Slashdot Mirror

You may own several hundred computer books, but how many do you read at a single time? How many during a 1 month period? 5? 10?

Although Safari is actually a joint venture between O'Rieilly and Pearson (who own Addison Wesley, Prentice Hall, Sams, Cisco Press, etc), the idea of books as bandwidth was Tim O'Reilly's.

Even though most of you would still want hard copies of books that you refer to continually, how many times do you have do learn something for work, and find yourself needing 5-10 tiles? Do you really want to buy 5 books on datamining, knowing that you'll only read a few pages of each, and be done with them in a few weeks? Next month you might need to be setting up a VPN. With Safari, you can subscribe to a half dozen datamining titles this month, and then next month, you can trade them in to subscribe to 5 books on VPNs. That's your bandwidth. Need more than 5 titles a month? Increase your bandwidth.

Sorry for sounding like an ad. I still buy computer books, but I've saved a fortune using Safari. The full text search through the entire catalog kicks ass. People are always coming to my desk to ask me to for something in Safari.

Lynn Bender aka Linear B
www.geekaustin.org

Since this is in the Austin area, I recommend checking out the Austin area slash based GeekAustin. They had a head's up on this event a while ago. I haven't seen a followup yet.

GeekAustin has also authored a thread pertaining to this subject.

Yes.

About six months ago, when my last employer went titsup.com, I had the opportunity to buy my brand-new totally maxed out Dell laptop from the company for about 20 cents on the dollar.

The machine had been purchased with one of those pricey Dell on-site same-day-service warranties . Since the video card seemed to be giving me problems, and the laptop cover was slightly warped, I decided that I should transfer the warranty to myself -- post-haste... When I had first purchased the laptop on the company account, Dell had bollocksed the order...multiple times . Despite the fact that my company had purchased hundreds of Dell machines, and despite the fact that Dell was one of our company's major sources of venture capital, orders were always being botched.

The order for my laptop had been lost 3 times. An entire month passed before I finally received it. When it arrived, the video didn't work, but nobody at Dell support had any idea what the problem was . Our head of MIS suggested that I send it back and get another -- but I doubted that our company would last long enough for me to ever see it.

So, I was not looking forward to transferring the warranty.

When I called Dell to find out about the transfer, I was told that they had a transfer ownership page on their website that would automate the process. Sure enough, they did.

I filled out all the spaces on the transfer form and hit the submit button. A message appeared stating that I would get a confirmation email within twenty-four hours. Guess what. I got nothing.

Rather than spend another hour on the phone with Dell support, I decided to fill the form out again...and again. I submitted the form from Windows, Mac, and Linux machines...using different browsers. All of this took but a few minutes. Far less than it would have taken for me to get a live human being at Dell support. I even toyed with the idea of writing a quick perl script to do it continuously.

Another 24 hours and no confirmation.

So I called Dell support.

No one had any ability to confirm whether any human or machine had received my request. I was told that the only way to transfer ownership was via the web page. Several Dell employees even filled out the form themselves.

On the third call to Dell support, I was informed that it would take 3-4 weeks to transfer ownership, and that Dell would have to contact my former employer to verify the sale. I told them that my employer had ceased business and had disconnected their phones. No one offered a solution.

PART TWO, HOW I GOT GOOD SERVICE FROM DELL!

I decided to use a trick that I employed when I needed to get the CDROM on my powerbook replaced...

I scoured the web for three phone numbers which you won't find on their website:
1)Dell's Public Relations Dept.
2)Dell's Marketing Dept.
3)Dell's Legal Dept.

I called the public relations office first, and stated:

Hello, this is (linearb) calling from Austin, Texas. I'm getting ready to launch a massive interactive Dell complaint site on the web. Rather than wait for you to contact me, asking what it would take to get me to stop, I'm giving you the opportunity to stop me from putting the site up in the first place. All you have to do is solve a simple problem - I want the ownership of my laptop transferred. I do not want to be put on hold. I want someone to contact me who can solve this problem. And I want it solved in the next few days.

The woman on the phone was very polite and sympathetic. I assured her that none of my frustration was directed at her, and thanked her for taking my call. Seriously, it's important to separate individuals from the company they work for. When a company has massive problems, most of the employees know it. Despite that, many still do the best they can.

I was assured that I would get a return call within 2 days.

Sure enough, I recieved a call...from a total mean bitch on wheels. She told me that there was nothing wrong with the website, and that I simply had to fill in the form properly, and that I would receive a confirmation within 24 hours. I gave her the name of several Dell employees who had filled out the form themselves a week previously, but no confirmation was ever recieved.

I asked her why Dell had no internal way of tracking whether the transfer process had been initiated. She said they did. I said "prove it." She had no answer.

I told the woman that all I wanted was a printed confirmation that ownership had been transferred to me. She said that she would do it personally, and gave me her phone number.

A day later, she called me back stating that the ownership had been transferred. I said that was good, but I still wanted a written confirmation stating such. She said she would send me an email.

