I've updated the webpage with a warning to XFS users. I'll submit a patch for 2.6.7 that removes this incorrect information from the documentation and sets the XFS_HZ value to 100 always.
Laptop mode does nothing that could cause this. This problem is probably related to other changes in 2.6.6. If you want to use laptop mode without the DMA problems that are apparently present in 2.6.6, use 2.6.5 with the laptop mode patch from my laptop mode web page.
It turns out that all my XFS patches went in, including the one to make XFS use USER_HZ (which is 100). So you now want to set XFS_HZ to 100. I'll update the web page ASAP.
Diebold has been a frequent target of such groups, though most California county election officials say problems have been overstated and that voters like the touch screen systems first installed four years ago.
That's what they say, the problems are overstated because voters like the machines? Hell, I like a lot of things that are easy to use, but that doesn't mean they're good for me! Think about these:
The funny thing about the whole thread is this: it eventually turned out that the guy who originally complained about swapping didn't have any actual swapping going on at all. What is usually happening is that pages from an *executable* are being dropped, and people incorrectly refer to this as "swapping". In Linux, pages from an executable aren't "swapped out" but are simply dropped and read back from the original executable as needed. The trouble is that once you then access some of those pages again -- say, when you're exercising the repaint code from some bloatware app for the first time in a while, because it's been in the background for a while -- they have to be faulted in one by one, and that takes a lot of time per page.
Just great. With hotmail the first thing you have to do when you do your daily mail check is to delete 2 MB worth of spam. With Gmail the first thing you will do when you do your daily mail check is to delete 1 GB worth of spam...
Just a minor (and not particularly relevant, shaving along the edge of off-topic) point: a peruke is not a goofy hat -- it's a goofy wig. Comes from the Dutch word "pruik", apparently.
I'm not curious anymore about what Richard Stallman's desktop looks like. I happened to be sitting behind him at the last FOSDEM conference, just before his presentation. Two observations about his desktop as I saw it that day.
First of all, he doesn't use a GUI.
Second, the desktop environment that he was using was not vi.:)
thank you Unix for combining data and error conditions into one convenient return value!
I'd love to see the day when one of these functions actually returns an error. AFAIK most C programmers only check error codes on functions of which they expect that they can actually fail when they are used correctly. Getting the current time is not one of these functions.:)
OK, to be fair, I'll quote the list of errors from the time(2) manpage:
EFAULTt points outside your accessible address space.
So the only thing that might cause this is a case of programmer stupidity. I'm not sure whether this error set is specified by POSIX however, so other systems might be able to return additional errors. For instance:
* EWORLDHASENDED past 21 March 2008 on The Lord's Witnesses's fork of Jesux * ESCOLICENSENOTPRESENT on the latest, fully security patched versions of Caldera Linux, etc.
I'll be laughing my ass off when a system gives me a timestamp in 2116.
I remember talking to a friend who tried to convince me that the earth was going to end somewhere in 2001. Why? Well, it's very simple. The number of the beast is 666, multiply that by three (there was a reason for that too -- not sure what it was, but it was biblical as well). That gives you 1998, and that's the number of years after the birth of Christ that the world is going to end. However, he told me, Jesus Christ wasn't born exactly on the first day of year one, he was actually born somewhere around 3 B.C., so that meant that the end of the world was going to take place in 2001.
This conversation took place somewhere in the year 2000. He was not very pleased to hear that if he were right, the world would already have ended 5 years ago.:)
Note how they say "possible improvements" when they ask about Windows and flat-out "improvements" when they ask about Linux. This sounds to me like: you (the user) say it's an improvement, we will see if we think that it really would be an improvement and we will decide if we will put it in there. Figures. It's probably just an unintentional inconsistency so we shouldn't attach that much value to it. However, for me this is a strong reminder about the most important thing that should have to change about Windows -- the attitude of the supplier.
Oh, and did you notice that they spelled "Motorolla"? Two words they must have been thinking of: Toyotta Corrola...
