FWIW, in electric RC and sometimes robotics we use what are called "electronic speed controllers" (ESCs). They're basically what you're describing. ESCs have been getting fairly sophisticated in the past few years, especially the brushless models, and would doubtless be a good model to work from.
Re:No distro comes close to Mandriva for ease of u
on
Mandriva 2007 Released
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· Score: 1
I do as well. I've been using it pretty much since its first release. It has the same basic layout as Redhat, uses a similar PAM configuration with pam-stack - unlike SuSE the last time I fought with it, and takes most Redhat RPMs without too much tooling around. Source RPMs tend to compile easily as well. The installer tends to do a better job at setting up hardware, and the dkms support is a pleasant surprise for keeping up with drivers that need to be compiled for each new kernel. I haven't had any problems installing software into its own subdirectory under, say,/usr/local when I want to build something myself either.
I also like the way urpmi works. I typically update to newer OS releases by downloading a DVD image release, pointing urpmi to it, and updating with --auto-select. Redhat's up2date isn't as bad as it was previously, but I like pushing things out with parallel urpmi commands and not being forced to pay for continued updates. I'd also rather use distributions that do not require an annoying product/registration key which can be easily lost. I will pay more to get software that doesn't need one if necessary.
Make sure you have file locking configured correctly. If you see the nolock option in/etc/mtab (it's implicit with some options) or if you don't have the NFS lock daemon running, you won't be able to run apps which require file locking.
The drive I recall being the biggest issue in one of my past jobs was the Quantum Bigfoot. They were actually 5.25" hard drives, but they did come in those capacities.
apart from the gross invasion of privacy and breach of lots of laws
Isn't that enough? I fail to see why willful breach of a lot of laws isn't grounds for punishment. I would personally hope that gross invasion of privacy would be punishable as well. Hopefully the aggregate punishments would lead to jail time. The court system is being used to punish file sharers, let's make sure it gets around to the people who illegally spy on their peers as well. If I'm having to pay for this with my taxes, some good should come out of it.
I still use it and recommend it. I've used just about every Linux distro out there at one time or another, starting with Slackware back in 94. I've used various BSDs, SunOS 4, Solaris from 5-10, Windows, MacOS 6-9 and OS X in several releases. Mandriva gives me a useful desktop in the default install that I don't need to tweak nearly as much as other distros or desktops, recent ubuntu/kubuntu included (I currently have kubuntu installed in VmWare to play around with.) A few reasons off the top of my head:
I like the security tools that come with it to maintain permissions, analogous to the permissions fixer in OS X but with multiple security levels. Sure, I could write my own for another distro, but in Mandriva it's already there and is quite configurable if you take a good look at it. The firewall's not bad either, although they could work on making it easier to modify for new users.
I don't want to fight with the distro to get my preferred KDE desktop on it. Yes, I've seen the newest version of GNOME in distro X, many times over. I've also seen the OS X desktop, Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP and betas of Vista, used VMS, SCO, IRIX and Solaris, and even Symbolics workstations. I really prefer the look and feel of KDE, especially KWM, kate, kmail/kontact, konsole, amaroK and Konqueror which I use daily.
Upgrading has been easy over the years, especially since they started packaging DVD releases. I download the DVD ISO, mount it, remove all sources in URPMI with urpmi-removemedia -a, and re-point URPMI to the new sources with the urpmi.addmedia --distrib command. A urpmi --auto-select does most of the work from there. I could work with a network source, but I prefer having everything on the HD before I start for speed/reliability reasons.
Hardware detection works, and works nicely. I know enough of the internals to fix an issue if I have one, but I buy supported hardware and happily haven't seen one for quite a while.
What it really boils down to is that I'd rather not be fiddling around with minor configuration issues to get the OS to the state I want if possible. Mandriva's distro give me that by default more than any others at the moment and for the past several years. An OS is a tool, and Mandriva has allowed me to be the most effective.
Whether or not he likes it, I'd be willing to bet Google has a bit on him. It probably has something on most people. What I suspect he should be most worried about though is his whois info, apparently he doesn't mind if these people have his home address. I certainly wouldn't want to give out this information in association with a prank.
At this point, I could buy at least two houses in the state where I grew up. In cash. It's quite possible, it just depends on whether or not you've been putting a little something away in savings every paycheck. And do not touch it, ever.
