I'd agree that the relative size of 8G page space is probably smaller than a 512M partition a while ago... However, some corrections:
Technically swap space is not page space, though the distinction is being blurred quite a bit. Swap space was used to actually swap out entire processes, while page space was used to page out memory, er, pages. I'll use swap here:D
The wikipedia link is a little incorrect. In many cases a swap partition can be more efficient than a swap file at least in Linux. For one, there's an extra overhead involved in dealing with files because of the OS filesystem layer. Perhaps there's a raw file option with a swapfile, but I'm not aware of it. In most cases (i.e., desktop and moderate server use) there's probably not a lot of difference and swapfiles are ostensibly easier to use. With LVMs it doesn't really matter.
In some OSes the swap space is not necessarily additive. In some versions of the Linux kernel, for example, only swap space above that of physical memory was additive. This was a consequence of the virtual memory subsystem.
In other OSes it worked similarly for performance reasons. E.g., once a page is requested from the OS and written, the OS would write both to physical memory and to the page space. If the page needed to be swapped out it was merely an update to the page table to indicate whether the page was in memory or not rather than doing a full write on every page-out. This could drastically improve performance under some circumstances but diminish it in others (thus it's usually a tunable parameter).
Having some page space is generally good too. Modern OSes will still swap out dormant pages if it can free up memory for running processes even if memory is not near capacity. This is also tunable.
There are also reasons to run without swap (i.e., no hard disk or slow hard disk). You can disable swap entirely by tuning the overcommit options of the kernel.
Having too much swap can be bad too. In some OSes the page table size (which cannot be swapped) was dependent on the size of total memory (physical + swap). An overenthusiastic administrator may decide to really bump up the size of his page space if he saw that physical memory was close to capacity. If he happened to be on one of the boundaries (4G, 16G in some cases) then adding more swap space would actually DECREASE his available physical memory because the size of the page table would grow.
In other words, there's no valid "rule of thumb":D
At the very least, configure the utilities that will quiesce the processors and disk when not in use. They can reduce power consumption of an idle machine by 80% or more.
Speaking of drives, do you recall the SpectreGCR and the Twister format? One of the Elders at the time (Dave Small) had written a program that re-worked the track/sector format. It skewed the sectors on the the disk so that as the read head moved from track to track it was quicker to get to the next sector number... The Spectre GCR was a hardware device that allowed the Atari ST drives to read the Macintosh disk format.
There was no difference, iirc, between an ST and MS-DOS disk except for some filesystem information. So MS-DOS disks could be read with the appropriate software.
This was not surprising and I don't place all the blame on the users.
There's a similar situation with semi experienced administrators. They may configure logging and monitoring on a system. Being security paranoid, they set the log level fairly low so they end up getting lots of alerts.
Somewhere along the line, however, the administrator stops paying as much attention. Maybe a CPU alert hits 100% every night. Then one day someone in Finance runs a half-assed join across a gateway and brings down a DB. The admin gets the alert but has gotten so used to them that it was ignored. This is worse than if he'd never gotten the alert at all.
The alerts that OSes put up (Vista, for example) and the host of browser and AV and IDE warnings get useless after a while. The system should do this transparently and not rely on the user to be the MAC layer.
I've been in IT for close to twenty years. You know what I've heard a hundred times?? It's this:
"I have this great idea. You do the work. We'll split the profits."
Of course the don't quite say it the same way. It's usually something like, "I can't pay you right now, but the profits will be huge. When it succeeds I can give you 10%."
This is invariably followed by something like, "Oh, it's very easy for someone like you. Maybe a week or so of work."
So I'm a little jaded.
Here's my suggestion. Show that you are investing your *time* and *money* (though I am being redundant since time *is* money). It should be an equal investment from the beginning. I think you're willing to do this, so attracting others should not be as difficult.
Xen and its offshoots use what is called "paravirtualization". To summarize, there are a few calls that an operating system can make to the underlying hardware that are very expensive in terms of CPU utilization. Paravirtualization removes these calls, but requires OS support. Many of these calls are related to memory so, for example, the guest OS communicates with the host OS to allocate memory versus the host OS trying to trap for each of those calls.
The upside is a great improvement in speed especially on newer processors that have hardware virtualization capability. The downside, of course, is that the OS needs modification to do this.
