Very different from days of Compute! and Byte...
on
Hello World!
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Back then, if you wanted to play a game you often had to copy programs from source code listings. So you had things like line validators (checksum as you entered each line) and whole sections devoted to programming. The projects, I think, were also very different. I remember building a WeFax device to decode satellite weather facsimile images. There was also the Ciarcia articles that talked about everything from building a micro-computer to assembly programming.
Sure, there are still programming magazines, but we don't have to solve the same things we did then. Now it's just a matter of running CPAN, downloading a Flash or Java snippet, or just a #include.
That's why I'm super grateful for the availability of Linux, free software, and the suite of compilers. I remember saving up for weeks to purchase Megamax C and later GFA BASIC. I remember borrowing a Z80 card so that I could run Borland Turbo Pascal. Now it's a quick download and every language I want is available within moments.
The downside is that it's a lot more complex now. If I wanted to make a graphics program back then, for example on TI BASIC, it was a relatively simple matter to redefine a character set with a bunch of POKEs. Now we have to worry about initializing a window, internationalization, acceleration, etc.. Sometimes it's a bit daunting for non-professionals. Sure, there things like SDL and TCL/TK and a raft of IDEs, but still I don't think it is as easy as it was back then. (Of course, today's software does a lot more).
Dude if 30 minutes a day worked for me, I'd do it in a heartbeat. The only couple of times I have lost weight in my life I lived on salad and lean meat/chicken in tiny portions and did AT LEAST 2 hours of heavy excercise a day. Anything short of that doesn't cut it. What's worse is when I've stopped it's taken a couple of months of eating reasonable portions and not excercising as much to put on all the weight I've lost over 6-8 months AND add some more kilos as the body overcompensates. Now you can choose to believe me or not. I'm guessing not. That's up to you. I happen to know for a fact that I'm not lying. Meanwhile I CAN'T keep that up while working 10 hrs a day 5 days a week plus some weekends, spending 3 hours a day in commute, doing chores till midnight when I get home and helping to raise a family.
Interesting.
Here's something as interesting too. To lose weight, expend more energy than you take in. You don't need to hit the gym either, though some moderate exercise two or three times a week (or even once a week) can do wonders.
I understand what you're saying though. Ten hour days, five days a week, plus weekends is tough. I was in the same situation. In my IT desk job I had swelled to 230lbs.
But it struck me when I was spending $40 a day in food and coffee and taking the elevator up a single flight of stairs that it was time to change.
The first thing I did was to eliminate the Starbucks macchiatos and the morning Dunkin' Donuts run for coffee and a bacon and egg croissant. I replaced these with regular coffee and used a sugar substitute (yes, I'm aware of the dangers of sugar substitutes, but I'll come to that in a moment). I started eating two packets of oatmeal in the morning to stave off the craving. It took a while to get used to it, but I enjoy it now.
I started doing some treadmill and light weights. Despite misconceptions, doing weights is one of the fastest ways to lose fat. Muscle uses more energy for upkeep and is denser than fat.
I reduced my portion sizes. Previously I was eating a typical American portion. I.e., meat was the centerpiece of the meal. I changed to a more Asian diet with more vegetables. I also started bringing my own meals. (I also admit that this was partially motivated by finances).
After a couple months, I began to prefer just coffee with milk (no sugar). I also stopped drinking that horrible swill they served at work and started bringing in my own coffee. Funny thing is that I was using sugar to disguise the taste of the coffee from work. Now I spend about $10 every couple weeks and use a single cup coffee brewer (just a funnel that holds a filter that you fill with hot water).
I reduced my commute to work. This was a more drastic change and coincided with being diagnosed with high blood pressure. Though I love to drive, the commute was stressful and made my blood pressure worse.
The one health thing I'm trying to do is to get more sleep. I get around 4 hours a night, but I'm trying to get at least six.
Windows XP. There is simply no comparing XP to previous "home" versions of Windows in terms of quality.
Looks like they stopped there. Vista is a piece of crap and the frustration experience is as bad as WindowsME. Sure, it's much better than WindowsME, but so are the alternatives. Sometimes it's not Vista's fault. For example, when I play Fallout3 the game will crash if anything pops up on the desktop. I can't save screenshots in Vista. On Vista64, I can't get VMWare Server to work properly. Just last month I finally got drivers for my printer after waiting months.
But more often it is a Vista problem. My wireless network connection drops all the time because of some brain dead power management. Vista doesn't resume from hibernation properly. If I boot with my Sigmatel USB 3G card, 1/5 times it will bluescreen when it resumes. Sometimes the system will resume but the display never turns back on. If it was just one Vista system I'd suspect hardware, but this is happening on three machines.
