Assuming the stand-alone box system works for the consumer, why waste all the money for a lot of similar components, while also having a PC that can do all? The logical next step is one server PC (ahem, what OS???) sitting somewhere inconspicuous, and a mini wireless network that provides all the other stuff? Okay, this kind of system isn't going to be the best for, say, a CD player, where you don't really need much processing power at all (even DSP stuff is pretty cheap), and the whole idea is to be able to pop in a new CD when you get tired of the old one and do so very easily. But for something like an MP3 radio, TiVo, Dreamcast, HDTV tuner, etc., this way is almost perfect! Two reasons for the almost: (1) you can't run a remote Dreamcast on a Pentium-120. You have to have a system with some might, and (2) be careful not to saturate your airways. Seriously, good-quality (e.g. HDTV @ even 480p) requires a heck of a lot of bandwidth. Direct connections would be so much better. Yeah, gigabit ethernet will handle HDTV; about ten 1080p streams (Ken is drooling). No need to even have enough RAM or CPU on each box to implement a TCP stack. Just enough for a bare minimum Ethernet frame plus a one-hop route protocol. Easy for the designers. Pressure people to get Linux drivers for stuff, too!
By the way: don't go shelling out that however-much-it-is for an HDTV tuner card just yet (unless it is totally flashable and has an FFT chip to spare). (Your handy MPEG decoder card will still work nicely.) 8VSB (the current HDTV standard), to put it mildly, might have to be slightly modified. (I'm purposely trying to be vague.)
Andover is fine, IMHO. Be thankful that they don't want their logo on every page (is their logo anywhere on Slashdot? I know it's on Freshmeat) like other acquired sites.
As for rejected stories, I have submitted several stories only to have the opposite of what I thought would happen actually happen. Well anyway, why not keep some stories "in queue", especially if they are not breaking news? There have been several days recently where new stories were scarce, and then several days where I almost missed something new because there were so many stories. Just because you can't post it today doesn't mean it should not be posted ever. Basically what I'm running in circles around is that stories, unless they're total crap, should never really be rejected. Maybe "set aside" would be better. Then, on boring days, we can eat leftovers.
With such an incredible amount of traffic on Slashdot, I often wonder why Slashdot never gets Slashdotted. If only 25% of readers actually click on off-site links, and that other site gets/.ed, that means that the Slashdot servers must be able to handle more than 4 times as much traffic. In some cases, the number of images matters. Slashdot has a relatively small number of images, compared to most sites. (quick nslookup shows that the ad server is on a different site in the Slashdot subnet.) You have the story topic icons (most of which are probably in the user's cache anyway), the Slashdot logo (ditto), and a few bullet-type graphics (ditto). The end result is that probably 99% of the traffic off of Slashdot is text. But most (all?) is dynamic, in some way (even static pages like the FAQ are server-preprocessed). So huge server load but not tremendous bandwidth (relative terms!). Look what I've done: I answered my own question again.
About users: how many users have not logged in in years? I know of no way for a user to get off of Slashdot. So maybe you have twice the uids, but do you really have twice the users?
I didn't know before I got introduced to Slashdot that Perl scripts could ever emulate albino elephants (or albino monkeys, or uber geese (or circus geese), not to mention orange squirrels). Excellent scripting, Rob!
Can I have some of your trained squirrels?
btw, cool site, but I'm sure you've heard that before...
Sure that works (I've done it with many other MS programs), but it's not something an end user is supposed to do. And okay, so what, it works. What about changing the entire interface? Why was (is) NetMarket (name?) so cool? Well anyway, that was just one item that is often either overlooked or evanuated at the wrong level.
Netscape's problems was the dominant reason that the Mozilla project was started. Just say for a moment that Mozilla is just as bad as Netscape. But look! Mozilla is in alpha stage! They have tons of bugs to sort out, and it is slow because of all the debugging code in there. The fact that it is open-source adds major karma points to Mozilla. Don't like something about Mozilla? Well you can go fix the source!
I personally said nothing about throbber icons (though that was on my mind). But at the heart of the matter is that the required changes involve messing around in the Windows registry (ickhhh) and changing some undocumented (or insanely underdocumented) key.
Mozilla was always skinnable. (Well I don't know about the always part, but it was part of the original plan.) The only problem is how hard it is do skin it if you aren't a graphic artist:-(. (If they made it any easier, everyone would think that Mozilla is bad just because the skin they created looks horrid.)