So, feel free to blame Broadcom for writing shitty drivers, or blame Dell for accepting them and selling them to you as functional, but don't blame the OS.
No, it's almost certainly Vista's problem. If I swap the drive out for a dualboot XP/Linux drive, both OSes work perfectly (though admittedly the Linux drive uses ndiswrappers, not native).
The problem lies with power saving features specific to Vista. It turns off the card to try to conserve despite whether the machine is plugged in or not.
The drivers have been updated -- *EVERY* driver because of the ongoing issues. Indeed, there's an update that specifically targets the power saving profile.
Superfetch is also a Vista specific problem. It would be great if it actually STOPPED at some point. But no, the drive can thrash for an hour and makes the system useless. Can you imagine how aggravating it was to open this really nice laptop and then have it work slower than an old Inspiron 600M??
As I mentioned, lack of RAM is the least of their problems. It will be a greater problem in the future since Vista 32 doesn't work with more than 4G RAM. My desktop systems already have 6G because the upgrade price was only $150 more. Of everything, this RAM limitation is the most disappointing thing. And please don't start re-gurgitating some Internet FAQ about 32-bit being a hardware limitation. It's annoying when some Windows-only user starts trying to deflect criticism of the Vista memory issues by blaming the hardware. Sure, on other OSes, perhaps a single process can be limited to the 4G space, but overall the other OSes can take advantage of up to 64G. This works beautifully for things like VMWare or Java.
It's more than just RAM problems. I'm typing this from a 4G XPS 1530. It's a great machine. Runs Ubunutu 8.04 and XP wonderfully, but the pre-installed Vista is a piece of crap. At this moment I'm connecting via the Gigabit wired connection because wireless is unstable. Wired is SO 2005!!!!!
Seriously though, the wireless connection drops every couple minutes. Googling informs that it could be a bunch of things and I've tried each one. These include switching to high performance mode (so the wireless card doesn't get turned off to conserve battery) to upgrading the access point so it understands some new power save feature, to disabling IPv6 settings. None work.
Even with 4G I get those freezes. Googling indicates it could be SuperFetch. It might be the virus scan. It might be my graphics card crashing and silently restarting. Doesn't matter what the culprit is, it's just freaking annoying to be typing something and have the machine pause for 10 to 20 seconds at a time.
I agree with you that Microsoft shouldn't have OKed 512M configurations, but I think that was probably the least of their problems. At least with a minimum RAM configuration you could upgrade.
Otherwise you need to diversify, pick decent stocks, and stick to time windows of at least a week.
Why do people always say this?? Diversification is dilution. If you want big gains, roll the dice with a big stake. I see so many people take the advice of fund managers and dilute their investing power by picking up the broad funds (or spreading their resources across a broad base). I'm not implying that someone should risk everything on a two-bit stock, but if you've done the research then make a big play.
But I agree completely with your second point. People get so WEIRD when the market drops. They start yanking their money out and then, this is completely bewildering to me, go on a buying spree when a stock is hot and overpriced.
Unlike free alternatives, which generally require some technical knowledge and make it difficult to copy an entire DVD with extras, etc.,...
What??? Maybe you're right.. there are a ton of steps..
Using DVDShrink and CDBurnerXP. Steps to copy a disk:
1) Insert DVD. 2) Launch DVDShrink. 3) Select Open Disc. 4) Select Backup. 5) Choose Backup location (make note of this location). 6) When complete, exit DVDShrink. 7) Launch CDBurnerXP. 8) Select Burn Disc from ISO. 9) Eject the source DVD and insert a blank DVD. 10) Select the source ISO. 11) Press Burn. 12) Wait
Actual time outside of the wait is about 20 seconds of real work.. Of course, I've listed EVERY step. If I detailed how to save a file in Notepad it would take quite a few steps...
1) Wait until the computer boots. 2) Click on Start. 3) Click on All Programs. 4) Click on Accessories. 5) Click on Notepad. 6) Type your message into the editing window. 7) Click on File. 8) Click on Save. 9) When prompted, select a location to save your file. 10) Press OK. (or SAVE) 11) Select File. 12) Select Exit.
Awesome explanation. From now on I will associate Microsoft with two old guys with wardrobe problems.
