13.1 is probably only going to be for the seriously wealthy. Here in the UK, houses are generally pretty small and 7.1 is difficult to incorporate and offers no advantage over 6.1 (as your rear surround speakers are only about 4 metres apart - the rear centres of 7.1 are only going to be a metre or two apart - plus the rear centres in so-called 7.1 actually carry identical sound from the 6.1 mix).
So firstly, where does the encoding of these extra channels come from? Secondly, only a few elite people will ever need/be able to afford/be able to accomodate this.
I've a Nokia 7610, and it's fantastic. There aren't many pieces of software that I, personally, consider are worth paying for, but Opera for Symbian is one of them, It's fantastic - it has turned my cute toy into a completely cool essential tool. I've even had to sign up to a data bundle from Orange (UK)!
You don't need the ActiveX controls - you can use Firefox - Microsoft, amazingly, have supplied a work around. (Download executable from MS - run executable - copy and paste text back into browser).
I wrote my PhD thesis using Axiom's source - Axiom has had c. 300 man-years work done on it. It is an unbelievable piece of work.
(It started in the early 1970's at IBM and was called Scratchpad, later Scratchpad 2 before being "sold" to NAG and rebranded).
Axiom 2 included a new compiler and a new language called Aldor (which was going to be called A# but apparently Sharp objected to the name. WTF about C# then?) and ran on other platforms than AIX 3.x. Solaris, Irix and in the end even Win32.
Unlike the "M'n'M" systems (Maple, Mathematica, etc). it is strongly typed and has its roots in Category theory and/or Universal Algebra - which is pretty much a necessity for and Algebra system to even make any sense. (OK, that's a loaded point - obviously Maple is a very good product without this basis).
Some things are currently missing from Axiom: Aldor - the re-implementation of Axiom's language by Pete Broadberry et al.; HyperTex - the online documentation browser with hyperlinks predating HTML! which are all loaded from the source files); and I believe the pretty GUI bits for graphs, 3D trefoil knots, etc.
Debian and Ubuntu users can just download it, the rest of us have to build it. (It takes about 2 hours on my 1133MHz box).
It is good. If you can grab a copy of Jenks and Sutor's manual then even better.
What an awful article "Here's how I installed KDE on Fedora Core 2 (Duh) and a couple of other things".
I'm using Fedora Core 2 on three machines with GNOME and I can't see the problem. Sure Mandrake 10 has a nicer GNOME menu structure, but that's it - it has no other improvements over FC2.
I'm using a few extra repositories but I don't write an article on linux.com about it. (I just googled for other people's less egotistal and more useful advice). Because it is a piece of cake.
There is nothing of any use or interest in this article and to state that the author "had to do a lot of work" is ridiculous: what was it half an hour or an hour?
Some Notes on the "Who wrote Linux" Kerfuffle, Release 1.1
Background
The history of UNIX and its various children and grandchildren has been in the news recently as a result of a
book from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. Since I was involved
in part of this history, I feel I have an obligation to set the record straight and correct some extremely serious
errors. But first some background information.
Ken Brown, President of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, contacted me in early March. He said he was
writing a book on the history of UNIX and would like to interview me. Since I have written 15 books and have been
involved in the history of UNIX in several ways, I said I was willing to help out. I have been interviewed by many
people for many reasons over the years, and have been on Dutch and US TV and radio and in various newspapers and
magazines, so I didn't think too much about it.
Brown flew over to Amsterdam to interview me on 23 March 2004. Apparently I was the only reason for his coming to
Europe. The interview got off to a shaky start, roughly paraphrased as follows:
AST: "What's the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution?"
KB: We do public policy work
AST: A think tank, like the Rand Corporation?
KB: Sort of
AST: What does it do?
KB: Issue reports and books
AST: Who funds it?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
AST: Is SCO one of them? Is this about the SCO lawsuit?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
AST: Is Microsoft one of them?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
He was extremely evasive about why he was there and who was funding him. He just kept saying he was just writing
a book about the history of UNIX. I asked him what he thought of Peter Salus' book, A Quarter Century of UNIX. He'd never heard of it! I mean, if you are writing a book on the
history of UNIX and flying 3000 miles to interview some guy about the subject, wouldn't it make sense to at least
go to amazon.com and type "history unix" in the search box, in which case Salus' book is the first hit? For $28
(and free shipping if you play your cards right) you could learn an awful lot about the material and not get any
jet lag. As I sooned learned, Brown is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I was already suspicious. As a
long-time author, I know it makes sense to at least be aware of what the competition is. He didn't bother.