Add 1 to the reasons I think IE is a piece of #!$@: The ISP customizations can't be removed easily. RANT ON. AOL supplied their own "version" of IE. They slap it on whether you have IE already or not. In the title bar: "(page title) - Microsoft Internet Explorer provided by America Online". IE's (download-and-)install windows, besides from being suspiciously broken, all have "AOL" in their title bars. But a quick (or not so quick) trip to Windows Update (doesn't do much good if you visit it from Linux, MacOS, BeOS, Netscape, etc.) fixes it. Now Microsoft says that you can remove IE from Windows. Now how come Windows Update updates IE??? RANT OFF.
I don't want your list of reasons. I have my own.
Anybody know if vanilla Netscape is/was skinnable? (i.e., no Mozilla)
All except the exact number, we have known that Mozilla will be Netscape 6.0. I mean, why would Netscape spend so much effort on a remake of their browser that is destined to turn out better than their browser and then not make it be their browser?
But remember, people, Mozilla still has lots of work yet to be done. But the end product will be an absolutely awesome, open-source browser.
This post powered by Mozilla M13. This poster can't wait for crypto in Mozilla.
From my own experience, VNC on the Mac is much more buggy than VNC on other platforms. The Linux (Unix) server is almost perfect (just one minor modification makes it run GNOME or KDE); the Windows server works fine for most things (if you don't have it poll the whole screen (which is slow) (and sometimes even if you do) some text elements in some windows won't get updated right, but it is still quite useful), and the Mac server looked like a bad hack. Maybe that is just my experience, but it crashing on every connect just doesn't seem like reliability to me. AT&T probably has a new version (the direct link is VNC - Virtual Network Computing from AT&T Laboratories Cambridge, courtesy of Google; check out their logo for today!).
VNC is really cool. It does not limit you to the X protocol, although the way the Unix server works is basically acting like an X server to X clients and a VNC server to VNC clients. This means it can work on OSes that have a closed window-update system, like Windows and Mac OS. It just polls windows for changes, if necessary, or updates windows when they receive a message, or whatever technique it wants (the two mentioned apply to the Windows server).Its advantages over an X server are that (1) the desktop is client-independant; you don't have to be running an OS on the client for which an X server has been written (there is a Java client!), and (2) for the Unix servers, if the client crashes or disconnects for any reason, the desktop stays as it was. An X server would dump all applications and you would lose your data, and (3) its compression rocks (better in many cases than GIF, and for a dynamic image!).
Yes, with a fast enough (and low-latency) link, you can play remote Quake. But why bother? Get your own!
Mozilla is still obviously in development. Some of these bugs are extremely minor (e.g., doing this sequence of 15 actions causes image timing in animated GIFs to be off by 53 ms or something like that). Mozilla is not expected to be released in a few days; no, try >6 months. It has far fewer bucks behind it. And how many of those bugs are ACTIVE?
It has something to do with the kernel and hard drive of my mind. It's really a kind of battle between the two, you see. My kernel is very Linux-like. It likes to stay up for a long time (you know, great uptime==something good, for some reason). In fact, when I start getting into the >20 hour range, it starts all sorts of 'w' processes just to check on its uptime and try to exceed my personal record, which was unfourtunately corrupted during my last fsck. See, that's why my hard drive wants a reset. The kernel (I run a devel kernel) has sorta fscked up (no pun intended) fs code. Sometimes a growing file will have its blocks wind up in some other file (this happens a lot when I'm reading for school. I guess that's why I have a strong association between mathematics and English. And maybe it's why I can never seem to get my periods on the right (or left) side of my parentheses (and why I like to nest them too)). So my hard drive (and process 1, 'kenneth') want to reset often. In fact, shutdown -fr is my favorite command. But the kernel doesn't like that. It wants big numbers for that uptime. It wants to get back something for making that a 32-bit integer! (RAM is not very plentiful in the box in my brain. Someday I'll get it upgraded...)
To top it off, pid 1 likes to make fun of the kernel. It gets an especially big laugh when the kernel asks for more disk cache. "I could use a little cash myself!" Ha ha, okay that wasn't very funny.
I'm suprised that I haven't had to boot off the install disk and do an FTP install in a whole entire 14 years! They must have some nice new features in the latest version! Well at least I can do some upgrades while up, but kernel compiles just load me down after some time. So that's what I do when I sleep; I get the latest kernel and recompile. Then, a few hours before I get up, there goes shutdown -fr. If I am awakened and the fsck on my either my/usr or/home partitions isn't done yet, I am not in a very good mood. I usually either just skip the mounting (especially if it's the/home partition; I can do without that at 5:30 in the morning) or force a mount of an unclean filesystem. Right there: the origin of almost all bad days. Where do the rest come from? Easy: a bug in the latest kernel. Of course I'm the first to notice, and sometimes I'll get a prepatch and take advantage of a particularly boring class to recompile. Of course I have to doze off for a little while to reboot, but I almost always forget to rerun kenlo (the Kenneth Loader). Good excuse for another reboot, er, snooze!