I can understand beer ads that don't mention the product but instead show a scantily clad model ringing the doorbell and saying, "Wazzup". I can understand ads that show a scantily clad hitchhiker leaning into the window and saying, "Can I have a ride?" and after the ad is over a logo for some jeans company pops up. I can even understand the ad of three fat, balding guys watching a neighbor get thrown out the house and saying, "Yup" while drinking a beer.
There's another effect that's quite similar: People over-estimate mediocre skills in others when they don't possess that skill. For example, I am, at best, an average math student by most standards. However, some people think I'm mathematically gifted because I can explain a linear equation.
Then there's the effect where people assume someone is smart because they agree on some irrelevant point. For example, say I oppose the (current incarnation) of the death penalty. Others think I'm smart because they oppose the death penalty. However, my argument may be based on the fairness of the punishment (i.e., not carried out equally to all violators) whereas their argument may be religiously based (thou shalt not kill). Politicians exploit this quite often. "I am a , therefore I am a good choice for this office."
I've worked at some companies that were really strange. In one particular place the CTO had some interesting files in his share. Now I'm a not a prude by any means, but this guys share had some weird sh*t. At least my p0rn is wholesome (yeah yeah, one man's wholesome is another man's bestiality... baaaah and moo to you). It's tough not to notice when the guys fileshare took up close to 80G out of the 100G allocated to the entire company (this was the days before 1TB drives were common).
They guy was also an ass though. When I left I made sure that I held onto the offsite mail spool backup because he wasn't above writing a check and then stopping it at the bank. I still have that backup, btw. Hi Mark.
In every other place though, I could not care any less about what they kept in their mail spool or fileserver. If their raccoon and chihuahua p0rn and watermelon fetish is clogging up the backups I'll send them an automated email telling them to clean up, but that's it. None of my business.
I use both RHEL and CentOS. RHEL is on our production machines and CentOS is what I use for proof-of-concept and non-production machines. RedHat fixes show up a few weeks before CentOS, though I do often just rebuild the SRPM directly on CentOS. Never had a problem building the source RPM either.
CentOS doesn't do the same thing as RedHat. They take RH packages and rebuild them without modification except for vendor tags. Though they do maintain their own bug lists, it's RedHat that does the heavy lifting.
A game is a game is a game... whether you call it a simulation or a VE or a VR...
Or maybe not.
I've had the opportunity to go on a track a couple times, and have also driven a couple interesting cars. My take is that the games are really a lot of fun, but don't quite give the same experience as, you know, real life. For example, accelerate hard from a stop and some cars will torque steer, some start to fishtail, some compensate electronically. When I shift gears I often go more by the sound of the engine rather than the RPM gauge because it's easier for me. Some of the games do this, but others match the sound to the speedometer rather than the tachometer.
I'm not saying I'm anything but an average guy who has in interest in cars, but I enjoy figuring out how each car responds. That's missing in some of the games I've played. Not that that's a bad thing, just a different goal than a simulation.
You can get archival quality paper that can survive for years under the right conditions. In 25 years we'll still have means of getting images from paper onto the computer in whatever form they happen to be. So, store your images as hex dumps on paper and include the algorithm to decode the hex dumps..
You could, for example, print the hex dump as an OCR readable page. As someone else mentioned, with a good printer you can get a decent amount of data on a single page.
For each image, print three or five copies and store them in separate locations... This will give some error correction capability later. The idea is that even if multiple pages from multiple sets are bad, you should be able to reconstruct them from the whole collection. It could be as simple as how RAID works, or as complex as how a drive can determine whether a bit is on or off based on thresholds..
Heck, you can even convert the data to sound. Burn the sound to a record. In 25 years there will still be a few grizzled folks that swear that analog recordings sound better. Hit them up to borrow their phonograph (wax cylinder, gramophone, etc). Take the sounds and convert them back to digital.
I remember the Antic magazine also. One of the issues had a utility to build a WeFAX (Weather facsimile) decoder. I was able to build everything but missed the ham radio part:)..
Magazines were much broader in scope then. Besides the software and hardware reviews there were in depth articles on how to do interesting things with your computer. For example, the STart (Atari ST magazine) had information about MIDI interfaces and how to fix the MIDI ports on the back of the Atari ST.
Then there was Byte, which took things to a new level. One of my earlier projects was an SBC written by IIRC S Ciarcia. I still have the folder of diagrams and notes..
