This might be the reason for me to get a dvd playback device.;-) (If it comes out on dvd, which i hope it does.) I really don't know which story I like better, Ghost In The Shell or Battle Angel Alita... I suppose I should just count myself lucky to have found both.
For those curious, here's a link to a page with pictures of the machine (absolute bottom, the cube on a stand). As far as practical benefits go, I can see the cube form factor being very practical in terms of fold/slide-out panels for things like motherboard, drive array, etc...
I seem to recall seeing an advertisement in the back of Wired or Web Tecniques,er,New Architect every issue for exactly that. Damned if I can find the advert now that I'm actually looking for it though...
What I really wanted to see take off was a company about three or four years ago that was making PC cases that were anodized aluminum cubes rotated such that they were effectively standing on one point. That had the advantage of using a standard square motherboard and looking terribly cool.
My mom has actually asked a few times about Linux, and seems genuinely interested in trying it someday.
Personally, I'm not ready to suggest people use it yet. It's close to being a great desktop... so close I can almost taste it (I've been using free unixen since slackware 3.0)... but IMHO it's just not *quite* there yet. A few more revisions of Mozilla, GNOME, and/or KDE and we'll see... I think that OpenOffice is a huge step in the right direction, I tried it for the first time a week ago and I was stunned at how much better it got since StarOffice 5.2. Really, I think the best part of my family members switching to linux would be ease of secure remote administration so I can just log in to fix something rather than having to actually drive to their place or walk them through something on the phone (which is painful, lord do I have sympathy for the telephone tech support people out there). As it is I've managed to train my mom in the basics of getting the machine's IP address and how to start up winvncserver so I can vnc in... I think that was one of the first times she really opened her eyes to th power of free software, becuase she was just stunned at how easy vnc made it for me to fix her machine from hundreds of miles away and completely blown away when I answered her "how much does this cost?" question with "not a damn thing, it's free software". I think probably what I'll do if she's serious about making the switch is start her off on openoffice, mozilla, and the gimp on windows, then after she's comfortable with that, give her a new machine running linux as the "invisible substrate" under openoffice et al.
OK, so as background, I just woke up ~ 5 minutes ago, so the coffee isn't finished brewing, much less finding it's way into my body yet... I read the headline and the first thing that came to mind was "What? OpenBSD 2.6/2.7? I manage those releases by keeping them neatly stacked in my pile-o'-unixen under 2.8 and 2.9..." Then my brain assimilated the fat little bird under the topic, some gears churned, a little smoke came out, and I realized we were talking about Linux...;-) The moral of this story I think is don't read slashdot right after you've woken up...
Easy, assuming you have a machine that can play streaming music decently (hook your soundcard into a decent stereo if possible, anything other than those crappy little $5 made-in-china speakers most computers come with).
Just head over to Shoutcast.com and start listening.
They've got eight sub-categories of electronica. Keep a notepad handy and write down any songs you like (picking a station that streams the song titles is handy;-)). You may also want to dip over into the Industrial section, as a lot of Industrial music is synthetic. Then, go to your local CD shop and buy what you liked. Telling the store manager that the reason you're buying the CDs is becuase you heard the music on the net might not hurt either...
Really, this is what streaming radio is all about to me, fostering communities of listeners for genres that don't get much or any radio play. I've probably learned of fifty new bands I like in the past six months alone just by browseing through Shoutcast a lot..
Somebody already posted a good list of traditional
electronica, and I'm not totally familiar with drum and bass enough to give you band names (that's my second favorite electronica genre after
a first place tie between trance and ambient), so
here's a short list of good electronic Industrial bands:
VnV Nation -- without question one of the best bands I've learned of in the past year. Hard to find in the States, originally from the UK. Excellent music and songwriting.
Front 242 -- Sort of the Kraftwerek of electronic Industrial. 80s and early 90s... Their "Headhunter" song is a classic.
Funker Vogt, Assemblage 23, Wumpscut -- If you like any one of these three, you'll probably like the other two. They do have unique styles, but I've yet to meet somebody that didn't end up liking all three.
Apoptgyma Bezerk -- I haven't heard much of their stuff, mainly remixes and Kathy's Song, but it's pretty good stuff from what I've heard of it.
(mainstream, but it has to be mentioned) Bjork's Homogenic album is a masterwork of electronic music. Pluto is probably in the top five of my favorite songs.
Good luck, and happy listening! There's a whole undiscovered world of electronic music that most people have never heard, so you've got months or years of discovery ahead of you.
