Posts by Brian Miller 1317 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jul 2007
I'm glad to see that Dell is loading Solaris. It is a great OS, and I have had better performance on Solaris than Linux.
The Solaris commands aren't "funny," they are standard. If you used more AT&T-derived Unixes, like HP-UX and AIX, you would see that they are very close to each other. It is Linux that is kind of "out there."
Do you realize that if access to the internet were to be restricted to 14.4K, all Web 2.0 companies would be out of business overnight? There wouldn't be enough bandwidth to serve up all the ads and other assorted garbage. The web browsers would be redesigned to acquire the page's text first, and then show images as a last resort. What a difference that would make! The sites would have to focus on content and service, and not try to tatoo the user's retinas with advertising.
When I lose something, say, a watch, I have to purchase another watch. I don't get it for free. Therefore, if you lose your software, you must buy a second copy. As stated in the article, the computer in question has neither COA sticker or OEM restore disks. Therefore, its become a blank box. Who really knows what the machine had on it in the first place?
Unfortunately, consumers don't jump for Linux. According to surfing statistics, Mac has increased its share at the expense of Linux. And both of them together are less than 10% of the web surfers.
Think a moment: A moth is used to run a helicopter. Remember how moths are attracted to light? Right. The hacks who came to cover the event would attract Robo-Mothra with their camera flashes and it would be an unmitigated disaster. Plus, MechaMothra could only be used during the daytime.
#1, she's sitting on the trolley tracks. #2, that's a lamp, not a PC. #3, she doesn't know the difference, and neither do the judges.
I had initially thought that there was something great, like a PC whose circuit boards were made from a wood derivative. That would be something to celebrate. But no, we get a nut who wants something that goes with her My Little Pony collection.
Copper nanotubes.
The upstream ISPs shouldn't have waited until the Washington Post started running articles about the problem. One would hope that ISPs would be more dilligent about ditching offenders like RBN.
Of course, if RBN moves to China, the ISPs there could fall foul of Beijing's head-rolling policy. This year the Chinese authorities executed a fellow for unauthorized use of the Chinese Olympics logo on pirated Windows CDs. Perhaps after a few heads roll the Chinese ISPs will boot RBN out, too.
I want one. No, I want a rack of them. Of course I don't have anything that needs it, but that's besides the point. I want to be in the Top500 list. Me.
Oh, well, everyone can have dreams.
Seriously, I looked at the Toop500 list to see the systems that had the fewest number of processors. What was there? Hitachi with Power5+ processors. And now here is Power6. Oo la la!
Actually, there's a lot of Linux that is supported at Microsoft. Yes, believe it or not, Linux is an actual test platform for some of the products.
What did he do? If Microsoft isn't saying and he isn't saying, there's no way to know. Anyways, it wasn't for open source or using a Mac or anything like that.
MIT signed off on the design, ignored all the warnings, and had it built. Now they complain about it???
How to not have problems: Get a building designed that functions reliably like every other building. Build it just like all the other buildings. Go and use it like all the other buildings. No problems.
How to have problems: Get your incompetent architect drunk and high. Ignore the stupid design. Ignore all warnings from the construction company. Throw lots of money at it.
Stop compaining, MIT. One would think that with all of the supposedly smart people on your campus, there might be a thimbleful of common sense to know that this would be a disaster.
Gee whiz, you guys act like there's something wrong with using Windows and Linux for a gun mounted on a bunch of Tinker Toy parts. Come on now, if its good enough for Grandma then its good enough for the world's military forces. Right?
Actually, if the GPL were modified for non-military uses only, then that would force the military to use Ada for the base OS language. Remember the article on the security of Multics?
The capacitors are for storing electricity which would otherwise be immediately wasted. When electric vehicles brake, the motor is used as part of the braking mechanism. This means that the motor is running as a generator. The diesel-electric trains currently use huge resistor packs to convert electricity into heat. Instead of wasting that electricity, it can now be used to charge up the ultracapacitors. Then the ultracapacitors are tapped for starting the car instead of the batteries. Two minutes of run-time are more than enough to bring the car up to speed from a stop.
Look, kerosene lamps aren't that bad. When I was a kid my family used them as the main light source for a while. There are now kerosene lamps in the local hardware stores that throw out as much light as a 60W lightbulb. That is *not* a dim light!