I remember getting my first Atari 800... Then after that the 800XL, 130XE, 520ST, 1040ST, etc.. The 800XL was my first real chance to learn to program. Previously it had been on a Commodore Vic-20 at a cousin's house. I actually owe my career to those days spent writing little BASIC programs to do simple things.
At the time there was a magazine called Compute!. It had program listings for multiple machines including the Atari, Commodore, Apple IIe, and later on, the PC, ST and Amiga lines. Many of the programs were written in BASIC, but as the magazine progressed more and more were written in 6502 assembler. It was tedious to key in those listings (essentially typing in HEX dumps with a checksum) but we managed.
In middle school I was in one of the first programming classes in the school and district. The computers were all Apple IIe and Franklin Ace 1000s, but the instructor had a soft spot for the Ataris. For the end of term project I wrote a little quiz program that flashed a question on the screen in one of the Atari graphic modes, then read the 8-bit joystick port to see which answer was selected. I also tried to write an Infocom-like game, but it proved much harder than I had anticipated. I did get the user to be able to navigate a map though:D
For a long time I missed those days... Luckily Linux came along and all is well again...
Funny you should mention the "desktop orientation" of Linux, considering that any recent Solaris puts on a shiny Gnome suit...
Solaris scales far better than any BSD or Linux distro out there.
Ask any *real* Unix admin who uses both and more than likely they will say Linux is great for small jobs but Solaris is king for anything else.
OK, I'll bite. I've been admin'ing Unix for 12 years, and a user for 20. I've maintained everything from an UltraSparc workstation to E10Ks. Lately (past five years) I've been doing AIX, maintaining over 150 OS instances.
For a test project I've been researching Linux and Solaris for an Oracle RAC installation. I will tell you that, hands down, the Linux network stack is faster. Raw i/o is close, but Linux wins small file writes and reads by a significant margin. BTW, the Sun.com site has a paper comparing Linux filesystems versus UFS, but take it with a grain of salt (look at the machine they use).
Now let's talk about scaling...
Up to the 8 processor machine that I tested (which is a *small* PC system), Linux continues to scale close to linearly for the Oracle/TomCat/Apache workload, as does Solaris. Beyond this I understand things can change, but so be it, that's not the platform I'm needing.
Now certainly you can build a workload requirement that will put Solaris on top, but in the vast majority of installations Linux will do just fine.
Of course there are other factors. RedHat doesn't have the most sterling support (compare it to IBM for example), but I can buy support through IBM (or Oracle or Sun for that matter) if I wanted. This may be the reason for a shop to go with Sun, but I wanted to correct the idea that Linux is not as technically valid as Solaris.
I had pretty much the same experience. Being the smallest kid in school, wearing second-hand clothes, socially inept, glasses, visual tics... not exactly a recipe for popularity. But I got through it.. The reason I don't remember it much is not because it was particularly horrible, but because life has just been so much better every year since leaving high school.
Emacs has a console plugin. With the plugin you can launch ImageMagick's convert of morgrify to modify images. Best you can do with vi is a hexed of the image data:)
I once believed that history can never be changed. We could make changes in the future, but the past was set in stone. The last person I thought would disagree with this was a history professor. But sure enough, my college history professor explains to the class that history is always changing. Whoever interprets the "records" makes the history.
Ask most 30- and 40-something guys what their high school or college was like and it's almost certain to be different from the reality. We remember what we want. We interpret how we want. The story of the three blind men and the elephant is an old take on this.
I was on a public beach in South Florida, just looking around after attending a showing of "Pineapple Express" at Aventura Mall. I saw a girl that I knew I would love to have a picture of and took a picture of her with my Canon 40D DSLR. Her boyfriend came over and told me to bugger off. At first I thought he was wrong, but decided to challenge him since I'd already taken the picture and I didn't want to get my ass kicked. So I ran away with my Boots of Escaping. Later that day I checked my computer and found other pictures so it didn't matter.
That's a good point.. Because Mac and Linux is different, they can't take the same approach to developing a product as they do for Windows. I.e., a company could previously build for a Windows base. In order to pursue the sizeable non-Windows market they will need to design to standards because it's often cost-prohibitive to design specifically for Linux, Mac or the host of other non-Windows based devices coming online.
