My_scrollback_buffer_is_bigger_than_your_scrollback_buffer

title: My scrollback buffer is bigger than your scrollback buffer date: 2004-08-20 23:59:19

There are two big-ass reasons why FTP sucks ass: clear-text passwords and the way it fucks with firewalls. Both are awful hangovers from the early days of the Internet where cute little elves would pop out of your compiler to offer hints on the fun they were having next door.

We laugh now at the pooheads who would telnet to their server, or open up their firewalls a port further than necessary. So why the fuck don't Dreamweaver et. al. have scp plugins? Why are we constantly having to open up an old, insecure protocol for the sake of poorly designed, overpriced software?

Ahem. As you were.

In other news, Knoppix 3.4 will not only boot from a USB CDROM without trouble, it will not hang on autodetecting partitions and writing them to /etc/fstab. Both these steps tripped up 3.3. Whee, what a mad merry-go-round my life is!

Also, here are some stats on kernel compilation times. In the one corner we have a 2.8GHz P4, 512KB cache, 800MHz frontside bus with 1GB of RAM and a 7200 RPM IDE hard drive. In the other corner, we have a EPIA-M MiniITX mobo with 1 GHz Via CPU, 64KB cache, 256MB of RAM, a FSB speed I can't be bothered to look up and a 4400 RPM IDE laptop drive. The time was for "make dep && make bzImage" on version 2.4.26 of the Linux kernel with a pretty random (by which I mean specific to our needs) configuration. Try to guess which is which:

real 1m51.998s user 1m45.920s sys 0m5.120s

real 6m7.849 user 5m24.530 sys 0m25.130

Just for fun, I tried swapping the drives around: the P4 got the laptop drive, and the MiniITX board got the full-on Kevin's mom. Results:

real 2m8.743s user 1m44.840s sys 0m6.160s

real 6m39.898s user 5m25.500s sys 0m25.940s

for the first time, and then:

real 1m54.601s user 1m45.330s sys 0m5.550s
real 5m54.717s user 5m26.410s sys 0m25.690s

after that. The fuck?

Also, have a look at this thread. I think I speak for all of us when I say that Linux will simply not be ready for the desktop until its scrollback buffer behaves like FreeBSD's. After all, the REAL measure of a man's worth is the size of his scrollback buffer. Yeah, baby!