Though I have no love for solaris, and I like budget options, I always defend sun hardware. Probably because I work on it on a daily basis (we use everything from IPC's to our quad proc ultra II at Netmar).
The hardware is rock solid. I mean, you have to beat them with hammers to break them. The PROMS die before anything else goes bad, and that's just cause of the battery. And when the prom dies? Just boot it and make it set it's own mac address in the OS. The fact that we still use IPC's (as monitoring servers, rstat graph displayers, etc) is a testiment to how long they last.
I just looked at the sun website. The machine you offer does indeed cost $40k, or close to it ($35k). However, make sure you see what's included in that. It's 4x Ultra SPARC III Cu 1.05 Ghz processors, EACH with 8MB of cache. On top of that, there's 32 256MB sticks of registered memory, 2 10k RPM 73GB discs, 2 Gigabit ethernet ports, and dual 1440 Watt power supplies. That's a beast of a machine.
Oh, and wait, what's this?
I configure a machine almost matching the specs. The difference here is the processors, which are 2.8 Ghz Xeons, but ONLY 2MB OF CACHE, and they're also only 32bit. Otherwise, the same. 8GB of ram, 2 10k rpm 73GB SCSI drives. Guess what? It cost $28,000.
Between $28,000 for 32 bit procs with 2MB of cache, and $35,000 for 64 bit procs with 8MB of cache, I might go ahead and bump it up.
I wish people would realize that sun is rock solid hardware and not that much more expensive.
There essentially are no more unregistered.(com|net) domains. Verisign has just in effect registered all unregistered domains in those TLD's and pointed them at their own little cash-spinner.
Even better, based on the things that people look up that don't exist, they can set an automatic threshold of, say, 5000 lookups in a day, which, if a domain name crosses this, they can register it and squat on it. Or, at least compile the results of all failed lookups with sort -n and sell them to a squatter.
Kevin Smith (silent bob himself) has said that, with the advent of DVD's, it changes the way that he films. Previously, he used to cut the scene when the actor started ad-libbing or embellishing (aflack is notorious, appearantly). Now, he just lets them rant and rave as long as they want, and then he cleans it up in post, and throws the cuts on the DVD.
So, directors are thinking about DVD's even as they are filming.
"The name change to SCO from Caldera builds on a strong market position which we will extend as we reinvent the SCO brand," said Darl McBride, president and CEO, SCO. "For more than two decades, the SCO name has been synonymous with reliability, stability and cost efficiency. Now, the coexistence and collaboration of UNIX and Linux systems from a single source offers our customers and channel partners a powerful choice of solutions, backed by a name that powers millions of servers around the world - SCO."
We recently put an openBSD machine on the network as our "admin login server". Previously, we were just logging into our main server directly via ssh, which wasn't really extremely safe, but, i mean, it was IP restricted to a/22 of IP's that we all had at home (lack of ISP's in the area lends to all of us using the same one).
So anyway, we locked down the main server and set up an admin-only login server, running OpenBSD. Previously, my password had been (backwords name of a person + two numerals), which was fairly secure. So, when I was setting up my account on the OpenBSD machine, i logged in via the password that my coassociate had given me, and tried to change my password to the other password. But, it wouldn't let me.
I was kinda miffed, but i just su'd to root, to change my password as root with passwd username. But, it wouldn't let me change it there either! It told me that it was too simple! So, i changed it, in case the program recognized people's names, backwards, for some reason - Changed it to a random string of 6 characters plus 2 numerals. Still wouldn't accept it!
Sometimes you can take security too far. If I am ROOT on a system, I AM GOD. If I want my password to be "1", i should be able to do that. I was very resentful when that system told me that I couldn't do something when I was root. If I'm root, I should be able to rm -rf/bin. Pissed me off royally. I mean, if you're root, you should understand and weigh the consequences of a password like RfoLr65 as opposed to WsukF&2, and understand that the &, while making it very hard to crack, is also an annoyance to someone who has to type it a hundred times a day.
There's always a trade off. And, if I'm root, don't fucking tell me I can't do something.
Also, congratulations to all who have not purchased CD's in protest. Keep up the good work.
Please quantify this: Don't buy music from big labels. When appropriate, go to see artists in person and buy CD's from the guy with the mohawk and the piercings behind the merch table. Elsewise, buy from the record label, or at the worst, a low level distributer.
