Well, maybe this post is supposed to be sarcastic. Didn't seem so to me though.
Hard to say. If you look at the guys history, he posts a lot of similiar stuff that gets rated 4 or 5: Funny (like The Hubble Telescope VIOLATES ALIENS' PRIVACY and Mozilla Dinosaur icon is THIEVERY). However, he was walking the thin line between Flamebait and Funny with that post (and IMHO he fell on the Flamebait side).
For the record, a search at the Patent Office's web site, reveals that Union Metals in fact owns the trademark, oddly enough.
Remember that several companies can own the same trademark, as long as they do different things. IIRC The Open Group owns the Unix trademark with regard to operating systems. And in fact if someone created a "Unix Burgers" restaurant, or something, I'm pretty sure they could trademark it and use the unix.com domain. I'm not to familiar with cybersquatting laws tho...
It's a good gig and I don't generally feel that I'm a servant of evil.
That's because you've been brainwashed. Snap out of it! Come to your senses! Install GNU/Linux now and SAVE YOURSELF! [Just kidding, do what you like].
Honestly, though, when MS had a presentation here last semester, I could feel the malavolent evil coming from them. Either that or I was having another one of my frequent psychotic breaks...
It took a few minutes of deep breathing before I was able to convince myself that this was a coincidence. Or was it?
Dunno... my brother installed a copy of 95 on his machine (this was a few years ago), and decided he really wanted Netscape not IE... so he goes to the Netscape web site to download it. But when then download should have started, IE told him "this site is a security risk, cancelling download". He eventually got in through FTP, but it was really weird to see...
LOL, the idea of MS programming IE to crash whenever the words ESR, Stallman, or Linux come up on the screen seems so ridiculous... yet... so plausible...:)
I'll side with Larry on this one. He's just so clear and easy to understand. For instance:
"His history is a bit too Torvalds focused imho [in my humble opinion]"
So that's that that means. I keep seeing "IMHO" it all over the place and no one would ever tell me what it meant! I wish I were a law student at Harvard and could have this guy as a professor, he must be amazing!
Well... unless you consider a big pile of loose, single-sided pages professional, I'd wonder about where the professional BINDING is.
Well, you're going to get much, much worse with HTML. And since when is LaTeX a single-sided document system? Every homework I've turned in this semester has been double-sided. And when have bindings come into it? That's entirely an meatspace thing: my PDFs don't have any binding at all, thank you.
All I was saying in my comment was that LaTeX (well TeX is doing the work but TeX really isn't that much fun to write in) formats much nicer than HTML. LaTeX output is worth binding well, HTML is not. Printed HTML deserves, at best, a couple staples.
I didn't say they were similar, I said they were in the same series. I thought it was a valid point when discussing the options of space sim fanatics.
OK, I suppose that's valid. I think the same "genre" would maybe be a little more accurate, though of course Terminus is in the same genre as well. Maybe just "Decent 3 and Freespace are both arcade style space shooters where you go around and blow up a bunch of ships". Yeah, that about covers it.:)
You could just give everyone accounts on a Unix machine, then you all log in (using SSH, of course) and use talk. Easy and secure.
Another method would be to setup a small IRC server on one of your machines. Then have everyone connect to your machine with port forwarding on. You almost certainly don't want to trust the public IRC servers.
A somewhat higher-latency solution would be to set up a mailing list and some simple scripts, lets say called mailit and readit. mailit [filename] will encrypt the file with GPG then mail it to the list. readit listens for mail from that address (probably with help from procmail), and automagically decrypts the message and displays it on the screen (you type the passphrase when you first run it). This is just a random thought, there are probably problems with it that I'm not thinking of.
Someone was doing work on a talk/IRC type client which encrypted using Diffie-Hellman and Blowfish, but I can't think of the name right now.
Descent Freespace and Descent 3 look to be nice additions to the genre, but they're all in the same series.
Freespace and Decent have absolutely nothing to do with each other, beside the Decent name (which they dropped for Freespace 2). Nothing. Nada. The world used for the Frespace games has a completely different plotline from Decent (assuming Decent has a plot, I never figured it out what it might be).