The real problem here is not what lights the homes at night. The real problem is a complete lack of industrial base and just too much war and general violence in the region. Until the violence subsides completely, don't expect any miracles in regards to the economy. It is hard to build idustrial infrastructure, but its really easy to tear all of it down.
Oh, good show on this article! Ignore the naysaying ninnies, they haven't paid attention to squat!
Software design is old. "Patterns" are just some fancy names for stuff we've been doing all along. What always amazes me is that software design and engineering JUST ISN'T BEING TAUGHT!! The design books from COBOL are still relevant! Object-oriented languages sprouted in the 1960s, with Simula. And you guys make a pretense that you have something that is wonderful and good? Heck, no! Multics, from 1965, had more security than our current OSes!
Just because somebody did something today doesn't mean that they did something better than yesterday. For some reason what was learned DECADES ago isn't being taught today. WTF is wrong with the educators? They are supposed to prepare students to be effective programmers, not screw around on their little fief and produce morons. Students coming out of colleges can't even type, use an OS (Windows or Linux), or even hook up a computer to a KVM. Colleges are nothing but a debt machine.
What you knuckleheads don't understand IS THAT YOU AREN'T BEING PAID TO BE SCIENTISTS! You are being paid to get an application out the door. Got the concept?? Vocation and business go hand-in-hand. If the state of computer languages upsets you, go and design one yourself! And remember, it needs to get things done in the real world!
What's a good word for statistics masturbation? Vicent Flanders coined "flashturbation" for Flash overkill, but what can we coin for meaningless quotes of statistics?
There were no numbers or examples backing up anything in that article. If you start removing CPUs from an overall setup, of course the focus shifts to storage! But has the electricity usage increased or decreased from the previous setup??
The question should be, what's the price point where a Linux hacker will buy a Linux phone? IIRC, the Green Phone cost $600, while my Motorola Razor cost about $100. Guess which I bought.
A cheap development environment may be in order. What about a big ugly prototype box thing instead? A development environment is just that: for developing, not for having the caché of having a Linux phone.
Cell phone broadband connections are notorious for dumping connections. Sometimes the connection is good for a day, sometimes its good for a few minutes. Each time the conneciton is reset, the machine gets a new IP address, and its over a very wide range. So as the worm is probed, the researcher can dump his cell broadband connection, and then resume probing with a new IP.
No, Boeing has absolutely *no* plans to build any supersonic passenger jet. Our airlines want jets that are profitable. If all of you will remember, the Concorde were always subsidised by coach customers, rather like the first-class cabins on the Titanic were subsidised by the huddled masses in steerage.
EU/Airbus wants to waste the money? Go for it. And have fun making the hydrogen to fly the thing. (Let's see, how many fields of solar cells will be needed in the cloudy UK for fuel production? Hmmm....) Or maybe it will only fly out of the south of France, where they have sunlight.
OK, so maybe most people would miss the fact that a scarer's market is a dream for lousy products. Like AV products, I don't use Norton or McAfee any longer. They just suck so badly for a software developer.
And of course people need to be taught how to use the product. How do you really know if your AV kit is working properly? Where's the independent test for the end-user? It takes some skill to run security tools on a machine, but there's nothing to test the effectiveness of AV besides some "lab" which you personally don't know is effective or not.
Hello!!! Isn't it obvious that you get paid more when your skill are in demand? Isn't that obvious?
The actual IMF report isn't all that eye-opening. Yes, there is inequality in incomes. Yes, the rich have grown richer, and the report also says that the poor have also grown richer! And the rich, by and large, got rich through shrewd actions, instead of wasting their money. I remember there was an article in the paper about a homeless guy who became a millionaire. How? While he was homeless, he went into the library and started reading the financial investment books. Then he took his beggings and invested it! Lo and behold, a number of years down the road his investments rose to over a million dollars.
There is nothing in the IMF report about everybody becoming a ditch-digger to even things out. Looking at the last paragraph, they say that there needs to be more education and more exports. Well, duh, dudes! My dad was a librarian, and I'm a software engineer. Guess who gets paid more? I hope that other countries take education seriously, and build up a cadre of people with respectable skills. It will do the whole world good.
Very well written. In the FMJ category, you didn't mention the amazing wound ballistics of the US .223 round used in the Isn't-it-swell-Mattie-Mattell M-16. While it has a full metal jacked, it is fired with such a high velocity that once it hits flesh it begins to turn end-on-end.
