That's more to do with vxworks requiring less memory (and thus the hardware can be made cheaper), you can still try to flash linux onto those devices but they don't work very well due to the limited amount of memory/flash... They still sell linux based devices, but these are no longer the lowest and cheapest routers they offer - the vxworks ones are the new bargain bucket.
It's not just less memory - vxWorks is very frugal with CPU usage too. I've seen 486 clone at 33Mhz maxing out the bandwidth on a network card while running an FTP demon out of flash memory.
The reason is that vxWorks is a very simple OS. It doesn't have much in the way of protection - all the code runs in Ring 0 on x86. So calls into the OS are just regular calls - you don't need to switch from Ring 3 to Ring 0. It can use the MMU but it doesn't usually have per process address spaces. So you don't need to flush the TLB on a process switch.
The kernel is very small and simple - it's vfs layer is only a line of two of code before jumping into a filesystem. And read() in a filesystem is very simple too - 99% of the time it just returns data from a cache buffer. TCP/IP implements zbuf to avoid copying. So the end result is that the 486 fetching a file over FTP from flash is only executing a few thousand instructions for each read - mostly copying from a buffer cache to a packet. Most the code/data probably fits in the on chip I/D cache. Which was good luck in this case, because this particular board had rather slow DRAM.
Now vxWorks isn't free in any sense - I believe it costs a buck or so per unit which is rather expensive. Still if you were switching to Linux in this system you'd need a faster CPU, more flash and more Ram. That would cost more than a vxWorks license.
Of course not. But it's not uncommon to find bugs that only appear on certain configurations. Most people test on Win7 64 and 32 bit, Vista 64 and 32 bit and XP to have a good chance of finding bugs before shipping.
I should explain how Atari’s Arcade conversions group worked. Basically, Atari’s marketing folks would negotiate a license to ship GameCorp’s “Foobar Blaster” on a cartridge for the Atari Home Computer System. That was it. That was the entirety of the deal. We got ZERO help from the original developers of the games. No listings, no talking to the engineers, no design documents, nothing. In fact, we had to buy our own copy of the arcade machine and simply get good at the game (which was why I was playing it at the hotel — our copy of the game hadn’t even been delivered yet)
I.e. the license was to make a clone of the game. There was no source code or documentation provided.
Yes. I have NetBSD installed on an SE/30. It has a 300-something by 200-something one bit screen running X11. It's still sort of cool though the resolution and bit-depth has it' limits.
Actually it was 512 x 384 x 1 bit.
FYI It's very important when talking about vintage machines running BSD on Slashdot that you memorise their specifications.
Here's a hint as to what might actually work: free trade deals linked to universal education coverage, especially for girls.
Good luck with you "free trade deals linked to universal education, especially for girls". The Taliban throw acid at girls that go to school, you know.
If you seek to understand the average Muslim perspective though, conduct the following though experiment: that you are black and some is chanting "nigger nigger nigger nigger" in your face, stopping only to pompously congratulate themselves on what champions of freedom they are.
Well a lot of people feel the same way about a bunch of medievalists trying to tell cartoonists in free countries what they can and can't draw.
This issue has the potential to radicalize more people than Al-Qaeda ever dreamed of. They shot their wad in Iraq with their murderous overreaching and failed to convince the Muslim masses to rise up. But this can very easily breathe new life into Islamist movements that have been discrediting themselves in the eyes of regular folks.
Yeah, just like at the end of the middle ages - people challenging the Catholic Church's silly rules on what people could and couldn't say prevented the Enlightenment.
Oh wait, that's not what happened at all - people stood up to them and eventually they backed down.
Religions need to be slapped down when they step out of line. Gradually they are abraded until they are powerless. I've got friends in Iran who - unlike you - actually understand what is at stake and are much more keen for this abrading process to be completed. Because then they can live a normal life. I'm sure 90% of "the Arab Street" feels the same way.
I think you've missed the point completely - "jsm" clearly knows a lot more about Linux than the people he's tormenting, the whole thing is made up to satirise the "community".
I agree with you here. I understand Cross wanted to make herself identifiable for business reasons. But "geekgirl" is obviously not unique enough and she should concede. I seriously doubt she can lay claim to being the geekgirl above all others.