I tried to get her to admit that the web interface didn't work, but she refused to do so. She didn't even apologize for my inconvenience in the matter. However, the woman obviously had the juice to solve my problem quickly.

So, as a service to you dear readers of Geek Austin, I'm going to save you the trouble I had to go through. If you have a real problem, I suggest that you just call this woman directly. She may be arrogant, curt, and totally unsympathetic; but she clearly has the juice to solve your problem.

Margaret Coca
margaret_coca@dell.com
1-800-624-9897
1-512-338-4400

About six months ago, when my last employer went titsup.com, I had the opportunity to buy my brand-new totally maxed out Dell laptop from the company for about 20 cents on the dollar.

The machine had been purchased with one of those pricey Dell on-site same-day-service warranties . Since the video card seemed to be giving me problems, and the laptop cover was slightly warped, I decided that I should transfer the warranty to myself -- post-haste... When I had first purchased the laptop on the company account, Dell had bollocksed the order...multiple times . Despite the fact that my company had purchased hundreds of Dell machines, and despite the fact that Dell was one of our company's major sources of venture capital, orders were always being botched.

The order for my laptop had been lost 3 times. An entire month passed before I finally received it. When it arrived, the video didn't work, but nobody at Dell support had any idea what the problem was . Our head of MIS suggested that I send it back and get another -- but I doubted that our company would last long enough for me to ever see it.

So, I was not looking forward to transferring the warranty.

When I called Dell to find out about the transfer, I was told that they had a transfer ownership page on their website that would automate the process. Sure enough, they did.

I filled out all the spaces on the transfer form and hit the submit button. A message appeared stating that I would get a confirmation email within twenty-four hours. Guess what. I got nothing.

Rather than spend another hour on the phone with Dell support, I decided to fill the form out again...and again. I submitted the form from Windows, Mac, and Linux machines...using different browsers. All of this took but a few minutes. Far less than it would have taken for me to get a live human being at Dell support. I even toyed with the idea of writing a quick perl script to do it continuously.

Another 24 hours and no confirmation.

So I called Dell support.

No one had any ability to confirm whether any human or machine had received my request. I was told that the only way to transfer ownership was via the web page. Several Dell employees even filled out the form themselves.

On the third call to Dell support, I was informed that it would take 3-4 weeks to transfer ownership, and that Dell would have to contact my former employer to verify the sale. I told them that my employer had ceased business and had disconnected their phones. No one offered a solution.

PART TWO, HOW I GOT GOOD SERVICE FROM DELL!

I decided to use a trick that I employed when I needed to get the CDROM on my powerbook replaced...

I scoured the web for three phone numbers which you won't find on their website:
1)Dell's Public Relations Dept.
2)Dell's Marketing Dept.
3)Dell's Legal Dept.

I called the public relations office first, and stated:

Hello, this is (linearb) calling from Austin, Texas. I'm getting ready to launch a massive interactive Dell complaint site on the web. Rather than wait for you to contact me, asking what it would take to get me to stop, I'm giving you the opportunity to stop me from putting the site up in the first place. All you have to do is solve a simple problem - I want the ownership of my laptop transferred. I do not want to be put on hold. I want someone to contact me who can solve this problem. And I want it solved in the next few days.

The woman on the phone was very polite and sympathetic. I assured her that none of my frustration was directed at her, and thanked her for taking my call. Seriously, it's important to separate individuals from the company they work for. When a company has massive problems, most of the employees know it. Despite that, many still do the best they can.

I was assured that I would get a return call within 2 days.

Sure enough, I recieved a call...from a total mean bitch on wheels. She told me that there was nothing wrong with the website, and that I simply had to fill in the form properly, and that I would receive a confirmation within 24 hours. I gave her the name of several Dell employees who had filled out the form themselves a week previously, but no confirmation was ever recieved.

I asked her why Dell had no internal way of tracking whether the transfer process had been initiated. She said they did. I said "prove it." She had no answer.

I told the woman that all I wanted was a printed confirmation that ownership had been transferred to me. She said that she would do it personally, and gave me her phone number.

A day later, she called me back stating that the ownership had been transferred. I said that was good, but I still wanted a written confirmation stating such. She said she would send me an email.

I tried to get her to admit that the web interface didn't work, but she refused to do so. She didn't even apologize for my inconvenience in the matter. However, the woman obviously had the juice to solve my problem quickly.

So, as a service to you dear readers of Geek Austin, I'm going to save you the trouble I had to go through. If you have a real problem, I suggest that you just call this woman directly. She may be arrogant, curt, and totally unsympathetic; but she clearly has the juice to solve your problem.

Margaret Coca
margaret_coca@dell.com
1-800-624-9897
1-512-338-4400

About six months ago, when my last employer went titsup.com, I had the opportunity to buy my brand-new totally maxed out Dell laptop from the company for about 20 cents on the dollar.