Just curious, but how do you switch to the new non-ide-scsi burning method? (hdc is my DVD +/- R/RW burner that also does CDR, do I just put "dev=/dev/hdc" in the cdrecord commandline?)
AFAIK it's just a matter of removing the "option ide-cd ignore=hdc" from your modules.conf and rebooting. That should make the/dev/hdc be bound to ide-cd again instead of to ide-scsi. After that, you can simply use dev=/dev/hdc for cdrecord.
Replying to myself here to get some more info -- did anyone else have trouble recording DAO discs using cdrecord and the new IDE burning interface? I can burn an iso just fine using plain TAO recording, but with dao it already fails to do OPC. It never even writes to the disc, it fails in the attempt!
Hmmm. If you're migrating from ide-scsi, it might be that your modules.conf still contains the line "options ide-cd ignore=hdX" (where hdX is your burner's device name, e.g. hdd). This is normally used for ide-scsi burning, so that the burner is not bound by the ide-cd and left free for binding by ide-scsi. With this line present in modules.conf and with ide-scsi disabled, you don't have the device through ide-scsi (because you didn't load that) and not as ide-cd either (because you told ide-cd to ignore the device).
When I switched from 2.4 to 2.6.0-test11, I ran into a bug in ide-scsi that caused "scheduling while atomic" errors when an interrupt was lost. To get around this problem, I switched to the new burning method that doesn't use ide-scsi, and it's been completely transparent -- no need to set anything up, it just works. (I use cdrecord 2.01 for burning.)
The ide-scsi bug may or may not have been fixed in the 2.6.0 release. I haven't checked, because I never want to go back to ide-scsi.:)
Of course they can fire me at any time. That's the point of being and employer.
Hmmmm. I don't think you have the point of being an employer quite right.:)
An employer employs people, but that doesn't necessarily give him the right to deploy these people just like that. Employers have a contract with their employees -- and in addition to clauses that are good for the employer, such a contract can also contain clauses that are good for the employee. This includes things such as money being paid for the work (that's good for you!) but it can also include that the employer has to give due notice before terminating the agreement, or that they can't fire you if you're not unreasonably underperforming. The fact that these clauses are rare where you live (apparently, otherwise you woulnd't have said of course the can fire me at any time) only shows that where you live, employers have relatively more power in the employee contract negotiations. And maybe they interpret this as some kind of absolute power that they have over their employees (I would!). However, this need not be true for employers everywhere, so the point of being an employer is definitely not that you are able to fire people. The point is that you are able to hire people.
You're right. I only realized this as I posted. And then to think that my mommy always told me to use the preview button first -- but hey, I was a stubborn kid and needed a real reason not to press the submit button immediately.;)
Anyway, the reason this works is that when you say "tits", you usually don't think of animals, just like you wouldn't think of animals when you'd say "hooters". Think about it: dog's hooters? It sounds like something genetically engineered, like the one where they had a human ear attached to the back of a mouse -- a human hooter attached to the belly of a dog.:)
KDan aparantly believes in teaching a child to do something once just to learn what it is, even when that something is wrong. I strongly disagree, and by following that logic through hopefully you will to. Example: Murdering is wrong but i should allow my child to experience it for themselves so that they *understand* murdering. Clearly that would not be good parenting.
The trouble I have with this example is that it is too extreme. It is pretty easy to prove just about anything by giving an extreme analogy. Yes, everybody will surely agree with you that you shouldn't let your kid commit murder just so that they can experience it. You could have made the same case using rape or any other thing that does permanent damage to either the person who does it or to someone else involved.
