* Posts by John

19 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Aug 2007

Adobe opens Photoshop for freetards

John
Black Helicopters

Stupid Sarah Bee

It's not satircal, it's insulting. Satire may offend, but does so by parody, by making someone or some action seem foolish.

Sheridan was a fine satrist.

Swift was a fine satirist.

James Barrie was a fine satirist.

Those understood satire.

All you can manage is crude insults.

Armed robbers target Oz biker shindig

John
Paris Hilton

Could've been worse

There are less gentle bike clubs around. Trust me.

IBM gives mainframe another push

John
Linux

1500 servers

Think how much space they'd take too. Plus power, cables, aircon.

A key feature of the modern mainframe _is_ virtualisation. I asked recently, and some folk are running upwards of 1000 Linux guests on their mainframes.

They're good at I/O (Gbytes/sec), but don't expect to see one mentioned at top500.org any time soon.

Firefox 3 beta is live

John
Linux

RW on Tom

If you want Linux on old, '95-level hardware, try CentOS 2.1. Should run in 64 Mbytes. It's fairly old tho, nearly as old as your hardware. Alternatively, get new hardware, Fedora 8 with all its "bloatware" runs fine on my Core 2 Duo system, 2 Gbytes of RAM. Can even run Windows and other Linuxes at the same time.

If you want the new features, you need the hardware to run them

John
Stop

Note to Neil

"These open source fools are once again fooled into believing that when an MS project has a beta phase its bad, but when anyone else does it its good."

and again

The point was that any time MS release some Beta software, all these people (usually open source advocates as they have some flag to burn with MS apparently) start shouting "MS shouldnt do beta software" and "Look MS are using you to test their software for free!!!!!". But when Firefox comes out with a Beta they stand up and cheer, hailing someone elses buggy software as being brilliant *because* they are releasing beta software.

Show us some of these OS advocates who shout "MS shouldn't do beta software" and praise Mozilla for doing beta software.

London to a brick they are very few, and none of any regard.

Canonical scoops up KVM for Ubuntu virtualisation

John
Stop

KVM doesn'r support ....

How is it then that I've been running 32-bit Linux and 32-bit Windows in KVM running in my 64-bit Fedora 8?

Sadly, I don't think either KVM or Xen matches Virtual PC on Windows yet.

As for running FreeBSD on Xen (I've not tried it on KVM yet), just run this google, it's still a current problem:

http://www.google.com.au/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=active&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&hs=EYY&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=%22BTX+Halted%22+xen&spell=1

I've been running Debian and Windows Server, virtualised, on the same hardware that gave me much grief with xen and KVM and most particularly, libvirt. I was hoping the stuff Ubuntu had used until now was going to provide a viable alternative.

Swedes to probe cow-belch threat to planet

John

CH4, CO2

I recall some decades ago, someone collected the slops from a piggery and used the methane for farm power.

The CO2 emissions from cattle (and any other herbivores) is pretty unimportant wrt global warming, a lot of it was in the atmosphere a week or so before it got eaten. In the case of supplements (hay, grain) maybe it's been out of circulation for a year or two.

Methane's more of a problem, it's lighter than air (CO2 is heavier) so drifts off into the upper atmosphere.

CO2 gets absorbed into plants and forms rocks (limestome and such). The problem there is not as quickly as we release it.

IBM snubs OS/2 open source plea

John
Boffin

OS/2 in ATMs

It's my undestanding that OS/2 in the ATMs was/is 1.x (16-bit). This is not what we want.

And afaik ATMs are not accessible from the public Internet. Cracking one from the Internet is not a trivial undertaking. Picking one up with a forklift is still the easiest way in.

OS/2 has been used in IBM mainframes (and midrange computers, i think), with an imbedded thinkpad to control the box: think of it as being about equivalent to a PC's BIOS. I think they're using Linux these days.

Amdahl's service processor ran some Unix varient.

Remembering the CDC 6600

John
Boffin

Other CDC machines

the 6600 was a johnny-come-lately; I think Adelaide uni had one. I worked at the Commonewealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, what had a brace of 3200s, some 3300s, a 3500 and a 3600.

The 3200s ran SCOPE and essentially program at a time; there was also a background, interrupt-driven program to mange off-line printing.

The 3300s came (at our establishment) in two flavours, the A running MSOS, a bit more capable than SCOPE and having disk, and the B, bigger and running a full multitasking OS, MASTER. It did clever things with special registers to extend memory addressing.