The machine had been purchased with one of those pricey Dell on-site same-day-service warranties . Since the video card seemed to be giving me problems, and the laptop cover was slightly warped, I decided that I should transfer the warranty to myself -- post-haste... When I had first purchased the laptop on the company account, Dell had bollocksed the order...multiple times . Despite the fact that my company had purchased hundreds of Dell machines, and despite the fact that Dell was one of our company's major sources of venture capital, orders were always being botched.

The order for my laptop had been lost 3 times. An entire month passed before I finally received it. When it arrived, the video didn't work, but nobody at Dell support had any idea what the problem was . Our head of MIS suggested that I send it back and get another -- but I doubted that our company would last long enough for me to ever see it.

So, I was not looking forward to transferring the warranty.

When I called Dell to find out about the transfer, I was told that they had a transfer ownership page on their website that would automate the process. Sure enough, they did.

I filled out all the spaces on the transfer form and hit the submit button. A message appeared stating that I would get a confirmation email within twenty-four hours. Guess what. I got nothing.

Rather than spend another hour on the phone with Dell support, I decided to fill the form out again...and again. I submitted the form from Windows, Mac, and Linux machines...using different browsers. All of this took but a few minutes. Far less than it would have taken for me to get a live human being at Dell support. I even toyed with the idea of writing a quick perl script to do it continuously.

Another 24 hours and no confirmation.

So I called Dell support.

No one had any ability to confirm whether any human or machine had received my request. I was told that the only way to transfer ownership was via the web page. Several Dell employees even filled out the form themselves.

On the third call to Dell support, I was informed that it would take 3-4 weeks to transfer ownership, and that Dell would have to contact my former employer to verify the sale. I told them that my employer had ceased business and had disconnected their phones. No one offered a solution.

PART TWO, HOW I GOT GOOD SERVICE FROM DELL!

I decided to use a trick that I employed when I needed to get the CDROM on my powerbook replaced...

I scoured the web for three phone numbers which you won't find on their website:
1)Dell's Public Relations Dept.
2)Dell's Marketing Dept.
3)Dell's Legal Dept.

I called the public relations office first, and stated:

Hello, this is (linearb) calling from Austin, Texas. I'm getting ready to launch a massive interactive Dell complaint site on the web. Rather than wait for you to contact me, asking what it would take to get me to stop, I'm giving you the opportunity to stop me from putting the site up in the first place. All you have to do is solve a simple problem - I want the ownership of my laptop transferred. I do not want to be put on hold. I want someone to contact me who can solve this problem. And I want it solved in the next few days.

The woman on the phone was very polite and sympathetic. I assured her that none of my frustration was directed at her, and thanked her for taking my call. Seriously, it's important to separate individuals from the company they work for. When a company has massive problems, most of the employees know it. Despite that, many still do the best they can.

I was assured that I would get a return call within 2 days.

Sure enough, I recieved a call...from a total mean bitch on wheels. She told me that there was nothing wrong with the website, and that I simply had to fill in the form properly, and that I would receive a confirmation within 24 hours. I gave her the name of several Dell employees who had filled out the form themselves a week previously, but no confirmation was ever recieved.

I asked her why Dell had no internal way of tracking whether the transfer process had been initiated. She said they did. I said "prove it." She had no answer.

I told the woman that all I wanted was a printed confirmation that ownership had been transferred to me. She said that she would do it personally, and gave me her phone number.

A day later, she called me back stating that the ownership had been transferred. I said that was good, but I still wanted a written confirmation stating such. She said she would send me an email.

I tried to get her to admit that the web interface didn't work, but she refused to do so. She didn't even apologize for my inconvenience in the matter. However, the woman obviously had the juice to solve my problem quickly.

So, as a service to you dear readers of Geek Austin, I'm going to save you the trouble I had to go through. If you have a real problem, I suggest that you just call this woman directly. She may be arrogant, curt, and totally unsympathetic; but she clearly has the juice to solve your problem.

Margaret Coca
margaret_coca@dell.com
1-800-624-9897
1-512-338-4400

About six months ago, when my last employer went titsup.com, I had the opportunity to buy my brand-new totally maxed out Dell laptop from the company for about 20 cents on the dollar.

The machine had been purchased with one of those pricey Dell on-site same-day-service warranties . Since the video card seemed to be giving me problems, and the laptop cover was slightly warped, I decided that I should transfer the warranty to myself -- post-haste... When I had first purchased the laptop on the company account, Dell had bollocksed the order...multiple times . Despite the fact that my company had purchased hundreds of Dell machines, and despite the fact that Dell was one of our company's major sources of venture capital, orders were always being botched.

The order for my laptop had been lost 3 times. An entire month passed before I finally received it. When it arrived, the video didn't work, but nobody at Dell support had any idea what the problem was . Our head of MIS suggested that I send it back and get another -- but I doubted that our company would last long enough for me to ever see it.

So, I was not looking forward to transferring the warranty.

When I called Dell to find out about the transfer, I was told that they had a transfer ownership page on their website that would automate the process. Sure enough, they did.