There's a gimp port to win32 that works pretty well. Google on "gimp win32" and you should pull it up in short order. I'd say in terms of features, it's sort of equivalent to photoshop 3 or 4, but then it's free and for the majority of the uses a non-graphics-designer would need, it's just fine. (I'm a deeply server-side web programmer, so I don't usually need to deal with graphics, but once or twice a month I need to tweak an image (e.g. copy one button to make another with the same look but different text) and it's not worth bothering the full-time graphics people with, so gimp is perfect...)
That is pretty tiny. You might check out the guys over at embsd.org, specifically this thing. Out of the box you could do NAT and Firewall with it I'm sure... I'd imagine Syslog (with a disk of some sort) and SNMP too. Only question is whether or not the cpu has enough grunt for IDS... Also, and this is a more expensive solution, you might consider getting one of the Cappucino mini-PCs over at thinkgeek. They'll set you back 800-1100, but they're certain to have enough pwr for your needs and they've got about a 6x5x2 footprint. They've only got one built-in rj45 port, but they've got something like 2-4 USB ports so you could string several USB ethernet controllers off the back for more interfaces as needed... (yeah, I know, not ideal, but it's probably 90% of what you want. ideally they'd have a pci slot for a multiport server nic; if nothing else just put the usb nics on the slow interfaces (e.g. the wan links)) The Shuttle cases are within the 9x9 part of your spec but are probably a litte too tall...
what do you want to use them for?
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Small Footprint PCs?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I think that will determine your search more than absolute size. Afterall, you could get a webserver the size of a matchbox, but it'd be pretty lousy as a user workstation... If you want really dense servers, check into the "blade" fad. If you want really tiny user workstations, look into Shuttle's line of small and quiet most-everything-is-integrated barebones PCs (they've got pci slots for that extra nic or whatever). And of course there are all kinds of tiny single board computers for industrial applications.
I recall a particularly cool assignment where the professor gave us a long-ish (~1-2KB) chunk of text that had been run through a rotation filter. He gave us the background info on what rotation filters were, how to defeat them (look for most frequent character, that's 'e', determine the shift, then reverse that and print out), etc. all the theory to solve the problem. It taught us simple file I/O (open old, read data, do computation, print out into new), really simple data structures (making us think about the best way to store the frequency information), as well as a little baby-step taste of how cool encryption/decryption was. There was just something magical about running the program and having it work right, producing the cleartext. It's great to feel like James Bond cracking the Secret Evil Message;-)!
The kicker was that he chose a very cool poem as the cleartext, so when you reached the finish line you got rewarded with a result that was actually interesting to read. This part might well appeal to liberal arts people, as well history types will be aware of how critical a role codes haved played throughout time.
This is just my very humble opinion, but are you sure c++ is the way to go for beginning programmers? I fully realize you may not have a choice due to departmental constraints. It's just my experience that most intro-level programmers being taught C++ have such a hard time with the language itself that they can't see past that to the applications of it. Otoh, a language with a C-like syntax is probably a good move because so many things use that (I've always said that if you learned C well you were half-way or more to learning any of a dozen other languages). So, have you considered something like Java or Perl? (Or, god forbid, python;-)) Both of those languages are easier to grasp, enabling you to focus more on what you can do with them than how to write a virtual destructor... Heck, with perl you could give them a very easy taste of web applications development using cgi and databases, for example, a collaborative story writing system (user A writes chunk 1, B writes 2, and so on)...
Showing the various types of linear transformations (reflection, rotation, etc) the authors of the applied linear algebra text I used in college used a sheep figure as the manipulated object... This goes on for a bit, and then you turn the page to the last type of transformation of their discussion... the shear transform. Naturally, the caption reads "Sheared Sheep"... (an example of a shear transform is what would make text looking like "this" originally, look instead like "this".)
Isn't methane as bad or worse a greenhouse effect agent as C02 (c.f. cow farts vs. automotive exhaust as greenhouse effect causes)? Frying pan, fire, what?