However, I think it is good to let kids experience things for themselves a bit so that they know what they're missing -- and that they're not missing anything. Let's take this to a less extreme subject more commonly experienced by parents -- hot objects that you don't want your kids touch. Say you have a radiator at 60 degrees Celcius (which is pretty hot) and an oven at 250 degrees Celcius (which might burn your kid's flesh pretty bad). You don't want your kid touching the oven when it's hot, right? But you have a young kid who doesn't know what the heat does and is very interested, so what should you do? If you don't do anything, it will pick any one of the two interesting hot things to touch, and it will do so when you're not looking (because they know you don't want them to) -- and I bet you they will choose the oven. So, what you do is: you allow it to touch the radiator. Once. They don't get burned really bad, but they might have to keep their hands under ice cold water for fifteen minutes. But the chances are a lot smaller now that they'll ever try and touch the oven.
Taking this example back to the realm of murder: no, it's not good to let your kids experience what it is to murder someone. But murder is the oven and not the radiator. Kids start committing crimes at a much lower level, they're not going to instantly change from a good kid into a professional hitman. If your kid's interested in committing crimes, it will probably start by doing some shoplifting -- the "radiator". And when this happens, it's important that the shoplifting is noticed so that the kids can experience not only the shoplifting (which might be fun and exciting) but also the result -- getting really mad parents and maybe a good talk with a police officer. AFAIK this is pretty effective at making them less interested in crime, if it's their first or second time. Now, I'm not telling you that you should send your kids out shoplifting. What I'm telling you is that for kids interested in crime, it might ultimately be a good thing to try it out and see themselves get caught at it.
Basically, what I am saying is that in order to tell your kids what direction not to go in, they'll need to know a reason why -- any reason that matters to them. "Because I say so" may be a good reason to you, but that'll make anything that's already interesting even more interesting and they'll do it behind your back anyway when you're not looking. The last thing you want is to have your kids hiding this kind of stuff from you because they already know you'll be mad when you find out. And real reasons for not doing stuff work best. Oven -- hurts. Murder -- you get arrested. Animal porn -- dogs don't have tits. It's as simple as that.
The fact that they own the stuff doesn't give them the right to just disallow anything they would like to disallow at their whim. First of all, it's a good policy to make explicit what's allowed and what's not. This protects employees for being fired for things they've been doing for years. I quote: We have an arrangement of sorts - informal. Does this protect you? No, it just gives the employer more power over you -- they can fire you any time they want, by denying you these rights and telling you you were wrong by violating their unwritten rules in the first place. Wake up! Either don't use their bandwidth/computers/etc. or get a formal statement that says that you are allowed to do so up to a certain amount.
Just for the record, this information is U.S. only. U.S. law is pretty much employer-biased in many cases, and in other countries the law may favour employees a lot more (and may make it look less like the employer owns the employee, which is the impression the U.S. legal system gives me).
For instance, in The Netherlands, it is illegal for a company to look at their people's browsing and e-mail. In order to be able to stop people from abusing the internet access they have at work, the company first has to inform their employees what kind of use is allowed/forbidden by company policy, and that browsing information and e-mails may be looked at if there are suspicions that an employee is using the internet for things that are not allowed by the policy. Even when a policy like this exists, the company can only look at the browsing records and e-mails if there is a reasonable suspicion that the employee in question violated the policy. And, to ensure that this only happens when there is a reasonable suspicion, the employee has to be notified of this search (after the fact, AFAIK) even if it did not deliver any proof of misconduct. Disclaimer: IANAL.
It would be perfect if they would only supply you with a way to buy Wallie cards online using a credit card. That way, they incur a credit card fee once, but it's probably cheaper than selling them in stores because stores want a profit too! I'd certainly be interested in this if they would do it like this, because it saves me from having to give out my credit card number to everyone and his dog...
Slashdot Mirror
Seeing as this thing is financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, I wonder if they're using Windows?
And I wonder, do they have a fallback on mechanical steering in case of crashes, like this ship does?
I've updated the webpage with a warning to XFS users. I'll submit a patch for 2.6.7 that removes this incorrect information from the documentation and sets the XFS_HZ value to 100 always.
-- Bart Samwel
Laptop mode does nothing that could cause this. This problem is probably related to other changes in 2.6.6. If you want to use laptop mode without the DMA problems that are apparently present in 2.6.6, use 2.6.5 with the laptop mode patch from my laptop mode web page.
