Thushan Fernando Uncut

\

Source: http://xkcd.com/644/

Source: http://xkcd.com/642/

Thats not a trick question either!

In an attempt to show just how slow South Africa’s Telkom broadband is, a frustrated IT company had a race to see which would be faster: transferring 4GB by sending a USB drive via pigeon 60 miles away, or transferring the files via the broadband connection. There were even rules in place so as to not have any unfair advantage over the broadband such as “birdseed must not have any performance-enhancing seeds within.” It was faster to send the data by pigeon than by broadband. It took the bird about an hour to reach the recipient station, and it took another hour to transfer the data to the other computer. The file being transferred via the broadband connection was still at 4%. Telkom said that it is not responsible for the firm’s slow Internet speed. Winston, the bird, is safely back in the IT office, probably enjoying birdseed without any performance-enhancing caplets mixed in.

Source: OSNews

So I guess you better download it now!

Classic.

You can now preorder Snow Lepoard (the worlds most advanced operating system!) on Amazon.com now!

I’ve pre-ordered mine for our Macs at home.

I've made a huge mistake

An article in The Age about computer techs and their chosen lifestyle made me realise just what a mistake we’re making.

Long story short: now I run a computer repair business.

Babes, parties, status, wealth – these are just some of the things you’ll be missing out on by becoming a computer tech.

But that’s OK. If you have what it takes to be a computer tech, you will have a genetic predisposition to driving away members of the opposite sex. In fact, members of any sex.

I’m just kidding.

Oh darn, I was just about to enjoy being a techie. But wait he’s just kidding.

How do you know if you have this personality type? If you have more computer magazines than girlie magazines, and if the thought of an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 with 12mb L2 cache running at a clock speed of 2.83GHz and a bus speed of 1333 MHz stirs the kind of feelings usually associated with procreation, you are well on your way to a career in computing.

Uh-oh, this one time, at band-camp LAN camp I was talking about the new Intel i7‘s coming up and oh noooooo! Just remembered I also have far too many developer mags lying around and no Womens Weekly nor Cosmopolitan‘s. Doom is imminent, it was also a kick-ass game made by those clever folks at id Software who just the other day got bought out by Zenimax Media, they’re also working on Doom 4 powered by the RAGE engine did you know? Doh, I’m digging my own grave aren’t I by going on? I better stop, you just go and read the article yourself before I start admitting to something like my crazy adventures in Linux.

But if your a hottie and you see a computer-techno-nottie, just go and give them a hug. They need it, those tradies, they’ve got their stuff together, so do the sparkies. We programmers, gamers who resort to online dating and wierdly obsessed facebook/twitter stalkers need love too. Who knows, we might even get around to fixing that problem with the mouse moving around the screen all by itself one day.

One things for sure, the future is not set, there is no fate but what we make for ourselves.

Wow, this is quite disturbing, a video of a kid who just had his WoW account canceled by his mother.

So sore from paintballing on Sunday

Linus has released 2.6.30 of the kernel, list of changes are available in the Linux Kernel Newbies guide.

This version adds the log-structured NILFS2 filesystem, a filesystem for object-based storage devices, a caching layer for local caching of NFS data, the RDS protocol which delivers high-performance reliable connections between the servers of a cluster, a distributed networking filesystem (POHMELFS), automatic flushing of files on renames/truncates in ext3, ext4 and btrfs, preliminary support for the 802.11w drafts, support for the Microblaze architecture, the Tomoyo security module, DRM support for the Radeon R6xx/R7xx graphic cards, asynchronous scanning of devices and partitions for faster bootup, MD support for switching between raid5/6 modes, the preadv/pwritev syscalls, several new drivers and many other small improvements.