On topic though, I don't agree with a credit check being a requirement for any position where one would not be handling finances. Due to a large student loan, a medical condition with the associated bills, and losing my "low-income friendly" apartment and the job which relied on the location many years ago, I wouldn't have my current job had they relied on a credit check. I'm no longer considered low income, and have been able to take care of all those monetary issues from back then. Had I not been able to get my current job, this certainly would not be the case.
In a few years, all that will be wiped from my history for most purposes. My credit is steadily improving, having obtained credit cards starting with secured ones as well as a "guaranteed" auto loan over time. Still, I'll always remember how easy it was to end up in this sort of situation - and how difficult it would be to get out without a good job.
They do make clusters as well, which I suspect is where they're really going to dig in. I work in a HPC environment and there are some fairly large SGI systems (how's 10240 CPUs sound?) in the building next door that scale quite well.
It might have been dangerous. If you actually found yourself in a tesseract, you might have ended up right back in your cube (possibly falling from the ceiling) when walking out the wrong side.
One of my computers (well, 'one' and 'my' being relative terms in this case) is a 40 node cluster, completely SMP with some of the newer nodes being dual core as well. Often they're fully utilized or more, imagine a 5.00+ loadavg per node weeks on end. When a job is winding down though, the remainder of the jobs will probably finish up one at a time and you often have a few CPUs with just one job running for a few days. It's good for the electric bill to allow the CPU cores to power down.
Another of my computers is basically used to play games. Most games don't seem to do much on the SMP side, so I doubt it would much matter how many cores there were as far as the game's concerned. They do tend to peak one CPU pretty much all the time though, while another core might end up servicing OS calls. Again, it couldn't hurt to let those sleeping processors/cores power down while they're not doing much of anything.
Absolutely! Having been ripped off through PayPal with no action taken on their part, I've decided against using eBay and PayPal going forward. Craigslist has proven just as useful as eBay in finding most things I want, while not finding too many unrelated things. When selling, I'm not forced into a bad deal just because the week's up. Being paid in cash is convenient enough for me, no worrying about whether that person was using a fraudulent PayPal account or if that credit card payment is going to be reversed. I really get the feeling there are people who know what they're doing behind the scenes when I use Craigslist. As long as it doesn't turn into the same fraud cesspool as eBay, I'll have no need to use anything else.
To clarify, I am describing Copyright in the United States. In the U.S. Constitution, Copyright was redefined and limited in scope to the end that it serves the promotion of science and the useful arts. Authorial profit is defined as a means to this end, not the end in itself.
The first copyright law in the US was entitled "An act for the encouragement of learning". Copyright exists (at least in the U.S.) purely to encourage the advance of science and the arts, which are the domain of the public, by encouraging people with a limited form of monopoly for their works. A reasonable limit is important, as it was recognized by the creators of the U.S. Constitution that unlimited monopolies do more damage than good. An excerpt from the Constitution:
"Copyright law, in turn, traces back to the English Statute of 1710, which secured to authors of books the sole right of publishing them for designated periods. Congress was not vested by this clause, however, with anything akin to the royal prerogative in the creation and bestowal of monopolistic privileges. Its power is limited with regard both to subject matter and to the purpose and duration of the rights granted. Only the writings and discoveries of authors and inventors may be protected, and then only to the end of promoting science and the useful arts."
The purpose of copyright is to encourage and reward creativity and ambition. It is not to make of the public domain a refuge for the second-rate.
Precisely, the intention was to make our public domain and culture first rate. The fact that it has been turned on itself to produce money rather than improve our culture is a shame.
While I don't disagree with any of your points in principle, I do believe that Copyright has been extended well beyond the period where it's useful for its intended purpose. It is my opinion that IP hoarding and the associated lawsuits have gotten to the point where they're destructive to both the public domain and the society in general.
If the US government sets up social security, that doesn't make it a capitalist action. If the Chinese government sets up a free market, that doesn't make it a communist action. I'm not saying it's communism, but I am pointing out that it's no closer to capitalism. I personally find a fair amount of humour in watching people defend one unworkable ideal over the other.
It certainly wasn't my argument, however I felt it was worth pointing out that it's not particularly capitalistic either. My argument is that copyright law has been twisted to the point where it no longer serves its intended role of improving the public domain.
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FWIW, in electric RC and sometimes robotics we use what are called "electronic speed controllers" (ESCs). They're basically what you're describing. ESCs have been getting fairly sophisticated in the past few years, especially the brushless models, and would doubtless be a good model to work from.
