Slashback: Picnic, Pistol, Doggedness 143
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."
Heh! (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Heh! (Score:1)
OmG (Score:4, Funny)
Free Food?!!111
Free Food (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, it is true. You can distribute it to whoever you want in both Original and Digested form, and are allowed to charge a modest distribution fee for this service.
However, if you choose to distribute the food in Digested form, you must also make the Original availeable to the public.
Beware of viral effects! (Score:2)
Re:Free Food (Score:2)
Re:Free Food (Score:2)
Not so fast. KFC has claimed that one of their secret herbs and spices was used in the preparation of the food at this picnic, and so you will need to pay their family meal price for every plate that you eat. They won't tell you which spice it is, so the picnic organizers can't change their recipes, but they have mentioned owning "pepper" and
Yes, free food! (Score:2)
Re:OmG (Score:1)
But Remember! (Score:2)
I confused myself.
Re:OmG (Score:1)
Menuet OS Development. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:2, Insightful)
anyway, sounds like a project worth following. but it might just be my youthful idealism.
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:1)
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:2)
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. Assembler is about as low level programming you can get without writing the hex code yourself. However, you still need to understand all the ops of a CPU and hardware interfaces when developing an OS, so it really isn't a big deal. (i.e. If you don't know what the LGDT instruction does, you won't be writing an OS any time soon.)
Would developers need to write in assembler as well, just to develop for it?
Nope. It's the job of a compiler to reduce the code into machine language. (Assembly is just a textual representation of machine language.) It's the job of a linker to produce binary "wrapper" files for machine code that tells the OS how to link the file in memory. Go look up the ELF (Executable and Linking Format) for a good example.
BTW, a tip for you. You can order bound manuals for the Pentium I/II/III/4 directly from Intel's website AT NO COST. Apparently, this is a result of their deal with the justice department to resolve possible anti-trust charges. They take a month or two to get, but they are nice manuals with plenty of detail.
Where? (Score:2)
Gotta pointer to specifically where on their site to get them? Thanks!
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:1)
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:1)
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:2)
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:2)
It's pretty cool that Motorola provides free bound manuals. Sun also provides full information [sparc.org] on their SPARC design. Sadly, I think they charge for bound manuals.
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:2)
Manuals are here... (Score:5, Informative)
Pentium manuals in download or dead-tree form. [intel.com]
Re:Manuals are here... (Score:1)
I will now have 4 more books in my library.
Re:Manuals are here... (Score:1)
Re:Manuals are here... (Score:2)
The more free stuff you give to developers, the more developers develop for your hardware. The more developers developing for your hardware, the more people using your product.
Developers, developers!, DEVELOPERS!!!
Someone stop me before I start bouncing around the room!!
Re:We've slashdotted their dead tree dept (nt) (Score:2)
Re:Manuals are here... (Score:1)
Re:Manuals are here... (Score:2)
I had printed out the PDFs a while back (at work, thankfully, not at home) and had them bound, but the binder fscked up...the larger volumes were split into two or three parts, and I think one of them was bound on the wrong edge. Now I can get properly-bound editions for free...w00t!
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:1)
PUUHHleeasse. Why bother with Intel when AMD [amd.com] offers the same deal? Quit obscuring the truth!!! Surely any company who can deliver a superior, [anandtech.com] innovative, [intelligent-video.com] reliable [anandtech.com] product has something to hide! [zdnet.com]
I
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:2)
Geez, you try to help a guy out and all of Slashdot attacks. Remind me to stay home next time.
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:1)
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:2)
Well, that's something I guess. Now all I need is a way to make money off of these posts! Oh wait, I guess that's what my
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:1)
In summary, it was quiet subversion and a chance to double the
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:2)
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:1)
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:1)
That is a very cool and good piece of information to know that I didn't know. I just ordered my manuals a few minutes ago. Thanks for the info!
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:2)
No problem!
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:2)
You can hand-tune your assembly to be the fastest possible on the i586 with it's 32 K of icache and 32 K of dcache (iirc), but what will you do when you want to run it on a i686 or Athlon with different instruction timings, different cache architectures, and different bus and memory speeds? Suddenly your hand-tuned assembly isn't so optimal anymore. You have to get out a whole other set of CP
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:2)
Authoring Windows Applications In Assembly Language [grc.com]
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:2)
I doubt that hand-coded assembly is going to be noticably different from compiler generated assembly. Compilers these day do a pretty good job of optimizing.
But yes, compared to Winbloat, it will most probably zoom!
Re:Menuet OS Development. (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Assembly highly overrated! (Score:2)
Many optimizations that compilers can do, like inlining, software pipelining, and loop unrolling are often difficult to do by hand, and at best result in assembly code that is a nightmare to maintain. (Before you jump up and tell me that macro assemblers make inlining easy, well, it's not true. They make cut-and-paste easy, but to really do inlining you need to optimize the pasted code in its new context, which means register-allocating the surrounding regio
The largest gathering (Score:2, Funny)
Mandrake and the community (Score:5, Insightful)
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 slightly peeved (Score:2)
I submitted this story the other day, no other than infoworld has it that mandrake's enterprise edition beats redhats, suses and turbolinux' [infoworld.com] enterprise editons.