One interesting change (amongst the many) is that we have this new feature called Fastboot. Essentially, when we boot right now, there is significant cycles wasted waiting for the device probing to complete. From Johnathan Corbet’s article on LWN:

There are many aspects to the job of making a system boot quickly. Some of the lowest-hanging fruit can be found in the area of device probing. Figuring out what hardware exists on the system tends to be a slow task at best; if it involves physical actions (such as spinning up a disk) it gets even worse. Kernel developers have long understood that they could gain a lot of time if this device probing could, at least, be done in a parallel manner: while the kernel is waiting for one device to respond, it can be talking to another. Attempts at parallelizing this work over the years have foundered, though. Problems with device ordering, concurrent access, and more have adversely affected system stability, with the inevitable result that the parallel code is taken back out. So early system initialization remains almost entirely sequential.

This new release attempts to address this problem.

Arjan hopes to succeed where others have failed by (1) taking a carefully-controlled approach to parallelization which doesn’t try to parallelize everything at once, and (2) an API which attempts to hide the effects of parallelization (other than improved speed) from the rest of the system. For (1), Arjan has limited himself to making parts of the SCSI and libata subsystems asynchronous, without addressing much of the rest of the system. The API work ensures that device registration happens in the same order is it would in a strictly sequential system. That eliminates the irritating problems which result when one’s hardware changes names from one boot to the next.

How well it does it, I guess we’ll have to wait and see. But here’s a bit of a tidbit in the kernel for the new Microblaze implementation.

void __init setup_cpuinfo(void)
{
struct device_node *cpu = NULL;

cpu = (struct device_node *) of_find_node_by_type(NULL, "cpu");
if (!cpu)
printk(KERN_ERR "You don't have cpu!!!\n");

printk(KERN_INFO "%s: initialising\n", __func__);

DUDE, You dont’ have cpu!!!

So you’d all know that Apple is having their WWDC is on right now, all those excited believers (NSFW or your eyes), evangelists, elitists, iPhone users and ‘cool folks’ turning up to get their:

in-depth technical information and hands-on learning about the powerful technologies in iPhone OS and Mac OS X from the Apple engineers who created them.

(from the WWDC website) They fail to mention the usual butt-wiping they include apart of the ‘festivities’. The guaranteed Microsoft .bash‘ing and the occasional pissing-all-over-Microsoft.

(Source: NeoWin -> Engadget )

Whats worse, the head poncho, Senior Vice Presidente of Software Engineering at Apple took the stage to claim that Windows 7 is the same old tech as Vista. Mr Apple man sir, may I remind you that your rotting iCandy contains parts of FreeBSD and NetBSD internally. Unix (which OS X is now certified for) predates Windows NT. Snow Leopard is also a refinement of Leopard no Señor?

Sure Microsoft may seem like one big evil company, but do you think Apple isnt? Google isnt? They’re all businesses, its all about the money, shareholders and making more moola. It’s All about the Benjamin’s buddy.

But I read an editorial written by Michael ‘Marshal’  Stanclift that screamed, YES DUDE, I AGREE. Instead of me ranting on, read what Marshal has to say. He sums it up pretty well and I back the man up.

Apple has a product that in some ways is superior to Windows, that does not have many of the problems that plague the Windows ecosystem. Apple can get away with a lot more than Microsoft can in terms of dropping support for older devices. But Apple needs to learn how to promote their technologies on their own merits, instead of acting like the pretty girl in high school that lobs insults at the ugly one to make itself feel better.

In the end though, if you want to give your support to a company who’s whole ethic seems to be bashing the competition – and quite poorly, go ahead. Give Jobs a job. They’ve got talent – cant deny that, they just dont know how to be professional about handling a bit of competition – just a bit.

Whilst on that same note, I was talking to someone at the station the other day, he was proudly showing me how his iPhone can surf the internet and I agreed that it was pretty awesome that we’re all heavily connected now. Just out of curiousity I asked him what he had before – because in his mind, the iPhone was the best thing since Xenu came and Elron Hubbard (who didn’t live in a cupboard it seems) gave us his cult relgion – and he told me he had a ‘crappy nokia from way back’. Just like people dont realise that there _were_ mp3 players before the iPod, it seems people didn’t know about SmartPhones.

Lesson? Apple knows how to sell things but it looks like they’re shitting Apples to be competitive – and you can be garanteed that the faithful will eat that right up. Windows 7 is picking up some press, what is a competitor to do?