I currently bike to work and it takes about 20 minutes.
I live 20 miles from where I work. I don't regularly ride a bicycle, but I'm pretty sure that if I could make that ride in 20 minutes, I'd be better off winning the Tour de France every year.
It is likely that you lack basic understanding of Windows terminology...any program that does not create a GUI window is a "console app".
In reality, though, every Windows program has a console (i.e., stdin and stdout), but these file handles get closed pretty quickly by most default library startup routines.
Actually, Doctor Who would never have survived on a true commercial network.
The BBC is able to produce shows without any eye for long-term gain, or requirement to fill a time slot with a highly-rated program. Because of that, they could have massive gaps between series of shows (some good, some not so good, but all important enough for some group of viewers), which just doesn't happen on commecial television.
You can always use "bash", which comes with Cygwin. The latest Cygwin installs an icon in your start menu that gets you a bash prompt.
Personally, though, I use 4NT. Although it isn't directly available anymore, Take Command Console/LE from the same company is close to the last version of 4NT, and free (as in beer).
One of my favorite current command lines is: sort < clip: > clip:
This sorts whatever is on the Windows clipboard essentially "in place".
I apologize for being so blunt, but I am a strong supporter of A La Carte cable, which by my calculation would drop my bill from $65 a month to about $20 a month
So, you only watch 4 channels?
Without the bundling, that's the price you'd have to pay for pretty much every channel. The popular ones (like ESPN...which is pretty much the highest-rated cable channel) would be able to charge a lot because they can, while the less popular ones (like the/. favorite ScyFy) would have to charge a lot to make up for the fact that they need to stand on their own.
If you have any doubts about the price of a la carte channels, take a look at the price of "premium" channels like HBO, Showtime, etc. They have to get all their money from subscribers, generally show a lot of repeat programming, and run about $10/month. Sure that $10 gets you multiple feeds, but it's really not a lot more programming, and is not nearly as important since DVRs have become available to everyone.
The actual reality, though, is that $20/month would get you two cable channels that you want, along with all the channels that the cable company is required by law to carry (local networks, "public interest", etc.), plus you'd still get all the infomercial channels, because they pay the cable companies to carry them.
Yes, after years of selling you DRM-infested music, Apple was one of the first* to ask to be able to sell without DRM so that they could re-sell you the same music, thus milking you for every penny as the GP said.
*By "one of the first", I mean "third or fourth out of the six or seven large downloadable music stores". EMusic, Amazon and others all offered DRM-free music before the Apple iTunes store.
The strength of those systems is the number of cores you can get in a single system. A T5440 supports 4 T2 Plus prcoessors which gives you 32 cores. The CoolThreads servers also the number of threads. A 4 socket Core i7 server only has 32 threads while a T5440 has 256.
With clusters of virtualization servers that can move workloads around, 8 servers using the current Core i7 chips would cost far less than a fully-outfitted T5440 (which runs about $150K), and be far more versatile.
The Core i7 is also not a server class processor, it is meant for the desktop and gaming market. It doesn't support ECC memory.
Core i7/Nehalam == poe-tay-toe/pa-tah-toe.
The differences are slight...really, except for ECC, there's not a whole lot that separates the two, since Core i7 is Nehalem, of the "Bloomfield" variety, while the Xeons are "Beckton", "Gainestown", "Bloomfield", and "Lynnfield".
The Nehalem Xeons have been out for a while, and systems are shipping with them, although none use the announced but maybe never actually shipping 8-core models. I suspect that most people will be better off with the 4-core/8-thread models, since this isn't your father's hyperthreading...it really is more like an extra core.
I am proud to say we didn't loose a single football player
So, all the football players are still locked in a room somewhere? Or perhaps they are chained up?
I suspect that you could have learned at least a few things by going to class, and that some of the football players still do some "creative" spelling.
Really, if you are writing about how people need to learn to spell (or proofread), you should make sure you can, too.
Sparc failure. Maybe not exactly a failure. I know it's really great processor family. It has got potential. It's fast, multi-core, modern. Probably made them loose lots of money recently. What went wrong here?
One problem is that the very latest SPARC chips ("CoolThreads") are outperformed on a per-core basis by the much cheaper Intel Core i7.
A fairly nice 16-core Core i7 motherboard/CPUs/RAM config will cost around $1000. Sure, you'll have to add disks, a case to put it in, etc., but those costs are essentially the same regardless of what CPU architecture is being used. And, you can get the Intel system from a variety of vendors (HP, Dell, etc.).