Also, I must point at that while the screenshots look good, they're not great. I would rate Freespace 2 as looking significantly "slicker", especially the computer controls (of course this can be "explained" by the fact that Terminus is set in 2200, while Freespace is set in >2300, IIRC). However, the realism introduced (radiation killing the pilot, etc) is pretty cool, and the Newtonian physics is nice, the one thing I don't like about Freespace2 is the very silly physics. So I'll probably buy it after it's been marked down in the $30 range.
And please give me online docs in html format (at minimum!) - no PDF or postscript please, unless this is also accomanied by html.
The advandage of PostScript/PDF is that when you print it out, you get a very professional looking document. There is a reason many books are written in LaTeX, after all...
Am I blind, is the documentation lacking, or does the compiler not include architecture-specific optimizations for post-486 AMD processors?
As others have mentioned, K6* and K7 optimizations are (slowly) making their way into the more recent gcc and friends. However, at this point, if you really need speed you've got to crank out some asm. GMP, for instance, supports the following x86 targets (according the the GMP 3.0 manual): i386, i486, i586, Pentuim, Pentium w/MMX, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, K6, K6-2, K6-3, and Athlon (though some of these are aliases for others). There are about ~6-7 different version of asm code for x86 alone. SMPEG and other high performance apps also use MMX/3DNow! asm.
Announcing payrandomibt.com
on
Pay Lars
·
· Score: 1
Soon you will be able to go to payrandombit.com and give me lots of money. Why would you want to do that? Because you should feel guilty! Hell, you're willing to pay Metallica and they already have tons of money! I'm a poor college student!
but you could go through all the colors and pick a nice high contrast color for each one (presumalby with a small special-purpose app). However, there are 2**24 possible colors in HTML, so you'd probably want to skip some of the low order bits, or something. If you skipped the lowest 3 bits, you get 2**(24 - 9) == 2**15 colors to check. That would take about 54 hours to do [averaging 6 seconds per check]... though I guess you'd only have to do it once. Of course the task is quite parrelizable... just give the applicationto the marketing people (finally they'll come in useful!). However once it's done you can write up a C program that, given a certain 24-bit color code as argv[1], prints out a cooresponding contrasting color. Or store them in a file or whatever.
This is a serious problem with some Linux apps. Some seem to take forever to develop and there are alot of apps with little to no development. Way too many version 0.02s out there!
People do have to work for a living, and it's a rare geek who get's paid to code OSS software. Also, people are (rightly) hesitant to tell people "yes, this code is absolutely perfect! Use it now!" if they're not really sure that's right. In fact usually it's just the opposite (look at the ext3 homepage). And version numbers are often kept very low for early beta testing, then go up quite a bit (for instance lsh went from 0.2.x to 0.9.0).
Anyway version numbers don't mean crap. Currently, I'm using: lilo 0.21, smpeg 0.3.5, ext2ed 0.1, pam 0.68, ORBit 0.5, etc, etc, etc.
Redhat DOES come on 3 CDs - 6.2 has the install CD, the documentation CD and the source CD.
Yes, but how useful is the source CD? It certainly doesn't come with anything extra. If I wanted to port Redhat to PowerPC (or whatever), yeah, the source CD would be great [just to a great big rpm --rebuild *.rpm], but otherwise it's useless. And the docs CD doesn't seem terribly useful to me...
This is out of about 5000 readers who responded. I wonder how the numbers would look in the US (SuSE - RedHat position reversed?)
Probably that's about right. I think the Debian numbers are a bit higher here in the US (maybe 10-15%?).
I don't really see why. As long as you get the opportunity of manually selecting what you want and what you don't want, I'm perfectly happy with a little application overkill. I like to get as much stuff as possible on the CDs, because online time is still paid for by the minute where I live.
