The simple fact is that no true partiot would use Linux at all. In these hard times we must rally around our companies, our economy, and our president...
What are you saying? Oh no, there's other country outside USA...
One of the most profound students of "what is
different about America was the Frenchman,
Alexis de Tocqueville. I*n his book
Democracy in America
describing what makes American culture distinctive, he said that the inclination of
Americans to form informal, community-based non-government,
non-corporate associations in order to do
the projects the community needs. Volunteer
fireman associations are but one common example.
And now the Internet has expanded the notion
of community past walking-distance geographic
boundaries, has expanded those needed community
projects to include Linux, Apache, and the
like, and has exported the whole volunteer community
association idea to the world.
The sad thing is that now big government and corporatism -- and collusion between
the two -- are destroying that uniquely
American practice of volunteer community associations at home!
...are adjacent to each other (basically the same
grounds for both) in Ft. Meyers FL. If you really
want Geek History, then both of these are important.
(Not to mention the largest Banyan tree in the
world...
Copyright or no copyright, it can force Lexmark out of selling printers that engage
in abusing copyright law in North Carolina at all, even though Lexmark treis to use the connivance of the courts (copyright law does explicitly permit reverse engineering for compatibility, even though the court opinion
ignores that fact).
We live in a time and place of judges who ignore
and break the law and who break their oaths to
uphold the law!
...On several different occasions I've had uptimes in Windows XP [and similarly for Linux]...
A month? What's the matter?
Over the last six years, the only things interrupting my Linux uptime have been
OS upgrades, sustained power failures that lasted
longer than my UPS (and now that I have a natural
gas backup generator, that won't be happening:-),
and the one time my video card burned out. Admittedly, I do time hardware upgrades to match
the OS upgrades, but...
FWIW, mean time between re-boots is about nine months.
I've seen no evidence that desktop Linux distros are more secure than Windows. Check the sites that cover Linux security, bugs, and updates a little more often. Sure, they don't get hit by viruses as much but I believe that's mainly due to the fact that the viruses are written for Windows.
Sorry, but the whole architecture of Windows systems, with built-in ActiveX, etc., is insecure in its very design. There aren't as many Linux viruses because the underlying
architecture doesn't have
that designed-in insecurity.
And it is true that twenty years later, Microsoft has finally fixed the 47.6-day bug
(recall that until about two years ago, all Microsoft systems had a millisecond counter that would overflow every 47.6 days and crash the system... and it took over fifteen years for uptime on MS systems to get long enough that anyone would notice! They have improved parts of Windows XP, it is true...
XML is Verbose...compresses beautifully-- NOT!!
on
Why XML Doesn't Suck
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I'm an environmental modeler (think supercomputing) , and most of the time the stuff I generate won't fit into dinky little 2GB files. Model data doesn't compress well (and even if it did, it'd take too many tera-ops).
And then, forcing it into a sequential access model is not a good idea..
When you have a 10GB data set, you really
need direct access to mine the contents, rather than having to "eat the file whole."
But bureaucrats being what they are (and bureaucrats being in charge of environmental agencies), they've been told that XML is a GOOD THING, and want to force everything into that mold. And it doesn't fit!
Call it the "law of the instrument," as someone
(Poul Anderson, I think, put it:
As soon as you invent a new and better type of
monkey wrench, you can be sure someone will make
use of it -- as a bludgeon!
Consider, of course, that the average amount of RAM in use in deskop PCs 256MB. Few people go above 512MB, even for 3D rendering. And, very, very, very few people have 1GB.
Your numbers are a year out-of-date, I think.
My wife is an attorney (corporate health care law;
if you want to buy an HMO, she's your girl!), and found that to get decent performance with her day-to-day work (given the characteristics of MS -- and adobe! -- bloatware), she needed to go with 1 GB RAM; 512K
was not enough.
And for what I do (serious environmental modeling), having to live within the limits of dinky little 2 GB files is ridiculous. And we wind up doing the analysis on desktops instead of directly on the supercomputers... Thank God (or Linux, or Alan...) for Large File Summit support in the
recent Linux releases!
Fortran as a language has evolved over the years. Most of the complaints that I see here are
really myths about 1960's vintage Fortran-IV, not even about quarter-century-old Fortran-77.
