The symmetry was just too much for me & mom
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The Challenger
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· Score: 3
My mother was in grade school when kennedy was killed (she was 11), and had been naughty that day. She was exiled to the corridor to "sit and think about what you've done" (<-- doesn't this happen to every kid at least once?). While she was out there, she heard the ladies working in the cafeteria talking about the asassination (they'd presumably heard it on the radio). Mom became quite disturbed and ran back into the classroom and shooted "Kennedy's dead! He's been shot!". The teacher didn't believe her and she got in even more trouble for telling "such hurtful lies." (Note that of course the teacher didn't apologize when she was found to be in the wrong, I think it's in their contracts that they can never do that...:-/)
Fast forward ~23 years. I'm in 2nd grade (I was about 8, we started regular schooling @ 6 in my district). All the kids had been getting worked up about the shuttle launch for weeks, making posters, reading things about it, etc.
The teacher told us (I don't recall how she found out), and I got in a lot of trouble for not believing her (shouting "That's not true! You're a liar!" probably didn't help)).
Well, at least good things have come from those tragedies. Now we take a little better care of our Presidents (i.e. no more riding around in convertibles). And from what other posters have said (corroborated by a friend who spent 6 months as an enginneering intern at NASA), they are a lot more fastidious now about launching safely.
The impression I got from reading about systems programming on MS-DOS was that it's in no way a real-time OS. The sarcastic phrase applied to it most often was "same day service" I think.:-) Note that this was mainly before my time, just casual reading on my part so I could be wrong. Anyway, based on my impression of DOS, I doubt linux would have higher latency on response times (provided you don't lard up the machine(s) with extraneous daemons and whatnot).
There is a lot activity going on around embedded and real-time linux now. Heck, the publishers of the Linux Journal just started a new magazine focused entirely on this area. So if you do need hard real-time (?and if you're doing ok on DOS now you may not?), there's probably a dozen/score/tripleassload of companies eager to help you with soft and hard-ware to make the switch. c.f. Lineo, Hard Hat Linux, et al.
One other poster mentioned QNX. Keep in mind that I personally have no experience with it, but somebody on a local unix group's mailing list was saying that a) it's a cool OS, but b) it's dev environment is kinda wierd to a UNIX developer. Something to maybe think about/ look into further if you're planning development in-house.
After all, one of the official expansions for "perl" is Practical Extraction and Report Language (the other being Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister)...
Perl supports interfacing to MySQL (quite well, see DBI.pm (and the supporting DBD::MySQL.pm for MySQL)). Perl also has something called "formats" which make writing formatted tabular data easy as pie (sort of like fortran IO maybe, or like structured string/variable substitution). See the camel book about that. Basically you'd just grab your result set, and then iterate through it, printing using a format. (you can also do formatted, repeating headers with this; and of course it handles stupid crap like pagination for you) The only "difficult" part would be tinkering with the format to get it like you want (formatting being the pickiest part of any report job).
If you really wanted to be a fancy-pants, perl also has (several? at least two that I can think of) interfaces to PDF generation libraries.
Of course this all requires some knowledge of perl.:-) (If you're a C programmer I'd say you could learn enough perl to do this project in a week or less. Java programmers might feel dirty doing it, but they could probably do the same.)
(I know other languages could do this all, but the format feature of perl would make it _really easy_.)
The Assault mission sounds really cool! But then I'm addicted to Assault missions in UT.:-)
Anyway, to make it slightly more realistic, would it be possible to have regiospecific single shot kill? I.e. if you're outside the station, a single shot would kill your character (by virtue of breaking seal on your space suit and death by explosive decompression/hard vacuum exposure). Just a thought...
(would say something about DSLreports but somebody beat me to the punch)
Anyway, in my part of the world (Texas, USA), cable modems are becoming suprisingly common. My mother has a cable modem in Nacogdoches, which is ~30,000 people deep in East Texas, a few hours drive from anything. It's roughly performance equal to a dual ISDN line, probably becuase the cable company doesn't have a really fat pipe (being as I said pretty much 150 miles from anything like a big city and thus a comm hub). I've heard from friends in other parts of the country that cable companies in their area are reasonably far along in their rollout as well.
So basically give the cable company/companies in the target town(s) a call to see if they offer service. True, cable modems might not be the absolute best solution technically and they might have crummy EULA/TOS consrtaints, but it beats dialup by a long shot... (Also there are typically fewer cable companies than ISPs for a given town, cutting down on the number of people to call.)
Good luck!
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Fuck Censorship.
38,000 not 38! (culture difference)
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2.2 vs 2.4
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· Score: 2
The original post was probably posted by somebody who comes from a culture where '.' is the demarcator for thousands-place instead of ','. i.e. 38.000 == 38,000. Either that or they typo'd, after all the two keys are right next to each other.
Based purely on personal experience, I can say with authority that linux can handle > 38 tcp/ip connections simultaneously:-).
He won't be able to run it, simply from the standpoint that the M64 AFAIK is AGP-only, and I doubt that a P120 has an AGP slot. Dude (p120 guy), just be happy with fvwm2 or blackbox or windowmaker or whatever works, because the amount of time and effort and potentially money you'll spend on that machine to get E/Gnome+Whatever/KDE
running smoothly is prohibitive (I ran E pretty well on a p233mmx with 64meg of ram and an ATI Xpert 98 card, that's probably the minimum; now I run it on a p2-450 with 128 and a Riva TNT, and it flys (no Gnome)).
If you are interested in getting a used PC, check out used-pcs.com(a local shop I've heard good things about; they have tons of Dells and whatnot. A system that meets the "minimum" for E I mentioned above looks like it would cost about $200-250 from them). Of course eBay is an option etc. etc. My point being is that if you really want to run this stuff just spend ~$300 or so on a used system, and make the old machine a server or something.:-) Good luck! (note also that you don't need Gnome at all if you're running E 0.16.x, so you can save memory and CPU by just running E.)