I filled out all the spaces on the transfer form and hit the submit button. A message appeared stating that I would get a confirmation email within twenty-four hours. Guess what. I got nothing.

Rather than spend another hour on the phone with Dell support, I decided to fill the form out again...and again. I submitted the form from Windows, Mac, and Linux machines...using different browsers. All of this took but a few minutes. Far less than it would have taken for me to get a live human being at Dell support. I even toyed with the idea of writing a quick perl script to do it continuously.

Another 24 hours and no confirmation.

So I called Dell support.

No one had any ability to confirm whether any human or machine had received my request. I was told that the only way to transfer ownership was via the web page. Several Dell employees even filled out the form themselves.

On the third call to Dell support, I was informed that it would take 3-4 weeks to transfer ownership, and that Dell would have to contact my former employer to verify the sale. I told them that my employer had ceased business and had disconnected their phones. No one offered a solution.

PART TWO, HOW I GOT GOOD SERVICE FROM DELL!

I decided to use a trick that I employed when I needed to get the CDROM on my powerbook replaced...

I scoured the web for three phone numbers which you won't find on their website:
1)Dell's Public Relations Dept.
2)Dell's Marketing Dept.
3)Dell's Legal Dept.

I called the public relations office first, and stated:

Hello, this is (linearb) calling from Austin, Texas. I'm getting ready to launch a massive interactive Dell complaint site on the web. Rather than wait for you to contact me, asking what it would take to get me to stop, I'm giving you the opportunity to stop me from putting the site up in the first place. All you have to do is solve a simple problem - I want the ownership of my laptop transferred. I do not want to be put on hold. I want someone to contact me who can solve this problem. And I want it solved in the next few days.

The woman on the phone was very polite and sympathetic. I assured her that none of my frustration was directed at her, and thanked her for taking my call. Seriously, it's important to separate individuals from the company they work for. When a company has massive problems, most of the employees know it. Despite that, many still do the best they can.

I was assured that I would get a return call within 2 days.

Sure enough, I recieved a call...from a total mean bitch on wheels. She told me that there was nothing wrong with the website, and that I simply had to fill in the form properly, and that I would receive a confirmation within 24 hours. I gave her the name of several Dell employees who had filled out the form themselves a week previously, but no confirmation was ever recieved.

I asked her why Dell had no internal way of tracking whether the transfer process had been initiated. She said they did. I said "prove it." She had no answer.

I told the woman that all I wanted was a printed confirmation that ownership had been transferred to me. She said that she would do it personally, and gave me her phone number.

A day later, she called me back stating that the ownership had been transferred. I said that was good, but I still wanted a written confirmation stating such. She said she would send me an email.

I tried to get her to admit that the web interface didn't work, but she refused to do so. She didn't even apologize for my inconvenience in the matter. However, the woman obviously had the juice to solve my problem quickly.

So, as a service to you dear readers of Geek Austin, I'm going to save you the trouble I had to go through. If you have a real problem, I suggest that you just call this woman directly. She may be arrogant, curt, and totally unsympathetic; but she clearly has the juice to solve your problem.

Margaret Coca
margaret_coca@dell.com
1-800-624-9897
1-512-338-4400

If anything, the mere suggestion that it is further proves the man's thesis. If there is one big "problem" with open source these days, it's the unreasoned fanaticism of its proponents. We have met the enemy, and it isn't Microsoft. It is us.

Yes, many times the Open Source community has produced things better than commercial endeavors. Apache and IIS is a great example. So are vim and/or emacs vs. pretty much any closed source editor. etc. etc. Perl kicks the ass out of VisualBasic every day of the week and three times on Sunday. In terms of security and ease of administration, any of the free unixen beat win32 server platforms hands down IMHO. But there are times when, well, face it guys, someone with a clue works for a company and makes something good that is closed source. ASP pages, for example, have a nice object model (just use jscript to avoid that vbscript suckage ;-) ). Anyone who things linux/*bsd is a good OpenGL development platform has never used Irix. etc. etc.

In the end, information technology is only useful in the extent that it makes people's lives easier or more entertaining in some way[1]. Whether the machine code came though gcc or msvc++, the end user does not care one whit. We are carpenters and stonemasons, only our raw materials are bits instead of wood or stone. So just pick the right tools for the job at hand, and leave the fanaticism at the door!

[1] Or to stick it to The Man. But that's besides the current point.

(I fully expect to get modded down for saying this stuff, but fuck it, I have 50 karma so I care not a fig for the slings and arrow of outrageous moderation.)

this reminds me of the possibly urban legend tale of aviators coming home from WW2 in the US and so associating vibration and loud noise with excitement that they couldn't "function" in quiet, intimate situations. so therapists advised putting a vacuum cleaner under the bed and the problem eventually cleared up. if it's true perhaps it is another datum for how strongly sound affects the human psyche.
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org

eh? so? clients don't matter squatola, as long as the data store and serving mechanisms are running on something secure. I do believe he said "anything important"... Or do you expect the average newbie employee or random client off the street to waltz into the bank and be perfectly adept using OS/2, Linux, *BSD, or whatever the hell the bank uses "for real"? (yes, many banks rely on IBM software like OS/2 for internal clients, DB2 on AIX for datastore, etc.; if one bank is retarded, this does not disprove the original posters thesis)

What's being asked is that the computer makers thoroughly test and understand the workings of the JRE being packaged.