Your own FTP server would do nicely. Log all incoming files in a special place and then set up a cron job that mirrors these files to the other servers (you'd have to use a special user whose transfers were not logged in the same way so you wouldn't be mirroring hundreds of times). Similarly, a delete request would pass to the other servers.
There is quite likely an FTP server available that is flexible enough with its logging to do this. The capability would not have to be in the FTP server; it could be a script that searched the server's log files. However, implementing it on the server side allows you to ensure that the mirroring is accurate and keep any parsing scripts from worrying about parsing date/times (unless you have a server that logs in Unix ticks; in that case you would just store the tick when the script last mirrored it, and only be concerned about the transfers after that date).
I would suggest running an rsync every so often just to make sure.
The key here would be to ensure that everything you are doing is accurate. This is a "high-profile" environment. You might want to consider something other than FTP, e.g., HTTP POSTs. (Yes, there are problems with using this method to upload large files. (No progress indication.) However, considering most users will be on a fast network, this should not be too much of a problem. A Java(Script) applet that broke the upload into managable chunks and displayed the progress to the user might cut it.) An HTTP POST would let you keep track of other information along with the file, such as specific user comments.
Keith Winstein, the third-place winner in the 1999 Intel Science Talent Search (see results here), developed a Perl script that stenographically encoded a message in some text. It relied on a big dictionary of words and their exact (or almost exact) synonyms, and encoded the information into the text by replacing a word in the text that had synonyms in this list by another word, and the choice of which word conveyed the information. It had some problems (for example, one hundred is a "synonym" for one thousand), and it could encode very little data in a small bit of text, but yes, it worked. Unfourtunately I can't find his web page. It's not on google, metacrawler, or any other sites I've tried:-(.
I met the guy at the fair in Washington DC. The thing looked pretty cool. I also downloaded it but lost it some time ago.
I will post my mods sans my password:-) up on my website here when I get around to it. (Up to an hour after comment post). Meanwhile, you can still get the original ball right here.
Up at my website (err, here) is a mirror of some software written for Linux (err, Unix) to allow you to tunnel IP packets through the service. Yes, it's real. You may run into some trouble with using pthreads. I am actively working on the code. Does anyone know the issues with pthreads and glibc 2.1 (it compiles fine; it segfaults after running for about a minute; I've traced this to one specific function call)? By the way, it's written in C++ (yuck for me; one virtual function made it not work at all for a while).
Just because AOL is generally considered a "newbie's" "ISP" doesn't mean that all of its users are newbies. It also does not mean that none of them use Unix. I am not a newbie, I use Linux, and I happen to use AOL as an ISP for other reasons.
The great thing about this software is it is not at all intrusive on your system. Just one client program, maybe a shell script (haven't figured that much out yet), and a network interface. Maybe you might have to change your default route. Big deal. It doesn't mess with apmd. It'll leave cron alone. You can keep your dial-up settings for Quake. Very nice.
Not that it really matters that much, but mkLinux runs on the Mach microkernel. So that shows that at least somebody who knows Linux also knows Mach. (Still won't make it any better to port stuff from it. But then again, why not write an implementation of the Mach API (or whatever they call it) for Linux? Heck, throw in the BSD API calls while you're at it, and then the only thing that is still lacking is binary translation, which couldn't be that hard but would be one huge pain. But it would be almost source-compatible.)
One of the things that I actually liked about Windows was its consistant (crappy or not; let's not argue about that here) interface, its "look and feel". All (err, most) Windows applications, no matter how bad they worked, looked vaguely the same. Everyone (okay, discounting LiteStep stuff) who programs for Windows gets the same API. You get a window that looks standard (okay, maybe kinda dull), a standard menu bar, toolbar, status bar, etc. There are little nice things about it, too, such as a uniform behavior of taskbar buttons (on GNOME you must do show-hide twice to raise an invisible window with the mouse (yes, you can do Alt-Tab, but even that is not as good as Windows's Alt-Tab)) (KDE thankfully does raise by taskbar click). Configuration for how all windows look is done in one place (the Display control panel). Maybe it isn't the individual elements that make the Windows UI nice; it is how it is all integrated. Even with KDE (which I think is nicest as far as "Windows emulation"), plain-old X apps don't, and can't, have the smae look and feel as straight KDE apps. And then there are the different desktop environments (someone suggested that this phrase should be in quotes; maybe that's a good idea) available for Unix (Linux), i.e., CDE(Motif), KDE(Qt), and GNOME(GTK). "So what if it's crap; it's all the same crap." -- Me
Don't go ranting and saying that I support Windows and must be burned:-). I'm just saying that Microsoft actually did get some things right. I could write a very long post on the many ways I hate Windows, but I like its consistent UI. This is one thing Linux (err, Unix) badly needs to have to really catch up and overtake Windows. Now MacOS is a different story, especially with Aqua. Man, why can't they release the source for that thing? I'd port it to Linux! (Shouldn't be that hard considering that the kernel is BSDish and Darwin is supposedly open-source.)