The more I read about all the bulshit going on with and around HDTV, the more I think I'm just going to not upgrade to it at all. When my regular set is no longer useful, I'll make it into a great big 35" aquarium.
Seriously, how many really good TV shows are there on TV now? CNN- and MSNBC-type info can all be gotten online. This leaves local news (read the paper) and fiction. OK, so you want to spend how much money to be able to watch Buffy, X-Files, Angel, StarCrap, et al.? I'm leaving asides sports games, but for me this is a total non-issue. Hmmm, movie playback... Unless you spend $100K on your home theater, it's better on the big screen (and if your memory is good it's pretty pointless to watch something more than once).
I suspect many people will hit this point of diminishing returns where the marginal utility realized from upgrading to HDTV is just too small (hastened by the prevalence of PCs and net appliances providing a roughly equivalent feed of information). If the broadcasters and manufacturers wish to avoid this fate they'd better begin acting intelligently real quick (interoperable standards, ease of use (including taping and reproduction) similar to prextant standards, etc.). If they don't I suspect that my as-yet unconceived child(ren) will ask me what this "TV" thing was that I and their grandparents blabber on about...
This is not to say that there won't be some form of intellectual cotton-candy available as an opiate to the anesthetised masses. It might just be tcp/ip based instead of TV-feeding-trough based.
Don't get me wrong, I like hearing my mp3s at "good enough" quality and various honks and tweets from first person shooters, but I'm also an audiophile. Even if you could somehow get standalone-amplifier sound quality from a computer card (hint: it ain't happening any time soon; decoding is one thing but amplification with clarity is entirely another), most computer speaker setups I've seen are just _wrong_. They all seem to revolve around 2 to n small, tweeter-sized speaker boxes, and one "big" subwoofer. The problem is this completely b0rks the midrange sound reproduction of the system (the more different speaker sizes (for cone speakers), the more discrete bands of sound you can reproduce at a time).
So if this new THX system has just a good, line-out only, decoder-only card, with a pamplet telling the end user how to buy a good amplifier (go Onkyo!:-) ) and good speakers (personal preference here, but practically anything mainstream home audio is better than the crap the computer manufacturers pawn off on people), then they're doing the right thing. Otherwise it's just a marketing gimmick. (Note also that THX certification is highly overrated, in that it is possible to qet audio kit that meets or exceeds the THX certifcation standards, but lacks the logo because the manufacturer didn't want to pony up the USD$100K (IIRC) that logo cost.)
If they aren't shielding the audio subsystem from EMF they're definitely doing it as a marketing gimmick. EMF does not do nice things to audio reproduction, and the inside of a computer case isn't exactly a low EMF area...;-)
To do surround sound _well_, your're probably looking at USD$600-1200 for a good amp and $500-1500 for speakers; with virtually unlimited upward headroom for cost expansion (e.g. vapor deposition speakers, which a really cool, and really expensive (saw a set once of 4 speakers a center and a sub that cost $60K)). This is for a system that would do a DVD encoded in 5.1 justice; that changes it from watching a movie to _feeling_ the movie. It sounds like a lot of money, but then once you've heard it it's hard to go back.:-)
One last random note for those of you who're contemplating hooking up your computer to your stereo: use the absolute minimum cable length you can -- noise increases with cable length (c.f. SCSI).
You're quite right about ssh on windows. I found a freeware SSH client for windows (actually a whole suite of SSH-related utils besides just a term) that I really like. It's called PuTTY SSH. I can never remember the address for the web page, but I never need to because when I search for "PuTTY SSH" on google or yahoo it's the first hit.
Give it a try the next time your stuck in the ass end of nowhere with nothing but a 486 running win95 and a 14.4 dialup connection, needing to log in to your corp. mail server remotely... (<-- true story) One advantage to the PuTTY SSH term is that it's small (~250Kb) and self contained (no installer, just one.EXE), so unless your on the most painful dialup connection imaginable it shouldn't take too long to grab from the website.
I'm not going to claim any great experience in the job market (I've been working in IT as a sysadmin and programmer off and on while finishing my degree for about the last year and a half, for context; ~70% of my friends are in IT full time and cover the gamut in terms of experience). Still, it seems that the problems that keep good people from connecting with good employers and vice versa are always HR-related.
The primary symptom of this is what I call the Laundry List syndrome. It seems to happen when the HR person(s) go about asking all the dept. heads what skill sets they need. Then, not knowing the difference between, say JSP and IOS, they place an ad for ONE person, listing ALL of ths skills as REQUIRED.:-( I can't count the number of times I've searched for "perl and linux and java" only to have a third of the result set read like so: "Java, AWT, JSP, Servlets, JDBC, Unix (Solaris, Linux expert admin level), perl, SQL, XML, DHTML, and Photoshop". Predictably this position goes unfilled and nobody is happy in the end. HR people need to _understand_ how what they're looking for fits into the company's goals in order to do their job well.
HR depts. (and recruiters) all to frequently tend to use really, really rigid demarcations and heuristics to attempt to sift for qualified potential employees. "Oh, we're sorry, you have everything we need in skills 1 - 4, and seem like a really easy guy to work with, but you only have 3 years experience with Java instead of 4." I'm not going to say I'm as good with Unix (with ~1 1/2 years experience) as some 20+ year admin; that's just silly. But, let's be honest here, what substantive difference is there between 2 years exp. and 1.5? Yet time and again I've been hit with walls like that, and I've seen it happen many times to friends. If less Procrustean standards were applied, the companies would be able to get people who were at least close enough to learn and come up to speed (this requires good teamwork in the workplace, of course), enabling work to accelerate instead of stagnate or decelerate as the existing employee base gets burned out from having no coworkers to rely on to share the load...
And of course let's not forget the classic chestnuts of "You're taking classes/have a family and thus can't work 60 hours a week, so you're useless to us." Internet Time is bullshit, and is purely a symptom of organizational failure: failure in planning, failure in leadership, failure in marketing, etc. etc. If you can't get all your work done at a reasonably human pace in 40 hours a week, something is W*R*O*N*G with your company.