Yeah. If you can give money to the artists more directly, do so. Remember, we're not mad at the content producers, we're mad at the middle men and the big labels.
If DRM in the BIOS becomes common then there will be motherboards made, most likley in places like Korea, that do not have this "feature".
That's not the point.
The point is that software may require DRM to run.
I know linux won't implement DRM, blah blah blah, but some of us use windows, and like it. If I can't play neverwinter nights 4 because my motherboard is cheap and from korea, it's going to piss me the fuck off. If I have to use gimp instead of photoshop 10, my boss at work is not going to like getting me a new computer so that we can make that happen.
It had better run freaking fast. Virginia Tech has had an OC-3 for at least 6 years, and I think they're upgrading to hook into network virginia's bigger pipes.
For those out of the loop, network virginia is a partnership between verizon (local loops), sprint (borders and pipes), and Virginia tech (expertise and tech support). A few years ago, they had 2 OC-3's from Northern Va to roanoke, 1 to richmond, and 1 from roanoke to richmond. Their updated network topology map can be found by clicking here. The bottom one is the latest one. At any rate, they've got multiple OC-12's running from Nova to Roanoke, mainly because of VT. Tech may already be hooked into the OC-12's, i'm not sure.
Also, I'm not sure about how much will be lost in clustering, but according to the CT article today, the dual 2.0 Ghz G-5 can pull 14 teraflops by it's self. If we're getting 1100 of them, say, drop ~10% for overhead, that would still put us up at 14000 teraflops, which is ahead of ascii white and behind los alamos.
Also: regarding power requirements and all of that - we have several state of the art facilities on campus for this kind of stuff, including the VT Corporate research center and Torgersen hall (home of the center for advanced computing and where we keep all the fun VR rooms and stuff). There's a power plant on campus. We never lost power when I lived in a dorm, not during snow storms or huge thunderstorms or anything. It supplies power for most of blacksburg, too. Shameless plug, but that's one selling point for the company where I work, netmar, because we get our power from the VT power plant, and it's about 2.5 blocks away, we hardly ever lose power for more than 2 minutes, so we haven't had to put our generators to work in forever. Nowadays, we just test them with the remote start to make sure they're working, and to scare people that are hanging around the generator hut.
Anyway, VT has no problems finding a place for these things to go, and will have no problem providing power for them. Climate control should be no problem, either. For starters, it's easy to cool things in blacksburg, cause it hasn't been above 100 degrees in 100 years here.
Some people in my econ class today were talking about why are we doing it, and what's it going to be used for. Really, I think we're doing it to get grant money and sponsorships/funding, because with the economic situation in VA, we're scrambling to find money. We've had to drop teachers without replacing them and cut back on services all over (no more trash cans in dorm hallways, you have to take your own trash outside, can't afford the maintinance staff). Also, the Vet school will get a lot of use out of it. That's the "virginia-maryland regional college of veteranary medicine". They're looking for ways to cure problems with small bacteria instead of drugs (i'm not clear on the particulars, that's the impression i got). They're going to try and track what happens to something when it's introduced into an animal or something. Anyway, they'll use it, as will VT's engineering school, which, despite being tied for like 73rd on the list of top schools, and inexplicably 55 positions behind UVA, is an excellent program and produces excellent engineers.
Click on SCO news archive. They're in reverse chronological order, from newer to oldest, and all the links work, or did 2 weeks ago.
My favorite quote of them all??
"The name change to SCO from Caldera builds on a strong market position which we will extend as we reinvent the SCO brand," said Darl McBride, president and CEO, SCO. "For more than two decades, the SCO name has been synonymous with reliability, stability and cost efficiency. Now, the coexistence and collaboration of UNIX and Linux systems from a single source offers our customers and channel partners a powerful choice of solutions, backed by a name that powers millions of servers around the world - SCO."
Yeah, so anyway, that's my SCO website. Archive and all.
So, you're suggesting that the video games do not increase performance, they just weed out the people who aren't bred for it anyway, or something like that. You're saying that people with an engineering degree are better at math, but it doesn't follow that an engineering degree makes you good it math, more logically, it follows that people who aren't good at math stay away from engineering.
In any competition in which eye-hand coordination would be to the advantage of the competitor (street fighter, for instance), in order to become master of the competition, it would be necesary for one to either learn better eye-hand coordination or to quit playing; either way, people who play video games will develop better motor skills related to the competition.
