Perl threads are terrifically unstable. I don't blame them for turning "there's" off. I still have some issues with 5.6 in other areas too, which is one reason I've stuck with 5.005_03. Threads are off in the standard build of perl as well.
Bah. Only reason I run redhat at work is that I can't get FreeBSD to *stop* detecting the integrated i810 so the XFree SVGA server will start using the voodoo3 I have in there instead.
You didn't look very far, did you? I still see no source for Module-nvkernel, which is statically linked with the rest of the source. You have a little bit of glue code, nothing more. All you do by buying an nvidia card is help them roll back the gains free software has made. I'm not even a free software zealot, I just want software that doesn't suck. A kernel that crashes because of a closed driver is software that sucks.
one site doesn't let me in because i don't have javascript (which i just disabled again because penny arcade's moronic ad banner script broke again) and another has absolutely nothing there.
> This is not a new idea, but rather yet another case of Microsoft "innovating" by taking other people's ideas and hawking them as their own.
Remember that next time you call Linux revolutionary. It's UNIX. And a not terribly advanced one at that (where's the ACL's? Where's the MLS version? where's the hotpatchable kernel?)
What is beautiful about FreeBSD is the post-install. I installed Redhat, then helix gnome (yes i used the horrible idea that is go-gnome, i was out of patience by then). Then I was presented with a really really pretty lot of nothing. Nothing to browse through available packages on a repository and install new ones. Heck not even an icon to grpm. No autorpm either, but that doesn't actually have any browse functionality anyway. I got netscape, and got this nice hodgepodge that was rpmfind. Browse by category, and you find the same package with slightly different versions and builds for about a dozen or so builds.
FreeBSD: cd/usr/ports. I am now a kid in a candy store.
Debian is a happy medium.. I just like my extreme:)
When you write a program to pull dependency information out of any README in such a fashion that you can build it into an autoconfiguration tool, please pick up your phd. I bet you think vi is for people too fancy for ed, don't you?
I can't run a geforce2 on my FreeBSD box. Won't buy one. Just business, nothing personal. Slightly personal, but still in the realm of the technical is the instability of the drivers nvidia uses for linux. Oh and their being locked to a kernel version.
Sorry nvidia, really wanted to buy your card, I did like the TNT2 for games. I don't even play games on BSD, but since you won't even let me drive it for 2d without a stable driver, guess I'll be going to the competition from now on.
... actually I would be surprised if she didn't peruse any of the commentary on at least SOME discussion sites... probably ones more focused on music tho.
Just in case you think just Courtney got a raw deal, check out http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/ which pretty much corroberates her story. It's true that the artists get nice perks -- all paid for by the record company, and most likely OWNED by the record company. Indentured servitude in a nice estate, basically (and tour buses aren't very comfy after a week either BTW). All the perks in the world don't erase the fact that the artist doesn't even own their own work (but hey, intellectual property is dead, no?)
Universal will probably be sending someone over to Courtney Love to be repossessing those Prada pants of hers any time now.
> I don't think so. Microsoft has been trying since 1984 to come up with something as good as a Mac, and the best they have got is still ten years behind the Mac.
Apple is plugging "new" OS features like memory protection that even Microsoft had 8 years ago with NT. The sky is bondi blue in your world, isn't it?
> RMS insisted that OS X would have to be GPL'd if Apple included GNU tools.
And thankfully RMS's license renders RMS's own opionion on this matter not worth a bucket of spit. Solaris 8 includes many GNU tools. BeOS includes the entire GNU toolchain. Cygwin is a GNU distribution for Windows. None of these OS's are GPL'd and my guess is none of them solicited RMS's opinion. My guess is neither did Apple, or for that matter, even Linus.
For my part, I am an atheist. (Strictly speaking, I am also an agnostic...
There is no God. There are no gods. Jesus was a man. He lived, he died. End of story
This sounds like the rarer variety of "strong atheism" that actively denies any existence of the divine, as opposed to the more common "weak atheism" (or "strong agnosticism") that says the existence of a higher power is unproven, unprovable, and at best irrelevant to everyday life. So I'd say you're not also agnostic, you have already made the ontological choice the agnostic refuses to make when he says that the existence of a god is unknowable.
Strong atheism is strictly speaking, logically indefensable, since you can't prove a negative you have no direct experience of or show that its existence is contrary to known facts about the subjects (thus I can prove there is not an elephant under my bed, because the physical dimensions of an elephant are incompatible with the space under my bed). This is a revision of the old saw "you can't prove a negative". In the case of a supreme entity, its existence would violate any number of laws of physics, but he who makes the rules can apparently break them if we're to take the definitions usually made of a god... so this little gem of not being able to prove a negative still gets hauled out.