In short, my sympathy for employers who whine about not being able to find anyone with one breath and yet reject 9 out of 10 applicants with the next is extremely limited.
As a side tangent, I recently found a funny posting in 1997 to Usenet talking about Usenet job ads (and the sad-but-true-insert-bitter-pained-chuckle-here things therein). I still see the exact same things in usenet and web board ads today. The archived post is here.
Just a footnote to anyone considering going with ColdFusion: it has documented security issues. Search (for example) securityfocus.com for examples. I don't recall if all of them were end-user fixable, but they might have been (I don't have access to it).
Before anyone gets too riled up, I'm not saying that CF is a crappy language (on the contrary it does look cool from the little bits I've seen). Also it should be noted I'm not a full-time security or CF person, so this is just an informal heads-up that people looking into CF should also see if there are still any issues with the current version(s)...
Once your karma hits a certain threshold (like 25 I think), you automatically post with a +1 bonus (+1 logged in, +1 karma bonus = +2 to start). There is a little check box over "Submit" that says "No Score +1 Bonus", which you can click if you don't feel that whatever you're saying is worthy of the boost.:-) This helps prevent you loosing karma from people modding down things that should have been at +1 to begin with; and of course it's usage is entirely a judgement call (like all things related to moderation). Hope that helps clear up what I think the area of your confusion is.
If I had to put on a pointy-haired-boss mask and think like a Sun manager in charge of this, I'd speculate that the machines will come standard with a choice between a Linux (most likely RH or Debian; to look at other companies doing similar things like SGI) and Solaris x86. Unless I'm missing something these are pretty standard x86 machines, so other OS's would be easy to install (*BSD, NT4/Win2k (ugh)).
But who knows? Maybe they'll decide to throw us all a curveball and stick something like Darwin or QNX on there by default.:-)
Well, there is a large market segment (ah, help, I'm thinking like a marketing major!:-) ) in terms of performance demand between one x86 processor and a high-end Ultra Enterprose machine (rackmount uniprocessor server = ~$3000, maxed-out E10K = ~$2,000,000 (of course you do get an awesome amount of performance with the later, heh)). In other words, if a customer comes to you and says: "Well, I need something more beefy than your $$$ uniprocessor machine, but not as beefy as your $$$$$$ U.E. line..." you want to be able to sell to than need.
This price/performance continuum is the same thing you see done in many markets (e.g. Celeron/Px(x={2/!!!}/Xeon by Intel). It just makes good business sense.
Your observation that the Athlons use, on average, more power and radiate more heat than the comparable Intel processor is, from what data I've seen, absolutely correct. However, I don't think that they use more power or generate more heat than an Alpha processor (some of those guys get hot, as anyone who's ever not quite given an Alpha-attached heatsink enough time to cool down has discovered;-) ). Alphas are fairly common in the server (and rackmount server) market. True, you probably wouldn't want to stick one in a 1U, but still... (I don't have any hard numbers, but I imagine that the Duron line is probably well suited to a 1U in terms of die size, power use, and heat profile, given a well-designed case at least.)
If there is anything that will hold the Duron/Athlon/Thunderbird line back from server-market acceptance (technical reason, not Intel-ism in IT depts.), it would be the comparatively small cache sizes. I.e. you'll probably want to use an UltraSparc-based solution with (2-8) megs of cache per chip (or some other "big cache" arch like Alpha) for the DB server[1], but everything else (www, mail, etc) is just fine with the "small" x86 machines, a domain in which ceteris parabis Athlon would win over Pentium by virtue of decreased cost for similar of greater functionality.
[1] of course there are many other factors that go into making a mid-to-high-end DB server, but I/O and backplane bandwidth do play an important role; having large chip caches and >32bit architectures helps this quite a bit (the other main area is of course disk, but that's outside the topic at the moment)
A friend of mine and I have set up ~5 slashcode[1] sites now (geekaustin.org is an example; they're all hosted off the same box). The first one you do is a royal with cheese pain in the ass. The engine is very flexible, but it'll probably take you a good month or two to get it up and become familiar with the inner workings.
So for a quick fix, my.02 USD is to avoid Slashcode and go with something simpler.
Just to add another name to the pot, Glasscode (java servlet based) was released yesterday or the day before. I'd provide a link here but if you can't look for the story link that's still more than likely on the front page yer just being laaaa-zeee.;-)
Good luck!
[1] the mod_perl/shtml/MySQL monstrosity that powers this website among (many) others. it works but on the inside it ain't pretty...
I have admin'd in a few middling-large environments (one, at a math dept with ~450 desktops, the other, at a chip designer firm with ~300 (and ~150 nodes in a sim farm); these numbers are subject to my bad memory). There are a few tips I have arrived at and have observed others say that may help:
One: NFS mount/home. Preferably not off of a linux NFS server, apparently Linux still isn't as good as, say, Solaris WRT NFS serving. Also note that, in the linux distros I've used in NFS/NIS environments, if the NFS/NIS server goes down and comes back up, the Linux clients can exhibit "odd" behavior. odd == {not coming back up, etc}. Both the client and server NFS funkiness may not be an issue with the new kernel, btw. This allows for _much easier_ centralized backup {tape library, raid, whatever). I imagine you already have your own network-centric user authentication system like NIS(+), ldap, kerberos, whatever. A second benefit to this is that of a user's machine dies, and you have a stock of "premade" workstations, you can just plug it in and they're back up. This requires a minimal bit of education WRT "keep all your shit in/home" but it's worth it.
Two: (this from an article written by the head admin @ RH). Use a source control system for your config files. That way you can track versions, changes, retrieve old versions, etc. CVS was the referenced system. This makes mucho sense when you think about it, as config file nightmares are enough to give the sturdiest admin pause.