We were all newbies once (expect the people who were not). This still applies to some people who have been using Unix for a long time. From my experience, reading the fine man page has given me a new insight into how the command works. Of course there are really bad man pages, but on the average, man pages are Informative, Interesting, Insightful, and sometimes even Funny. As well as getting the run-down on the command in question, the man page (sometimes) lists related commands. When I was a newbie, knowing only about 5 commands and none of them well, man would uncover a new, possibly useful, command that occasionally helped me but generally just made me feel more comfortable with my system. For example, I always wanted to log the output of, say, make, but also be able to see it at the same time. less can sometimes do this for me, but I discovered tee, a command specifically designed for this purpose, by following the related commands on many different man pages.
For the AC: I would have moderated you up but I already used too many points in this discussion. Consider this a hint for any lazy moderator.
Kenneth
Re:Can I post release info to /. now too?
on
Linux Kernel 2.3.41
·
· Score: 1
Okay, never mind, this is too deep to start any discussion. I gotta watch how many times I click in the reply lists:-).
Re:Can I post release info to /. now too?
on
Linux Kernel 2.3.41
·
· Score: 1
So how is this more important than 2.1-2.2 or any other devel-to-stable releases? (Yeah I know, just wanted to bring up a discussion...)
You moderators sure don't know what's flamebait. Simple reason: No flames. Hah.
I have recently been required to describe what the heck a "kerenl" is to some people in close relation to myself. Of course there is the obvious for us geeks, but there are two other possible interpretations that I can think of:
Kernel as a rank in the military -- Why would I want one of them on my computer? And I guess the military has very high expectations of these kernels, because they come out with new kernels every couple of weeks. For some reason, some higher-ranking officers don't replace their kernels that often; maybe they like them. But the new kernels have lots of new personality features, and they are even more tough on those below them. There even development kernels, the kernels who have not yet completed their training but are available for use by those of higher rank who might want to try out some of the new features before everyone else, but there is the possability of an occasional slip-up, possibly causing an "oops!" or even a "panic". Worse yet, these development kernels can cause corruption in the system below them. Some kernels, for some officers, have run for a very long time in some of the military systems, and I am very suprised that they don't get tired and fall to the ground. I guess that's the problem withh kernels in the Bill Branch of the military, but the Open Source troops seem to have little problem with this. Well the Open Source commanding officers get to have an in-depth look at how their kernels are trained, so it is possible that this allows the officers at higher ranks to make better decisions about them.
Corn kernels -- Yeah, that fits on my hard drive. I spend endless hours in front of my computer monitor^D^D^D^D^D^Dagnifying glass, examining the various ridges and structures on and in the kernel. I occasionally tap at the kernel to see how the structure responds to stresses. It seems to occupy a lot of people for many hours at a time examining and prodding at these kernels. Sometimes, at lower magnification, the surface of the kernel begins to form the shapes of letters, when viewed by the trained eye. Untrained people are cluless. At higher magnifications pictures sometimes become visible, appearing similar to pictures found in everyday life. Through careful prodding through the prodboard one is sometimes able to coax these pictures into changing. The "mouse" is a fairly new addition to the interface used to study these kernels; it is unknown to us how exactly it influences the kernel without eating it. Micros kernels have always showed a lot of detail initially, but viewing the kernel at a higher magnification showed minute impurities that would cause the kernel to split apart relatively soon after the investigation began. The kernel has remained much the same despite many advances in the apparent detail and complexity as viewed at low magnification. Macintosh kernels started out rathar bland-looking, but they contained many useful features from the beginning that allowed studying to be significantly more efficient. However, until recently, the smaller details of the Macintosh kernels were almost as bad as the Micros kernels. In recent years Macintosh kernels have developed a much more detailed structure at any magnification, and as an added bonus when replacing kernels, some have even begun to taste good (Yum.) Linukernels are regularly updated, but older kernels are still so interesting to look at that people have kept them around for a long time. The development kernels sometimes fall apart due to structural problems, but in general they have offered much more detail. People staring at Linukernels are generally happy with how stable their kernels are and how nice it is to be able to know how the kernels were made. Some people tailor their Linukernels to their specific tastes, something which is usually not possible for investigators of other kernels. The report must be cut short here becuase we are still investigating the role of the "printer" in the kernel investigations. Preliminary findings indicate that often the printer is used to capture a view of the kernel to share with others, but often the output of the printer is much different than the view on the magnifying glass. This may be attributed to a special scanning structure that is able to examine different parts of the kernel and print the results. That is all the information we have at this time.
