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I mean, if you duct-tape a Sparc Classic to the side of whatever, you've got the ethernet and serial ports (I think they have or can easily be made to have a 422 as well), and you can run sparc linux on it. :-) So I know that's not really embedded, but what the heck, maybe your controlled device is really big (like a huge pump or valve) and something the size of a lunch box could work...

Personally, I think that proprietary extensions would not be used so often if the standard were to keep up with the times, accomodating the needs of the community in a uniform and non-propriety fashion.

While you may be right, what's the use of a "standard" that changes every (short enough time period to track the state of the art)? In an ideal world, the point of standards is that they change very slowly so that all applications can adhere to the baseline features and behaviors delineated in the standard.

The politics surrounding standards processes now is bad enough. Imagine what it would be like with a new standard coming down the pipe every 6 months? A new standard that, if your corporation can influence it to use YourThing2000's features instead of TheirThing2000's features, will let you bash the competitor's products for the next release cycle...

Yeah, I thought of that about 10 seconds after I hit submit. :-) You're absolutely right, my remarks make sense only when applied to production systems. Most of the places I've worked for did not have a significant budget for test systems/networks, so to an extent I've been conditioned to go the slow and cautious way by default.

I run into this in the sysadmin field (it's one of the things I can do and have done to bay the bills). By nature I like to always be trying out new stuff and be tweaking things. This is a really bad trait to give into as a sysadmin, where stability, caution, and slow-moving perfectionism are the ways to excel. Being a programmer gives me more freedom to cut loose (although not as much as I am with my own code, fast-and-loose is no way to run a project somebody is paying for).

Good advice. Here's a few specific recommendations I've heard: csoft.net for good and inexpensive web/email/ftp hosting, and register.com (if you want to switch registrars for your domains or make new ones) as they provide free primary and secondary DNS. The ZoneEdit place sounds cool too if have pre-extant domains through NSI.

Take a gander doxygen (http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/) or doc++ (http://www.zib.de/Visual/software/doc++/).

They're both like JavaDoc for other languages such as C/C++ supporting HTML, LaTeX, etc. as output formats. Good docs (esp. for OO projects) are important, and these two tools let you make them pretty easily. Yeah, more time consuming than // or /* ... */ but you get more for your effort too...

Yeah, becuase it splits evenly into two 16-bit values. This was good for LISP (which was along with Fortran pretty much the only game in town as far as high level languages go at the time (we're talking PDP's here) from what I've heard), as the "low moby" (is that the right term? the "low" half of the 36-bit byte) could hold 16 bits of data, and the "high moby" could hold a 16 bit pointer to the rest of a list structure. The two correspond to car and cdr respectively, I think. I don't hack LISP, so please forgive me if I've gotten that backwards.
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News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org

Minor sidenote: png support in Netscape 4.x is pretty spotty at best. YMMV. But still, you'd only be pissing off ~15% of your traffic (unless _all_ of your visitors are using non-IE platforms).

You never know, he could be doing a network install ... from Pluto.

arsDigita, not arstechnica. aD was actually quite profitable from my understanding (well, certaintly not an IBM or GM or MSFT in terms of absolute dollars but fairly impressive for a small design shop nonetheless).

I think the numbers mentioned by PG were 10K in initial investment, building into a company with annual revenues in the $millions. I don't know what their profit margin was but it was probably pretty good (the customer is buying all the bandwidth and machinery, all you have to pay are salaries, and maybe the occasional Ferrari ;-).

I wish I knew more about the case. It's still a shame to see this happen to PG and Co. though, I think a lot of people have learned very cool things becuase of their efforts to disseminate what they've learned.

Well, exploding when dropped would be a security feature for those really paranoid clients. "Don't make me drop this thing!" :-)

Dude, call or email CmdrTaco or somebody at slashdot and have them make this a front page story. Definitely news for nerds and stuff that matters. Plus you'll probably get about 90 bajillion donations that way. :-) (I'd donate right now but I'm a poor college student (really, I have $3.41 in my bank account right now). When I get a job in a few weeks I will though.)

