But many times, life imitates art. Automatic doors, wrist communicators, virtual interfaces (which includes touchscreen devices that change on context rather than warping the task to fit the existing interface), moving walkways, holograms, etc., all were once just fantasy.
Though I agree that it's the wrong category, there should at least be a "science fiction" section where this can go... (and I think there is one).
All kidding aside, being proficient in math and science often means that you have a leg up on almost any profession. Certainly there are some fields where it won't help, but the ability to reason and figure out what the numbers are really saying can help anyone from lawyers to doctors to politicians. For the latter, it's sometimes depressing how few understand math and science.
Now I don't know the reasons why the niece doesn't want to pursue a science/math career, but it's likely because the traditionally male dominated careers are from very early on discouraged to females. It's not an overt pressure, just the insinuations from teachers and peers. Girls get oven sets. Boys get chemistry sets.
The other day I was in a mall with my daughter. I went to try on some jeans. At one point I caught myself thinking, "These jeans don't really flatter my shape." (Well, actually I was thinking, "Does my ass look OK in these jeans?" but I wasn't about to admit that.)
Now, I'll NEVER be in style or badass (it's physically impossible to buy your clothes in a mall and be badass; for proof just look at anyone sporting "Hollister" apparel), but somehow advertising has planted that little seed of doubt in my delusion of awesomeness that I began to wonder if my ass looks good in a pair of jeans.
There's even advertising to appeal to my sense of rebellion. I am not like everyone else I might think, so there are hordes of advertisers who will craft product campaigns targeting my personality. Buy this SUV because it screams "maverick". Buy this laptop because it means you're edgy and not a clone. Buy this toothpaste because the raucous non-comformity of FDC Mint #16 drowns out mediocrity.
I feel like I'm in Lucius Shepards "Surrender" sometimes..:P
When I was a kid I enjoyed the Radio Shack electronics kits. I have not seen them recently, but they can be built rather easily with a piece of thin plywood and a bunch of nuts and bolts, plus the actual electronics which can be culled from scrap equipment. There are ample schematics on the web for building anything from simple radios to logic gates to metal detectors. Once they've been prototyped on the kit they can be built for a few dollars worth.
If you want to go the programming route, there are a few cheap boards out there. They're not very powerful, but good enough to run Linux, serve web pages, control lights, etc.. At 13 he's old enough to learn programming too:D
There's a tool called Ghost 4 Linux that might do what you need. You boot with the g4l disk on your backup target. You can then specify a remote server or a local storage device to create the image backup. It doesn't matter what OS is being stored as it's a physical image.
Files can be very large because it copies sectors, not files, so even deleted files can take space. To minimize this there are some disk zero utilities that will zero out the unused space on your drive.
This is going to sound really dorky, but I really enjoy hearing about the Mars landers. I get a kick out of getting a camera in the next room to send images to my laptop over the radio. When I was a kid, I built a WeFAX interface to my 8-bit Atari to pull weather satellite images down (I didn't have a HAM radio so couldn't actually do it, but it was cool to play around with the hardware).
Images from Mars. How frickin' cool is that? A quarter century later it still gives me this "anything is possible" feeling..
It's often the case when you need to check the sectors on your disk for corruption, or just during hard drive testing. One of the coolest things that Emacs allows you to do is check your filesystem. For example on CentOS:
yum -y install emacs*
This will proceed to fill up your hard drive with tons of software until the filesystem is full.
Instead of using find and xargs it's sometimes easier to use the -exec parameter to find:
find . -type f -exec ls -l {} \;
xargs is very useful in other circumstances. One thing that I get asked about a lot is how to pass variables. Main thing to remember is to call the shell via xargs to process variables and other parameters.
Hehe... Here's one that will separate the Unix from the pure Linux folks:
killall find
On Linux this will kill all find processes. On another OS it will gleefully kill everything on the system. My favorite response when someone does this on a non-Linux machine: "What did you think kill *all* meant?"
The newest admins will also, on hearing that you can set the suid bit on an executable, try to setuid a shell script. It won't work of course, but I've seen many questions asking about it.