Netfilter (at least in 2.3.40) is optional. You can switch a little flag in the Networking config section that looks something like "use netfilter". Help on that says that if it is not enabled, you get good old ipchains etc.
Unfourtunately, I don't think you can enable both at the same time.
Windows has contained OS code from the very beginning; try DOS. Ever wondered why such a primitive OS like DOS had multitasking by way of TSRs? I bet that code was ripped right out of (fill in any OS that Microsoft could bribe, er, steal the code from here). Win 3.x's WM code? Straight from _____. So why was it always so unstable, bad, etc.?
Because the lame "programmers" at MS guessed on how to interface that code with the little bits and pieces that they wrote. Maybe a pointer type isn't the same but is pretty close. Or maybe one function assumed that some other was called first, but the MS developers didn't make sure of that. In such a big piece of ____ like Windows, it's pretty hard not to _____ up.
So why do so many people use Windows, and so many programs are writted for it? Because underneath the cobwebs straining to hold it all together is the rock-solid code right from the core of ____.
Ken
btw, this is posted from mozilla M12. I now know where MS got its code for IE5 from... Just kidding.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming the stand-alone box system works for the consumer, why waste all the money for a lot of similar components, while also having a PC that can do all? The logical next step is one server PC (ahem, what OS???) sitting somewhere inconspicuous, and a mini wireless network that provides all the other stuff? Okay, this kind of system isn't going to be the best for, say, a CD player, where you don't really need much processing power at all (even DSP stuff is pretty cheap), and the whole idea is to be able to pop in a new CD when you get tired of the old one and do so very easily. But for something like an MP3 radio, TiVo, Dreamcast, HDTV tuner, etc., this way is almost perfect! Two reasons for the almost: (1) you can't run a remote Dreamcast on a Pentium-120. You have to have a system with some might, and (2) be careful not to saturate your airways. Seriously, good-quality (e.g. HDTV @ even 480p) requires a heck of a lot of bandwidth. Direct connections would be so much better. Yeah, gigabit ethernet will handle HDTV; about ten 1080p streams (Ken is drooling). No need to even have enough RAM or CPU on each box to implement a TCP stack. Just enough for a bare minimum Ethernet frame plus a one-hop route protocol. Easy for the designers. Pressure people to get Linux drivers for stuff, too!
By the way: don't go shelling out that however-much-it-is for an HDTV tuner card just yet (unless it is totally flashable and has an FFT chip to spare). (Your handy MPEG decoder card will still work nicely.) 8VSB (the current HDTV standard), to put it mildly, might have to be slightly modified. (I'm purposely trying to be vague.)
Having fun?
Kenneth
Andover is fine, IMHO. Be thankful that they don't want their logo on every page (is their logo anywhere on Slashdot? I know it's on Freshmeat) like other acquired sites.
As for rejected stories, I have submitted several stories only to have the opposite of what I thought would happen actually happen. Well anyway, why not keep some stories "in queue", especially if they are not breaking news? There have been several days recently where new stories were scarce, and then several days where I almost missed something new because there were so many stories. Just because you can't post it today doesn't mean it should not be posted ever. Basically what I'm running in circles around is that stories, unless they're total crap, should never really be rejected. Maybe "set aside" would be better. Then, on boring days, we can eat leftovers.
With such an incredible amount of traffic on Slashdot, I often wonder why Slashdot never gets Slashdotted. If only 25% of readers actually click on off-site links, and that other site gets /.ed, that means that the Slashdot servers must be able to handle more than 4 times as much traffic. In some cases, the number of images matters. Slashdot has a relatively small number of images, compared to most sites. (quick nslookup shows that the ad server is on a different site in the Slashdot subnet.) You have the story topic icons (most of which are probably in the user's cache anyway), the Slashdot logo (ditto), and a few bullet-type graphics (ditto). The end result is that probably 99% of the traffic off of Slashdot is text. But most (all?) is dynamic, in some way (even static pages like the FAQ are server-preprocessed). So huge server load but not tremendous bandwidth (relative terms!). Look what I've done: I answered my own question again.
About users: how many users have not logged in in years? I know of no way for a user to get off of Slashdot. So maybe you have twice the uids, but do you really have twice the users?
I didn't know before I got introduced to Slashdot that Perl scripts could ever emulate albino elephants (or albino monkeys, or uber geese (or circus geese), not to mention orange squirrels). Excellent scripting, Rob!