I'm a strong atheist myself, and I defend this claim with the simple declaration that it's absurd. I start with the foundation of weak atheism: requiring a standard of proof, even for the most spectacular claims -- especially for them (I don't subscribe to the idea that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, any evidence will do). But since logic is only a framework of consistency and not an epistemological foundation, I merely present the absurdity of the idea in general, of the good and evil forces, devils, demons, and how they are chuckled at in children's stories and other religions, but taken for granted in the mythos of a believer.
There's no winning the argument. With fundies, at some point it boils down to argumentum ad bacillum (argument from the club) that I'm damned to hell if I don't believe. Currently I continue to argue (not always fruitlessly, I've uncovered interesting variations on beliefs) at the illogic of hell. I think instead I just need to learn how to say "then I'll see you there" in the native tongues of a few other religions:)
> One thing that I have not seen, and I hope never to, is any geek attempt to press his/her views on anyone else
Oh please. Linux. Windows. Unix. Emacs. Vi. GUI. Text.
Geeks are some of the most vocally opinionated people on earth and spare no opportunity to make their case for the technology they consider superior. I'm certainly a geek and I certainly do so, and I don't apologize for it.
> Also, as is quite obvious many of them turn to very vocal atheism. This atheism/agnosticism is most likely so vocal because secretly they want someone to come around and convince them they are wrong
Speaking as a born-again atheist, I agree. Good ol happy existence forever and ever, however implausible, because I would eventually run out of things to experience, still has a certain allure for my mortal self. As it stands, I still believe in the oblivion part, but feel free to convince me otherwise.
And you will convince me by proving that I am wrong. Though I can't think of anything more horrifying than the thought of a jealous and petty god who damns people to eternal suffering because of their sexual peccadilos or their use of profane language...
Here's that post reformatted a bit for readability. I'm not karma whoring here, I've already hit the cap.
---Begin quote---
I'll try to answer/respond to the most significant questions and points made here.
2.5 is the next "development kernel", and is clearly the right place to initiate a fundamental kernel change such as preemptability. 2.6 is the right place for commercial usage, obviously.
Preemptibility means the systems can and will stop a process running in kernel mode and switch to a higher priority newly executable process. For more, including specifics of what our prototype does and how we want to advance it...read our white paper! Here isn't the place to repeat those details.
We are not dogs, but after a few beers or missed shots on the pool table we do howl alot.
We actually did initial work on 2.2.14 but our primary goal is proving out this technology, providing to customers who may need it, and offering back as a technology for 2.5 (->2.6). Hence, 2.4 was and is the proper base, given that we think we can have production ready software early next year, "long after" 2.4 is cooked. We feel releasing a prototype on 2.4-test software is okay.
A preemptable kernel is not a rate monotonic scheduler! We also offer a scheduler that sits on top of (runs before) the standard Linux scheduler that does a good job of selecting/dispatching real-time processes very quickly and with fixed overhead. It's not rate monotonic, it's a simple priority driven scheduler.
I won't engage in arguing the pro's and con's of "one man's control of an OS". It is the way it is. MontaVista lives with it and is trying to work with it. We think a preemptible kernel design, leveraging the SMP locks, is a good next step for the Linux kernel and benefits all "market segments" (types of users). We want to prove it with real software, and this is our starting point. We are "releasing early, releasing often", amen.
"these guys proposal was regeted"...I reget to tell you that you misunderstand. What was "rejected" was a set of patches that injected preemption points, which is a fundamentally different technology than what we've implemented. We have not proposed or submitted anything as of yet, beyond making our current prototype available.
Fross, THANK YOU.
Inclusion in 2.4 is absurd, it's time for it to stabilize, finalize and start getting deployed.
Most of the systems that Hard Hat Linux get designed into aren't serving "multiple users". They are control oriented environments. In such environments, having a design ability to assure that high priority tasks get cycles very quickly, with assurance, and all the cycles they want until they are "done", is critical. We are trying to enable that capability. Superuser privileges usually protect real-time priorities from casual mis-use on multi-user systems.
RTAI and RTLinux are "sub-kernels" which provide a lower level multi-tasking environment, a small set of services (mostly around synchronization and passing data to/from higher level Linux processes), and which virtualize interrupt off/on operations in Linux. Basically, they provide a multi-threaded interrupt handling environment with better worst case interrupt off characteristics. There are limitations to such an environment. A preemptible Linux kernel attempts to improve PROCESS responsiveness in Linux proper (as opposed to attached a small underlying, separate multi-tasking environment). They are quite different. They are not in conflict, and even with excellent preemption performance, a system can still benefit from improved interrupt responsiveness via use of RTLinux.
MontaVista did not request/support the request for preemption point inclusion in Linux. The perspective of our real-time team is that preemption points are NOT a desirable long-term technology, and we don't support their inclusion in Linus's kernel.