So yeah.. I went and pre-ordered Windows7 like a good monkey because Vista is so damn unusable. Maybe that's their business model. Offer crap then the new version seems so much better.
Many of the skills that make a good technical worker can make a good technical manager. You need to pay attention to details, keep track of a lot of different tasks, break up problems into manageable pieces, quantify risks and benefits, deal with unreasonable folks on occasion.
Some people claim that a good manager does not need to know much about the industry being managed. The idea is that a good manager can find the proper people that understand what they need to do and do it. I think this is true in an ideal world, but a technical manager who can dissociate himself from the technical aspects can make an exceptional manager.
There's an incremental financial benefit to management, but in the right organization you should be able to progress quite well in the technical track too.
Personally the thought of managing more than a couple people is unpleasant to me. I could probably do an adequate job, but it would not be something that I'd relish.
I worked at UPS in the Technology Support Group some years ago. One day I was in Naples, FL training employees how to scan packages using a new tracking system. I was standing next to an employee and showing him how to hold the scanner (distance from package, laser placement etc.). So I take up a letter, scan it, then put it into a bin to get processed. Soon as I do this, two very large guys walk up behind me. "What are you doing?" they ask. Because they're in suits, I think they're some managers. I explain that I'm showing the employee how to use the scanner. "I saw you load that package," one guy tells me. Not familiar with all the vagaries of union rules, I say, "Yes, just a couple." I'm thinking that they want to make sure I put it in the right bin or something else. "What are you doing touching packages?" they ask me. I really didn't know what to say because I was really confused by his question. Luckily an actual manager rushed up at that point to straighten out everything.
I hear later that not being an hourly employee, I am not allowed to touch packages. This is doubly true when union reps are standing behind me.
I'm not particularly fond of many of the managers at UPS as they would do things that I thought were just as shady. For example, managers would instruct the belt supervisors to stagger the start times on each employee working a conveyor belt. The reasoning was that packages would get to the rear of the belt several minutes after they hit the front of the belt. But they wouldn't tell this to the employees. The employees had to be in their area and ready to work at start time (around 4AM), but because of the stagger, would be cheated out of 30 minutes to an hour each week. I.e., show up to work at 4AM and you won't get paid until 4:20AM but you need to be prepared as soon as the belt starts up.
This past weekend I had a garage sale and, as I was clearing stuff, realized how much junk paperwork I had stashed in the garage. There were books, manuals, class notes, lecture notes (from those I attended and those I gave), meeting notebooks, documentation on long obsolete processes (Token Ring MAU reset procedures, Novell Netware rebuild procedures). I had notebooks of stories, embarrassing journal entries from college ("DH has the most beautiful eyes!!"), and all sorts of other uselessness that I had never really cataloged.
And how do you catalog such stuff anyway? I have 20 years of stuff. NASA generates less than one hour what it's taken me a lifetime to accrete.
I wonder what the costs are for a broadcast versus a webcast? For a broadcast you'd need to coordinate multiple stations and time zones, there are power costs to push the signal, station costs, licensing costs.. For a webcast there's the server and pipe sized to the load you expect. Maybe you need Akamai or some other similar system, but I expect that it's much cheaper than broadcast.
The heart of my network is a xen based server running fileserver, DNS, DHCP, web proxy and LDAP.
Physically, the system is an older Athlon 2200 with 3G RAM, mirrored 100G disks for the base OS and disk files. The software stack is CentOS 5.3 based, running xen.
The fileserver virtual machine has its own 500G single disk assigned to it one which I keep media files, pictures etc. I run a rsync backup script to another physical machine. The really critical stuff (family pictures, irreplaceable documents) also get backed up to an external hard drive every week or so (no set schedule). I don't have an automated process to back up my OS images though.
I run CentOS directory server (now Port389). Windows and Linux clients can authenticate, but most systems have local authentication. I also use autodir/autofs on Linux/Solaris systems. This allows me to login on any Unix/Linux system and have my entire work environment ready. I have the following.profile that lets me keep separate profiles for each login:
## Profile Script LDAP_HOME: Contains the NFS automount directories for a subset of LDAP users.
LDAP_CURRENT_HOST=`hostname -s`
if [ -f ~/.hostconfig/${LDAP_CURRENT_HOST}.profile ]; then
. ~/.hostconfig/${LDAP_CURRENT_HOST}.profile fi
For my Linux clients, I automount the fileshare to/mnt/fileserver. Each home directory has a symlink to that mount point. You can put this in the skel startup so that each new user gets the link. This allows anyone on my network to play music, watch movies, view pictures, from the share. I set up the directory structure on the fileshare as follows:
Media: Contains subdirs for Audio, Video, and Images. Documentation: Contains subdirs for Computer, Household, Film, etc.. CVS: The main CVS repository for my work Software: Contains subdirs for Windows, Linux, MacOS, Java, Solaris
For the Windows clients, I define a network drive on each system pointing to the fileserver. I can also access the CVS server via Eclipse when I need to do something with Java or Windows Perl.