The SPARC version will cost closer to $4000 (tough to call, because you can't get the raw motherboard), and run at 1.4GHz instead of 2.66GHz.
Then there's virtualization, which Sun uses to claim SPARC is lower cost because it comes free while you must pay $4000+ for x86 virtualization on an equivalent system. One problem with this claim is that SPARC only allows you to virtualize Solaris, while x86 virtualization allows you to virtualize Windows, BSD, Linux, etc. The second problem is that there are many free hypervisors for x86 that are as good as the one included with Solaris...it's only the enterprise-class easy-to-manage ones that cost money.
A sequence of 4 bytes can be considered an 32-bit unsigned number (assuming 8-bit bytes). Any truly random way to create those 4 bytes will result in an equal chance for all 4,294,967,296 bit patterns. Any way that fills those 4 bytes that doesn't have an equal chance of each of those bit 4,294,967,296 patterns is not random...it is pseudo-random.
Likewise, a sequence of 100 bytes can be considered an 800-bit unsigned number, and any truly random way of creating those bytes will have an equal chance for all 2^800 bit patterns.
Although some of those bit patterns may seem more organized to a human observer, and might have less "entropy" by some definition, they do not require any more work to create than those with "more entropy".
Last, it all depends on how you look at those bit patterns whether there truly is more or less entropy. A sequence interpreted as individual bytes may have far more "organization" than the same sequence when treated as 32-bit little-endian values, for some definition of "organization".
Honestly, I'd love to see a 13 to 20 episode "miniseries" set completely in the Star Trek mirror universe. I don't think they could sustain it for more than that due to the required cast turnover ("I've got the part of captain of the Enterprise in the new Star Trek series...great...what do you mean it's only a 6-episode contract?"), but it would be a hell of a lot of fun.
No, the entropy is identical...that's the point of truly random data, as opposed to pseudo-random.
For truly random data of a given length, then every bit pattern is equally likely to occur. Humans tend to view things with repeating patterns as not random, but that doesn't make it true.
Part of the problem with convincing people about true randomness is the way pseudo-random generators work, in that "good" ones will not have long blocks of repeated patterns, but that's only for the full bit-length of the generated number. So, if you use a 64-bit PRNG and generate 64-bit numbers, the sequence has no (or very few) "patterns" as far as a human is concerned. But, if you only want numbers from 0-7 (i.e., 3-bit numbers), then you will end up with a lot of "patterns".
A standard 100 bill packet of US currency takes up about 24 cubic inches (6 x 1-5/8 x 1-1/2). So, with $1 bills, that would be 22,204 packets for about 534,561 cubic inches, or 309 cubic feet.
Your typical "small car" has a luggage space of around 15 cubic feet. So, you could just barely cram that much money in using $20 bills. You'd have to go to "large" bills (i.e., $100) for at least some of the packets if want to fit it in comfortably.
Sorry, though...if I had that much cash crammed in the trunk of my car, I wouldn't be loaning any to you, because I wouldn't posting on/. at all...I'd be relaxing on some beach without any technology but drink mixers.
If Windows would actually join the 1980s and have decent support for virtual desktops that would alleviate a lot of that, but even in KDE or Gnome it's often the case that I have stuff open on all of the desktops and would still have to move things. (On the tiling WM I'm using now, awesome, I've got 32 virtual desktops on each monitor, about 1/3 of which are usually used, so there getting to an open desktop would be pretty easy.)
The Windows NT 3.1 Resource Kit included a program called TopDesk which still works fine with everything up through XP. It does the same sort of multiple desktop system that your link shows.
I run with and 11x3 layout, so that's 33 total desktops. Windows can be set to follow you to the current desktop, or stay where they were as you switch. You can also have "ghosts", which allow you to force a particular program to always start up on a particular desktop.
That's only if there isn't an autorun.inf pointing to an executable. If there is, it runs that instead of showing the "What do you want to do?" dialog. Only having autorun disabled will protect you from that.
This allows media with music and pictures to do whatever you have chosen for them (i.e., running a known, already installed program), while stopping that random.EXE from the media from running automatically.
About the only good thing I can think of is that the judge wanted to give the **AA lawyers just one chance to fix something in private before he hauled out the contempt charges and sanctions. And that's a real long shot.
Every other reason I can think of would seem to be bad news for the human race, and good news for the **AA.
Add a bunch more RAM and set your temporary directory up on a RAM drive.
