Slashback: Picnic, Pistol, Doggedness

Slashback tonight brings you updates on low-power hardware, unauthorized music distribution by buymusic.com, and more, including a reminder of the upcoming (now annual) Linux picnic at the conclusion of LWCE. (If you're not there, start your own local chapter ;)) Read on for more!

MenuetOS progresses. For those with a taste for esoteric tiny operating systems for low-power systems, the x86 release of Contiki wasn't the only news this week. Lgd writes "Menuet, the 100 % assembly OS, has made quite a few improvements since it was last reported at Slashdot. Menuet has now a simple tcp/ip stack with tiny http, mp3 and email servers, FASM 1.48 assembler and demo applications like the 3d maze."

Perhaps this will lead to a finer toothed comb overall. Jody Whitesides writes "Hello, I want to take a moment to update you about my situation that you posted recently... As of right now, I won my fight with BuyMusic and the Orchard. I have been promptly let out of a contract that was already terminated February 1st of 2001. It seems they had kept me in their catalog on a contract clause that had been overlooked when the contract was signed back in 1999.

As of 5 p.m. pst 07/31/2003 I was given notice that I was removed from the Orchard's distribution. In turn I have since checked with BuyMusic's website and have been swiftly removed from the website and now all has been set right in the world. It seems that even the big corporations don't wish to face copyright infringement.

I want to thank you for running the story as I have no doubt that it helped bring a swift decision in getting my music under my control so that I can best determine how fans will get it into their hands.

I harbor no ill will towards BuyMusic or the Orchard."

MandrakeSoft still not dead (wants to go for a walk). LinuxGeek8 writes "In their latest shareholder newsletter MandrakeSoft made a few statements about their financial position. Their retail sales decreased, while their high-margin sales (oem, club, online sales, etc.) increased. In total their revenue decreased somewhat, while the operating loss decreased. Since January they have been cash-flow positive.

Quoting about their "Chapter 11": "On January 27th, 2003, the Commercial Court granted MandrakeSoft a six month observation and protection period (similar to a U.S. Chapter 11 procedure). This period will end on July 27th, 2003. The company is pursuing an opportunity to be granted an additional six month observation and protection period. In the upcoming months, the company's objective is to exit the Observation Period with a 'Continuation Plan'."
Things seem to be looking good on the radar."

This is good news for those of us who like all the work that Mandrake has put into making Free software easy to install.

Video Capturing Part 2 at Ars Technica miskatonic alumnus writes "Recently, slashdot reported on an excellent article -- Part I: Video Capture -- of the 3-part series 'Guide to Capturing, Cleaning & Compressing Video' at Ars Technica. At last, Part II: Video Cleaning is now available."

The largest gathering, of a sort. Linda Denison links to these "several articles about GenCon, handily linked to one place!"

From the article: 'GenCon: Freaks & Geeks,' she excerpts: 'My wife wrinkled her nose in response. Computer geeks tend to be clean. They wear clean clothes, and bathe regularly. Usually this is because they live in their mother's house. Probably in their old room. Tabletop geeks tend to wear the same clothes they bought in their early twenties, roughly three belt sizes ago, and aren't well versed in the bathing arts. This is because they live in their mother's basement. The heat sort of exacerbated this problem.'

(We've run a couple of articles originating at this year's GenCon already.)

Sci-Fi Auction Followup... cjustus writes "The live auction mentioned earlier in the week is over... Here are the prices that items went for. The big item? Original George Reeves Superman Costume for $110K ... Harrison Ford's pistol from Blade Runner went for $17K... Any slashdotters bid / win?"

Matching hardware to actual needs is not crazytalk. Michael C. Barnes writes with a followup to the recent mention of his company's low-power MicroServer, which, it turns out, has a larger sibling. "One of the people reading your post did a review of the Microserver HP. ... The person doing the review benchmarked our Microserver High Performance and thought it did a reasonably good job with My SQL."

"Penguin dip" is just an expression. Bill Kendrick writes "This Saturday, August 9th (after the Linux World Expo) San Francisco Bay Area Linux lovers and the people who love them will be gathering at the Baylands Park in Sunnyvale for Picn*x12, the third annual Linux anniversary picnic. Organized by several local LUGs and sponsored by Oracle, this barbecue is a free event for the entire family."

Whether or not you can get to the picnic, FeeDBaCK writes "It has been almost 2 years since the Linux Counter has been mentioned on Slashdot. It was last mentioned in October of 2001 and brought on an impressive number of registrations. Accounts are deleted after 2 years of inactivity, so now is a good time for everyone to freshen up their account, or create a new one if they don't have one already."

Mandrake and the community

[Telex4]

That's good news about Mandrake, and it's good to see that some of their financial success is coming from community support (i.e. the club). It'd be interesting to get a breakdown of figures to see how much they rely on it.

Mandrake have put so much back into the community that it'd be fitting for the community to then help keep them afloat. It'd be a short-term disaster if they went under.

I'm impressed by MenuetOS.

[James A. A. Joyce]

I notice that like a lot of assembler OSes it doesn't seem too modular. (That's fine, though, considering that it's just 70K!) All the utilities which are needed are builtin. Which brings me to the question I wish to ask for any who are more informed than I?

Is there a simple way of interfacing with the GUI to produce dialog boxes and the like from a simple shell? I'm thinking of something like xdialog or gdialog in UNIX/Linux systems with X/GNOME installed.

Re:Menuet OS Development.

[BelugaParty]

I agree, it sounds very interesting. It could do to OS's what early versions of Opera did for web browsing. However, with my limited computer knowledge, doesn't writing in assembler require a lot of knowledge about the computers underlying hardware? Would developers need to write in assembler as well, just to develop for it?

anyway, sounds like a project worth following. but it might just be my youthful idealism.

Re:Video Capture

[Gherald]

Indeed, as soon as I come across a good HOWTO article I will buy a Winfast TV2000XP [newegg.com]

Unless you are building a mini HTPC type system, I think AIW is pointless. Much better to have a vanilla AGP card that can be upgraded at any time.

Linux Counter

[Cpl Laque]

Not to be mister negative but...
Being that slashdot is pro-Linux. You think the editors would have been nice enough to give Linux counter its own Article instead of being buried in a slashback. The Counter wasn't even mentioned on the main page.

Re:Menuet OS Development.

[Stormie]

The reality is that optimizing C compilers can produce faster code than most programmers

Yes, but "most programmers" don't sit down to write an OS in assembly. Optimizing C compilers most certainly do not produce faster code than a true kick-ass assembly guru, and I assume that's the sort of person who would take on a project like this.

After writing something at a snail's pace for days, the developer often says to himself: I'll come back later and code this up as a binary tree, for now I'm just going to use a linear search and get it done.

On that front, however, you may well be correct. Writing something in "100% asm" is almost certainly more about ego than performance. One adage which actually is true is the old "10% of the code takes 90% of the CPU time" one, so write it, profile it, and then rewrite the critical bits in assembly.