I did just that, used it on my main machine for six months or so and rather liked it. Then for the last couple of months I've been using OpenBSD, and I really don't see myself changing from it any time soon.
My preferences in descending order would be
Server:
OpenBSD
FreeBSD
Debian
Workstation:
Debian
OpenBSD
FreeBSD
I've also used Slackware, RedHat and Mandrake in the past, and none of them really stood the test of time.
Of course, OpenBSD is a waste on SMP machines, but I don't own any of those.
My flatmate is a big fan of rallying and racing games on his PlayStation. Consequently one of the games he likes is Colin McRae Rally 2. You get a selection of rally cars in the game - Evos, WRX's, and the Ford Focus. It just so happens that McRae drives a Focus...hence I find it rather suspicious that my flatmate reports the Focus is far less susceptible to damage than the other cars in the game.
> Has anybody ever seen a bug-free piece of software of any complexity greater than "Hello World"?"
I've even seen Hello World with a bug in it. Forgetting the \n on the end of the printf in a shell which didn't LF when a program exited resulted in the shell prompt being printed over the top of the output...
A box with this config will produce the following "netstat -l" has no externally open ports except echo. The only exception to this is when running X, port 6000 will be opened (personally I firewall this).
I say:
You don't need to firewall 6000, if you add "-nolisten tcp" to the end of the line that starts the X server. On the Mandrake system I'm currently using, with gdm as the login manager, it's in the servers section of/etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf. If using xdm (or kdm) its probably the last line in/etc/X11/xdm/Xservers. On FreeBSD, using xdm, its in/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/Xservers.
I, like others, was very keen to get my hands on AFS and was getting frustrated with the delay. So I emailed the sales contact address with a query. This was just before it actually was released (a couple of days or so).
I get into work one morning and the sales guy has left an email telling me its just come out and giving the URL etc.
A little later I notice the "you have voicemail waiting" light on my phone is flashing. I check it and it's the same guy who has, from the US, called me in *New Zealand* to tell me the same thing! Above and beyond...
Nah, the mention couldn't actually be there because he did NOT use it.
*scratch* Nah.
End quote:
The slide on which hdparm was mentioned was in a series of slides at the end which had a rather speculative tone ie "these are things we might think about". It doesn't say it was used, it IMHO implies in fact that it wasn't.
I'm pleased to see you know what sarcasm is, but it's not a very useful first step to convincing people that you're right.
Lots of people are saying Linux didn't have DMA turned on, and that's the reason for the low scores. You can see on Slide 41 that hdparm is mentioned with the -d flag. I think that means that he turned it on, ladies and gentleman.
End quote:
Unfortunately, it's rather typical behaviour of DMA driver problems for DMA to be turned on, then turn itself off again soon afterwards when it gets a timeout error. And yes, I did notice that slide, but it doesn't state that option was actually used during the tests, does it?
The patterns in the disk read performance figures look suspiciously like the sort of gaps you get with and without DMA enabled on a disk. I note that the motherboard is a VIA board; Linux is known for having problems with DMA on via boards. Also, depending on distro, some may or may not enable DMA by default on bootup.
My opinion is that the BSDs having in the range of (say) 10% improvement over competitors would be easily explained by possibly better file system and VM architecture. But when we see a difference of five to one surely there's got to be something seriously wrong there. I've gotten better bonnie figures than that on an old Pentium.
A machine that's only saving to disk anything coming in via serial and has no network connection will be *very* hard to crack, and you have the advantage that your logs are still in electronically searchable form.
I tried FreeBSD 3.3 a few months back. There were a few things I liked about it (Linux' partitioning sucks real bad by comparison, etc) and a few I didn't (media auto-detection on my network card didn't work, the installation of bash didn't have cursor keys or tab completion enabled, etc) but by and large I didn't see enough interesting in FreeBSD to make it worth my while learning how to do the things that it does differently. By the same token, I don't imagine the average *BSD user would find much in Linux that would be worth learning all the differences, either.
>Lemme guess, you did that to increase your hacker purity test score?
>I did, as well. Actually, you get another point for attempting to increase the score.
Gee, I thought the usual procedure for increasing the purity score was to do things like copulating with a domestic animal whilst in a land vehicle of more than 50,000 tons and the like. You pick up multiple points simultaneously this way, much more efficient.
If you're starting with no PC, as I was, and don't have much cash, as I didn't, but have a steady income with which to pay a machine off, as I did, then buying a whole machine first up can be the best idea. I purchased two machines two years ago; once they went out of warranty I started upgrading them piecemeal. I worked for the company I bought them off so I still had a lot of control over which parts went into them, and I've had excellent Linux compatibility and few failures with the components I did select.
