I was wondering if someone could tell me the main differences between the Alpha architecture and the x86 arch? Are Alpha's RISC? 64-bit? In what areas (/applications) does an Alpha beat an x86? What about vice versa? Thanks in advance.
Yeah, Sensei for sure. www.linuxnewbie.org is a great site for anyone looking for info on how to do something using Linux. And the people @ the UBB will answer any questions you have. Go Sensei!
That's a pretty pessimistic and short-sighted attitude to take with a source code release - the release of the Quake1 source release (under the GPL) is exactly the thing the internet 'geek' community has been pressuring companies to do for years. FYI, cheating was rampant in Quake1 *before* this source release. If someone wanted to cheat, they probably would have been able to anyways. The client/server model that the Quake games use is inherently insecure. Even Carmack admits that. There may be more rampant cheating now, sure - but before the source release, Quake1 enjoyed 'security through obscurity'. As any developer knows, that isn't a valid philosophy.
To quote from the Slashdot interview with Wichert Akkerman, Debian Project Leader (get it here):
2) When will KDE be included in Debian? by grrussel Now that Qt 2 is free software, under the QPL, will Debian include KDE 2 when it is released, based on Qt 2?
Short answer: yes. Long answer: we will include it when we're sure that all license issues have been resolved. The QPL is a major step forward over the previous license and allows you to use it in Free Software projects. There is still a slight problem though: it is not compatible with the GPL. This doesn't mean that it's not free, but it does mean that if you want to use code that has been licensed with the GPL and use it with something that is licensed under the QPL (like Qt) you have a problem. There are two ways to fix that: change the license for the GPL'ed part to add a special clause stating it is okay to do this, or replace the GPL'ed part with something under a different license. KDE has stated that they are indeed going to make or request the necessary license changes so all these problems should be fixed for KDE
Once that has been done there is nothing to stop us from including KDE in Debian.
I would recommend avoiding Diamond Multimedia like the plague. In my experience, there products are consistently over-hyped, under-supported, and come with horrible, horrible drivers. They are also quite a bit more expensive than video cards based on the same chipset (TNT2) made by different manufacturers. I have the Creative TNT2, and it's a good card. I have also heard that Guillemot make a good TNT2. You might want to look at the Matrox G400 - great 2d + 3d image quality, fast, and I have heard the Linux drivers are very good - as good or better than the Windows drivers, even. John Carmack (lead programmer of Quake/Doom/etc) is part of the team writing the open source (glx) drivers. Rambus RAM sucks, from what I have heard. Very high latency, although some pretty impressive bandwidth. Before paying for these machines I would recommend you try them out - Rambus might let you down.
The/. article before this asks the question - "Why is BSD not as popular as Linux?". I don't mean to offend any, but after reading the above post, the answer is pretty obvious. This kind of bigotry certainly doesn't help BSD, and makes the whole free *NIX movement look bad.
First, I should warn you that this review is written by a Linux weenie that arrived at that particular brand of UNIX via NetWare and Windows NT.
What exactly is a Linux weenie? I mean, come on - why are Linux users "the enemy"? It just makes you seem spiteful that more people use Linux than *BSD.
I use both FreeBSD and Debian GNU/Linux. I am very satisfied with both OSs. As far as I am concerned, they are both sides of the same coin - I would love to see *BSD adopted by more people, because it really is a great OS. But that kind of attitude doesn't help things. Furthermore, BSD isn't the golden, perfect OS to which everyone should bow down in homage. It's good, yes. But it's not for everyone.
>>To make the most of it however, you'll need plenty of time to explore FreeBSD and come to grips with the convoluted system configuration process.
[..] a more informed article would be nice
I hate to break it to you, but IMHO sysinstall is definately a handful for new users - I would know, I didn't think very kindly of it the first time I installed FreeBSD. Now that I have gotten used to it, I think it's very useful - but there is definately room for improvement. Simply because someone thinks that sysinstall isn't easy to use is not reason to slam them for being un-informed.
Not who, but what. Answer: usability studies. With extensive usability studies Microsoft has been able to make user interfaces, mice, keyboards, joystics etc. that most people think are great [..]
What? That just plain doesn't make any sense. People should be able to use what they like, not what a group of people thinks is the best. Plain and simple. Usability studies or not. That's part of the philosophy that has produced the free OS (GNU/Linux) that many of us use today.
People will use what they think is the best. The more people use something, the more successful it will become (in general - and especially with OSS software and community involvement). Therefore, the software that people think is the best will become 'selected' in this manner. There is no need for usability studies.
Personally, I love Linux software the way it is now. There are many different choices for anything I could possibly want to do. How exactly is this wrong?
More and more distros are beginning to use graphical installers - Caldera, Redhat, Corel, SuSE, and now Mandrake.
Am I the only person who doesn't like them? Obviously, they are prettier than the standard text / ncurses based installer. But do they really offer any additional functionality?
By switching to a graphical installer, you introduce the signficant possibility that, for whatever reason, X won't load. I have heard tales of GUI installers refusing to start, and rebooting the machine without any explanation. Graphical installers are inherently more complex than text-based ones, and thus more likely to have bugs.
I'm the first to admit that I have never extensively used a GUI installer - but for those of you who have - what did you think? Does moving to (g)tk really improve the installation experience? Does it make it easier to install? Does the install ever fail? Or am I just paranoid?
Why A P3? How exactly will SSE help a web server? Personally, I think RAID is overkill when you are just starting. And your server hardware depends a lot on the content you will be serving. If you are going to have a lot of static content, a fast HD is important. If you have more dynamic content (e.g. slashdot), then CPU power becomes more important. In the case of dynamic, you might want to consider dual CPUs.
