibility of E and the fact that it can be quite efficicient when you want it to be, but that pager is the biggest CPU hog ever. Its pretty, but I don't see enough functionality to justify the resources it demands, even on a reasonably fast machine.
Skipping to the assertion (why doesn't/. have a spell checker;-) that VM totally obviates the need to be concerned about memory allocation, you *know* that there is always a price to be paid for excessive memory allocation. In the best case it never gets allocated (lazy allocation). In the more common case, it gets allocated but paged out which gives a temporary performance hit. In the next worse case, it periodically gets used and must be repeatedly paged in and out. VM is very useful but not a panacea. I agree with Bero.
BTW, Bero, I thought you were at Mandrake. Now your at RedHat. Well, wherever you are, best of luck and enjoy what you are doing.:-)
-Steve
Re:did raster piss you off that bad ?
on
RedHat 6.2 - RSN
·
· Score: 1
Way back when, as Gnome plans began to take shape, I heard that Gnome would be window manager independent. My first thought was "Uh Oh, this is going to be a BIG mistake". An interface intended for clueless newbies (no offense, anyone;-) must above all be seemless and have an integrated feel. Anything less is hell on the learning curve. After a couple of years I am very glad to hear that Gnome is getting an honest to god *standard* window manager. Hopefully everything will soon be configurable in one place rather that having GTK+ themes running parallel to E themes. I have nothing against E, but it is evolving into a desktop environment of its own. This is not really in line with what Gnome's standard window manager needs to be. (BTW, I'm happy that E is going the way it is and I am happy that one can still use any WM they want with Gonme.) The relative lack of integration (E never did recognize the panel when setting window sizes, for example) is the main reason that I never present Gnome to my newbie friends. I'm excited about the switch to something else.
Me too. This is probably *THE SINGLE MOST* irritating feature of several current distributions. Its a real embarrassment, especially after one has gone on and on to friends about the stability of Linux. It will be great to finally toss out that kruft congested old code base in favor of Mozilla/Netscape 5.0.:-) Mandrake 7.0 seems pretty stable and RedHat 6.1 updated to NS 4.72 seems more stable that earlier releases.
My first thoughts as well. Isaac dealt with at least part of this issue decades ago. In his robots, the three laws were so inate to the brain that designing a positronic brain *not* based on them required a *HUGE* redesign and investment. We need to start thinking about the laws (or something like them, but Isaac's three laws + the "Zeroth" law are quite elegant and concise.)
Of course, in Isaac's universe, robots turned out to be not such a good idea anyway, or at least having very many of them. Although in the end it *was* robots (Giskard and later, R. Daneel Olivaw) that saved humanity. One thing is certain. We can't go back. The only direction we can go is forward. If we do things right we can create something wonderful and enriching to the human condition.
And about Isaac Asimov, I will also say that even 8 years after his death, few days go by that I don't find myself consciously thinking at some point how much I miss that guy. His science fiction was great but his science fact was incredible.
Yes, I suppose we *are* totally off-topic.;-) I have been thinking about this a good bit lately and frankly, I have no sympathy for those car owners caught by surprise by the price increase. Although the federally mandated fleet average for *cars* is 27.5 MPG, many (most?) people have side-stepped this requirement by buying trucks and other vehicles that must only average 21.5 or so, as I recall. Hopefully, this will make an impression on someone, but I rather doubt it. I'll continue to sick with my trusty '88 Chevy Sprint Metro, rated at 55 MPG City, 60 MPG Highway, the highest rating ever for any production car sold in the US (although manufactured by Suzuki) and also the most reliable car I have ever owned, and currently at ~274,000 miles.
Moore's law applies to overall machine speed once it is up and going. I now propose Bergman's law, which declares that the amount of time required by the Bios to turn the system over to the boot loader or OS is inversely proportional to whatever metric one wants to apply to Moore's law, a 25% premium added on a SCSI based machine. My Apple II+ (the plus had Floating Point Basic in ROM, not that crappy old Integer Basic) would boot in less than a second. Flip the switch and "BEEP" you're at a Basic> prompt and ready to go!:-)
BTW, there is an implementation of Unix for the 6502. Charmingly, it's called Lunix (Little Unix;-)
Hey, if you were giving a bunch of people you had never met, units (worth hundreds of dollars a piece) for free, on the promise that they would not "just disappear", wouldn't you want a little insurance?
Slashdot Mirror
BSD is not one entity, but actually a family of different dying operating systems. NETBSD is a dying OS that seeks to run on as many platforms as possible. OpenBSD is another, variant, dying OS, that seeks to be as secure as possible, whereas FreeBSD is yet another dying OS that hopes to follow in the footsteps of Linux and have a lot of momentum and developer interest. BSD/OS is a dying commercial OS which even those of us that follow dying OS'es don't really care about anymore. I hope this makes things clearer for you. ;-)
I started out, in high school, on an Altair 8080. It did not have the "front panel switches", but the model before it did. The machine booted from an 8 inch floppy and we had several teletypes. One was equipped with a tape reader which I used to back up my (rather simple) programs. We also had a DEC printing terminal. (MUCH faster than the teletypes!) And even a couple of CRT's which a friend of mine kicked up to 9600 baud one day and blew us all away! Ahhh. Those were the days!
