The problem with any lawless place like these is corruption. If officials can be bribed, then the guy with the most money to hand over to the officials wins. Now, how much money do you think the record companies have?
I've got an old multia running RHAT 6.1 w/ 64 MB and a 2.2GB drive (from way back when TheLinuxStore was dumping them). I've got the sound working, but mpg123 needs a patch (I think) to work properly on alpha CPU's.
Sounds like you've made one work. Is the sound quality good enough, say, to plug it into my audio system? Secondly, has the CPU enough power to decode high bitrate stuff, y'know, 256 or 320 kbps?
So you get your copy of W2K, and you run it under Linux using VMWare. Then you get M$'s AD development kit and write some custom sockets stuff to talk between the W2K and Linux sides of the internal bridged network...
I don't know about you, but when I'm running an FFT to punch-up 60+ minutes of 44.1 KHz 16-bit PCM stereo audio, today's processor's don't seem fast enough. It gets even worse if your working with digital video. Manipulating massive amounts of data calls for massive amounts of compute power.
Shannon's work defines the theoretical maximum carrying capacity for a communications channel . The guys at Bell Labs found a clever way to add more channels to a wireless transmission using fancy signal processing techniques. None of their individual channels beats Shannon's limitations. If they'd beaten Shannon, they'd be crowing about it.
I'm running Slack 7.0 w/ kernel 2.2.15 on a FIC SD11 w/ 650 MHz Athlon and 160 MB SDRAM. The only gotcha so far is the notorious failure to detect all the RAM. Simple to fix with the 'ol:
APPEND="MEM=160M"
in lilo.conf. I haven't done much heavy lifting with the box yet, but it seems problem-free so far.
Actually they're not based on Intel's design. The K6 series is based upon a core developed by NexGen, a company AMD purchased. The core is, at heart, a RISC processor. There is custom logic and/or uCode that converts X86 instructions to a series of RISC micro-ops on-the-fly. As for Athlons, I'm not as sure about the basis for their core, but I know it's not Intel.
Um, have you tried to install w98 recently? Sorry, pal. Linux is *MUCH* easier to install. Last time I installed W98 I had to reboot my system over 30 times, and still, when I was done, my device drivers were in a horrible state that required a tremendous amount of manual diddling and rebooting before all my hardware functioned correctly. Then, of course, I had to go out to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com several times to install M$ patches to make my box more secure from h@k3rz (read: lame script kiddies) trying to break in off of my DSL line. And still, there was more work to be done in configuring networking to further secure the box from attack. All in all, I spent a full evening, working from 4:00 PM until midnight, making a W98 installation work correctly. OTOH, I can install *ANY* Linux distro and secure it in under 90 minutes, and some of them in as little as 10 minutes. As for compiling programs on Linux, why don't you just get the binaries and save yourself the trouble. They're almost always available either in an rpm or a tarball. Installing via an rpm-based installer is just as easy, or perhaps even easier, than running some SETUP.EXE mainly because you won't have to reboot your Linux box. Finally, as an IT guy, I'd rather support Linux any day than have to correct some mess made by M$ (and I've worked extensively with all M$ messes).
64-bits buys other stuff, too. For example, larger file systems. Most 32-bit OS'es give you a 2GB or 4GB file or volume size because that conveniently fits in their 32-bit integers. But things get dicey when you start working with digital video, large databases, etc. because you start hitting those limitations. My biggest problem [off topic] with 64-bits is that nobody writes good 64-bit safe code. Any time I try porting some 32-bit package to my dearly loved Alpha's I get nailed by idiots casting 64-bit pointers to 32-bit ints. People, please don't assume sizeof(long) == sizeof(void *)!
Do we really need another 64-bit CPU when there is already a really great one languishing on the sidelines? Alpha AXP runs Linux extremely well and is the fastest microproceesor out there. Don't get me wrong... I love AMD's offerings--I've got Linux boxen running on their 5x86, their K6 II and K6 III lines, and I'm hankering for an Athlon, but Alphas are a sweet machine, and you can get 'em now. I guess I'd have a more welcoming attitude if I thought it would help drive down entry-level price points for the other offering like Itaniums and Alphas.
I don't buy your theory. In a democracy, every eligible voter gets a chance to express themselves through their vote. In a society such as ours where "free speech" is also a right, one has the opportunity to be heard.
But, in many places here and abroad there's also such a thing as "fighting words." And in the legal definition of that term, someone is well within their legal rights to "pop you one" under the law (at least as I understand it) if you insist upon berating them with such language.
On the net, though, you can hurl any kind of immature, insulting and opinionated invective without fear of somebody "dotting your eye", so you end up with anarchy, i.e. a place without any form of courtesy and little rule of law. People hide behind their keyboards and say things they'd never dare say face-to-face.