There are some downsides to my setup. I tend to upload images from my Windows machines and for the most part, these are laptops that connect wirelessly so synchronization can take hours to upload an 8G CF card. I'm happy with the setup, however. Placing something in a "critical" folder means it gets a backup rotation so I can retrieve earlier versions. Other stuff is backed up, but not at a high priority and no versioning.
And then there's my personal favorite, a short-sighted effort to limit property taxes whose only real effect is to hurt younger people just starting out and drive the schools into the shitter?
We had a similar thing in Florida called SaveOurHomes.
Here's my take on it though..
There's been a lot of real estate speculation in Florida up until the bottom fell out last year. This had the effect of artificially driving up property taxes for all sorts of people.
Most annoyingly, those folks who didn't speculate on housing, who didn't contribute to the real estate hysteria, found themselves unable to pay the rapidly rising property taxes. They got driven out of their homes and their homes snatched up anyway, even if they had opted to stay away from the hysteria.
SaveOurHomes was a way of limiting the property tax increases over the years.
The problem was that the state got very greedy. With all these revenues from the ballooning real estate market, they overspent themselves. When it went bust, cities and counties had sudden revenue issues.
Now they are repealing SaveOurHomes because of the massive budget shortfalls.
Because of the bubble, housing prices are grossly inflated. Now people who were financially responsible are going to pay the penalty for all the people speculated. Doesn't sound fair to me.
The need for the young and/or first-home buyers to have affordable *first homes* is important. That's why there are homestead acts throughout the country (Florida included). These homestead acts reduce property taxes for your primary home.
In a Department of Justice tally covering the last decade, Florida wins by its sheer number of guilty. The report, released last week, itemizes convictions in federal public corruption cases at local, state and federal levels in the 50 states, the District of Columbia and three United States territories.
I live in South Florida and am very used to politicians from city council member to congress folks making excuses for their convictions.
I live near Miami. I remember once telling my cousins in the UK that I really enjoyed Florida. They responded to the effect, "How can you live in Miami? Don't you worry about the assault rifle wielding drug dealing, ganster thug rapists?"
Recently in Philly, driving along one absolutely normal looking city block, my friends said remarked that they were surprised that people were walking around *at night* in this warzone.
It's one thing to be careless but this irrational fear of cities is mindboggling.
To see real urban ganglands, you need to walk through the gritty Weston neighborhood along the I75 corridor near the 'Glades. Some real thugs hang out here.
I mean this if you're in the US. Over here, women (geeky and non-geeky alike), tend to focus a lot more on physical appearance than outside the USA. Now I'm a particularly dorky looking male geek, but managed to date and actually get married.
Next thing is to stop trying so hard. Ever heard someone say that they always had trouble getting a date until they finally got married? It's not only that some females may want to compete with someone who's "taken", but I think it's more that you stop trying so hard. Then you'll find lots and lots of women want friends. "Friends" is good. "Friends" can become more than that after a few weeks.
There are other things you can do such as exercise. Join a team sport (dragon boating is fun). Join a running club. Join a photography meetup. Take a college course.
You can also do the matchmaking thing. I know people who've gotten married through them.
But more than anything, be yourself. If you fake it to win a girl, then what happens when you get tired of faking it???
so, damnit, everyone else better go through the same thing.
Seriously though... though I learned it as part of my CS coursework, I used it more often in the math minor portion. Lots of the examples were in Fortran, and I remember having to write Newton-Raphson and trapezoid functions. It served the purpose of showing how numerical methods worked.
I'm not certain how useful it would be in a current CS course. Today you'd just link a library and and make a call. I'm not saying that's in any way worse than how I learned it, but may not be as useful as a learning tool.
I remember reading an interesting finance/economy related article about schooling. In brief, it said that schooling served a purpose of preventing young kids from entering the workforce and competing with adults. Specialized schooling was just another re-vamping of the guild system. The article over-simplified a lot of things (especially since it was written before the Internet took off), but I can't help thinking that there was a lot of truth in it.