>It was an 8086 with 4K of ram,
Hmmm. Sounds more like an 8080...
In the wake of reports that "Terminator 3" star Arnold Schwartzenager experienced a mild heart attack this morning, Paramount Pictures has announced that he will be replaced on the set by William Shatner... ;-)
>Start the movement for ANOTHER desktop environment?
>If he was crazy enough to do it once, don't think he wouldn't consider it twice.
Too late. Read the article. You should have said:
If he was crazy enough to do it three times, don't think that he wouldn't consider it a fourth time.
Yes. Sadly, I must agree. Gnome is losing blood right and left; red writing flows like a river of hands. You don't have to be a Kreskin to see the walls... ;-)
This reminds me of Popular Science articles on harnessing the power of ocean waves.
I mean, first there were water beds. Then people wanted water beds with baffles to damp the waves. The next logical step is to use the power of the waves to, I don't know, power the electric blanket, or the electric vibrator, or whatever. Obviously, some sort of limiter would be necessary to prevent catastophic positive feedback loops with *certain* appliances.
When I was young, I was always a bit surprised about those little generator kits that run against your bicycle tire and power the little headlight. I mean, it's just powering that little flashlight bulb. Why does it make it *so* much harder to pedal? Inefficiencies? Or is our energy output really so pathetic. "Luminous Beings are we!" Yoda said in 'The Empire Strikes Back'. Well, maybe Hercules... ;-)
Simple. Pedal all the way down is full throttle. Pedal in the middle coasts. Pedal all the way up is full braking. (Note that a car like this would no doubt have anti-lock brakes as well ;-) Modulate your braking by holding the pedal down x% where x is less than 50%. Being an advocate of 2-3 button mice, however, I hope nobody ever gets this past the DOT (in the US) or whatever your local automotive standards body happens to be. ;-)
-----------------
I don't know what the question is, but the answer is 42.
The Torvalds quote seems a bit odd to me. Linus is not really given to being quoted in press releases and it's hard to imagine him saying things like "This is a historical day for blah blah blah". The thing that seems really odd, though, is the implication that complexity is good. My perception of his philosophy is that complexity is bad. A certain amount is necessary to perform a given function, but to imply that "complexity" and "powerful" go hand in hand just doesn't sound, well, Linus-like.
;-)
That said, applications are always welcome. Go SGI!
-Steve
Hmmmm. Very "Insightful" and rather "Interesting". Given that SlashDot does not allow moderators to reveal their true identities, and the fact that your algorithm mimics reality as faithfully as it does, I find myself wondering if /. moderators are not, in fact, scripts. I would guess that the "moderators" include more random() calls so as not to be so obvious. Also, I suspect that moderation is multithreaded. That way you can be a "Troll" the first time the page is viewed, "Insightful" the next, "Funny" the next, "Over-rated" the next, and "Off-topic" the next...
;-)
---
P.S. I'll refrain from making any comments about pouring Beowulf clusters of grits down Natalie's HotPants... (I'll be moderated down for this...)
Only for Solaris Sparc. MS has no problem supporting IE on hardware that Windows does not run on.
Try an strace. e.g.:
strace -f -o outputfile.txt whatever_the_binary_is_called
Then look at outputfile.txt
This will show you all the system calls (like requests to open files.) It is normal to see some errors opening files as anytime the binary is searching the path it will try to open files that are not there. This may give you a hint as to what is going on.
My hangup, BTW, was Hexen II. It was a great game with great artistry, but I made the "desktop jump" and nuked my Win95 partition in 1996 and although I can't say I never missed it, I can say that I've never had any regrets.
-Steve Bergman
Just go to their site and order the free versions. I believe you pay ( a surprisingly large fee ) for shipping, handling and media.
I have worked with Open Server and it's predecessors for many years. SCO is rock solid for character based apps over serial connections. Unfortunately, their networking is unstable. MAC addresses mysteriously vanishing from the ARP cache, never being refreshed. No support for NAT (masquerading). A broken ppp implementation, with no intent to fix it. That sort of thing....
But Linux/FreeBSD is as stable in non-networked situations and much more capable and stable on networks. Why bother with SCO?
-Steve Bergman
The *fact* is that they were all trading at insane prices. (RedHat had a higher market cap than AMR, American Airlines' holding company!) The valuations are just starting to look reasonable now. Things may well fall some more before leveling out. After that I would exect to see prices rising steadily over the next few years, at least for well managed companies. The recent drops *had* to occur. *Any* reasonable person *had* to have seen them as inevitable from day one. I certainly did.
I believe that AT&T System V 3.x used a 256-rotor enigma algorithm.
I think you are being a bit overly sensitive on this one. There have been many times that I have seen a question that made me wonder if the poster is really asking the *right* question. The only way to find out is to supply some info and ask if this is perhaps *really* what was meant by the original question. To direct someone to the right question can be far more helpful than having an outright answer.
:-)
It's kind of like "The Hitchhikers's Guide". We all know that the answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is '42'. The problem is that none of us seem to know what the actual question is...