Three: security is of course a combination of many things. network security is outside of the question's space, and I assume you already have that aspect covered anyway (NB: openbsd makes a kickass firewall router if you are looking for a cisco/lucent/whatever alternative). WRT host-based security, just turn off all the services you don't need. That's step #1. Axe inetd. Use shadow/MD5 passwords, or customize the distro to use something else secure (OTPIE, kerberos, isn't there encrypted NIS+ transmission?, et al. (the places I've worked at haven't been more paranoid than shadow/MD5 for the workstations)). Have a centralized loghost that you spend a LOT of time securing. (OTPIE == one time passwords in everything. a google search will pull it up; I think it's dicussed in the ORA Practical Unix and Internet Security book). There are other tweaks that can be done but I think what I've described will take you a long way. There is a book on the LDP (Linux Documentation Project) called Securing and Optimizing Linux that was IIRC pretty good.
The previous posters were all pretty much dead on that a pre-extant distro is probably what you want to start with. Either debian or Mandrake/RH would do fine. Debians package management system is pretty neat once you get used to it. Mandrake has an interesting install-time option that lets you affect system security on a wholescale level (file and dir permissions, su-ability, blah blah) via a selection box ranging from "Hello, Crackers!" to "Insane" or some such. Of course you may also have the resources to build a distro effectively from scratch to exactly fit you needs. Whatever works. I will say the one-step installs like KickStart (RH/?Mandrake?) or a Big Ass (tm) shell script launched from a boot/root floppy combined with a central media mount point (e.g. an NFS'd cdrom or a FTP dir) are _nice_ when you have 100s of machines to install. There was an article in the most recent LJ (maybe it was the one before that) about this.
WRT apps, StarOffice is OK. It gets the job done but you'll probably want 128+ MB of ram and a 400+ MHz processor. Browsing with Netscape is tolerable as long as you don't expect much. Groupware is a whole other thread in the making, and has shown up at least three times here on/. in the past week. That's probably the common subset of functionality the users will need (i.e. progammers and secretaries both check mail). After that, well, it depends on the users. If they're programmers, well, linux is a programmer's _dream operating system_ IMNSHO. As far as desktops go, I know that gdm (gtk-using-update of xdm) can launch different sessions selectively. So give them kde, gnome+(E/fvwm2/Afterstep/Whatever), or any other combo of things your black sysadmin heart desires and let the users choose what they like the best. StarOffice, Netscape, and xterm/rxvt/et.al. work the same in pretty much any desktop environment. KDE is particularly easy for most win32 users to adapt to.
Sorry if it seems like I have babble mode on, but I'm up late.;-) Good luck! I'd offer to help in person (I'm in Texas, so is JSC, so there's a chance we're in the same area code) but I somehow doubt a national agency is going to be thrilled to have a 22-year-old goth punk who is probably utterly incapable of getting a security clearance (for pretty much all the reasons you could think of except being a spy for a foreign power) poking about their network...
Last tangental thought: ask the fellows over in the NSA about how they did it. Since they just released NSALinux v.01 or some such they have probably tested its use internally and in a similar environment (.gov, $security++). Maybe you could collaborate to produce some guidelines for other.gov agencies looking to make the switch (USDOC-STD-1234-ABCD-LMNOP no doubt;-) )...
Sure, that's easy. I'd post it here but the lameness filter keeps complaining...;-)
(I'm just joking btw, unless you want a tv-late-night-commercial-billing-system that always says, no matter the product or service, that it is "only 19.95 plus shipping and handling".)
IIRC TeX is asymptotically converging on PI -- to an arbitrary but large percision -- for it's version number (trust a mathematician to come up with this). So when TeX is feature-complete for all possible uses and contains no bugs, version will exactly equal PI...
Of course it could be argued that this numbering scheme is perfect for TeX since it's just about the last possible thing a clueless newbie should be trying to use.:-)
Is the 'supplier' you mention the place that supplies your networking hardware? If so, I'd trust their advice about as much as I would the answer resulting from asking a car salesman "do I need a new car?" or "is leasing wiser than buying financially?". At the very least you should get a second opinion (e.g. usenet, other sysadmins in the area, etc) from somebody who doesn't stand to gain $$$ from your buying new networking kit.
Nope. The water would boil off first, leaving all the organic crud (to use a technical term;-)) in the water vessel. The organics AFAIK all have boiling points about 100 C. Anyway, why bother? If the extraction goes ideally well 100 % of the caffeine has been removed. If that isn't good enough for you, you need to look into crystal meth for your awakeness needs...;-)
Yes. However in theory you use the absolute minimum required amount of water. If you fuck up and add too much, just pop it on the stove for a little while (all the organics have a higher boiling point that water AFAIK). Of course if you wanted to get some _really_ wierd looks, just buy an industrial strength rotavap for your cube...;-)
I'm not trying to troll here, but I swear the first thing that popped to mind when I read the story heading was "Damn, a flexible, charge-emitting polymer?! They're going to have a field-day making electric dildii with that."
Oh, you think I'm joking? Well, there used to be a company called Folsum Electric. Damned if I can find their page anymore. Anyway, there is a listing of their products with pictures here. Personally, I think it's eerie how much that stuff looks like my stereo equipment, well, if my stereo had a 5&3/4" chrome buttplug attached to it anyway... (I wouldn't advise clicking on that if you're easily offended by the sight of objects meant to induce current through various orfices, btw.)
Nah, you don't even need to be a shareholder to get information. Hell, you can get so much information due to required public disclosure that
it becomes a matter of filtering out information. The SEC filings are a prime source for this. If you pull a symbol lookup on Yahoo! Finance for example , click on "Research", and then in the research section on the "More Info" line up at the top click on "SEC" to get 10-Q Quarterly and 10-K annual reports. (I'm a computational chem major but I have a business minor (need easy buffer classes, and believe me if you have half a brain you can get a 4.0 in business), so I had to use this stuff for some financial accounting classes.) There are other sources of this information, like EDGAR Online, who have everything, not just 10-Q/Ks.
WRT Amazon, here's a link to their last 10-Q from Oct. 30, 2000 and archived reports.
This is dry reading, as they don't try to make it easy to read like the shareholder's reports, but this is the hard data that shows where the money goes inside Amazon.