Probably another year to 18 months from now, I'll be back at the point where it's easier just to get a whole new machine on repayments than to scrounge together the $$$ to do the upgrades I want, but until then I'm slowing improving my system with better and better components as I go.
Oh, of course, the other advantage to building from scratch is you don't have to pay for Windows with your system. But then, another advantage to buying a complete machine is you don't have the bullshit where you're having problems and the motherboard vendor blames it on the video card and the video card vendor blames it on the RAM and the RAM vendor blames it on the hard drive etc etc etc - if one company supplied it all then it's THEIR problem, not yours or anyone else's.
Last time I looked at one of these, it had all sorts of absurdities such as BeOS being rated above Windows 95 for application availability etc. Okay, it could have been a BeOS fan vote-stuffing but more likely it's just a combination of people not thinking at all carefully, wishful thinking (at least where Be apps are concerned) and total subjectivity of the assessments. It's like trying to describe pain to your doctor - "it's sorta like really sore, about here, feels kinda a dull pain" - your description of exactly the same pain probably isn't going to match anybody else's.
Plus the fact that with the obscure operating systems, the only people likely to be voting are the BIG fans of those OS's...this will skew results even more.
Mine's an A2000, so it came from the manufacturer with a built-in clock. Although, A2000 backup batteries have a *bad* habit of leaking and corroding traces on the motherboard, so unfortunately being able to tell the time isn't a recipe for longevity. My main machine is fine so far, but the two spare-parts A2000s sitting in the cupboard have long since suffered from corrosion and hence there motherboards are rather useless when it comes to spares (can still pinch chips from them of course).
Moral of the story? If you have an Amiga 2000, check and make sure your battery isn't leaking on your mobo.
Coming up 3am and doubtless a few other countries now have had midnight come and go without the world collapsing in a chaotic heap of doom. Come 2000/01/01 12:00:01 the power was still on, TV still broadcasting (although after a few minutes of the moron they had doing the presentation I was starting to wish the TVNZ studios would have a localised Y2K power problem), just checked and water is still flowing from the taps (I don't need to go wee-wee or poo-poo just now so I'll take it on faith that the sewage system is still working). My main Linux box is running and knows what time it is, Internet connectivity is fine, ssh'ed to work and all the servers are up and know what time it is, the work web site is happy as Larry etc. Haven't turned on the other PC or the Amiga yet. Will be interesting to see what the SparcStation 2 running non-Y2K-compliant SunOS 4.1.3 does when I try booting it up...
Oh, in other news, I might've been on track for the first road accident of the new millenium when I found myself going sideways on a *very* slippery corner on a wet and windy road coming home a couple of hours ago. Managed to straighten up safely though, would have been heaps of fun if I'd done it deliberately:-)
One of the things I found really handy in AmigaOS was being able to control the mouse with the keyboard - you held down combinations of the Alt and left and right Amiga keys and used the cursor keys to move, or to use either mouse button. It wasn't the most pin-point control, but it was totally independent of any need for application support and saved my bacon many times (especially when I had a break in my mouse cable and had to survive a couple of days before I could buy another one).
I'd love it if someone would add this sort of functionality to X.
I can think of at least one optimisation that an optimising compiler isn't likely to be able to make - namely, processing a large data set split into-self contained chunks that are small enough to fit into the cache memory of whichever system you're using. ie, if you have 512kb of L2, if you can stick to working on a total code + data size of less than 512k in one go, you should get a performance win, especially with SMP.
Re:How did distinction come about?
on
Geeks vs. Nerds
·
· Score: 2
What I'm getting from the discussions here is that nerd is the more likely to be claimed in a positive sense and that geek is more insulting. Here in NZ, at least from where I stand, it's the other way round - geek is more positive and nerd is more negative. I hear terms like "geek flat" used a lot to describe houses full of computers (supposedly any house with more computers than people is a geek house, although I dunno how good a rule of thumb this is because this house of five has more computers than people and I'm the only one who owns any!) and a co-worker and I will refer to doing something geeky rather than doing something nerdy.
Either way, as the Jargon file alludes, I personally find it a little offensive to be called a geek by somebody who isn't one.
I've replaced many a dud Bigfoot during my time in hardware repairs, and the one I owned carked it recently as well.