Always use IMPLICIT NONE in your
Fortran; making declaration of variables required
(as this command does) really can save your butt on large programs.
It is really nice to program in a language where arrays are true "first class citizens". In neither C nor C++ can one conveniently and efficiently do the equivalent of
Subroutine S( M, N, P, A )
! arguments:
Integer M, N, P
Real A( M*N, 13*P, M+N-P )
! local variables:
Real X( M*N, 13*P, M+N-P )...
For the current generation of compilers, Fortran is about twice as optimizable as C or C++.
There are a number of reasons for this:
C compilers generally lack the
address-calculation optimizations
required for efficient access to
run-time-dimensioned multidimensional arrays (stubbornness of the C-compiler writers being an obstacle here;-()
Aliasing (array-overlap) assumptions present in C and C++ but not in Fortran (this may eventually be fixed by strinct-ANSI typing rules and restrict pointers -- provided that the programmer is smart enough to use them correctly.)
A native complex data type is nice to have for many applications domains.
Fortran character-strings frankly are both safer and a lot easier to use than C strings: they're the equivalent of a system-supported
struct{ int length; char * contents; } foo_string;
together with built-in (and optimizable!) concatenation operators, and comparison operators that behave sanely for different-length strings.
Fortran-77 and K&R C are "small" languages with simple concepts and therefore are easier to learn and understand. Fortran-90/95 and ANSI C89 are "large" languages with correspondingly more subtleties and difficulty of learning. C++ is a huge language, and almost impossible to learn and understand completely--a fact that has much to do with the popularity of Java.
As a numerical analyst, I find the fact that C -- by explicit wording in the standard -- refuses to respect parentheses, and has ill-defined arithmetic to disqualify that language for serious numerical algorithms. The result of
-1/(-1) should not be up to the vendor to define!
As a matter of fact, Craig Burley (original author
of "g77") had quite a fight with RMS over optimizations that "gcc" did not provide but that
are necessary for performance in a language where multi-dimensional arrays are first-class citizens.
There are still a couple of "compilers" that
translate into C (Gnu "fort" which is basically
both obsolete and dead from a development point
of view, and NAG "f90" that is free and is OK if
you are only doing development work that doesn't
involve real number crunching.
Neither is used for serious computational work;
having to live within the C aliasing rules doesn't permit the optimizations necessary for high performance computing problems.
Historically it's necessary for some of the older X applications...
I'm a software developer and systems architect
in the environmental modeling/high performance
computing arena. My home and work machines have
21-inch 1280x1024 monitors, and I normally use
(a 5x2 array of) 2048x1536 virtual screens on
both. A few months ago, I had to get along in
just 1280x1024 on an SGI that didn't do virtual
screens. It cut my productivity in half.
What I want is a Samsung 240T (1920x1200) LCD running 3072x2048 or better virtual.
But at least with nVidia boards, 2048x1536 is the biggest virtual XFree86 will let me have (the
XFree86 docs are reticent on per-hardware virtual limits, and I can't see buying a new top-end ATI just so that I can experiment to see whether it
will do better...;-()
Here's another one for the "....That Have Been Solved" page.
The editor you want is "nedit", an OpenSource product from
http://nedit.org/
It gives you a choice of which mode you want to use -- continuous
wrap or autowrap at either window edge or user-selected margin, or
no wrap (using scrollbars) -- on a window-by-window basis. And
continuous wrap behaves the way you requested: I just checked.
It originally started as a MS "notepad" clone for UNIX users
at FermiLab, and rather quickly turned into such a nice lightweight
programming editor that the MS-users there insisted that it be ported
back to Windows from UNIX, so that they could use it, too.
It went OpenSource two or three years ago, is available on a wide
variety of platforms including Linux, and is currently in version 5.3.
I've been using it for the last six or seven years, and really like
the facilities it offers.
fwiw.
His reply:
Thanks, I've gotten a lot of mail on this point. Unfortunately it
doesn't fulfill the most important part of the requirement: "standard".
Standard means part of KDE or GNOME. Joe User doesn't know how to do a
freshmeat search for a new text editor, he's just going to use whatever
is in the standard menu.:)
That's an awfully strong notion of "standard". For that matter, between home and work I'm running machines with both RedHat and Mandrake, and neditdoes show up on the standard menus for both!
Re:Luke, use the source...
