I think it all started with the first Vax 780, or possibly the first IBM 370 channel controller. Those old machines booted with a 7" floppy that had a capacity of 0.5k. Yep, 512 bytes. Early bootstraps could store the entire contents on to a hard disk with very few instructions if the sector size matched.
The 11/750 loaded its microcode from a little magnetic tape. It used to take (seemingly) ages to get going. I used to boot PDP 11/84's and 83's from TK50 tape. This was in traffic signal cabins out in the middle of nowhere, usually at 0200 or so. I could go for a walk and listen for the console printer to start chattering as the system came up.
I think the pdp's are the reason I now use NetBSD. Not sure why. Just a similar feel.
I had a CP/M system as well and IIRC it stored contiguous files on every third or sixth sector because the CPU could not always keep up with the disk.
I remember writing some slow basic code around the same time on an apple ][ which caused the floppy drive to stop and wait for the CPU.
Also there was something about batch files in CP/M. I think the files were structured so that the shell could go back to the disk for the next step in the script. Those were the days when memory was really scarce.
Back when I ran sendmail I had heaps of problems with it. I bought a book called (I think) sendmail for linux and the conclusion of the book was to run something else. I went to qmail. Since then I have got more into free software (the GNU type) and I can see why the qmail license is a really bad thing. I run netqmail which is packaged as a set of patches with the qmail tarball because Dan Bernstein won't let people extend the source.
I won't move away from qmail yet but it will happen. I think the time to try qmail was five years ago. If I was in the same position now I would move to postfix.
From previous experience, the Fedora installation has been painfully slow. You can see the (lack of) activity when it's copying over packages from the CDROM. It copies the package, installs it to the hard drive, copies another package, installs that, and so on.
NetBSD does this in five minutes or less with tar xvfz. Its no big deal. The packages can be installed when the tar files are made, not when they are extracted.
ince when did the democratic party want to censor internet access? I usually here proposals like this from the other side of the isle.
The Liberals (the right wing party) have teamed up with the Family First (right wing religious) party. This is an attempt to draw either the votes in parliament of the sole Family First MP, or to attract votes from people who might vote for that party.
Any Aussies want to pass me the vegemite and throw their 2's worth in?
Labour won't win the next election so none of this is going to happen. I think they are probing for policies. If they get a good reaction they may continue pushing it, otherwise it will be quietly forgotten.
The whole time, people thought things would last forever, but they couldn't see the end coming.
A couple of years ago I read about a large permanent settlement which Archeologists discovered here in Australia. It was occupied by Aboriginal people for a period of time and then abandoned.
The implication was that indiginous Australians tried to follow the natural progression from hunter gathering to large scale settlement, but it somehow failed.
But this imminent scientist tells correspondent Scott Pelley that the Bush administration is restricting who he can talk to and editing what he can say. Politicians, he says, are rewriting the science.
Perhaps Ubuntu can do it, but it will need to nail both the OEM Linux market, as well as user's needs going forward. Given that much of their success and failure is still dependent on areas farther back in the pipeline (e.g. GNOME), only time will tell if Ubuntu becomes a serious contender in the home.
My highly non-technical sister in law runs Ubuntu. She ran redhat for about a year using it just for email and web browsing.
I upgraded her system to Ubuntu because she wanted to get an iPod and that was where the trouble started. The file system on the iPod became corrupted; eventually I used iTunes on a windows machine which silently repaired the file system (I wonder how often that happens). Its working pretty well, but gtkpod refuses to install some mp3 files on the ipod, possible because they are particularly large files.
I have serious issues with gtkpod. Its error messages are pretty hopeless.
Now she wants to get a laptop running windows and I am all for it. It it too hard maintaining her system.
Its almost winter in the southern hemisphere of Mars. I wonder if there is a chance that a contact has contracted in the cold enough to break off power to this motor. Who knows? Spirit has been lucky before. Perhaps this wheel will start working again in the summer.
Failing that I am available to fix the broken motor, assuming that NASA can provide transportation:)
They are at a distinct advantage here. Of course the other anti-spyware companies are screwed.