The 3600 ran SCOPE which wans't mich like the 3200-scope or theat which appeared later in the 60-bit boxes.

The low 3000 series (up to 3500) had 32-bit words, the high 3000s (except I think there as a 48-bit 3400) had, um, 48-bit words.

the little 3200 in Perth was the first one I used, I later programmed the 3500 (in compass) and the 3600 in fortran.

John
Boffin

IBM's offerings about then...

Those who remember IBM's S/360 and S/370 might like to google for hercules. it emulates IBM's mainframe, from then to now, is FOSS, runs on Linux and, er, Winders.

Having got that, one can then choose from OS (I think it's around), MVS, VM and (I think) DOS variants. MVS runs somewhat faster than we ran it in the 70s.

And Linux, of course, but that's too modern for these reminisces.

Hackers re-poison Google search results

John
Linux

.cn

I don't worry about the domain name, but when I see spam that gets psst my blocklists, I update my firewall. whois often indicates a arge (up to /11) range of IP address, and I simply block the lot against smpt and ssh. www I don't worry about, but it's just crossed my bind I should also take out imap.

Top US engineer in piss-off-everybody car fuel solution

John

Notes on biofuels and hydrogen

Diesel

In OZ, biodiesel is being made from waste fats. It's not going to be available in sufficient volumes to replace regular diesel.

Hydrogen

Technology exists for making hydrogen directly from select algae. However, it's very new and probably wants another 20 years. Or more, I call that when I was last at school ('65), fuel cells were the next big thing, and people were talking of powering agricultural tractors with them.

Multifuel vehicles.

Orbital Engine Company has the technology and is licencing it for use right now. Browse its company announcements at www.asx.com.au

It's true that it's not those three fuels, they cater "We don't have any diesel? Just fill the tank with kero or petrol."

Hydrogen again.

Technology exists for storing it absorbed into other materials. Doesn't have to be kept under high compression or very cold.

Botmaster owns up to 250,000 zombie PCs

John
Stop

Lyndon Barry?

Unlike with Windows, reporting problems with Linux software in particular and open source software in general is easy. Anyone can do it, even if they've not paid any money for the right to use the software.

Distribution makers take security problems very seriously indeed, and it's not unknown for one to be fixed in under 24 hours.

May writers write programs as a hobby, and they take pride in getting it right. A security problem is clearly wrong.

The onus is, of course, on users to keep their software up to date, and to practice safe internetting, but those requirements apply equally to all.

Google succumbs to German cybersquatter's advances (maybe)

John
Coat

Trademark? I don't think so

It's been tried and lost with names such as "windowssucks" and "microsoftsucks." Try this:

www.appleSUCKS.COM

Notes to self, a good list of sites to add to my block list.

Half-petaflop IBM BlueGene supercomputer plan announced

John
Boffin

The first working computer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRAC

http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/dept/about/csirac/

This machine had to work for a living.

When antivirus products (and Internet Explorer) fail you

John
Boffin

NULL ^= NUL

It grieves me that someone who pretends IT competence doesn't ken the difference between NUL and NULL.

NUL is the name of the (ASCII) character with the binary value of 0000 0000.

NULL is empty, not value, undefined. As in a NULL pointer, a pointer that has not been initialised.

A NUL is commonly used in programs (and hence the strings of characters the use) to denote the end of a string, and this would be why Internet Exploder ignores them.

Judge rules Gore's film an inconvenient catalogue of errors

John
Gates Horns

Meteorologists don't believe in anthropogenic global warming?

They don't? Perhaps there's something here I don't understand:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=global+warming+site+bom.gov.au&btnG=Google+Search

I home that early next year (post election) our govt begins planning for entire Pacific Is nations of refugees.

Windows Genuine Advantage cries wolf (again)

John

What's wrong with being Indian?

depends on how well the customer can understand the accent. I had to ask for an Australian when I called MS, because I couldn't understand the Yankee accent the first person used.

I love it when the Indians are here and we have Howsha (sp?) to talk about the cricket, but I don't think I'd want to have him read me a critically-important Microsoft code.

How would you go with a solid Japanese accent?

Model train software spat threatens future of open source

John

Copyright?

I've just read the artistic licence. While it does talk about the Copyright Holder, it doesn't actually seem to include a claim of copyright.

I think something like this is probably needed;

"This software is copyright <author>. Copying and distribution is only allowed under the terms of the <blah>. license. A copy of the licence should be included with the software, but if not, it can be obtained by <instructions>"