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 2
Really, there is nothing to difficult about:
./configure
make
su
make install
Try that on a fully-configured development-server configuration RedHat 7.1 machine with the AbiWord
1.0.x.src.tar.gz and tell me what to do
when configure says "gcc does not work on this machine"... and you know damned well that gcc does work and you've been building
stuff with it for years!
Re:apt-get is nice
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
...However, Abiword seems broken -- can't get the latest installed...
Can't even get it to build from source, on either
Mandrake 8.2 or RedHat 7.1 developer systems... their autoconf stuff is broken in the.src.tar.gz. (This is a reported bug
on their bugzilla...)
I've seen a lot of this "dependency hell" and it
makes me really hate dependency on.so's:
with a statically-linked build, it either works -- reliably -- or it doesn't work at all. I've heard
all the.so justifications before, and from my point
of view as a practicing fifty-year-old mathematician, computer scientist, and
environmental modeler, it is all a lot of bunk
when it comes up against the real practice of computing.
Rapidsite/Apa/1.3.20 (Unix), FrontPage/4.0.4.3, mod_ssl/2.8.4, and OpenSSL/0.9.6
on an IRIX machine, according to NetCraft's
"What's that site running?" at
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph
They're not running their touted monoculture
on their own web servers!
My wife is a contracts attorney and had been
having major carpal-tunnel problems, in spite of
correctly-positioned chair, etc. She switched
to an ergonomic keyboard, and it helped a little.
Her problem really seemed to be the mouse, since
she is editing contracts all day long -- more mouse-work than keyboarding.
I persuaded her to give the Logitech Optical Trackball a try, and she loves it. All the
carpal-tunnel problems seem to have gone away,
and when you watch her play games now, she can
make that trackball fly!
I note that a few others said they had mouse
problems as well... maybe this will help.
Most pop culture dies off within a decade. It therefore has no apperciable economic value for about 9/10 of the copyright's duration.
And this last fifty years is the first half
century in which that has been true.
Maybe the unreasonable extension of copyright is
actually responsible for "disposable" popular
culture: after a work's first flush of popularity, it is now illegal for anyone other than the original artist to try to keep it going. Could that be the cause that the great jazz of
the thirties (to pick just one example)
is no longer with us (but sitting in Time-Warner's vaults) -- that Time-Warner thinks
it can make a higher return on investment by
pushing new crap than by maintaining older? (But
of course, they don't want anyone else to re-issue the stuff either -- "I have it and I'm going to
keep it to myself (and make it die):-(
Then why isn't Microsoft being charged with
felony computer crime for the way all of its
OS upgrades surreptitiously inistall Outlook
preferences over the existing mail agent preferences, in ways that are very hard to undo.
In this pleading,
Microsoft themselves admit that their stuff is
widely installed on Federal Interest Computers.
Microsoft's use of so-called operating system patches to disable user mail applications and replace them with the Outlook mail server application is unauthorized hacking of Federal
Interest Computers, a Federal felony under US
Code Title 18 Section 1030 (the COMPUTER FRAUD AND ABUSE STATUTE: see
http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/privacy/crime/fraud.act.t xt).
Microsoft's pervasive practice of using their upgrade/patch excuse for hacking Federal computers and replacing relatively secure software like Eudora with nightmares like Outlook (which is itself responsible for something like 80% of the viruses and worms on the net!)is a violation by
my reading of the Act (but IANAL). I think that
Paragraph (b)(1)(B) ought to be applied!
I'm sure nuclear simulations, or any natural
simulation (like weather) will create massive
datasets too.
Consider a seasonal air pollution study at the continental scale.
You want at least a 20KM grid resolution
(actually, you rather better than
that, but we have real-world constraints in my
business:-) -- that means something like a
200x200x25 grid. So that (at 4 bytes/number), one 3D state variable occupies 4 MB. For air
pollution, you will need about 60 such variables
(12 meteorology state variables, and another 48
or so chemistry variables): 240 MB per time step.
The summer air pollution season is about 100 days long, and you'll want to use a time step of half an hour or better (by Courant's theorem, wind speed gives the translation factor between spatial resolution and the required temporal), so that's 4800 time steps.
240 MB/step times 4800 steps -- about a terabyte.
Go to a (better) 10KM resolution, and the compute
time and data set size go up by 2^4. fwiw.
