If you want brainless system installs, look into Ghost by Symantec. It is a dos program that does disk duplication. It is completely configurable from the command line. With a bootable CD containg ghost and the disk image (compressed) an entire machine can be installed in less than 10 minutes. Assuming they have a decently fast CD-ROM of course.
The resolution on these puppies is terrible. What is it, like 512x384 (NTSC???) or something? I thought sony already had glasses with 800x600 resolution?
Ha!!! I finished it in 3 days. Of course, in order to read about 300 pages a day I had to ignore my bladder's pitiful pleas for me to visit the restroom.
Although your post is probably facetious, I'll reply to it anyway since I am a sucker.
Software projects usually start by spending lots of time writing the basic libraries and foundation code that will be used during the rest of the project. The foundation code usually isn't obvious to the end user - none of it is directly exposed to the user. But after all the foundation is laid the rest of the code development seems to go rather quickly. Just add a menu item, call some of your foundation code, and you've added a lot of functionality to your program.
It's sort of like the math "joke" - What's the difference between lemmas and proofs? Proofs are easy. Or something like that...
The only hope of making the VW really useful is to get Linux fully working. With any luck Linux will actually provide USB support beyond the stinking keyboard/mouse combo.
Of course even then the VW is only marginally useful. One empty 64-bit PCI (how many 64-bit cards are out there?), non-standard memory and bus all add up to make the VWs fun machines to play with, but an expensive nightmare to maintain and make usable.
I don't think that the network cards that support boot proms are expensive. I got some NE2000 compatible PCI 10baseT cards that support PROMS for US$20. I'm not sure if it supports 32k though. The only expensive part would be the writer and eraser.
There isn't enough prevention in the world to stop a hardware failure or natural disaster.
Probably the best approach to mirroring is loose consistency. Have a daemon running in the background that will pop up once in a while and check to see if usage is below a certain point. If it is then start updating the secondary system. This method is better than strict consistency which requires that all updates happen to both systems at once before the transaction can continue. In the event of a failure this approach gives you a bit more data reliability than loose consistency but greatly reduces availability because both systems must be working in order to get any real work done.
You seem to be misunderstanding RISC. There is not necessarily anything inherently superior about it. If it were all machines would only have a few instructions. There is a balance to be reached between how much work the CPU, compiler, and programmer does. RISC is about making the compiler (assembler) do more work. In fact MMX and Altivec are a tendency back to CISC type architectures. More complex instructions. Otherwise they would just give you multiply and add instead of dotproduct.
Remember RISC executes more instructions to do any operation. Since there is a smaller granularity though, effective pipelining and out-of-order execution allows greater throughput.
Last I checked, I didn't see many system calls to open a window. So the author is technically correct. Windows and MacOS have the GUI integrated into the kernel while on the UNIX front the GUI is still in user space (even if it does run with lots of privilages). When Windows was running on top of DOS one wouldn't claim that suddenly DOS was a GUI. Of course, the author of the article does make it sound like before GNOME there was no way to have a graphical interface on UNIX machines.
Yeah, didn't he build it at the same time that the turing et al were doing computer stuff at Blechly( is that where they were doing enigma decoding stuff or am I delusional) and Aiken was working on ENIAC? It seems like a case of the proper foundations in technology & science being in place thus making an invention almost inevitable.
But one must also remember that there were tons of mechanical, and I believe electro-mechanical machines to do specialized calculations like solving differential equations.
Penrose, a fine mathematician, came up with a non-repeating tiling. A toilet paper company apparently thought it was neat, so they stuck it on their product - I guess toilet paper needs texture or something. Penrose was upset by this, sued, but I think it settled out of court. Almost as funny as Apple's prototype named Sagan. Carl Sagan filed suit, Apple changed the name of the prototype to "Butthead Astronomer"
Re: Emperor's new Mind, I agree that if the human mind works in a fundamentally different way than computers, then we shouldn't be surprised if computers cannot emulate them. However I never quite saw Penrose do anymore than throw out lamebrained theories regarding what those different fundamental processes are. I don't have the book with me at school right now so I am going off the top of my head right now.