Everything MontaVista develops on our own dime is released as GPL or LGPL software. Everything to date anyway, and we don't see that changing anytime soon. Even most of what we've been paid to develop user professional services has been GPL/LGPL licensed (with our customers approval of course), as it's turned out. We are dedicated to the values of open source. We're a Linux company for gosh sakes!
Minimizing throughput impact on a uniprocessor is important. There are opportunities for throughput improvement under busy workloads...very simple workloads won't improve and could degrade, the questions are how much, and is the tradeoff worth it in order to get responsiveness/consistency of high priority behavior. Exploring, proving and educating in this area is an important component of our prototype work.
No our prototype doesn't yet support SMP. The cost of synchronizing across processors using the SMP locks shouldn't be more than synchronizing across processors using the SMP locks...don't know where you are coming from suggesting what we are doing will be prohibitively expensive on a multiprocessor! We'll share an SMP version when we get one put together (but it's not highest priority for us, our first order target for this thing is uniprocessors, which are far more prevalent in the embedded market segments.)
This is available for an IA32 platform. If you think that's an obscure platform...I guess you live in a parallel universe where Motorola hardware got selected by IBM back in the early 80's for their PC, or something! We'll productize on all supported MontaVista platforms (21 different boards across 4 different architectures as of our 2.1 release 2 weeks ago...).
I'm not aware Ingo did fully preemptable kernel work, and if Ingo did any work on such a system, we weren't aware of it and did not base this on any such work.
Preemptible is not interruptable. We've separately and previously done characterization work on interrupt off times in Linux. See our real-time project area on our web pages (www.mvista.com). Interrupt off times in Linux are surprisingly good, with one exception (child process exit with many children)...and of course ignoring arbitrary drivers that can misbehave.
Time to go howl... Sorry to be long winded. I hope this helps to clarify a few things. -Kevin
Slashdot Mirror
Perl threads are terrifically unstable. I don't blame them for turning "there's" off. I still have some issues with 5.6 in other areas too, which is one reason I've stuck with 5.005_03. Threads are off in the standard build of perl as well.
Bah. Only reason I run redhat at work is that I can't get FreeBSD to *stop* detecting the integrated i810 so the XFree SVGA server will start using the voodoo3 I have in there instead.
You didn't look very far, did you? I still see no source for Module-nvkernel, which is statically linked with the rest of the source. You have a little bit of glue code, nothing more. All you do by buying an nvidia card is help them roll back the gains free software has made. I'm not even a free software zealot, I just want software that doesn't suck. A kernel that crashes because of a closed driver is software that sucks.
one site doesn't let me in because i don't have javascript (which i just disabled again because penny arcade's moronic ad banner script broke again) and another has absolutely nothing there.
color me impressed, yeah.
Quick way to tell, without clicking anything: win2k has a shadow under the mouse pointer. Gee, what a feature every server needs.
> This is not a new idea, but rather yet another case of Microsoft "innovating" by taking other people's ideas and hawking them as their own.
Remember that next time you call Linux revolutionary. It's UNIX. And a not terribly advanced one at that (where's the ACL's? Where's the MLS version? where's the hotpatchable kernel?)
WinME isn't getting rid of the command prompt, it's getting rid of real mode.
Supposedly.
My guess is there's still 16 bit thunking going on underneath. But it's not the command prompt they're talking of getting rid of.
What is beautiful about FreeBSD is the post-install. I installed Redhat, then helix gnome (yes i used the horrible idea that is go-gnome, i was out of patience by then). Then I was presented with a really really pretty lot of nothing. Nothing to browse through available packages on a repository and install new ones. Heck not even an icon to grpm. No autorpm either, but that doesn't actually have any browse functionality anyway. I got netscape, and got this nice hodgepodge that was rpmfind. Browse by category, and you find the same package with slightly different versions and builds for about a dozen or so builds.
/usr/ports. I am now a kid in a candy store.
.. I just like my extreme :)
FreeBSD: cd
Debian is a happy medium
When you write a program to pull dependency information out of any README in such a fashion that you can build it into an autoconfiguration tool, please pick up your phd. I bet you think vi is for people too fancy for ed, don't you?
I can't run a geforce2 on my FreeBSD box. Won't buy one. Just business, nothing personal. Slightly personal, but still in the realm of the technical is the instability of the drivers nvidia uses for linux. Oh and their being locked to a kernel version.
Sorry nvidia, really wanted to buy your card, I did like the TNT2 for games. I don't even play games on BSD, but since you won't even let me drive it for 2d without a stable driver, guess I'll be going to the competition from now on.
The simpler explanation may be that their ftp server is slow while their http server (and possibly squid proxy) is fast?
> Where can I get this magazine?
I bet it'd start with "www"
duh.
> That ruins it. The Prisoner was so great because you kept on asking Who is Number One!?
Yeah but most of us are unix geeks. That means C. Who is number zero?
> Okay, so I am Courtney Love.