UNIX and Me
I didn't think it odd that Brown would want to interview me about the history of UNIX. There are worse people to
ask. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I spent several summers in the UNIX group (Dept. 1127) at Bell Labs. I knew
Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and the rest of the people involved in the development of UNIX. I have stayed at Rob
Pike's house and Al Aho's house for extended periods of time. Dennis Ritchie, Steve Johnson, and Peter Weinberger,
among others have stayed at my house in Amsterdam. Three of my Ph.D. students have worked in the UNIX group at Bell
Labs and one of them is a permanent staff member now.
Oddly enough, when I was at Bell Labs, my interest was not operating systems, although I had written one and
published a paper about it (see "Software - Practice & Experience," vol. 2, pp. 109-119, 1973). My interest then
was compilers, since I was the chief de
After seeing him as The Second Coming as an unwilling messiah and in the powerful adoption-drama Flesh And Blood, you can not deny that this is the best actor of our generation.
He's also had small parts in enjoyable crap like 24 Hour Party People and Existenz and was one of the main characters in Shallow Grave.
We should be honoured to accept him as Dr Who - his talent and choice of roles is way beyond such enjoyable (Sci-fi) fluff.
With the rise-and-rise of agribusiness and the permanent pressure they place on our governments, how long before such genetic modifications are made to cows, pigs, etc.?
But seriously, Athens is not a one-stop shop for data, it is:
A large user database
An API for 3rd party data collections to authenticate against + verify that the user has access to that particular collection (or subsets of that collection).
A secure single sign-on mechanism for all these third party datasets; all hosted and managed remotely.
Just because something is in use in academia in our relatively small country does not make it a mickey-mouse solution.
A recent addition is called Athens-DA which means that sites can use their own user databases (LDAP, etc.) instead of the central Athens user DBs for authentication.
Am I the only one here who's heard of Eduserv Athens? (Disclaimer: I am employed by Eduserv in a different department).
Athens has over 2,500,000 users (from UK and Irish Academia and the NHS) and allows secure single sign on to more than 300 resources. It has also been around for years (at least 7). So all this talk of secure single sign-on being "new" seems to be a bit of misinformation as far as I can tell.
Downside: Athens is not open-source:-( Upside: Eduserv are a not-for-profit company that makes substantial grants back to academia.
A lot of people here don't seem to have noticed that Red Hat still have a desktop product (RHEL WS 3) and if they did would find the pricing intimidating. Sure $179 of x86 isn't much, but it's a lot more than $0! Moreover $792 for AMD64 is out of the reach of non-corporate purchasers. (If my next home box in a year or so is an AMD64 will I be forced to use a different distro for the first time ever?)
So onto the question:
Could there be room for a level between Fedora (free, good, etc.) and the RHEL WS 3 pricing: ie. the RHEL WS 3 product, but with updates only via 3rd-party yum mirrors or some such?
The author raises many valid points, but it should be noted that not many Red Hat users could give a stuff about 'apt'.
Red Hat Linux comes with one free basic RHN/up2date licence. For enterprise customers (like us) 'RHN Enterprise' with central package management, server grouping etc. is a fantastic product and superior to using apt.
Obsessing with apt and the (internal) superiority of dpkg is typical of the Debian bigot. Those of us in the real world have more important fish to fry.
We use Win2K for 3rd party authoured sites that require it, Linux for low/medium traffic sites and Solaris (sparc) for pretty much everything else, because (apart from recompiling Apache, PHP and OpenSSH, BIND with every security hole, and Sun's god-awful patch management) TCO is pretty low and we get good hardware support.
However, half of the technical staff run Linux on the desktop, and it's going to be a rough ride for Sun over the next 2 years.
These are my views and not those of my employer's etc. Blah-blah.
Red Hat's major numbering actually makes sense
on
SuSE 8.0 Now Shipping
·
· Score: 1
Er, Red Hat historically have incremented major version numbers when they've shipped major new versions of the kernel, glibc, gcc or rpm. A major number tweak at Red Hat implies binary incompatibility, package incompatibility or a real important upgrade to glibc or the kernel.