I'd hate to see Slackware take it on the chin. It was the first linux distro I tried (Slack96! w00w00!), and the one I keep coming back to (every now and again I've dallied with debian and redhat, but I miss the simplicity and purity of design that seems to be the characteristic of Slack).

If Slackware doesn't have it's own category/icon, a picture of Bob would be cool... ;-)

I sometimes think BeOS is the perfect counterpart to free Unixen. I mean, it's polished, performs great on the desktop, easy to use (by non-gearhead users), and interoperates very well in a standards-compliant manner. And it runs on cheap hardware. And it's stable. And it costs way less than Win9x or NT-W/2k-Pro.

I don't know much about office productivity on BeOS, but I heard nice things about Gobe Productive.

I think in my ideal office, in an ideal world, I'd have all the non-techies running BeOS on their desktops with network infrastructure running on things like Linux or a *BSD.

What version of Oracle? 8.1.x seems to be a bit hungrier than that (like 192 or higher just to run the damn java installer). Or else you've discovered a way to tame it, in which case I'd love to hear about it. :-)

I am so not a C++ guru, but I'll try to respond with what I know. (I last used C++ for a class a year ago, of which the major focus was data structures, both the old skool way and with newer features. But I tried to blot out any inadvertantly aquired knowledge after the semester ended with heavy drinking... ;-)

Ok, so you have a data structure that uses a Node inner class (or whatever it's called in C++). If you template that, would not all be well? So like Tree has a private inner class Node that only Tree's member functions can manipulate. Since presumably Tree would only have one data type per instance (an Int tree or Float tree or Foo Tree :), Tree's constructor can make the Nodes be the right type. getNode and setNode and addNode in Tree would also be template based so they return and accept the right thing(type T; removeNode would probably just be bool anyway). What I'm getting at is that you may not need to make an inheritance chain, just one templated Tree class[1]. This is the point of templates as I recall them (I recall reading an interesting interview with the guy whose name I can't recall at the moment who initiated the STL, wherein he said that he very much does not like traditional "OO" programming in favor of generic, paramerterized/templated, almost functional programming).

So anyway take all this with a huge grain of salt. :-) I'm far from being an expert (perl and C and Java are more my thing). And thanks for your reply, it made me stretch my head to think about this stuff again, and brain stretching is always cool.

[1] like the whole Tree class is templated on type T. Then the Node inner class and all the accessor/mutator functions use the same type. So each Tree instance is of a given type. If you wanted a Tree that could hold more than one thing (is that still a tree in the classical sense?), it would get wierd.

I never said the governemt didn't fund stupid ideas (actually I implicitly said the converse by mentioning the Helium Fund). Just because some government spending is idiotic is no reason to deny funding to good projects (just give 'em the dang money and axe something stupid, like Social Security).

The idea of public funding for slack is not a troll, but formulated as it was by the original poster it probably was.

Relying on uptime measurements as the sole determinant of how stable some OS is is a fallacy. I notice that not one of those high uptime sites seemed to be a place that I'd ever heard of. Not one. Far more interesing would be the uptimes of very popular and loaded sites.

Also, I think uptime is a bit over-rated in any operating system. Sure, having it not crash is nice, but there are reasons to reboot machines.

(This is not to say BSD is bad, I like Open quite a lot. I just that that finding out that Y version of BSD can stay up for X days on some J. Random's machine is trivia at best.)

yes, or somebody trying to be funny

Still, the basic idea striped of trollness and hyperbole does have merit. Linux is something a lot of agencies and schools and whatnot feeling a budget pinch could use (not with the students or teachers directly perhaps but certainly to replace expensive NT or Novell servers, expensive both as software cost and because you aren't going to get the dusty 486 in the corner to run NT). Furthering the development of linux (say Slack for the sake of the arguement, Mr. Volkerding is an American and Slack is a good baseline "serverish" linux distro that any Unix oldschooler that a school district or agency had would feel comfy with) would be extremely cheap compared to most of the things our government does. Arbitrarily setting the "Slack Development" budget at $1,000,000 a year, that's 1/16th what we pay for the helium fund (I think the helium fund was 16million/year. May be 30 mil.)