Now, on to the original Times article: "Police marksmen shot Jean Charles de Menezes seven times in the head with hollow-point “dumdum” bullets designed to kill instantly, the Old Bailey was told yesterday." All bullets are designed to kill. Got it? Good! For heaven's sakes, its a deadly weapon! Hello, there's a reason for the term "deadly."
"Their usual and more powerful 9mm jacketed soft-point bullets would pass through the other side." Umm, I don't think that Adam Fresco of The Times has a clue what he's writing about. The cartridges have the same amount of powder, its just the bullet shape that is different. And with a head shot, there isn't enough mass to cause the bullet to stop in the head. There are very few rounds which dump all of their kinetic energy in a short distance. I really don't know why any department would not favor a hollow-point bullet. The hollow-point is designed to stop within the target, while round-nose bullets will typically over-penetrate and hit something (someone!) behind the target.
I'm glad that Lewis has a reasonable take on this.
According to the USPTO, "the term of a new patent is 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed". The patent was filed over 20 years ago, and seems to be six months deceased.
Also, since the patented concept is nothing new in a Motif/CDE desktop, why isn't IBM mentioned? Looks like a bash-Linux-only filing.
Hello! Reality time. If you don't like a country, don't do business with it.
I'll admit that its quite hard, though. The last time I went shopping for a lamp fixture that wasn't made in China, I failed. All of the products I looked at in several stores were made in China. We have no choice but to support the Chinese government with our money. I cannot choose to support a different country, because there is no choice for me to do that. Where is free will if there is no alternative choice? We have no free will. We are enslaved to China.
What's with the big fascination with virtual machine languages? Here you have scads of processor power, and yet its wasted by dropping VMs on everything. Java, .NET, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.: why? You want to do more with less? Use a real compiled language. C/C++ aren't the only things out there, you know!
Well, it looks like the BMW Isetta et. al. are going to make a comeback! Looks like an Isetta crossed with children's toys.
Actually, its a good thing that Nissan won't be releasing it. Do you how fast Linux would be loaded on that car and the robot would be playing Twisted Sister?
Um, Chuck, did you note that the photographs on the website showed Thylacines in zoos in the 1920s? "Postcard of Tasmanian Marsupial Wolf. Hobart Zoo c. 1928" would mean that the beastie was around then. The website says that they became extinct on the mainland 2000 year ago.
The website doesn't mention when the last Thylacine in captivity died.
The way these are set up is that an alias has a lot of names on it. It is just that, an alias. This doesn't go to a redistribution point like a proper mailing list, it just gets sent out automatically. Very probably they were using Exchange, and group aliases are the rule of operation. I don't even know if Exchange offers the option of a moderated mail list. I've seen a couple of huge email storms like this, and one of them took down the Exchange message server.
Here's an approximation of the first one:
"Who owns this distribution list? I'd like to get off of it."
"I'd like to know who owns it, too."
"Me too!"
"Me three!"
(and so on, and collectible t-shirts were made to commemorate the event.)
The other time was that someone sent an email to the wrong alias, which generated an amazing number of less-than-professional replies from supposed professionals.
Come on, do you think that the spook brain trust wouldn't have choice stuff like this? They have the Windows source code, for heaven's sakes! They've looked at the code, found that it sucks, and have been creating the very best in malware. What do you think the CIA would drop on someone's machine to get the info on them? Something from a script kiddie malware generator? Of course not. They'd use the best available!
So kudos to NSA for being the baddest malware writers out there.
At work I've been given a monster laptop with Vista Home Premium. Yes, a work machine with Home. Core 2 Duo with 2Gb RAM, and its not a fun experience. The first order of business was removing all of the garbage-ware from the system, and then trying to make Vista behave in a more reasonable manner.
It is not simply a matter of a few quirks in a new OS. The OS has been ridiculously divided into half a dozen different marketing schemes. This fragmentation is entirely unnecessary. The different schemes range from horribly crippled to slightly useable.
The laptop was a "factory refurbished" unit. Vista claimed that the key was inappropriate, and wanted another key. So I put in the key from the sticker on the bottom of the machine. Vista still didn't like that key. Finally I had to activate the machine over the phone. Once activation was completed, Vista claimed that it was non-genuine. A quick trip over to the MS Genuine page solved that.