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I'd agree that the relative size of 8G page space is probably smaller than a 512M partition a while ago... However, some corrections:
Technically swap space is not page space, though the distinction is being blurred quite a bit. Swap space was used to actually swap out entire processes, while page space was used to page out memory, er, pages. I'll use swap here :D
The wikipedia link is a little incorrect. In many cases a swap partition can be more efficient than a swap file at least in Linux. For one, there's an extra overhead involved in dealing with files because of the OS filesystem layer. Perhaps there's a raw file option with a swapfile, but I'm not aware of it. In most cases (i.e., desktop and moderate server use) there's probably not a lot of difference and swapfiles are ostensibly easier to use. With LVMs it doesn't really matter.
In some OSes the swap space is not necessarily additive. In some versions of the Linux kernel, for example, only swap space above that of physical memory was additive. This was a consequence of the virtual memory subsystem.
In other OSes it worked similarly for performance reasons. E.g., once a page is requested from the OS and written, the OS would write both to physical memory and to the page space. If the page needed to be swapped out it was merely an update to the page table to indicate whether the page was in memory or not rather than doing a full write on every page-out. This could drastically improve performance under some circumstances but diminish it in others (thus it's usually a tunable parameter).
Having some page space is generally good too. Modern OSes will still swap out dormant pages if it can free up memory for running processes even if memory is not near capacity. This is also tunable.
There are also reasons to run without swap (i.e., no hard disk or slow hard disk). You can disable swap entirely by tuning the overcommit options of the kernel.
Having too much swap can be bad too. In some OSes the page table size (which cannot be swapped) was dependent on the size of total memory (physical + swap). An overenthusiastic administrator may decide to really bump up the size of his page space if he saw that physical memory was close to capacity. If he happened to be on one of the boundaries (4G, 16G in some cases) then adding more swap space would actually DECREASE his available physical memory because the size of the page table would grow.
In other words, there's no valid "rule of thumb" :D
At the very least, configure the utilities that will quiesce the processors and disk when not in use. They can reduce power consumption of an idle machine by 80% or more.
The amazing little floppy.. hehe..
Speaking of drives, do you recall the SpectreGCR and the Twister format? One of the Elders at the time (Dave Small) had written a program that re-worked the track/sector format. It skewed the sectors on the the disk so that as the read head moved from track to track it was quicker to get to the next sector number... The Spectre GCR was a hardware device that allowed the Atari ST drives to read the Macintosh disk format.
There was no difference, iirc, between an ST and MS-DOS disk except for some filesystem information. So MS-DOS disks could be read with the appropriate software.
This was not surprising and I don't place all the blame on the users.
There's a similar situation with semi experienced administrators. They may configure logging and monitoring on a system. Being security paranoid, they set the log level fairly low so they end up getting lots of alerts.
Somewhere along the line, however, the administrator stops paying as much attention. Maybe a CPU alert hits 100% every night. Then one day someone in Finance runs a half-assed join across a gateway and brings down a DB. The admin gets the alert but has gotten so used to them that it was ignored. This is worse than if he'd never gotten the alert at all.
The alerts that OSes put up (Vista, for example) and the host of browser and AV and IDE warnings get useless after a while. The system should do this transparently and not rely on the user to be the MAC layer.
I've been in IT for close to twenty years. You know what I've heard a hundred times?? It's this:
"I have this great idea. You do the work. We'll split the profits."
Of course the don't quite say it the same way. It's usually something like, "I can't pay you right now, but the profits will be huge. When it succeeds I can give you 10%."
This is invariably followed by something like, "Oh, it's very easy for someone like you. Maybe a week or so of work."
So I'm a little jaded.
Here's my suggestion. Show that you are investing your *time* and *money* (though I am being redundant since time *is* money). It should be an equal investment from the beginning. I think you're willing to do this, so attracting others should not be as difficult.
Xen and its offshoots use what is called "paravirtualization". To summarize, there are a few calls that an operating system can make to the underlying hardware that are very expensive in terms of CPU utilization. Paravirtualization removes these calls, but requires OS support. Many of these calls are related to memory so, for example, the guest OS communicates with the host OS to allocate memory versus the host OS trying to trap for each of those calls.
The upside is a great improvement in speed especially on newer processors that have hardware virtualization capability. The downside, of course, is that the OS needs modification to do this.
So, feel free to blame Broadcom for writing shitty drivers, or blame Dell for accepting them and selling them to you as functional, but don't blame the OS.