This will cause some Windows updates to fail, because they write a file to your TEMP that gets run at reboot.
Mostly, this is just for cleanup, but sometimes important things happen at that point. There are some other utilities (like partition re-sizers) that do the same thing.
Lately, though, I've been noticing that MS updates create a randomly-named directory in the root of the drive with the most free space. Some of the updates don't delete it correctly, and some even set the permissions on it so that Administrators can't delete it, either, without changing the permissions.
What you say was only true for MS volume licenses purchased using "software assurance".
There are many companies who have figured out that without new versions every year, MS "software assurance" is just a scam that moves money into Microsoft bank accounts for no reason. It turns out that if you need more than about 50 licenses, then just buying new volume licenses every 4 years is cheaper than paying for software assurance.
Also, with the new PITA volume license checking in Vista and beyond, you get many of the disadvantages of having individually activated licenses, so it may not be a good idea to even use that model anymore, unless you are a very large company. And since smaller companies can't use the new version at all (you must have at least 25 active Vista licenses, and 5 active 2008 server licenses to keep the license server happy), I suspect many will just go for the standard method of activation.
Except that this is pure PHB-bait -- IT professionals are going to realize pretty quick that all their apps are going to require testing to ensure they can be run in this VM, just like if they were being tested for Windows 7.
Give that man some more mod points.
Also, you can do exactly what Microsoft is offering using VMware Player or Server (or many other hypervisors) and your old XP license. Both will be free, but the latter method will work with all versions of Win 7, and won't require hardware virtualization support (although VT or AMD-V would allow the VM to run with better performance).
Slashdot Mirror
I currently bike to work and it takes about 20 minutes.
I live 20 miles from where I work. I don't regularly ride a bicycle, but I'm pretty sure that if I could make that ride in 20 minutes, I'd be better off winning the Tour de France every year.
Here's an overview of the courses I took that were required for my degree
No required algorithms class?
Well, that explains the current crop of programmers who think that memory and CPU are infinite resources.
It is likely that you lack basic understanding of Windows terminology...any program that does not create a GUI window is a "console app".
In reality, though, every Windows program has a console (i.e., stdin and stdout), but these file handles get closed pretty quickly by most default library startup routines.
So while Crap normally means deification it has been expanded to anything so worthless that it needs to be disposed of as soon as possible.
I don't think I have ever seen the term "crap" used in such a way as to imply that something was to be worshipped like a god.
This has to be the most twist from the intended meaning on a /. typo ever. The word you were looking for was "defecation".
BTW, Dr. Who doesn't count.
Actually, Doctor Who would never have survived on a true commercial network.
The BBC is able to produce shows without any eye for long-term gain, or requirement to fill a time slot with a highly-rated program. Because of that, they could have massive gaps between series of shows (some good, some not so good, but all important enough for some group of viewers), which just doesn't happen on commecial television.
You're still watching it on a TV though, right? It's just standard TV over IP, not TV on your computer.
That's not a very meaningful statement, because my computer outputs video directly to my TV, and I watch that way a lot (using my computer as a DVR).
I also have a network media player that can read files from network shares or connect to Internet streams and display them on my TV.
Last, there are now TVs that need nothing more than an Internet connection to view YouTube, Hulu, or Netflix.
You can always use "bash", which comes with Cygwin. The latest Cygwin installs an icon in your start menu that gets you a bash prompt.
Personally, though, I use 4NT. Although it isn't directly available anymore, Take Command Console/LE from the same company is close to the last version of 4NT, and free (as in beer).
One of my favorite current command lines is:
sort < clip: > clip:
This sorts whatever is on the Windows clipboard essentially "in place".
I apologize for being so blunt, but I am a strong supporter of A La Carte cable, which by my calculation would drop my bill from $65 a month to about $20 a month
So, you only watch 4 channels?
Without the bundling, that's the price you'd have to pay for pretty much every channel. The popular ones (like ESPN...which is pretty much the highest-rated cable channel) would be able to charge a lot because they can, while the less popular ones (like the /. favorite ScyFy) would have to charge a lot to make up for the fact that they need to stand on their own.
If you have any doubts about the price of a la carte channels, take a look at the price of "premium" channels like HBO, Showtime, etc. They have to get all their money from subscribers, generally show a lot of repeat programming, and run about $10/month. Sure that $10 gets you multiple feeds, but it's really not a lot more programming, and is not nearly as important since DVRs have become available to everyone.