Slashdot Mirror
My mother was in grade school when kennedy was killed (she was 11), and had been naughty that day. She was exiled to the corridor to "sit and think about what you've done" (<-- doesn't this happen to every kid at least once?). While she was out there, she heard the ladies working in the cafeteria talking about the asassination (they'd presumably heard it on the radio). Mom became quite disturbed and ran back into the classroom and shooted "Kennedy's dead! He's been shot!". The teacher didn't believe her and she got in even more trouble for telling "such hurtful lies." (Note that of course the teacher didn't apologize when she was found to be in the wrong, I think it's in their contracts that they can never do that... :-/)
Fast forward ~23 years. I'm in 2nd grade (I was about 8, we started regular schooling @ 6 in my district). All the kids had been getting worked up about the shuttle launch for weeks, making posters, reading things about it, etc. The teacher told us (I don't recall how she found out), and I got in a lot of trouble for not believing her (shouting "That's not true! You're a liar!" probably didn't help)).
Well, at least good things have come from those tragedies. Now we take a little better care of our Presidents (i.e. no more riding around in convertibles). And from what other posters have said (corroborated by a friend who spent 6 months as an enginneering intern at NASA), they are a lot more fastidious now about launching safely.
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Fuck Censorship.
The impression I got from reading about systems programming on MS-DOS was that it's in no way a real-time OS. The sarcastic phrase applied to it most often was "same day service" I think. :-) Note that this was mainly before my time, just casual reading on my part so I could be wrong. Anyway, based on my impression of DOS, I doubt linux would have higher latency on response times (provided you don't lard up the machine(s) with extraneous daemons and whatnot).
There is a lot activity going on around embedded and real-time linux now. Heck, the publishers of the Linux Journal just started a new magazine focused entirely on this area. So if you do need hard real-time (?and if you're doing ok on DOS now you may not?), there's probably a dozen/score/tripleassload of companies eager to help you with soft and hard-ware to make the switch. c.f. Lineo, Hard Hat Linux, et al.
One other poster mentioned QNX. Keep in mind that I personally have no experience with it, but somebody on a local unix group's mailing list was saying that a) it's a cool OS, but b) it's dev environment is kinda wierd to a UNIX developer. Something to maybe think about/ look into further if you're planning development in-house.
Good luck!
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Fuck Censorship.
After all, one of the official expansions for "perl" is Practical Extraction and Report Language (the other being Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister)...
Perl supports interfacing to MySQL (quite well, see DBI.pm (and the supporting DBD::MySQL.pm for MySQL)). Perl also has something called "formats" which make writing formatted tabular data easy as pie (sort of like fortran IO maybe, or like structured string/variable substitution). See the camel book about that. Basically you'd just grab your result set, and then iterate through it, printing using a format. (you can also do formatted, repeating headers with this; and of course it handles stupid crap like pagination for you) The only "difficult" part would be tinkering with the format to get it like you want (formatting being the pickiest part of any report job).
If you really wanted to be a fancy-pants, perl also has (several? at least two that I can think of) interfaces to PDF generation libraries.
Of course this all requires some knowledge of perl. :-) (If you're a C programmer I'd say you could learn enough perl to do this project in a week or less. Java programmers might feel dirty doing it, but they could probably do the same.)
(I know other languages could do this all, but the format feature of perl would make it _really easy_.)
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Fuck Censorship.
The Assault mission sounds really cool! But then I'm addicted to Assault missions in UT. :-)
Anyway, to make it slightly more realistic, would it be possible to have regiospecific single shot kill? I.e. if you're outside the station, a single shot would kill your character (by virtue of breaking seal on your space suit and death by explosive decompression/hard vacuum exposure). Just a thought...
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Fuck Censorship.
(would say something about DSLreports but somebody beat me to the punch)
Anyway, in my part of the world (Texas, USA), cable modems are becoming suprisingly common. My mother has a cable modem in Nacogdoches, which is ~30,000 people deep in East Texas, a few hours drive from anything. It's roughly performance equal to a dual ISDN line, probably becuase the cable company doesn't have a really fat pipe (being as I said pretty much 150 miles from anything like a big city and thus a comm hub). I've heard from friends in other parts of the country that cable companies in their area are reasonably far along in their rollout as well.
So basically give the cable company/companies in the target town(s) a call to see if they offer service. True, cable modems might not be the absolute best solution technically and they might have crummy EULA/TOS consrtaints, but it beats dialup by a long shot... (Also there are typically fewer cable companies than ISPs for a given town, cutting down on the number of people to call.)
Good luck!
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The original post was probably posted by somebody who comes from a culture where '.' is the demarcator for thousands-place instead of ','. i.e. 38.000 == 38,000. Either that or they typo'd, after all the two keys are right next to each other.
Based purely on personal experience, I can say with authority that linux can handle > 38 tcp/ip connections simultaneously :-).
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He won't be able to run it, simply from the standpoint that the M64 AFAIK is AGP-only, and I doubt that a P120 has an AGP slot. Dude (p120 guy), just be happy with fvwm2 or blackbox or windowmaker or whatever works, because the amount of time and effort and potentially money you'll spend on that machine to get E/Gnome+Whatever/KDE running smoothly is prohibitive (I ran E pretty well on a p233mmx with 64meg of ram and an ATI Xpert 98 card, that's probably the minimum; now I run it on a p2-450 with 128 and a Riva TNT, and it flys (no Gnome)).
If you are interested in getting a used PC, check out used-pcs.com(a local shop I've heard good things about; they have tons of Dells and whatnot. A system that meets the "minimum" for E I mentioned above looks like it would cost about $200-250 from them). Of course eBay is an option etc. etc. My point being is that if you really want to run this stuff just spend ~$300 or so on a used system, and make the old machine a server or something. :-) Good luck! (note also that you don't need Gnome at all if you're running E 0.16.x, so you can save memory and CPU by just running E.)
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The more I read about all the bulshit going on with and around HDTV, the more I think I'm just going to not upgrade to it at all. When my regular set is no longer useful, I'll make it into a great big 35" aquarium.