No, it's almost certainly Vista's problem. If I swap the drive out for a dualboot XP/Linux drive, both OSes work perfectly (though admittedly the Linux drive uses ndiswrappers, not native).
The problem lies with power saving features specific to Vista. It turns off the card to try to conserve despite whether the machine is plugged in or not.
The drivers have been updated -- *EVERY* driver because of the ongoing issues. Indeed, there's an update that specifically targets the power saving profile.
Superfetch is also a Vista specific problem. It would be great if it actually STOPPED at some point. But no, the drive can thrash for an hour and makes the system useless. Can you imagine how aggravating it was to open this really nice laptop and then have it work slower than an old Inspiron 600M??
As I mentioned, lack of RAM is the least of their problems. It will be a greater problem in the future since Vista 32 doesn't work with more than 4G RAM. My desktop systems already have 6G because the upgrade price was only $150 more. Of everything, this RAM limitation is the most disappointing thing. And please don't start re-gurgitating some Internet FAQ about 32-bit being a hardware limitation. It's annoying when some Windows-only user starts trying to deflect criticism of the Vista memory issues by blaming the hardware. Sure, on other OSes, perhaps a single process can be limited to the 4G space, but overall the other OSes can take advantage of up to 64G. This works beautifully for things like VMWare or Java.
It's more than just RAM problems. I'm typing this from a 4G XPS 1530. It's a great machine. Runs Ubunutu 8.04 and XP wonderfully, but the pre-installed Vista is a piece of crap. At this moment I'm connecting via the Gigabit wired connection because wireless is unstable. Wired is SO 2005!!!!!
Seriously though, the wireless connection drops every couple minutes. Googling informs that it could be a bunch of things and I've tried each one. These include switching to high performance mode (so the wireless card doesn't get turned off to conserve battery) to upgrading the access point so it understands some new power save feature, to disabling IPv6 settings. None work.
Even with 4G I get those freezes. Googling indicates it could be SuperFetch. It might be the virus scan. It might be my graphics card crashing and silently restarting. Doesn't matter what the culprit is, it's just freaking annoying to be typing something and have the machine pause for 10 to 20 seconds at a time.
I agree with you that Microsoft shouldn't have OKed 512M configurations, but I think that was probably the least of their problems. At least with a minimum RAM configuration you could upgrade.
Otherwise you need to diversify, pick decent stocks, and stick to time windows of at least a week.
Why do people always say this?? Diversification is dilution. If you want big gains, roll the dice with a big stake. I see so many people take the advice of fund managers and dilute their investing power by picking up the broad funds (or spreading their resources across a broad base). I'm not implying that someone should risk everything on a two-bit stock, but if you've done the research then make a big play.
But I agree completely with your second point. People get so WEIRD when the market drops. They start yanking their money out and then, this is completely bewildering to me, go on a buying spree when a stock is hot and overpriced.
Hehe... look at that.. you can do it all in one tool.
But that would just completely destroy my argument that free tools are hard to use. :D
Unlike free alternatives, which generally require some technical knowledge and make it difficult to copy an entire DVD with extras, etc.,...
What??? Maybe you're right.. there are a ton of steps..
Using DVDShrink and CDBurnerXP. Steps to copy a disk:
1) Insert DVD.
2) Launch DVDShrink.
3) Select Open Disc.
4) Select Backup.
5) Choose Backup location (make note of this location).
6) When complete, exit DVDShrink.
7) Launch CDBurnerXP.
8) Select Burn Disc from ISO.
9) Eject the source DVD and insert a blank DVD.
10) Select the source ISO.
11) Press Burn.
12) Wait
Actual time outside of the wait is about 20 seconds of real work.. Of course, I've listed EVERY step. If I detailed how to save a file in Notepad it would take quite a few steps...
1) Wait until the computer boots.
2) Click on Start.
3) Click on All Programs.
4) Click on Accessories.
5) Click on Notepad.
6) Type your message into the editing window.
7) Click on File.
8) Click on Save.
9) When prompted, select a location to save your file.
10) Press OK. (or SAVE)
11) Select File.
12) Select Exit.
Awesome explanation. From now on I will associate Microsoft with two old guys with wardrobe problems.