What if she could demonstrate it, Highlander style?
<jsm> So in other words, my fucking modem is never going to work with Linux at all?
<linuxbabe> no no no. in the first place you never had a modem you had a winmodem. in the second place its M$ fault that the drivers are closed and you can go to jail for trying to reverse engineer them like this guy dimitri skylab and the DMCA. its nothing to do with linux that M$ fills the world with its proprietary crap
<jsm> But in terms of actually getting my computer to work with Linux, I get the impression that it won't?
<linuxbabe> M$ should have to open up the drivers have you read CatB? and vaio sucks because they won't open up their standards either.
<jsm> Congratulations on wasting half an hour of my life, you fucking loser. And stop pretending to be a fucking woman. Your advice is useless. You, and the other hundred members of the so called fucking Linux community for which you stand, have broken my computer, wasted my time, patronised me senseless, revealed your lack of real knowledge, patronised me again and you *still* can't get something as simple as a fucking laptop computer to fucking work. Your so called free fucking software, like your
<jsm> so called fucking free advice, is still too fucking expensive. I cannot believe that you have so little fucking self-respect that in order to find the attention you clearly crave, you have to spend your life lying about the usability of a fucking computer operating system, purely for the joy of creating problems which you can then pretend to solve. You are worse than a fucking fireman who sets buildings on fire. I have had enough of your fucking Munchausen-by-proxy version of tech support. Now get off
<jsm> this fucking channel, hunt down someone who knows what they're fucking doing and bring them here or I will never, repeat never, use your fucking system ag....
Mozilla official cite that the innovation of new features in other browsers suspiciously correlate to the sudden appearance of black duck eggs at restaurants near the Mozilla office.
Black duck eggs on the menu of a Chinese restaurant drew the suspicions of a security consultant reporting to renowned security expert Ira Winkler.
The colleague, a former Russian security agent named Stan, was at a new Chinese restaurant in "the middle of nowhere" in the United States, but conspicuously near the R&D center of a Fortune 5 U.S. business.
"Don't you know black duck eggs are a delicacy in China?" Winkler said Stan asked. "I can't get black duck eggs in San Francisco, let alone this little piece of crap town in the middle of nowhere." Stan's conclusion was that the Chinese restaurant was a front for a Chinese espionage operation targeting the Fortune 5 business.
This is just a fault of boot loaders. If someone makes a boot loader that can fit on sector 0 along with the protective partition table, and understand the GPT or just hard codes some addresses to load more from regardless of partition tables, you're good to go.
Well yeah - but this should have been part of the GPT spec so that everyone who creates GPT partitioned disks would do it right. It should have been able to boot legacy OSs from a GPT disk using a regular Bios.
It's by no means impossible too - offhand I'd just have put a regular MBR with regular boot code at sector 0. The boot partition - marked as active - and any others beneath 2TB would be listed in the MBR partition table. Other partitions would only be listed in the GPT one. And hey presto you could boot an unmodified non GPT aware OS with a normal Bios from a GPT disk. GPT aware OSs would also see the partitions above 2TB.
That's not part of the standard though and it doesn't work with Windows. Windows only supports booting from a GPT disk if you have real EFI firmware which is very rare on PCs. My point is that rather than specifying a protective MBR with no code in it, GPT should have specified that the disk have code which would load the active partition boot sector if the disk was used with an old style Bios. Then all OSs would support booting off GPT.
Slashdot Mirror
That baby is infected by a DEADLY BACILLUS! The DEADLY BACILLUS of COMMUNISM!
Duck and cover! Duck and cover!
That's more to do with vxworks requiring less memory (and thus the hardware can be made cheaper), you can still try to flash linux onto those devices but they don't work very well due to the limited amount of memory/flash...
They still sell linux based devices, but these are no longer the lowest and cheapest routers they offer - the vxworks ones are the new bargain bucket.
It's not just less memory - vxWorks is very frugal with CPU usage too. I've seen 486 clone at 33Mhz maxing out the bandwidth on a network card while running an FTP demon out of flash memory.