If you're lucky enough to have an automounter module running then you can also use a static shell such as busybox. I like to keep a subset of utilities available on the filesystems for these types of emergencies:D
Use the watch utility to keep checking the status of an output. E.g.:
watch ls -l foo
Within vim and vi you can read input from the shell. This allows you to do things across the network and read it directly into the current buffer. For example, launch vim then do::r! ssh maggot@darkstar cat/etc/ldap.conf
This is a shortcut method of copying the file locally, editing, then saving.
On machines where rsync is not available, I often use tar/ssh to move directories:
tar cf -/home/maggot/source | ssh maggot@darkstart "cd/export; tar xf - "
I remember a similar demo in the TI/994A Reference Manual. It also had a program to re-define a character to make a little jumping man in an 8x16 grid. One of my first programs was to make a running man move across the screen based on the code in the reference manual.
One thing that may or may not be a factor... At least on my cases if I touch the mounting bracket it's usually quite warm. In other words, it seems that mounting the drives normally plays a part in cooling down the drive itself.
At one time in history it was a moral obligation to kill the spawn of the enemy. It was once a moral obligation to kill in the name of your god.
Imagine if God was actually a miliary sub-commander in some Vogon army. His task was to breed a legion of super-warriors to combat the evil army of N'yarlathotep. One (cosmic) morning he creates the Earth and sets it to create a population of fierce fighters. He goes to sleep. The next day (4 billion years later in our time) He wakes up to check his creation. Instead of fighters he has a bunch of fornicating flower children dripping in weird bodily fluids.
Oh god, what a misconception you have about Asian culture.
Asians, and I know many, are some of the most sexually aware and intrepid people I know. Prudes? Americans (and I live in the USA) are probably the most prudish people in the world. In fact, some even have trouble typing the word "sex". Many can't say the word "sex" and even substitute neutered (haha) words like "gender" for parts of speech when "sex" is the right word. Many *TALK* a lot about sex, but they don't actually *HAVE* it. Maybe it's some Victorian holdover, but it's annoying sometimes when the subject of sex is considered taboo conversation even in an adult gathering.
But there are stereotypes about Asians, I'll grant. The same as there are stereotypes about Americans. Some of the ones I've heard about Americans are that they are fat, uneducated, listen to country music, technologically backwards, willingly ignorant, gun crazy, fanatically religious, and mono-lingual. Within America these same stereotypes are applied to various ethnic groups. We know that the stereotypes are not true of the population as a whole, but that's what people outside the USA think.
But back to sex. It's a whole lot of fun. It's not the be-all and end-all of our reason for existence (well, maybe it is) but it's no worse than a good day fishing or a nice espresso or a good movie.
Most 20 somethings I know of would love a 40 yr old looking Vette or one of the other power player cars that GM makes.
Oh, I'd agree.. I'd love a 40year old Vette. Much the same way I would love a vintage Atari 520ST. However, I don't want a 2008 Vette that looks like a 1968 Vette.
There was once this software company that wanted to redo its image. Its primary market was supposedly average folks. So they made an ad campaign that relied on some aging comedian and the former CEO of the company and talked about shoes. At the end of the ad, the CEO wriggles his ass at the audience. It didn't go over very well.
Sometimes marketing folks do know their target audience. In the case of another computer company, their target audience was primarily creative folks. I.e., the people they were marketing to were just like the marketers themselves. So there was obviously a lot that the marketers knew about what would appeal to their audience.
The problem with in-house marketing is that you tend to forget your customers. If you have a great product you can probably sell it to anyone. If your product is a relative commodity, then marketing has to be spot on.
Look at GM, for example. Their management seems to believe that their target audience should be people who grew up in the riotous Sixties (based on their current throwback, er, retro designs). So they have a lot of vehicles that look like they were plucked from Bullit or old Starsky and Hutch reruns. To sell these vehicles to the 20-somethings and 30-somethings that are driving now, they need to make a 40 year old look seem fresh. Tough job.
I don't know what it is with their designers, but even though I want them to do really well (I own a few shares), their vehicles just look ugly to me. All these throwback vehicles they're pushing out are hideous. I'm not saying the originals are ugly, but taking design cues from 40 years ago tells me that their designers are probably at that age when 40 year old cars remind them of their youth... Or they are consciously trying to target the 50+ demographic who those cars would have a nostalgic appeal.