Did anyone actually like this book? It seems to me that Penrose spent most of the book providing a lackluster introduction to modern physics and computational theory. Then he basically says that we don't understand quantum gravity, we don't understand the mind, so (much hand waving) they are obviously related.
The book left a bad taste in my mouth. Remember, this is the guy who sued a toilet paper company.
As someone else said this is from "Psychology of Computer Programing." The idea is that you allow others to look at your code and to criticize it, and that you use these criticisms to improve your code. Of course no one said there wasn't a lot of yelling and screaming involved.
Minidiscs hold 140MB and there are prototypes that can hold 650MB. Why haven't we seen something using this technology? Probably because Sony never had a decent data version of it. I'm not sure why a minidisc that holds data would be any different than one that holds compressed sound (data). Oh well.
As far as the clik drive, AFAIK they are proprietary and who knows how rugged they are, how much they cost, etc.
There's about sentences and links in this story that are colored white just like the background, and are thus invisible. An attempt to make slashdot into a fun and addicting game of find-the-link, an incredible simulation of the world wide web before CRT existed, or a simple mistake? You be the judge.
Slashdot Mirror
I second the idea of European/Asian posters. It will also benefit us Yanks that are up all night hacking away. 24 hours of /. goodness!
If you want brainless system installs, look into Ghost by Symantec. It is a dos program that does disk duplication. It is completely configurable from the command line. With a bootable CD containg ghost and the disk image (compressed) an entire machine can be installed in less than 10 minutes. Assuming they have a decently fast CD-ROM of course.
The resolution on these puppies is terrible. What is it, like 512x384 (NTSC???) or something? I thought sony already had glasses with 800x600 resolution?
Ha!!! I finished it in 3 days. Of course, in order to read about 300 pages a day I had to ignore my bladder's pitiful pleas for me to visit the restroom.
Although your post is probably facetious, I'll reply to it anyway since I am a sucker.
Software projects usually start by spending lots of time writing the basic libraries and foundation code that will be used during the rest of the project. The foundation code usually isn't obvious to the end user - none of it is directly exposed to the user. But after all the foundation is laid the rest of the code development seems to go rather quickly. Just add a menu item, call some of your foundation code, and you've added a lot of functionality to your program.
It's sort of like the math "joke" - What's the difference between lemmas and proofs? Proofs are easy. Or something like that...
The only hope of making the VW really useful is to get Linux fully working. With any luck Linux will actually provide USB support beyond the stinking keyboard/mouse combo.
Of course even then the VW is only marginally useful. One empty 64-bit PCI (how many 64-bit cards are out there?), non-standard memory and bus all add up to make the VWs fun machines to play with, but an expensive nightmare to maintain and make usable.
I don't think that the network cards that support boot proms are expensive. I got some NE2000 compatible PCI 10baseT cards that support PROMS for US$20. I'm not sure if it supports 32k though. The only expensive part would be the writer and eraser.
There isn't enough prevention in the world to stop a hardware failure or natural disaster.
Probably the best approach to mirroring is loose consistency. Have a daemon running in the background that will pop up once in a while and check to see if usage is below a certain point. If it is then start updating the secondary system. This method is better than strict consistency which requires that all updates happen to both systems at once before the transaction can continue. In the event of a failure this approach gives you a bit more data reliability than loose consistency but greatly reduces availability because both systems must be working in order to get any real work done.
You seem to be misunderstanding RISC. There is not necessarily anything inherently superior about it. If it were all machines would only have a few instructions. There is a balance to be reached between how much work the CPU, compiler, and programmer does. RISC is about making the compiler (assembler) do more work. In fact MMX and Altivec are a tendency back to CISC type architectures. More complex instructions. Otherwise they would just give you multiply and add instead of dotproduct.