It could be argued that the same is true of games that have no time constraint, i.e. final fantasy in wait mode, turn based "civ" style games, etc, where it regards mental capacity.
I'd like to (at least) third the support of ECS. It would feel awkward for me to consider purchasing other motherboards at this point. ECS is really where it's at. They're dirt cheap, and the quality of them has increased so much in recent memory that they aren't having anywhere near as many problems as you'd think.
We use them in servers all the time at work.
I have a friend who works at a retailer. He says it's mabey 1/200 ECS boards that fail, but, no shit, 1/10 Asus boards bite the turdburger within a year. Know what's cool about that? Asus support SUCKS ASS.
I know there are probably some diehard ASUS fans out there, but let me put it to you this way. I'll grant you asus boards are sometimes inexplicably fast and overclockable. Now, I'll raise you this: Go to their website, http://www.asus.com.tw and click on "N. America". Oooh, this is getting better by the minute. Earlier today, that page was working, but when you clicked on "support" you got a runtime script error. Now, it doesn't even fucking come up with a website! Should be http://usa.asus.com/index.htm, but that's comming up 404 now.
GOD DAMN, I hate asus. Any motherboard manufacturer who's link to "support" is broken on their front page, and has been for over a month, should have their business licence revoked. I've been trying to RMA a never-working ASUS board that was given to me for a MONTH AND A HALF now, and i've submitted the form at least 3 times, and faxed it at least 5.
If you want stability and a freaking motherboard that won't break, get an ECS. You'll be happy, and you'll keep some dollars in your pocket.
i often wonder if companies that have cheif coders that are "sympathetic" to OSS users make their products easy to revers engineer.
For example, if someone made a video driver, refused to release it open source because of contractual problems, but made it relatively easy to pick apart a bit at a time, it would give them plausable deniability, but still help out the OSS community.
~Will
Re:Gemstones as investments.
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The Diamond Age
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do you have a link to a site where one might inquire as to the availability of said stones??
Just wondering. Would be appreciated.
~Will
Re:The South African economy?
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The Diamond Age
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They'll mine coal.
With the breakdown of the union system here, it's less and less common, but for a while (read: mid 80's), it was cheaper for some coal companies to import coal from south africa than it was to pay union miners to mine it in WVA.
The problem comes in with overuse of CGI. Star wars episode 2 yoda for example. CGI-gone-haywire. CGI characters have never been believable to me. Well, mabey gollum, but that's one out of how many? And even he didn't look "real", he just looked better.
When movies are done entirely CGI (toy story, finding nemo, moster's inc, shrek, etc), they know that the movie isn't going to look real, so they give it a cartoon feel.
When movies try to portrey a lifelike "real" figure, along side humans, in CGI, it always seems bad to me (jar jar, yoda, scooby doo, etc).
Give me puppets anyday over CGI-characters. I'd take Empire strikes back yoda over attack of the clones yoda any day. To put it in another realm, how about Farscape, with Rygel XVI. For a show with a $1 Mil budget per show, I loved rygel. Puppets have to follow the laws of physics, because they exist - they're real. CGI have to attepmt to follow the laws of physics defined by computers. So, CGI for moyia starbursting - that's cool. CGI for rygel would have been dumb.
See, the thing here is gentoo will detect everything when you use the bootable CD. Network, hard drives, etc. But, then, you have to do the install. It's not graphical. It's actually kind of hard.
On the other hand, have you seen the install documentation? It's about 35 pages. So, you have to do everything yourself, but it walks you through it step by step, with boxes that show you *exactly* what to type. You have to partition your hard drive manually, then use mke2fs to create the file system (or mkreiserfs if you're leet), then networking, etc.
Read the install documentation, it's on the left hand pane of their website. It's very, VERY comprehensive. Plus, the reward is that you'll feel like a power user after the install, even though you'll have only followed instructions. It'll teach you a lot. Kernel compiles, for example, and how to use lilo. Just give it a shot. Their user's forums are rediculously cool, too.
Realize that, once you do this, you'll have a completely optimized system. When you start from stage one, it downloads the latest compiler and libraries, and during the bootstrap proceedure, it recompiles the libraries with the optimization levels you set, then it recompilies the compiler, linking it against the compiled libraries, then it works on the base system. It's from the ground up optimized for your athlon-xp or pentium3 or whatever.