I work about a mile from the Pembroke Pines Century Village (or Cemetery Village as most people call it), and every month or so, there's one senior citizen crawling along at 10 miles per hour in a 45mph zone. Last year I had to call 911 because a very confused man was starting and stopping, swerving back and forth, crossing into the grass median, etc..
On the I95 and Turnpike, I've seen people reading, painting toenails, turning completely around to take things from the back floor (not seat, FLOOR).
In Florida, people will SPEED UP so you don't get in front if you signal. I actually thought of doing a video just to document this behaviour. In every other place (in Philadelphia where I am at this moment, in Atlanta, in California) people let you in.
When I went to get my Florida permit I saw people with cheat sheets taking the test. They didn't hide it either, just had the notes written up. You wonder why they don't know to let ambulances pass, or why they don't know what to do when the stoplights are out, or why they put on their hazard lights when it starts to drizzle, or why they don't know who must yield at a flashing yellow/red... it's probably because they paid someone to take the test or just outright cheated.
Ever read _A Canticle for Leibowitz_? It's one of my favorites, particularly because it pokes fun at our tendency to sanctify the innocuous. In the book an ancient relic is found, something from antiquity. Turns out to be a shopping list from a guy who works a 9 to 5 job. There's another short story called "Motel of the Mysteries" that does a similar thing, except that toilet seats become some ancient religious headdressing.
The knowledge is what we need to hold dear, not the artifacts created in search of that knowledge. It's nice in a saccharine sort of way to have tangible evidence of where someone stood, but the real treasure is what that person did. If we sanctify the artifacts we tend to lose sight of the knowledge.
I fixed a computer for a family member by having it auto-boot a VMWare image. Underneath the XP client, the machine runs CentOS 5.3 with the latest VMWare server. It's configured to automatically use a snapshot image so the original image is never touched. If there's a problem it's a simple matter of rebooting and selecting a revert option. Once it boots, it autologins as a non-priv user and starts the guest then opens the console (google the VMWare forums for instructions on doing that).
My laptop has a known and ongoing issue. According to the manufacturer, it's a problem with the power-saving code of the operating system. According to the OS manufacturer, it's a problem with the wireless access point not fully supporting a new OS manufacturer feature. According to the access point manufacturer, the OS vendor are a bunch of mouth-breathing morons.
(Dell laptop, Windows Vista, Linksys access point)...
The solution the OS vendor has proposed is to set my power saving features to high-performance even on battery. This shortens the useful charge from about 2.5 hours to about 45 minutes, which is just about useless to me.
I know a good way. Use the KSayIt! application to speak the threads out. It's quite enthralling actually.. Nothing like a robotic voice reading email messages:
"from colon less than ultorvaldus at sign ulkaymul dot com greater than to colon ah cox at sign cox nos pam dot com subject colon you areeee mad you should have radeee your comshee book"
I don't remember the title and hope someone here does, but there was a book that explained Einstein's Principles of Relativity. The book started out with some thought experiments then talked about a box floating in space to help explain relativity. Further on it explained the mathematics behind relativity. All one needed was a good understanding of first year calculus.
For the life of me, I can't recall the title..
To the OP, a good "guide" IMHO is Daniel Boorstin's "The Discovers". It's one of my favorite books and does a good job of explaining how developments in science affected the world.
On my street of 12 houses, at least two homes use Linux on the desktop.
If the average household has 2 computers, then my street has a 50% Linux adoption rate.
At least two houses use MythTV. There are at least 4 Linux desktops in active use, giving a 17% market share.
Linux has saturated the under 5 year-old demographic with a 100% adoption rate on my street. The 6-10 year old demographic is less clear, but based on observation, Linux commands 75% of the market.
Using my house as a typical example, Linux adoption is far ahead of Windows and MacOS. Of server systems in active use, 85% are Linux based. Of laptops, Linux has a commanding 66% share, followed by Windows then MacOS.
We must not overlook Solaris installations. In the past month, their server market share has grown by 100%. Solaris/x86 market share is the fastest growing of all the tracked OSes. Linux is the slowest growing, with just 5% growth in the past month.
Depending on platform text and graphics mode might not have been so different.
The TI99/4A, for example, had a fairly standard process to redefine characters. Even the reference guide had a short basic program to change a text character into a little jumping man animation. They weren't true sprites, but with some cleverness could do many of the same things.
The 8-bit Atari had player missile graphics with similar functionality.
Slashdot Mirror
Back then, if you wanted to play a game you often had to copy programs from source code listings. So you had things like line validators (checksum as you entered each line) and whole sections devoted to programming. The projects, I think, were also very different. I remember building a WeFax device to decode satellite weather facsimile images. There was also the Ciarcia articles that talked about everything from building a micro-computer to assembly programming.