Remember RISC executes more instructions to do any operation. Since there is a smaller granularity though, effective pipelining and out-of-order execution allows greater throughput.
Hopefully that made some sense.
So you suggest having a Yahoo-like interface for slashdot?
Last I checked, I didn't see many system calls to open a window. So the author is technically correct. Windows and MacOS have the GUI integrated into the kernel while on the UNIX front the GUI is still in user space (even if it does run with lots of privilages). When Windows was running on top of DOS one wouldn't claim that suddenly DOS was a GUI. Of course, the author of the article does make it sound like before GNOME there was no way to have a graphical interface on UNIX machines.
Yeah, didn't he build it at the same time that the turing et al were doing computer stuff at Blechly( is that where they were doing enigma decoding stuff or am I delusional) and Aiken was working on ENIAC?
It seems like a case of the proper foundations in technology & science being in place thus making an invention almost inevitable.
But one must also remember that there were tons of mechanical, and I believe electro-mechanical machines to do specialized calculations like solving differential equations.
Borland was da bomb!
I still use Turbo C++ v.2.0 for DOS for a lot of my development. Too bad it pushes me to like 100% CPU cycles in Win98. Some funky DOS thing.
Too bad Borland was raided by MS a while ago.
Of course I do spend most of my time in Emacs/gdb
( Yes, I have to flaunt my manliness lest you all think me a girly man for devloping in windows )
Good list just remove Negroponte. What has he done other than self-promotion and vapid speculation?
Ok, so the desktop quantum computer is pretty cool, even though only 2(?) bits, but I bet the guy from Harvard did all the real work.
www.geocities.com
;)
Penrose, a fine mathematician, came up with a non-repeating tiling. A toilet paper company apparently thought it was neat, so they stuck it on their product - I guess toilet paper needs texture or something. Penrose was upset by this, sued, but I think it settled out of court. Almost as funny as Apple's prototype named Sagan. Carl Sagan filed suit, Apple changed the name of the prototype to "Butthead Astronomer"
Re: Emperor's new Mind, I agree that if the human mind works in a fundamentally different way than computers, then we shouldn't be surprised if computers cannot emulate them. However I never quite saw Penrose do anymore than throw out lamebrained theories regarding what those different fundamental processes are. I don't have the book with me at school right now so I am going off the top of my head right now.
Did anyone actually like this book? It seems to me that Penrose spent most of the book providing a lackluster introduction to modern physics and computational theory. Then he basically says that we don't understand quantum gravity, we don't understand the mind, so (much hand waving) they are obviously related.
The book left a bad taste in my mouth. Remember, this is the guy who sued a toilet paper company.
Why not at least sue the gun and ammo manufacturers. I would say they are at least as responsible than any video games
A cracker is a white person in the southern united states.
As someone else said this is from "Psychology of Computer Programing." The idea is that you allow others to look at your code and to criticize it, and that you use these criticisms to improve your code. Of course no one said there wasn't a lot of yelling and screaming involved.
Minidiscs hold 140MB and there are prototypes that can hold 650MB. Why haven't we seen something using this technology? Probably because Sony never had a decent data version of it. I'm not sure why a minidisc that holds data would be any different than one that holds compressed sound (data). Oh well.
As far as the clik drive, AFAIK they are proprietary and who knows how rugged they are, how much they cost, etc.
Which game was it (quake or doom) that was rumored to be called Smashing Pumpkins Into Small Pieces of Putrid Debris?
I think it ended up being the noclip cheat in one of the games.
You need to get out more guy! She's super skanky
There's about sentences and links in this story that are colored white just like the background, and are thus invisible. An attempt to make slashdot into a fun and addicting game of find-the-link, an incredible simulation of the world wide web before CRT existed, or a simple mistake? You be the judge.
Visit The La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, CA.
(the the tar tar pits)