I just finished setting up my girls (7 & 10) PCs, with Linux... Merry bye bye Windoze.
Last year, Christmas of 2007, I purchased three Asus Eee PCs, one for me, one for my son and one for a girlfriend. (Sadly I am divorced, but that is off topic, and no the girlfriend came years after, lol.)
My 14 year old son and my 10 year old daughter absolutely love their brother's Asus Eee PC, the small size, the light weight, the built in web cam, WiFi, ethernet, external monitor and 3 USB ports, the audio and speaker jacks as well as built in speakers and mic. They will be getting theirs, yes I plan to purchase two more this next year, in a few months. Since I saved so much money buying the Asus for only $399 fully installed; I had left over money to purchase my son an external 22" monitor, USB keyboard and USB Mouse. So at home they have a big monitor and when we were away from home on vacation for a week, it was no problem finding a WiFi connection. They absolutely love that little beast! And I love the price.
I switched to Skype many years ago, after my second "no customer service" experience with my current cellular provider. Compared to my cellular phone plan and the amount of money it cost per year compared to SkypeIn + Skype Pro costing about $60 per year; I can purchase a new computer each and every year. Heck based on the price of the new netbooks, I can purchase 3 computers for what I am saving by not having a cellular bill! You gotta love that!
The next generation is discovering Linux, finally. My 16 year old did not know that you could run World of War Craft on Linux...that sold him also. He has a Pentium D running Linux.
If MS wants me to upgrade to Vista, I'll do it, once they make it an operating system suitable for general purpose computation...
Sorry I am not buying your argument. You will upgrade sooner than that for one of these reasons:
Microsoft stops supporting it, like they did 95; like they did 98; like they did 2000, like they will do with XP. Heck they only extended XP's support date because Vista was bombing in the marketplace so badly.
Another application that you feel you must have, will not install until you upgrade to the most current Microsoft O.S. (I say feel because in most cases there are superior open source alternatives available but most will not look for them. When this happened to me the software package tried to prevent me from installing in a subdirectory of my choice. Big mistake. I used another PC that was current and installed it to my USB thumb drive. Once installed I used it just fine on my older out dated operating system to finish that project. Once that project was finished, that situation left such a bad taste in my mouth that I searched and found a superior open source alternative for that software project. So that company who I was very happy with up to that point, lost this customer forever. You think companies would learn. Typically they do NOT, until it is too late. Especially when Microsoft develops an alternative software application to their product and takes their market from them.)
A component on your computer fails, when you buy the replacement part you are told that your current operating system will not work until you authenticate it. (Granted it might take replacing more than one component before you are forced to authenticate it)
Any one else think of other reasons why we would be 'forced' to upgrade to the current operating system whether we like it or not?
The main thing is that Dell now sell most of their hardware at a spec that will run Vista acceptably, as long as you make sure you spec 1 or 2GB ram, and the memory upgrade is only slightly more than the XP cross-grade.
And what is acceptable for Vista will be blazingly fast with GNU/Linux...pretty much any distro.
I have been running Linux with either 256MB or 512MB of RAM without issues. (Purchased an Asus Eee PC in Dec 2007 and it ran fine right out of the box...wait until I replace Xandros with Ubuntu, it will be even better). I also have a Pentium D (64 bit dual processor) with 1 GB of RAM...Linux screams and I love it! Can't wait to get a decent Graphics card installed and run the Beryl Desktop...Vista is not only slow, but just plain boring in comparison.
Everyone I know that has 2 GB or less of RAM and tries to run Vista, gives up and goes back to XP. I believe most people accept that you need at least 3 GB or 4 GB of RAM for Vista to run well.
Personally if I put down the money (granted it is cheaper today than in years past) for more memory, I want that memory to be available to my applications, not sucked up by the operating system.
What I still want it to be able to spec a full Linux desktop with all the hardware supported fully. Why is this still so hard for them when the community has 99% of all the issues sorted already?
You are not kidding about most of the issues being resolved. And you are CORRECT that many are unaware that past problems have been resolved. Take plug & play, it has only been a few years back when there were still problems with plug and play when using Linux, NOT ANYMORE.
Try to find an external hard drive in a store that advertises on its box that it is compatible with Linux. I looked last year and did not see one. They all listed Vista and XP, but not Linux and in many cases not MacIntosh either. I knew it would work so I went on and purchased Seagate's Free Agent 500GB USB drive. No problems at all, it plugged and played like a champ. Now you can get 1 TB for what I paid for the 500GB a year ago. WOW! But still no notice of compatibility with Linux.
While I have heard that Microsoft influences which operating systems many computer resellers installs on their computers, I do not know if they influence other companies like Seagate and Intel, but it would not surprise me.
When I asked the sales reps at Frys whether or not the USB drive would work with Linux, they did not know. I admit that I paused at first and I have a bit of knowledge. Imagine a complete newbie, makes them think that a Linux OS will not work when it most certainly will.
Just a week or two ago I read here on./ how Dell's website offered Linux but that option was definitely NOT as visible as Microsoft Vista or XP. No surprise there either.
Problem is people just are NOT aware of the facts. For well over a year the main complaints that I use to hear from friend about Linux vs Microsoft have been overcome and resolved. It's just that people are unaware of it. And we are failing them by not advertising it!
Just look at the Wikipedia, go to any topic that you have good to expert knowledge of and read through the information. See if you see the GNU/Linux solution or if the listing is slanted more towards Microsoft's solutions. Many times I will see paragraphs about various Microsoft solutions and one short sentence about the equivalent (or better) Linux solution.
Check the links at the bottom of the article, what do you see? Are the equivalent Linux and MacIntosh links there or not? Is the Wiki for your project listed there? How about the home site for the open source project? What about the great tutorial that helped you figure out how to use that feature...is it listed? If not, add them.
If you are involved in any open source solution please go to the Wikipedia and make sure your solution is equally r
My brother works for a company that has many many servers running PHP. PHP's performance is horrible. It's a badly designed language and it's hitting its limits.
PHP makes it quick and easy to start new projects, but once you start to try to scale up you realize you are trapped.
Python and Django are a much better way to go. I've used Django and it is frikkin sweet.
I definitely plan to checkout Python...heard many good things about it and have noted Django also to check out in the future, thank you.
I probably will regret putting this in, as many will think I am trying to start a flame war, however I am not, I am very interested and curious about improving server performance no matter what is running on them. And I believe given time and money, anything can be made to scale, though you have to consider the cost.... Unfortunately we often do not have enough of either.
My brother... company... many many servers running PHP. PHP's performance is horrible.... hitting its limits.
...but once you start to try to scale up you realize you are trapped
And we don't have to be just language specific as I have seen replies (here on./ and other websites) to all most if not all of them...
I continuously hear that this language, this tool, or this database, etc... will not scale, only to have another person come on and explain how they got it to scale handling multiple millions of requests or with multiple hundreds of terabytes of data... (I really enjoy those posts!)
So one person was not able to get it to scale, yet another individual did...
I have seen the impossible made possible too many times in my short career to accept that...
Because of all the people who can pretty much make anything scale, I tend to be a little skeptical, so please forgive me and please understand that this is NOT a personal attack at all, only a weak attempt to make some observations from personal experience...
Without knowing if your brother's company dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's can we really be sure. Besides while a system admin, network engineer or systems engineer might want to take the time to look at all the options, the needs of the business (and wants of a Manager, experienced or not) usually come first.
