Comment Re:Incremental approach (Score 1) 455
I stand corrected on the autologin issue, thanks.
Another thing the new GDM cannot do is to specify the arguments of the X server command line (e.g. for running two X servers in a multiseat setup).
Comment Incremental approach (Score 1) 455
I think it is not because of an incremental approach of GNOME, but rather because of their decremental approach.
Things like replacing GDM with a rewrite that still does not match the original GDM feature-wise (it even could not do XDMCP for a long time and it cannot do auto-login for single-user systems even now), replacing Sawfish with Metacity, replacing Galeon with Epiphany, which - even with epiphany-extensions package - still cannot match Galeon (despite the fact the development of Galeon has been dormant for several years now), etc.
I guess the next decremental step would be kicking out Ekiga in favour of Empathy.
Comment Re:Is Virtualization the New OS? (Score 1) 259
How good are LVM snapshots at rolling back a hosed OS?
About the same as VM snapshots. For example, Solaris uses ZFS snapshots for OS upgrades by default.
How easy is it to:
Use the same hardware to run a test environment for that case without any virtualization products like OpenVZ/Virtuozzo or Xen/VMware etc?
It depends whether your application has any hardcoded paths in it, whether it can use e.g. different TCP ports, whether it is easy to impose ulimits on it, etc. Some can do it, some cannot. But still, it is much faster to have (say) two VMs - one for testing and one for production use, but definitely not one per application.
Comment Re:Is Virtualization the New OS? (Score 1) 259
Just a minor nitpick: for rolling back a SW upgrade, you can use LVM/FS/storage snapshots, which are as good as the virtual machine snapshots.
And of course, many HW problems affect the whole system, the virtual machines have no means of magically escaping from this.
Don't get me wrong, I also use virtual machines for many purposes. I have just wanted to point out that a "one application = one virtual machine" approach is quite insane. We already have a means of isolating applications from each other - it is called "an operating system kernel". Virtualization just brings an unnecessary overhead in this case. OTOH, running a virtual machine with _many_ applications for the purpose of live migration and whatnot - this a right use of virtualization.
Comment Re:Is Virtualization the New OS? (Score 1) 259
What do you do when you have to go down to the physical machine to patch firmware/bios? You lose all your applications, right?
Well, I patch the firmware probably once or at most two or three times in the server HW lifetime. OTOH, patching the OS kernel is way more frequent in my part of timespace. And the new kernel means server reboot, be it virtualized or not.
The point of virtualization is mostly to isolate the applications which require different operating systems or OS versions (with a minor added bonus of faster reboot time and live migration). But a separate virtual host per application is simply insane. After all, it is the operating system kernel which has been designed to provide a more-or-less "virtualized" view of the hardware for the applications. One OS image can more often than not run multiple applications without a problem.
Via Unveils 1-Watt x86 CPU 276
DeviceGuru writes "Taiwanese chip and board vendor Via Technologies has introduced a new ultra-low voltage (ULV) processor aimed at industrial, commercial, and ultra-mobile applications. Touted as the world's most power-efficient x86-compatible CPU, the 500MHz 'Eden ULV 500' processor debuted at an Embedded Systems Conference in Taipei this week. Via says its chip draws a minimum of 0.1 Watts, when idle, and a maximum of 1 Watt, making it a great candidate for consumer electronics devices such as UMPCs, PVRs, and such."
Submission + - Human diversity on the decline
jd writes: "In a study covering five different periods of history, from 300 AD to the present day, and geographically spread across much of Europe, scientists have extracted the mitochondrial DNA from a sizable number of individuals in an effort to examine changes in diversity. The results, published in the Royal Society journal is intriguing to say the least. 1700 years ago, three out of every four individuals belonged to a different haplotype. In modern Europe, the number is only one in three. The researchers blame a combination of plague, selection of dominant lineages and culturally-inflicted distortions. The researchers say more work needs to be done, but are unclear if this involves archaeology or experiments involving skewing the data in the local female population."
Self-Healing Plastic Skin 104
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have developed a form of plastic skin that can heal itself when damaged. The material relies on an underlying network of vessels — similar to blood capillaries — that carry a healing agent to areas on the material's surface that sustain damage. Unlike previous self-healing systems that relied on capsules of agent buried in the polymer and which became depleted after one use, the new system can respond to damage at the same point many times over."
Submission + - I wnat to relearn programming
Imsdal writes: "I used to be a reasonably good programmer, but life has taken me in a different direction, and my skills are now quite out of date. I want to learn a good, modern language with a good modern IDE. I only have the time and inclination to learn one. Which should I choose?
Here is more background:
I learnt programming 25+ years ago. I started with BASIC and moved to Z80 assembler, Pascal and FORTRAN. In 89-94 I got a M.Sc. in Computer Science with a heavily theoretical focus, so at that time I knew about a dozen languages reasonably well (LISP in several flavors, ML, SQL, PROLOG, C, ADA and a bunch of others. Note the absence of Java and C++, though). I then started working, and spent most of my time working with SQL. I have since moved to "general management", so apart from the occasional spell of SQL and VBA, I haven't really been programming much for almost ten years (and most of you will of course say that VBA isn't programming at all).
Now I want to "get back into the game", but I have found that programming today isn't so much learning syntax and general ideas (which I can still do quickly), but learning and IDE and/or a fairly huge library of supporting functions. Thus, it seems like a bigger project to learn a new environment these days, and I want to make sure I go down the right path.