Seriously, how many really good TV shows are there on TV now? CNN- and MSNBC-type info can all be gotten online. This leaves local news (read the paper) and fiction. OK, so you want to spend how much money to be able to watch Buffy, X-Files, Angel, StarCrap, et al.? I'm leaving asides sports games, but for me this is a total non-issue. Hmmm, movie playback... Unless you spend $100K on your home theater, it's better on the big screen (and if your memory is good it's pretty pointless to watch something more than once).
I suspect many people will hit this point of diminishing returns where the marginal utility realized from upgrading to HDTV is just too small (hastened by the prevalence of PCs and net appliances providing a roughly equivalent feed of information). If the broadcasters and manufacturers wish to avoid this fate they'd better begin acting intelligently real quick (interoperable standards, ease of use (including taping and reproduction) similar to prextant standards, etc.). If they don't I suspect that my as-yet unconceived child(ren) will ask me what this "TV" thing was that I and their grandparents blabber on about...
This is not to say that there won't be some form of intellectual cotton-candy available as an opiate to the anesthetised masses. It might just be tcp/ip based instead of TV-feeding-trough based.
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Don't get me wrong, I like hearing my mp3s at "good enough" quality and various honks and tweets from first person shooters, but I'm also an audiophile. Even if you could somehow get standalone-amplifier sound quality from a computer card (hint: it ain't happening any time soon; decoding is one thing but amplification with clarity is entirely another), most computer speaker setups I've seen are just _wrong_. They all seem to revolve around 2 to n small, tweeter-sized speaker boxes, and one "big" subwoofer. The problem is this completely b0rks the midrange sound reproduction of the system (the more different speaker sizes (for cone speakers), the more discrete bands of sound you can reproduce at a time).
So if this new THX system has just a good, line-out only, decoder-only card, with a pamplet telling the end user how to buy a good amplifier (go Onkyo! :-) ) and good speakers (personal preference here, but practically anything mainstream home audio is better than the crap the computer manufacturers pawn off on people), then they're doing the right thing. Otherwise it's just a marketing gimmick. (Note also that THX certification is highly overrated, in that it is possible to qet audio kit that meets or exceeds the THX certifcation standards, but lacks the logo because the manufacturer didn't want to pony up the USD$100K (IIRC) that logo cost.)
If they aren't shielding the audio subsystem from EMF they're definitely doing it as a marketing gimmick. EMF does not do nice things to audio reproduction, and the inside of a computer case isn't exactly a low EMF area... ;-)
To do surround sound _well_, your're probably looking at USD$600-1200 for a good amp and $500-1500 for speakers; with virtually unlimited upward headroom for cost expansion (e.g. vapor deposition speakers, which a really cool, and really expensive (saw a set once of 4 speakers a center and a sub that cost $60K)). This is for a system that would do a DVD encoded in 5.1 justice; that changes it from watching a movie to _feeling_ the movie. It sounds like a lot of money, but then once you've heard it it's hard to go back. :-)
One last random note for those of you who're contemplating hooking up your computer to your stereo: use the absolute minimum cable length you can -- noise increases with cable length (c.f. SCSI).
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You're quite right about ssh on windows. I found a freeware SSH client for windows (actually a whole suite of SSH-related utils besides just a term) that I really like. It's called PuTTY SSH. I can never remember the address for the web page, but I never need to because when I search for "PuTTY SSH" on google or yahoo it's the first hit. Give it a try the next time your stuck in the ass end of nowhere with nothing but a 486 running win95 and a 14.4 dialup connection, needing to log in to your corp. mail server remotely... (<-- true story) One advantage to the PuTTY SSH term is that it's small (~250Kb) and self contained (no installer, just one .EXE), so unless your on the most painful dialup connection imaginable it shouldn't take too long to grab from the website.
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I'm not going to claim any great experience in the job market (I've been working in IT as a sysadmin and programmer off and on while finishing my degree for about the last year and a half, for context; ~70% of my friends are in IT full time and cover the gamut in terms of experience). Still, it seems that the problems that keep good people from connecting with good employers and vice versa are always HR-related.
The primary symptom of this is what I call the Laundry List syndrome. It seems to happen when the HR person(s) go about asking all the dept. heads what skill sets they need. Then, not knowing the difference between, say JSP and IOS, they place an ad for ONE person, listing ALL of ths skills as REQUIRED. :-( I can't count the number of times I've searched for "perl and linux and java" only to have a third of the result set read like so: "Java, AWT, JSP, Servlets, JDBC, Unix (Solaris, Linux expert admin level), perl, SQL, XML, DHTML, and Photoshop". Predictably this position goes unfilled and nobody is happy in the end. HR people need to _understand_ how what they're looking for fits into the company's goals in order to do their job well.
HR depts. (and recruiters) all to frequently tend to use really, really rigid demarcations and heuristics to attempt to sift for qualified potential employees. "Oh, we're sorry, you have everything we need in skills 1 - 4, and seem like a really easy guy to work with, but you only have 3 years experience with Java instead of 4." I'm not going to say I'm as good with Unix (with ~1 1/2 years experience) as some 20+ year admin; that's just silly. But, let's be honest here, what substantive difference is there between 2 years exp. and 1.5? Yet time and again I've been hit with walls like that, and I've seen it happen many times to friends. If less Procrustean standards were applied, the companies would be able to get people who were at least close enough to learn and come up to speed (this requires good teamwork in the workplace, of course), enabling work to accelerate instead of stagnate or decelerate as the existing employee base gets burned out from having no coworkers to rely on to share the load...
And of course let's not forget the classic chestnuts of "You're taking classes/have a family and thus can't work 60 hours a week, so you're useless to us." Internet Time is bullshit, and is purely a symptom of organizational failure: failure in planning, failure in leadership, failure in marketing, etc. etc. If you can't get all your work done at a reasonably human pace in 40 hours a week, something is W*R*O*N*G with your company.