Can I have some of your trained squirrels?
btw, cool site, but I'm sure you've heard that before...
Sure that works (I've done it with many other MS programs), but it's not something an end user is supposed to do. And okay, so what, it works. What about changing the entire interface? Why was (is) NetMarket (name?) so cool? Well anyway, that was just one item that is often either overlooked or evanuated at the wrong level.
i had other complaints too. but so what.
Netscape's problems was the dominant reason that the Mozilla project was started. Just say for a moment that Mozilla is just as bad as Netscape. But look! Mozilla is in alpha stage! They have tons of bugs to sort out, and it is slow because of all the debugging code in there. The fact that it is open-source adds major karma points to Mozilla. Don't like something about Mozilla? Well you can go fix the source!
I personally said nothing about throbber icons (though that was on my mind). But at the heart of the matter is that the required changes involve messing around in the Windows registry (ickhhh) and changing some undocumented (or insanely underdocumented) key.
Mozilla was always skinnable. (Well I don't know about the always part, but it was part of the original plan.) The only problem is how hard it is do skin it if you aren't a graphic artist :-(. (If they made it any easier, everyone would think that Mozilla is bad just because the skin they created looks horrid.)
Add 1 to the reasons I think IE is a piece of #!$@: The ISP customizations can't be removed easily. RANT ON. AOL supplied their own "version" of IE. They slap it on whether you have IE already or not. In the title bar: "(page title) - Microsoft Internet Explorer provided by America Online". IE's (download-and-)install windows, besides from being suspiciously broken, all have "AOL" in their title bars. But a quick (or not so quick) trip to Windows Update (doesn't do much good if you visit it from Linux, MacOS, BeOS, Netscape, etc.) fixes it. Now Microsoft says that you can remove IE from Windows. Now how come Windows Update updates IE??? RANT OFF.
I don't want your list of reasons. I have my own.
Anybody know if vanilla Netscape is/was skinnable? (i.e., no Mozilla)
All except the exact number, we have known that Mozilla will be Netscape 6.0. I mean, why would Netscape spend so much effort on a remake of their browser that is destined to turn out better than their browser and then not make it be their browser?
But remember, people, Mozilla still has lots of work yet to be done. But the end product will be an absolutely awesome, open-source browser.
This post powered by Mozilla M13. This poster can't wait for crypto in Mozilla.
Kenneth
From my own experience, VNC on the Mac is much more buggy than VNC on other platforms. The Linux (Unix) server is almost perfect (just one minor modification makes it run GNOME or KDE); the Windows server works fine for most things (if you don't have it poll the whole screen (which is slow) (and sometimes even if you do) some text elements in some windows won't get updated right, but it is still quite useful), and the Mac server looked like a bad hack. Maybe that is just my experience, but it crashing on every connect just doesn't seem like reliability to me. AT&T probably has a new version (the direct link is VNC - Virtual Network Computing from AT&T Laboratories Cambridge, courtesy of Google; check out their logo for today!).
VNC is really cool. It does not limit you to the X protocol, although the way the Unix server works is basically acting like an X server to X clients and a VNC server to VNC clients. This means it can work on OSes that have a closed window-update system, like Windows and Mac OS. It just polls windows for changes, if necessary, or updates windows when they receive a message, or whatever technique it wants (the two mentioned apply to the Windows server).Its advantages over an X server are that (1) the desktop is client-independant; you don't have to be running an OS on the client for which an X server has been written (there is a Java client!), and (2) for the Unix servers, if the client crashes or disconnects for any reason, the desktop stays as it was. An X server would dump all applications and you would lose your data, and (3) its compression rocks (better in many cases than GIF, and for a dynamic image!).
Yes, with a fast enough (and low-latency) link, you can play remote Quake. But why bother? Get your own!
Kenneth
Try viewing the ZDNet page in Linux, then Windows. The following is straight out of "View Source":
- linux.css" TITLE="ZDNet Planet Styles - Linux">'); . css" TITLE="ZDNet Planet Styles">'); - ns.css" TITLE="ZDNet Planet Styles - Netscape">');
if (OpSys == "Linux") {
document.write('<LINK REL="STYLESHEET" TYPE="text/css" HREF="http://www.zdnet.com/graphics/styles/planet
} else {
document.write('<LINK REL="STYLESHEET" TYPE="text/css" HREF="http://www.zdnet.com/graphics/styles/planet
if (isNav4PC) {
document.write('<LINK REL="STYLESHEET" TYPE="text/css" HREF="http://www.zdnet.com/graphics/styles/planet
}
}
Mozilla is still obviously in development. Some of these bugs are extremely minor (e.g., doing this sequence of 15 actions causes image timing in animated GIFs to be off by 53 ms or something like that). Mozilla is not expected to be released in a few days; no, try >6 months. It has far fewer bucks behind it. And how many of those bugs are ACTIVE?