When I was the sys admin at a telco, if I did not take whatever free time I could scrounge together to do base lining and tweak system performance it was always considered by management to be an extravagance. Definitely always and after thought. While I have never agreed with that perspective, when your boss tells you to drop it, you do that. (and hope when you are the boss you will have budget to do those things, but realize you probably will not...) And in a case like this I admit that time is money. (I still want to use some time, usually my free time, to uncover the truth about performance issues. I just wish it was not always my free time and life outside of the company that had to suffer to do that.)
Add in that there are multiple bottlenecks to performance that are often not known until some other bottle neck is removed, well it just makes me skeptical.
Again not a personal attack, but rather an observation based on feedback right here on./
I remember one person saying something would not scale, and another person said oh yea it will, sometimes they add a resource or split a resource from one to many, but they always manage to find a way to reduce the load and increase performance, thus it continues to scale just fine - because they figured out a way to do it.
At least with open source solutions I can throw another server at a problem cheaper than with any other proprietary solution. If I have the hardware already lying around all the better.
You know, you can write object-oriented assembler or c if you want to... people have been doing it for decades.
This comment is not about asembler or object-oriented but rather, coding something if you want to...read on and I hope a few people are amused...and if you see yourself here, I would think your programming skills are pretty amazing as I probably would never take the time to do this.
But first a short story...
A direct report of mine in a college environment (so he was a college student, had the time and was not working, nor had a family yet) had been doing some interesting master - slave programming, using an IBM Model 80 as the Master machine and using a Min/Max algorithm to control a couple of hundred slave machines...using a Novell network running on an Arcnet Token Ring and Ethernet topology...yea it was years ago... He and two others were working on coding the Game Othello to play against other competitors. The rules: use any computer(s) you have access to, to play Othello and win. Make your move in a given time frame.
Teams would call each other via phone, make their move, tell the other team what the move was and then the other team would have a time limit to make their move and so forth until the end of the game was reached. If you did not make your move in the given time frame it was considered a forfeit. I do not remember what the time frame was.
I made arrangements for them to have access to either 100 to 200 (memory...) of our lab PCs for use in the competition on game day. They figured that an IBM Model 50z could do 6 times the work of an IBM PC so they sent 6 times the work to the IBM Model 50z. They had access to one IBM Model 80 (386 processor) some IBM Model 50z (286 proc) and a bunch of IBM PCs (4 Mhz, 8088). I do not think there were many IBM Model 70s available to them, but I digress...
In the first round they got beat by a super computer, a cray, that ended up winning the competition.
A week later they found an error in their algorithm and believed had they had it fixed they might have had a shot at the Cray...
End of story, what your comment made me think of:
Either before or after that event he decide to write the Knights tour in every language he could get his hands on: Pascal, Fortran, Watfiv, Cobol, Assembler, C, Basic, and a few others that I can not recall at the spur of the moment. He had access to IBM PC clones, MacIntoshs and an IBM Mainframe.
He told me his most challenging attempt was writing it in DOS Batch scripting language. He said he had to cheat (could not do it all in memory, which he was trying to do it all in memory) and write to and read from disk files in order to get it to work. I believe it was the only way he could get DOS Batch to mimick recursion, but am unsure as its been a few years.
I remember being very impressed, wishing I took the time to gain that knowledge, however at the same time thinking I would probably never be doing that. I was happy to be able to call him friend.
Years later and the only language I have written the Knights Tour in was PLC and yes that was in college for me, forced me to learn recursion and recursive calls. I remember being blown away and confused about APL code as well...so much in a itty bitty living space. I was using Punch cards back at that date to submit my Knights Tour running in PLC.
russotto, Tacvek, molarmass192, Joce640K - thanks for the feedback;
You're stoking one hell of a flame war here but here's my $0.02...
I promise I was not trying to do that... Thank you all for the info, another reason to love./
It's a function of your compiler, not "C++".
My compiler can link individual functions, it doesn't pull in whole libraries like some of the the old ones did.
I suspected as much, about the linking individual functions, very cool.
As you can tell from my post its been a few years since I wrote any C code. Heck I will be building a couple of Linux distros from the kernel up just to learn how its done this year for the first time ever. I am hoping I will have some time to volunteer to do some testing just to support open source!
Perhaps I will find a reason to pick up C programming again, most of my IT jobs over the last 25 years have only required scripting with a few exceptions.
Given the wealth of tools available now, wow....
I have programmed in Cobol, Fortran, DB2 and a couple of other legacy languages, but only for a specific project, not for years at a time. On the PC side of the house a little Database Manager, C PM for OS/2, Basic, PHP and a few others. As far as scripting, my first was Exec and Exec 2 (IBM Legacy), than DOS Batch, Rexx, AWK, various Unix/Linux shells, Perl, ASP (I only used it in a few scripts...know its a languaage), SQL and JavaScript. I am far from an expert. However I have always been able to figure out what code was doing and how to fix it. I am just slower than many of you, in some cases, much, much slower, lol.
Its a far cry from Turbo Pascal, MASM and some of the old PC compilers I used years ago, obviously....again thank you all for your input!
I have always said that I could program my way out of a wet paper bag...but if its dry....could be dicey, lol!
... it is also pertinent to note here that the GNU standards document, section 3.1: "Which Languages to Use" strongly advises plain old C for both performance and absolute maximum cross-platform compatibility.
I remember for years C being considered faster on systems than C++, although I believe over the years the gap, if there still is one at all, has narrowed? What is true, someone share it with me as I am curious? Are there any incompatibilities when using C++ and migrating to different Operating System environments any more like their use to be in the dark ages?
Can you compile C++ down small enough to use in embedded devices or does C++ still pull in libraries that are not needed or too big? My guess is you can exclude the libraries that you do not need, correct? (Not trying to start anyone flaming, I honestly do NOT know.)
If you're writing web software use PHP, but it will make you feel dirty inside.
I know there are Ruby on Rails camps and Python advocates, however does not PHP still run faster than either? (Take the same programmer, writing code with expert knowledge with all three programming languages, would not his final product , from a strictly performance issue in PHP be faster than Ruby or Pythong?)
Considering that PHP was written with the web in mind and delivering web pages...do you really want anything else from strictly performance issues?
Granted I understand that you can probably prototype in other languages much faster...
Also your feel dirty comment, is that because of the ease in which a poor programmer can create unstructured code? If so would it not be the fault of the programmer and not the language specifically? (i.e. Assembly for the 8088,..286,..386 and IBM Mainframe made me feel dirty sometimes with they way you were forced to branch, but it was fast...and no I am far from an expert Assembly programmer.
Also from a modularity, library, procedure / function, object perspective, if you have been coding in any of them PHP, Python or Ruby on Rails, would you not have a significant library built up where the library issue becomes a non-issue?
FYI, personally I do not have a preference and simply choose what is convenient for me to use that will get the job done, period. I honestly do not know the nuances between them...and I am sure that there are some.
I do not have any Ruby on Rails or Python experience and am looking forward to learning more about them. To date I have been able to do everything I need to do with scripting and PHP...so my knowledge is very limited and I admit that freely. Further my Perl knowledge has been with simple scripting only, I have not had a 8 hour a day, 5 day a week Perl coding job.... Further when competing in an ACM Programming contest at college, of the 40 programmers who competed, I was 20th...so I have no delusions I know I am an average programmer and am okay with that. I always get the job done one way or another regardless.