The gentoo equivilant of apt-get is "emerge". For example, once your install is done, and you've got your basic command prompt, you'd type emerge gnome to download, compile, and install gnome. When my friend did this the other day on his gentoo box, he had to emerge XFree86 after gnome, too, but whatever.
The ISO's your looking for are: http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distribu tions/ gentoo/releases/x86/1.4/livecd/
I'm not sure what's up with the cd1 and cd2. The first stage is only 10 megs. I'd check the site to see about that. But, the beauty of it is, there's no rush to download the latest gentoo - those of us that already use it just do emerge sync (gets the latest list of all versions of files), and emerge world (which checks everything we've installed to make sure we're running the latest version). So, if you want, you could grab one of the 1.4_rc4 candidate iso's. Or, heck, you could get 1.2. The idea's the same, you always are downloading the latest stuff, and compiling it for your computer.
All in all, though, Outlook Express was a damned good e-mail client for me.
See, my thing with outlook express is that it's simple. It's my main mail client. Flame away, but all the added features in eudora did as much to confuse me as they did to make me feel better.
I don't want spell check. I don't want all my folders to open in seperate tabs (eudora). I don't want more buttons than I use on a daily basis. I want 1.) send/receive, 2.) reply, 3.) reply all, 4.) forward, 5.) address book. That's it. Not all this other crap. I want my folders on the left, in an XML-tree-kind of expandable menu. I want my message pane on the right, with the list of messages in the currently selected mailbox at the top and the message at the bottom. Plus those buttons, and that's it, that's the perfect mail client.
Outlook express is rediculously simple. The setup is simple. The message filters are simple. The interface is simple.
I have to agree with this guy. I mean, i've used 'em all, from mh/mutt/pine to squirrel mail, evolution, eudora, etc. Outlook express, while it has it's faults, is really pretty damn good.
~Will
Re:Can anyone list pros of debian vs gentoo
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You've nailed it on the head, much better than I did. Exactly right.
I have a friend who's running gentoo on his laptop because, with debian and redhat, things like mozilla, natulus, etc were very slow. With the compiler optimizations in gentoo, he's got a very much improved system, plus a later version of gnome (2.2.1).
The laptop is a 700 mhz, but it's 500 mhz when not plugged in (speed step), so it's pretty important to have, for him, more optimization. This, you accomplish with gentoo by compiling for i686-pc-linux and -march=pentium3 -O3, more so than you would than with a debian distro, where everything is portable back to 486, or 386 even.
But, on the other hand, my gentoo server that I have sitting around at work isn't any faster than any other OS I've used. Mabey 5%, but nothing really noticible. When you're not using a GUI, stability is probably more important, so debian is probably a good choice.
So, as always, depends on the application.
Re:Can anyone list pros of debian vs gentoo
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Debian Turning 10
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· Score: 1
I prefer gentoo, so this is probably biased...
Pros for debian: There's a package for everything, and nothing you install from the stable tree will break your machine. Auto-dep resolution.
Cons for debian (and most everything else): the packages are compiled with out optimization for specific platforms.
Pros for gentoo: 100% optimized, compiled system, from the ground up. Easy to use. Good documentation.
Cons for gentoo: Not as easy as some others.
Bascially, I break it down like this: 3 things are the "newhotness" in linux usability - Automatic downloading of packages, automatic dependancy resolution, and custom compiling. Redhat has none of those. If you look at the redhat kernel, it's an exercise in pushing the "M" key. People that want to do things in redhat by now are familiar with "dependancy hell" also known as "this RPM needs these 7 rpms, which each need 10". With debain, you apt-get install mod_perl and it will download and install apache, perl, and mod_perl, in the correct order, plus whatever else you need it to install. With gentoo, however, it will do all of that, plus compile it to your specifications to be faster, more optimized, etc.
To me, gentoo is the next logical step beyond debian. I love it.
Slashdot Mirror
I just looked at it.
Though I have no love for solaris, and I like budget options, I always defend sun hardware. Probably because I work on it on a daily basis (we use everything from IPC's to our quad proc ultra II at Netmar).
The hardware is rock solid. I mean, you have to beat them with hammers to break them. The PROMS die before anything else goes bad, and that's just cause of the battery. And when the prom dies? Just boot it and make it set it's own mac address in the OS. The fact that we still use IPC's (as monitoring servers, rstat graph displayers, etc) is a testiment to how long they last.