Well, I suppose it's less of a problem for SuSE (it ships on something like 6 CDs, right?), but Redhat is only 1 (actually I think 6.2 is 2 now, but one is all documentation), but it seems like packages that should be shipped with the basic distro aren't, while fairly useless things are included. For instance Mesa wasn't in the basic distro up until 6.2, and if you want to use anything but sendmail as an MTA you have to go get the source and build it yourself.
It would be kinda nice if Redhat shipped on 2 or 3 CDs: one a basic install (basic stuff like the kernel, emacs, netscape/mozilla, games, KDE + GNOME, etc), one with development tools (and I mean every development tool and language there is, *-devel packages galore, etc), and one with server related stuff (Apache (plus mod_*), telnetd, ftpd (perferably several versions, like wu-ftpd and OpenBSD's ftpd), SSHD [probably OpenSSL/lsh], BIND, and with sendmail, smail, qmail, and postfix all available as MTAs). That would make my day.:)
YaST makes it very easy to do all the system administration you need
I'm a Redhat user (but don't really have anything against the other distros...) but personally I don't like stuff like that. Redhat ships with something similiar, linuxconf. Sadly, even if you tell the installer not to install it, it will. So I always remove it after installation.
vi is the only true sysadmin tool!:)
The bundled software is also a real catchy part
It bothers me when distros ship with tons and tons of stuff.
Honestly, it really seems like SuSE takes the stuff that I don't like about Redhat and does them better... I actually don't think I know anyone using SuSE - Redhat is by far the most popular distro on campus, a few Debian users, couple Mandrakes. Everyone else is using *BSD, Solaris, or Windows. Odd.
Actually, my brother had this little ball and after a few months the cloth covering it got ripped and pretty much the same stuff was inside that. I'm not real sure what exactly it is though - not plastic, not exactly rubber... ?
If it was GPLed code it'd be a different matter, but how can a copy of BSD code be "stolen"?
Well, in the legal sense, of course you can take BSD code and use it without telling anyone or recontributing your changes. However, it seems like a very mean thing to do. Of course, the BSD license still requires that users of the code redistribute the license and include the copyright notice. So if MS really did take the OpenBSD TCP/IP stack and use it without displaying the copyright, they _are_ in violation of the license (and therefore in some sense "stealing").
I would be very interested if that allegation is true. And it would be great if OpenBSD could sue MS for copyright infrignment, as they don't get much money and while I don't like OpenBSD that much, I feel it is an important tool for network infrastructure.
I was having very nasty problems with a (brand new) 810A SCSI card and an old CD-R I got for X-mas: I/O timeouts, things like mount, etc would go into uninteruptable sleeps, etc. I changed my kernel configuration so "default tagged command queue depth", "maximum queued commands", and the scyncronous transfer Mhz to levels significantly lower than the defaults. Also, I enabled normal I/O (vs memory mapped I/O). Probably the exact options are different on your card, but in any case it's probably worth a shot. It may lower performance significantly but it beats crashes.
As most people know, SCO is working with IBM and Sequent (which IIRC IBM bought a while back) to develop a new 64 bit Unix. How will these two OSes work together on your systems? Are you planning on using Linux only on low-end machines, while Monteray runs on IA-64, or while Linux be a "stopgap OS" to run on your systems until Monteray is finished?
PNG seems to be an excellent quality compression format, even though I will miss my animated GIFs...
*sniff*
Well cry no more! There is a format called MNG which is based (somewhat) on the PNG tech, but allows things like... tada! Animated graphics. It's still in development but I suspect that support will be in Mozilla fairly soon.
The MNG webpage is at http://www.cdrom.com/pub/mng/
I'm glad Unisys is doing this. Not only are they displaying themselves as the idiots they obviously are, but now major companies will be switching to PNG. Which means Netscape and MSIE will soon follow with really good PNG support. Which means we'll finally be able to get rid of the completely obsolete graphics format that is GIF and replace it in it's entirety with PNG (and JPEG where useful).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, maybe this post is supposed to be sarcastic. Didn't seem so to me though.