Funny off-topic story...the ACM Programming contest: I finished my first problem in a little over 2 hours. A friend of mine who placed, with his team representing our university, second in the world at the international contest in a previous year, finished his first program and had it judged correct in 27 seconds. (Since he had already officially represented the University twice over the years, he was ineligible for that years team and was competing just for the fun of it.) They give you the programming packets and allow you to look at them 10 minutes before the official start time, thus when the clock started he started typing and he was much, much faster typist than my 30 wpm with 5 mistakes, lol. I have nothing but respect for all of you who can put me to shame with your incredibly fast and excellent programming skills. As f
If I owned a bar I'd tell BMI/ASCAP to "fuck off; I only play public domain stuff here". A commercial entity only has power over you if you give it to them. Don't give away your power so casually.
You hit the nail on the head. It's just a money grab by them and any university that falls for this legalized extortion should not be in the business of educating anyone.
If I buy it, I want to copy it and watch the copy...thus when the copy goes bad, I can make a new copy. If a movie or CD of songs will not allow me to do this, than I will NOT buy it until it is in the "sale" bin where I can get it for less than $5.00. That way when it goes bad I will not feel as ripped off.
I would never buy music from an online store that will not let me copy it for my own use. Based on what I have read online, many others will not either. One reason the Apple online store will ultimate fail...obviously Amazon understands this simple fact.
I will not buy movies from stores like Walmart that censor the movie. (There are better reasons never to shop at Walmart ever again, but that is off topic...see for yourself!
I can censor myself, don't need your help, no thank you no way. What I see, the language I hear, is up to me. If you are offended, don't buy it. Also don't tell me I cannot see or hear it. That last part reminds me of why I disliked Tipper Gore's censoring policies so much. Al Gore almost lost my vote, not that it did any good, because of his wife's anti-American censorship leanings and policies.
Walmart - off topic:
The best show highlighting problems at Walmart was on TV (60 minutes or more I believe). One segment noted that rain was causing fertilizer (broken bags in the back of the store, supposedly for sale) was polluting a towns only water source, it took months of complaints and finally legal action before Walmart would do anything...they were literally killing the town via its only water source, amazingly bad neighbor...I use to shop there, never again. Other issues in TV Show: Chinese work force - how mis-treated; Walmart Associates how mis-treated; Walmart Managers unable to run store due to inadequate budget; Medical so high its unaffordable for associates; Lists of communities that have already banned Walmarts coming into their area; and many, many more issues, sadly I do not know the name of this show that I saw on TV. Chances are the Youtube videos will give anyone who is uneducated as I was a clue...
Note: I am not trying to start a political war either mentioning the Gores, over the years I have voted for the lessor of two evils in every election, thus I have voted for both Republicans and Democrats over the years...anyone who reads my posts already knows this.
Political off topic:
After this next 4 years both the Democrats and Republicans will have had 12 years to make things better (since the elder Bush). If they continue to play partisan politics and ignore the rest of us, shouldn't we vote for anyone other than a Democrat or Republican in 2012? If Obama gets us on track in fixing things without extra taxes and business killing policies than I would be for giving him another 4 years, considering Democratic control of the House, the Senate and the White House, they have no excuses. First he must pass the line item veto to use a scalpel to remove the partisan politics injected into everything. However if they do not get us back on track and well on our way to recovery than neither party deserves any more chances.(Besides there is over a 74% chance you are neither a Democrat or Replubican...did you know that? World's Smallest Political Quiz!!)
I pay my US Bank CC bill with automatic withdrawal from my WAMU/CHASE bank account. Not sure what state your in, maybe it's a local thing... or maybe it's only if you already have a US Bank checking account, I do not.
I suppose you were not using WAMU a few years back when a software update resulted in no customer's automatic payments getting made via their automatic bill payment system.
A friend of mine was and when he contacted the bank, they refused to make any restitution of late fees or anything fees resulting from WAMU's mistake.
Personally I believe they should have taken responsibility for their actions, as the software update was their responsibility.
Just one more reason why I will not use automated bill payment via any of my checking accounts. (Yes I am a WAMU, now Chase customer, however I always have a backup bank, just to be safe. If one of those banks screws up my account, I will drop them and look for another second bank, allowing the current second bank to become my primary bank)
Having a minimum of two valid solvent bank accounts avoids have the check system issues of opening a new banking account after the credit reporting industry trashes your credit reputation. You can google that too, too many stories so no need for me to defend, support, etc...
I will not let anyone auto-draft from my account either. Too many horror stories and bad experiences out there about this mistake.
Fortunately there are other methods of online electronic payment, PayPal being one of them, that will allow you to make electronic payments without putting your bank account at risk.
Remember you can always use one account for all your electronic online needs, shuffling only enough money into it for your current needs, making sure that it cannot be overdrafted for any reason (get that in writing as you will probably need it), that way should the account get compromised it does not haunt you forever. That account can be closed in a heartbeat without impacting your primary accounts, where you have direct deposit for instance.
And without a copy of the bill to dispute these types of mistakes you are asking for problems eventually. I suppose you could get an electronic copy, however you better save it off to your own system to make sure it does not get changed. Which is a double edged sword as well, considering that the official record of a check USE TO BE the the paper check ONLY. For years after electronic statements the legal system refused to accept an electronic copy in lieu of a paper copy. My guess is that has changed by now (hopefully) and yes I can imagine the stories that many can tell because of this change.
In an honest world, you can do business with a handshake, how many lawyers would recommend that today, enough said.
In my opinion it all comes back to personal responsibility. Sadly others do not feel the same, thus you must protect yourself from them.
...Don't think any of the SSD based netbooks use swap at all and they get along just fine...
What is the best way to configure Linux on a sub 512MB RAM box, sub notebook, etc..., so that no matter how much you load (application wise) it will not die, although it might run slower should swapping occur? (The system seems to stop swapping as well when Free Memory falls below 10MB and really poorly when it falls below 5 MB. Ideally I would like to maintain 10 - 15 MB of Free RAM Memory available at all times.)
I know Linux can be configured to run in 128MB of RAM and love that...actually have a PC that I would like to configure and use with that low of RAM. (Intuitively I understand that if I can run with less RAM, when I purchase newer boxes with more RAM I should be able to run, much, much faster...the idea that a system for a normal Power user would ever get sluggish with over 1 GB of RAM is ridiculous in my opinion. If I purchase more RAM, I want my apps to benefit from that, not be required to have it just to function, but than my first work computer was an IBM mainframe with 32KB of RAM, an IBM 360.
My first desktop was the Radio Shack Model III, (4K RAM, Floppy drives, 12 inch B/W Monitor, keyboard, BASIC in ROM, TRS-DOS on disk, between $700 - $2,500 depending on config)my first IBM PC had either 16kB of RAM, 4.77 MHz Intel 8088, Floppy Disk Drive (credited with its business success per the wiki, aah the power of the floppy), 5 Bus slots (w/Expander in 1 of 5 - 8 more Bus Slots, slots used by Monitor, Hard Disk (if you had one, my first did not), I/O adapters, 3278/3279 Adapter - for moving up to 2 MB files to/from mainframe.), No hard disk for around $3,000. My first lug gable the IBM P70, OS/2 1.2 Extended Edition, MSDOS, Windows 3.1, Microsoft Word, Intel 9600 EX Modem, Hyper Access software, Token Ring Built in, slot for Ethernet, external monitor port (dual monitor mode), 8512 Color Monitor, floppy drive and hard disk (120 MB I believe) cost over $5,000. Made well over $15,000 working out of a hotel room on a consulting contract in a few weeks with that sexy heavy beast which was state of the art at the time. so was well worth the purchase.