Ignoring the rest of the thrid world and concentrating on Africa a moment.
If the usage of net-phones increases in Africa, and the previous story was also true - someone somewhere is going to end up paying more. Seems a loss-maker in the making for third-world ISPs.
nic
PS. This comment clearly side-steps many, many obvious points. (e.g. the super-poor countries with no network connectivity; countries where no-one who can afford a phone-call of any price, etc., etc.) Please don't just state the obvious in any reply.
Question for Nat: "How do you cope, on a personal level, with all the negative and sometimes ill-informed comments that people make about GNOME and Ximian?"
People reading this: I am a GNOME user, and I love it. I understand that you may prefer KDE and that it does do somethings better than GNOME. It's just that GNOME suits my needs better.
I only ask as I personally don't deal with these sorts of things well.
No, I don't think that the world's poorest nations are going to be directly affected today by this.
However,
1) those whose administrations might use computers will all be glad of saving themselves all those licence fees and the lower TCO.
2) developing nations (ie. not the world's poorest) can use open-source OS, office-products and development tools in a wider deployment (regional government, possibly education, and eventually businesses).
If you think that every country in the world should send 1% of their GNP to Bill Gates just to exist then fair enough.
Yes your 'starving kid in the Congo' example throws my argument out of the window on a more fundamental level - there are huge politcal problems in the world that have to be solved. But for some, more stable countries, wouldn't it be nice to level the technological playing field so they can become as good as us?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the further round you spread the sh*t, the less you notice it? :-)
13.1 is probably only going to be for the seriously wealthy. Here in the UK, houses are generally pretty small and 7.1 is difficult to incorporate and offers no advantage over 6.1 (as your rear surround speakers are only about 4 metres apart - the rear centres of 7.1 are only going to be a metre or two apart - plus the rear centres in so-called 7.1 actually carry identical sound from the 6.1 mix).
So firstly, where does the encoding of these extra channels come from? Secondly, only a few elite people will ever need/be able to afford/be able to accomodate this.
I've a Nokia 7610, and it's fantastic. There aren't many pieces of software that I, personally, consider are worth paying for, but Opera for Symbian is one of them, It's fantastic - it has turned my cute toy into a completely cool essential tool. I've even had to sign up to a data bundle from Orange (UK)!
Slashdot works particularly well.
You don't need the ActiveX controls - you can use Firefox - Microsoft, amazingly, have supplied a work around. (Download executable from MS - run executable - copy and paste text back into browser).
I wrote my PhD thesis using Axiom's source - Axiom has had c. 300 man-years work done on it. It is an unbelievable piece of work.
(It started in the early 1970's at IBM and was called Scratchpad, later Scratchpad 2 before being "sold" to NAG and rebranded).
Axiom 2 included a new compiler and a new language called Aldor (which was going to be called A# but apparently Sharp objected to the name. WTF about C# then?) and ran on other platforms than AIX 3.x. Solaris, Irix and in the end even Win32.
Unlike the "M'n'M" systems (Maple, Mathematica, etc). it is strongly typed and has its roots in Category theory and/or Universal Algebra - which is pretty much a necessity for and Algebra system to even make any sense. (OK, that's a loaded point - obviously Maple is a very good product without this basis).
Some things are currently missing from Axiom: Aldor - the re-implementation of Axiom's language by Pete Broadberry et al.; HyperTex - the online documentation browser with hyperlinks predating HTML! which are all loaded from the source files); and I believe the pretty GUI bits for graphs, 3D trefoil knots, etc.
Debian and Ubuntu users can just download it, the rest of us have to build it. (It takes about 2 hours on my 1133MHz box).
It is good. If you can grab a copy of Jenks and Sutor's manual then even better.
What an awful article "Here's how I installed KDE on Fedora Core 2 (Duh) and a couple of other things".
I'm using Fedora Core 2 on three machines with GNOME and I can't see the problem. Sure Mandrake 10 has a nicer GNOME menu structure, but that's it - it has no other improvements over FC2.
I'm using a few extra repositories but I don't write an article on linux.com about it. (I just googled for other people's less egotistal and more useful advice). Because it is a piece of cake.
There is nothing of any use or interest in this article and to state that the author "had to do a lot of work" is ridiculous: what was it half an hour or an hour?