Heck, triple that and pay folks to develop software on linux to meet agency needs, like educational software perhaps, or tools for a farm agency, or a slick admin interface that's really foolproof so even an elementary school teacher could admin a Slack box powering the classroom network most of the time without having to call the school admin. And since the OS and the developed apps are open source, every agency could benefit (unlike buying commercial ware for one agency in need at time X). 3million equates to less than a penny per person in the US per year.

It's an interpreter-based language. You can tweak all you want but there is a finite limit to how fast it will ever be. In any case for most of the problems it is meant to solve it is fast enough (i.e. you'll need C (or Fortran) extensions to do fast numerical code, like if you have a 512K by 512K matrix to do a transform on, and this has been done with NumPython; you'd probably never write a device driver in Python; but for writing a network client or GUI it's plenty fast (eons of time are spent waiting for a byte from the wire or an action from the user)). These same factors apply to Perl/Java/etc. just as much.

The Right Way to implement this is to make an abstract class for the tree node, write the tree manipulation methods to work with the abstract class, and make derived classes that store different types of data, with appropriate constructors that initialize the data fields. Anything that doesn't have to care about the data type can just manipulate the objects as the original abstract class.

This sounds like a perfect place to use the STL and/or C++'s templating mechanism. Trust me, I'm not a huge C++ fan, but the container classes in the STL kick ass (I imagine something like what you describe is already there). Even if the STL don't give you no lovin', templates (and references) make it really easy to write a storage class that works over an arbitrary range of types.

This is just my 2 cent's worth. I'm mainly a C guy too, but the STL was the single biggest thing tempting me to switch to C++.

There is good coverage of all this in Bruce Eckel's Thinking in C++ (and other such as the C++ Primer by Lajoie et al.) I mention Bruce Eckel's books because they're available to peruse online, his site is mindview.net which unfortunately seems to be down right now (maybe it's hosted in california ;-). I found a mirror of his C++ books in PDF form here and a mirror of all his books in HTML form here. If you're like me you'll read the book(s) online and end up liking them so much you want to own a paper copy (and here I make my standard reference to bookpool for discount tech books).

Bruce Eckel's books are also pretty good (Thinking in C++ (2nd), also Thinking in (several other languages/ patterns)).

He talks about looking for the killer application that will make him go out and spend the big money on a whole new system.

Actually I have three of them:

• Solaris 8 -- either the incredibly picky x86 version, or just buying a damn (ultra)sparc to run the sparc version
• Oracle -- this is the real killer. According to my friend Lynn who had the inclination to run it and the money to keep buying stuff until it was happy, you need 512 meg of ram and up as a practical limit. Not to mention a fast disk that's in the 8+ gig range you plan on devoting solely to Oracle. And this is just for a smallish installation he's using to teach himself. God only knows how much it would want for a big one (well, a Sun E10K is a good bet, I seem to recall that was what eBay used to run their Oracle on).
• Enterprise Java -- anything in the java app server / servlet / J2EE category just soaks up the ram as fast as I can throw it at the machine...

And all of these are not flashy, consumer, game-type 'ware, the usual suspects for driving hardware upgrades. My point being that even us CLI-only, minimalist sysadmin types are going to run into this phenomenon now and again. (Although in this realm I think the scaling axis is usually more ram / more processors as opposed to faster processors (and of course video cards aren't a factor at all), as an example see the configuration of the pretty-damn-busy-but-still-very-responsive ccwf, where my skool account is...).