A Intel Celeron M running at 900 MHz sub notebook, 512MB of RAM, 4GB SSD drive, 10/100 & WiFi built in; Web Cam, Audio and Mic ports, 3 USB ports, MMC.SD slot, external monitor port for $300 - $400 is something else... warning...slow loading flash; wiki page.
I could probably fit 9+ sub Notebooks the size of the Asus Eee PC in the IBM P70 leather carrying case, lol.
Thanks to the many great posts here I am learning this is a bit art as it is science and I do not mind experimenting with different configurations...
Read on if you need specifics about my configurations and PCs to help me...honestly looking for the right answers. I too would love to be able to set a MIN and MAX memory point (as another poster mentioned above) to begin swapping IN/OUT only allowing the swap if it is honestly required. Sounds like that is NOT possible at this time, though I sneakingly expect there might be a way...one day as I learn more...might be time to pick up programming in C again.
On my Asus EeePC I have noticed that my free memory continues to shrink, down to around 4 - 6KB free, at which point my performance suffers greatly. If an app fails or my Network Adapter hic ups when it is this low it can cause a lockup situation for me. I thought about swap space, but based on reading about hard disk performance issues, that does not sound like a good solution. ( Or is it?)
What about latency and reliability?
I'm happy with 3.6 Mbit/s, or even lower, if I get a reliable connection with low latency.
Rock solid 512 kbit/s with 20 ms latency would be preferable to anything available in the mobile market right now.
I will be happy when I get 100 MB / 100 MB bi-directional access to the internet for around $50 per month. Heck the Japanese have had this level since 2003 and now in 2008 they are migrating up to 1GB / 1Gb for less than $55.00 per month. How far behind do we have to fall anyway?
As for
Who cares about bandwidth?
I do!
I still want the same speed upstream as I am getting downstream. Enough excuses already time to honor your promises to the United States government and U.S. consumers. (Note: While some of the telcos that promised no longer exist, I would suggest that the homes and area that they serviced does still exist. The business that acquired their area, should also acquire responsibility to build out that area per the promises that the telco that was bought made. I would suggest that they bought both the assets and the liabilities. I believe this liability, a public trust if you will, should be passed on as it is attached to our tax dollars, fees-still-being-charged every month and government funding and therefore should not be ignored because the business was purchased and/or acquired....my.02 cents)
And do NOT state that you are providing high speed access to consumers based on the FCC definition of high speed internet, 200Kbps - try to run videos at that speed, high speed my behind....
I am concerned that the wireless providers will play the same sleight of hand with or without the FCC for wireless internet that they have been playing with hard wired access. Surprised they are not asking for tax breaks, money or a bail out as well!
Now for a question to those of you who say reduce the latency and than work on speed, because I honestly do NOT know the answer. Here is the question:
If you had 100MB / 100MB (bi-directional) at how high a latency (how slow could it get) until you were as slow as what the average American high speed internet user gets today? (Assume an average bandwidth of 8.8 Mbps downstream (I do not get that either, but it is the average listed in the articl
Oh MAN, it's not gnu/Linux compatible... it's no wonder slashdotters aren't getting any!
Hey McNeely, you can always start the next Open Source project with it!;-)
Then you can add in those body-sensor suits and expand the project to even more.
No, I was quite serious. It's not often we get cool articles like this one, I do not often get a chance to discuss programming on-topic.
That said, OO seems to have some good tenets such as design patterns. So why is it that OO geeks seem to love piling layers upon layers?
It seems like a good idea at the time, especially to PHBs.
I've been involved off and on, mostly on with "reusable" software projects at work for over 2 decades now. The only conclusion I've come to is that it sounds very, very good, but does not quite work out in practice.
I also love your quote:
Steve's Law - If a layer of abstraction is the right answer, you have probably asked the wrong question.
I am pleasantly surprised to read this, perhaps I have not read the right forums...many times it seems people will select the newest greatest fad, tool, package, framework, etc... not because it is the best to get the job done, but because its new and they want to do something new and different.
Than they leave the project and/or company and you are stuck with the mess they leave behind due to the choice they were able to get the manager to say Yes to.
Even worse are companies that have the golden project mentality. When the new project gets proposed and run with, that project gets the lions share of the funding, literally anything and everything that they want whether its needed or not. When the project falters, it seems that the Director / Managers are the first to jump ship...if they can so they will not be held responsible for their poor decision.
Even more amazing is those very same Managers are the ones that are in charge of the next Golden project.
With one company, in less than 6 years I saw the same set of Managers start and jump ship from two different huge Golden projects (both failures). I was always amazed at how personal never seemed to look at the employee turn-over they caused and do something about them.
I saw the company lose some very expert knowledge wise employees, however those managers never lost their jobs, even though the fault in both cases was easily partially their faults. When I finally gave my notice and left for greener pastures, those same managers were still there.
I am not suggesting always firing someone when they fail as some companies do, after all any time I have failed it has always been one heck of a learning experience. One that I did not repeat I might add.
At the very least, they should not be put in charge of the very next new project. Geez. The institutional memory at that place was amazingly bad.
I have always maintained that if a Manager has abnormally high turnover rates, perhaps they might be part of the problem. But no one seems to monitor that or at least it seems like most companies do NOT.
It's not rewriting code or reusing code that makes you a successful programmer: it's knowing when your project manager wants you to rewrite or reuse code for "business reasons". As I have found out to my cost in the past.
You are assuming that your project direction has not changed for you due to some external influence beyond your scope and/or control.
Often no matter how well designed, no matter how well coded, no matter how well managed, things happen, external influences that force changes to the end software product. This type of thing simply can NOT be planned for, especially if the market says No to your product due to missing critical features.
Not much better if you determine that features not planned until multiple releases away are suddenly determined to be more critical now than previously determined by sales, marketing and business units. Especially if you do not have the budget for additional resources.
That can happen even with good communication with your customers, the market and knowledge of the competition.
One external influence that I really loath is when you are dependent on a discontinued proprietary commercial library or a framework (that you did not select and that you do not have access to the source code for), but its critical to the success of your project. Often the company is unable to buy it so time to find something else or start coding. Even better if the company that discontinued the framework was the only one that would do the job for you.
Having access and ability to change the source has saved my bacon on more than one occasion. And no matter how well supported a framework or library is today, it might not be tomorrow.
Sign me as not a big fan of third party development tools that you cannot live without.
... I absolutely abhor doing something over and over,... When one of my fellow employees quit, I took the majority of his work and turned into Perl scripts. Literally. What used to take him hours each day now takes minutes... And because I've made it so easy, others can do it as well.
Not only over and over, I don't even want to do it twice if I can avoid it. Though I will admit any time I rewrite code it is better the second time than the first.
My first programming job I replaced a guy who got fired because he could not get his own custom code to work. He was being cute with over 400 lines of logical ands and ors it was pathetic.
Being too new to know any better I first tried to make sense out of his code but simply could not it was just badly written.
I finally pulled myself away from his junk and thought about the problem. Controlling two sets of 8 switches to turn various things on and off at appropriate times based on sensors...no problem.
Once I determined the distinct set of codes to do everything I needed it to do, I proceeded to do them at appropriate places based on the data in the sensors.
Piece of cake, removed over 400 lines, replaced with a logical 30 - 50 lines of code and low and behold the entire software program worked like a champ.
I learned early on about keeping it simple. Works every time.