Hard to say. If you look at the guys history, he posts a lot of similiar stuff that gets rated 4 or 5: Funny (like The Hubble Telescope VIOLATES ALIENS' PRIVACY and Mozilla Dinosaur icon is THIEVERY). However, he was walking the thin line between Flamebait and Funny with that post (and IMHO he fell on the Flamebait side).
IMNSHO, I thought everyone knew what IMHO meant. :)
:)
Well AFAIK it's not exactly well documented. Though IIRC the Jargon File has them.
For the record, a search at the Patent Office's web site, reveals that Union Metals in fact owns the trademark, oddly enough.
Remember that several companies can own the same trademark, as long as they do different things. IIRC The Open Group owns the Unix trademark with regard to operating systems. And in fact if someone created a "Unix Burgers" restaurant, or something, I'm pretty sure they could trademark it and use the unix.com domain. I'm not to familiar with cybersquatting laws tho...
That's because you've been brainwashed. Snap out of it! Come to your senses! Install GNU/Linux now and SAVE YOURSELF! [Just kidding, do what you like].
Honestly, though, when MS had a presentation here last semester, I could feel the malavolent evil coming from them. Either that or I was having another one of my frequent psychotic breaks...
:)
It took a few minutes of deep breathing before I was able to convince myself that this was a coincidence. Or was it?
Dunno... my brother installed a copy of 95 on his machine (this was a few years ago), and decided he really wanted Netscape not IE... so he goes to the Netscape web site to download it. But when then download should have started, IE told him "this site is a security risk, cancelling download". He eventually got in through FTP, but it was really weird to see...
LOL, the idea of MS programming IE to crash whenever the words ESR, Stallman, or Linux come up on the screen seems so ridiculous... yet... so plausible...
I'll side with Larry on this one. He's just so clear and easy to understand. For instance:
"His history is a bit too Torvalds focused imho [in my humble opinion]"
So that's that that means. I keep seeing "IMHO" it all over the place and no one would ever tell me what it meant! I wish I were a law student at Harvard and could have this guy as a professor, he must be amazing!
Well... unless you consider a big pile of loose, single-sided pages professional, I'd wonder about where the professional BINDING is.
Well, you're going to get much, much worse with HTML. And since when is LaTeX a single-sided document system? Every homework I've turned in this semester has been double-sided. And when have bindings come into it? That's entirely an meatspace thing: my PDFs don't have any binding at all, thank you.
All I was saying in my comment was that LaTeX (well TeX is doing the work but TeX really isn't that much fun to write in) formats much nicer than HTML. LaTeX output is worth binding well, HTML is not. Printed HTML deserves, at best, a couple staples.
I didn't say they were similar, I said they were in the same series. I thought it was a valid point when discussing the options of space sim fanatics.
:)
OK, I suppose that's valid. I think the same "genre" would maybe be a little more accurate, though of course Terminus is in the same genre as well. Maybe just "Decent 3 and Freespace are both arcade style space shooters where you go around and blow up a bunch of ships". Yeah, that about covers it.
You could just give everyone accounts on a Unix machine, then you all log in (using SSH, of course) and use talk. Easy and secure.
Another method would be to setup a small IRC server on one of your machines. Then have everyone connect to your machine with port forwarding on. You almost certainly don't want to trust the public IRC servers.
A somewhat higher-latency solution would be to set up a mailing list and some simple scripts, lets say called mailit and readit. mailit [filename] will encrypt the file with GPG then mail it to the list. readit listens for mail from that address (probably with help from procmail), and automagically decrypts the message and displays it on the screen (you type the passphrase when you first run it). This is just a random thought, there are probably problems with it that I'm not thinking of.
Someone was doing work on a talk/IRC type client which encrypted using Diffie-Hellman and Blowfish, but I can't think of the name right now.
From the review:
Descent Freespace and Descent 3 look to be nice additions to the genre, but they're all in the same series.
Freespace and Decent have absolutely nothing to do with each other, beside the Decent name (which they dropped for Freespace 2). Nothing. Nada. The world used for the Frespace games has a completely different plotline from Decent (assuming Decent has a plot, I never figured it out what it might be).