Slashdot Mirror
I was wondering if someone could tell me the main differences between the Alpha architecture and the x86 arch? Are Alpha's RISC? 64-bit? In what areas (/applications) does an Alpha beat an x86? What about vice versa? Thanks in advance.
Yeah, Sensei for sure. www.linuxnewbie.org is a great site for anyone looking for info on how to do something using Linux. And the people @ the UBB will answer any questions you have. Go Sensei!
That's a pretty pessimistic and short-sighted attitude to take with a source code release - the release of the Quake1 source release (under the GPL) is exactly the thing the internet 'geek' community has been pressuring companies to do for years. FYI, cheating was rampant in Quake1 *before* this source release. If someone wanted to cheat, they probably would have been able to anyways. The client/server model that the Quake games use is inherently insecure. Even Carmack admits that. There may be more rampant cheating now, sure - but before the source release, Quake1 enjoyed 'security through obscurity'. As any developer knows, that isn't a valid philosophy.
2) When will KDE be included in Debian? by grrussel
Now that Qt 2 is free software, under the QPL, will Debian include KDE 2 when it is released, based on Qt 2?
Short answer: yes. Long answer: we will include it when we're sure that all license issues have been resolved. The QPL is a major step forward over the previous license and allows you to use it in Free Software projects. There is still a slight problem though: it is not compatible with the GPL. This doesn't mean that it's not free, but it does mean that if you want to use code that has been licensed with the GPL and use it with something that is licensed under the QPL (like Qt) you have a problem. There are two ways to fix that: change the license for the GPL'ed part to add a special clause stating it is okay to do this, or replace the GPL'ed part with something under a different license. KDE has stated that they are indeed going to make or request the necessary license changes so all these problems should be fixed for KDE
Once that has been done there is nothing to stop us from including KDE in Debian.
I would recommend avoiding Diamond Multimedia like the plague. In my experience, there products are consistently over-hyped, under-supported, and come with horrible, horrible drivers. They are also quite a bit more expensive than video cards based on the same chipset (TNT2) made by different manufacturers. I have the Creative TNT2, and it's a good card. I have also heard that Guillemot make a good TNT2. You might want to look at the Matrox G400 - great 2d + 3d image quality, fast, and I have heard the Linux drivers are very good - as good or better than the Windows drivers, even. John Carmack (lead programmer of Quake/Doom/etc) is part of the team writing the open source (glx) drivers. Rambus RAM sucks, from what I have heard. Very high latency, although some pretty impressive bandwidth. Before paying for these machines I would recommend you try them out - Rambus might let you down.
First, I should warn you that this review is written by a Linux weenie that arrived at that particular brand of UNIX via NetWare and Windows NT.
What exactly is a Linux weenie? I mean, come on - why are Linux users "the enemy"? It just makes you seem spiteful that more people use Linux than *BSD.
I use both FreeBSD and Debian GNU/Linux. I am very satisfied with both OSs. As far as I am concerned, they are both sides of the same coin - I would love to see *BSD adopted by more people, because it really is a great OS. But that kind of attitude doesn't help things. Furthermore, BSD isn't the golden, perfect OS to which everyone should bow down in homage. It's good, yes. But it's not for everyone.
>>To make the most of it however, you'll need plenty of time to explore FreeBSD and come to grips with the convoluted system configuration process.
[..] a more informed article would be nice
I hate to break it to you, but IMHO sysinstall is definately a handful for new users - I would know, I didn't think very kindly of it the first time I installed FreeBSD. Now that I have gotten used to it, I think it's very useful - but there is definately room for improvement. Simply because someone thinks that sysinstall isn't easy to use is not reason to slam them for being un-informed.
Not who, but what. Answer: usability studies. With extensive usability studies Microsoft has been able to make user interfaces, mice, keyboards, joystics etc. that most people think are great [..]
What? That just plain doesn't make any sense. People should be able to use what they like, not what a group of people thinks is the best. Plain and simple. Usability studies or not. That's part of the philosophy that has produced the free OS (GNU/Linux) that many of us use today.
People will use what they think is the best. The more people use something, the more successful it will become (in general - and especially with OSS software and community involvement). Therefore, the software that people think is the best will become 'selected' in this manner. There is no need for usability studies.
Personally, I love Linux software the way it is now. There are many different choices for anything I could possibly want to do. How exactly is this wrong?
Am I the only person who doesn't like them? Obviously, they are prettier than the standard text / ncurses based installer. But do they really offer any additional functionality?
By switching to a graphical installer, you introduce the signficant possibility that, for whatever reason, X won't load. I have heard tales of GUI installers refusing to start, and rebooting the machine without any explanation. Graphical installers are inherently more complex than text-based ones, and thus more likely to have bugs.
I'm the first to admit that I have never extensively used a GUI installer - but for those of you who have - what did you think? Does moving to (g)tk really improve the installation experience? Does it make it easier to install? Does the install ever fail? Or am I just paranoid?
"You can't [Censored] censor me" the cracker wrote
http://apps.freshmeat.net/homepage/89 0390921/
Another good web log analyzer is "webilizer":
http://apps.freshmeat.net/homepage/88 4569634/
Hope this helps.
Why A P3? How exactly will SSE help a web server? Personally, I think RAID is overkill when you are just starting. And your server hardware depends a lot on the content you will be serving. If you are going to have a lot of static content, a fast HD is important. If you have more dynamic content (e.g. slashdot), then CPU power becomes more important. In the case of dynamic, you might want to consider dual CPUs.