The JRE is about as stone simple as you can get in terms of installation[1]. They don't need to understand jack squat about how the JVM works as long as the person making the disk image can click through a few dialog boxes to install it. Analogy: do you understand how a glow plug works? Can you drive a car with a diesel engine?

Besides, don't you think Sun or IBM would jump all over themselves providing technical info to OEMs willing to try this with their JREs?

Regarding Microsoft support of OEM installations (either of MS products or otherwise): hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahaha. thanks, I haven't laughed that way in a long time.

[1]Well, unless you're using Mozilla. But I don't see OEMs shipping a beta product as the main browser anytime soon.

Yep. And the differences become larger on the server side. (SQL Server is way more expensive than NT Server, as is Exchange, as is ...). True, you have to buy license packs for the OS to add on users, but that's just them designing a razor where you have to replace two blades at once. ;-)

using SDL for input, as a graphics substrate for 2D games and for OpenGL-based 3D games, etc. Throw in some coverage of OpenAL as well as generally applicable topics such as AI, Maths, and the like. Garnish with touches of the 'other side' of game development (plot, characterization, artwork) so the code monkeys understand what the writers and artists are talking about.

Result: a book teaching folks how to make games that run on Linux. And windows. And any other platform SDL, OpenGL, and OpenAL work on. If it can be pointed out to the development community that these tools are viable and easy to use, further that they get portability almost for free using them thus expanding their market for low marginal cost, more games might come out that Linux, MacOS, BeOS, *BSD, etc. could play.

Plus SDL is just cool. :-)

Only question in my mind is would O'Reilly publish a book like this; if so what animal would it be? (would a woodcut of Pac-Man work?)

Side note: gv works just as well as Acrobat to view PDF files from netscape as a helper app (and PS too, of course). Just add "gv %s" in as the application to handle the file types for PostScript and PDF(edit->preferences->helperapps or something like that). Personally I like gv's navigational structure better anyway.

(Well, /path/to/gv if it isn't in your path, naturally.)

Very rarely I will run across a document that gv just doesn't like but that Acrobat displays fine. This happens maybe once a month, if I'm looking at a fair amount of pdf's.

I think the software dependencies for gv are ghostscript and whatever dependencies it has but I'm not sure. apt-get or rpmfind.net or your ports tree are your friends in that regard.

Yeah, it's fast and supports transactions. BUT, at least in the last stable release, there were still some nasty catches. One I do recall was that the database could have no more than 1023 tables of the gemini type.

So if you do use it, make damn sure you read the docs on it and use it wisely given its limitations. IMHO, all of the new table types designed to give MySQL ACID-level database behavior have flaws, so you'd be better off using something with more mature suport if you need this (like PostgreSQL or a commercial rdbms).

(The first chapter is chronologically the second-last, which is a little confusing at first.)

This same structure is found in Homer's Odysee. IIRC from freshman literature in high school (a disturbing number of years ago), the term for this was in media res or "in the middle" (someting like that anyway).

Rather effective for a heroic work as you see the penultimate part of the plot and the character's struggles to reach that point, with the final segment providing the climactic resolution / bad-guy-smiting. This yields a sense of inevitability to the character's actions, as they are drawn to their fate in the future. This "charmed life" atmosphere is of course fitting for a heroic character/story arc. So the use here could be a deliberate nod to Homer.

OTOH, this device is used everywhere in literature (and things derived from literature such as TV shows and movies, eg. how many times has a Star Trek episode gone like this: two minutes of stuff from the 'end' of that show's plot, intro/credits, back to the beginning...). Consider that this meme has had a few millenia to propogate through the writing culture and it's no wonder that this device is so frequently employed. So maybe RZ wasn't thinking in particular about Homer at the time.

stepwise.com for osx related things (& osx server and openstep and ...). See the softrak section for osx databases (mysql an Pg both). nb: the osx server and osx sections are different; and I don't use either so ?? on the cross compatibility front.

This spring during this OOD class I was taking at UT-Austin, the teacher gave an example of code resuse taken a bit too far (it lead into better ways to do what the programmers were trying to do). You will I hope pardon that I can't give any attribution or backup material for this, she didn't give any and I didn't think at the time to ask her...

Apparently, the Australian army wanted to make a flight sim to train helicopter pilots/gunnery officers on, complete with all the things you'd expect like infantry, ground vehicles, various and sundry air units, and non-combatants like civilians and atmosphere critters like kangaroos. This is in the early 90s from what I recall her saying.