In short, my sympathy for employers who whine about not being able to find anyone with one breath and yet reject 9 out of 10 applicants with the next is extremely limited.
As a side tangent, I recently found a funny posting in 1997 to Usenet talking about Usenet job ads (and the sad-but-true-insert-bitter-pained-chuckle-here things therein). I still see the exact same things in usenet and web board ads today. The archived post is here.
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Just a footnote to anyone considering going with ColdFusion: it has documented security issues. Search (for example) securityfocus.com for examples. I don't recall if all of them were end-user fixable, but they might have been (I don't have access to it).
Before anyone gets too riled up, I'm not saying that CF is a crappy language (on the contrary it does look cool from the little bits I've seen). Also it should be noted I'm not a full-time security or CF person, so this is just an informal heads-up that people looking into CF should also see if there are still any issues with the current version(s)...
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Once your karma hits a certain threshold (like 25 I think), you automatically post with a +1 bonus (+1 logged in, +1 karma bonus = +2 to start). There is a little check box over "Submit" that says "No Score +1 Bonus", which you can click if you don't feel that whatever you're saying is worthy of the boost. :-) This helps prevent you loosing karma from people modding down things that should have been at +1 to begin with; and of course it's usage is entirely a judgement call (like all things related to moderation). Hope that helps clear up what I think the area of your confusion is.
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If I had to put on a pointy-haired-boss mask and think like a Sun manager in charge of this, I'd speculate that the machines will come standard with a choice between a Linux (most likely RH or Debian; to look at other companies doing similar things like SGI) and Solaris x86. Unless I'm missing something these are pretty standard x86 machines, so other OS's would be easy to install (*BSD, NT4/Win2k (ugh)).
But who knows? Maybe they'll decide to throw us all a curveball and stick something like Darwin or QNX on there by default. :-)
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Well, there is a large market segment (ah, help, I'm thinking like a marketing major! :-) ) in terms of performance demand between one x86 processor and a high-end Ultra Enterprose machine (rackmount uniprocessor server = ~$3000, maxed-out E10K = ~$2,000,000 (of course you do get an awesome amount of performance with the later, heh)). In other words, if a customer comes to you and says: "Well, I need something more beefy than your $$$ uniprocessor machine, but not as beefy as your $$$$$$ U.E. line..." you want to be able to sell to than need.
This price/performance continuum is the same thing you see done in many markets (e.g. Celeron/Px(x={2/!!!}/Xeon by Intel). It just makes good business sense.
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Your observation that the Athlons use, on average, more power and radiate more heat than the comparable Intel processor is, from what data I've seen, absolutely correct. However, I don't think that they use more power or generate more heat than an Alpha processor (some of those guys get hot, as anyone who's ever not quite given an Alpha-attached heatsink enough time to cool down has discovered ;-) ). Alphas are fairly common in the server (and rackmount server) market. True, you probably wouldn't want to stick one in a 1U, but still... (I don't have any hard numbers, but I imagine that the Duron line is probably well suited to a 1U in terms of die size, power use, and heat profile, given a well-designed case at least.)
If there is anything that will hold the Duron/Athlon/Thunderbird line back from server-market acceptance (technical reason, not Intel-ism in IT depts.), it would be the comparatively small cache sizes. I.e. you'll probably want to use an UltraSparc-based solution with (2-8) megs of cache per chip (or some other "big cache" arch like Alpha) for the DB server[1], but everything else (www, mail, etc) is just fine with the "small" x86 machines, a domain in which ceteris parabis Athlon would win over Pentium by virtue of decreased cost for similar of greater functionality.
[1] of course there are many other factors that go into making a mid-to-high-end DB server, but I/O and backplane bandwidth do play an important role; having large chip caches and >32bit architectures helps this quite a bit (the other main area is of course disk, but that's outside the topic at the moment)
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Fuck Censorship.
A friend of mine and I have set up ~5 slashcode[1] sites now (geekaustin.org is an example; they're all hosted off the same box). The first one you do is a royal with cheese pain in the ass. The engine is very flexible, but it'll probably take you a good month or two to get it up and become familiar with the inner workings.
So for a quick fix, my .02 USD is to avoid Slashcode and go with something simpler.
Just to add another name to the pot, Glasscode (java servlet based) was released yesterday or the day before. I'd provide a link here but if you can't look for the story link that's still more than likely on the front page yer just being laaaa-zeee. ;-)
Good luck!
[1] the mod_perl/shtml/MySQL monstrosity that powers this website among (many) others. it works but on the inside it ain't pretty...
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I have admin'd in a few middling-large environments (one, at a math dept with ~450 desktops, the other, at a chip designer firm with ~300 (and ~150 nodes in a sim farm); these numbers are subject to my bad memory). There are a few tips I have arrived at and have observed others say that may help:
One: NFS mount /home. Preferably not off of a linux NFS server, apparently Linux still isn't as good as, say, Solaris WRT NFS serving. Also note that, in the linux distros I've used in NFS/NIS environments, if the NFS/NIS server goes down and comes back up, the Linux clients can exhibit "odd" behavior. odd == {not coming back up, etc}. Both the client and server NFS funkiness may not be an issue with the new kernel, btw. This allows for _much easier_ centralized backup {tape library, raid, whatever). I imagine you already have your own network-centric user authentication system like NIS(+), ldap, kerberos, whatever. A second benefit to this is that of a user's machine dies, and you have a stock of "premade" workstations, you can just plug it in and they're back up. This requires a minimal bit of education WRT "keep all your shit in /home" but it's worth it.
Two: (this from an article written by the head admin @ RH). Use a source control system for your config files. That way you can track versions, changes, retrieve old versions, etc. CVS was the referenced system. This makes mucho sense when you think about it, as config file nightmares are enough to give the sturdiest admin pause.