Both RHEL 2.1 (2.4.9-e40) and RHEL 3 (2.4.21-15) are vulnerable, which means that Red Hat back-ported this bug into their 2.1 product line. Nice!
Background
The history of UNIX and its various children and grandchildren has been in the news recently as a result of a
book from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. Since I was involved
in part of this history, I feel I have an obligation to set the record straight and correct some extremely serious
errors. But first some background information.
Ken Brown, President of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, contacted me in early March. He said he was
writing a book on the history of UNIX and would like to interview me. Since I have written 15 books and have been
involved in the history of UNIX in several ways, I said I was willing to help out. I have been interviewed by many
people for many reasons over the years, and have been on Dutch and US TV and radio and in various newspapers and
magazines, so I didn't think too much about it.
Brown flew over to Amsterdam to interview me on 23 March 2004. Apparently I was the only reason for his coming to
Europe. The interview got off to a shaky start, roughly paraphrased as follows:
AST: "What's the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution?"
KB: We do public policy work
AST: A think tank, like the Rand Corporation?
KB: Sort of
AST: What does it do?
KB: Issue reports and books
AST: Who funds it?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
AST: Is SCO one of them? Is this about the SCO lawsuit?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
AST: Is Microsoft one of them?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
He was extremely evasive about why he was there and who was funding him. He just kept saying he was just writing
a book about the history of UNIX. I asked him what he thought of Peter Salus' book, A Quarter Century of UNIX. He'd never heard of it! I mean, if you are writing a book on the
history of UNIX and flying 3000 miles to interview some guy about the subject, wouldn't it make sense to at least
go to amazon.com and type "history unix" in the search box, in which case Salus' book is the first hit? For $28
(and free shipping if you play your cards right) you could learn an awful lot about the material and not get any
jet lag. As I sooned learned, Brown is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I was already suspicious. As a
long-time author, I know it makes sense to at least be aware of what the competition is. He didn't bother.
UNIX and Me
I didn't think it odd that Brown would want to interview me about the history of UNIX. There are worse people to
ask. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I spent several summers in the UNIX group (Dept. 1127) at Bell Labs. I knew
Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and the rest of the people involved in the development of UNIX. I have stayed at Rob
Pike's house and Al Aho's house for extended periods of time. Dennis Ritchie, Steve Johnson, and Peter Weinberger,
among others have stayed at my house in Amsterdam. Three of my Ph.D. students have worked in the UNIX group at Bell
Labs and one of them is a permanent staff member now.
Oddly enough, when I was at Bell Labs, my interest was not operating systems, although I had written one and
published a paper about it (see "Software - Practice & Experience," vol. 2, pp. 109-119, 1973). My interest then
was compilers, since I was the chief de
Christopher Ecclestone is the the best living British actor.
After seeing him as The Second Coming as an unwilling messiah and in the powerful adoption-drama Flesh And Blood, you can not deny that this is the best actor of our generation.
He's also had small parts in enjoyable crap like 24 Hour Party People and Existenz and was one of the main characters in Shallow Grave.
We should be honoured to accept him as Dr Who - his talent and choice of roles is way beyond such enjoyable (Sci-fi) fluff.
With the rise-and-rise of agribusiness and the permanent pressure they place on our governments, how long before such genetic modifications are made to cows, pigs, etc.?
Most apps don't need to be 64-bit, it doesn't make them faster, kewler or anything.
For example Solaris 8 only comes with 32 64-bit binaries (/usr/bin/sparcv9) and they're almost all ones which look at the process table.
Very humourous.
But seriously, Athens is not a one-stop shop for data, it is:
Just because something is in use in academia in our relatively small country does not make it a mickey-mouse solution.
A recent addition is called Athens-DA which means that sites can use their own user databases (LDAP, etc.) instead of the central Athens user DBs for authentication.
Am I the only one here who's heard of Eduserv Athens? (Disclaimer: I am employed by Eduserv in a different department).
Athens has over 2,500,000 users (from UK and Irish Academia and the NHS) and allows secure single sign on to more than 300 resources. It has also been around for years (at least 7). So all this talk of secure single sign-on being "new" seems to be a bit of misinformation as far as I can tell.
Downside: Athens is not open-source :-(
Upside: Eduserv are a not-for-profit company that makes substantial grants back to academia.