Quote my whole comment instead of pulling out sections to argue a point I didn't make. Yes, dammit, create the swapfile soon after installation otherwise it's likely to be fragmented. BUt at that point, just create a partition when you build out so that the page space is completely contiguous. ext2/3 is not fragmentation proof and can fragment. As the file gets larger (and swapfiles are very large) then the likelihood of fragmentation goes way up.
Yeah, things change from day to day and year to year. AM's post says that the swapfile bypasses the OS. But......Keep in mind that creating a swapfile uses dd. When dd creates a file there's nothing to specify that the file is contiguous. Therefore it's likely to be fragmented. Whether the fragmentation is significant is another story worthy of benchmarks. Andrew Morton knows this of course, and says to create the swapfile early. I.e., not early in boot time, but soon after the system is installed. Even so, that won't guarantee a contiguous swapfile. May not matter except on a heavily loaded system. But at that point you want it to be as efficient as possible.:P
BTW, there's another developer who mentioned way back that swap partitions were more efficient:
Things have changed of course, and shame on me for breaking my own rule about rules of thumb.... As I said, there's probably not a lot of difference and swapfiles are generally easier to use.
Slashdot Mirror
True.. true...
But many times, life imitates art. Automatic doors, wrist communicators, virtual interfaces (which includes touchscreen devices that change on context rather than warping the task to fit the existing interface), moving walkways, holograms, etc., all were once just fantasy.
Though I agree that it's the wrong category, there should at least be a "science fiction" section where this can go... (and I think there is one).
All kidding aside, being proficient in math and science often means that you have a leg up on almost any profession. Certainly there are some fields where it won't help, but the ability to reason and figure out what the numbers are really saying can help anyone from lawyers to doctors to politicians. For the latter, it's sometimes depressing how few understand math and science.
Now I don't know the reasons why the niece doesn't want to pursue a science/math career, but it's likely because the traditionally male dominated careers are from very early on discouraged to females. It's not an overt pressure, just the insinuations from teachers and peers. Girls get oven sets. Boys get chemistry sets.
There's always this or this.
Yeah, there's also never been a randomized, blinded clinical trial that shows gunshot wounds to the head cause death.
If you put a bunch of babies in a room together and don't interact with them in any way except to provide food, will they develop their own language?
There are countless studies that for ethical reasons cannot be completed.
I dunno.
The other day I was in a mall with my daughter. I went to try on some jeans. At one point I caught myself thinking, "These jeans don't really flatter my shape." (Well, actually I was thinking, "Does my ass look OK in these jeans?" but I wasn't about to admit that.)
Now, I'll NEVER be in style or badass (it's physically impossible to buy your clothes in a mall and be badass; for proof just look at anyone sporting "Hollister" apparel), but somehow advertising has planted that little seed of doubt in my delusion of awesomeness that I began to wonder if my ass looks good in a pair of jeans.
There's even advertising to appeal to my sense of rebellion. I am not like everyone else I might think, so there are hordes of advertisers who will craft product campaigns targeting my personality. Buy this SUV because it screams "maverick". Buy this laptop because it means you're edgy and not a clone. Buy this toothpaste because the raucous non-comformity of FDC Mint #16 drowns out mediocrity.
I feel like I'm in Lucius Shepards "Surrender" sometimes.. :P
When I was a kid I enjoyed the Radio Shack electronics kits. I have not seen them recently, but they can be built rather easily with a piece of thin plywood and a bunch of nuts and bolts, plus the actual electronics which can be culled from scrap equipment. There are ample schematics on the web for building anything from simple radios to logic gates to metal detectors. Once they've been prototyped on the kit they can be built for a few dollars worth.
If you want to go the programming route, there are a few cheap boards out there. They're not very powerful, but good enough to run Linux, serve web pages, control lights, etc.. At 13 he's old enough to learn programming too :D
There's a tool called Ghost 4 Linux that might do what you need. You boot with the g4l disk on your backup target. You can then specify a remote server or a local storage device to create the image backup. It doesn't matter what OS is being stored as it's a physical image.