Three: security is of course a combination of many things. network security is outside of the question's space, and I assume you already have that aspect covered anyway (NB: openbsd makes a kickass firewall router if you are looking for a cisco/lucent/whatever alternative). WRT host-based security, just turn off all the services you don't need. That's step #1. Axe inetd. Use shadow/MD5 passwords, or customize the distro to use something else secure (OTPIE, kerberos, isn't there encrypted NIS+ transmission?, et al. (the places I've worked at haven't been more paranoid than shadow/MD5 for the workstations)). Have a centralized loghost that you spend a LOT of time securing. (OTPIE == one time passwords in everything. a google search will pull it up; I think it's dicussed in the ORA Practical Unix and Internet Security book). There are other tweaks that can be done but I think what I've described will take you a long way. There is a book on the LDP (Linux Documentation Project) called Securing and Optimizing Linux that was IIRC pretty good.
The previous posters were all pretty much dead on that a pre-extant distro is probably what you want to start with. Either debian or Mandrake/RH would do fine. Debians package management system is pretty neat once you get used to it. Mandrake has an interesting install-time option that lets you affect system security on a wholescale level (file and dir permissions, su-ability, blah blah) via a selection box ranging from "Hello, Crackers!" to "Insane" or some such. Of course you may also have the resources to build a distro effectively from scratch to exactly fit you needs. Whatever works. I will say the one-step installs like KickStart (RH/?Mandrake?) or a Big Ass (tm) shell script launched from a boot/root floppy combined with a central media mount point (e.g. an NFS'd cdrom or a FTP dir) are _nice_ when you have 100s of machines to install. There was an article in the most recent LJ (maybe it was the one before that) about this.
WRT apps, StarOffice is OK. It gets the job done but you'll probably want 128+ MB of ram and a 400+ MHz processor. Browsing with Netscape is tolerable as long as you don't expect much. Groupware is a whole other thread in the making, and has shown up at least three times here on /. in the past week. That's probably the common subset of functionality the users will need (i.e. progammers and secretaries both check mail). After that, well, it depends on the users. If they're programmers, well, linux is a programmer's _dream operating system_ IMNSHO. As far as desktops go, I know that gdm (gtk-using-update of xdm) can launch different sessions selectively. So give them kde, gnome+(E/fvwm2/Afterstep/Whatever), or any other combo of things your black sysadmin heart desires and let the users choose what they like the best. StarOffice, Netscape, and xterm/rxvt/et.al. work the same in pretty much any desktop environment. KDE is particularly easy for most win32 users to adapt to.
Sorry if it seems like I have babble mode on, but I'm up late. ;-) Good luck! I'd offer to help in person (I'm in Texas, so is JSC, so there's a chance we're in the same area code) but I somehow doubt a national agency is going to be thrilled to have a 22-year-old goth punk who is probably utterly incapable of getting a security clearance (for pretty much all the reasons you could think of except being a spy for a foreign power) poking about their network...
Last tangental thought: ask the fellows over in the NSA about how they did it. Since they just released NSALinux v.01 or some such they have probably tested its use internally and in a similar environment (.gov, $security++). Maybe you could collaborate to produce some guidelines for other .gov agencies looking to make the switch (USDOC-STD-1234-ABCD-LMNOP no doubt ;-) )...
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Sure, that's easy. I'd post it here but the lameness filter keeps complaining... ;-)
(I'm just joking btw, unless you want a tv-late-night-commercial-billing-system that always says, no matter the product or service, that it is "only 19.95 plus shipping and handling".)
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IIRC TeX is asymptotically converging on PI -- to an arbitrary but large percision -- for it's version number (trust a mathematician to come up with this). So when TeX is feature-complete for all possible uses and contains no bugs, version will exactly equal PI...
Of course it could be argued that this numbering scheme is perfect for TeX since it's just about the last possible thing a clueless newbie should be trying to use. :-)
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Is the 'supplier' you mention the place that supplies your networking hardware? If so, I'd trust their advice about as much as I would the answer resulting from asking a car salesman "do I need a new car?" or "is leasing wiser than buying financially?". At the very least you should get a second opinion (e.g. usenet, other sysadmins in the area, etc) from somebody who doesn't stand to gain $$$ from your buying new networking kit.
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Nope. The water would boil off first, leaving all the organic crud (to use a technical term ;-)) in the water vessel. The organics AFAIK all have boiling points about 100 C. Anyway, why bother? If the extraction goes ideally well 100 % of the caffeine has been removed. If that isn't good enough for you, you need to look into crystal meth for your awakeness needs... ;-)
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Yes. However in theory you use the absolute minimum required amount of water. If you fuck up and add too much, just pop it on the stove for a little while (all the organics have a higher boiling point that water AFAIK). Of course if you wanted to get some _really_ wierd looks, just buy an industrial strength rotavap for your cube... ;-)
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I'm not trying to troll here, but I swear the first thing that popped to mind when I read the story heading was "Damn, a flexible, charge-emitting polymer?! They're going to have a field-day making electric dildii with that."
Oh, you think I'm joking? Well, there used to be a company called Folsum Electric. Damned if I can find their page anymore. Anyway, there is a listing of their products with pictures here. Personally, I think it's eerie how much that stuff looks like my stereo equipment, well, if my stereo had a 5&3/4" chrome buttplug attached to it anyway... (I wouldn't advise clicking on that if you're easily offended by the sight of objects meant to induce current through various orfices, btw.)
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Nah, you don't even need to be a shareholder to get information. Hell, you can get so much information due to required public disclosure that it becomes a matter of filtering out information. The SEC filings are a prime source for this. If you pull a symbol lookup on Yahoo! Finance for example , click on "Research", and then in the research section on the "More Info" line up at the top click on "SEC" to get 10-Q Quarterly and 10-K annual reports. (I'm a computational chem major but I have a business minor (need easy buffer classes, and believe me if you have half a brain you can get a 4.0 in business), so I had to use this stuff for some financial accounting classes.) There are other sources of this information, like EDGAR Online, who have everything, not just 10-Q/Ks.
WRT Amazon, here's a link to their last 10-Q from Oct. 30, 2000 and archived reports. This is dry reading, as they don't try to make it easy to read like the shareholder's reports, but this is the hard data that shows where the money goes inside Amazon.
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