Wouldn't it be nice to finally have saved up enough money to go on a trip abroad, land in the airport, you go through airport security, they check your visa, type your name into their computer and UP pops a wants and warrants for you to be arrested. Yes you worked at that company that posted that video. Or you posted a comment that many in our government found offensive. Or you offended the-supreme-being-we-believe-in with your remarks in that slashdot post therefore we are going to take you out back and shoot you. Yes it would suck.
The impact on censorship is huge. No provider should ever be held liable for anyone's content. The fact that they are going after the company, in this case Google, and not the individuals that posted the content is bad enough in my opinion. If I were on a jury (of course in another country would you even have that option) I would want it thrown out based on censorship alone. You want to censor, go ahead and censor yourself if you want, but do NOT dare to decide for me or anyone else.
Bringing down the offending video should have been sufficient, but in this case appears not to have been. It should have been.
A good reason not to allow any court in any other country, NOT to have an impact in the country in which you live. We need to be held accountable to our laws alone, and many are bad enough without putting another countries garbage before our own.
Should this case or any case like it impact anyones freedom in the USA (or any other country); we all have additional problems. This must not be allowed to happen in the United States. (And no amount of fear should be acceptable to reduce an individuals rights as has been done here in the US by our own government in the last few years...sad but true for us.)
Another good reason for the separation of powers for any government. Two that come quickly to mind are legislative vs judicial and church vs state.
For legislative vs judicial, it seems simple enough, one group legislates, makes laws the other group bases their decisions on those laws. As I read this, this seems too simple a definition, perhaps someone with more legal expertise than I can add to this and make it better. Specifically, I do not have a problem as many do with the Supreme Court legislating from the Bench, is this not one thing they MUST do? Another thought, if you do not bring a decision up for them to decide than they cannot legislate from the bench can they? As I mention later this falls into the category of watching what you wish for as you just might get it. (Of course you can legislate morality, but SHOULD you? I would suggest that a wise person would NOT ever!)
For church vs state, it seems simple enough. If any of us want freedom of religion to worship and believe that this is a right given to us by our creator, than why allow any law to be made that will allow another group, no matter how well meaning, discriminate against our ability to worship (or not) as we see fit.
Yet many in this country, the good old USA, must really want to live under a theocracy as they consistently attempt to legislate religious activities, behavior, etc, you name it. Or perhaps many misguided Americans want to live under Despotism, our founding fathers understood what that meant as well. This is extremely short sighted and
How much does bandwidth actually cost for a major ISP?... Imagine if the cable companies capped how much TV you could watch per month.
Less than $5.00 per month their cost, for what we would pay $50 or more for per month for. IMO $50 per month for 100MB / 100MB or.5 per Gig is too much. If only never-to-be-throttled 100MB / 100MB would be offered to us...
Of course 100 MB / 100 MB is not yet available to us here in the USA. But it is coming, and when it does watch out...
"Obviously, without the competition, we would not have done all this at this pace," said Hideki Ohmichi, NTT's senior manager for public relations.
I heard another Japanese telecom executive state that it cost them less than $5.00 to provide services to customers on a PBS show. You will not hear American executives telling American consumers that it costs them less than $5.00 per month. The American telecom executives on the show / panel had pained expressions on their faces. I am sure they are counting on their customers remaining oblivious to how much we are getting hurt by charging more for less; throttling services based on type of services; putting caps on services; etc....
If it costs less than $5.00 per month for a fiber link, than why is anyone, anywhere else in the world paying more for less. And once you learn of these facts, it really does make you mad when shills for the US cable and DSL companies come out complaining the opposite is true. I am sick of the lies and many innocent people jumping on the band wagon only because they are in the dark and do not know any better, WAKE UP please for all of our sakes.
Eventually there will be a company in your area offering uncapped, fiber-last-mile connection to your home, apartment, community and you will be able to thank your ISP for years of abuse by churning.
The more they piss off customers, the less sympathy any of us should have for them. I know I do not feel sorry for any of them. And marketing campaigns to buy American and get screwed will not work on me and many others either.
USA consumers should have had this back in 2000, perhaps as early as 1998 in some larger cities, definitely by 2003. Here it is 2008 and we still can't get service anywhere near 100MB / 100MB. Pathetic and definitely NOT FORGIVABLE! How many of you reading this understand that the telcos promised higher speeds and collected money for those promises that they reneged on?
We, the USA High Speed Internet consumer, have been getting screwed for years. Our only chance will be if government steps in as they did in Japan and forces the hands of the major telcos, cable companies and related telecommunications companies. Normally I am NOT for government regulation however, as Japan has proved and the US telcos have shown by their lack of keeping promises they made, in thi
... Nethack is from 1987, and is based on hack from 1985.
If you install `bsdgames' on debian/ubuntu, you can play hack, the precursor to nethack....
First played Rogue on a DOS PC around that same time frame. It ran just fine on that old PC. I will have to give the debian/ubuntu version a try one day. Back than we were playing Chess, Othello, Go and Solitare on the PCs as well.
One of the better programmers (he was on a team that placed 2nd in the ACM's international programming contest a year or so later) stayed in one of the university computer labs all night long playing Rogue. His goal at that time was to do it in one pass without stopping, no saves, just playing all night long. He managed to do it too! He was also doing some pretty interesting stuff on a VAX with Fractiles also.
Sadly I never made it all the way to the Amulet, nor did I try to cheat. Perhaps one day I will give it another try. And yes I will look over the hints before I do, lol.
Got to play Apache on the MacIntosh within a year or two of that same time period, flying a helicopter through the city and shooting at things was a blast compared to the pixel computer games I was use too.
It was years later that I got to play BattleZone on an IBM PC. I remember being sad that I had finished all of the missions and wanted to play more. That was before having kids of course when I had more time. I first played the Arcade version of BattleZone for a quarter; the PC version with missions was so much better than the Arcade version that only gave you a screen you could pivot and move.
Two of my favorite really old games, pre PC; pre MacIntosh because they did not cost me a quarter like Missile Command did in the arcade, were played in 1979 with a TSO account on an IBM 360 and Amdhal 470 with not enough system RAM memory so that only two or three players could play at the same time. That system RAM was of coursed shared by everyone and everything running on the system at that time. Adventure and Empire. I believe they were written in Fortran, but honestly do not remember...its been a couple of years.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike
Found a link with a map of another game, Zork, but it is similar enough to give someone who has never seen it an idea. We would take our printouts (remember that green and white banded paper from the mainframe days) and make maps like these.
Since the TSO account playing the game took up so many system resources, I had to promise that I would only play it on the weekends after 10pm or risk losing my TSO access. There were 9 or 10 accout levels, with TSO access not being granted until either level 6 or level 8 and I was not going to blow it.
One of the systems programmers had managed to get through Adventure to the end, but he told me that he went through the code to learn more about the game to do it. He told me what he did to win it and what he did when all the dwarfs woke up, lol, but I do not remember exactly what he said now. I got killed by waking up the dwarfs more than once.
Empire was fun, the world was randomly generated each time, so you explored and learned the lay of the land as you played the game. Battle was simple, you had a 50/50 shot when your pixel Army or Fighter encountered a city (or the enemyA) and 10 turns to build a Fighter (F) plane. While I never played long enough to build them, you could build Troop Transports (T), Aircraft carrieer's and Submarines (S) also. Of course they took longer to build, but you would need them to cross a body of water and only Cities next to a body of water could build them. In the time it would take to build one fighter, you could have built 5 Armies, so the more
Yeah, because no-one did payroll before clusters of P4s. Those IBM and UNISYS mainframe timetracking apps must have been figments of my imagination. I confess I don't know how many MIPS the mainframes had, but the keyboard I used looked like this.