Didn't get placed. Is it just me who thinks that mandrake only is news for the slashdot editors when they have financial reports, or when the words mandrake and bankrupcy are found in the same sentence?
I bet Mandrake is still the number one distribution measured in both install base and ease of use. It certainly has been number
Linux Counter. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm #85934. I think I saw that Slackware reminder to register a thousand times (certainly three different installs) until I finally gave in and registered.
Too bad, for some weird reason I really wonder how low a # I'd gotten if I'd registered ASAP
Oh, well. At least I got #24 of 1283 in the 2.4 kernel pool [tummy.com]. But I truly digress
I'm impressed by MenuetOS. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Guess they over-estimated Scotty's value... (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone got any obvious jokes about the fact that it's a RED uniform?
Re:Guess they over-estimated Scotty's value... (Score:2)
Maybe when people tried to bid on it, it went something like:
"I wan't to bid on some TOS stuff. Oh, what's this uniform over heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeer!"
Never heard from again.
-Peter
Overestimated a lot, actually. (Score:2)
Neither did a whole [ebay.com] bunch [ebay.com] of [ebay.com] other [ebay.com] cool [ebay.com]
stuff [ebay.com]
What, doesn't anyone want to pay $8000 to dress up as Imperious Leader [ebay.com]?
That's funny (Score:2)
Wait a minute. I seem to recall that the set from TOS was acquired by the Smithsonian! I smell a con.
Beam me up, Scotty! (Score:5, Interesting)
You'll note that the rank stripes are for a Lieutenant J.G., though by the end of TOS Scotty jumped up to Lieutenant Commander. Roddenberry explained this with some silly story about giving the actors promotions instead of raises. But I suspect that he really had no idea what the stripes meant. A lot more of Star Trek was invented by other people than members of the Church of St. Gene will admit.
Re:Guess they over-estimated Scotty's value... (Score:1)
To keep his trousers up.
Thank you, thank you. I can hear the groans already.
Nice advert (Score:3, Funny)
As opposed to those languages that aren't assembly in some form...
Re:Nice advert (Score:1)
Video Capture (Score:5, Interesting)
I have an ATI Radeon 8500 All-In-Wonder rotting away in my machine, and some Hi-8 tapes that I'd like to digitize... :-(
Re:Video Capture (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Video Capture (Score:2)
The KWORLD TV787RF-Pro I bought is $40 at newegg, comes with a remote (can't say if it works with LIRC yet) tunes in FM, and I know from experience that it completely ignores Macrovision (That's right, you can actually make legal copies with decent quality now, try not to hyperventilate as you realize your rights).
That is putting it very nicely... See my reply to the parent.
Re:Video Capture (Score:2)
AIW relies way too much on CPU power; which means you can readily drop frames if you actually use it for anything while it's working. Useless.
Re:Video Capture (Score:1)
To digitize Hi8 tapes (Score:1)
This may seem like it would take more time than it would to directly capture the video via the AIW, but having experienced all the hassles of analog capture via an AIW--dropped frames, and a myriad of other problems--this has worked ou
Re:To digitize Hi8 tapes (Score:2)
Re:Video Capture (Score:2)
As do I.
Tell me... What's it feel like to know you spent hundreds of dollars on a card that can't do TV-out under anything but Windows, and getting Linux TV-in with sound to work requires the sacrifice of a virgin to the computer gods.
Oh yeah, that whole processor off-loading of video processing... forget about it.
Man am I glad I spent a load of money on a card that has such great support... Hell, aeven under Windows their software suc
Re:Video Capture (Score:2)
You idiot. Have sex with the virgin first, then sacrifice her to the gods.
Re:Video Capture (Score:2)
Cinelerra [heroinewarrior.com]
Video Capture and Editing under Linux [nmt.edu]
Consumer Video Editing in Linux [camcorderinfo.com]
Linux Tutorial: Video, DVD, TV and Multimedia [yolinux.com]
Now let's all repeat after me...
Google is my friend [google.com].
Seriously, are you people just to lazy to type 3 frickin words into Google?
Interesting Mandrake quip (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought you might find that interesting.
Re:Interesting Mandrake quip (Score:1)
And all together Suse, Red Hat, and Mandrake has actually sold more then Windows XP since XP's release.
Might that have something to do with the fact that around 90% of PCs ship with WinXP pre-installed?
Re:Interesting Mandrake quip (Score:1)
If you went to a number of other stores you might get the same data as well.
Pool all that data together and you realise that Linux has more sales the XP since the upgrades don't count since they are going from one windows to another.
When you look at this it's obvious that the facts are wrong but this is what microsoft does. Here's some of the tricks that are used to manipulate the stats.