In the U.S. we live in a democracy, but that doesn't mean we can spout off any time we feel like it, say, for example, in a courtroom, in a church, in your doctor's waiting room, in the supermarket aisles, etc. You'd get locked-up if you did, or at the very least people would look at you like you were crazy. Let's not confuse anarchy and democracy.
So now the question is: Why should the net be allowed to be anarchic? Why should people be allowed to be unrestrainedly obnoxious and vicious? Why shouldn't the net have netiquette?
I believe the anarchy part does serve a purpose in the unrestrained flow of ideas. That part of it is constructive. I also believe people have every right to their diversity, their opinions, and their God-given right to be jerks and immature @ssholes, but most of that flaming that emerges is about as useful to society at large as graffiti. I'd rather do without.
Quest Electronics had a nice kit based on Pop-Tronics' article about building the ELF computer. It was based on the RCA 1802 running at 2 MHz. Mine had a whopping 36.25 Kb of memory (32K of it on an S-100 card), an ASCII keyboard, a 64x16 character display, and a cassette interface for secondary storage. What a machine! It still runs, too. Unfortunately, it sits in my closet most of the time. What a waste of raw computing power...
I missed the streaming audio that went out yesterday (4/19) and would love to hear what Linus had to say without all the middle-man interpretations of the attending media.
Sure Linux is temporary. So's winblows. Every few years, the next big thing comes along. Some are fads, others are less transient, but nothing lasts forever. So in the big scheme of things they're right.
But they're dead wrong if they think Linux is a passing fad.
I've got a good system, THX certified, 5 channels, dual active subs w/ 300 W RMS apiece. My minidiscs sound damn good!
Sure, maybe not quite as good as the CD they were dubbed from, but in an A/B comparison between the original CD and the mini, you've gotta be listening real closely. Let me repeat -- real closely!
Minidisc beats most other home recording gear for fidelity. Make no mistake.
I think any company, whatever their motiviation, does a good thing by opening source for our inspection. Sure, maybe we won't have all the freedom we'd like, maybe the sources will be encumbered by restrictive licenses, maybe they'll be incomplete, but that's a heck of a lot better than the alternative, i.e. trying to develop for an absolutely opaque and buggy black box. If I can occasionally peek into the black box, lift its lid and shine a light on its inner workings, then my burden as a developer will be eased.
I don't think we can initially expect the likes of corporate America to jump into the open source ocean with both feet. They're gonna wade in slowly... Test the waters. But these baby steps are steps in the right direction. I applaud ESR and company for their efforts. I didn't ask 'em to represent me, but nevertheless I feel they're helping me and the community as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with any lawless place like these is corruption. If officials can be bribed, then the guy with the most money to hand over to the officials wins. Now, how much money do you think the record companies have?
That's the biggest bong I ever saw!
Sounds like you've made one work. Is the sound quality good enough, say, to plug it into my audio system? Secondly, has the CPU enough power to decode high bitrate stuff, y'know, 256 or 320 kbps?
So you get your copy of W2K, and you run it under Linux using VMWare. Then you get M$'s AD development kit and write some custom sockets stuff to talk between the W2K and Linux sides of the internal bridged network...
I don't know about you, but when I'm running an FFT to punch-up 60+ minutes of 44.1 KHz 16-bit PCM stereo audio, today's processor's don't seem fast enough. It gets even worse if your working with digital video. Manipulating massive amounts of data calls for massive amounts of compute power.
I can't wait until they release it on DVD!
Shannon's work defines the theoretical maximum carrying capacity for a communications channel . The guys at Bell Labs found a clever way to add more channels to a wireless transmission using fancy signal processing techniques. None of their individual channels beats Shannon's limitations. If they'd beaten Shannon, they'd be crowing about it.
APPEND="MEM=160M"
in lilo.conf. I haven't done much heavy lifting with the box yet, but it seems problem-free so far.
Actually they're not based on Intel's design. The K6 series is based upon a core developed by NexGen, a company AMD purchased. The core is, at heart, a RISC processor. There is custom logic and/or uCode that converts X86 instructions to a series of RISC micro-ops on-the-fly. As for Athlons, I'm not as sure about the basis for their core, but I know it's not Intel.
Is Bob Metcalfe posting to Slashdot?
Um, have you tried to install w98 recently? Sorry, pal. Linux is *MUCH* easier to install. Last time I installed W98 I had to reboot my system over 30 times, and still, when I was done, my device drivers were in a horrible state that required a tremendous amount of manual diddling and rebooting before all my hardware functioned correctly. Then, of course, I had to go out to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com several times to install M$ patches to make my box more secure from h@k3rz (read: lame script kiddies) trying to break in off of my DSL line. And still, there was more work to be done in configuring networking to further secure the box from attack. All in all, I spent a full evening, working from 4:00 PM until midnight, making a W98 installation work correctly. OTOH, I can install *ANY* Linux distro and secure it in under 90 minutes, and some of them in as little as 10 minutes. As for compiling programs on Linux, why don't you just get the binaries and save yourself the trouble. They're almost always available either in an rpm or a tarball. Installing via an rpm-based installer is just as easy, or perhaps even easier, than running some SETUP.EXE mainly because you won't have to reboot your Linux box. Finally, as an IT guy, I'd rather support Linux any day than have to correct some mess made by M$ (and I've worked extensively with all M$ messes).