So the programmers naturally spend most of their time working on the "active" interaction objects, i.e. the ones the pilots/gunners will most likely be shooting at: infantry and vehicles. (friend and foe, for IFF tests) It came time to do the atmosphere things and they decided to be efficient and reuse many of the behavioral subroutines from the enemy infantry for the ground critters (like herds of kangaroos instead of platoons of infantry; enemy becuase kangaroos wouldn't most likely stand and wave at a helicopter like Australian troops would).

This worked very well, mostly. The kangaroos would scatter and try to run away from the helicopter as soon as they heard it, hiding behind trees, hills, and in valleys, etc.

Unfortunately, the code reused also modeled the "pop out from behind cover and fire shoulder-launched AA missiles at helicopter" behavior, a fact no one noticed until the first air crew was lost due to the KLA (Kangaroo Liberation Army, as the bug manifestation apparently became known as).

Oops.

Well, they do ship PostgreSQL, which is at least an ORDBMS. (And it's really cool!</advocacy>). Plus even the latest versions of Pg typically are a zero sweat install (rpms from the Pg site).

Aren't they international? Of course I don't know how great their mb/cpu selection is (I just got a router from them). Well, anyway, good luck! Another idea, and maybe one easier to swing where you are, would be to get a K6-2/3 chip (provided your MB is one of those super7 boards (socket 7, up to 100 fsb if the term isn't familiar)), that could give you a factor of two or more increase in cpu speed.
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org

You might have better luck with one of the new portable cd players coming out that also play mp3 cd(r/rw)s. True the display probably sucks more, but then OTOH the sound is probably better and you can cram way more onto a cdr(w) than you can for even the largest CF/SD card, for a vanishingly small fraction of the price.

I just saw one of these beasts at Radio Shack the other day, damn if I can recall the name of it or how much it was though. (And if there are always the laptop-hd-in-pretty-case things (c.f. thinkgeek) too.)

Of course the ideal would be a mobile phone with better sound chips, blazing fast wireless ethernet, and your own personal WAPish-interface streaming MP3 server... ;-) "Yeah, all 120 gigs of mp3s are available through my phone..."

well, I do know about them, I just omitted the "use namespace std;" bit because I was feeling lazy ;-)

thanks for the url, btw.
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org

a) printf statements and I/O inside loops in a performance benchmark? hello, McFly... you aren't really testing the compiler there.

b) gcc only as source??? (see your installation media for any free unix to get binaries, cygwin for win32, etc. etc. GNU may only distribute source but other folks can and do distribute binaries, and I'm sure gcc 3.0 binaries will be released for your platform of choice Real Soon Now)

c) FP perf: what do those numbers mean? There is no explanation given of how they're arrived at or what scale they're on. "Naked numbers unlike naked ladies aren't terribly interesting."

d) Ease of Use/Installation: Totally subjective and totally irrelevant to the merits of the compiler. Just because a preteen could install VC++ doesn't make it's code any better.

e) "overhyped","not ready" gcc: ok, so you're a troll. Just try not to be flaming stupid while you're at it. If it isn't ready then why is the operating system I'm using to type this reply on built with it? Is gcc the best compiler ever, well, no, there's no such thing. Frankly I wish gcc supported something more recent in the fortran family than F77 (not that I like Fortran per se but as a scientific coder it's sort of common and stuff).

You don't want BGP.

But if you did, try GNU Zebra as a nice alternative for all your heavy-duty rouing needs. (GNU Zebra homepage: http://www.zebra.org, site seems to be down at the moment)

Umm, ok. Then why does this work:

And that proto for main is in very widespread usage. Maybe the standard says different and it's just all the compiler makers and C++ book writers that are "wrong", heh. Maybe the compilers silently turn void return in to int return 0. Maybe C++ just sucks. ;-)

I _think_ it can be either int main() or void main() or main() (which the compiler takes as void main() ).

But then I hack perl and C, not C++. :-) I'd check but I don't have a c++ compiler handy at the moment.

I've administered both NT and Unix platforms (including the pricey proprietary ones). Unix wins on TCO, in my expereience, and it's no contest if it's x86 hardware unix.

Why? Business requires a certain minimum level of functionality from their servers, some level such that the temptation to go back to paper and pencils isn't a factor, which varies from business to business and from usage to usage. In order to reliably meet a given level of functionality (performance or stability), I have found that pretty much without fail NT required more machines and more powerful machines (== more expensive machines) to meet that limit than Unix did. More machines means more admins. More machines and more admins mean more cost.

This is not to say that NT goes down every five minutes. But in order to keep one NT server up even approximately as long as a Unix machine, I find that I must restrict it to doing just one service at a time (i.e. just mail, or just file serving, or just web, or just DB, etc.); whereas on a Unix machine I can frequently roll several services onto one machine with no significant drop in performance or reliability.

I am not an Open Source zealot. I am a pragmatist, and I only evaluate the tools I use based on how well they meet my or my client's needs. Microsoft simply does not provide good tools to run mission-critical services on, however "cost effective" they may be.