The reason is that vxWorks is a very simple OS. It doesn't have much in the way of protection - all the code runs in Ring 0 on x86. So calls into the OS are just regular calls - you don't need to switch from Ring 3 to Ring 0. It can use the MMU but it doesn't usually have per process address spaces. So you don't need to flush the TLB on a process switch.
The kernel is very small and simple - it's vfs layer is only a line of two of code before jumping into a filesystem. And read() in a filesystem is very simple too - 99% of the time it just returns data from a cache buffer. TCP/IP implements zbuf to avoid copying. So the end result is that the 486 fetching a file over FTP from flash is only executing a few thousand instructions for each read - mostly copying from a buffer cache to a packet. Most the code/data probably fits in the on chip I/D cache. Which was good luck in this case, because this particular board had rather slow DRAM.
Now vxWorks isn't free in any sense - I believe it costs a buck or so per unit which is rather expensive. Still if you were switching to Linux in this system you'd need a faster CPU, more flash and more Ram. That would cost more than a vxWorks license.
Of course not. But it's not uncommon to find bugs that only appear on certain configurations. Most people test on Win7 64 and 32 bit, Vista 64 and 32 bit and XP to have a good chance of finding bugs before shipping.
It seems like they could be though - solar panels could generate lift via a tether.
Skynet will protect you if you're on its side.
so will never be able to deal with high bandwidth super quality things like blurry disks in the same way.
Tee hee.
Actually back in the 70's and 80's licensing worked like this
http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=987
I should explain how Atari’s Arcade conversions group worked. Basically, Atari’s marketing folks would negotiate a license to ship GameCorp’s “Foobar Blaster” on a cartridge for the Atari Home Computer System. That was it. That was the entirety of the deal. We got ZERO help from the original developers of the games. No listings, no talking to the engineers, no design documents, nothing. In fact, we had to buy our own copy of the arcade machine and simply get good at the game (which was why I was playing it at the hotel — our copy of the game hadn’t even been delivered yet)
I.e. the license was to make a clone of the game. There was no source code or documentation provided.
Yes. I have NetBSD installed on an SE/30. It has a 300-something by 200-something one bit screen running X11. It's still sort of cool though the resolution and bit-depth has it' limits.
Actually it was 512 x 384 x 1 bit.
FYI It's very important when talking about vintage machines running BSD on Slashdot that you memorise their specifications.
Here's a hint as to what might actually work: free trade deals linked to universal education coverage, especially for girls.
Good luck with you "free trade deals linked to universal education, especially for girls". The Taliban throw acid at girls that go to school, you know.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27713077/
And 'school' even for boys consists of rote learning the Quran.
MP3Pro and HE-AAC have yet to make a dent. AC-3 has virtually no presence outside of audio accompanying video.
Yo! All the cool, cutting edge media savvy kids are switching from MP3Pro to MP3Pro Extreme To the Max Radical II. Ring the bell, suckah. Schools in!
I think demilogue sounds better.
If you seek to understand the average Muslim perspective though, conduct the following though experiment: that you are black and some is chanting "nigger nigger nigger nigger" in your face, stopping only to pompously congratulate themselves on what champions of freedom they are.
Well a lot of people feel the same way about a bunch of medievalists trying to tell cartoonists in free countries what they can and can't draw.
This issue has the potential to radicalize more people than Al-Qaeda ever dreamed of. They shot their wad in Iraq with their murderous overreaching and failed to convince the Muslim masses to rise up. But this can very easily breathe new life into Islamist movements that have been discrediting themselves in the eyes of regular folks.
Yeah, just like at the end of the middle ages - people challenging the Catholic Church's silly rules on what people could and couldn't say prevented the Enlightenment.
Oh wait, that's not what happened at all - people stood up to them and eventually they backed down.
Religions need to be slapped down when they step out of line. Gradually they are abraded until they are powerless. I've got friends in Iran who - unlike you - actually understand what is at stake and are much more keen for this abrading process to be completed. Because then they can live a normal life. I'm sure 90% of "the Arab Street" feels the same way.
Infidel pig! May all your camels suffer from flatulence and halitosis!
I think you've missed the point completely - "jsm" clearly knows a lot more about Linux than the people he's tormenting, the whole thing is made up to satirise the "community".