I can understand beer ads that don't mention the product but instead show a scantily clad model ringing the doorbell and saying, "Wazzup". I can understand ads that show a scantily clad hitchhiker leaning into the window and saying, "Can I have a ride?" and after the ad is over a logo for some jeans company pops up. I can even understand the ad of three fat, balding guys watching a neighbor get thrown out the house and saying, "Yup" while drinking a beer.
But two old guys in a mall talking about shoes???
There's another effect that's quite similar: People over-estimate mediocre skills in others when they don't possess that skill. For example, I am, at best, an average math student by most standards. However, some people think I'm mathematically gifted because I can explain a linear equation.
Then there's the effect where people assume someone is smart because they agree on some irrelevant point. For example, say I oppose the (current incarnation) of the death penalty. Others think I'm smart because they oppose the death penalty. However, my argument may be based on the fairness of the punishment (i.e., not carried out equally to all violators) whereas their argument may be religiously based (thou shalt not kill). Politicians exploit this quite often. "I am a , therefore I am a good choice for this office."
I dunno..
I've worked at some companies that were really strange. In one particular place the CTO had some interesting files in his share. Now I'm a not a prude by any means, but this guys share had some weird sh*t. At least my p0rn is wholesome (yeah yeah, one man's wholesome is another man's bestiality... baaaah and moo to you). It's tough not to notice when the guys fileshare took up close to 80G out of the 100G allocated to the entire company (this was the days before 1TB drives were common).
They guy was also an ass though. When I left I made sure that I held onto the offsite mail spool backup because he wasn't above writing a check and then stopping it at the bank. I still have that backup, btw. Hi Mark.
In every other place though, I could not care any less about what they kept in their mail spool or fileserver. If their raccoon and chihuahua p0rn and watermelon fetish is clogging up the backups I'll send them an automated email telling them to clean up, but that's it. None of my business.
I use both RHEL and CentOS. RHEL is on our production machines and CentOS is what I use for proof-of-concept and non-production machines. RedHat fixes show up a few weeks before CentOS, though I do often just rebuild the SRPM directly on CentOS. Never had a problem building the source RPM either.
CentOS doesn't do the same thing as RedHat. They take RH packages and rebuild them without modification except for vendor tags. Though they do maintain their own bug lists, it's RedHat that does the heavy lifting.
A game is a game is a game... whether you call it a simulation or a VE or a VR...
Or maybe not.
I've had the opportunity to go on a track a couple times, and have also driven a couple interesting cars. My take is that the games are really a lot of fun, but don't quite give the same experience as, you know, real life. For example, accelerate hard from a stop and some cars will torque steer, some start to fishtail, some compensate electronically. When I shift gears I often go more by the sound of the engine rather than the RPM gauge because it's easier for me. Some of the games do this, but others match the sound to the speedometer rather than the tachometer.
I'm not saying I'm anything but an average guy who has in interest in cars, but I enjoy figuring out how each car responds. That's missing in some of the games I've played. Not that that's a bad thing, just a different goal than a simulation.
That's actually not so far fetched.. :D
You can get archival quality paper that can survive for years under the right conditions. In 25 years we'll still have means of getting images from paper onto the computer in whatever form they happen to be. So, store your images as hex dumps on paper and include the algorithm to decode the hex dumps..
You could, for example, print the hex dump as an OCR readable page. As someone else mentioned, with a good printer you can get a decent amount of data on a single page.
For each image, print three or five copies and store them in separate locations... This will give some error correction capability later. The idea is that even if multiple pages from multiple sets are bad, you should be able to reconstruct them from the whole collection. It could be as simple as how RAID works, or as complex as how a drive can determine whether a bit is on or off based on thresholds..
Heck, you can even convert the data to sound. Burn the sound to a record. In 25 years there will still be a few grizzled folks that swear that analog recordings sound better. Hit them up to borrow their phonograph (wax cylinder, gramophone, etc). Take the sounds and convert them back to digital.
Awesome link..
I remember the Antic magazine also. One of the issues had a utility to build a WeFAX (Weather facsimile) decoder. I was able to build everything but missed the ham radio part :)..
Magazines were much broader in scope then. Besides the software and hardware reviews there were in depth articles on how to do interesting things with your computer. For example, the STart (Atari ST magazine) had information about MIDI interfaces and how to fix the MIDI ports on the back of the Atari ST.
Then there was Byte, which took things to a new level. One of my earlier projects was an SBC written by IIRC S Ciarcia. I still have the folder of diagrams and notes..