I would so love to have hardknocks.edu! I know just about a bazillion people that would be qualified to have an alumni.hardknocks.edu email address (myself included, if having your kidneys fail when you're 20 counts as a hard knock ;-) ).

Buy Journalists Beer.

(Or: Get Journalists Laid)

Trust me, I know several journalists and outright bribery usually works well. ;-)

If it doesn't come out soon, I will start throwing cups at Jon. ;-)
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News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org

The real silent majority: the Horny-Americans.

You need apache, php, and mysql. Many, many hosting providers will have accounts set up around this configuration, allowing you to "just have a website up without all this bull" as you put it. They worry about server admin and security (on the host and network level anyway), all you have to do is write code and pay the bills.

As an example of a place that has the feature set you're looking for with very generous disk allocations for reasonable prices, see csoft.net. (I've never used them but I've heard good things about them, and when I emailed them some techie questions about their service they responed quickly and very professionally.) For example, the $25/mo. plan gives you unlimited disk. All plans include 1Gb/day of traffic ($6/Gb per Gb over 30 per month). Anyone here actually, directly used these guys that would like to comment?

Well, I don't know, y'all had enough balls to kick some serious Soviet ass in the late 30s... :-)

I worked for a while in an academic dept. where all the secretarial pool used Macs, and everybody else used Linux (or occasionally Solaris, but mostly Linux). The Macs were a constant source of problems, and quite frankly just didn't get along well with anything else on the network. (Oh god, where to begin? Having ethernet adaptors that only worked with a specific kind of switch, causing broadcast stormlets, not being able to see network shares and printers and the internet at the same time, etc. etc.)

I'm not a mac-head, but it should be possible to configure the macs to use TCP/IP instead of Appletalk. This is supported better as you increase the MacOS version number. This cured a lot of our file sharing or printing but not both at the same time problems. (Note that we were using NFS mostly, with one file server running atalkd to interact with the macs). Don't know about netware.

So basically, your admins aren't bullshitting you. Macs are a royal pain in a heterogenous network (esp. the more you stick with Apple-specific protocols, of course).

Minor sidenote, as you may or may not know, the national service academies (west point, et al.) are $0/year institutions. Of course the students that go there are going to "pay back" the government by providing (what was it, 4 or 6 minimum?) years of dedicated service as officers in the armed forces. But then it could be argued that increasing our countries' stock of bright young engineers and scientists is of similar national benefit (heh, "work for American companies for 6 years and your tuition is free!" or something).

I suspect that they would use Qt. The reasons are threefold in my mind: 1) it's C++, and the object model would be fairly familiar to somebody whose done MFC, 2) it's pretty standard looking from one instllation to the next (no wild and wooliness like Gtk+ can get with themes; yes I know Qt is themeable too but frankly I haven't seen many of my KDE friends do that), 3) the company that makes Qt is open to it's use in a commercial, closed-source application (and has the corporate infrastructure to sell it).

Note that I said Qt and not KDE. I think the dithering over KDE or Gnome is a ruse, as I use apps from both "environments" quite regularly in my Enlightenment (0.16.5) WM. I truly don't think the WM has much to do with how the app operates (and if you're anal enough about the way your app's borders look to care about it at all, you've got problems a WM won't fix). Can anyone think of an instance where an application required (I mean would not operate without), Gnome or KDE (as opposed to gnome-libs or kde-libs)?

That being said, I'd gladly pay for some Microsoft applications on linux. Word and Excel spring immeadiately to mind becuase I pretty much have to use them for some of the classes I take (well, I could probably do without word but Excel simply offers things that gnumeric et al. don't). Heck, I'd pay for IE too if it didn't suck like some of the other Unix IE ports apparently have (figure $20 or $30). Further, I think the reason that Linux will never catch on in the corporate envirtonment outside of the IT dept is that it doesn't have Office/IE/Outlook. Too many normal business types (bizdev et al.) simply will not make the change (don't want to or can't), and why should they? The computer is just a tool for them to acheive their real goals, so once they've learned one application or application suite well enough to acheive those goals, why devote more brain power to switching abscent a compelling technical reason.

