I liked the convenience of Red Hat. But I figured if I was going to have to deal with something else, I might as well learn something. Plus, others, like SuSE, wouldn'd recognize my 3ware RAID controller.
So I switched to Gentoo. It was a pain to set up, but I'm very happy with it now.
I looked for info on ROCK, and the best I can determine is that ROCK is also a multi-threaded core that favors multiprocessing over single-threaded applications.
Training and computing may be more accessible, but programming is not.
With my Atari 800XL came a VERY SMALL book on BASIC. There didn't need to be much there. Everything in that book was all I needed to be able to write simple programs that plotted pixels, did polynomial regression, etc. I didn't need any TRAINING, because it was all trivially simple.
So, although you can easily go take a C programming class, it'll take you 10 times longer to learn to do anything in multitasking-computer C than in 8-bit computer BASIC. The C language is more complex than BASIC, and interacting with the environment is too.
Here's how to plot a pixel in Atari BASIC:
GRAPHICS 8 COLOR 1 PLOT 10,10
Now try doing something like that in C under UNIX.
Sun's hardware doesn't "stay up" like it used to. It used to be that if you bought a Sun, you could count on the hardware lasting a LONG time and remaining VERY STABLE. With newer Suns, we get hardware failures of one sort or another on a regular basis.
Computers died for me the day the stopped shipping them with built-in BASIC.
Seriously, though. The computers of the 80's were great for learning programming on. Not that BASIC is a good teaching language, but it was accessible and simple.
Modern computers have too many features that you want serious programmers to have access to (complicating languages), and modern languages have all sorts of safety, structure, and OO features that are great for serious programmers but also complicate things for beginners.
Breaking into programming is much harder than it used to be.
I like Sun's massively parallel Niagra architecture. Each chip runs 32 threads in parallel with an impressive 80% efficiency in pipeline usage.
If they can get this off the ground, it'll be great for servers.
Unfortunately, it's lousy for single-threaded compute-intensive processes like chip synthesis and simulation tools which are what I need.
It's interesting that they are kinda going back to the mainframe mentality where I/O and over-all throughput are more important than single-threaded performance, but with the way servers are going, this, I think, is really what is needed.
The PTO's reputation for accepting bogus patents is what is reponsible for their recent flood of patents. If they'd done their jobs right, people would think twice before filing for a patent.
I don't blame the patent examiners themselves. They're over-worked. In hind-sight, we should all be realizing that a little extra tax money would have saved the U.S. (and the world) from this horrible fiasco.
This situation is a rolling snowball. The attitude in our culture now is that if you do ANYTHING, you'd better get a patent on it, otherwise someone else will beat you to it and sue you for patent violation.
One way to fix this is to hire more patent examiners. Another is to stop accepting patent applications for as long as it takes for the PTO to review all existing patents and reject any for which prior art can be found. Of course, that could take decades, by which point all existing patents would have expired. Maybe the U.S. should have a 10-year moratorium on accepting patent applications.
I have this vague recollection of some Discovery or History Channel show which pointed out that what is today called "Ararat" is not the same mountain as the one the Bible refers to.
But it's all moot anyway, since the biblical flood is just an adaptation of the Gilgamesh story.
I work with a number of people who are much older than I am. I'm 30, and I work with engineers in the range of 28 to 55. Management has people in their 40's, 50's, and 60's.
We have had people in management and engineering who weren't flexible. Hard times pretty much made those people go away due to layoffs.
Those people who are left are plenty flexible. We have one 54 year old who is a runner. He's healthy as a horse and quick. We have another 51 year old who recently made an easy transition from test engineering (a stepping-stone position) to driver development.
It seems to be an assumption that getting old makes you incompetent. But my opinion is that "old" people who are incompetent were always that way. Perhaps they are no longer so good at hiding it. But those people twice my age who were good at their jobs when they were younger are still good at their jobs AND are able to adapt to new positions.
Mind you, I don't adapt as quickly as I did when I was 20. When you get older, you slow down a bit. Sometimes, learning takes a little longer. But intelligence and discipline can make up for that, and a lot of experience makes one more efficient at identifying WHAT to learn.
On an 8.5x11 page, you really don't want to print all the way to the edge. The registration is too difficult (down to 1/300 inch). Plus, edges get more easily damaged. Additionally, you'd like reference marks that a scanner would use to determine alignment.