The actual reality, though, is that $20/month would get you two cable channels that you want, along with all the channels that the cable company is required by law to carry (local networks, "public interest", etc.), plus you'd still get all the infomercial channels, because they pay the cable companies to carry them.
Yes, after years of selling you DRM-infested music, Apple was one of the first* to ask to be able to sell without DRM so that they could re-sell you the same music, thus milking you for every penny as the GP said.
*By "one of the first", I mean "third or fourth out of the six or seven large downloadable music stores". EMusic, Amazon and others all offered DRM-free music before the Apple iTunes store.
The strength of those systems is the number of cores you can get in a single system. A T5440 supports 4 T2 Plus prcoessors which gives you 32 cores. The CoolThreads servers also the number of threads. A 4 socket Core i7 server only has 32 threads while a T5440 has 256.
With clusters of virtualization servers that can move workloads around, 8 servers using the current Core i7 chips would cost far less than a fully-outfitted T5440 (which runs about $150K), and be far more versatile.
The Core i7 is also not a server class processor, it is meant for the desktop and gaming market. It doesn't support ECC memory.
Core i7/Nehalam == poe-tay-toe/pa-tah-toe.
The differences are slight...really, except for ECC, there's not a whole lot that separates the two, since Core i7 is Nehalem, of the "Bloomfield" variety, while the Xeons are "Beckton", "Gainestown", "Bloomfield", and "Lynnfield".
The Nehalem Xeons have been out for a while, and systems are shipping with them, although none use the announced but maybe never actually shipping 8-core models. I suspect that most people will be better off with the 4-core/8-thread models, since this isn't your father's hyperthreading...it really is more like an extra core.
I am proud to say we didn't loose a single football player
So, all the football players are still locked in a room somewhere? Or perhaps they are chained up?
I suspect that you could have learned at least a few things by going to class, and that some of the football players still do some "creative" spelling.
Really, if you are writing about how people need to learn to spell (or proofread), you should make sure you can, too.
I think something like it is already there.
I hear "bucket, it's XP" all the time around my office.
What do you mean "you need to get your ear-ring checked?"
Sparc failure. Maybe not exactly a failure. I know it's really great processor family. It has got potential. It's fast, multi-core, modern. Probably made them loose lots of money recently. What went wrong here?
One problem is that the very latest SPARC chips ("CoolThreads") are outperformed on a per-core basis by the much cheaper Intel Core i7.
A fairly nice 16-core Core i7 motherboard/CPUs/RAM config will cost around $1000. Sure, you'll have to add disks, a case to put it in, etc., but those costs are essentially the same regardless of what CPU architecture is being used. And, you can get the Intel system from a variety of vendors (HP, Dell, etc.).
The SPARC version will cost closer to $4000 (tough to call, because you can't get the raw motherboard), and run at 1.4GHz instead of 2.66GHz.
Then there's virtualization, which Sun uses to claim SPARC is lower cost because it comes free while you must pay $4000+ for x86 virtualization on an equivalent system. One problem with this claim is that SPARC only allows you to virtualize Solaris, while x86 virtualization allows you to virtualize Windows, BSD, Linux, etc. The second problem is that there are many free hypervisors for x86 that are as good as the one included with Solaris...it's only the enterprise-class easy-to-manage ones that cost money.
It all comes down to random bit patterns.
A sequence of 4 bytes can be considered an 32-bit unsigned number (assuming 8-bit bytes). Any truly random way to create those 4 bytes will result in an equal chance for all 4,294,967,296 bit patterns. Any way that fills those 4 bytes that doesn't have an equal chance of each of those bit 4,294,967,296 patterns is not random...it is pseudo-random.
Likewise, a sequence of 100 bytes can be considered an 800-bit unsigned number, and any truly random way of creating those bytes will have an equal chance for all 2^800 bit patterns.
Although some of those bit patterns may seem more organized to a human observer, and might have less "entropy" by some definition, they do not require any more work to create than those with "more entropy".
Last, it all depends on how you look at those bit patterns whether there truly is more or less entropy. A sequence interpreted as individual bytes may have far more "organization" than the same sequence when treated as 32-bit little-endian values, for some definition of "organization".
So the whole movie is set in the mirror universe?
That would truly rock.
Honestly, I'd love to see a 13 to 20 episode "miniseries" set completely in the Star Trek mirror universe. I don't think they could sustain it for more than that due to the required cast turnover ("I've got the part of captain of the Enterprise in the new Star Trek series...great...what do you mean it's only a 6-episode contract?"), but it would be a hell of a lot of fun.
