Parolski.com

Its been added to snv (Solaris Nevada, the development build of Solaris) build 100 (were on 99 at the moment).

This includes the following changes:

6368478 Solaris needs to support the Rock processor
6440653 stores to sun4v error queue head registers are missing a membar #Sync
6639717 FLUSH instruction used more than necessary in sun4v

It doesn’t fix greed, bad ideas, or worse still, embedded contradiction. You have no freedom, just rights, fact. house.gov is down, so if you were looking for a copy of the new proposal for the $700 billion bail out, you’ll have to wait. So Pelosi tells Wall street that the party is over. CEO compensation is going to be regulated. What, you mean they can’t decide for themselves how much they get? That is a restriction of their freedom, and quite likely a form of terrorism.

They’ve only just started emphasising the need for accountability. The first draft was essentially a blank cheque. Clinging onto a patchwork solution shows serious lack of fore sight, which is a pity, given that their governance effects billions of lives. To think that they want to export this form of governance to the rest of the world, completely unaware of the huge array of caveats.

On a more positive note, it will push the public to pay more attention to public affairs, internal and external. That you chose your future for yourself in a consenting manner doesn’t make it ok when it all goes wrong. It just means you implemented a bad idea. Sometimes your best isn’t good enough. Lets think a little more about the matter, or hire someone smarter than us.

Is using software to work out what folds you need to do, cheating? Who cares! I have always been a fan of folding paper, so I’m quite happy that people spent time to work out what the principles are behind the art, and then applying them in some decent software Happy folding!

It feels like it took a while, but now that storm over South Ossetia has calmed a little, the media has taken a step back and started digging harder. Lionel Beehner reveals to us his thoughts on why Dick Cheneny has arrived in Eastern Europe, (reosurces) with some aid in hand. It makes you wonder why the BBC don’t let the cat out the bag, when they showed a map of the region pinpointing the pipe lines, but saying nothing about them. Put simply, Georgian foreign policy is under the hand of the US and it probably won’t be long before military presence gets beefed up with an arms deal.

But for me the more interesting question is, when will it be publicly revealed that there is already American and Israeli ordinance in Georgia, and that the Russians have captured unmanned aerial vehicles? It won’t be long before that kit gets stripped down, reverse engineered and resold to the Syrians ….. (Bashar Al Assad has already made his visit to Moscow)

You can find XMMS in the ports collection, which is great. XMMS will even play you wav files out of the box. To get mp3s to play, you’ll need to do a little bit more work and also install:

xmms-mad

which you can find in /usr/ports/audio (presuming thats where you put your ports files)

In unix pretty much everything is a file (some people don’t like this), including audio devices. So if you fancy listening to some white noise, just cat a file to /dev/sound

Its got to be said, the documentation from the bsd guys is very thorough. Its not good enough for them that they get your mp3s playing. They tell you that wav and au files use little-endian byte ordering and signed linear quantization. You could figure this out by reading the header with hexdump(1). Reading the hex of your audio files, wow, thats a bit hardcore! Having said that, if you cared a little bit more and read up what that meant, you might be a better person. Or maybe a little more bitter….or maybe neither. Who knows! Either way, enjoy the audible goodness!

Search, advertising, email, android,

Now its Chrome , Google’s browser to be. Its promising to be good, with some quite smart ideas

Theres a little comic strip explaining all the juicy details. Its all comes down to:

• Separate process for each tab
• New javascript engine (It compiles it into a machine code for a virtual machine)
• Their huge test suite (they can run loads of rendering tests on the own web page index. Nice)
• Being able to close tabs which have hung
• Gears- transferable features between browsers. Need something from another browser which isn’t a plugin? Just use a gear!

Lets hope they deliver! Even if they didn’t its a good contribution to the open source mind share.