Sure, there are still programming magazines, but we don't have to solve the same things we did then. Now it's just a matter of running CPAN, downloading a Flash or Java snippet, or just a #include.
That's why I'm super grateful for the availability of Linux, free software, and the suite of compilers. I remember saving up for weeks to purchase Megamax C and later GFA BASIC. I remember borrowing a Z80 card so that I could run Borland Turbo Pascal. Now it's a quick download and every language I want is available within moments.
The downside is that it's a lot more complex now. If I wanted to make a graphics program back then, for example on TI BASIC, it was a relatively simple matter to redefine a character set with a bunch of POKEs. Now we have to worry about initializing a window, internationalization, acceleration, etc.. Sometimes it's a bit daunting for non-professionals. Sure, there things like SDL and TCL/TK and a raft of IDEs, but still I don't think it is as easy as it was back then. (Of course, today's software does a lot more).
Dude if 30 minutes a day worked for me, I'd do it in a heartbeat. The only couple of times I have lost weight in my life I lived on salad and lean meat/chicken in tiny portions and did AT LEAST 2 hours of heavy excercise a day. Anything short of that doesn't cut it. What's worse is when I've stopped it's taken a couple of months of eating reasonable portions and not excercising as much to put on all the weight I've lost over 6-8 months AND add some more kilos as the body overcompensates. Now you can choose to believe me or not. I'm guessing not. That's up to you. I happen to know for a fact that I'm not lying. Meanwhile I CAN'T keep that up while working 10 hrs a day 5 days a week plus some weekends, spending 3 hours a day in commute, doing chores till midnight when I get home and helping to raise a family.
Interesting.
Here's something as interesting too. To lose weight, expend more energy than you take in. You don't need to hit the gym either, though some moderate exercise two or three times a week (or even once a week) can do wonders.
I understand what you're saying though. Ten hour days, five days a week, plus weekends is tough. I was in the same situation. In my IT desk job I had swelled to 230lbs.
But it struck me when I was spending $40 a day in food and coffee and taking the elevator up a single flight of stairs that it was time to change.
The first thing I did was to eliminate the Starbucks macchiatos and the morning Dunkin' Donuts run for coffee and a bacon and egg croissant. I replaced these with regular coffee and used a sugar substitute (yes, I'm aware of the dangers of sugar substitutes, but I'll come to that in a moment). I started eating two packets of oatmeal in the morning to stave off the craving. It took a while to get used to it, but I enjoy it now.
I started doing some treadmill and light weights. Despite misconceptions, doing weights is one of the fastest ways to lose fat. Muscle uses more energy for upkeep and is denser than fat.
I reduced my portion sizes. Previously I was eating a typical American portion. I.e., meat was the centerpiece of the meal. I changed to a more Asian diet with more vegetables. I also started bringing my own meals. (I also admit that this was partially motivated by finances).
After a couple months, I began to prefer just coffee with milk (no sugar). I also stopped drinking that horrible swill they served at work and started bringing in my own coffee. Funny thing is that I was using sugar to disguise the taste of the coffee from work. Now I spend about $10 every couple weeks and use a single cup coffee brewer (just a funnel that holds a filter that you fill with hot water).
I reduced my commute to work. This was a more drastic change and coincided with being diagnosed with high blood pressure. Though I love to drive, the commute was stressful and made my blood pressure worse.
The one health thing I'm trying to do is to get more sleep. I get around 4 hours a night, but I'm trying to get at least six.
:)
Windows XP. There is simply no comparing XP to previous "home" versions of Windows in terms of quality.
Looks like they stopped there. Vista is a piece of crap and the frustration experience is as bad as WindowsME. Sure, it's much better than WindowsME, but so are the alternatives. Sometimes it's not Vista's fault. For example, when I play Fallout3 the game will crash if anything pops up on the desktop. I can't save screenshots in Vista. On Vista64, I can't get VMWare Server to work properly. Just last month I finally got drivers for my printer after waiting months.
But more often it is a Vista problem. My wireless network connection drops all the time because of some brain dead power management. Vista doesn't resume from hibernation properly. If I boot with my Sigmatel USB 3G card, 1/5 times it will bluescreen when it resumes. Sometimes the system will resume but the display never turns back on. If it was just one Vista system I'd suspect hardware, but this is happening on three machines.
So yeah.. I went and pre-ordered Windows7 like a good monkey because Vista is so damn unusable. Maybe that's their business model. Offer crap then the new version seems so much better.