Ken
To top it off, pid 1 likes to make fun of the kernel. It gets an especially big laugh when the kernel asks for more disk cache. "I could use a little cash myself!" Ha ha, okay that wasn't very funny.
I'm suprised that I haven't had to boot off the install disk and do an FTP install in a whole entire 14 years! They must have some nice new features in the latest version! Well at least I can do some upgrades while up, but kernel compiles just load me down after some time. So that's what I do when I sleep; I get the latest kernel and recompile. Then, a few hours before I get up, there goes shutdown -fr. If I am awakened and the fsck on my either my /usr or /home partitions isn't done yet, I am not in a very good mood. I usually either just skip the mounting (especially if it's the /home partition; I can do without that at 5:30 in the morning) or force a mount of an unclean filesystem. Right there: the origin of almost all bad days. Where do the rest come from? Easy: a bug in the latest kernel. Of course I'm the first to notice, and sometimes I'll get a prepatch and take advantage of a particularly boring class to recompile. Of course I have to doze off for a little while to reboot, but I almost always forget to rerun kenlo (the Kenneth Loader). Good excuse for another reboot, er, snooze!
Kenneth
Your own FTP server would do nicely. Log all incoming files in a special place and then set up a cron job that mirrors these files to the other servers (you'd have to use a special user whose transfers were not logged in the same way so you wouldn't be mirroring hundreds of times). Similarly, a delete request would pass to the other servers.
There is quite likely an FTP server available that is flexible enough with its logging to do this. The capability would not have to be in the FTP server; it could be a script that searched the server's log files. However, implementing it on the server side allows you to ensure that the mirroring is accurate and keep any parsing scripts from worrying about parsing date/times (unless you have a server that logs in Unix ticks; in that case you would just store the tick when the script last mirrored it, and only be concerned about the transfers after that date).
I would suggest running an rsync every so often just to make sure.
The key here would be to ensure that everything you are doing is accurate. This is a "high-profile" environment. You might want to consider something other than FTP, e.g., HTTP POSTs. (Yes, there are problems with using this method to upload large files. (No progress indication.) However, considering most users will be on a fast network, this should not be too much of a problem. A Java(Script) applet that broke the upload into managable chunks and displayed the progress to the user might cut it.) An HTTP POST would let you keep track of other information along with the file, such as specific user comments.
Kenneth
This is definately a geek thing:
Keith Winstein, the third-place winner in the 1999 Intel Science Talent Search (see results here), developed a Perl script that stenographically encoded a message in some text. It relied on a big dictionary of words and their exact (or almost exact) synonyms, and encoded the information into the text by replacing a word in the text that had synonyms in this list by another word, and the choice of which word conveyed the information. It had some problems (for example, one hundred is a "synonym" for one thousand), and it could encode very little data in a small bit of text, but yes, it worked. Unfourtunately I can't find his web page. It's not on google, metacrawler, or any other sites I've tried :-(.
I met the guy at the fair in Washington DC. The thing looked pretty cool. I also downloaded it but lost it some time ago.
Kenneth
I will post my mods sans my password :-) up on my website here when I get around to it. (Up to an hour after comment post). Meanwhile, you can still get the original ball right here.
Ken
The problem is, you get used to rm asking you for confirmation, so when you hop over to a system that doesn't have this in place, you could be toast.
Up at my website (err, here) is a mirror of some software written for Linux (err, Unix) to allow you to tunnel IP packets through the service. Yes, it's real. You may run into some trouble with using pthreads. I am actively working on the code. Does anyone know the issues with pthreads and glibc 2.1 (it compiles fine; it segfaults after running for about a minute; I've traced this to one specific function call)? By the way, it's written in C++ (yuck for me; one virtual function made it not work at all for a while).
Just because AOL is generally considered a "newbie's" "ISP" doesn't mean that all of its users are newbies. It also does not mean that none of them use Unix. I am not a newbie, I use Linux, and I happen to use AOL as an ISP for other reasons.
The great thing about this software is it is not at all intrusive on your system. Just one client program, maybe a shell script (haven't figured that much out yet), and a network interface. Maybe you might have to change your default route. Big deal. It doesn't mess with apmd. It'll leave cron alone. You can keep your dial-up settings for Quake. Very nice.