;)
... probably ones more focused on music tho.
Chalk up one more celebrity on slashdot
... actually I would be surprised if she didn't peruse any of the commentary on at least SOME discussion sites
Just in case you think just Courtney got a raw deal, check out http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/ which pretty much corroberates her story. It's true that the artists get nice perks -- all paid for by the record company, and most likely OWNED by the record company. Indentured servitude in a nice estate, basically (and tour buses aren't very comfy after a week either BTW). All the perks in the world don't erase the fact that the artist doesn't even own their own work (but hey, intellectual property is dead, no?)
Universal will probably be sending someone over to Courtney Love to be repossessing those Prada pants of hers any time now.
> I don't think so. Microsoft has been trying since 1984 to come up with something as good as a Mac, and the best they have got is still ten years behind the Mac.
Apple is plugging "new" OS features like memory protection that even Microsoft had 8 years ago with NT. The sky is bondi blue in your world, isn't it?
> RMS insisted that OS X would have to be GPL'd if Apple included GNU tools.
And thankfully RMS's license renders RMS's own opionion on this matter not worth a bucket of spit. Solaris 8 includes many GNU tools. BeOS includes the entire GNU toolchain. Cygwin is a GNU distribution for Windows. None of these OS's are GPL'd and my guess is none of them solicited RMS's opinion. My guess is neither did Apple, or for that matter, even Linus.
> We'll have Heisenberg compensators to take care of that.
Life imitates Trek. IBM has invented just such a thing.
I did find it screamingly apropos that the link in the article returned "Document contains no data" thought :)
> The ending of the first one didn't leave much room for a second story. It would have to involve a different main character.
...) ;)
Dakkon springs immediately to mind. Maybe Morte (always wondered how he managed to carry stuff for me
> Extending the RGB model further just wastes more backing store memory for more shades of brown
... Quake seems particularly attached to that color after all ;)
I imagine it could have a market
Wow, and I thought *I* was the only solipsist around here :)
For my part, I am an atheist. (Strictly speaking, I am also an agnostic ...
... so this little gem of not being able to prove a negative still gets hauled out.
:)
There is no God. There are no gods. Jesus was a man. He lived, he died. End of story
This sounds like the rarer variety of "strong atheism" that actively denies any existence of the divine, as opposed to the more common "weak atheism" (or "strong agnosticism") that says the existence of a higher power is unproven, unprovable, and at best irrelevant to everyday life. So I'd say you're not also agnostic, you have already made the ontological choice the agnostic refuses to make when he says that the existence of a god is unknowable.
Strong atheism is strictly speaking, logically indefensable, since you can't prove a negative you have no direct experience of or show that its existence is contrary to known facts about the subjects (thus I can prove there is not an elephant under my bed, because the physical dimensions of an elephant are incompatible with the space under my bed). This is a revision of the old saw "you can't prove a negative". In the case of a supreme entity, its existence would violate any number of laws of physics, but he who makes the rules can apparently break them if we're to take the definitions usually made of a god
I'm a strong atheist myself, and I defend this claim with the simple declaration that it's absurd. I start with the foundation of weak atheism: requiring a standard of proof, even for the most spectacular claims -- especially for them (I don't subscribe to the idea that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, any evidence will do). But since logic is only a framework of consistency and not an epistemological foundation, I merely present the absurdity of the idea in general, of the good and evil forces, devils, demons, and how they are chuckled at in children's stories and other religions, but taken for granted in the mythos of a believer.
There's no winning the argument. With fundies, at some point it boils down to argumentum ad bacillum (argument from the club) that I'm damned to hell if I don't believe. Currently I continue to argue (not always fruitlessly, I've uncovered interesting variations on beliefs) at the illogic of hell. I think instead I just need to learn how to say "then I'll see you there" in the native tongues of a few other religions
> One thing that I have not seen, and I hope never to, is any geek attempt to press his/her views on anyone else
Oh please. Linux. Windows. Unix. Emacs. Vi. GUI. Text.
Geeks are some of the most vocally opinionated people on earth and spare no opportunity to make their case for the technology they consider superior. I'm certainly a geek and I certainly do so, and I don't apologize for it.
> Also, as is quite obvious many of them turn to very vocal atheism. This atheism/agnosticism is most likely so vocal because secretly they want someone to come around and convince them they are wrong
Speaking as a born-again atheist, I agree. Good ol happy existence forever and ever, however implausible, because I would eventually run out of things to experience, still has a certain allure for my mortal self. As it stands, I still believe in the oblivion part, but feel free to convince me otherwise.
And you will convince me by proving that I am wrong. Though I can't think of anything more horrifying than the thought of a jealous and petty god who damns people to eternal suffering because of their sexual peccadilos or their use of profane language...
---Begin quote---
I'll try to answer/respond to the most significant questions and points made here.