I worked in a data center with an IBM 370 and it had 32K or RAM...lol, have no idea if it had even 1 MIP. Based on this blog post it probably had 1 MIP or less. The quote in the blog that I saw was
The years was 1979...And with the older IBM 370/158 rated as a 1.0 âoeold styleâ MIPS machine (based on IBMâ(TM)s figures of a cycle time of 115 nanoseconds, which is about 8.7 MHz.), this new one, the 4331 mainframe, rated at about.3 MIP, and its big brother, the 4341, at a shade under 1 MIP â" an incredible price/performance achievement at the time.
In the early 80s I worked with the IBM 4341, 61 and 81s. Back closer to 79 it was an IBM 360, so my guess is we had 1 MIP or less on that 32MB of RAM box.
...On my eee PC with a stock hardware configuration, I go from a cold boot to the desktop in around 40 seconds whereas with XP it was taking about 3 minutes on average...
On my Asus EeePC (the Surf, a 901 w/out the webcam...should have got the webcam, running debian Linux 2.6.21.4-eeepc i686) I boot up between 10 - 23 secs. I will double check that and try to remember to come back and edit it this post.
On my Windows 2000 PC I counted to 110 seconds (1001, 1002, 1003... 1109, 1110) before I had the desktop up. I am getting up a couple of Linux servers, perhaps after I get them up I will reinstall my Windows 2000 from scratch to speed it back up. But I doubt that it will boot up faster then 50 - 60 seconds no matter what I do to it.
My windows 2000 box is only an IBM 6565 w/ 667 Pentium III processor, I got three of them for about $100 per quite a few years ago. With cheap, cheap memory they make a very workable Linux servers for under $250.
Heck i just got 1 GB or RAM (2 X 512 MB) on sale for $39.00 and a 500 GB drive for $109, looking forward to setting up my own distributed server machine and see how many different distros I can run on it at the same time. I have been pleasantly pleased what I can do with only 128 MB of RAM, bump that up to either 256MB or only 512MB of RAM and you have a very workable home server.
Thanks to Linux, I can turn one of them into a very fast custom DVD player, (maybe even put in my own internal fiber), currently running a gigabit network which of course is faster then my ISP provided router and connection anyway.
Not a big fan of WINE and would like to run a virtualized Windows 98, 2000 or XP in its own slice one day. Put it in its own sandbox just for the heck of it. (Either that or just stop buying Microsoft games all together. That is all I ever use Microsoft at home for anymore anyway is Microsoft specific games; fortunately I am not a big gamer anyway).
Hoping that my next job will have me in either a Linux only or at least a dual Linux / Microsoft environment. Best of all would be a Linux / Mac / Microsoft environment, but that is probably too much to hope for!
...
1) private and secure
3) available to your apps
4) backed up....
I would add #5) Able to restore from backups.
While working at a telco, with a commercial backup package, not going to mention the name, everyone thought we were getting good backups.
Until we could not restore a file, after it had been modified by others, needed by one of the executives in the company. He needed information that had been removed and did not have backups of the file he sent to be modified. (...I know, I know...how could he not had a backup of the old file, well he did not)
At that time we had been performing backups for a long time with out needing to restore data from the LAN/WAN servers... The backups were checked every day to make sure that they ran and completed successfully, they did or so we thought from what the reports revealed. We ran full backups once a week and an incremental backup on the other days of the week. This was back in the days when the mainframe data center staff looked at PCs as nothing more than toys...so the LAN/WAN server room was not even in the hardened data center.
It was not fun to tell him that not only could we not restore the file, but we had no faith in our backups.
Our short term solution, while we looked for a new backup software package; was to use a very large harddisk and xcopy data files across the network to it at night. Something you could do back in the NT, OS/2 and early Lotus Notes days.
I doubt that would be possible today with companies regularly backing up terabytes of data every day.
It was a good lesson for me early in my career, you don't know if you have backups if you have not successfully restored from them.
We were lucky it happened when it did as the very next day after implementing xcopy from a command prompt and copying data to the hard drives another group lost an entire subdirectory of information when the hard disk got corrupted, don't remember how or why, just that it did. They were working on a multi million dollar proposal when they lost everything. We were able to restore the entire subdirectory over for them with one copy command. It was so much faster simply copying the files from one disk on the backup machine to the server as a restore process compared to putting in a dat tape, searching through it for a file and if the file was found restoring the file.
The user only had to provide us with the domain name, filename and the path. It was real fast as compared to searching through a tape backup system.
You can bet we double checked our server backups with the new system on a test server before implementing it. If memory serves, we kept xcopying data to the backup machine and archiving to tape until the hard disks in the server got too large to make that practical. It was nice being able to simply copy to restore while it lasted, it was a lot faster than restoring from tape.
Even today at home, as soon as I get a new computer system, (I usually buy two or three at a time just to have extra parts, down the road, in an emergency) if I have two identical systems, I will try to blow one away, reformat and reinstall from scratch to make sure that I can. Better to know you can when you do not have too, rather than finding out you can NOT when you need too.
One manager had been compressing data files with a password and hiding not only the files, but the subdirectory structure as well. I guess he thought noone would find hidden subdirectories with hidden files. We just let him continue to think his method was secure and unknown to anyone but him. No point in stirring up the pot, we honestly could have cared less, we had more than enough work to do.
It was interesting to note that the access was gained via another government agency, the Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency in Cleveland on 10/17/08, but not at all surprising.
As interesting (and also not surprising at all) is the quote from the article,
The LEADS system also can be used to check for warrants and criminal histories, but such checks would not be reflected on the records obtained by The Dispatch
Why anyone would trust any online system with anything that could cost them a job, impact their credit, prevent them from receiving health insurance, prevent them from being considered from a job, put-your-privacy-concern-here, etc.... is beyond me.
... Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has claimed that Linux violates 235 Microsoft patents. If he wasn't trying to sow doubt amongst enterprises as to the long term viability of Linux, why would he do such a thing? Lets also not forget Microsoft's aid in arranging funding for SCO. So, while Microsoft hasn't gone after anyone directly for patent issues, they've certainly done so indirectly.
I have read through many of the documents, especially the EU Ct. of 1st Instance: Microsoft Abused its Dominant Position - Updated This link has the not only the conversation after the court decision but links to videos and a recording of the conversation (Sean Daly, Georg Greve of FSFE, Jeremy Allison and Volker Lendecke of Samba, and Carlo Piana, their lawyer of record in the case) so you can here it in their words. Thank you for posting the link!
Microsoft's blue and green bubble defense is laughable and fortunately for all of us, at least the EU courts saw through it. It is telling that Microsoft's lawyer submitted 258 pages only about one hour before the case for review and that per Volker Lendecke, Microsoft deliberately muddied the waters with the term intellectual property in such a way that it was not clear whether they were talking about copyrights or patents or what. Very telling and sadly not surprising.
To think of those companies that actually got scared and agreed to settle with Microsoft, per Georg Greve, to the tune of ($3.6 million for Sun, Novell, REal and CCIA who were all bought out of the case). And how about those companies that actually bought worthless coupons out of fear of being sued, from Novell. Talk about a waste of money and we are not talking thousands or millions, but billions. In the first six months, Novell sold coupons to such marquee clients as Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, AIG Technologies, HSBC, Wal-Mart, Dell and Reed Elsevier have all acquired Novell Linux coupons from Microsoft."