No, the entropy is identical...that's the point of truly random data, as opposed to pseudo-random.
For truly random data of a given length, then every bit pattern is equally likely to occur. Humans tend to view things with repeating patterns as not random, but that doesn't make it true.
Part of the problem with convincing people about true randomness is the way pseudo-random generators work, in that "good" ones will not have long blocks of repeated patterns, but that's only for the full bit-length of the generated number. So, if you use a 64-bit PRNG and generate 64-bit numbers, the sequence has no (or very few) "patterns" as far as a human is concerned. But, if you only want numbers from 0-7 (i.e., 3-bit numbers), then you will end up with a lot of "patterns".
...and you're never going to be able to get 84 of anything.
OK, I'll do the math....
A standard 100 bill packet of US currency takes up about 24 cubic inches (6 x 1-5/8 x 1-1/2). So, with $1 bills, that would be 22,204 packets for about 534,561 cubic inches, or 309 cubic feet.
Your typical "small car" has a luggage space of around 15 cubic feet. So, you could just barely cram that much money in using $20 bills. You'd have to go to "large" bills (i.e., $100) for at least some of the packets if want to fit it in comfortably.
Sorry, though...if I had that much cash crammed in the trunk of my car, I wouldn't be loaning any to you, because I wouldn't posting on /. at all...I'd be relaxing on some beach without any technology but drink mixers.
If Windows would actually join the 1980s and have decent support for virtual desktops that would alleviate a lot of that, but even in KDE or Gnome it's often the case that I have stuff open on all of the desktops and would still have to move things. (On the tiling WM I'm using now, awesome, I've got 32 virtual desktops on each monitor, about 1/3 of which are usually used, so there getting to an open desktop would be pretty easy.)
The Windows NT 3.1 Resource Kit included a program called TopDesk which still works fine with everything up through XP. It does the same sort of multiple desktop system that your link shows.
I run with and 11x3 layout, so that's 33 total desktops. Windows can be set to follow you to the current desktop, or stay where they were as you switch. You can also have "ghosts", which allow you to force a particular program to always start up on a particular desktop.
That's only if there isn't an autorun.inf pointing to an executable. If there is, it runs that instead of showing the "What do you want to do?" dialog. Only having autorun disabled will protect you from that.
The following registry change works quite well:
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\IniFileMapping\Autorun.inf]
@="@SYS:DoesNotExist"
This allows media with music and pictures to do whatever you have chosen for them (i.e., running a known, already installed program), while stopping that random .EXE from the media from running automatically.
It's $4/line/month, so that's $2,220,384/year, which is a boatload of money.
About the only good thing I can think of is that the judge wanted to give the **AA lawyers just one chance to fix something in private before he hauled out the contempt charges and sanctions. And that's a real long shot.
Every other reason I can think of would seem to be bad news for the human race, and good news for the **AA.
Add a bunch more RAM and set your temporary directory up on a RAM drive.
This will cause some Windows updates to fail, because they write a file to your TEMP that gets run at reboot.
Mostly, this is just for cleanup, but sometimes important things happen at that point. There are some other utilities (like partition re-sizers) that do the same thing.
Lately, though, I've been noticing that MS updates create a randomly-named directory in the root of the drive with the most free space. Some of the updates don't delete it correctly, and some even set the permissions on it so that Administrators can't delete it, either, without changing the permissions.
What you say was only true for MS volume licenses purchased using "software assurance".
There are many companies who have figured out that without new versions every year, MS "software assurance" is just a scam that moves money into Microsoft bank accounts for no reason. It turns out that if you need more than about 50 licenses, then just buying new volume licenses every 4 years is cheaper than paying for software assurance.
Also, with the new PITA volume license checking in Vista and beyond, you get many of the disadvantages of having individually activated licenses, so it may not be a good idea to even use that model anymore, unless you are a very large company. And since smaller companies can't use the new version at all (you must have at least 25 active Vista licenses, and 5 active 2008 server licenses to keep the license server happy), I suspect many will just go for the standard method of activation.
Except that this is pure PHB-bait -- IT professionals are going to realize pretty quick that all their apps are going to require testing to ensure they can be run in this VM, just like if they were being tested for Windows 7.
Give that man some more mod points.
Also, you can do exactly what Microsoft is offering using VMware Player or Server (or many other hypervisors) and your old XP license. Both will be free, but the latter method will work with all versions of Win 7, and won't require hardware virtualization support (although VT or AMD-V would allow the VM to run with better performance).