I remember getting my first Atari 800... Then after that the 800XL, 130XE, 520ST, 1040ST, etc.. The 800XL was my first real chance to learn to program. Previously it had been on a Commodore Vic-20 at a cousin's house. I actually owe my career to those days spent writing little BASIC programs to do simple things.
At the time there was a magazine called Compute!. It had program listings for multiple machines including the Atari, Commodore, Apple IIe, and later on, the PC, ST and Amiga lines. Many of the programs were written in BASIC, but as the magazine progressed more and more were written in 6502 assembler. It was tedious to key in those listings (essentially typing in HEX dumps with a checksum) but we managed.
In middle school I was in one of the first programming classes in the school and district. The computers were all Apple IIe and Franklin Ace 1000s, but the instructor had a soft spot for the Ataris. For the end of term project I wrote a little quiz program that flashed a question on the screen in one of the Atari graphic modes, then read the 8-bit joystick port to see which answer was selected. I also tried to write an Infocom-like game, but it proved much harder than I had anticipated. I did get the user to be able to navigate a map though :D
For a long time I missed those days... Luckily Linux came along and all is well again...
Funny you should mention the "desktop orientation" of Linux, considering that any recent Solaris puts on a shiny Gnome suit...
Solaris scales far better than any BSD or Linux distro out there.
Ask any *real* Unix admin who uses both and more than likely they will say Linux is great for small jobs but Solaris is king for anything else.
OK, I'll bite. I've been admin'ing Unix for 12 years, and a user for 20. I've maintained everything from an UltraSparc workstation to E10Ks. Lately (past five years) I've been doing AIX, maintaining over 150 OS instances.
For a test project I've been researching Linux and Solaris for an Oracle RAC installation. I will tell you that, hands down, the Linux network stack is faster. Raw i/o is close, but Linux wins small file writes and reads by a significant margin. BTW, the Sun.com site has a paper comparing Linux filesystems versus UFS, but take it with a grain of salt (look at the machine they use).
Now let's talk about scaling...
Up to the 8 processor machine that I tested (which is a *small* PC system), Linux continues to scale close to linearly for the Oracle/TomCat/Apache workload, as does Solaris. Beyond this I understand things can change, but so be it, that's not the platform I'm needing.
Now certainly you can build a workload requirement that will put Solaris on top, but in the vast majority of installations Linux will do just fine.
Of course there are other factors. RedHat doesn't have the most sterling support (compare it to IBM for example), but I can buy support through IBM (or Oracle or Sun for that matter) if I wanted. This may be the reason for a shop to go with Sun, but I wanted to correct the idea that Linux is not as technically valid as Solaris.
:)
I had pretty much the same experience. Being the smallest kid in school, wearing second-hand clothes, socially inept, glasses, visual tics... not exactly a recipe for popularity. But I got through it.. The reason I don't remember it much is not because it was particularly horrible, but because life has just been so much better every year since leaving high school.
No way, man..
Emacs has a console plugin. With the plugin you can launch ImageMagick's convert of morgrify to modify images. Best you can do with vi is a hexed of the image data :)
I once believed that history can never be changed. We could make changes in the future, but the past was set in stone. The last person I thought would disagree with this was a history professor. But sure enough, my college history professor explains to the class that history is always changing. Whoever interprets the "records" makes the history.
Ask most 30- and 40-something guys what their high school or college was like and it's almost certain to be different from the reality. We remember what we want. We interpret how we want. The story of the three blind men and the elephant is an old take on this.
Man, the same thing happened to me the other day.
I was on a public beach in South Florida, just looking around after attending a showing of "Pineapple Express" at Aventura Mall. I saw a girl that I knew I would love to have a picture of and took a picture of her with my Canon 40D DSLR. Her boyfriend came over and told me to bugger off. At first I thought he was wrong, but decided to challenge him since I'd already taken the picture and I didn't want to get my ass kicked. So I ran away with my Boots of Escaping. Later that day I checked my computer and found other pictures so it didn't matter.
(I kid, I kid)
That's a good point.. Because Mac and Linux is different, they can't take the same approach to developing a product as they do for Windows. I.e., a company could previously build for a Windows base. In order to pursue the sizeable non-Windows market they will need to design to standards because it's often cost-prohibitive to design specifically for Linux, Mac or the host of other non-Windows based devices coming online.