Also, I must point at that while the screenshots look good, they're not great. I would rate Freespace 2 as looking significantly "slicker", especially the computer controls (of course this can be "explained" by the fact that Terminus is set in 2200, while Freespace is set in >2300, IIRC). However, the realism introduced (radiation killing the pilot, etc) is pretty cool, and the Newtonian physics is nice, the one thing I don't like about Freespace2 is the very silly physics. So I'll probably buy it after it's been marked down in the $30 range.
Not a unique name by any measure. T'was also the home of the First Foundation in Asimov's "Foundation" series, if memory serves.
You are indeed correct. That's a great series: I still haven't had time to read the 4th and 5th books in the series yet.
And please give me online docs in html format (at minimum!) - no PDF or postscript please, unless this is also accomanied by html.
The advandage of PostScript/PDF is that when you print it out, you get a very professional looking document. There is a reason many books are written in LaTeX, after all...
Am I blind, is the documentation lacking, or does the compiler not include architecture-specific optimizations for post-486 AMD processors?
As others have mentioned, K6* and K7 optimizations are (slowly) making their way into the more recent gcc and friends. However, at this point, if you really need speed you've got to crank out some asm. GMP, for instance, supports the following x86 targets (according the the GMP 3.0 manual): i386, i486, i586, Pentuim, Pentium w/MMX, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, K6, K6-2, K6-3, and Athlon (though some of these are aliases for others). There are about ~6-7 different version of asm code for x86 alone. SMPEG and other high performance apps also use MMX/3DNow! asm.
Soon you will be able to go to payrandombit.com and give me lots of money. Why would you want to do that? Because you should feel guilty! Hell, you're willing to pay Metallica and they already have tons of money! I'm a poor college student!
but you could go through all the colors and pick a nice high contrast color for each one (presumalby with a small special-purpose app). However, there are 2**24 possible colors in HTML, so you'd probably want to skip some of the low order bits, or something. If you skipped the lowest 3 bits, you get 2**(24 - 9) == 2**15 colors to check. That would take about 54 hours to do [averaging 6 seconds per check]... though I guess you'd only have to do it once. Of course the task is quite parrelizable... just give the applicationto the marketing people (finally they'll come in useful!). However once it's done you can write up a C program that, given a certain 24-bit color code as argv[1], prints out a cooresponding contrasting color. Or store them in a file or whatever.
This is a serious problem with some Linux apps. Some seem to take forever to develop and there are alot of apps with little to no development. Way too many version 0.02s out there!
People do have to work for a living, and it's a rare geek who get's paid to code OSS software. Also, people are (rightly) hesitant to tell people "yes, this code is absolutely perfect! Use it now!" if they're not really sure that's right. In fact usually it's just the opposite (look at the ext3 homepage). And version numbers are often kept very low for early beta testing, then go up quite a bit (for instance lsh went from 0.2.x to 0.9.0).
Anyway version numbers don't mean crap. Currently, I'm using: lilo 0.21, smpeg 0.3.5, ext2ed 0.1, pam 0.68, ORBit 0.5, etc, etc, etc.
Redhat DOES come on 3 CDs - 6.2 has the install CD, the documentation CD and the source CD.
Yes, but how useful is the source CD? It certainly doesn't come with anything extra. If I wanted to port Redhat to PowerPC (or whatever), yeah, the source CD would be great [just to a great big rpm --rebuild *.rpm], but otherwise it's useless. And the docs CD doesn't seem terribly useful to me...
This is out of about 5000 readers who responded. I wonder how the numbers would look in the US (SuSE - RedHat position reversed?)
:)
Probably that's about right. I think the Debian numbers are a bit higher here in the US (maybe 10-15%?).
I don't really see why. As long as you get the opportunity of manually selecting what you want and what you don't want, I'm perfectly happy with a little application overkill. I like to get as much stuff as possible on the CDs, because online time is still paid for by the minute where I live.