-- Bart Samwel
It turns out that all my XFS patches went in, including the one to make XFS use USER_HZ (which is 100). So you now want to set XFS_HZ to 100. I'll update the web page ASAP.
-- Bart Samwel
That's what they say, the problems are overstated because voters like the machines? Hell, I like a lot of things that are easy to use, but that doesn't mean they're good for me! Think about these:
* beer
* cola
* sweets
* credit card
* slot machine
* M$ software
The funny thing about the whole thread is this: it eventually turned out that the guy who originally complained about swapping didn't have any actual swapping going on at all. What is usually happening is that pages from an *executable* are being dropped, and people incorrectly refer to this as "swapping". In Linux, pages from an executable aren't "swapped out" but are simply dropped and read back from the original executable as needed. The trouble is that once you then access some of those pages again -- say, when you're exercising the repaint code from some bloatware app for the first time in a while, because it's been in the background for a while -- they have to be faulted in one by one, and that takes a lot of time per page.
Just great. With hotmail the first thing you have to do when you do your daily mail check is to delete 2 MB worth of spam. With Gmail the first thing you will do when you do your daily mail check is to delete 1 GB worth of spam...
Just a minor (and not particularly relevant, shaving along the edge of off-topic) point: a peruke is not a goofy hat -- it's a goofy wig. Comes from the Dutch word "pruik", apparently.
I tried it with a hand-crafted "porn" URL, and it seems that they cut it off:
Results 1-15 of about 75967 containing "porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn por"
However, it did upset Firebird. After keeping Ctrl+V pressed for about 20 seconds on "+bork" the URL field went completely blank.
Let's take a look at the score:
Microsoft:
+1 (Correctly handle loads of borks)
-1 (XFree86 is porn)
==
0
Open Source:
-1 (Incorrectly handle loads of borks)
+1 (XFree86 can be used to view porn)
==
0
Total score: 0-0!
I'm not curious anymore about what Richard Stallman's desktop looks like. I happened to be sitting behind him at the last FOSDEM conference, just before his presentation. Two observations about his desktop as I saw it that day.
:)
First of all, he doesn't use a GUI.
Second, the desktop environment that he was using was not vi.
Cube houses in Rotterdam. I used to live in one.
Oh, you meant cubicle, not cube!
thank you Unix for combining data and error conditions into one convenient return value!
:)
I'd love to see the day when one of these functions actually returns an error. AFAIK most C programmers only check error codes on functions of which they expect that they can actually fail when they are used correctly. Getting the current time is not one of these functions.
OK, to be fair, I'll quote the list of errors from the time(2) manpage:
EFAULT t points outside your accessible address space.
So the only thing that might cause this is a case of programmer stupidity. I'm not sure whether this error set is specified by POSIX however, so other systems might be able to return additional errors. For instance:
* EWORLDHASENDED past 21 March 2008 on The Lord's Witnesses's fork of Jesux
* ESCOLICENSENOTPRESENT on the latest, fully security patched versions of Caldera Linux, etc.
I'll be laughing my ass off when a system gives me a timestamp in 2116.
I remember talking to a friend who tried to convince me that the earth was going to end somewhere in 2001. Why? Well, it's very simple. The number of the beast is 666, multiply that by three (there was a reason for that too -- not sure what it was, but it was biblical as well). That gives you 1998, and that's the number of years after the birth of Christ that the world is going to end. However, he told me, Jesus Christ wasn't born exactly on the first day of year one, he was actually born somewhere around 3 B.C., so that meant that the end of the world was going to take place in 2001.
:)
This conversation took place somewhere in the year 2000. He was not very pleased to hear that if he were right, the world would already have ended 5 years ago.