I bought myself a 13gb Fireball KA recently though, and I love it. I'm only running it on an ATA33 controller, but it's pushing 20mb/sec on writes in bonnie. hdparm -t gives similar results. It made a BIG performance improvement over my old 5400RPM Seagate. I don't notice it swapping now. Definitely recommended from this corner.
dogbert odie gromit scooby scrappy goober and muttley
Maybe if we get some more we'll start with perdita and pongo from 101 Dalmations. My co-worker who came up with these names has a Gromit back pack (a cutesy little thing with a *tiny* storage space and thus of limited utility) which we left sitting in the server room on top of the appropriate server for people to see through the window. To my disappointment, nobody commented on it...
Basically where the ICQ protocol is concerned, it's a case of "Security? What security?". I subscribed to an icq-devel mailing list for a while and to say it was eyebrow raising was an understatement. Amongst other things, features like requiring authorisation (for the non ICQ users among you - you can tell the ICQ service that other ICQ users can only see if you're online if you've authorised them first) are controlled by the CLIENT end. That is, instead of the client saying "is xxx online" and the server saying "you need authorisation" and the client saying to the user "Bugger! They've got to authorise you", what actually happens is that the server says "Yep, xxx is online, but you need authorisation" and the client is not supposed to tell the user this. So if you make an ICQ client, you have to specifically have code in it to honour the authorisation requirement, otherwise it's effectively non-existent. I wouldnt be surprised if the invisible function works much the same way - I should try getting a Windoze ICQ user to mark themselves invisible and seeing if I can still see them in LICQ:-)
The protocol is also TRIVIALLY easy to spoof - LICQ even comes with the feature to send messages from any UIN. While I've not looked at the source I bet the code that does this is pretty simple. There were plenty of other examples of how bad the protocol was. No doubt some of the ICQ clone developers can go into far greater detail than I have (and maybe correct any boneheaded misconceptions on my part:-) )
Dammit - put a couple of angle brackets in that and it treated the text in between as HTML code and cut it out:-(
I meant that PII CPUs at 333 or greater are Deschutes core (cache 4gb), most at 300 or below are Klamath (cache 512mb) but there are a few PII 300s and a very few PII 266s that use the Deschutes core. Celeron 266's and 300's also use the Deschutes core, Celeron A's use the Mendocino core which also caches 4gb.
Slashdot Mirror
> I'd recommend you take a good look at FreeBSD.
I did just that, used it on my main machine for six months or so and rather liked it. Then for the last couple of months I've been using OpenBSD, and I really don't see myself changing from it any time soon.
My preferences in descending order would be
Server:
OpenBSD
FreeBSD
Debian
Workstation:
Debian
OpenBSD
FreeBSD
I've also used Slackware, RedHat and Mandrake in the past, and none of them really stood the test of time.
Of course, OpenBSD is a waste on SMP machines, but I don't own any of those.
My flatmate is a big fan of rallying and racing games on his PlayStation. Consequently one of the games he likes is Colin McRae Rally 2. You get a selection of rally cars in the game - Evos, WRX's, and the Ford Focus. It just so happens that McRae drives a Focus...hence I find it rather suspicious that my flatmate reports the Focus is far less susceptible to damage than the other cars in the game.
> Has anybody ever seen a bug-free piece of software of any complexity greater than "Hello World"?"
I've even seen Hello World with a bug in it. Forgetting the \n on the end of the printf in a shell which didn't LF when a program exited resulted in the shell prompt being printed over the top of the output...
e_n_d_o said:
/etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf. If using xdm (or kdm) its probably the last line in /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers. On FreeBSD, using xdm, its in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/Xservers.
A box with this config will produce the following "netstat -l" has no externally open ports except echo. The only exception to this is when running X, port 6000 will be opened (personally I firewall this).
I say:
You don't need to firewall 6000, if you add "-nolisten tcp" to the end of the line that starts the X server. On the Mandrake system I'm currently using, with gdm as the login manager, it's in the servers section of
I, like others, was very keen to get my hands on AFS and was getting frustrated with the delay. So I emailed the sales contact address with a query. This was just before it actually was released (a couple of days or so).
I get into work one morning and the sales guy has left an email telling me its just come out and giving the URL etc.
A little later I notice the "you have voicemail waiting" light on my phone is flashing. I check it and it's the same guy who has, from the US, called me in *New Zealand* to tell me the same thing! Above and beyond...
Quote:
Nah, the mention couldn't actually be there because he did NOT use it.
*scratch* Nah.
End quote:
The slide on which hdparm was mentioned was in a series of slides at the end which had a rather speculative tone ie "these are things we might think about". It doesn't say it was used, it IMHO implies in fact that it wasn't.
I'm pleased to see you know what sarcasm is, but it's not a very useful first step to convincing people that you're right.