I've got this genetic disorder called Alport's Syndrome. It sucks. Macular degeneration, inner ear nerve cell degeneration, and kidney degeneration... (As I recall it's becuase my body doesn't make a particular protein correctly that is found in the support matrices of the three tissues listed.) Anyway, as you can imagine I've been looking at the whole grow-a-new-organ technology with considerable interest. I have a kidney transplant now, which is the most wonderful, selfless, live-giving thing anyone has ever done for me, but the drugs you have to take to keep transplanted tissue vital are a Real Bummer (expensive, bad side effects, or both). So the possibility of having organs tailor grown to fit me, eliminating the need for immunosupressive therapy, is incredibly exciting... The problem is, if organs were grown from my DNA, they'd be defective also (still, it'd probably take 20+ years for them to fail;) my natural born kidneys made it about 21, and a lot can happen in 20 years...) So, I think this is a neccessary and vital first step. The next revolution will be using genetic modification techniques to tweak the grown organs in such a way to fix the underlying flaw (or even add new features?;) how'd you like to be able to see into the near infrared? have an extra couple of kHz at teh top of your hearing range? have a different eye color? jeez, and we thought case modding is getting wacky... (of course I imagine that organs with major nerve bundles will take longer to perfect))
Isn't technology/science cool? I mean, damn... Imagine the radiant smile of a little kid seeing a rainbow for the first time or that of somebody being freed from dialysis or... Makes perl seem almost sorta lame by comparison...;)
compared to the licensing costs for some other commercial unixen... compare this to what SGI wants for the latest IRIX (their workstation IRIX is, iirc, something like $600). Given a) Sun's current financial position (could be better) and b) the fact that solaris is a project involving many, many highly paid engineers, them wanting some bucks makes perfect sense. They're still giving away (iso download soon, physical media now for $fairly_cheap) the 1-cpu version, which covers the majority of workstations and low-end servers...
finally found somebody willing to talk about how much they want for the Usparc3 (allsunplus.com):
X6990A Sun UltraSPARC-III 750MHz CPU module with 8MB L2 cache.
Condition RETAIL BOX $3,400.00
X7000A UltraSPARC III 900 MHz processor module with 8MB L2 cache for Sun Blade 1000.
Condition RETAIL BOX $9,500.00
The 750Mhz part will iirc the specX numbers right beat the 800Mhz itanium across the board in terms of performance... If nothing else, there are mature optimizing compilers for the Usparc3 architecture, which is not AFAIK the case yet with the Itanium.
Finding prices for parts this high is somewhat of a black art becuase all the companies treat this data like goddamned state secrets or something, but from what I can tell that price is roughly equivalent (maybe a little higher) to a 900 Mhz Ultrasparc III (with, I might add, 8mb of cache), which is really the competition that chip is aimed at (along with the power4)... Of course, anyone in their right mind that needs the performance of 64 bit is going to choose something other than Intel's solution which is (IMHO) overpriced and immature. I think the current holder of the specfp/specint crown is IBM, followed fairly closely by Sun, and then a pretty big gap down to the itanium... True, you'll pay considerably more for an ibm sp2 or sun fire server than you would for most Itanium-carrying things, but if you need this class of performance then money isn't really much of an issue (big science labs, huge database instances, etc).
Thanks. Now my nose hurtz becuase of the hot coffee...;-) Anyway, in response to your original post: I think the guy you responded to was just throwing that out as a tongue-in-cheek joke. Cheap and stupid joke, perhaps, but... Another point: who says drooling is bad, provided it's done with class? Hell, I know I'm immensely flattered when a member of the appropriate sex has their hormones sing at the sight of me... (Note, obviously, I don't mean talking to the woman's chest or something equally crass.) I think it's wrong to be a slavering hound, in other words, but I think perhaps it's taken to far in the opposite direction sometimes, and any admittance of attraction is seen as crude... Dragging this post back somewhat to the realm of topicality... w00w00 mozilla!:-) I think I'm going to make either the Houston or Austin one... (/me checks the server maintenance schedule, shakes his head, and crosses his fingers...)
The soviets actually changed the russian cyrillic alphabet when they came into power, dropping four characters (in the very early 1920s iirc). (They did a lot of other societal things that didn't last, such as switching to a five day week.) 'I' was replaced with 'backwards n' (sorry, no way to input cyrillic on this terminal), 'lower case b melded with a capital T' by 'E', 'almost greek nu' (i think, v-shaped) by 'backwards n', and 'greek theta' was replaced by 'greek phi' (i think). [Source material: page 8 of Scientific Russian, J. Perry, 1950 Interscience Publishing]
About, er... two years ago I bought a 486 server machine from a used computer place ("COMPUDYNE" I think was the manufacturer, and yes, I don't mean a 486 desktop being used as a server, but a 486 that was actually a server machine back in The Day). It was remarkably like the G3 and G4 cases, in the way it unhinged, the way the cables were routed, and the way the drives were mounted... All in all, a pretty sweet little machine with its pimpin' VLB 256kb vid card;-) (it served as my lan2ppp machine for about six months, then it became an IRC server for a while, then I had to move and get rid of a bunch of stuff so it went to a friend).