I just looked at the sun website. The machine you offer does indeed cost $40k, or close to it ($35k). However, make sure you see what's included in that. It's 4x Ultra SPARC III Cu 1.05 Ghz processors, EACH with 8MB of cache. On top of that, there's 32 256MB sticks of registered memory, 2 10k RPM 73GB discs, 2 Gigabit ethernet ports, and dual 1440 Watt power supplies. That's a beast of a machine.
Oh, and wait, what's this?
I configure a machine almost matching the specs. The difference here is the processors, which are 2.8 Ghz Xeons, but ONLY 2MB OF CACHE, and they're also only 32bit. Otherwise, the same. 8GB of ram, 2 10k rpm 73GB SCSI drives. Guess what? It cost $28,000.
Between $28,000 for 32 bit procs with 2MB of cache, and $35,000 for 64 bit procs with 8MB of cache, I might go ahead and bump it up.
I wish people would realize that sun is rock solid hardware and not that much more expensive.
~Will
You missed "Natlaie Protman's hot Grtis"
There essentially are no more unregistered .(com|net) domains. Verisign has just in effect registered all unregistered domains in those TLD's and pointed them at their own little cash-spinner.
Even better, based on the things that people look up that don't exist, they can set an automatic threshold of, say, 5000 lookups in a day, which, if a domain name crosses this, they can register it and squat on it. Or, at least compile the results of all failed lookups with sort -n and sell them to a squatter.
~Will
Interesting point.
Kevin Smith (silent bob himself) has said that, with the advent of DVD's, it changes the way that he films. Previously, he used to cut the scene when the actor started ad-libbing or embellishing (aflack is notorious, appearantly). Now, he just lets them rant and rave as long as they want, and then he cleans it up in post, and throws the cuts on the DVD.
So, directors are thinking about DVD's even as they are filming.
~Will
Then the web came along and they registered wwf.com. After a long court battle, the Wildlife Fund won because of the prior agreement.
And now, when you go to www.wwf.com, you get a domain squatter who sells wrestling tickets to "wwe" shows. Whatever. Stupid.
~Will
Even better:
"The name change to SCO from Caldera builds on a strong market position which we will extend as we reinvent the SCO brand," said Darl McBride, president and CEO, SCO. "For more than two decades, the SCO name has been synonymous with reliability, stability and cost efficiency. Now, the coexistence and collaboration of UNIX and Linux systems from a single source offers our customers and channel partners a powerful choice of solutions, backed by a name that powers millions of servers around the world - SCO."
(Daryl Mcbride).
From pinkfairies.org
~Will
Even more interesting idea: How about not associating correlation with causation??!?
I cut my toenails. I shot a cop. Therefore, because I cut my toenails, I shot a cop.
Or, I drive a car. I drink alcohol. Therefore, I drive drunk.
One thing does not always lead to another, worse, thing.
~Will
We recently put an openBSD machine on the network as our "admin login server". Previously, we were just logging into our main server directly via ssh, which wasn't really extremely safe, but, i mean, it was IP restricted to a /22 of IP's that we all had at home (lack of ISP's in the area lends to all of us using the same one).
/bin. Pissed me off royally. I mean, if you're root, you should understand and weigh the consequences of a password like RfoLr65 as opposed to WsukF&2, and understand that the &, while making it very hard to crack, is also an annoyance to someone who has to type it a hundred times a day.
So anyway, we locked down the main server and set up an admin-only login server, running OpenBSD. Previously, my password had been (backwords name of a person + two numerals), which was fairly secure. So, when I was setting up my account on the OpenBSD machine, i logged in via the password that my coassociate had given me, and tried to change my password to the other password. But, it wouldn't let me.
I was kinda miffed, but i just su'd to root, to change my password as root with passwd username. But, it wouldn't let me change it there either! It told me that it was too simple! So, i changed it, in case the program recognized people's names, backwards, for some reason - Changed it to a random string of 6 characters plus 2 numerals. Still wouldn't accept it!
Sometimes you can take security too far. If I am ROOT on a system, I AM GOD. If I want my password to be "1", i should be able to do that. I was very resentful when that system told me that I couldn't do something when I was root. If I'm root, I should be able to rm -rf
There's always a trade off. And, if I'm root, don't fucking tell me I can't do something.
~Will
Also, congratulations to all who have not purchased CD's in protest. Keep up the good work.
