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Comment mmm, R! (Score 1) 91

R is a very impressive, mature program that does a hell of a job.
I best liked connecting R data sets to a PostgreSQL database
for my PhD thesis, and then doing statistical data on SQL selections
without bothing about the SQL bits any more.

Also, I see lots of universities in Germany step up and teach R, which I think is good.

  - Hubert

Comment Congratulations, but ... (Score 0) 37

... what exactly is it? I've missed some striking reason to dig deeper on the webpage. Some showcase with examples, screenshots etc. may be in order to get people look into it. Also, an answer to the question how it relates to Nagios may be nice.

Keep up the good work!

  - Hubert

Comment Re:ALIX (Score 1) 697

I use an Alix board too, and it works fine with NetBSD 5.0/i386.
I don't know the power consumption, but this may be available somewhere on the website: www.pcengines.ch.

  - Hubert

Comment No Windows-keys on this 20yr old Olivetti Keyboard (Score 1) 939

I'm using an ~20 years old Olivetti Keyboard.
It's pretty heavy with excellent feeling.
It's connector was soldered into a PS/2 connector,
which is nowadays connected to a usb-converter,
going straight into my Mac Mini (running Mac OS X).

All this predates "Windows-Keys" and the like by
a bunch of years. The missing Apple command-key
is mapped to caps-lock.

  - Hubert

Software

Submission + - NetBSD developers speak about version 4.0

Quique writes: "NetBSD 4.0 was released last December. I read in Hubert Feyrer's blog that Federico Biancuzzi (who recently interviewed the founders of the OSI) has collected interviews from more than twenty NetBSD developers in an multiple-page article on Ars Technica, which talks about what's new in the latest release of this ultraportable Unix-like free operating system, including release engineering, some of the latest security features in NetBSD 4.0, virtualization with Xen, a number of filesystem enhancements (and new filesystems) and NetBSD's participation in Google's Summer of Code. If you have any comments, there's also a page for comments and discussion available."
Software

Submission + - Ten years of pkgsrc - Interviews (netbsd.org)

hubertf writes: "10 years ago — on October 3rd 1997 — the pkgsrc software management system was created by Alistair Crooks and Hubert Feyrer. pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection, was intended primarily as a packaging system for NetBSD. Derived from the FreeBSD Ports system, pkgsrc became a success story. Today, pkgsrc is a cross-platform framework, running on the BSDs, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, many Unix derivatives, and even on QNX and Windows.

Mark Weinem has made inverviews with lots of developers of pkgsrc and related projects, among them the original pkgsrc creators, but also users and developers of pkgsrc and related projects, like the FreeBSD and OpenBSD ports collection as well as MacPorts.

Overall, this article is a fine lesson in history of source based packaging system that also goes much beyond pkgsrc itself."

Portables

Submission + - Neo1973 (=OpenMoko) phone booting NetBSD/(evb)arm (feyrer.de)

hubertf writes: "OpenMoko is a project that runs Open Source software on Open hardware. So far, only Linux is available, but this is changing now: Noud de Brouwer has posted about his success running NetBSD on qemu-neo1973, which emulates the hardware that the OpenMoko project uses.

The post includes links to a package for 'mkimage', which, according to the packages' DESCR file, ``adds a header to a kernel image with information and checksums for the u-boot bootloader used in embedded systems'', instructions on how to derivea NEO1973/OpenMoko port for NetBSD from the existing evbarm/SMDK2410 port, and discussion about running OpenMoko under Qemu."

Operating Systems

Submission + - NetBSD boosts MySQL performance (feyrer.de)

hubertf writes: "Andrew Doran, who was recently hired by the NetBSD project to work on NetBSD's SMP implementation, has done a lot of good work, and he has merged some of his work from the vmlocking-branch into NetBSD-current. Effects of this are that time for build.sh on a quad-Opteron went down by ~10%.

Andrew also updated his previous benchmarks, and posted about his recent results: ``Most of the sysbench runs that I've seen to date have sysbench running on the same machine as the database. That's a good test but with the exception of small installations and out-of-band activity, production setups rarely look like that. So I ran sysbench itself on a seperate dual core system.''

There are images that compare NetBSD 3 with NetBSD-current (where most of Andrew's changes are now), and NetBSD-current compared to Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD.

The original benchmarks didn't include Solaris/x86, so Jaime Fournier sat down and repeated the test (on a single system). The results show that NetBSD beats Solaris by ~25% in the ReadOnly test, and that they're about on par in the ReadWrite test, with NetBSD kicking in earlier WRT the number of client threads, but Solaris keeping up longer before they both degrade. The courves are quite similar, and my guess is that there is some room for finetuning there."

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It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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