Well, I suppose it's less of a problem for SuSE (it ships on something like 6 CDs, right?), but Redhat is only 1 (actually I think 6.2 is 2 now, but one is all documentation), but it seems like packages that should be shipped with the basic distro aren't, while fairly useless things are included. For instance Mesa wasn't in the basic distro up until 6.2, and if you want to use anything but sendmail as an MTA you have to go get the source and build it yourself.
It would be kinda nice if Redhat shipped on 2 or 3 CDs: one a basic install (basic stuff like the kernel, emacs, netscape/mozilla, games, KDE + GNOME, etc), one with development tools (and I mean every development tool and language there is, *-devel packages galore, etc), and one with server related stuff (Apache (plus mod_*), telnetd, ftpd (perferably several versions, like wu-ftpd and OpenBSD's ftpd), SSHD [probably OpenSSL/lsh], BIND, and with sendmail, smail, qmail, and postfix all available as MTAs). That would make my day.
YaST makes it very easy to do all the system administration you need
:)
I'm a Redhat user (but don't really have anything against the other distros...) but personally I don't like stuff like that. Redhat ships with something similiar, linuxconf. Sadly, even if you tell the installer not to install it, it will. So I always remove it after installation.
vi is the only true sysadmin tool!
The bundled software is also a real catchy part
It bothers me when distros ship with tons and tons of stuff.
Honestly, it really seems like SuSE takes the stuff that I don't like about Redhat and does them better... I actually don't think I know anyone using SuSE - Redhat is by far the most popular distro on campus, a few Debian users, couple Mandrakes. Everyone else is using *BSD, Solaris, or Windows. Odd.
Of course!
Actually, my brother had this little ball and after a few months the cloth covering it got ripped and pretty much the same stuff was inside that. I'm not real sure what exactly it is though - not plastic, not exactly rubber... ?
If it was GPLed code it'd be a different matter, but how can a copy of BSD code be "stolen"?
Well, in the legal sense, of course you can take BSD code and use it without telling anyone or recontributing your changes. However, it seems like a very mean thing to do. Of course, the BSD license still requires that users of the code redistribute the license and include the copyright notice. So if MS really did take the OpenBSD TCP/IP stack and use it without displaying the copyright, they _are_ in violation of the license (and therefore in some sense "stealing").
I would be very interested if that allegation is true. And it would be great if OpenBSD could sue MS for copyright infrignment, as they don't get much money and while I don't like OpenBSD that much, I feel it is an important tool for network infrastructure.
Hate to respond to my own post (yet another sign of schizoprenia, I think), but it's probably spelled Monterey. [slaps forehead]
I was having very nasty problems with a (brand new) 810A SCSI card and an old CD-R I got for X-mas: I/O timeouts, things like mount, etc would go into uninteruptable sleeps, etc. I changed my kernel configuration so "default tagged command queue depth", "maximum queued commands", and the scyncronous transfer Mhz to levels significantly lower than the defaults. Also, I enabled normal I/O (vs memory mapped I/O). Probably the exact options are different on your card, but in any case it's probably worth a shot. It may lower performance significantly but it beats crashes.
As most people know, SCO is working with IBM and Sequent (which IIRC IBM bought a while back) to develop a new 64 bit Unix. How will these two OSes work together on your systems? Are you planning on using Linux only on low-end machines, while Monteray runs on IA-64, or while Linux be a "stopgap OS" to run on your systems until Monteray is finished?
PNG seems to be an excellent quality compression format, even though I will miss my animated GIFs...
*sniff*
Well cry no more! There is a format called MNG which is based (somewhat) on the PNG tech, but allows things like... tada! Animated graphics. It's still in development but I suspect that support will be in Mozilla fairly soon.
The MNG webpage is at http://www.cdrom.com/pub/mng/
I'm glad Unisys is doing this. Not only are they displaying themselves as the idiots they obviously are, but now major companies will be switching to PNG. Which means Netscape and MSIE will soon follow with really good PNG support. Which means we'll finally be able to get rid of the completely obsolete graphics format that is GIF and replace it in it's entirety with PNG (and JPEG where useful).