Sort of like the god-and-nazis Usenet rule, as soon as the phrase "Set Top Box(es)" is uttered in a headline...

(Well, some of the subsections already have the WiReD color-scheme-cum-retinal-damage thing going on.)

:-) Kill your TV, and the box sitting on top of it.

Yes. They already are. The suits just don't know about it yet.

Example: I work for an IT consultancy shop in $SOUTHERN_US_STATE. A large part of our business comes from @BIG_OIL_COMPANYS. Something like 90% of the code we write for them is in perl (even if half the time it's ActivePerl on NeanderthalTechnology(<-- 'Oog write operating system. Oog like color blue')).

Most of the time, clients couldn't POSSIBLY care less about whether tech FOO or tech BAR is used, open or closed, as long as it lets them do what they need to do. Becuase, let's face it, if they cared about this crap they'd do it for a living instead of whatever it is they do now.

Yeah, that was a brain fart, I meant the 760MP. If you follow the search link you will indeed find that the Tyan board is dual cpu. :-) Word on the grapevine is that Tyan will be the first manufacturer of these beasts.
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org

Seems the 760 chipset is already available on the street: ugly pricewatch.com search query for the Tyan S2462. Price is about 580 give or take 20 it seems. (Of those shops I've actually directly dealt with essencom.com a few times; they seem to be a nice, reputable shop.)

(This suprised me as I thought what I've been seeing around the past few days were just beta boards.)

I wonder how long it will be until places like VA Linux and Penguin Computers have dual-athlon rackmount servers and deskside workstations for sale? :-)

Very true. It seems that the same problem infests used Unix machines and networking hardware as well. A specific example is the price of a used, decently appointed Cisco 2501 router. These usually end in the $700 - 1250 range from what I've seen, and for Christ's sake, the damn things are older than dirt. Strom Thurmond probably used one when he was in junior high. ;-) The reason why is all the clueless people trying to get one for CCNx studies (and for what the 2501s sometimes go for, you could get a new 1600R/1700 series router and almost a 261x series router used). Another would be people bidding on Sparc 5's like crazy, paying 5 and 6 hundred american dollars for them, when for the same price or even a hair less they could get a (much better IMHO, even if it is uglier) Ultra 1.

it's right here on swift-tools.com (SWF-->SWiFt). For the link wary that's http://www.swift-tools.com/Flash/ . The site has all sorts of other cool SWF-based tools too (like an analog of Generator that doesn't cost 20 bajillion dollars per CPU, I think it's free if you display the little link button, US$100 otherwise).
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org

But at the same time, he could just as well have been saying that the success of Microsoft is due to Gates having a bad haircut, and that every CEO/founder/President should have a bad haircut.

I think it was that awful blue sweater he wore in the DOS->Win16 days. "No Bill! Damnit, ok, we'll bundle your stupid crap with our machines if you'll just stop wearing that fucking sweater to our offices!"

On a funny note, it's probably so people couldn't post derogatory statements about slashcode (pre-bender) that had examples in them (I finally figured out what $S is but wtf is $I?).

On a not-so-funny note, it's not just that "junk" chars are verboten, but the lack of a 'pre' or 'code' tag with which to meaningfully render code is a real bummer. Especially in this section, a priori a code-focused one. I'd propose relaxing the restrictions on 'code' or 'pre' here but I'm sure it would be a pain to implement[1].

[1] yeah, yeah. trolls abusing it for page screwage. cry me a river, and while you're at it just set threshold = [1 .. 3]. ;-)

The test was run on SGI hardware. Even though it's intel, it's still SGI. I love the SGI hardware I've been exposed to, but you have to go into it with the knowledge and acceptance of the plain fact that you will pay out the nose for it and maybe a few other orfii too if the sales weasel is being efficient that day. At least they have the decency to make their uberexpensive machines look nice.

So while the OS was free, the hardware was cost++. (think about it man, 16 p!!! zeons alone ...)

No actually I didn't know that. Thanks for replying, I may have to look at python again. (I suspected the semicolon was redundant but after hacking in C long enough it's sort of an instinct ;-) ).
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org

Heck, I'd by a box like that just to run BeOS on. :-) And since the thermal characteristics of the ppc's are nice, I bet those guys would make great little firewalls with OpenBSD (or heck, 1U machines in general).

I'm assuming those boards take "normal" sdram and I/O connectors (hd, mouse, kb)?

Just my two cents, becuase I think that having a central print magazine coming out every month is a really strengthening thing for a "marginalized" community (e.g. what the linux journal did/does for the linux community). I say "marginalized" from the standpoint that python is a much smaller community than, say, java.

My other four cents worth would be a) something besides whitespace for block indentation (by that I mean let me use {} if I want to, and I do, if for no other reason that when I'm 5 levels deep and want to write something like
someProperlyAndDescriptivelyNamedVariable = somObjectWithAnotherLongAndDescriptiveName.aMethod WithSimilarlyLongAndDescriptiveName(someObviouslyN amedParameters,someOtherObject.someOtherMethod());
it's running off the side of a normal xterm real quick) and b) constructing a CPAN equiv. (addressed by posts above, so thats minus two cents).