Microsoft have one big handicap: belief in their product. This is the real reason why the "many eyes finds bugs" approach of OSS works well. Its not the number of people its the fact that people who have no stake in the product can go out and find the bugs.
I must say this is astounding from a legal services point of view.
I don't. When I worked for a state government road building authority I saw us send out contracts for software which specified precicely how all asphalting works were to be carried out.
Once the person is through physical security, what will that person do? They have to be clueful as well as loyal in order to be safe for the network
My mental image is of a small team of well drilled military people who know exactly how to do their jobs. Maybe thats a wrong image. If so thats the real problem.
No amount of computer security will protect a system if the operational side hasn't been thought out.
Somebody correct me if I am wrong about this, but a system like this should be run in an airgapped environment where external interfaces (radars, etc) are not ones which you can ssh over or anything like that. Most likely every interface into the system will do exactly what it is designed for and nothing else.
People who have access to workstations on the system should need to go through a significant amount of physical security before they are able to do anything. At least thats how similar systems I have seen are run.
but what about my right to protect my child from pornography online?
Fair enough, but we already have standards for content rating in web sites and it works to a varying degree. The.xxx domain is really just a content rating system with low resolution: it can mark a site as porn or not porn.
US Legislators would be better off requiring web sites hosted in the US to carry correct content rating information.
GPL wins. A professor may not bother that people close his code, but companies do, so lots of developers never see the BSD kernels, nor work with it. And the word doesn't spread, so people don't consider it.
There is nothing to stop you from modifying BSD code and releasing the lot under the GPL.
Re:The Economist... only 20 years behind the times
on
Unusual Open Source
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You see, one thing economists (and many, many others) get wrong time and time again, is self organisation... They just don't get it for some reason.
Actually I think economists have too much faith in self organisation, particularly by markets. For example by insisting that markets can solve environmental problems without intervention.
And the decelleration and temperature resulting from the crash landing is substantially different from the acceleration and temperature resulting from an explosion that caused the rock to exceed escape velocity in the first place?
If you start with a big rock under the surface close to an impact point on Earth, most of the rock will be damaged while being ejected into space but a few small bits in the centre may survive intact. But these bits won't be able to survive an impact on Europa.
About 100 have reached Jupiter's moon Europa - but they landed at 24 miles/sec.
This bit seems wrong. The escape velocity of jupiter from the surface of Europa is not 24 miles per second. Not even close. IIRC the escape velocity from the surface of Jupiter is less then 60 km/s. Rocks should be able to arrive on elliptical orbits with zero relative velocity at Jupiter.
Even so, without an atmosphere to slow them dowm, rocks will make quite a bang at Europa. Much less on Titan.
Shucks, perhaps I should give 'em a call and pretend to be John Howard.. although my English accent might give me away, though probably not.
You could claim to be Alexander Downer.
When I was in vicroads we used to joke that you could call the help desk and say "my name is system can you change my password for me" and they would do it for you. Never actually tried it though.
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My son learnt to say "Truck" when he was about a year old. Unfortunately his T sounded more like an F.
Well before then he knew how to ask for yoghurt (go-go!) and later pineapple pizza (apple pie!)
The 11/750 loaded its microcode from a little magnetic tape. It used to take (seemingly) ages to get going. I used to boot PDP 11/84's and 83's from TK50 tape. This was in traffic signal cabins out in the middle of nowhere, usually at 0200 or so. I could go for a walk and listen for the console printer to start chattering as the system came up.
I think the pdp's are the reason I now use NetBSD. Not sure why. Just a similar feel.
I had a CP/M system as well and IIRC it stored contiguous files on every third or sixth sector because the CPU could not always keep up with the disk.
I remember writing some slow basic code around the same time on an apple ][ which caused the floppy drive to stop and wait for the CPU.
Also there was something about batch files in CP/M. I think the files were structured so that the shell could go back to the disk for the next step in the script. Those were the days when memory was really scarce.
Back when I ran sendmail I had heaps of problems with it. I bought a book called (I think) sendmail for linux and the conclusion of the book was to run something else. I went to qmail. Since then I have got more into free software (the GNU type) and I can see why the qmail license is a really bad thing. I run netqmail which is packaged as a set of patches with the qmail tarball because Dan Bernstein won't let people extend the source.