*Sell copies of Windows XP
Re:Interesting Mandrake quip (Score:1)
Upgrade CDs do count. Some of the people buying Redhat 8, probably bought Redhat 7 as well. In fact, I would suggest that a large portion of those Linux buyers are repeat customers. Let's face it - if you can't afford the download for one major release, you're probably in the same boat the next t
Re:Interesting Mandrake quip (Score:4, Informative)
It's telling that the XP upgrade CD outsells the Big 3. It shows that Windows is still the OS that these 'real people' want on their machines.
It is good to see people willing to fork out the cash to support the cause though.
Re:Interesting Mandrake quip (Score:2)
Careful... Corporate America may be listening...
Microsoft: Today we have decided to join the RIAA in their fight against Piracy. Clearly, the fact that Linux has sold more than Windows XP is incontrovertable proof that rampant Piracy is going on.
Re:Interesting Mandrake quip (Score:2)
That's true actually. Everyone I know is still downloading and copying Windows 2000 because XP is so incredibly awful.
Nobody wants to wait 2 minutes between clicking on the menu, and having it pop-up... It's just craptactular, needless wasted CPU cycles that Microsoft is famous for, but with XP, they took it much too far.
Personally, I still use NT4 (I'm 100% legal BTW)... USB support and DirectX > 5 isn't worth it, if it requires you to have
video capture (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.digital-rapids.com
here is a link to their video processing, all hardware pre-processing with amazing results in real-time.
http://www.digital-rapids.com/Products_DemoRoom
We are using some of these boards for our digital dailies at the post house and they are amazing, sadly enough however, no linux drivers yet.
Sean Young's Haircut (Score:2)
What's it called? Parting of the Waves?
Lawsuit Fest (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Lawsuit Fest (Score:2)
Yeah, but just imagine what would happen to any SCO lawyer that shows up.
I'd rather get sued. It would be far less unpleasant.
-
Linux Counter (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Please RSVP for the picnic if you'll attend (Score:5, Informative)
As the posting says, there is no fee to attend. The costs of this year's picnic have been picked up by Oracle.
And a bit of trivia: the Sunnyvale Baylands Park where the picnic is held is also one of the sites where filming took place for Revolution OS [revolution-os.com]. For anyone who's interested, we can show you the boardwalk area where the interviews with Michael Tiemann of Cygnus (now CTO of RedHat) took place.
Re:Please RSVP for the picnic if you'll attend (Score:2)
Re:Please RSVP for the picnic if you'll attend (Score:2)
However, get used to it. In English any word can be verbed. :-)
George Reeves? (Score:2)
His name was Christopher last I looked...
Q.
Re:George Reeves? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:George Reeves? (Score:2)
Look again.
Christopher Reeve (no "s") starred in several [imdb.com] cheesy [imdb.com] Superman [imdb.com] movies [imdb.com] in the 70's and 80's. George Reeves starred in a cheesy Superman TV series [imdb.com] in the 50's.
Re:George Reeves? (Score:5, Informative)
That the two actors names are almost identical is a coincidence.
Buymusic.com (Score:3, Interesting)
In other news, we are talking with a lawyer and hope to have some news soon about our status on buymusic.com.
After some homework, we did *not* sign anything with 'The Orchard'. We had our CDs manufactured by a company called 'Oasis' [oasiscd.com], and agreed for a song to be put on a sampler. That's it.
'The Orchard' and buymusic.com are blatantly violating copyright in the worst way (selling the infrigements).
Personally, I don't care if this CD is on p2p (I plan to make files available after this is taken care of), but when someone charges for these songs without our knowledge and pockets the proceeds, that is not cool.
Thanks again for all those who emailed for a CD and to chat about it, many more are available, so feel free to contact me and buy one ($5+shipping) if you like the samples. [amazon.com]
Re:Buymusic.com (Score:2)
Re:Buymusic.com (Score:2)
I don't know if they are liable for any $$$ as of yet, but if they are I'd love to see the RIAA put up a paypal donation link after we drain their life savings. ;)
Of course, I won't be posting here anymore because I'll be on an island in the South Seas drinking rum.
We'll see... :)
I bought Erin Gray's spandex at the auction... (Score:1)
The big question here is... (Score:2)
Re:The big question here is... (Score:2)
(1) This may astonish you, but a large percentage of Slashdot's readership doesn't use Linux on a daily basis. And many of those who do still have access to Windows and Internet Explorer.
(2) This Slashback about BuyMusic began as a copyright issue, with the store acquiring lots of artists' music from a third party without ever compensating the original artists, or even checking to see if they had permission
Re:The big question here is... (Score:2)
It's obvious that the company doesn't care about the users or the artists, but only about making money.
I actually emailed support when I found that you couldn't get on the site without IE 5 + (on windows) and have yet to hear from them (3 or more weeks later).
Matching hardware to actual needs is not crazytalk (Score:2)
Lisa S.: No, it's true.
Indian: No, thats my brother, Crazy Talk.
Orchard's contract (Score:2)
Rock on (Score:1)
No. (Score:1)
So don't quibble.
Re:Big Name Pistol (Score:2)