If I were they, I think I would want my money back.
I find it interesting that Thomas Vinje, actually stated that "if you think about any of these markets, who were the innovators? Novell was the innovator. Novell created singlhandedly the workgroup server market. It was taken away from them by the monopoly." Real created streaming media, innovating and creating the streaming media market and they're gone now, at least fewer people use it these days. Netscape and browsers...of course there are many others.
Yes excellent article thanks for posting! It will be interesting to see how many of the companies that have outstanding court cases with Microsoft might try to force them to an earlier resolution now...I for one will not hold my breath.
...I think they are looking for people with older cars because they usually have less money to fight back against them with. Preying on the weak, these people are really scum.
-molo
I too was thinking, why, if you check online there are many people getting these calls and many of them do NOT have cars...so what is the motivation?
Perhaps to get a list of numbers to call for another reason? (ie. perceived to be poor)
Perhaps simply because you answered the phone. I have noticed comments that the caller hung up when a person answered?
Perhaps an automated system gathering information to be sold to someone else?
I can honestly think of no reason to legitimately answering the phone. With VoIP at least you are NOT getting charged for the call as you will if you exceed your plan with a cellular phone. Either way, just hitting the red hangup button would cut that call.
Slashdot Mirror
I just finished setting up my girls (7 & 10) PCs, with Linux... Merry bye bye Windoze.
Last year, Christmas of 2007, I purchased three Asus Eee PCs, one for me, one for my son and one for a girlfriend. (Sadly I am divorced, but that is off topic, and no the girlfriend came years after, lol.)
My 14 year old son and my 10 year old daughter absolutely love their brother's Asus Eee PC, the small size, the light weight, the built in web cam, WiFi, ethernet, external monitor and 3 USB ports, the audio and speaker jacks as well as built in speakers and mic. They will be getting theirs, yes I plan to purchase two more this next year, in a few months. Since I saved so much money buying the Asus for only $399 fully installed; I had left over money to purchase my son an external 22" monitor, USB keyboard and USB Mouse. So at home they have a big monitor and when we were away from home on vacation for a week, it was no problem finding a WiFi connection. They absolutely love that little beast! And I love the price.
I switched to Skype many years ago, after my second "no customer service" experience with my current cellular provider. Compared to my cellular phone plan and the amount of money it cost per year compared to SkypeIn + Skype Pro costing about $60 per year; I can purchase a new computer each and every year. Heck based on the price of the new netbooks, I can purchase 3 computers for what I am saving by not having a cellular bill! You gotta love that!
The next generation is discovering Linux, finally. My 16 year old did not know that you could run World of War Craft on Linux...that sold him also. He has a Pentium D running Linux.
If MS wants me to upgrade to Vista, I'll do it, once they make it an operating system suitable for general purpose computation...
Sorry I am not buying your argument. You will upgrade sooner than that for one of these reasons:
Any one else think of other reasons why we would be 'forced' to upgrade to the current operating system whether we like it or not?
The main thing is that Dell now sell most of their hardware at a spec that will run Vista acceptably, as long as you make sure you spec 1 or 2GB ram, and the memory upgrade is only slightly more than the XP cross-grade.
And what is acceptable for Vista will be blazingly fast with GNU/Linux...pretty much any distro.
I have been running Linux with either 256MB or 512MB of RAM without issues. (Purchased an Asus Eee PC in Dec 2007 and it ran fine right out of the box...wait until I replace Xandros with Ubuntu, it will be even better). I also have a Pentium D (64 bit dual processor) with 1 GB of RAM...Linux screams and I love it! Can't wait to get a decent Graphics card installed and run the Beryl Desktop...Vista is not only slow, but just plain boring in comparison.
Everyone I know that has 2 GB or less of RAM and tries to run Vista, gives up and goes back to XP. I believe most people accept that you need at least 3 GB or 4 GB of RAM for Vista to run well.
Personally if I put down the money (granted it is cheaper today than in years past) for more memory, I want that memory to be available to my applications, not sucked up by the operating system.
What I still want it to be able to spec a full Linux desktop with all the hardware supported fully. Why is this still so hard for them when the community has 99% of all the issues sorted already?
You are not kidding about most of the issues being resolved. And you are CORRECT that many are unaware that past problems have been resolved. Take plug & play, it has only been a few years back when there were still problems with plug and play when using Linux, NOT ANYMORE.
Try to find an external hard drive in a store that advertises on its box that it is compatible with Linux. I looked last year and did not see one. They all listed Vista and XP, but not Linux and in many cases not MacIntosh either. I knew it would work so I went on and purchased Seagate's Free Agent 500GB USB drive. No problems at all, it plugged and played like a champ. Now you can get 1 TB for what I paid for the 500GB a year ago. WOW! But still no notice of compatibility with Linux.
While I have heard that Microsoft influences which operating systems many computer resellers installs on their computers, I do not know if they influence other companies like Seagate and Intel, but it would not surprise me.
When I asked the sales reps at Frys whether or not the USB drive would work with Linux, they did not know. I admit that I paused at first and I have a bit of knowledge. Imagine a complete newbie, makes them think that a Linux OS will not work when it most certainly will.
Just a week or two ago I read here on ./ how Dell's website offered Linux but that option was definitely NOT as visible as Microsoft Vista or XP. No surprise there either.
Problem is people just are NOT aware of the facts. For well over a year the main complaints that I use to hear from friend about Linux vs Microsoft have been overcome and resolved. It's just that people are unaware of it. And we are failing them by not advertising it!
Just look at the Wikipedia, go to any topic that you have good to expert knowledge of and read through the information. See if you see the GNU/Linux solution or if the listing is slanted more towards Microsoft's solutions. Many times I will see paragraphs about various Microsoft solutions and one short sentence about the equivalent (or better) Linux solution.
Check the links at the bottom of the article, what do you see? Are the equivalent Linux and MacIntosh links there or not? Is the Wiki for your project listed there? How about the home site for the open source project? What about the great tutorial that helped you figure out how to use that feature...is it listed? If not, add them.
If you are involved in any open source solution please go to the Wikipedia and make sure your solution is equally r
My brother works for a company that has many many servers running PHP. PHP's performance is horrible. It's a badly designed language and it's hitting its limits.
PHP makes it quick and easy to start new projects, but once you start to try to scale up you realize you are trapped.
Python and Django are a much better way to go. I've used Django and it is frikkin sweet.
I definitely plan to checkout Python...heard many good things about it and have noted Django also to check out in the future, thank you.
I probably will regret putting this in, as many will think I am trying to start a flame war, however I am not, I am very interested and curious about improving server performance no matter what is running on them. And I believe given time and money, anything can be made to scale, though you have to consider the cost.... Unfortunately we often do not have enough of either.
My brother ... company ... many many servers running PHP. PHP's performance is horrible. ... hitting its limits.
...but once you start to try to scale up you realize you are trapped
And we don't have to be just language specific as I have seen replies (here on ./ and other websites) to all most if not all of them...
I continuously hear that this language, this tool, or this database, etc... will not scale, only to have another person come on and explain how they got it to scale handling multiple millions of requests or with multiple hundreds of terabytes of data... (I really enjoy those posts!)
So one person was not able to get it to scale, yet another individual did...
I have seen the impossible made possible too many times in my short career to accept that...