So, what do I actually want to do with my newly acquired skill set? Let's start with what I don't want to do:
* I don't want to be a programmer as a job, so there doesn't have to be a market for whatever language/environment you recommend.
* I wont write applications that anyone else will use, so robustness/error handling etc is nice but not a critical factor.
* The stuff I write doesn't have to be web applications. It might be, but stand alone stuff that just runs on my computer is fine.
And here are a few examples of stuff I want to actually achieve:
* An application that reads stuff from web pages, analyzes them and stores the result in a DB, for instance:
— Sales data from amazon.com
— Play by play data from Major League Baseball games
* Simulations of games, for example
— Algorithms that play Othello or Mastermind
— Simulations of poker hands
* Solutions to projecteuler.net problems.
The first example requires the easy ability to get a web page and do some pretty basic string manipulation to it (but easy hookups to lex and yacc or variants is a huge advantage), and easy writing to a DB. (I'll do the actual processing of the data from the DB in SQL and won't need support there.)
The second example shouldn't exclude any particular modern language, I would guess.
The third example requires a very good and fast bignum implementation. This is mandatory, not optional.
I have computers running Ubuntu and XP (sorry, no Mac), so whatever you suggest should run on either of those. It's not important (and not even an advantage, really) that it runs on both. Since this is for my own enjoyment and non-professional, the environment should be free or very cheap. It strictly doesn't have to be open source, but maybe that's an advantage.
So, in conclusion, I'm looking for a computer language with a good environment that allows me to get started quickly, is versatile in what I can do in it, has a good bignum implementation and, hopefully, is fun. What would you recommend and why?"
Here is more background:
I learnt programming 25+ years ago. I started with BASIC and moved to Z80 assembler, Pascal and FORTRAN. In 89-94 I got a M.Sc. in Computer Science with a heavily theoretical focus, so at that time I knew about a dozen languages reasonably well (LISP in several flavors, ML, SQL, PROLOG, C, ADA and a bunch of others. Note the absence of Java and C++, though). I then started working, and spent most of my time working with SQL. I have since moved to "general management", so apart from the occasional spell of SQL and VBA, I haven't really been programming much for almost ten years (and most of you will of course say that VBA isn't programming at all).
Now I want to "get back into the game", but I have found that programming today isn't so much learning syntax and general ideas (which I can still do quickly), but learning and IDE and/or a fairly huge library of supporting functions. Thus, it seems like a bigger project to learn a new environment these days, and I want to make sure I go down the right path.
So, what do I actually want to do with my newly acquired skill set? Let's start with what I don't want to do:
* I don't want to be a programmer as a job, so there doesn't have to be a market for whatever language/environment you recommend.
* I wont write applications that anyone else will use, so robustness/error handling etc is nice but not a critical factor.
* The stuff I write doesn't have to be web applications. It might be, but stand alone stuff that just runs on my computer is fine.
And here are a few examples of stuff I want to actually achieve:
* An application that reads stuff from web pages, analyzes them and stores the result in a DB, for instance:
— Sales data from amazon.com
— Play by play data from Major League Baseball games
* Simulations of games, for example
— Algorithms that play Othello or Mastermind
— Simulations of poker hands
* Solutions to projecteuler.net problems.
The first example requires the easy ability to get a web page and do some pretty basic string manipulation to it (but easy hookups to lex and yacc or variants is a huge advantage), and easy writing to a DB. (I'll do the actual processing of the data from the DB in SQL and won't need support there.)
The second example shouldn't exclude any particular modern language, I would guess.
The third example requires a very good and fast bignum implementation. This is mandatory, not optional.
I have computers running Ubuntu and XP (sorry, no Mac), so whatever you suggest should run on either of those. It's not important (and not even an advantage, really) that it runs on both. Since this is for my own enjoyment and non-professional, the environment should be free or very cheap. It strictly doesn't have to be open source, but maybe that's an advantage.
So, in conclusion, I'm looking for a computer language with a good environment that allows me to get started quickly, is versatile in what I can do in it, has a good bignum implementation and, hopefully, is fun. What would you recommend and why?"
Submission + - AMD to open ATI video drivers
Submission + - IPv6 flaw could greatly amplify DDoS attacks
tygerstripes writes: The Register has a story about the discovery of a flaw in part of the IPv6 specification which has experts scrambling to have the feature removed, or at least disabled by default. From the article:
Paul Vixie, president of the Internet Systems Consortium, described the fault bluntly. "It can be exploited by any greedy Estonian teenager with a $300 Linux machine."The specification, known as the Type 0 Routing Header (RH0), allows computers to tell IPv6 routers to send data by a specific route. Originally envisioned as a way to let mobile users to retain a single IP for their devices... RH0 support allows attackers to amplify denial-of-service attacks on IPv6 infrastructure by a factor of at least 80.
Submission + - OpenBSD developers caught stealing GPL'd code
Submission + - OpenBSD caught stripping copyrights from GPL code
An anonymous reader writes: OpenBSD caught taking GPLed code from the Linux kernel while stripping off copyright notices, Theo deRaadt doesn't see any problem:
http://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/bcm43xx-dev/2007 -April/004359.html
Submission + - OpenBSD copies Linux code without attribution
An anonymous reader writes: It seems like the OpenBSD guys are not as serious about copyright of other people as they claim they are.
According to a post on various mailing lists the GPL'd bcm43xx driver has been copied into OpenBSD's bcw driver with all copyright notices removed and illegally relicensed as BSD license.
One might wonder what other 'interesting' copyrighted code might lurk in that codebase...