A lot of you people owe me money!
64-bits buys other stuff, too. For example, larger file systems. Most 32-bit OS'es give you a 2GB or 4GB file or volume size because that conveniently fits in their 32-bit integers. But things get dicey when you start working with digital video, large databases, etc. because you start hitting those limitations. My biggest problem [off topic] with 64-bits is that nobody writes good 64-bit safe code. Any time I try porting some 32-bit package to my dearly loved Alpha's I get nailed by idiots casting 64-bit pointers to 32-bit ints. People, please don't assume sizeof(long) == sizeof(void *)!
Do we really need another 64-bit CPU when there is already a really great one languishing on the sidelines? Alpha AXP runs Linux extremely well and is the fastest microproceesor out there. Don't get me wrong... I love AMD's offerings--I've got Linux boxen running on their 5x86, their K6 II and K6 III lines, and I'm hankering for an Athlon, but Alphas are a sweet machine, and you can get 'em now. I guess I'd have a more welcoming attitude if I thought it would help drive down entry-level price points for the other offering like Itaniums and Alphas.
I don't buy your theory. In a democracy, every eligible voter gets a chance to express themselves through their vote. In a society such as ours where "free speech" is also a right, one has the opportunity to be heard.
But, in many places here and abroad there's also such a thing as "fighting words." And in the legal definition of that term, someone is well within their legal rights to "pop you one" under the law (at least as I understand it) if you insist upon berating them with such language.
On the net, though, you can hurl any kind of immature, insulting and opinionated invective without fear of somebody "dotting your eye", so you end up with anarchy, i.e. a place without any form of courtesy and little rule of law. People hide behind their keyboards and say things they'd never dare say face-to-face.
In the U.S. we live in a democracy, but that doesn't mean we can spout off any time we feel like it, say, for example, in a courtroom, in a church, in your doctor's waiting room, in the supermarket aisles, etc. You'd get locked-up if you did, or at the very least people would look at you like you were crazy. Let's not confuse anarchy and democracy.
So now the question is: Why should the net be allowed to be anarchic? Why should people be allowed to be unrestrainedly obnoxious and vicious? Why shouldn't the net have netiquette?
I believe the anarchy part does serve a purpose in the unrestrained flow of ideas. That part of it is constructive. I also believe people have every right to their diversity, their opinions, and their God-given right to be jerks and immature @ssholes, but most of that flaming that emerges is about as useful to society at large as graffiti. I'd rather do without.
Quest Electronics had a nice kit based on Pop-Tronics' article about building the ELF computer. It was based on the RCA 1802 running at 2 MHz. Mine had a whopping 36.25 Kb of memory (32K of it on an S-100 card), an ASCII keyboard, a 64x16 character display, and a cassette interface for secondary storage. What a machine! It still runs, too. Unfortunately, it sits in my closet most of the time. What a waste of raw computing power...
I missed the streaming audio that went out yesterday (4/19) and would love to hear what Linus had to say without all the middle-man interpretations of the attending media.
I don't think college hurt our hero one bit.
Sure Linux is temporary. So's winblows. Every few years, the next big thing comes along. Some are fads, others are less transient, but nothing lasts forever. So in the big scheme of things they're right.
But they're dead wrong if they think Linux is a passing fad.
Yours in ephemeral passing,
Bubba
-----------
I've got a good system, THX certified, 5 channels, dual active subs w/ 300 W RMS apiece. My minidiscs sound damn good!
Sure, maybe not quite as good as the CD they were dubbed from, but in an A/B comparison between the original CD and the mini, you've gotta be listening real closely. Let me repeat -- real closely!
Minidisc beats most other home recording gear for fidelity. Make no mistake.
I think any company, whatever their motiviation, does a good thing by opening source for our inspection. Sure, maybe we won't have all the freedom we'd like, maybe the sources will be encumbered by restrictive licenses, maybe they'll be incomplete, but that's a heck of a lot better than the alternative, i.e. trying to develop for an absolutely opaque and buggy black box. If I can occasionally peek into the black box, lift its lid and shine a light on its inner workings, then my burden as a developer will be eased.
I don't think we can initially expect the likes of corporate America to jump into the open source ocean with both feet. They're gonna wade in slowly... Test the waters. But these baby steps are steps in the right direction. I applaud ESR and company for their efforts. I didn't ask 'em to represent me, but nevertheless I feel they're helping me and the community as a whole.