For a moment there, I thought they were saying that Solaris and Linux were making compromises in order to become more alike or that universities were compromising by installing Linux on some of their SPARC machines, and that people were saying that it was an epidemic.
Sure, Intel is known, like Microsoft, to do underhanded things, but these are all gray areas... marketing tactics, etc. But when it comes to a clear-cut IP thing like this, there's no way they're going to want to put themselves at risk like this.
Besides: (1) Intel and AMD have all sorts of cross-licensing things in place, and (2) there are only so many ways to extend a 32-bit arch to 64-bit.
Intel's "IA32e" is fundamentally an Intel design, with 64-bit extensions. I think IA32e is basically a Prescott (or later) core. Intel and AMD go about their CISC-front-end-to-RISC-core in quite different ways with quite different results in terms of efficiency, etc.
So, the bottom line is that I'm sure, given that they do execute the same instruction set, that there will be MANY similarities, but they will be either accidental or necessary similarities.
This is what bugs me so much about these ultra-conservatives. I may or may not feel that porn is wrong, but I don't want them deciding it on my behalf!
I guess they have nothing better to do... no terrorists left to hunt for, so they're going after "immoral" people. *sigh*
I personally feel that some kinds of porn ARE wrong.
Consider child porn. Some people say that children are capable of understanding sex. Some say they are not. Either way, the risk of psychological damage is great enough that that we should play it safe. (Actually, I think child porn is a horrible violation of a child's rights, but the "play it safe, because you can't be sure" approach is easier for some people to buy.)
But when you have consenting adults engaging in acts that are intended to be viewed only by consenting adults, who is being hurt?
Here, the "play it safe" argument lands on the side of choice. Children aren't born with much knowlege, so they are to be guided and protected so that when they grow up, they can make informed choices. Until they DO grow up, their rights are restricted. But once they have reached a certain age, the responsibilities for their actions moves from their mentors to themselves, and with that responsibility also comes many freedoms.
So, to play it safe with children, we shield. To play it safe with adults, we allow them to choose. This seems very reasonable to me.
So, while I may feel grossed out by seeing a scat video, I don't feel the need to restrict other informed adults from having a different reaction.
Now, you may ask, is it HEALTHY for people to be watching these sorts of things? Violence can teach violence, and playing with feces is linked to certain mental disorders. Could certain kinds of porn make viewers mentally unhealthy?
Possibly. But consider the FDA and the Surgeon General. The FDA has laws which protect consumers from unknowningly buying foods which contain harmful chemicals, etc. Science has been used to prove that certain chemicals and microbes are harmful. Similarly, tobacco and alcohol containers sport labels which warn of their potentially harmful effects. But once again, science (and many DUI deaths) have proven that people need to be warned about these things.
But (a) Science has not shown any compelling evidence that porn is bad for your health, and (b) you are still allowed to buy alcohol and tobacco.
So, if the government wants to put a warning label on porn that says "we're not absolutely sure, but watching this could possibly harm your mind", then I'm all for it!
But that is the extent to which they should interfere. Oh, and I am definately in support of prosecuting child pornographers.
Sci Fi is not bringing back Farscape because the people love it. They're bringing it back because they can make money from it. While I'm very happy about the miniseries, I don't delude myself into thinking that there will be any more. It's just not profitable enough.
If television executives cared about quality and content, we'd have a lot less crap on TV.
I've often had a lot of trouble building programs from downloaded tarballs. Besides mysterious dependencies that I can't track down, sometimes things just don't compile, or they crash, or they produce errors of other sorts. But in many of those cases, I could download, say, an RPM of supposedly the same package, and it would install just fine.
On the other hand, I've never had any problems. Emerging new packages deals properly with all dependencies, and things always compile correctly. And there's like a review process where packages are first added to portage as "unstable" and then once they have passed everyone's criticism, they are added to "stable". So far, the only "unstable" package I've decided to emerge was Linux kernel 2.6.4, and that all worked out brilliantly.
Also, if you have a cluster of computers, you can do distributed compiles with, I think, distcc and/or some other package. Gentoo documents this VERY well. Plus, if your cluster is all identical machines, you can build binary packages once and then install them onto all other machines.
BTW, Gentoo isn't for everyone. The learning curve is STEEP. I had to start from scratch and do it all a second time before I got everything right. (Although I am a bit of a dolt.) Setting up is complex but VERY WELL documented. Only once you've finished building your base system does the extreme convenience of portage become evident.