If bulk is your thing, I'm sure you could find a small board that Linux (or certainly netbsd) will run on (example: embsd.org's board), and fitting a full-featured install of either of the above OSen onto a CompactFlash device from SanDisk (ide adaptors are available for not much, media is pretty cheap) isn't hard... Heck using the PCMCIA slot on that board, you could have (up to) a gig to play with via IBM's microdrive for the system "disk". This means that you'd be using an operating system with a much larger user community that whatever proprietary thing you went with, and not to be neglected, the free OSen would be, well, uh... free.;-) SAMBA, netatalk, ftp, nfs, afs, coda, etc. all pretty much guarantee that your little *nix machine could talk to pretty much anything with a power cable. The embsd board has a PCI slot, so you could easily stick a raid adaptor on it, and with 3 10/100 interfaces you probably don't have to worry about network I/O... All in all, a pretty cheap solution: $255 for the board, $0 for the OS and software, maybe $300 for an ata100 pci board and a couple of big ass IDE drives... This would scale up to N many scsi drives / raid, blah blah... all while taking up way less space and pwr than a desktop (the embsd board also has a bios that allows serial-console-only admin of everything, a la the PC WEASEL).
I think that saying the commercial internet radio stations have an advantage over commercial radiative stations (assuming, for the moment, that the internet commercial stations aren't just divisions of a traditional, pump-out-radio-waves place) is not as obviously true as you may assume. They are related but fairly different enterprises.
Internet radio stations have lower equipment costs to broadcast, but their users have much higher equipment costs to listen (the cheapest computer you'll be able to use to listen to a net stream will probably set you back 250-350 american dollars, not to mention the cost of net access, and how much does a decent little am/fm thing cost? maybe 20 bucks?). Also, for a net radio station to reach and service the same number of potential users as a 100,000 watt radio tower (which could be in the tens to hundreds of thousands depending on where the tower is), I'm betting the bandwidth costs would far exceed the FCC frequency license... Staff costs would be about the same, as would things like office space.
So, basically, it's not a trivial thing to compare sound-broadcast-places that use different mediums of transmission, because each one has fundamentally different economic constraints.
With regard to tracking listeners, this is far less trivial than you would assume. A simple log parser isn't going to do it (... to the standard of precision they wanted, anyway). Hell, all of AOL shows up as coming from a handful of IPs in west virginia. NATing gateways are common, so that one IP could be a college kid in Nebraska or thirty people in a branch office in Texas or...
Yeah, that's another implicit reason. If I get lazy about writing my own OS to run on the hardware, I'd have something to fall back on...;-) Come to think of it, it probably would add some jazz to the NetBSD team to be able to say "we run on XX arches, even a custom built one, just for us" heh. not that anyone would ever use the theoretical machine as more than (at most) an X term, but distributing all the plans and parts lists and whatnot along with the distribution would be a pretty cool thing for hobbyists and students to fool around with...
This is also a project I've been idly thinking about for a while, simply for the challenge.:-) (So, you're not alone or crazy, heh.) I've been thinking of using an m68k cpu, for a couple of reasons:
It seems like everybody was using them in the mid 80s to early 90s (sun, amiga, macs, next, just off the top of my head). This means that a) they're probably easy to design around, b) they've probably got LOTS of public-domain documentation, and c) they're cheap;-)
The initial versions of SunOS as well as all the versions of NeXT ran on m68ks, so I know it's possible to run a Unix-like OS on them.
I've been told that m68k assembly is comparatively easy and straight-forward to learn, and I'm going to have to hack at least SOME asm to get an OS going on my theoretical creation.
Did I mention they're cheap?;-) At maybe five bucks per good chip on ebay, I can afford to fry quite a few of them
Of course, I'm just a software dude (actually, my formal training is in chemistry, I just sort of fell into programming), so if any hardware people are in the audience hopefully they'll correct any stupid assumptions I've made.
Re:How fast a computer needed?
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OpenBSD 3.1 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
more than adequate. I ran my home gateway on a p166/48mb ram machine for something like a year and a half (only downtime was due to things like me tripping over the power cable in a drunken stupor;-)), no problems at all. I don't think the load ever went above 0.3 the whole time. (This was with 2.7, I don't see how 3.1 could be much different.) Heck, you could probably use a 486 if it had enough ram... Honestly, if all you're doing is firewall/gateway duty anything north of 8megs would probably be ok. I got openbsd to run on a 486/33 with (iirc) 6 megs at one point (a fancy struck me to put an irc server in my bathroom)... that was sort of painful, but the machine did run. I ended up reinstalling win98 on the p166 machine and using my old linksys router in it's place (becuase some friends of mine lost their computer in hurricane Allison last year, i figured they needed _a_ machine more than I needed _another_ machine, heh), if not for that then I imagine the little box would still be cheerfully tossing packets around for me. Now, obviously, if you have a bigger network behind the obsd machine than, say, 10 workstations, you're going to need more hw (faster proc, more ram to hold state tables, etc.)... Given that amd k6-2 cpus and super-7 motherboards are practically free these days, a machine to stand in front of a good sized office network probably wouldn't cost more than a hundred bucks if you were willing to scrounge (you only need a couple hundred meg hd unless you want to log things).
ya, that sure is a big "Forbidden" error.;-) I know there are workstation cards bigger than the obsidian, but the obsidian is the biggest consumer card I've ever seen.