What about trademarking "Two Girls, One Trademark"?
I agree with you here. I understand Cross wanted to make herself identifiable for business reasons. But "geekgirl" is obviously not unique enough and she should concede. I seriously doubt she can lay claim to being the geekgirl above all others.
What if she could demonstrate it, Highlander style?
Probably a man though ; ).
ObAdequacy.org
http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2001.10.2.33542.4010.html
<jsm> So in other words, my fucking modem is never going to work with Linux at all?
<linuxbabe> no no no. in the first place you never had a modem you had a winmodem. in the second place its M$ fault that the drivers are closed and you can go to jail for trying to reverse engineer them like this guy dimitri skylab and the DMCA. its nothing to do with linux that M$ fills the world with its proprietary crap
<jsm> But in terms of actually getting my computer to work with Linux, I get the impression that it won't?
<linuxbabe> M$ should have to open up the drivers have you read CatB? and vaio sucks because they won't open up their standards either.
<jsm> Congratulations on wasting half an hour of my life, you fucking loser. And stop pretending to be a fucking woman. Your advice is useless. You, and the other hundred members of the so called fucking Linux community for which you stand, have broken my computer, wasted my time, patronised me senseless, revealed your lack of real knowledge, patronised me again and you *still* can't get something as simple as a fucking laptop computer to fucking work. Your so called free fucking software, like your
<jsm> so called fucking free advice, is still too fucking expensive. I cannot believe that you have so little fucking self-respect that in order to find the attention you clearly crave, you have to spend your life lying about the usability of a fucking computer operating system, purely for the joy of creating problems which you can then pretend to solve. You are worse than a fucking fireman who sets buildings on fire. I have had enough of your fucking Munchausen-by-proxy version of tech support. Now get off
<jsm> this fucking channel, hunt down someone who knows what they're fucking doing and bring them here or I will never, repeat never, use your fucking system ag ....
Good times. Good times.
It's traditional to use a brother/sister incest reference when trolling people who make Star Wars based jokes.
Mozilla official cite that the innovation of new features in other browsers suspiciously correlate to the sudden appearance of black duck eggs at restaurants near the Mozilla office.
Reference
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/61425
Black duck eggs on the menu of a Chinese restaurant drew the suspicions of a security consultant reporting to renowned security expert Ira Winkler.
The colleague, a former Russian security agent named Stan, was at a new Chinese restaurant in "the middle of nowhere" in the United States, but conspicuously near the R&D center of a Fortune 5 U.S. business.
"Don't you know black duck eggs are a delicacy in China?" Winkler said Stan asked. "I can't get black duck eggs in San Francisco, let alone this little piece of crap town in the middle of nowhere." Stan's conclusion was that the Chinese restaurant was a front for a Chinese espionage operation targeting the Fortune 5 business.
Good. Use your aggressive feelings, boy. Let the hate flow through you.
Your faith in your friends is your greatest weakness. Witness the power of this fully ARMED and OPERATIONAL web browser! Fire at will!
How much code have you contributed to Firefox? How much time have you spent auditing source code for bugs?
Back to work, peasant.
This is just a fault of boot loaders. If someone makes a boot loader that can fit on sector 0 along with the protective partition table, and understand the GPT or just hard codes some addresses to load more from regardless of partition tables, you're good to go.
Well yeah - but this should have been part of the GPT spec so that everyone who creates GPT partitioned disks would do it right. It should have been able to boot legacy OSs from a GPT disk using a regular Bios.
It's by no means impossible too - offhand I'd just have put a regular MBR with regular boot code at sector 0. The boot partition - marked as active - and any others beneath 2TB would be listed in the MBR partition table. Other partitions would only be listed in the GPT one. And hey presto you could boot an unmodified non GPT aware OS with a normal Bios from a GPT disk. GPT aware OSs would also see the partitions above 2TB.
That's not part of the standard though and it doesn't work with Windows. Windows only supports booting from a GPT disk if you have real EFI firmware which is very rare on PCs. My point is that rather than specifying a protective MBR with no code in it, GPT should have specified that the disk have code which would load the active partition boot sector if the disk was used with an old style Bios. Then all OSs would support booting off GPT.