Also, there are still a few minor unresolved issues that no one seems to have a clue about.
There is an error in the transcription of the Afrikaans speaker from Pretoria. Near the beginning, the first vowel in the pronounciation of "ask" is wrong. It's transcribed as a backwards c. That's appropriate for the vowel in "call" prior, but in "ask", it's pronounced as an unrounded vowel, and it's lower.
So, I was a gifted student, I have a high IQ, people call me 'genius', blah, blah, blah.
But the fact is, I don't think I was SMART enough as a kid to be able to understand what I understand now to function well socially.
While I'm sure kids like me can learn some rules that will help them get by, and it certainly helps when parents buy reasonable clothing and get their kids decent hair cuts, there are frankly just certain trade-offs in intelligence. Savants take this to the extreme, but in everyone, there is an uneven distribution in the KINDS of intelligence that an individual has, and everyone is different. Some intelligence is social, some is logical, some is kinetic, etc.
So, in my case, there were just certain things that I DID NOT UNDERSTAND as a child. This is in part because I was unwilling to accept certain principles in social interaction, like that when people pick on you, you can laugh and pick back; as long as you don't get UPSET about it, everyone's happy.
There is an alternate theory. I'm now MUCH better socially than my parents. They also insisted in buying the cheapest clothing possible. I was socially inept as a child, but perhaps if my parents had been more clued-in, I would have faired better. I don't know.
That's quite alright. But I'm still dubious. Why would SCO want to _confirm_ a memo like that? It's very self-incriminating, as well as incriminating for the source of their funds.
I doubt that the confirmation is real.
But if it IS real, then I suspect that SCO 'leaked' it intentionally. They're up to something (as usual). Something like this is either leaked and denied (they are liars, after all), or PLANTED.
So, while we're getting our jollies over Microsoft funding of SCO, they're onto their next nefarious tactic.
Slashdot Mirror
I liked the convenience of Red Hat. But I figured if I was going to have to deal with something else, I might as well learn something. Plus, others, like SuSE, wouldn'd recognize my 3ware RAID controller.
So I switched to Gentoo. It was a pain to set up, but I'm very happy with it now.
I looked for info on ROCK, and the best I can determine is that ROCK is also a multi-threaded core that favors multiprocessing over single-threaded applications.
Training and computing may be more accessible, but programming is not.
With my Atari 800XL came a VERY SMALL book on BASIC. There didn't need to be much there. Everything in that book was all I needed to be able to write simple programs that plotted pixels, did polynomial regression, etc. I didn't need any TRAINING, because it was all trivially simple.
So, although you can easily go take a C programming class, it'll take you 10 times longer to learn to do anything in multitasking-computer C than in 8-bit computer BASIC. The C language is more complex than BASIC, and interacting with the environment is too.
Here's how to plot a pixel in Atari BASIC:
GRAPHICS 8
COLOR 1
PLOT 10,10
Now try doing something like that in C under UNIX.
What you describe looks like a very indirect and convoluted way of being able to write a program.
There is nothing which comes with Windows that is touted as a stand-alone, simple BASIC interpreter.
I'm not saying that's wrong, just that I miss it.
Name a scriping language that is as syntactically and semantically simple as BASIC for, say, an Atari 800.
Sun's hardware doesn't "stay up" like it used to. It used to be that if you bought a Sun, you could count on the hardware lasting a LONG time and remaining VERY STABLE. With newer Suns, we get hardware failures of one sort or another on a regular basis.
Computers died for me the day the stopped shipping them with built-in BASIC.
Seriously, though. The computers of the 80's were great for learning programming on. Not that BASIC is a good teaching language, but it was accessible and simple.
Modern computers have too many features that you want serious programmers to have access to (complicating languages), and modern languages have all sorts of safety, structure, and OO features that are great for serious programmers but also complicate things for beginners.
Breaking into programming is much harder than it used to be.
I like Sun's massively parallel Niagra architecture. Each chip runs 32 threads in parallel with an impressive 80% efficiency in pipeline usage.
If they can get this off the ground, it'll be great for servers.
Unfortunately, it's lousy for single-threaded compute-intensive processes like chip synthesis and simulation tools which are what I need.
It's interesting that they are kinda going back to the mainframe mentality where I/O and over-all throughput are more important than single-threaded performance, but with the way servers are going, this, I think, is really what is needed.
The PTO's reputation for accepting bogus patents is what is reponsible for their recent flood of patents. If they'd done their jobs right, people would think twice before filing for a patent.