Quote:
Lots of people are saying Linux didn't have DMA turned on, and that's the reason for the low scores. You can see on Slide 41 that
hdparm is mentioned with the -d flag. I think that means that he turned it on, ladies and gentleman.
End quote:
Unfortunately, it's rather typical behaviour of DMA driver problems for DMA to be turned on, then turn itself off again soon afterwards when it gets a timeout error. And yes, I did notice that slide, but it doesn't state that option was actually used during the tests, does it?
The patterns in the disk read performance figures look suspiciously like the sort of gaps you get with and without DMA enabled on a disk. I note that the motherboard is a VIA board; Linux is known for having problems with DMA on via boards. Also, depending on distro, some may or may not enable DMA by default on bootup.
My opinion is that the BSDs having in the range of (say) 10% improvement over competitors would be easily explained by possibly better file system and VM architecture. But when we see a difference of five to one surely there's got to be something seriously wrong there. I've gotten better bonnie figures than that on an old Pentium.
How about logging via serial port?
A machine that's only saving to disk anything coming in via serial and has no network connection will be *very* hard to crack, and you have the advantage that your logs are still in electronically searchable form.
You're joking, right?
We have a stack of SMP servers here on BX-based boards, and they are rock solid. One of them gets up to 10+ load average on occasion.
About the only BX board I can think of that *is* known for instability with SMP is the Abit BP6. Unsurprisingly, you get what you pay for.
I tried FreeBSD 3.3 a few months back. There were a few things I liked about it (Linux' partitioning sucks real bad by comparison, etc) and a few I didn't (media auto-detection on my network card didn't work, the installation of bash didn't have cursor keys or tab completion enabled, etc) but by and large I didn't see enough interesting in FreeBSD to make it worth my while learning how to do the things that it does differently. By the same token, I don't imagine the average *BSD user would find much in Linux that would be worth learning all the differences, either.
>Lemme guess, you did that to increase your hacker purity test score?
>I did, as well. Actually, you get another point for attempting to increase the score.
Gee, I thought the usual procedure for increasing the purity score was to do things like copulating with a domestic animal whilst in a land vehicle of more than 50,000 tons and the like. You pick up multiple points simultaneously this way, much more efficient.
If you're starting with no PC, as I was, and don't have much cash, as I didn't, but have a steady income with which to pay a machine off, as I did, then buying a whole machine first up can be the best idea. I purchased two machines two years ago; once they went out of warranty I started upgrading them piecemeal. I worked for the company I bought them off so I still had a lot of control over which parts went into them, and I've had excellent Linux compatibility and few failures with the components I did select.
Probably another year to 18 months from now, I'll be back at the point where it's easier just to get a whole new machine on repayments than to scrounge together the $$$ to do the upgrades I want, but until then I'm slowing improving my system with better and better components as I go.
Oh, of course, the other advantage to building from scratch is you don't have to pay for Windows with your system. But then, another advantage to buying a complete machine is you don't have the bullshit where you're having problems and the motherboard vendor blames it on the video card and the video card vendor blames it on the RAM and the RAM vendor blames it on the hard drive etc etc etc - if one company supplied it all then it's THEIR problem, not yours or anyone else's.
Is this the first case of an electronic denial-of-service attack that isn't computer or internet related? :-)
Last time I looked at one of these, it had all sorts of absurdities such as BeOS being rated above Windows 95 for application availability etc. Okay, it could have been a BeOS fan vote-stuffing but more likely it's just a combination of people not thinking at all carefully, wishful thinking (at least where Be apps are concerned) and total subjectivity of the assessments. It's like trying to describe pain to your doctor - "it's sorta like really sore, about here, feels kinda a dull pain" - your description of exactly the same pain probably isn't going to match anybody else's.
Plus the fact that with the obscure operating systems, the only people likely to be voting are the BIG fans of those OS's...this will skew results even more.
Mine's an A2000, so it came from the manufacturer with a built-in clock. Although, A2000 backup batteries have a *bad* habit of leaking and corroding traces on the motherboard, so unfortunately being able to tell the time isn't a recipe for longevity. My main machine is fine so far, but the two spare-parts A2000s sitting in the cupboard have long since suffered from corrosion and hence there motherboards are rather useless when it comes to spares (can still pinch chips from them of course).
Moral of the story? If you have an Amiga 2000, check and make sure your battery isn't leaking on your mobo.