Kenneth
That's idiot basic. Try this:
#include <stdio.h>void main(){while(1)printf("In reality I'm an obfuscated version of msvcrt.dll");}
I hope that works right :-)
Not that it really matters that much, but mkLinux runs on the Mach microkernel. So that shows that at least somebody who knows Linux also knows Mach. (Still won't make it any better to port stuff from it. But then again, why not write an implementation of the Mach API (or whatever they call it) for Linux? Heck, throw in the BSD API calls while you're at it, and then the only thing that is still lacking is binary translation, which couldn't be that hard but would be one huge pain. But it would be almost source-compatible.)
Ken (cluelessly?)
One of the things that I actually liked about Windows was its consistant (crappy or not; let's not argue about that here) interface, its "look and feel". All (err, most) Windows applications, no matter how bad they worked, looked vaguely the same. Everyone (okay, discounting LiteStep stuff) who programs for Windows gets the same API. You get a window that looks standard (okay, maybe kinda dull), a standard menu bar, toolbar, status bar, etc. There are little nice things about it, too, such as a uniform behavior of taskbar buttons (on GNOME you must do show-hide twice to raise an invisible window with the mouse (yes, you can do Alt-Tab, but even that is not as good as Windows's Alt-Tab)) (KDE thankfully does raise by taskbar click). Configuration for how all windows look is done in one place (the Display control panel). Maybe it isn't the individual elements that make the Windows UI nice; it is how it is all integrated. Even with KDE (which I think is nicest as far as "Windows emulation"), plain-old X apps don't, and can't, have the smae look and feel as straight KDE apps. And then there are the different desktop environments (someone suggested that this phrase should be in quotes; maybe that's a good idea) available for Unix (Linux), i.e., CDE(Motif), KDE(Qt), and GNOME(GTK). "So what if it's crap; it's all the same crap." -- Me
Don't go ranting and saying that I support Windows and must be burned :-). I'm just saying that Microsoft actually did get some things right. I could write a very long post on the many ways I hate Windows, but I like its consistent UI. This is one thing Linux (err, Unix) badly needs to have to really catch up and overtake Windows. Now MacOS is a different story, especially with Aqua. Man, why can't they release the source for that thing? I'd port it to Linux! (Shouldn't be that hard considering that the kernel is BSDish and Darwin is supposedly open-source.)
"Whatever,"
Ken
We were all newbies once (expect the people who were not). This still applies to some people who have been using Unix for a long time. From my experience, reading the fine man page has given me a new insight into how the command works. Of course there are really bad man pages, but on the average, man pages are Informative, Interesting, Insightful, and sometimes even Funny. As well as getting the run-down on the command in question, the man page (sometimes) lists related commands. When I was a newbie, knowing only about 5 commands and none of them well, man would uncover a new, possibly useful, command that occasionally helped me but generally just made me feel more comfortable with my system. For example, I always wanted to log the output of, say, make, but also be able to see it at the same time. less can sometimes do this for me, but I discovered tee, a command specifically designed for this purpose, by following the related commands on many different man pages.
For the AC: I would have moderated you up but I already used too many points in this discussion. Consider this a hint for any lazy moderator.
Kenneth
Okay, never mind, this is too deep to start any discussion. I gotta watch how many times I click in the reply lists :-).
So how is this more important than 2.1-2.2 or any other devel-to-stable releases? (Yeah I know, just wanted to bring up a discussion...)
You moderators sure don't know what's flamebait. Simple reason: No flames. Hah.
Ken
I have recently been required to describe what the heck a "kerenl" is to some people in close relation to myself. Of course there is the obvious for us geeks, but there are two other possible interpretations that I can think of:
And we make Beowulf clusters out of these things?
Netfilter (at least in 2.3.40) is optional. You can switch a little flag in the Networking config section that looks something like "use netfilter". Help on that says that if it is not enabled, you get good old ipchains etc.
Unfourtunately, I don't think you can enable both at the same time.
Thanks; the docs I had weren't very clear on this.
Windows has contained OS code from the very beginning; try DOS. Ever wondered why such a primitive OS like DOS had multitasking by way of TSRs? I bet that code was ripped right out of (fill in any OS that Microsoft could bribe, er, steal the code from here). Win 3.x's WM code? Straight from _____. So why was it always so unstable, bad, etc.?
Because the lame "programmers" at MS guessed on how to interface that code with the little bits and pieces that they wrote. Maybe a pointer type isn't the same but is pretty close. Or maybe one function assumed that some other was called first, but the MS developers didn't make sure of that. In such a big piece of ____ like Windows, it's pretty hard not to _____ up.
So why do so many people use Windows, and so many programs are writted for it? Because underneath the cobwebs straining to hold it all together is the rock-solid code right from the core of ____.
Ken
btw, this is posted from mozilla M12. I now know where MS got its code for IE5 from... Just kidding.