Not a legal (per se) precedent, but a financial one: Deep link to our site, and we'll sic our
lawyers on you, which we can afford and you can't. We know what your doing has already been upheld
as legal in court, but we still don't want anyone
doing it, so we're going to attempt to bully you.
IANAL, but...
The technical term for that is
barratry , and it is cause for
major countersuit. I think they should countersue, asking for treble the amount the
Dallas Daily News wants.
The HTTP protocol works in terms of requests, not commands. Furthermore, it gives the HTTP server the URL
of the requesting page, as well as lots of other
info such as the browser identity. If the Dallas
Morning News wants to refuse requests
coming from BarkingDogs.org web pages,
then all they have to do is to do so. There's
plenty of precedent, including (for example)
Microsoft's some-time refusal to render pages
to users of Opera...
Why this isn't a "capabilities" issue instead of
a legal issue is beyond me.
I'm getting a Samsung 240T. It's more expensive, but HDTV wide (I think 24" diagonal).
The TMDS hardware on the latest video cards seems to be honestly able to drive 1920x1200 digitally insetad of only 1600x1200 or 1280x1024, I'm ready for a flat panel.
--4of12
I've got one of these -- it kicks ass
--AC
Yes, the Samsung 24T is 24-inch diagonal.
Judging from another post below, I strongly
suspect Sun re-markets it...
Several current video cards will drive up through
2048x1536, including the nVidia ones.
On the other hand (and here's the lead-in to
my question), this is nVidia's hardware support
limit, and it would seem that there is an
identical (but undocumented) virtual display
size limit in the XFree86 nVidia drivers.
With a 240T, I would really like to
run virtual on the order of 3072x2048. I've heard
rumors that the ATI drivers don't have this
virtual limit the way the nVidia drivers do.
Is this true? Does anyone here have
actual experience running 32-bit virtual screens as large as this on ATI or Matrox cards?
It is just a little bit too expensive
to buy one just in order to experiment and find out...
Slashdot Mirror
One of the most profound students of "what is different about America was the Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville. I*n his book Democracy in America describing what makes American culture distinctive, he said that the inclination of Americans to form informal, community-based non-government, non-corporate associations in order to do the projects the community needs. Volunteer fireman associations are but one common example.
And now the Internet has expanded the notion of community past walking-distance geographic boundaries, has expanded those needed community projects to include Linux, Apache, and the like, and has exported the whole volunteer community association idea to the world.
The sad thing is that now big government and corporatism -- and collusion between the two -- are destroying that uniquely American practice of volunteer community associations at home!
Under MDK 9.0, at least, there were serious focus problems that kept you from being able to use it ;-(
We live in a time and place of judges who ignore and break the law and who break their oaths to uphold the law!
Over the last six years, the only things interrupting my Linux uptime have been OS upgrades, sustained power failures that lasted longer than my UPS (and now that I have a natural gas backup generator, that won't be happening :-),
and the one time my video card burned out. Admittedly, I do time hardware upgrades to match
the OS upgrades, but...
FWIW, mean time between re-boots is about nine months.
And it is true that twenty years later, Microsoft has finally fixed the 47.6-day bug (recall that until about two years ago, all Microsoft systems had a millisecond counter that would overflow every 47.6 days and crash the system... and it took over fifteen years for uptime on MS systems to get long enough that anyone would notice! They have improved parts of Windows XP, it is true...
But bureaucrats being what they are (and bureaucrats being in charge of environmental agencies), they've been told that XML is a GOOD THING, and want to force everything into that mold. And it doesn't fit!
Call it the "law of the instrument," as someone (Poul Anderson, I think, put it:
That's XML, to a tee!Any idea when Kevin's Red Hat Uber Distribution
will have a clean-ed up and enhanced variation on RedHat 9 out??My wife is an attorney (corporate health care law; if you want to buy an HMO, she's your girl!), and found that to get decent performance with her day-to-day work (given the characteristics of MS -- and adobe! -- bloatware), she needed to go with 1 GB RAM; 512K was not enough.
And for what I do (serious environmental modeling), having to live within the limits of dinky little 2 GB files is ridiculous. And we wind up doing the analysis on desktops instead of directly on the supercomputers... Thank God (or Linux, or Alan...) for Large File Summit support in the recent Linux releases!