Anything that speeds the adoption of linux on the desktop and home market is good for linux, even for those of use that use it soley as a servcr and use it on our desktops. Quite simply, the larger our market share is, the more likely hardware companies will develop linux drivers at the same time as win32 ones. Increased hardware support benefits the entire community.

Well, at least it's easy to mirror...

Well, you could always just turn off your computer... (the-no-plug-in-socket-firewall, works every time)

Slash is written with mod_perl. It's not CGI.

Actually, slashcode is written in Gibberish. It's not mod_perl. (Well, ok, maybe it's Gibberish that plays mod_perl on TeeVee.)

I found this pretty cool site through a comment or sig here IIRC... Either way, it covers all sorts of things (incl. ppp setup): FreeBSD Cheat Sheets. As far as the word processing thing goes, if you're laptop is beefy enough give StarOffice a try. If not, try AbiWord.

The ppp setup described above is for 3.x and it's for a lan2dial home gateway. You may wish to try looking at chapters 15 (Serial Communications) and 16 (PPP and SLIP) of the FreeBSD Handbook for more up to date or generalized instructions.

• Enemy at the Flow Gate Array
• The Determinant
• Men In Pocket Protectors
• One Flew Over The Coder's Nest
• Titanic: The Story Of Amazon.com (too big to fail!)
• Bridges and Routers of Madison County
• The Dirty 0x0C

Besides do you really want to drink something that has been pasteurised, homogenised AND carbonated?

Sure, to get the taste of the vegemite out... ;-)

heh, the problem being that by virtue of VB programs' tendancy to allocate memory extremely poorly, VB:QE (quantum edition) might inadvertantly be running out of control one day and by virtue Heisenberg (et al.) end up running on (and screwing up) every atom in the known universe. Maybe this is MS's secret plot for world domination by atomic subjugation[1]?

[1] Bill. Boris. Natasha. Lordy, do I need sleep.

In terms of usability anyway. I've heard many people say that the practical usability RAM minimum for Solaris 8, for example, is 128 even though the listed minimum is 64. 3 gigs is sort of big, but still, the recommended minimum for Solaris 8 is 2gb... And while I can run Linux on 16mb ram and 540meg disk, it's a lot more functional with 64mb+ ram and 4gb+...

And lordy, let's not get started on how much ram you need to run something like oracle! ;-)

I think there are ultrasparc laptops being made, probably by the RDI folks that made the old Sparcbooks. But a) I don't know for sure and b) even if they are being made they'll be stunningly expensive.

well, sooner or later Cisco will cook up a CCNP or IE test for it then... ("Q1010: When attempting to establish an access-list on a 25xx router while under fire from customs...").

Your best bet may be to ask around in the science and engineering (under)graduate populations of a local university. Ideally you'll get some scientist/engineer type that discovered a love for computers while using them to further their own research...[1] They're guaranteed to have at least a minimal brain wave (at least after the second year ;^) ), and more than likely they need money and/or a place to gain experience in as wide a range of things as possible.

You may also want to consider narrowing exactly what you are looking for. People that are, for example, expert at network administration and coding simulations code and soldering data collection circuits and (...) are rare enough in the tech field without also asking them to be scientists as well. Try segmenting your requirements out into seperate, smaller positions and then be willing to create an environment where learning and cross-training is encouraged.

Last but not least, look for a local uni that offers courses in scientific programming (UT Austin has them in CS, but also in other places like the Math dept, the ChE dept, etc., so you may want to look a little further than pure CS). Ask the professors if you could put up a job flyer in their class.

Anyhow, good luck!

[1] Hey, happened to me at least. :-) (In reality I know several other people that started out in Chemistry and ended up CS or whatnot. Maybe it's becuase the two buildings are across the street from each other on the UT campus?)