I won't move away from qmail yet but it will happen. I think the time to try qmail was five years ago. If I was in the same position now I would move to postfix.
NetBSD does this in five minutes or less with tar xvfz. Its no big deal. The packages can be installed when the tar files are made, not when they are extracted.
virtualization
Why not? The project could sell LGPL or BSD licensed copies of the source, much like MySQL.
The Liberals (the right wing party) have teamed up with the Family First (right wing religious) party. This is an attempt to draw either the votes in parliament of the sole Family First MP, or to attract votes from people who might vote for that party.
WTF? Where?
Labour won't win the next election so none of this is going to happen. I think they are probing for policies. If they get a good reaction they may continue pushing it, otherwise it will be quietly forgotten.
A couple of years ago I read about a large permanent settlement which Archeologists discovered here in Australia. It was occupied by Aboriginal people for a period of time and then abandoned.
The implication was that indiginous Australians tried to follow the natural progression from hunter gathering to large scale settlement, but it somehow failed.
I too wonder if this will happen here again.
Is that better than eminent?
My highly non-technical sister in law runs Ubuntu. She ran redhat for about a year using it just for email and web browsing.
I upgraded her system to Ubuntu because she wanted to get an iPod and that was where the trouble started. The file system on the iPod became corrupted; eventually I used iTunes on a windows machine which silently repaired the file system (I wonder how often that happens). Its working pretty well, but gtkpod refuses to install some mp3 files on the ipod, possible because they are particularly large files.
I have serious issues with gtkpod. Its error messages are pretty hopeless.
Now she wants to get a laptop running windows and I am all for it. It it too hard maintaining her system.
Its almost winter in the southern hemisphere of Mars. I wonder if there is a chance that a contact has contracted in the cold enough to break off power to this motor. Who knows? Spirit has been lucky before. Perhaps this wheel will start working again in the summer.
Failing that I am available to fix the broken motor, assuming that NASA can provide transportation :)
Microsoft have one big handicap: belief in their product. This is the real reason why the "many eyes finds bugs" approach of OSS works well. Its not the number of people its the fact that people who have no stake in the product can go out and find the bugs.
I don't. When I worked for a state government road building authority I saw us send out contracts for software which specified precicely how all asphalting works were to be carried out.
My mental image is of a small team of well drilled military people who know exactly how to do their jobs. Maybe thats a wrong image. If so thats the real problem.
No amount of computer security will protect a system if the operational side hasn't been thought out.
Somebody correct me if I am wrong about this, but a system like this should be run in an airgapped environment where external interfaces (radars, etc) are not ones which you can ssh over or anything like that. Most likely every interface into the system will do exactly what it is designed for and nothing else.
People who have access to workstations on the system should need to go through a significant amount of physical security before they are able to do anything. At least thats how similar systems I have seen are run.
Fair enough, but we already have standards for content rating in web sites and it works to a varying degree. The .xxx domain is really just a content rating system with low resolution: it can mark a site as porn or not porn.
US Legislators would be better off requiring web sites hosted in the US to carry correct content rating information.
There is nothing to stop you from modifying BSD code and releasing the lot under the GPL.
Actually I think economists have too much faith in self organisation, particularly by markets. For example by insisting that markets can solve environmental problems without intervention.
Sounds reasonable to me. Earth life at the time may have been better suited to Jovian environments than it is now.
If you start with a big rock under the surface close to an impact point on Earth, most of the rock will be damaged while being ejected into space but a few small bits in the centre may survive intact. But these bits won't be able to survive an impact on Europa.
This bit seems wrong. The escape velocity of jupiter from the surface of Europa is not 24 miles per second. Not even close. IIRC the escape velocity from the surface of Jupiter is less then 60 km/s. Rocks should be able to arrive on elliptical orbits with zero relative velocity at Jupiter.
Even so, without an atmosphere to slow them dowm, rocks will make quite a bang at Europa. Much less on Titan.
You could claim to be Alexander Downer.
When I was in vicroads we used to joke that you could call the help desk and say "my name is system can you change my password for me" and they would do it for you. Never actually tried it though.