Slashdot Mirror
This might be the reason for me to get a dvd playback device. ;-) (If it comes out on dvd, which i hope it does.) I really don't know which story I like better, Ghost In The Shell or Battle Angel Alita... I suppose I should just count myself lucky to have found both.
For those curious, here's a link to a page with pictures of the machine (absolute bottom, the cube on a stand). As far as practical benefits go, I can see the cube form factor being very practical in terms of fold/slide-out panels for things like motherboard, drive array, etc...
I seem to recall seeing an advertisement in the back of Wired or Web Tecniques,er,New Architect every issue for exactly that. Damned if I can find the advert now that I'm actually looking for it though...
What I really wanted to see take off was a company about three or four years ago that was making PC cases that were anodized aluminum cubes rotated such that they were effectively standing on one point. That had the advantage of using a standard square motherboard and looking terribly cool.
My mom has actually asked a few times about Linux, and seems genuinely interested in trying it someday. Personally, I'm not ready to suggest people use it yet. It's close to being a great desktop... so close I can almost taste it (I've been using free unixen since slackware 3.0) ... but IMHO it's just not *quite* there yet. A few more revisions of Mozilla, GNOME, and/or KDE and we'll see... I think that OpenOffice is a huge step in the right direction, I tried it for the first time a week ago and I was stunned at how much better it got since StarOffice 5.2. Really, I think the best part of my family members switching to linux would be ease of secure remote administration so I can just log in to fix something rather than having to actually drive to their place or walk them through something on the phone (which is painful, lord do I have sympathy for the telephone tech support people out there). As it is I've managed to train my mom in the basics of getting the machine's IP address and how to start up winvncserver so I can vnc in... I think that was one of the first times she really opened her eyes to th power of free software, becuase she was just stunned at how easy vnc made it for me to fix her machine from hundreds of miles away and completely blown away when I answered her "how much does this cost?" question with "not a damn thing, it's free software". I think probably what I'll do if she's serious about making the switch is start her off on openoffice, mozilla, and the gimp on windows, then after she's comfortable with that, give her a new machine running linux as the "invisible substrate" under openoffice et al.
OK, so as background, I just woke up ~ 5 minutes ago, so the coffee isn't finished brewing, much less finding it's way into my body yet... I read the headline and the first thing that came to mind was "What? OpenBSD 2.6/2.7? I manage those releases by keeping them neatly stacked in my pile-o'-unixen under 2.8 and 2.9..." Then my brain assimilated the fat little bird under the topic, some gears churned, a little smoke came out, and I realized we were talking about Linux... ;-) The moral of this story I think is don't read slashdot right after you've woken up...
Easy, assuming you have a machine that can play streaming music decently (hook your soundcard into a decent stereo if possible, anything other than those crappy little $5 made-in-china speakers most computers come with).
Just head over to Shoutcast.com and start listening. They've got eight sub-categories of electronica. Keep a notepad handy and write down any songs you like (picking a station that streams the song titles is handy ;-)). You may also want to dip over into the Industrial section, as a lot of Industrial music is synthetic. Then, go to your local CD shop and buy what you liked. Telling the store manager that the reason you're buying the CDs is becuase you heard the music on the net might not hurt either...
Really, this is what streaming radio is all about to me, fostering communities of listeners for genres that don't get much or any radio play. I've probably learned of fifty new bands I like in the past six months alone just by browseing through Shoutcast a lot..
Somebody already posted a good list of traditional electronica, and I'm not totally familiar with drum and bass enough to give you band names (that's my second favorite electronica genre after a first place tie between trance and ambient), so here's a short list of good electronic Industrial bands:
Good luck, and happy listening! There's a whole undiscovered world of electronic music that most people have never heard, so you've got months or years of discovery ahead of you.
There's a gimp port to win32 that works pretty well. Google on "gimp win32" and you should pull it up in short order. I'd say in terms of features, it's sort of equivalent to photoshop 3 or 4, but then it's free and for the majority of the uses a non-graphics-designer would need, it's just fine. (I'm a deeply server-side web programmer, so I don't usually need to deal with graphics, but once or twice a month I need to tweak an image (e.g. copy one button to make another with the same look but different text) and it's not worth bothering the full-time graphics people with, so gimp is perfect...)