Many of the skills that make a good technical worker can make a good technical manager. You need to pay attention to details, keep track of a lot of different tasks, break up problems into manageable pieces, quantify risks and benefits, deal with unreasonable folks on occasion.
Some people claim that a good manager does not need to know much about the industry being managed. The idea is that a good manager can find the proper people that understand what they need to do and do it. I think this is true in an ideal world, but a technical manager who can dissociate himself from the technical aspects can make an exceptional manager.
There's an incremental financial benefit to management, but in the right organization you should be able to progress quite well in the technical track too.
All that said, I just saw this article:
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23800/
Personally the thought of managing more than a couple people is unpleasant to me. I could probably do an adequate job, but it would not be something that I'd relish.
I worked at UPS in the Technology Support Group some years ago. One day I was in Naples, FL training employees how to scan packages using a new tracking system. I was standing next to an employee and showing him how to hold the scanner (distance from package, laser placement etc.). So I take up a letter, scan it, then put it into a bin to get processed. Soon as I do this, two very large guys walk up behind me. "What are you doing?" they ask. Because they're in suits, I think they're some managers. I explain that I'm showing the employee how to use the scanner. "I saw you load that package," one guy tells me. Not familiar with all the vagaries of union rules, I say, "Yes, just a couple." I'm thinking that they want to make sure I put it in the right bin or something else. "What are you doing touching packages?" they ask me. I really didn't know what to say because I was really confused by his question. Luckily an actual manager rushed up at that point to straighten out everything.
I hear later that not being an hourly employee, I am not allowed to touch packages. This is doubly true when union reps are standing behind me.
I'm not particularly fond of many of the managers at UPS as they would do things that I thought were just as shady. For example, managers would instruct the belt supervisors to stagger the start times on each employee working a conveyor belt. The reasoning was that packages would get to the rear of the belt several minutes after they hit the front of the belt. But they wouldn't tell this to the employees. The employees had to be in their area and ready to work at start time (around 4AM), but because of the stagger, would be cheated out of 30 minutes to an hour each week. I.e., show up to work at 4AM and you won't get paid until 4:20AM but you need to be prepared as soon as the belt starts up.
Not sure if I can really blame them.
This past weekend I had a garage sale and, as I was clearing stuff, realized how much junk paperwork I had stashed in the garage. There were books, manuals, class notes, lecture notes (from those I attended and those I gave), meeting notebooks, documentation on long obsolete processes (Token Ring MAU reset procedures, Novell Netware rebuild procedures). I had notebooks of stories, embarrassing journal entries from college ("DH has the most beautiful eyes!!"), and all sorts of other uselessness that I had never really cataloged.
And how do you catalog such stuff anyway? I have 20 years of stuff. NASA generates less than one hour what it's taken me a lifetime to accrete.
I wonder what the costs are for a broadcast versus a webcast? For a broadcast you'd need to coordinate multiple stations and time zones, there are power costs to push the signal, station costs, licensing costs.. For a webcast there's the server and pipe sized to the load you expect. Maybe you need Akamai or some other similar system, but I expect that it's much cheaper than broadcast.
I use lots and lots of stubs. My program compiles and runs perfectly now. The moment I start replacing those stubs though..
The heart of my network is a xen based server running fileserver, DNS, DHCP, web proxy and LDAP.
Physically, the system is an older Athlon 2200 with 3G RAM, mirrored 100G disks for the base OS and disk files. The software stack is CentOS 5.3 based, running xen.
The fileserver virtual machine has its own 500G single disk assigned to it one which I keep media files, pictures etc. I run a rsync backup script to another physical machine. The really critical stuff (family pictures, irreplaceable documents) also get backed up to an external hard drive every week or so (no set schedule). I don't have an automated process to back up my OS images though.
I run CentOS directory server (now Port389). Windows and Linux clients can authenticate, but most systems have local authentication. I also use autodir/autofs on Linux/Solaris systems. This allows me to login on any Unix/Linux system and have my entire work environment ready. I have the following .profile that lets me keep separate profiles for each login:
## Profile Script
LDAP_HOME: Contains the NFS automount directories for a subset of LDAP users.
LDAP_CURRENT_HOST=`hostname -s`
if [ -f ~/.hostconfig/${LDAP_CURRENT_HOST}.profile ]; then
. ~/.hostconfig/${LDAP_CURRENT_HOST}.profile
fi
For my Linux clients, I automount the fileshare to /mnt/fileserver. Each home directory has a symlink to that mount point. You can put this in the skel startup so that each new user gets the link. This allows anyone on my network to play music, watch movies, view pictures, from the share. I set up the directory structure on the fileshare as follows:
Media: Contains subdirs for Audio, Video, and Images.