Note how they say "possible improvements" when they ask about Windows and flat-out "improvements" when they ask about Linux. This sounds to me like: you (the user) say it's an improvement, we will see if we think that it really would be an improvement and we will decide if we will put it in there. Figures. It's probably just an unintentional inconsistency so we shouldn't attach that much value to it. However, for me this is a strong reminder about the most important thing that should have to change about Windows -- the attitude of the supplier.
Oh, and did you notice that they spelled "Motorolla"? Two words they must have been thinking of: Toyotta Corrola...
Just curious, but how do you switch to the new non-ide-scsi burning method? (hdc is my DVD +/- R/RW burner that also does CDR, do I just put "dev=/dev/hdc" in the cdrecord commandline?)
/dev/hdc be bound to ide-cd again instead of to ide-scsi. After that, you can simply use dev=/dev/hdc for cdrecord.
AFAIK it's just a matter of removing the "option ide-cd ignore=hdc" from your modules.conf and rebooting. That should make the
Handyman
Replying to myself here to get some more info -- did anyone else have trouble recording DAO discs using cdrecord and the new IDE burning interface? I can burn an iso just fine using plain TAO recording, but with dao it already fails to do OPC. It never even writes to the disc, it fails in the attempt!
Handyman
Hmmm. If you're migrating from ide-scsi, it might be that your modules.conf still contains the line "options ide-cd ignore=hdX" (where hdX is your burner's device name, e.g. hdd). This is normally used for ide-scsi burning, so that the burner is not bound by the ide-cd and left free for binding by ide-scsi. With this line present in modules.conf and with ide-scsi disabled, you don't have the device through ide-scsi (because you didn't load that) and not as ide-cd either (because you told ide-cd to ignore the device).
Does this help?
When I switched from 2.4 to 2.6.0-test11, I ran into a bug in ide-scsi that caused "scheduling while atomic" errors when an interrupt was lost. To get around this problem, I switched to the new burning method that doesn't use ide-scsi, and it's been completely transparent -- no need to set anything up, it just works. (I use cdrecord 2.01 for burning.)
:)
The ide-scsi bug may or may not have been fixed in the 2.6.0 release. I haven't checked, because I never want to go back to ide-scsi.
Of course they can fire me at any time. That's the point of being and employer.
:)
Hmmmm. I don't think you have the point of being an employer quite right.
An employer employs people, but that doesn't necessarily give him the right to deploy these people just like that. Employers have a contract with their employees -- and in addition to clauses that are good for the employer, such a contract can also contain clauses that are good for the employee. This includes things such as money being paid for the work (that's good for you!) but it can also include that the employer has to give due notice before terminating the agreement, or that they can't fire you if you're not unreasonably underperforming. The fact that these clauses are rare where you live (apparently, otherwise you woulnd't have said of course the can fire me at any time) only shows that where you live, employers have relatively more power in the employee contract negotiations. And maybe they interpret this as some kind of absolute power that they have over their employees (I would!). However, this need not be true for employers everywhere, so the point of being an employer is definitely not that you are able to fire people. The point is that you are able to hire people.
You're right. I only realized this as I posted. And then to think that my mommy always told me to use the preview button first -- but hey, I was a stubborn kid and needed a real reason not to press the submit button immediately. ;)
:)
Anyway, the reason this works is that when you say "tits", you usually don't think of animals, just like you wouldn't think of animals when you'd say "hooters". Think about it: dog's hooters? It sounds like something genetically engineered, like the one where they had a human ear attached to the back of a mouse -- a human hooter attached to the belly of a dog.
Yay, someone's going to save my views on animal porn for posterity. Kewl! :)
KDan aparantly believes in teaching a child to do something once just to learn what it is, even when that something is wrong. I strongly disagree, and by following that logic through hopefully you will to. Example: Murdering is wrong but i should allow my child to experience it for themselves so that they *understand* murdering. Clearly that would not be good parenting.
The trouble I have with this example is that it is too extreme. It is pretty easy to prove just about anything by giving an extreme analogy. Yes, everybody will surely agree with you that you shouldn't let your kid commit murder just so that they can experience it. You could have made the same case using rape or any other thing that does permanent damage to either the person who does it or to someone else involved.