Please quantify this: Don't buy music from big labels. When appropriate, go to see artists in person and buy CD's from the guy with the mohawk and the piercings behind the merch table. Elsewise, buy from the record label, or at the worst, a low level distributer.
Some labels i've bought from recently:
vagrant records
hopeless records
fearless records
and a low level distributer: interpunk
Yeah. If you can give money to the artists more directly, do so. Remember, we're not mad at the content producers, we're mad at the middle men and the big labels.
~Will
If DRM in the BIOS becomes common then there will be motherboards made, most likley in places like Korea, that do not have this "feature".
That's not the point.
The point is that software may require DRM to run.
I know linux won't implement DRM, blah blah blah, but some of us use windows, and like it. If I can't play neverwinter nights 4 because my motherboard is cheap and from korea, it's going to piss me the fuck off. If I have to use gimp instead of photoshop 10, my boss at work is not going to like getting me a new computer so that we can make that happen.
~Will
Quality = good, price = high, result = Some people willing to pay.
Quality = bad, price = high, result = far fewer people willing to pay.
Quality = bad, price = low, result = Some people willing to pay.
Quality = good, price = low, result = maximum number of people willing to pay.
Simple economics. Price of normal goods go up, demand for inferrior goods goes up. Substitute CD's for "normal goods" and MP3's for "inferrior goods".
I hope this is amazing because they're willing to actually do it, not because they think it's a revolutionary idea.
~Will
It had better run freaking fast. Virginia Tech has had an OC-3 for at least 6 years, and I think they're upgrading to hook into network virginia's bigger pipes.
For those out of the loop, network virginia is a partnership between verizon (local loops), sprint (borders and pipes), and Virginia tech (expertise and tech support). A few years ago, they had 2 OC-3's from Northern Va to roanoke, 1 to richmond, and 1 from roanoke to richmond. Their updated network topology map can be found by clicking here. The bottom one is the latest one. At any rate, they've got multiple OC-12's running from Nova to Roanoke, mainly because of VT. Tech may already be hooked into the OC-12's, i'm not sure.
Also, I'm not sure about how much will be lost in clustering, but according to the CT article today, the dual 2.0 Ghz G-5 can pull 14 teraflops by it's self. If we're getting 1100 of them, say, drop ~10% for overhead, that would still put us up at 14000 teraflops, which is ahead of ascii white and behind los alamos.
Also: regarding power requirements and all of that - we have several state of the art facilities on campus for this kind of stuff, including the VT Corporate research center and Torgersen hall (home of the center for advanced computing and where we keep all the fun VR rooms and stuff). There's a power plant on campus. We never lost power when I lived in a dorm, not during snow storms or huge thunderstorms or anything. It supplies power for most of blacksburg, too. Shameless plug, but that's one selling point for the company where I work, netmar, because we get our power from the VT power plant, and it's about 2.5 blocks away, we hardly ever lose power for more than 2 minutes, so we haven't had to put our generators to work in forever. Nowadays, we just test them with the remote start to make sure they're working, and to scare people that are hanging around the generator hut.
Anyway, VT has no problems finding a place for these things to go, and will have no problem providing power for them. Climate control should be no problem, either. For starters, it's easy to cool things in blacksburg, cause it hasn't been above 100 degrees in 100 years here.
Some people in my econ class today were talking about why are we doing it, and what's it going to be used for. Really, I think we're doing it to get grant money and sponsorships/funding, because with the economic situation in VA, we're scrambling to find money. We've had to drop teachers without replacing them and cut back on services all over (no more trash cans in dorm hallways, you have to take your own trash outside, can't afford the maintinance staff). Also, the Vet school will get a lot of use out of it. That's the "virginia-maryland regional college of veteranary medicine". They're looking for ways to cure problems with small bacteria instead of drugs (i'm not clear on the particulars, that's the impression i got). They're going to try and track what happens to something when it's introduced into an animal or something. Anyway, they'll use it, as will VT's engineering school, which, despite being tied for like 73rd on the list of top schools, and inexplicably 55 positions behind UVA, is an excellent program and produces excellent engineers.
~Will
identical ram in each of the 12!! RAM slots
Dude, look at an old sparc sometime. Sparc 1/1+/2 had 16 ram slots, circa 1990. Of course, you had to fill 4 at a time. The max is 128 MB i think.