Documentation: Contains subdirs for Computer, Household, Film, etc..
CVS: The main CVS repository for my work
Software: Contains subdirs for Windows, Linux, MacOS, Java, Solaris
For the Windows clients, I define a network drive on each system pointing to the fileserver. I can also access the CVS server via Eclipse when I need to do something with Java or Windows Perl.
There are some downsides to my setup. I tend to upload images from my Windows machines and for the most part, these are laptops that connect wirelessly so synchronization can take hours to upload an 8G CF card. I'm happy with the setup, however. Placing something in a "critical" folder means it gets a backup rotation so I can retrieve earlier versions. Other stuff is backed up, but not at a high priority and no versioning.
And then there's my personal favorite, a short-sighted effort to limit property taxes whose only real effect is to hurt younger people just starting out and drive the schools into the shitter?
We had a similar thing in Florida called SaveOurHomes.
Here's my take on it though..
There's been a lot of real estate speculation in Florida up until the bottom fell out last year. This had the effect of artificially driving up property taxes for all sorts of people.
Most annoyingly, those folks who didn't speculate on housing, who didn't contribute to the real estate hysteria, found themselves unable to pay the rapidly rising property taxes. They got driven out of their homes and their homes snatched up anyway, even if they had opted to stay away from the hysteria.
SaveOurHomes was a way of limiting the property tax increases over the years.
The problem was that the state got very greedy. With all these revenues from the ballooning real estate market, they overspent themselves. When it went bust, cities and counties had sudden revenue issues.
Now they are repealing SaveOurHomes because of the massive budget shortfalls.
Because of the bubble, housing prices are grossly inflated. Now people who were financially responsible are going to pay the penalty for all the people speculated. Doesn't sound fair to me.
The need for the young and/or first-home buyers to have affordable *first homes* is important. That's why there are homestead acts throughout the country (Florida included). These homestead acts reduce property taxes for your primary home.
Hehe..
Get used to disappointment. From:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/weekinreview/14marsh.html
In a Department of Justice tally covering the last decade, Florida wins by its sheer number of guilty. The report, released last week, itemizes convictions in federal public corruption cases at local, state and federal levels in the 50 states, the District of Columbia and three United States territories.
I live in South Florida and am very used to politicians from city council member to congress folks making excuses for their convictions.
I live near Miami. I remember once telling my cousins in the UK that I really enjoyed Florida. They responded to the effect, "How can you live in Miami? Don't you worry about the assault rifle wielding drug dealing, ganster thug rapists?"
Recently in Philly, driving along one absolutely normal looking city block, my friends said remarked that they were surprised that people were walking around *at night* in this warzone.
It's one thing to be careless but this irrational fear of cities is mindboggling.
To see real urban ganglands, you need to walk through the gritty Weston neighborhood along the I75 corridor near the 'Glades. Some real thugs hang out here.
Seriously.
I mean this if you're in the US. Over here, women (geeky and non-geeky alike), tend to focus a lot more on physical appearance than outside the USA. Now I'm a particularly dorky looking male geek, but managed to date and actually get married.
Next thing is to stop trying so hard. Ever heard someone say that they always had trouble getting a date until they finally got married? It's not only that some females may want to compete with someone who's "taken", but I think it's more that you stop trying so hard. Then you'll find lots and lots of women want friends. "Friends" is good. "Friends" can become more than that after a few weeks.
There are other things you can do such as exercise. Join a team sport (dragon boating is fun). Join a running club. Join a photography meetup. Take a college course.
You can also do the matchmaking thing. I know people who've gotten married through them.
But more than anything, be yourself. If you fake it to win a girl, then what happens when you get tired of faking it???
so, damnit, everyone else better go through the same thing.
Seriously though... though I learned it as part of my CS coursework, I used it more often in the math minor portion. Lots of the examples were in Fortran, and I remember having to write Newton-Raphson and trapezoid functions. It served the purpose of showing how numerical methods worked.
I'm not certain how useful it would be in a current CS course. Today you'd just link a library and and make a call. I'm not saying that's in any way worse than how I learned it, but may not be as useful as a learning tool.
I remember reading an interesting finance/economy related article about schooling. In brief, it said that schooling served a purpose of preventing young kids from entering the workforce and competing with adults. Specialized schooling was just another re-vamping of the guild system. The article over-simplified a lot of things (especially since it was written before the Internet took off), but I can't help thinking that there was a lot of truth in it.
In Florida, driving with the hazard lights on is illegal.
