Comment Re:ext4 is buggy (Score 1) 289
This sounds like a problem I have had. It isn't ever time I reboot, and has gotten better with newer kernel versions. Mine is a 4tb ext4 filesystem on linux software raid5.
Comment eVGA GTX260 216 SC and CUDA (Score 4, Interesting) 186
I just bought a eVGA GTX260 216(core) SC at Fry's for $200+$20 tax. But it had a mail in rebate for $50. Which will bring the price down to $150+$20 tax. I bought it not as a gaming card, but as a second CUDA card. I already had a PNY GTX260(192 core).
CUDA doesn't play nice with regular graphics usage. Your machine will be really jerky every few seconds. I also didn't have room in my main computer, motherboard or power supply wise. So I put it in my second desktop that I use for iSCSI and a third monitor via synergy. The machine already had a 6600GT, which then became the secondary card. I run X off it. Which leaves the eVGA card just for CUDA. Then I can run it all day and not even notice a performance hit.
Comment Monitor setups (Score 1) 503
I have two setups with three monitors. One at work and one at home. Both use two desktops. Home is two 24" at 1920x1200, along with a 20" at 1680x1050. Work is three 20" at 1680x1050. The third monitor is on the second machine, and is accessible via synergy. The third monitor is great for IM, especially for work related stuff. I can look at it at a glance, along with a spreadsheet on the second monitor, and four terminal windows on the first monitor.
At home the second desktop is another Linux box that I use for additional storage for the primary desktop via iSCSI. At work the second desktop is a Windows machine.
I only recently went to three monitor. I looked at doing it with a second video card in the main desktop, or using a Matrox splitter box to run two monitors off one DVI connector. A second video card in Linux just doesn't work that well, and the splitter boxes are expensive. Plus a second computer has some advantages. More segregated CPU and memory, more storage, different OS, etc.
Linux Needs Critics 1127
An anonymous reader writes "Keir Thomas berates the fact that the world of Linux almost entirely lacks critics. In fact, he says, Linux people tend to see genuine critical evaluation as a bad thing. FTA: 'The problem with this anti-criticism approach is that it's damning Linux to an eternity of navel gazing. Nothing can ever get any better. The best hope we have are the instances where a few bright sparks, with their heads screwed on the right way, get together and make something cool (as happened with, say, Firefox back in the day). But that's rare and can't be relied upon.'"
Linux Kernel 2.6.29 Released 265
diegocgteleline.es writes "Linus Torvalds has released Linux 2.6.29. The new features include the inclusion of kernel graphic modesetting, WiMAX, access point Wi-Fi support, inclusion of squashfs and a preliminary version of btrfs, a more scalable version of RCU, eCryptfs filename encryption, ext4 no journal mode, OCFS2 metadata checksums, improvements to the memory controller, support for filesystem freeze, and other features. Here is the full list of changes."
Researchers Demo BIOS Attack That Survives Disk Wipes 396
suraj.sun writes "A pair of Argentinian researchers have found a way to perform a BIOS level malware attack capable of surviving even a hard-disk wipe.
Alfredo Ortega and Anibal Sacco from Core Security Technologies — used the stage at last week's CanSecWest conference to demonstrate methods (PDF) for infecting the BIOS with persistent code that will survive reboots and re-flashing attempts. The technique includes patching the BIOS with a small bit of code that gave them complete control of the machine. The demo ran smoothly on a Windows machine, a PC running OpenBSD and another running VMware Player."
Comment Re:nVidia rules (Score 2, Informative) 102
No, they are all of the same base architecture, but aren't the same card. The 8800GT and the 9800GT are pretty close. Probably the biggest difference is some 9800GT cards are 55nm chips instead of 65nm. On the other hand there is a lot of difference between 8800GT and the GTX260. The GTX260 has 32 dedicated double precision processors that the 8800GT does not. My rough understanding is that those double precision processors are roughly equal to 1.5x a Q6600(quad core), or 6 cores. The GTX260 also comes with more streaming(single precision) processors. The 8800GT is 96/112 and the GTX260 is 192/216, depending on model.
Just look at this graphic.