Files can be very large because it copies sectors, not files, so even deleted files can take space. To minimize this there are some disk zero utilities that will zero out the unused space on your drive.
I use it often for backing up my Windows laptops.
This is going to sound really dorky, but I really enjoy hearing about the Mars landers. I get a kick out of getting a camera in the next room to send images to my laptop over the radio. When I was a kid, I built a WeFAX interface to my 8-bit Atari to pull weather satellite images down (I didn't have a HAM radio so couldn't actually do it, but it was cool to play around with the hardware).
Images from Mars. How frickin' cool is that? A quarter century later it still gives me this "anything is possible" feeling..
It's often the case when you need to check the sectors on your disk for corruption, or just during hard drive testing. One of the coolest things that Emacs allows you to do is check your filesystem. For example on CentOS:
yum -y install emacs*
This will proceed to fill up your hard drive with tons of software until the filesystem is full.
(I kid, I kid)
Doh!! You are correct.
I'd even documented this before::
http://sites.google.com/site/disciplinux/linux/unixlinux-scripts/lots-to-learn
Exactly. You can suid the shell itself, but suid'ing the script will do nothing.
But why would anyone do that, other than as an example of how not to do things?
I ask myself this every once in a while when I look at some user source directories. Usually the process is like this:
1) New unix user learns that setting the suid bit lets the process run as the owner of the file.
2) Whooohooo, they think. This solves the problem where I need to delete/update/whatever the files that are owned by another user.
3) They chmod the file.
4) ./deletelogs
5) It's not working!!!
6) Call Unix support. "Hey dude. Something is wrong with your system. I set the sticky bit on the script but it's not running as the correct user."
I used to get this once a month.
Instead of using find and xargs it's sometimes easier to use the -exec parameter to find:
find . -type f -exec ls -l {} \;
xargs is very useful in other circumstances. One thing that I get asked about a lot is how to pass variables. Main thing to remember is to call the shell via xargs to process variables and other parameters.
BTW: How does one ork a cow?
Hehe... Here's one that will separate the Unix from the pure Linux folks:
killall find
On Linux this will kill all find processes. On another OS it will gleefully kill everything on the system. My favorite response when someone does this on a non-Linux machine: "What did you think kill *all* meant?"
The newest admins will also, on hearing that you can set the suid bit on an executable, try to setuid a shell script. It won't work of course, but I've seen many questions asking about it.
If you're lucky enough to have an automounter module running then you can also use a static shell such as busybox. I like to keep a subset of utilities available on the filesystems for these types of emergencies :D
Clear a file:
>filename.log
Use the watch utility to keep checking the status of an output. E.g.:
watch ls -l foo
Within vim and vi you can read input from the shell. This allows you to do things across the network and read it directly into the current buffer. For example, launch vim then do: :r! ssh maggot@darkstar cat /etc/ldap.conf
This is a shortcut method of copying the file locally, editing, then saving.
On machines where rsync is not available, I often use tar/ssh to move directories:
tar cf - /home/maggot/source | ssh maggot@darkstart "cd /export; tar xf - "
I remember a similar demo in the TI/994A Reference Manual. It also had a program to re-define a character to make a little jumping man in an 8x16 grid. One of my first programs was to make a running man move across the screen based on the code in the reference manual.
One thing that may or may not be a factor... At least on my cases if I touch the mounting bracket it's usually quite warm. In other words, it seems that mounting the drives normally plays a part in cooling down the drive itself.
Hehe... Sign of the times..
At one time in history it was a moral obligation to kill the spawn of the enemy. It was once a moral obligation to kill in the name of your god.
Imagine if God was actually a miliary sub-commander in some Vogon army. His task was to breed a legion of super-warriors to combat the evil army of N'yarlathotep. One (cosmic) morning he creates the Earth and sets it to create a population of fierce fighters. He goes to sleep. The next day (4 billion years later in our time) He wakes up to check his creation. Instead of fighters he has a bunch of fornicating flower children dripping in weird bodily fluids.
Morality changes from year to year.
Oh god, what a misconception you have about Asian culture.