The method of paper-borne packet transmission should be updated to take advantage of today's advances in airborne transmission media. Specifically, liquid or solid propellant rockets. Given the possibility of packet loss due to negative in-flight uncontrolled combustion events, this would best be paired with UDP.

The MTU of the media is also selectively adaptable by adjusting the size of the rocket device. As a specific example, ping packets with the size parameter used to max out the packet data payload would of course need larger rockets. This is perhaps appropriate given the designation of "ping of death" sometimes applied to large ping packets.

findable in any physical chemistry text (usually in the first chapter (maybe second) dealing with quantum). The nice thing about it is that it would be "tunable" for the subject's pain threshold, and it has cool greek letters in it (I say tunable because the form of the Hamiltonian operator depends on what dimensionality system yer lookin' at (hint: if they like to pour hot wax on themselves for kicks give them the 3d polar coordinates version, which expands quite a bit with that lambda thingy (the Lambertian? something like that, I can never recall the name) that ends up in the Hamiltonian).

But make sure they understand what the equation means, like a previous poster said. Covering yourself with Greek gibberish is just as bad as the fools that had the Hip'n'Trendy(TM) Kanji tats done when they don't speak Japanese. I've thought about getting my fav russian quote done, but that's only becuase I'd know if the tattoo artist decided to write "I am a stupid American" rather than "pravda harasho, a chaste luche[1]", which is not idle speculation as a local shop had/has a big flashy kanji tat offering that translates as "I have no fucking clue what this means becuase I'm an idiot." according to my Japanese-speaking friends.

[1] "The truth is good, but happiness is better.", and what I wrote up there is of course just a mangling of english letters to sort of produce the same sounds as the cyrillic/russian words.

:-) unless there's something in the newer stuff you can't live without. and 6.2 is hardly ancient tech. for the binaries try running them individually to see what they say (and then running "strace binaryname" to see what they are _doing_ when they say what they say, and "ldd binaryname" to see what (dynamic) libs it wants (is ldd just dynlibs? seems to make sense but I don't recall and it's 4am so I can't be buggered to go find out)). This may require a good bit of spelunking on your part to fix, but that's the joy of unix. One good source of rpms is rpmfind.net (aka rufus.w3.org), for all your obscure rpm-finding needs.
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org

obligatory absolutely fabulous reference:

"Oh, that's what it's for!", in reference to a vibrating pager.

(Followed by: "Eh, do you want it back?""No! Keep it!", heh heh)

I was trying to point out that in the public domain, copyright does not (really, see unique performance thing) apply. I meant "fair use" as in "use that is fair" as in "use that doesn't break any other laws", not "Fair Use as defined as specific outs when something is copyrighted". So it looks like it is you who is holding the directionally challenged portion of a fibrous tree growth structure. ;-) In any case, my point is only salient to music in the PD, if they made a Ringtone or whatever of "Oops! I did it again!" by future porn star Brittany Spears (god forbid), of course that would probably not be Fair Use.
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org

Why? Is it a parody, scholarly work, or other protected derivative work? Is it a backup or time-shift of a broadcast signal? No

Repeat after me: Puuuuubbbbblllliiiicccc Ddddddoooooommmmaaaaiiiiinnnn wherein just about any use is fair use. So I can play my Beethoven's fifth reproduction all I want... (note that in this instance a specific performance of music that is effectively public domain is still unique and copyrightable, so you make up your own, as DTMF ain't that hard, burning copies of a recording by $orchestra is still piracy).

Yeah, like they have alt.solaris.x86 but not alt.solaris. ??? (I know, comp.unix.solaris or whatever, but still...)

I think that they suffered from this very problem.

No, Intel just fucked up. Purely human error in designing the lookup tables for floating point division.

Let's guarantee we are getting quality products (though from AMD, it's less than likely).

Uhhh... yeah. Last I checked AMD made some pretty damn good parts and always has. AMD's chips haven't always been performance leaders, but to my knowledge they haven't had quite the cavalcade of errors intel has (F00F anyone?).

Oh, and the part where you're rabbiting on about quantum tunneling, well, this is not a significant factor on the scale of a cpu. When the walls are the width of an electron, maybe... Even if an electron or two was heading south of the border, components are not triggered by one electron yet. Maybe in 50 years this will be a problem.

Mod me down for being harsh if you want, I'll still be right and I've got karma to burn.

(plus they're super cheap on eBay. A sparc classic is maybe USD 50 or so, not that this is a serious suggestion per se.)
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org

I mean, what proto-geek kid wouldn't get a kick out of that? Hell, I'd get a kick out of it and I'm 23. :-) Run some power back there, put in some grain alcohol dispensers, you'd be the pimpin' cosmonaught on the block, that's for sure... :-)