I don't appreciate my experience with Vista. It used to be that all you had to contend with was loading drivers. I wish that I could run a different OS. Unfortunately, no. Its the only Vista machine at work, and its needed for development and testing. *sigh*
Why isn't it obvious that Linux and Apple aren't popular?
Apple never pursued the business market. They went after the artistic/educator market. The Mac-clone market was shut down. Apple really doesn't want to be in the computer business. If Apple was serious about the computer business, then it would be serious about software. Unfortunately, Apple just doesn't care. I have no idea why Apple bothers to sell computers. They should just dump that business and let someone else do it right.
Linux is a toy. It was made to be a toy. It is amazing how far this toy has gone, but its still a toy, and the development model is still haphazard. After all this time, what do we have to show for all of this? Is this something that is as reliable for the incompetent user as Windows? No.
Is Solaris 10 ready for the incompetent user? No. I just installed some recommended patches, and my system won't boot now. I have to boot in single-user mode and sort things out. If installing recommended patches kills a machine, then it definitely isn't ready for the messy masses. The Solaris updater should be able to figure out that a package shouldn't be loaded on a machine.
Do any of you realize what commercial Unix software costs? A heck of a lot!! Like an order of magnitude (at least) more than the equivalent Windows software.
Windows is the only OS out there which usually doesn't take a highly trained and/or motivated user to use it. Programmers write for it because its either all they know, or else because there isn't a market for other platforms. There's lots of market share, so the software is cheap. No wonder its a natural monopoly!
Any bright shiny thing will grab a moron's attention. Just wait, someone will be wearing sequins in the airport, and the bright sun will, of course, cause them to flash. The bomb recognition algorithm will be triggered, and mayhem will ensue.
When this story first broke, I was amazed that the security people hadn't learned the concept of what is, and what isn't, a bomb. Come on! Blinky lights don't equal a bomb! The idiots over-reacted like this with the Cartoon Network advertising sign, too.
Major bombs in the United States: passenger jet aircraft, and moving vans.
Blinky lights are not on that list, and have never been on any bomb list. Not even suicide bombers wear blinky lights!
David, I wouldn't characterize the masses at M$ like that at all. They are either shackled by the M$ frat-house culture, or they aren't "smart and get it done" type people in the first place. There are more of the latter than the former. M$ complains that it can't hire enough smart people, but when they hire smart people the smart people can't do anything that would actually make a difference. Thus the smart people leave M$ for somewhere they /can/ make a difference.
I see people complaining about Microsoft Windows all the time. But where the heck *are* the competitors? SCO decided to go lawsuit-happy. Novell didn't have anything, so they decided to buy Suse. Redhat has been plugging along.
Where is Sun's Solaris? They're pretty mum about it. They mainly blab about Java, but do they actually make a dime on it? (And Java isn't an OS anyways.) I just installed a bunch of patches in single-user mode. You expect Granny, et alia, to do that? No way.
I just looked up statistics for desktop OSes, based on browser hits (http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=5). Microsoft has about 90.4%, Mac has 6.2%, and Other has 3.4%. One year ago Microsoft was at 90.7%, Mac at 4.7%, and Other at 4.6%.
I don't see a mass exodus from Windows. A 0.3% drop is not exactly significant. Other had a 1.2% drop, and that's a 26% loss from the previous year.
I just looked up market share for server OSes, and Microsoft is getting the edge there, too. Apache is beginning to lose ground to IIS, according to Netcraft. Businesses are making these decisions, based on cold hard cash. Linux/Unix takes smart people to run the machines. These people cost more money than Windows admins. Look at the Microsoft success stories, about how one guy was paying four developers $100/hr, and then he switched to IIS. Or the one about how the Linux 2.4 kernel blows in comparison to Windows, and no major vendor offered the 2.6 kernel. One company I interviewed with wrote their site in Visual Basic because they wanted non-computer people to work on it. Yuck.
At some point, "free" doesn't cut it. The OS has to be usable by the ignorant masses. And believe me, businesses are hiring some ignorant people. The place where I currently work hired a "developer" who can't type, doesn't know anything about the command prompt, very little about Windows OS, and doesn't exhibit any professional qualifications or qualities that are evident to me. But of course this person is an "ideal candidate."
Companies complain about not being able to find good people. Sorry, but as far as I'm concerned, they aren't bothering to look. They sit on their butts with their products and people. No complaining! Get out and *do*!
Christopher, have you ever written a kernel?