Florida is by far the worst.
I work about a mile from the Pembroke Pines Century Village (or Cemetery Village as most people call it), and every month or so, there's one senior citizen crawling along at 10 miles per hour in a 45mph zone. Last year I had to call 911 because a very confused man was starting and stopping, swerving back and forth, crossing into the grass median, etc..
On the I95 and Turnpike, I've seen people reading, painting toenails, turning completely around to take things from the back floor (not seat, FLOOR).
In Florida, people will SPEED UP so you don't get in front if you signal. I actually thought of doing a video just to document this behaviour. In every other place (in Philadelphia where I am at this moment, in Atlanta, in California) people let you in.
When I went to get my Florida permit I saw people with cheat sheets taking the test. They didn't hide it either, just had the notes written up. You wonder why they don't know to let ambulances pass, or why they don't know what to do when the stoplights are out, or why they put on their hazard lights when it starts to drizzle, or why they don't know who must yield at a flashing yellow/red... it's probably because they paid someone to take the test or just outright cheated.
Ever read _A Canticle for Leibowitz_? It's one of my favorites, particularly because it pokes fun at our tendency to sanctify the innocuous. In the book an ancient relic is found, something from antiquity. Turns out to be a shopping list from a guy who works a 9 to 5 job. There's another short story called "Motel of the Mysteries" that does a similar thing, except that toilet seats become some ancient religious headdressing.
The knowledge is what we need to hold dear, not the artifacts created in search of that knowledge. It's nice in a saccharine sort of way to have tangible evidence of where someone stood, but the real treasure is what that person did. If we sanctify the artifacts we tend to lose sight of the knowledge.
I fixed a computer for a family member by having it auto-boot a VMWare image. Underneath the XP client, the machine runs CentOS 5.3 with the latest VMWare server. It's configured to automatically use a snapshot image so the original image is never touched. If there's a problem it's a simple matter of rebooting and selecting a revert option. Once it boots, it autologins as a non-priv user and starts the guest then opens the console (google the VMWare forums for instructions on doing that).
My laptop has a known and ongoing issue. According to the manufacturer, it's a problem with the power-saving code of the operating system. According to the OS manufacturer, it's a problem with the wireless access point not fully supporting a new OS manufacturer feature. According to the access point manufacturer, the OS vendor are a bunch of mouth-breathing morons.
(Dell laptop, Windows Vista, Linksys access point)...
The solution the OS vendor has proposed is to set my power saving features to high-performance even on battery. This shortens the useful charge from about 2.5 hours to about 45 minutes, which is just about useless to me.
The other solution was to use the wired adapter.
I know a good way. Use the KSayIt! application to speak the threads out. It's quite enthralling actually.. Nothing like a robotic voice reading email messages:
"from colon less than ultorvaldus at sign ulkaymul dot com greater than to colon ah cox at sign cox nos pam dot com subject colon you areeee mad you should have radeee your comshee book"
I don't remember the title and hope someone here does, but there was a book that explained Einstein's Principles of Relativity. The book started out with some thought experiments then talked about a box floating in space to help explain relativity. Further on it explained the mathematics behind relativity. All one needed was a good understanding of first year calculus.
For the life of me, I can't recall the title..
To the OP, a good "guide" IMHO is Daniel Boorstin's "The Discovers". It's one of my favorite books and does a good job of explaining how developments in science affected the world.
On my street of 12 houses, at least two homes use Linux on the desktop.
If the average household has 2 computers, then my street has a 50% Linux adoption rate.
At least two houses use MythTV. There are at least 4 Linux desktops in active use, giving a 17% market share.
Linux has saturated the under 5 year-old demographic with a 100% adoption rate on my street. The 6-10 year old demographic is less clear, but based on observation, Linux commands 75% of the market.
Using my house as a typical example, Linux adoption is far ahead of Windows and MacOS. Of server systems in active use, 85% are Linux based. Of laptops, Linux has a commanding 66% share, followed by Windows then MacOS.
We must not overlook Solaris installations. In the past month, their server market share has grown by 100%. Solaris/x86 market share is the fastest growing of all the tracked OSes. Linux is the slowest growing, with just 5% growth in the past month.
Everything in this post is verifiable.
Depending on platform text and graphics mode might not have been so different.
The TI99/4A, for example, had a fairly standard process to redefine characters. Even the reference guide had a short basic program to change a text character into a little jumping man animation. They weren't true sprites, but with some cleverness could do many of the same things.
The 8-bit Atari had player missile graphics with similar functionality.
I hunt your kind.
Sincerely,
Van Helsing