However, I think it is good to let kids experience things for themselves a bit so that they know what they're missing -- and that they're not missing anything. Let's take this to a less extreme subject more commonly experienced by parents -- hot objects that you don't want your kids touch. Say you have a radiator at 60 degrees Celcius (which is pretty hot) and an oven at 250 degrees Celcius (which might burn your kid's flesh pretty bad). You don't want your kid touching the oven when it's hot, right? But you have a young kid who doesn't know what the heat does and is very interested, so what should you do? If you don't do anything, it will pick any one of the two interesting hot things to touch, and it will do so when you're not looking (because they know you don't want them to) -- and I bet you they will choose the oven. So, what you do is: you allow it to touch the radiator. Once. They don't get burned really bad, but they might have to keep their hands under ice cold water for fifteen minutes. But the chances are a lot smaller now that they'll ever try and touch the oven.
Taking this example back to the realm of murder: no, it's not good to let your kids experience what it is to murder someone. But murder is the oven and not the radiator. Kids start committing crimes at a much lower level, they're not going to instantly change from a good kid into a professional hitman. If your kid's interested in committing crimes, it will probably start by doing some shoplifting -- the "radiator". And when this happens, it's important that the shoplifting is noticed so that the kids can experience not only the shoplifting (which might be fun and exciting) but also the result -- getting really mad parents and maybe a good talk with a police officer. AFAIK this is pretty effective at making them less interested in crime, if it's their first or second time. Now, I'm not telling you that you should send your kids out shoplifting. What I'm telling you is that for kids interested in crime, it might ultimately be a good thing to try it out and see themselves get caught at it.
Basically, what I am saying is that in order to tell your kids what direction not to go in, they'll need to know a reason why -- any reason that matters to them. "Because I say so" may be a good reason to you, but that'll make anything that's already interesting even more interesting and they'll do it behind your back anyway when you're not looking. The last thing you want is to have your kids hiding this kind of stuff from you because they already know you'll be mad when you find out. And real reasons for not doing stuff work best. Oven -- hurts. Murder -- you get arrested. Animal porn -- dogs don't have tits. It's as simple as that.
The fact that they own the stuff doesn't give them the right to just disallow anything they would like to disallow at their whim. First of all, it's a good policy to make explicit what's allowed and what's not. This protects employees for being fired for things they've been doing for years. I quote: We have an arrangement of sorts - informal. Does this protect you? No, it just gives the employer more power over you -- they can fire you any time they want, by denying you these rights and telling you you were wrong by violating their unwritten rules in the first place. Wake up! Either don't use their bandwidth/computers/etc. or get a formal statement that says that you are allowed to do so up to a certain amount.
Just for the record, this information is U.S. only. U.S. law is pretty much employer-biased in many cases, and in other countries the law may favour employees a lot more (and may make it look less like the employer owns the employee, which is the impression the U.S. legal system gives me).
For instance, in The Netherlands, it is illegal for a company to look at their people's browsing and e-mail. In order to be able to stop people from abusing the internet access they have at work, the company first has to inform their employees what kind of use is allowed/forbidden by company policy, and that browsing information and e-mails may be looked at if there are suspicions that an employee is using the internet for things that are not allowed by the policy. Even when a policy like this exists, the company can only look at the browsing records and e-mails if there is a reasonable suspicion that the employee in question violated the policy. And, to ensure that this only happens when there is a reasonable suspicion, the employee has to be notified of this search (after the fact, AFAIK) even if it did not deliver any proof of misconduct. Disclaimer: IANAL.
It would be perfect if they would only supply you with a way to buy Wallie cards online using a credit card. That way, they incur a credit card fee once, but it's probably cheaper than selling them in stores because stores want a profit too! I'd certainly be interested in this if they would do it like this, because it saves me from having to give out my credit card number to everyone and his dog...