I don't blame the patent examiners themselves. They're over-worked. In hind-sight, we should all be realizing that a little extra tax money would have saved the U.S. (and the world) from this horrible fiasco.
This situation is a rolling snowball. The attitude in our culture now is that if you do ANYTHING, you'd better get a patent on it, otherwise someone else will beat you to it and sue you for patent violation.
One way to fix this is to hire more patent examiners. Another is to stop accepting patent applications for as long as it takes for the PTO to review all existing patents and reject any for which prior art can be found. Of course, that could take decades, by which point all existing patents would have expired. Maybe the U.S. should have a 10-year moratorium on accepting patent applications.
Make an unbreakable device, and a kid will find a way to destroy it. These notebook computers won't last a week.
I have this vague recollection of some Discovery or History Channel show which pointed out that what is today called "Ararat" is not the same mountain as the one the Bible refers to.
But it's all moot anyway, since the biblical flood is just an adaptation of the Gilgamesh story.
I work with a number of people who are much older than I am. I'm 30, and I work with engineers in the range of 28 to 55. Management has people in their 40's, 50's, and 60's.
We have had people in management and engineering who weren't flexible. Hard times pretty much made those people go away due to layoffs.
Those people who are left are plenty flexible. We have one 54 year old who is a runner. He's healthy as a horse and quick. We have another 51 year old who recently made an easy transition from test engineering (a stepping-stone position) to driver development.
It seems to be an assumption that getting old makes you incompetent. But my opinion is that "old" people who are incompetent were always that way. Perhaps they are no longer so good at hiding it. But those people twice my age who were good at their jobs when they were younger are still good at their jobs AND are able to adapt to new positions.
Mind you, I don't adapt as quickly as I did when I was 20. When you get older, you slow down a bit. Sometimes, learning takes a little longer. But intelligence and discipline can make up for that, and a lot of experience makes one more efficient at identifying WHAT to learn.
I could swear I saw a story like this on April first.
On an 8.5x11 page, you really don't want to print all the way to the edge. The registration is too difficult (down to 1/300 inch). Plus, edges get more easily damaged. Additionally, you'd like reference marks that a scanner would use to determine alignment.
:)
Of course, I know this all academic anyhow.
I think privacy is important, but in my opinion, you forfeit many such rights the instant you hurt or kill someone.
For a moment there, I thought they were saying that Solaris and Linux were making compromises in order to become more alike or that universities were compromising by installing Linux on some of their SPARC machines, and that people were saying that it was an epidemic.
Oh well.
Sure, Intel is known, like Microsoft, to do underhanded things, but these are all gray areas... marketing tactics, etc. But when it comes to a clear-cut IP thing like this, there's no way they're going to want to put themselves at risk like this.
Besides: (1) Intel and AMD have all sorts of cross-licensing things in place, and (2) there are only so many ways to extend a 32-bit arch to 64-bit.
Intel's "IA32e" is fundamentally an Intel design, with 64-bit extensions. I think IA32e is basically a Prescott (or later) core. Intel and AMD go about their CISC-front-end-to-RISC-core in quite different ways with quite different results in terms of efficiency, etc.
So, the bottom line is that I'm sure, given that they do execute the same instruction set, that there will be MANY similarities, but they will be either accidental or necessary similarities.
Yes!
This is what bugs me so much about these ultra-conservatives. I may or may not feel that porn is wrong, but I don't want them deciding it on my behalf!
I guess they have nothing better to do... no terrorists left to hunt for, so they're going after "immoral" people. *sigh*
I personally feel that some kinds of porn ARE wrong.
Consider child porn. Some people say that children are capable of understanding sex. Some say they are not. Either way, the risk of psychological damage is great enough that that we should play it safe. (Actually, I think child porn is a horrible violation of a child's rights, but the "play it safe, because you can't be sure" approach is easier for some people to buy.)
But when you have consenting adults engaging in acts that are intended to be viewed only by consenting adults, who is being hurt?
Here, the "play it safe" argument lands on the side of choice. Children aren't born with much knowlege, so they are to be guided and protected so that when they grow up, they can make informed choices. Until they DO grow up, their rights are restricted. But once they have reached a certain age, the responsibilities for their actions moves from their mentors to themselves, and with that responsibility also comes many freedoms.
So, to play it safe with children, we shield. To play it safe with adults, we allow them to choose. This seems very reasonable to me.