I do as well. I've been using it pretty much since its first release. It has the same basic layout as Redhat, uses a similar PAM configuration with pam-stack - unlike SuSE the last time I fought with it, and takes most Redhat RPMs without too much tooling around. Source RPMs tend to compile easily as well. The installer tends to do a better job at setting up hardware, and the dkms support is a pleasant surprise for keeping up with drivers that need to be compiled for each new kernel. I haven't had any problems installing software into its own subdirectory under, say, /usr/local when I want to build something myself either.
I also like the way urpmi works. I typically update to newer OS releases by downloading a DVD image release, pointing urpmi to it, and updating with --auto-select. Redhat's up2date isn't as bad as it was previously, but I like pushing things out with parallel urpmi commands and not being forced to pay for continued updates. I'd also rather use distributions that do not require an annoying product/registration key which can be easily lost. I will pay more to get software that doesn't need one if necessary.
Make sure you have file locking configured correctly. If you see the nolock option in /etc/mtab (it's implicit with some options) or if you don't have the NFS lock daemon running, you won't be able to run apps which require file locking.
The drive I recall being the biggest issue in one of my past jobs was the Quantum Bigfoot. They were actually 5.25" hard drives, but they did come in those capacities.
Perhaps, if you have a USB bluetooth adapter.
If the news surrounding Lithium technology batteries is any indication, Lithium-Polymer batteries might very well be considered explosives.
Often time the only thing either one has going for it is graphics, and we all know that isn't enough to carry a movie or a video game.
;)
I'm pretty sure the adult film industry would disagree.
apart from the gross invasion of privacy and breach of lots of laws
Isn't that enough? I fail to see why willful breach of a lot of laws isn't grounds for punishment. I would personally hope that gross invasion of privacy would be punishable as well. Hopefully the aggregate punishments would lead to jail time. The court system is being used to punish file sharers, let's make sure it gets around to the people who illegally spy on their peers as well. If I'm having to pay for this with my taxes, some good should come out of it.
I still use it and recommend it. I've used just about every Linux distro out there at one time or another, starting with Slackware back in 94. I've used various BSDs, SunOS 4, Solaris from 5-10, Windows, MacOS 6-9 and OS X in several releases. Mandriva gives me a useful desktop in the default install that I don't need to tweak nearly as much as other distros or desktops, recent ubuntu/kubuntu included (I currently have kubuntu installed in VmWare to play around with.) A few reasons off the top of my head:
I like the security tools that come with it to maintain permissions, analogous to the permissions fixer in OS X but with multiple security levels. Sure, I could write my own for another distro, but in Mandriva it's already there and is quite configurable if you take a good look at it. The firewall's not bad either, although they could work on making it easier to modify for new users.
I don't want to fight with the distro to get my preferred KDE desktop on it. Yes, I've seen the newest version of GNOME in distro X, many times over. I've also seen the OS X desktop, Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP and betas of Vista, used VMS, SCO, IRIX and Solaris, and even Symbolics workstations. I really prefer the look and feel of KDE, especially KWM, kate, kmail/kontact, konsole, amaroK and Konqueror which I use daily.
Upgrading has been easy over the years, especially since they started packaging DVD releases. I download the DVD ISO, mount it, remove all sources in URPMI with urpmi-removemedia -a, and re-point URPMI to the new sources with the urpmi.addmedia --distrib command. A urpmi --auto-select does most of the work from there. I could work with a network source, but I prefer having everything on the HD before I start for speed/reliability reasons.
Hardware detection works, and works nicely. I know enough of the internals to fix an issue if I have one, but I buy supported hardware and happily haven't seen one for quite a while.
What it really boils down to is that I'd rather not be fiddling around with minor configuration issues to get the OS to the state I want if possible. Mandriva's distro give me that by default more than any others at the moment and for the past several years. An OS is a tool, and Mandriva has allowed me to be the most effective.
Whether or not he likes it, I'd be willing to bet Google has a bit on him. It probably has something on most people. What I suspect he should be most worried about though is his whois info, apparently he doesn't mind if these people have his home address. I certainly wouldn't want to give out this information in association with a prank.
At this point, I could buy at least two houses in the state where I grew up. In cash. It's quite possible, it just depends on whether or not you've been putting a little something away in savings every paycheck. And do not touch it, ever.