That is pretty tiny. You might check out the guys over at embsd.org, specifically this thing. Out of the box you could do NAT and Firewall with it I'm sure... I'd imagine Syslog (with a disk of some sort) and SNMP too. Only question is whether or not the cpu has enough grunt for IDS... Also, and this is a more expensive solution, you might consider getting one of the Cappucino mini-PCs over at thinkgeek. They'll set you back 800-1100, but they're certain to have enough pwr for your needs and they've got about a 6x5x2 footprint. They've only got one built-in rj45 port, but they've got something like 2-4 USB ports so you could string several USB ethernet controllers off the back for more interfaces as needed... (yeah, I know, not ideal, but it's probably 90% of what you want. ideally they'd have a pci slot for a multiport server nic; if nothing else just put the usb nics on the slow interfaces (e.g. the wan links)) The Shuttle cases are within the 9x9 part of your spec but are probably a litte too tall...
I think that will determine your search more than absolute size. Afterall, you could get a webserver the size of a matchbox, but it'd be pretty lousy as a user workstation... If you want really dense servers, check into the "blade" fad. If you want really tiny user workstations, look into Shuttle's line of small and quiet most-everything-is-integrated barebones PCs (they've got pci slots for that extra nic or whatever). And of course there are all kinds of tiny single board computers for industrial applications.
I recall a particularly cool assignment where the professor gave us a long-ish (~1-2KB) chunk of text that had been run through a rotation filter. He gave us the background info on what rotation filters were, how to defeat them (look for most frequent character, that's 'e', determine the shift, then reverse that and print out), etc. all the theory to solve the problem. It taught us simple file I/O (open old, read data, do computation, print out into new), really simple data structures (making us think about the best way to store the frequency information), as well as a little baby-step taste of how cool encryption/decryption was. There was just something magical about running the program and having it work right, producing the cleartext. It's great to feel like James Bond cracking the Secret Evil Message ;-)!
The kicker was that he chose a very cool poem as the cleartext, so when you reached the finish line you got rewarded with a result that was actually interesting to read. This part might well appeal to liberal arts people, as well history types will be aware of how critical a role codes haved played throughout time.
This is just my very humble opinion, but are you sure c++ is the way to go for beginning programmers? I fully realize you may not have a choice due to departmental constraints. It's just my experience that most intro-level programmers being taught C++ have such a hard time with the language itself that they can't see past that to the applications of it. Otoh, a language with a C-like syntax is probably a good move because so many things use that (I've always said that if you learned C well you were half-way or more to learning any of a dozen other languages). So, have you considered something like Java or Perl? (Or, god forbid, python ;-)) Both of those languages are easier to grasp, enabling you to focus more on what you can do with them than how to write a virtual destructor... Heck, with perl you could give them a very easy taste of web applications development using cgi and databases, for example, a collaborative story writing system (user A writes chunk 1, B writes 2, and so on)...
Showing the various types of linear transformations (reflection, rotation, etc) the authors of the applied linear algebra text I used in college used a sheep figure as the manipulated object... This goes on for a bit, and then you turn the page to the last type of transformation of their discussion... the shear transform. Naturally, the caption reads "Sheared Sheep"... (an example of a shear transform is what would make text looking like "this" originally, look instead like "this".)
Isn't methane as bad or worse a greenhouse effect agent as C02 (c.f. cow farts vs. automotive exhaust as greenhouse effect causes)?
Frying pan, fire, what?
I've got this genetic disorder called Alport's Syndrome. It sucks. Macular degeneration, inner ear nerve cell degeneration, and kidney degeneration... (As I recall it's becuase my body doesn't make a particular protein correctly that is found in the support matrices of the three tissues listed.) Anyway, as you can imagine I've been looking at the whole grow-a-new-organ technology with considerable interest. I have a kidney transplant now, which is the most wonderful, selfless, live-giving thing anyone has ever done for me, but the drugs you have to take to keep transplanted tissue vital are a Real Bummer (expensive, bad side effects, or both). So the possibility of having organs tailor grown to fit me, eliminating the need for immunosupressive therapy, is incredibly exciting... The problem is, if organs were grown from my DNA, they'd be defective also (still, it'd probably take 20+ years for them to fail ;) my natural born kidneys made it about 21, and a lot can happen in 20 years...) So, I think this is a neccessary and vital first step. The next revolution will be using genetic modification techniques to tweak the grown organs in such a way to fix the underlying flaw (or even add new features? ;) how'd you like to be able to see into the near infrared? have an extra couple of kHz at teh top of your hearing range? have a different eye color? jeez, and we thought case modding is getting wacky... (of course I imagine that organs with major nerve bundles will take longer to perfect))
Isn't technology/science cool? I mean, damn... Imagine the radiant smile of a little kid seeing a rainbow for the first time or that of somebody being freed from dialysis or... Makes perl seem almost sorta lame by comparison... ;)
compared to the licensing costs for some other commercial unixen... compare this to what SGI wants for the latest IRIX (their workstation IRIX is, iirc, something like $600). Given a) Sun's current financial position (could be better) and b) the fact that solaris is a project involving many, many highly paid engineers, them wanting some bucks makes perfect sense. They're still giving away (iso download soon, physical media now for $fairly_cheap) the 1-cpu version, which covers the majority of workstations and low-end servers...