Detecting Click Tracks 329
jamie found a blog entry by Paul Lamere, working for audio company Echo Nest, in which he experiments with detecting which songs use a click track. Lamere gives this background: "Sometime in the last 10 or 20 years, rock drumming has changed. Many drummers will now don headphones in the studio (and sometimes even for live performances) and synchronize their playing to an electronic metronome — the click track. ...some say that songs recorded against a click track sound sterile, that the missing tempo deviations added life to a song." Lamere's experiments can't be called "scientific," but he does manage to tease out some interesting conclusions about songs and artists past and present using Echo Nest's developer API.
Scientists Create Compound With a Single Element 163
rocketman768 writes "An international team of researchers including scientists at the Carnegie Institution has discovered a new chemical compound that consists of a single element: boron. Chemical compounds are conventionally defined as substances consist of two or more elements, but the researchers found that at high pressure and temperature pure boron can assume two distinct forms that bond together to create a novel 'compound' called boron boride."
Hope For Fixing Longstanding Linux I/O Wait Bug 180
DaGoodBoy writes "There has been a long standing performance bug in Linux since 2.6.18 that has been responsible for lagging interactivity and poor system performance across all architectures. It has been notoriously difficult to qualify and isolate, but in the last few days someone has finally gotten a repeatable test case! Turns out the problem may not even be disk related, since the test case triggers the bug only by transferring data either between two processes or threads. The test results are very revealing. The developer ran regressions all the way back to version 2.6.15 that demonstrate this bug has more than doubled the time to run the test in 2.6.28. Many, many people working at improving the desktop performance of Linux will be very happy to see this bug die. I know that I, personally, will find a way to send the guy that found this test case his beverage of choice in thanks. Please spread the word and bring some attention to this issue so we can get it fixed!"
Comment Re:The source was out there for years! (Score 1) 387
IcedTea's plugin is worthless. It doesn't deal with signed applets.
The only two things I use java for with a web browser are two different types of network kvm. One uses a java applet, and the other uses a java webstart application. I had to use 32bit sun java to get support for both at once.
Now the only thing left 32bit is mplayer for win32 codecs. I will have to do much testing and see if I can now live without them and use mplayer.x86_64. If so I can pretty much go pure 64bit. I do run into x86_64 applications every so often that don't behave properly. The last example I can think of is rtorrent.
Comment Works! But needs a minor fix (Score 3, Informative) 387
It includes a plugin and javaws support. The two major things sun java 64bit has been lacking for years. It is still lacking the rim.cgi, but I have never had a need for it.
The plugin needs some polish. It doesn't properly declare it's version. Which makes a kvm application I use fail, because it tries to check the version.
Submission + - Livejournal brought to its' knees by angry drunk! (valleywag.com)
corewtfux writes: "Breakdowns
A drunk employee kills all of the websites you care about! 365 Main, a datacenter on the edge of San Francisco's Financial District, is popular with Soma startups for its proximity and its state-of-the-art facilities. Or it used to be, anyway, until a power outage took down sites including Craigslist, Six Apart's TypePad and LiveJournal blogging sites, local listings site Yelp, and blog search engine Technorati. The cause? A source close to the company says:
"Someone came in shitfaced drunk, got angry, went berserk, and fucked up a lot of stuff. There's an outage on 40 or so racks at minimum."
Whoever it is, while we like how you roll in theory, in practice, we'd appreciate it if you laid off the servers running websites we actually use."
A drunk employee kills all of the websites you care about! 365 Main, a datacenter on the edge of San Francisco's Financial District, is popular with Soma startups for its proximity and its state-of-the-art facilities. Or it used to be, anyway, until a power outage took down sites including Craigslist, Six Apart's TypePad and LiveJournal blogging sites, local listings site Yelp, and blog search engine Technorati. The cause? A source close to the company says:
"Someone came in shitfaced drunk, got angry, went berserk, and fucked up a lot of stuff. There's an outage on 40 or so racks at minimum."
Whoever it is, while we like how you roll in theory, in practice, we'd appreciate it if you laid off the servers running websites we actually use."
Submission + - PHP 5.2.0 Released
pestilence669 writes: PHP 5.2.0 Released
[02-Nov-2006] The PHP development team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 5.2.0. This release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features, bug fixes and security enhancements. Further details about this release can be found in the release announcement 5.2.0, the full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog PHP 5.
[02-Nov-2006] The PHP development team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 5.2.0. This release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features, bug fixes and security enhancements. Further details about this release can be found in the release announcement 5.2.0, the full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog PHP 5.