Yeah, ultra-fundamentalist Muslims frequenting places where pornography is distributed... Next thing you know they'll be holding monthly terrorist meetings at Al's Big House of Liquor. ;-)

You're right! :-) It was really bugging me where that came from... But now I recall reading it there. Thanks for reminding me, otherwise it would have bugged me for days...

Actually I've never noticed OpenSSH having problems. Care to elaborate? (genuinely curious, I use ssh in a pretty vanilla fashion so maybe I'm not hitting the bugs)

More generally, what do you have against DJB's and TdR's code? (again, I ask because I'm curious, I don't have an agenda about this except I like qmail better than sendmail becuase it's easier to config and openbsd becuase I like IPF more than IPCHAINS)

As a developer, linux is sooooooooo much nicer in terms of development environment than windows or macos or (...). Well, I should say unix in general is this way. Part of it is having a very efficient CLI shell, part is the toolset that is available to make programmer's lives easier, part is I think due to the simple underlying philosophy of not getting in your way.

And I never said that server programs are evil, just insecurely installed server programs. ;-) I have all kinds of shit hanging off my workstation, but a) it's all pretty much locked down in service-specific ways to be reasonably secure, and b) I have a fairly tight firewall in between my internal LAN and the net (gotta love openBSD, IPF kicks the ass out of IPCHAINS).

See my "bastille" comment a few posts up. If you're using a redhat-derivative (RH, Mandrake, etc.), look in /etc/init.d or /etc/rc/init.d for the shell scripts that turn things on and off (e.g. /etc/init.d/named stop). Editing /etc/inetd.conf or /etc/xinetd.conf to comment out or remove the ability of the inetd-superserver to start up a connection to service X is another approach. Also see the program "ntsysv" on RH derivatives that gives you easy access to the "what starts on boot" list (hint: you can safely uncomment most of that list :) ). Note that some services (e.g. bind) run on their own continuously and some run on an as-needed, connection-oriented basis from (x)inetd (e.g. telnet, ftp) and some can run either way (ftp, ssh), the exact methods for disabling them depend...

If you have an always on connection, consider getting a personal firewall (there are bazillions of them, I've had good luck with the Linksys (linksys.com) series of products, buy.com has good (sub $100 for some models) prices on them). Even if you end up ditching linux it'll make your windows/whatever boxen on the home lan more secure.

Long term, get yourself a good book on unix administration (the armadillo book from o'reilly is a good bet (author = aeleen frisch iirc)). Read the docs on the Linux Documentation Project, particularly the book-length opus on security and system performance tuning. (www.redhat.com/mirrors/LDP is usually the mirror I use, I _think_ the home url is www.linuxdoc.org). I know it seems like a mountain of information but give yourself 6 months or so and it'll all seem clear. (plus you can get a stable, reasonbly lucrative job doing it if you devote enough time to becoming an admin to do it well).

I don't recall where I saw this but it makes sense: don't use the "*-line" down the left side of the comment, just the "/*" and "*/" parts on lines by themselves. Makes editing easier, perhaps at the price of some visual distinction.

(vaguely related: damn I wish somebody would "back port" the "//" comment notation from C++ to C. So much quicker to type for those quick one-liners to explain a small point...)

I'd say the fault lies with whoever wrote the inscrutable documentation for svscan, whoever decided svscan was a good idea in the first place (I can start my own daemons, thank you very much), and whoever decided that changing the naming convention for svscan directories between releases and not updating the svscan directories created by install scripts for djbdns/qmail was a good idea... Due diligence only goes so far in protecting the author of crummy code from liability. Don't get me wrong, I like qmail, and to a lesser extent I like djbdns. But I think svscan is a piece of shit.

... like the one that's always advertised in LJ. Of course I don't know how easy it would be to hack a ps/2 port onto the watch or if it already has some form of KB adaptor...

I think I found the web site for it here (1/2 way down the page). Phoenix Group International is the manufacturer's name.