finally found somebody willing to talk about how much they want for the Usparc3 (allsunplus.com):
X6990A Sun UltraSPARC-III 750MHz CPU module with 8MB L2 cache.
Condition RETAIL BOX $3,400.00
X7000A UltraSPARC III 900 MHz processor module with 8MB L2 cache for Sun Blade 1000.
Condition RETAIL BOX $9,500.00
The 750Mhz part will iirc the specX numbers right beat the 800Mhz itanium across the board in terms of performance... If nothing else, there are mature optimizing compilers for the Usparc3 architecture, which is not AFAIK the case yet with the Itanium.
Finding prices for parts this high is somewhat of a black art becuase all the companies treat this data like goddamned state secrets or something, but from what I can tell that price is roughly equivalent (maybe a little higher) to a 900 Mhz Ultrasparc III (with, I might add, 8mb of cache), which is really the competition that chip is aimed at (along with the power4)... Of course, anyone in their right mind that needs the performance of 64 bit is going to choose something other than Intel's solution which is (IMHO) overpriced and immature. I think the current holder of the specfp/specint crown is IBM, followed fairly closely by Sun, and then a pretty big gap down to the itanium... True, you'll pay considerably more for an ibm sp2 or sun fire server than you would for most Itanium-carrying things, but if you need this class of performance then money isn't really much of an issue (big science labs, huge database instances, etc).
Thanks. Now my nose hurtz becuase of the hot coffee... ;-) Anyway, in response to your original post: I think the guy you responded to was just throwing that out as a tongue-in-cheek joke. Cheap and stupid joke, perhaps, but... Another point: who says drooling is bad, provided it's done with class? Hell, I know I'm immensely flattered when a member of the appropriate sex has their hormones sing at the sight of me... (Note, obviously, I don't mean talking to the woman's chest or something equally crass.) I think it's wrong to be a slavering hound, in other words, but I think perhaps it's taken to far in the opposite direction sometimes, and any admittance of attraction is seen as crude... Dragging this post back somewhat to the realm of topicality... w00w00 mozilla! :-) I think I'm going to make either the Houston or Austin one... (/me checks the server maintenance schedule, shakes his head, and crosses his fingers...)
The soviets actually changed the russian cyrillic alphabet when they came into power, dropping four characters (in the very early 1920s iirc). (They did a lot of other societal things that didn't last, such as switching to a five day week.) 'I' was replaced with 'backwards n' (sorry, no way to input cyrillic on this terminal), 'lower case b melded with a capital T' by 'E', 'almost greek nu' (i think, v-shaped) by 'backwards n', and 'greek theta' was replaced by 'greek phi' (i think). [Source material: page 8 of Scientific Russian, J. Perry, 1950 Interscience Publishing]
About, er... two years ago I bought a 486 server machine from a used computer place ("COMPUDYNE" I think was the manufacturer, and yes, I don't mean a 486 desktop being used as a server, but a 486 that was actually a server machine back in The Day). It was remarkably like the G3 and G4 cases, in the way it unhinged, the way the cables were routed, and the way the drives were mounted... All in all, a pretty sweet little machine with its pimpin' VLB 256kb vid card ;-) (it served as my lan2ppp machine for about six months, then it became an IRC server for a while, then I had to move and get rid of a bunch of stuff so it went to a friend).