So, while I may feel grossed out by seeing a scat video, I don't feel the need to restrict other informed adults from having a different reaction.
Now, you may ask, is it HEALTHY for people to be watching these sorts of things? Violence can teach violence, and playing with feces is linked to certain mental disorders. Could certain kinds of porn make viewers mentally unhealthy?
Possibly. But consider the FDA and the Surgeon General. The FDA has laws which protect consumers from unknowningly buying foods which contain harmful chemicals, etc. Science has been used to prove that certain chemicals and microbes are harmful. Similarly, tobacco and alcohol containers sport labels which warn of their potentially harmful effects. But once again, science (and many DUI deaths) have proven that people need to be warned about these things.
But (a) Science has not shown any compelling evidence that porn is bad for your health, and (b) you are still allowed to buy alcohol and tobacco.
So, if the government wants to put a warning label on porn that says "we're not absolutely sure, but watching this could possibly harm your mind", then I'm all for it!
But that is the extent to which they should interfere. Oh, and I am definately in support of prosecuting child pornographers.
Sci Fi is not bringing back Farscape because the people love it. They're bringing it back because they can make money from it. While I'm very happy about the miniseries, I don't delude myself into thinking that there will be any more. It's just not profitable enough.
If television executives cared about quality and content, we'd have a lot less crap on TV.
What amazes me is that it's taken THIS LONG for everyone to realize such a painfully obvious thing that free software tends to be a pain to use.
I've often had a lot of trouble building programs from downloaded tarballs. Besides mysterious dependencies that I can't track down, sometimes things just don't compile, or they crash, or they produce errors of other sorts. But in many of those cases, I could download, say, an RPM of supposedly the same package, and it would install just fine.
On the other hand, I've never had any problems. Emerging new packages deals properly with all dependencies, and things always compile correctly. And there's like a review process where packages are first added to portage as "unstable" and then once they have passed everyone's criticism, they are added to "stable". So far, the only "unstable" package I've decided to emerge was Linux kernel 2.6.4, and that all worked out brilliantly.
Also, if you have a cluster of computers, you can do distributed compiles with, I think, distcc and/or some other package. Gentoo documents this VERY well. Plus, if your cluster is all identical machines, you can build binary packages once and then install them onto all other machines.
BTW, Gentoo isn't for everyone. The learning curve is STEEP. I had to start from scratch and do it all a second time before I got everything right. (Although I am a bit of a dolt.) Setting up is complex but VERY WELL documented. Only once you've finished building your base system does the extreme convenience of portage become evident.
Also, there are still a few minor unresolved issues that no one seems to have a clue about.
There is an error in the transcription of the Afrikaans speaker from Pretoria. Near the beginning, the first vowel in the pronounciation of "ask" is wrong. It's transcribed as a backwards c. That's appropriate for the vowel in "call" prior, but in "ask", it's pronounced as an unrounded vowel, and it's lower.
So, I was a gifted student, I have a high IQ, people call me 'genius', blah, blah, blah.
But the fact is, I don't think I was SMART enough as a kid to be able to understand what I understand now to function well socially.
While I'm sure kids like me can learn some rules that will help them get by, and it certainly helps when parents buy reasonable clothing and get their kids decent hair cuts, there are frankly just certain trade-offs in intelligence. Savants take this to the extreme, but in everyone, there is an uneven distribution in the KINDS of intelligence that an individual has, and everyone is different. Some intelligence is social, some is logical, some is kinetic, etc.
So, in my case, there were just certain things that I DID NOT UNDERSTAND as a child. This is in part because I was unwilling to accept certain principles in social interaction, like that when people pick on you, you can laugh and pick back; as long as you don't get UPSET about it, everyone's happy.
There is an alternate theory. I'm now MUCH better socially than my parents. They also insisted in buying the cheapest clothing possible. I was socially inept as a child, but perhaps if my parents had been more clued-in, I would have faired better. I don't know.
That's quite alright. But I'm still dubious. Why would SCO want to _confirm_ a memo like that? It's very self-incriminating, as well as incriminating for the source of their funds.
I doubt that the confirmation is real.
But if it IS real, then I suspect that SCO 'leaked' it intentionally. They're up to something (as usual). Something like this is either leaked and denied (they are liars, after all), or PLANTED.
So, while we're getting our jollies over Microsoft funding of SCO, they're onto their next nefarious tactic.