On the other hand, the poster may be asking *exactly* the right question. In which case, I'm rather curious as to just what it is he *is* working on.
Sincerely,
Steve Bergman
My guess is that it is related to the fact that the netscape code base is a house of cards built upon Netscape 1.0 and never really rewritten. This is why the Mozilla project finally gave up on the whole thing and started mostly from scratch.
But tell me, is Java Plugin 1.2.2 rc4 usable with Mozilla/Linux? I have been waiting for this for some time and thought that it would be a long time before it was even close to ready. Did I just miss reading about it?
-Steve
I must say I have never really found a use for that icon box. Taskbars and the like suit my taste perfectly. In the interest of full disclosure, I did use Windows95 as my primary home OS for about a year around 1996 ;-).
/. have a spell checker ;-) that VM totally obviates the need to be concerned about memory allocation, you *know* that there is always a price to be paid for excessive memory allocation. In the best case it never gets allocated (lazy allocation). In the more common case, it gets allocated but paged out which gives a temporary performance hit. In the next worse case, it periodically gets used and must be repeatedly paged in and out. VM is very useful but not a panacea. I agree with Bero.
:-)
I do like the flexibility of E and the fact that it can be quite efficicient when you want it to be, but that pager is the biggest CPU hog ever. Its pretty, but I don't see enough functionality to justify the resources it demands, even on a reasonably fast machine.
Skipping to the assertion (why doesn't
BTW, Bero, I thought you were at Mandrake. Now your at RedHat. Well, wherever you are, best of luck and enjoy what you are doing.
-Steve
Way back when, as Gnome plans began to take shape, I heard that Gnome would be window manager independent. My first thought was "Uh Oh, this is going to be a BIG mistake". An interface intended for clueless newbies (no offense, anyone ;-) must above all be seemless and have an integrated feel. Anything less is hell on the learning curve. After a couple of years I am very glad to hear that Gnome is getting an honest to god *standard* window manager. Hopefully everything will soon be configurable in one place rather that having GTK+ themes running parallel to E themes. I have nothing against E, but it is evolving into a desktop environment of its own. This is not really in line with what Gnome's standard window manager needs to be. (BTW, I'm happy that E is going the way it is and I am happy that one can still use any WM they want with Gonme.) The relative lack of integration (E never did recognize the panel when setting window sizes, for example) is the main reason that I never present Gnome to my newbie friends. I'm excited about the switch to something else.
Me too. This is probably *THE SINGLE MOST* irritating feature of several current distributions. Its a real embarrassment, especially after one has gone on and on to friends about the stability of Linux. It will be great to finally toss out that kruft congested old code base in favor of Mozilla/Netscape 5.0. :-) Mandrake 7.0 seems pretty stable and RedHat 6.1 updated to NS 4.72 seems more stable that earlier releases.
My first thoughts as well. Isaac dealt with at least part of this issue decades ago. In his robots, the three laws were so inate to the brain that designing a positronic brain *not* based on them required a *HUGE* redesign and investment. We need to start thinking about the laws (or something like them, but Isaac's three laws + the "Zeroth" law are quite elegant and concise.)
Of course, in Isaac's universe, robots turned out to be not such a good idea anyway, or at least having very many of them. Although in the end it *was* robots (Giskard and later, R. Daneel Olivaw) that saved humanity. One thing is certain. We can't go back. The only direction we can go is forward. If we do things right we can create something wonderful and enriching to the human condition.
And about Isaac Asimov, I will also say that even 8 years after his death, few days go by that I don't find myself consciously thinking at some point how much I miss that guy. His science fiction was great but his science fact was incredible.
-Steve Bergman
Yes, I suppose we *are* totally off-topic. ;-) I have been thinking about this a good bit lately and frankly, I have no sympathy for those car owners caught by surprise by the price increase. Although the federally mandated fleet average for *cars* is 27.5 MPG, many (most?) people have side-stepped this requirement by buying trucks and other vehicles that must only average 21.5 or so, as I recall. Hopefully, this will make an impression on someone, but I rather doubt it. I'll continue to sick with my trusty '88 Chevy Sprint Metro, rated at 55 MPG City, 60 MPG Highway, the highest rating ever for any production car sold in the US (although manufactured by Suzuki) and also the most reliable car I have ever owned, and currently at ~274,000 miles.
Moore's law applies to overall machine speed once it is up and going. I now propose Bergman's law, which declares that the amount of time required by the Bios to turn the system over to the boot loader or OS is inversely proportional to whatever metric one wants to apply to Moore's law, a 25% premium added on a SCSI based machine. My Apple II+ (the plus had Floating Point Basic in ROM, not that crappy old Integer Basic) would boot in less than a second. Flip the switch and "BEEP" you're at a Basic> prompt and ready to go! :-)
;-)
BTW, there is an implementation of Unix for the 6502. Charmingly, it's called Lunix (Little Unix
-Steve Bergman
Hey, if you were giving a bunch of people you had never met, units (worth hundreds of dollars a piece) for free, on the promise that they would not "just disappear", wouldn't you want a little insurance?