As a matter of fact, Craig Burley (original author of "g77") had quite a fight with RMS over optimizations that "gcc" did not provide but that are necessary for performance in a language where multi-dimensional arrays are first-class citizens.
There are still a couple of "compilers" that translate into C (Gnu "fort" which is basically both obsolete and dead from a development point of view, and NAG "f90" that is free and is OK if you are only doing development work that doesn't involve real number crunching.
Neither is used for serious computational work; having to live within the C aliasing rules doesn't permit the optimizations necessary for high performance computing problems.
What I want is a Samsung 240T (1920x1200) LCD running 3072x2048 or better virtual. But at least with nVidia boards, 2048x1536 is the biggest virtual XFree86 will let me have (the XFree86 docs are reticent on per-hardware virtual limits, and I can't see buying a new top-end ATI just so that I can experiment to see whether it will do better... ;-()
Down with the porthole metaphor!
fwiw
I still stand by what I said.
I've seen a lot of this "dependency hell" and it makes me really hate dependency on .so's:
with a statically-linked build, it either works -- reliably -- or it doesn't work at all. I've heard
all the .so justifications before, and from my point
of view as a practicing fifty-year-old mathematician, computer scientist, and
environmental modeler, it is all a lot of bunk
when it comes up against the real practice of computing.
They're not running their touted monoculture on their own web servers!
I persuaded her to give the Logitech Optical Trackball a try, and she loves it. All the carpal-tunnel problems seem to have gone away, and when you watch her play games now, she can make that trackball fly!
I note that a few others said they had mouse problems as well... maybe this will help.
Maybe the unreasonable extension of copyright is actually responsible for "disposable" popular culture: after a work's first flush of popularity, it is now illegal for anyone other than the original artist to try to keep it going. Could that be the cause that the great jazz of the thirties (to pick just one example) is no longer with us (but sitting in Time-Warner's vaults) -- that Time-Warner thinks it can make a higher return on investment by pushing new crap than by maintaining older? (But of course, they don't want anyone else to re-issue the stuff either -- "I have it and I'm going to keep it to myself (and make it die) :-(
In this pleading, Microsoft themselves admit that their stuff is widely installed on Federal Interest Computers.
Microsoft's use of so-called operating system patches to disable user mail applications and replace them with the Outlook mail server application is unauthorized hacking of Federal Interest Computers, a Federal felony under US Code Title 18 Section 1030 (the COMPUTER FRAUD AND ABUSE STATUTE: see http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/privacy/crime/fraud.act.t xt).
Microsoft's pervasive practice of using their upgrade/patch excuse for hacking Federal computers and replacing relatively secure software like Eudora with nightmares like Outlook (which is itself responsible for something like 80% of the viruses and worms on the net!)is a violation by my reading of the Act (but IANAL). I think that Paragraph (b)(1)(B) ought to be applied!
You want at least a 20KM grid resolution (actually, you rather better than that, but we have real-world constraints in my business :-) -- that means something like a
200x200x25 grid. So that (at 4 bytes/number), one 3D state variable occupies 4 MB. For air
pollution, you will need about 60 such variables
(12 meteorology state variables, and another 48
or so chemistry variables): 240 MB per time step.
The summer air pollution season is about 100 days long, and you'll want to use a time step of half an hour or better (by Courant's theorem, wind speed gives the translation factor between spatial resolution and the required temporal), so that's 4800 time steps.
240 MB/step times 4800 steps -- about a terabyte.
Go to a (better) 10KM resolution, and the compute time and data set size go up by 2^4. fwiw.
The technical term for that is barratry , and it is cause for major countersuit. I think they should countersue, asking for treble the amount the Dallas Daily News wants.
Why this isn't a "capabilities" issue instead of a legal issue is beyond me.
Several current video cards will drive up through 2048x1536, including the nVidia ones.
On the other hand (and here's the lead-in to my question), this is nVidia's hardware support limit, and it would seem that there is an identical (but undocumented) virtual display size limit in the XFree86 nVidia drivers.
With a 240T, I would really like to run virtual on the order of 3072x2048. I've heard rumors that the ATI drivers don't have this virtual limit the way the nVidia drivers do. Is this true? Does anyone here have actual experience running 32-bit virtual screens as large as this on ATI or Matrox cards? It is just a little bit too expensive to buy one just in order to experiment and find out...