Weekly Edition
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Quotes of the week
Quite some time ago I was horrified by the private behaviour of a
hacker I deeply respected: malicious, hypocritical stuff. And it
caused an internal crisis for me: I thought we were all striving
together to make the world a better place. Here are the results I
finally derived:
-- Rusty Russell
This wasn't obvious to me, and it seems it's not obvious to others.
The more I look at the arguments for why assholes are necessary to
good code, the more I have to wonder if some form of Stockholm
syndrome is at work.
-- Valerie
Aurora
Can we drop most of MCA, EISA and ISA bus if we are going to have a
big version change ? A driver spring clean is much overdue and it's
all in git in case someone wishes to sneak out at midnight and
bring some crawly horror back from the dead.
-- Alan Cox
UEFI stands for "Unified Extensible Firmware Interface", where
"Firmware" is an ancient African word meaning "Why do something
right when you can do it so wrong that children will weep and brave
adults will cower before you", and "UEI" is Celtic for "We missed
DOS so we burned it into your ROMs".
-- Matthew Garrett(Log in to post comments)
Quotes of the week Posted May 26, 2011 14:16 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] I'm with Alan on this one. If they're even considering a version number jump, then surely getting rid of drivers for Fred Flintstone's computer is in order. And besides, if someone still wants kernel 2.OLD (or even 1.ANCIENT for that matter), then kernel.org still has it.
Quotes of the week Posted May 27, 2011 16:00 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
ISA is still widely used on industrial hardware. And it's not going to be phased out for many years.
Quotes of the week Posted May 27, 2011 16:09 UTC (Fri) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]
Out of curiosity, how much of this industrial hardware is modern enough in other respects to use a modern kernel?
Quotes of the week Posted May 27, 2011 18:17 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
What do you mean by 'modern'?
Industrial equipment often has quite a long lifetime. I've personally worked with equipment from 70-s which used _punch_ _cards_ back in 1998.
I also personally know one system which uses ISA cards. It's a data acquisition hardware for drilling well rigs. And it's not really that old - this system was designed in 2001 and required top-notch hardware back then.
Quotes of the week Posted May 28, 2011 18:24 UTC (Sat) by mastro (subscriber, #72665) [Link]
Do you think anyone will ever install a 2.8.x kernel on it? It can continue to run with 2.6.x (or, more likely, 2.4.x) just as it has done so far.
Quotes of the week Posted May 29, 2011 12:11 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
It's running 2.6.26 right now, so it's not inconceivable that someone might want to install 2.8 on it. For example, if new motherboards are not supported by 2.6 releases.
Quotes of the week Posted May 29, 2011 22:09 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Though of course, if supporting ISA is such a PITA then it should be dropped. But if it's just a cleanup for aesthetic reasons - let it stay.
Quotes of the week Posted Jun 4, 2011 13:21 UTC (Sat) by jjs (guest, #10315) [Link]
One reason HP kept MPE around so long is backwards compatability. I don't think many people (certainly not me until I got into it) realize how often stuff is used because "it's working, why change it?" - to the extent of keeping 20 year old software & hardware running an operation because it works.
Sometimes, though, they do want the latest & greatest OS for security reasons, even if the HW & SW are unchanged. Strange as it sounds, it happens.
ISA support Posted May 31, 2011 16:51 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] You may have ISA devices even if you don't have any ISA slots on your motherboard. Until quite recently (and possibly even still today) it's been used an on-board bus to talk to legacy devices like PS2 and serial ports and floppy controllers. I guess it was easier to include ISA support in new chipsets than to redesign those legacy devices to work with a more modern bus.
Quotes of the week Posted Jun 2, 2011 11:51 UTC (Thu) by runciter (guest, #75370) [Link] I agree. I have used PC/104 computers with serial transceiver add-on cards at work and I can say that ISA is by no means dead. On these I ran the most recent PREEMPT_RT linux, and I would be disappointed if I were prevented from using new real-time improvements because ISA support was removed.
Quotes of the week Posted May 26, 2011 16:07 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]
To generalize from Rusty's observation, capability, talent, intent, and probably most other personality traits are surprisingly independent. I am probably older than Rusty, but I still surprise myself from time to time with implicit assumptions I have made. I think it is one of those lessons I will always be learning.
Quotes of the week Posted May 26, 2011 20:51 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]
It's human nature to assume others working in the same field have the same moral compass as yourself and to be shocked when they don't. No single data point can predict another in the human psyche. Or in other words, we're all little monkeys with differing levels of "crazy" where crazy is defined as different than the observer.
Quotes of the week Posted Jun 4, 2011 0:48 UTC (Sat) by efexis (guest, #26355) [Link]
Weird, I actually just assume people are going to be quite different to me, so the idea that other people asssume similarities and are surprised when they find differences - to me - is quite surprising.
Quotes of the week Posted Jun 4, 2011 19:44 UTC (Sat) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
So your assumption is that other people will also assume differences, just like you? :-)
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