Asians, and I know many, are some of the most sexually aware and intrepid people I know. Prudes? Americans (and I live in the USA) are probably the most prudish people in the world. In fact, some even have trouble typing the word "sex". Many can't say the word "sex" and even substitute neutered (haha) words like "gender" for parts of speech when "sex" is the right word. Many *TALK* a lot about sex, but they don't actually *HAVE* it. Maybe it's some Victorian holdover, but it's annoying sometimes when the subject of sex is considered taboo conversation even in an adult gathering.
But there are stereotypes about Asians, I'll grant. The same as there are stereotypes about Americans. Some of the ones I've heard about Americans are that they are fat, uneducated, listen to country music, technologically backwards, willingly ignorant, gun crazy, fanatically religious, and mono-lingual. Within America these same stereotypes are applied to various ethnic groups. We know that the stereotypes are not true of the population as a whole, but that's what people outside the USA think.
But back to sex. It's a whole lot of fun. It's not the be-all and end-all of our reason for existence (well, maybe it is) but it's no worse than a good day fishing or a nice espresso or a good movie.
Most 20 somethings I know of would love a 40 yr old looking Vette or one of the other power player cars that GM makes.
Oh, I'd agree.. I'd love a 40year old Vette. Much the same way I would love a vintage Atari 520ST. However, I don't want a 2008 Vette that looks like a 1968 Vette.
Sort of depends on who the customers are.
There was once this software company that wanted to redo its image. Its primary market was supposedly average folks. So they made an ad campaign that relied on some aging comedian and the former CEO of the company and talked about shoes. At the end of the ad, the CEO wriggles his ass at the audience. It didn't go over very well.
Sometimes marketing folks do know their target audience. In the case of another computer company, their target audience was primarily creative folks. I.e., the people they were marketing to were just like the marketers themselves. So there was obviously a lot that the marketers knew about what would appeal to their audience.
The problem with in-house marketing is that you tend to forget your customers. If you have a great product you can probably sell it to anyone. If your product is a relative commodity, then marketing has to be spot on.
Look at GM, for example. Their management seems to believe that their target audience should be people who grew up in the riotous Sixties (based on their current throwback, er, retro designs). So they have a lot of vehicles that look like they were plucked from Bullit or old Starsky and Hutch reruns. To sell these vehicles to the 20-somethings and 30-somethings that are driving now, they need to make a 40 year old look seem fresh. Tough job.
I don't know what it is with their designers, but even though I want them to do really well (I own a few shares), their vehicles just look ugly to me. All these throwback vehicles they're pushing out are hideous. I'm not saying the originals are ugly, but taking design cues from 40 years ago tells me that their designers are probably at that age when 40 year old cars remind them of their youth... Or they are consciously trying to target the 50+ demographic who those cars would have a nostalgic appeal.
God, I'm waiting for the joke about the sonic screwdriver.... Hasn't arrived yet.
Good lord, are you a politician?
Quote my whole comment instead of pulling out sections to argue a point I didn't make. Yes, dammit, create the swapfile soon after installation otherwise it's likely to be fragmented. BUt at that point, just create a partition when you build out so that the page space is completely contiguous. ext2/3 is not fragmentation proof and can fragment. As the file gets larger (and swapfiles are very large) then the likelihood of fragmentation goes way up.
Yeah, things change from day to day and year to year. AM's post says that the swapfile bypasses the OS. But... ...Keep in mind that creating a swapfile uses dd. When dd creates a file there's nothing to specify that the file is contiguous. Therefore it's likely to be fragmented. Whether the fragmentation is significant is another story worthy of benchmarks. Andrew Morton knows this of course, and says to create the swapfile early. I.e., not early in boot time, but soon after the system is installed. Even so, that won't guarantee a contiguous swapfile. May not matter except on a heavily loaded system. But at that point you want it to be as efficient as possible. :P
BTW, there's another developer who mentioned way back that swap partitions were more efficient:
http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-activists/1992/10/24/14522
Things have changed of course, and shame on me for breaking my own rule about rules of thumb.... As I said, there's probably not a lot of difference and swapfiles are generally easier to use.