On topic though, I don't agree with a credit check being a requirement for any position where one would not be handling finances. Due to a large student loan, a medical condition with the associated bills, and losing my "low-income friendly" apartment and the job which relied on the location many years ago, I wouldn't have my current job had they relied on a credit check. I'm no longer considered low income, and have been able to take care of all those monetary issues from back then. Had I not been able to get my current job, this certainly would not be the case.
In a few years, all that will be wiped from my history for most purposes. My credit is steadily improving, having obtained credit cards starting with secured ones as well as a "guaranteed" auto loan over time. Still, I'll always remember how easy it was to end up in this sort of situation - and how difficult it would be to get out without a good job.
It's running Linux, linking several 512 CPU NUMA components via Infiniband.
They do make clusters as well, which I suspect is where they're really going to dig in. I work in a HPC environment and there are some fairly large SGI systems (how's 10240 CPUs sound?) in the building next door that scale quite well.
Just build it in 3 dimensions, and let an earthquake fold it for you.
It might have been dangerous. If you actually found yourself in a tesseract, you might have ended up right back in your cube (possibly falling from the ceiling) when walking out the wrong side.
One of my computers (well, 'one' and 'my' being relative terms in this case) is a 40 node cluster, completely SMP with some of the newer nodes being dual core as well. Often they're fully utilized or more, imagine a 5.00+ loadavg per node weeks on end. When a job is winding down though, the remainder of the jobs will probably finish up one at a time and you often have a few CPUs with just one job running for a few days. It's good for the electric bill to allow the CPU cores to power down.
Another of my computers is basically used to play games. Most games don't seem to do much on the SMP side, so I doubt it would much matter how many cores there were as far as the game's concerned. They do tend to peak one CPU pretty much all the time though, while another core might end up servicing OS calls. Again, it couldn't hurt to let those sleeping processors/cores power down while they're not doing much of anything.
Absolutely! Having been ripped off through PayPal with no action taken on their part, I've decided against using eBay and PayPal going forward. Craigslist has proven just as useful as eBay in finding most things I want, while not finding too many unrelated things. When selling, I'm not forced into a bad deal just because the week's up. Being paid in cash is convenient enough for me, no worrying about whether that person was using a fraudulent PayPal account or if that credit card payment is going to be reversed. I really get the feeling there are people who know what they're doing behind the scenes when I use Craigslist. As long as it doesn't turn into the same fraud cesspool as eBay, I'll have no need to use anything else.
No, that's only the foolish goldfish.
What do you mean, magnets? Everyone knows gold's a non-ferrous metal.
To clarify, I am describing Copyright in the United States. In the U.S. Constitution, Copyright was redefined and limited in scope to the end that it serves the promotion of science and the useful arts. Authorial profit is defined as a means to this end, not the end in itself.
The first copyright law in the US was entitled "An act for the encouragement of learning". Copyright exists (at least in the U.S.) purely to encourage the advance of science and the arts, which are the domain of the public, by encouraging people with a limited form of monopoly for their works. A reasonable limit is important, as it was recognized by the creators of the U.S. Constitution that unlimited monopolies do more damage than good. An excerpt from the Constitution:
"Copyright law, in turn, traces back to the English Statute of 1710, which secured to authors of books the sole right of publishing them for designated periods. Congress was not vested by this clause, however, with anything akin to the royal prerogative in the creation and bestowal of monopolistic privileges. Its power is limited with regard both to subject matter and to the purpose and duration of the rights granted. Only the writings and discoveries of authors and inventors may be protected, and then only to the end of promoting science and the useful arts."
The purpose of copyright is to encourage and reward creativity and ambition. It is not to make of the public domain a refuge for the second-rate.
Precisely, the intention was to make our public domain and culture first rate. The fact that it has been turned on itself to produce money rather than improve our culture is a shame.
While I don't disagree with any of your points in principle, I do believe that Copyright has been extended well beyond the period where it's useful for its intended purpose. It is my opinion that IP hoarding and the associated lawsuits have gotten to the point where they're destructive to both the public domain and the society in general.
If the US government sets up social security, that doesn't make it a capitalist action. If the Chinese government sets up a free market, that doesn't make it a communist action. I'm not saying it's communism, but I am pointing out that it's no closer to capitalism. I personally find a fair amount of humour in watching people defend one unworkable ideal over the other.
It certainly wasn't my argument, however I felt it was worth pointing out that it's not particularly capitalistic either. My argument is that copyright law has been twisted to the point where it no longer serves its intended role of improving the public domain.