A lot of people here don't seem to have noticed that Red Hat still have a desktop product (RHEL WS 3) and if they did would find the pricing intimidating. Sure $179 of x86 isn't much, but it's a lot more than $0! Moreover $792 for AMD64 is out of the reach of non-corporate purchasers. (If my next home box in a year or so is an AMD64 will I be forced to use a different distro for the first time ever?)
So onto the question:
Could there be room for a level between Fedora (free, good, etc.) and the RHEL WS 3 pricing: ie. the RHEL WS 3 product, but with updates only via 3rd-party yum mirrors or some such?
And if you own a 2.1 licence, the upgrade to 3.0 is free!!! I've just ordered another 15 licences...
This is not so. SGI's XFS is a very high performance filesystem (originally available on IRIX) as it would have to be considering SGI's market.
Well after reading this I've just ordered a Gigabyte 9200 card GV-R92VIVO since as far as I can see ATI are a cool company doing The Right Thing (TM).
For the original poster, this site summarizes all your options.
So an ill-informed, stupid /. story results in me purchasing an ATI card. Weird no?
The author raises many valid points, but it should be noted that not many Red Hat users could give a stuff about 'apt'.
Red Hat Linux comes with one free basic RHN/up2date licence. For enterprise customers (like us) 'RHN Enterprise' with central package management, server grouping etc. is a fantastic product and superior to using apt.
Obsessing with apt and the (internal) superiority of dpkg is typical of the Debian bigot. Those of us in the real world have more important fish to fry.
No-one's pointed this out, but the e-envoy site runs Apache on Solaris 8 (it's an E450).
We host a few of the government websites (including e-envoy) and some are Solaris, some Lose2K and some are Linux (e.g. Office of the Deputy Prime Minisiter and Department for Transport).
We use Win2K for 3rd party authoured sites that require it, Linux for low/medium traffic sites and Solaris (sparc) for pretty much everything else, because (apart from recompiling Apache, PHP and OpenSSH, BIND with every security hole, and Sun's god-awful patch management) TCO is pretty low and we get good hardware support.
However, half of the technical staff run Linux on the desktop, and it's going to be a rough ride for Sun over the next 2 years.
These are my views and not those of my employer's etc. Blah-blah.
Er, Red Hat historically have incremented major version numbers when they've shipped major new versions of the kernel, glibc, gcc or rpm. A major number tweak at Red Hat implies binary incompatibility, package incompatibility or a real important upgrade to glibc or the kernel.
nic
Ignoring the rest of the thrid world and concentrating on Africa a moment.
If the usage of net-phones increases in Africa, and the previous story was also true - someone somewhere is going to end up paying more. Seems a loss-maker in the making for third-world ISPs.
nic
PS. This comment clearly side-steps many, many obvious points. (e.g. the super-poor countries with no network connectivity; countries where no-one who can afford a phone-call of any price, etc., etc.) Please don't just state the obvious in any reply.
nic
Please accept my apologies - it was clearly I who wasn't thinking. I feel like a real twat now. Sorry.
I retract my previous comment as it is very obviously wrong to anyone with a brain.
nic (hanging head in shame)
SGI certainly do sell machines with more processors than this: SGI ASCI Blue Mountain has 6144 CPUs
Re: your less-than-insightful comment on x86: Intel's ASCI Red has 9472 x86 CPUs. Guess what - they don't share 4GB memory...
Like the other poster said: look up NUMA.
nic
Question for Nat: "How do you cope, on a personal level, with all the negative and sometimes ill-informed comments that people make about GNOME and Ximian?"
People reading this: I am a GNOME user, and I love it. I understand that you may prefer KDE and that it does do somethings better than GNOME. It's just that GNOME suits my needs better.
I only ask as I personally don't deal with these sorts of things well.
nic
No, I don't think that the world's poorest nations are going to be directly affected today by this.
However,
1) those whose administrations might use computers will all be glad of saving themselves all those licence fees and the lower TCO.
2) developing nations (ie. not the world's poorest) can use open-source OS, office-products and development tools in a wider deployment (regional government, possibly education, and eventually businesses).
If you think that every country in the world should send 1% of their GNP to Bill Gates just to exist then fair enough.
Yes your 'starving kid in the Congo' example throws my argument out of the window on a more fundamental level - there are huge politcal problems in the world that have to be solved. But for some, more stable countries, wouldn't it be nice to level the technological playing field so they can become as good as us?
nic