~Will
http://www.pinkfairies.org/
Click on SCO news archive. They're in reverse chronological order, from newer to oldest, and all the links work, or did 2 weeks ago.
My favorite quote of them all??
Yeah, so anyway, that's my SCO website. Archive and all.
~Will
So, you're suggesting that the video games do not increase performance, they just weed out the people who aren't bred for it anyway, or something like that. You're saying that people with an engineering degree are better at math, but it doesn't follow that an engineering degree makes you good it math, more logically, it follows that people who aren't good at math stay away from engineering.
An excellent argument.
In any competition in which eye-hand coordination would be to the advantage of the competitor (street fighter, for instance), in order to become master of the competition, it would be necesary for one to either learn better eye-hand coordination or to quit playing; either way, people who play video games will develop better motor skills related to the competition.
It could be argued that the same is true of games that have no time constraint, i.e. final fantasy in wait mode, turn based "civ" style games, etc, where it regards mental capacity.
~Will
I'd like to (at least) third the support of ECS. It would feel awkward for me to consider purchasing other motherboards at this point. ECS is really where it's at. They're dirt cheap, and the quality of them has increased so much in recent memory that they aren't having anywhere near as many problems as you'd think.
We use them in servers all the time at work.
I have a friend who works at a retailer. He says it's mabey 1/200 ECS boards that fail, but, no shit, 1/10 Asus boards bite the turdburger within a year. Know what's cool about that? Asus support SUCKS ASS.
I know there are probably some diehard ASUS fans out there, but let me put it to you this way. I'll grant you asus boards are sometimes inexplicably fast and overclockable. Now, I'll raise you this: Go to their website, http://www.asus.com.tw and click on "N. America". Oooh, this is getting better by the minute. Earlier today, that page was working, but when you clicked on "support" you got a runtime script error. Now, it doesn't even fucking come up with a website! Should be http://usa.asus.com/index.htm, but that's comming up 404 now.
GOD DAMN, I hate asus. Any motherboard manufacturer who's link to "support" is broken on their front page, and has been for over a month, should have their business licence revoked. I've been trying to RMA a never-working ASUS board that was given to me for a MONTH AND A HALF now, and i've submitted the form at least 3 times, and faxed it at least 5.
If you want stability and a freaking motherboard that won't break, get an ECS. You'll be happy, and you'll keep some dollars in your pocket.
~Will
i often wonder if companies that have cheif coders that are "sympathetic" to OSS users make their products easy to revers engineer.
For example, if someone made a video driver, refused to release it open source because of contractual problems, but made it relatively easy to pick apart a bit at a time, it would give them plausable deniability, but still help out the OSS community.
~Will
do you have a link to a site where one might inquire as to the availability of said stones??
Just wondering. Would be appreciated.
~Will
They'll mine coal.
With the breakdown of the union system here, it's less and less common, but for a while (read: mid 80's), it was cheaper for some coal companies to import coal from south africa than it was to pay union miners to mine it in WVA.
~Will
The problem comes in with overuse of CGI. Star wars episode 2 yoda for example. CGI-gone-haywire. CGI characters have never been believable to me. Well, mabey gollum, but that's one out of how many? And even he didn't look "real", he just looked better.
When movies are done entirely CGI (toy story, finding nemo, moster's inc, shrek, etc), they know that the movie isn't going to look real, so they give it a cartoon feel.
When movies try to portrey a lifelike "real" figure, along side humans, in CGI, it always seems bad to me (jar jar, yoda, scooby doo, etc).
Give me puppets anyday over CGI-characters. I'd take Empire strikes back yoda over attack of the clones yoda any day. To put it in another realm, how about Farscape, with Rygel XVI. For a show with a $1 Mil budget per show, I loved rygel. Puppets have to follow the laws of physics, because they exist - they're real. CGI have to attepmt to follow the laws of physics defined by computers. So, CGI for moyia starbursting - that's cool. CGI for rygel would have been dumb.
~Will
See, the thing here is gentoo will detect everything when you use the bootable CD. Network, hard drives, etc. But, then, you have to do the install. It's not graphical. It's actually kind of hard.
u tions/ gentoo/releases/x86/1.4/livecd/
On the other hand, have you seen the install documentation? It's about 35 pages. So, you have to do everything yourself, but it walks you through it step by step, with boxes that show you *exactly* what to type. You have to partition your hard drive manually, then use mke2fs to create the file system (or mkreiserfs if you're leet), then networking, etc.