If bulk is your thing, I'm sure you could find a small board that Linux (or certainly netbsd) will run on (example: embsd.org's board), and fitting a full-featured install of either of the above OSen onto a CompactFlash device from SanDisk (ide adaptors are available for not much, media is pretty cheap) isn't hard... Heck using the PCMCIA slot on that board, you could have (up to) a gig to play with via IBM's microdrive for the system "disk". This means that you'd be using an operating system with a much larger user community that whatever proprietary thing you went with, and not to be neglected, the free OSen would be, well, uh... free. ;-) SAMBA, netatalk, ftp, nfs, afs, coda, etc. all pretty much guarantee that your little *nix machine could talk to pretty much anything with a power cable. The embsd board has a PCI slot, so you could easily stick a raid adaptor on it, and with 3 10/100 interfaces you probably don't have to worry about network I/O... All in all, a pretty cheap solution: $255 for the board, $0 for the OS and software, maybe $300 for an ata100 pci board and a couple of big ass IDE drives... This would scale up to N many scsi drives / raid, blah blah... all while taking up way less space and pwr than a desktop (the embsd board also has a bios that allows serial-console-only admin of everything, a la the PC WEASEL).
I think that saying the commercial internet radio stations have an advantage over commercial radiative stations (assuming, for the moment, that the internet commercial stations aren't just divisions of a traditional, pump-out-radio-waves place) is not as obviously true as you may assume. They are related but fairly different enterprises.
Internet radio stations have lower equipment costs to broadcast, but their users have much higher equipment costs to listen (the cheapest computer you'll be able to use to listen to a net stream will probably set you back 250-350 american dollars, not to mention the cost of net access, and how much does a decent little am/fm thing cost? maybe 20 bucks?). Also, for a net radio station to reach and service the same number of potential users as a 100,000 watt radio tower (which could be in the tens to hundreds of thousands depending on where the tower is), I'm betting the bandwidth costs would far exceed the FCC frequency license... Staff costs would be about the same, as would things like office space.
So, basically, it's not a trivial thing to compare sound-broadcast-places that use different mediums of transmission, because each one has fundamentally different economic constraints.
With regard to tracking listeners, this is far less trivial than you would assume. A simple log parser isn't going to do it (... to the standard of precision they wanted, anyway). Hell, all of AOL shows up as coming from a handful of IPs in west virginia. NATing gateways are common, so that one IP could be a college kid in Nebraska or thirty people in a branch office in Texas or ...
Yeah, that's another implicit reason. If I get lazy about writing my own OS to run on the hardware, I'd have something to fall back on... ;-) Come to think of it, it probably would add some jazz to the NetBSD team to be able to say "we run on XX arches, even a custom built one, just for us" heh. not that anyone would ever use the theoretical machine as more than (at most) an X term, but distributing all the plans and parts lists and whatnot along with the distribution would be a pretty cool thing for hobbyists and students to fool around with...
- It seems like everybody was using them in the mid 80s to early 90s (sun, amiga, macs, next, just off the top of my head). This means that a) they're probably easy to design around, b) they've probably got LOTS of public-domain documentation, and c) they're cheap
;-) - The initial versions of SunOS as well as all the versions of NeXT ran on m68ks, so I know it's possible to run a Unix-like OS on them.
- I've been told that m68k assembly is comparatively easy and straight-forward to learn, and I'm going to have to hack at least SOME asm to get an OS going on my theoretical creation.
- Did I mention they're cheap?
;-) At maybe five bucks per good chip on ebay, I can afford to fry quite a few of them
Of course, I'm just a software dude (actually, my formal training is in chemistry, I just sort of fell into programming), so if any hardware people are in the audience hopefully they'll correct any stupid assumptions I've made.more than adequate. I ran my home gateway on a p166/48mb ram machine for something like a year and a half (only downtime was due to things like me tripping over the power cable in a drunken stupor ;-)), no problems at all. I don't think the load ever went above 0.3 the whole time. (This was with 2.7, I don't see how 3.1 could be much different.) Heck, you could probably use a 486 if it had enough ram... Honestly, if all you're doing is firewall/gateway duty anything north of 8megs would probably be ok. I got openbsd to run on a 486/33 with (iirc) 6 megs at one point (a fancy struck me to put an irc server in my bathroom)... that was sort of painful, but the machine did run. I ended up reinstalling win98 on the p166 machine and using my old linksys router in it's place (becuase some friends of mine lost their computer in hurricane Allison last year, i figured they needed _a_ machine more than I needed _another_ machine, heh), if not for that then I imagine the little box would still be cheerfully tossing packets around for me. Now, obviously, if you have a bigger network behind the obsd machine than, say, 10 workstations, you're going to need more hw (faster proc, more ram to hold state tables, etc.)... Given that amd k6-2 cpus and super-7 motherboards are practically free these days, a machine to stand in front of a good sized office network probably wouldn't cost more than a hundred bucks if you were willing to scrounge (you only need a couple hundred meg hd unless you want to log things).
ya, that sure is a big "Forbidden" error. ;-) I know there are workstation cards bigger than the obsidian, but the obsidian is the biggest consumer card I've ever seen.