Coming up 3am and doubtless a few other countries now have had midnight come and go without the world collapsing in a chaotic heap of doom. Come 2000/01/01 12:00:01 the power was still on, TV still broadcasting (although after a few minutes of the moron they had doing the presentation I was starting to wish the TVNZ studios would have a localised Y2K power problem), just checked and water is still flowing from the taps (I don't need to go wee-wee or poo-poo just now so I'll take it on faith that the sewage system is still working). My main Linux box is running and knows what time it is, Internet connectivity is fine, ssh'ed to work and all the servers are up and know what time it is, the work web site is happy as Larry etc. Haven't turned on the other PC or the Amiga yet. Will be interesting to see what the SparcStation 2 running non-Y2K-compliant SunOS 4.1.3 does when I try booting it up...
:-)
Oh, in other news, I might've been on track for the first road accident of the new millenium when I found myself going sideways on a *very* slippery corner on a wet and windy road coming home a couple of hours ago. Managed to straighten up safely though, would have been heaps of fun if I'd done it deliberately
One of the things I found really handy in AmigaOS was being able to control the mouse with the keyboard - you held down combinations of the Alt and left and right Amiga keys and used the cursor keys to move, or to use either mouse button. It wasn't the most pin-point control, but it was totally independent of any need for application support and saved my bacon many times (especially when I had a break in my mouse cable and had to survive a couple of days before I could buy another one).
I'd love it if someone would add this sort of functionality to X.
I can think of at least one optimisation that an optimising compiler isn't likely to be able to make - namely, processing a large data set split into-self contained chunks that are small enough to fit into the cache memory of whichever system you're using. ie, if you have 512kb of L2, if you can stick to working on a total code + data size of less than 512k in one go, you should get a performance win, especially with SMP.
What I'm getting from the discussions here is that nerd is the more likely to be claimed in a positive sense and that geek is more insulting. Here in NZ, at least from where I stand, it's the other way round - geek is more positive and nerd is more negative. I hear terms like "geek flat" used a lot to describe houses full of computers (supposedly any house with more computers than people is a geek house, although I dunno how good a rule of thumb this is because this house of five has more computers than people and I'm the only one who owns any!) and a co-worker and I will refer to doing something geeky rather than doing something nerdy.
Either way, as the Jargon file alludes, I personally find it a little offensive to be called a geek by somebody who isn't one.
I've replaced many a dud Bigfoot during my time in hardware repairs, and the one I owned carked it recently as well.
I bought myself a 13gb Fireball KA recently though, and I love it. I'm only running it on an ATA33 controller, but it's pushing 20mb/sec on writes in bonnie. hdparm -t gives similar results. It made a BIG performance improvement over my old 5400RPM Seagate. I don't notice it swapping now. Definitely recommended from this corner.
At work we have:
dogbert
odie
gromit
scooby
scrappy
goober
and muttley
Maybe if we get some more we'll start with perdita and pongo from 101 Dalmations. My co-worker who came up with these names has a Gromit back pack (a cutesy little thing with a *tiny* storage space and thus of limited utility) which we left sitting in the server room on top of the appropriate server for people to see through the window. To my disappointment, nobody commented on it...
I'm so glad I have a Squid ACL rule blocking access to doubleclick :-)
Basically where the ICQ protocol is concerned, it's a case of "Security? What security?". I subscribed to an icq-devel mailing list for a while and to say it was eyebrow raising was an understatement. Amongst other things, features like requiring authorisation (for the non ICQ users among you - you can tell the ICQ service that other ICQ users can only see if you're online if you've authorised them first) are controlled by the CLIENT end. That is, instead of the client saying "is xxx online" and the server saying "you need authorisation" and the client saying to the user "Bugger! They've got to authorise you", what actually happens is that the server says "Yep, xxx is online, but you need authorisation" and the client is not supposed to tell the user this. So if you make an ICQ client, you have to specifically have code in it to honour the authorisation requirement, otherwise it's effectively non-existent. I wouldnt be surprised if the invisible function works much the same way - I should try getting a Windoze ICQ user to mark themselves invisible and seeing if I can still see them in LICQ :-)
:-) )
The protocol is also TRIVIALLY easy to spoof - LICQ even comes with the feature to send messages from any UIN. While I've not looked at the source I bet the code that does this is pretty simple. There were plenty of other examples of how bad the protocol was. No doubt some of the ICQ clone developers can go into far greater detail than I have (and maybe correct any boneheaded misconceptions on my part
Dammit - put a couple of angle brackets in that and it treated the text in between as HTML code and cut it out :-(
I meant that PII CPUs at 333 or greater are Deschutes core (cache 4gb), most at 300 or below are Klamath (cache 512mb) but there are a few PII 300s and a very few PII 266s that use the Deschutes core. Celeron 266's and 300's also use the Deschutes core, Celeron A's use the Mendocino core which also caches 4gb.