Read the install documentation, it's on the left hand pane of their website. It's very, VERY comprehensive. Plus, the reward is that you'll feel like a power user after the install, even though you'll have only followed instructions. It'll teach you a lot. Kernel compiles, for example, and how to use lilo. Just give it a shot. Their user's forums are rediculously cool, too.
Realize that, once you do this, you'll have a completely optimized system. When you start from stage one, it downloads the latest compiler and libraries, and during the bootstrap proceedure, it recompiles the libraries with the optimization levels you set, then it recompilies the compiler, linking it against the compiled libraries, then it works on the base system. It's from the ground up optimized for your athlon-xp or pentium3 or whatever.
The gentoo equivilant of apt-get is "emerge". For example, once your install is done, and you've got your basic command prompt, you'd type emerge gnome to download, compile, and install gnome. When my friend did this the other day on his gentoo box, he had to emerge XFree86 after gnome, too, but whatever.
The ISO's your looking for are:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distrib
I'm not sure what's up with the cd1 and cd2. The first stage is only 10 megs. I'd check the site to see about that.
But, the beauty of it is, there's no rush to download the latest gentoo - those of us that already use it just do emerge sync (gets the latest list of all versions of files), and emerge world (which checks everything we've installed to make sure we're running the latest version). So, if you want, you could grab one of the 1.4_rc4 candidate iso's. Or, heck, you could get 1.2. The idea's the same, you always are downloading the latest stuff, and compiling it for your computer.
~Will
All in all, though, Outlook Express was a damned good e-mail client for me.
See, my thing with outlook express is that it's simple. It's my main mail client. Flame away, but all the added features in eudora did as much to confuse me as they did to make me feel better.
I don't want spell check. I don't want all my folders to open in seperate tabs (eudora). I don't want more buttons than I use on a daily basis. I want 1.) send/receive, 2.) reply, 3.) reply all, 4.) forward, 5.) address book. That's it. Not all this other crap.
I want my folders on the left, in an XML-tree-kind of expandable menu. I want my message pane on the right, with the list of messages in the currently selected mailbox at the top and the message at the bottom. Plus those buttons, and that's it, that's the perfect mail client.
Outlook express is rediculously simple. The setup is simple. The message filters are simple. The interface is simple.
I have to agree with this guy. I mean, i've used 'em all, from mh/mutt/pine to squirrel mail, evolution, eudora, etc. Outlook express, while it has it's faults, is really pretty damn good.
~Will
You've nailed it on the head, much better than I did. Exactly right.
I have a friend who's running gentoo on his laptop because, with debian and redhat, things like mozilla, natulus, etc were very slow. With the compiler optimizations in gentoo, he's got a very much improved system, plus a later version of gnome (2.2.1).
The laptop is a 700 mhz, but it's 500 mhz when not plugged in (speed step), so it's pretty important to have, for him, more optimization. This, you accomplish with gentoo by compiling for i686-pc-linux and -march=pentium3 -O3, more so than you would than with a debian distro, where everything is portable back to 486, or 386 even.
But, on the other hand, my gentoo server that I have sitting around at work isn't any faster than any other OS I've used. Mabey 5%, but nothing really noticible. When you're not using a GUI, stability is probably more important, so debian is probably a good choice.
So, as always, depends on the application.
I prefer gentoo, so this is probably biased...
Pros for debian: There's a package for everything, and nothing you install from the stable tree will break your machine. Auto-dep resolution.
Cons for debian (and most everything else): the packages are compiled with out optimization for specific platforms.
Pros for gentoo: 100% optimized, compiled system, from the ground up. Easy to use. Good documentation.
Cons for gentoo: Not as easy as some others.
Bascially, I break it down like this: 3 things are the "newhotness" in linux usability - Automatic downloading of packages, automatic dependancy resolution, and custom compiling. Redhat has none of those. If you look at the redhat kernel, it's an exercise in pushing the "M" key. People that want to do things in redhat by now are familiar with "dependancy hell" also known as "this RPM needs these 7 rpms, which each need 10". With debain, you apt-get install mod_perl and it will download and install apache, perl, and mod_perl, in the correct order, plus whatever else you need it to install.
With gentoo, however, it will do all of that, plus compile it to your specifications to be faster, more optimized, etc.
To me, gentoo is the next logical step beyond debian. I love it.
~Will