Just a simple one, mind you. I have, and I honestly think that every programmer worth his salt should do the same. It's as easy as making a call and swapping some registers. Voilà, cooperative task switching. Now apply that in a non-threaded OS, and you have threads. Did you know that the Modula-2 language has threading built into it? Radical stuff for the late 1970's.
And here it is about 30 years later. Where is multithreading today? Essentially no place at all. The "in" thing is to tout that a language threads by itself, or to put "easy-to-use" functionality into a development studio, like Sun Studio, for Solaris and Linux. How much real multithreading do we see in Windows? Not a lot.
The software is behind the hardware because its developers are behind the state of the art 20 years ago. I recently spoke with a few fellows with freshly-minted BS in CS. Design is not taught. HELLO!!! Any educators out there? I don't care that some prof thinks that Java is the next incarnation of Buddha and Mohamed and Jesus Christ all rolled into one. A language is not design, it is a tool used to accomplish a solution! There is no magic bullet to get around the task of creating good software.
Design is fundamental, and too many loose sight of that far to easily.
One thing that never ceases to amaze me is that every time someone borrows from the past, it becomes fantastically great and radical news. Virtualization moves from the mainframe to the x86. Great big news. Now x86 gets some RISC functionality. Once again, great big news.
Whoopee.
This crapola is what we get for commodity CPUs. AMD plans to roll out a chip with 8 to 16 Bulldozer cores on it (Sandtiger). How far are they behind Sun?
Anyways, to clue you in on the obvious: Developers rarely touch assembly language.
The compiler is where the action is at for these new instructions. Your old software will have to be recompiled to take advantage of this "advance." However, developers could take advantage of what exists today, has been analyzed and documented for over 20 years, and write multithreaded code! Hello, why is this always new???
Why is there a paucity of developers who will get off their butts, do a bit of reading, and write good code? Every "advance" has been a rehash of yesterday, and for quite some time. Anybody remember the nCUBE machines? 1024 cores in 1985?
Maybe there *is* a lack of documentation. I was just looking for books on Winsock programming, and there is a complete dearth of good information. Microsoft Press stopped publishing their book, and new copies go for $200-$500. WTF???
Maybe some day Intel or AMD processors will be as good as the IBM Power5+. Check out Top500.org, then look at the bottom 100. Notice that Hokkaido University's Hitachi SR11000-K1/40 uses 40 (just 40!) IBM Power5+ processors at 2.1GHz.
http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pete/upside-down-ternet.html
I laughed myself silly when I found that someone decided to have fun with the squid proxy and his neighbors. He found that (*gasp*) they were logging onto his wireless connection and hogging the traffic on his broadband connection. So he decided to give them an entirely different Internet experience: all your pictures are belong to upside-down! HA HA HA!
Now when someone logs onto his network, he lets them surf the web, but their connection results in their pictures being shown upside-down via squid.
Evidently you are not familiar with how these sites operate. One posts a CV/résumé which is searchable by employers, and in addition one may send information to an employer. If no "active" resume exists for you, then the system bumps you off after a short time, like a month. The scammers got an employer account on the system, and then proceeded to download every bit of info they could. Of course the contact info is a required part of the personal information posted on the site.
This is probably a combination of Skype's own updates and Microsoft's updates. Skype probably had changed their algorithms in the past month, and had inadvertently introduced a bug which DOSed their system when Microsoft caused too many PCs to reboot. There are certain scales of testing that can't effectively be done inside a company. Think: what company has 2000000 test clients? (answer: none!) The most test client machines I have worked with has been 200, and that number would be inadequate to forsee the Skype login bug.
Of course HP and IBM are putting Solaris on their x86 lines. What else are they going to load on them, SCO? What choice is there for a real Unix? Solaris is the only game in town for x86. There were mom-and-pop x86 System V r4 offerings like Consensys (I bought that one and ran it on a 386). But where are they now? Gone.
SCO chose litigation over innovation. Bye-bye, SCO. Sun has been working hard on Solaris. I have installed Solaris 10, and I like it. I really like having a professional-grade Unix on at least one of my boxes. (Yes, I also have HP-UX, but the PA-RISC workstation does draw a large bit of power.) Neither HP or SGI are going to port their OS's to the x86. HP got rid of most of their OS developers, and SGI is primarily Windows and Linux now.
This move simply makes sense. Maybe Apple will come to its senses and start selling their OS without the bundled hardware, but I doubt it.
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