Because of all the people who can pretty much make anything scale, I tend to be a little skeptical, so please forgive me and please understand that this is NOT a personal attack at all, only a weak attempt to make some observations from personal experience...
Without knowing if your brother's company dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's can we really be sure. Besides while a system admin, network engineer or systems engineer might want to take the time to look at all the options, the needs of the business (and wants of a Manager, experienced or not) usually come first.
When I was the sys admin at a telco, if I did not take whatever free time I could scrounge together to do base lining and tweak system performance it was always considered by management to be an extravagance. Definitely always and after thought. While I have never agreed with that perspective, when your boss tells you to drop it, you do that. (and hope when you are the boss you will have budget to do those things, but realize you probably will not...) And in a case like this I admit that time is money. (I still want to use some time, usually my free time, to uncover the truth about performance issues. I just wish it was not always my free time and life outside of the company that had to suffer to do that.)
Add in that there are multiple bottlenecks to performance that are often not known until some other bottle neck is removed, well it just makes me skeptical.
Again not a personal attack, but rather an observation based on feedback right here on ./
I remember one person saying something would not scale, and another person said oh yea it will, sometimes they add a resource or split a resource from one to many, but they always manage to find a way to reduce the load and increase performance, thus it continues to scale just fine - because they figured out a way to do it.
At least with open source solutions I can throw another server at a problem cheaper than with any other proprietary solution. If I have the hardware already lying around all the better.
Take any t
You know, you can write object-oriented assembler or c if you want to ... people have been doing it for decades.
This comment is not about asembler or object-oriented but rather, coding something if you want to...read on and I hope a few people are amused...and if you see yourself here, I would think your programming skills are pretty amazing as I probably would never take the time to do this.
But first a short story...
A direct report of mine in a college environment (so he was a college student, had the time and was not working, nor had a family yet) had been doing some interesting master - slave programming, using an IBM Model 80 as the Master machine and using a Min/Max algorithm to control a couple of hundred slave machines...using a Novell network running on an Arcnet Token Ring and Ethernet topology...yea it was years ago... He and two others were working on coding the Game Othello to play against other competitors. The rules: use any computer(s) you have access to, to play Othello and win. Make your move in a given time frame.
Teams would call each other via phone, make their move, tell the other team what the move was and then the other team would have a time limit to make their move and so forth until the end of the game was reached. If you did not make your move in the given time frame it was considered a forfeit. I do not remember what the time frame was.
I made arrangements for them to have access to either 100 to 200 (memory...) of our lab PCs for use in the competition on game day. They figured that an IBM Model 50z could do 6 times the work of an IBM PC so they sent 6 times the work to the IBM Model 50z. They had access to one IBM Model 80 (386 processor) some IBM Model 50z (286 proc) and a bunch of IBM PCs (4 Mhz, 8088). I do not think there were many IBM Model 70s available to them, but I digress...
In the first round they got beat by a super computer, a cray, that ended up winning the competition.
A week later they found an error in their algorithm and believed had they had it fixed they might have had a shot at the Cray...
End of story, what your comment made me think of:
Either before or after that event he decide to write the Knights tour in every language he could get his hands on: Pascal, Fortran, Watfiv, Cobol, Assembler, C, Basic, and a few others that I can not recall at the spur of the moment. He had access to IBM PC clones, MacIntoshs and an IBM Mainframe.
He told me his most challenging attempt was writing it in DOS Batch scripting language. He said he had to cheat (could not do it all in memory, which he was trying to do it all in memory) and write to and read from disk files in order to get it to work. I believe it was the only way he could get DOS Batch to mimick recursion, but am unsure as its been a few years.
I remember being very impressed, wishing I took the time to gain that knowledge, however at the same time thinking I would probably never be doing that. I was happy to be able to call him friend.
Years later and the only language I have written the Knights Tour in was PLC and yes that was in college for me, forced me to learn recursion and recursive calls. I remember being blown away and confused about APL code as well...so much in a itty bitty living space. I was using Punch cards back at that date to submit my Knights Tour running in PLC.
You're stoking one hell of a flame war here but here's my $0.02 ...
I promise I was not trying to do that... Thank you all for the info, another reason to love ./
It's a function of your compiler, not "C++". My compiler can link individual functions, it doesn't pull in whole libraries like some of the the old ones did.
I suspected as much, about the linking individual functions, very cool.
As you can tell from my post its been a few years since I wrote any C code. Heck I will be building a couple of Linux distros from the kernel up just to learn how its done this year for the first time ever. I am hoping I will have some time to volunteer to do some testing just to support open source!
Perhaps I will find a reason to pick up C programming again, most of my IT jobs over the last 25 years have only required scripting with a few exceptions.
Given the wealth of tools available now, wow....
I have programmed in Cobol, Fortran, DB2 and a couple of other legacy languages, but only for a specific project, not for years at a time. On the PC side of the house a little Database Manager, C PM for OS/2, Basic, PHP and a few others. As far as scripting, my first was Exec and Exec 2 (IBM Legacy), than DOS Batch, Rexx, AWK, various Unix/Linux shells, Perl, ASP (I only used it in a few scripts...know its a languaage), SQL and JavaScript. I am far from an expert. However I have always been able to figure out what code was doing and how to fix it. I am just slower than many of you, in some cases, much, much slower, lol.
Its a far cry from Turbo Pascal, MASM and some of the old PC compilers I used years ago, obviously....again thank you all for your input!
I have always said that I could program my way out of a wet paper bag...but if its dry....could be dicey, lol!
... it is also pertinent to note here that the GNU standards document, section 3.1: "Which Languages to Use" strongly advises plain old C for both performance and absolute maximum cross-platform compatibility.
I remember for years C being considered faster on systems than C++, although I believe over the years the gap, if there still is one at all, has narrowed? What is true, someone share it with me as I am curious? Are there any incompatibilities when using C++ and migrating to different Operating System environments any more like their use to be in the dark ages?
Can you compile C++ down small enough to use in embedded devices or does C++ still pull in libraries that are not needed or too big? My guess is you can exclude the libraries that you do not need, correct? (Not trying to start anyone flaming, I honestly do NOT know.)
If you're writing web software use PHP, but it will make you feel dirty inside.
I know there are Ruby on Rails camps and Python advocates, however does not PHP still run faster than either? (Take the same programmer, writing code with expert knowledge with all three programming languages, would not his final product , from a strictly performance issue in PHP be faster than Ruby or Pythong?)
Considering that PHP was written with the web in mind and delivering web pages...do you really want anything else from strictly performance issues?
Granted I understand that you can probably prototype in other languages much faster...
Also your feel dirty comment, is that because of the ease in which a poor programmer can create unstructured code? If so would it not be the fault of the programmer and not the language specifically? (i.e. Assembly for the 8088, ..286, ..386 and IBM Mainframe made me feel dirty sometimes with they way you were forced to branch, but it was fast...and no I am far from an expert Assembly programmer.
Also from a modularity, library, procedure / function, object perspective, if you have been coding in any of them PHP, Python or Ruby on Rails, would you not have a significant library built up where the library issue becomes a non-issue?
FYI, personally I do not have a preference and simply choose what is convenient for me to use that will get the job done, period. I honestly do not know the nuances between them...and I am sure that there are some.
I do not have any Ruby on Rails or Python experience and am looking forward to learning more about them. To date I have been able to do everything I need to do with scripting and PHP...so my knowledge is very limited and I admit that freely. Further my Perl knowledge has been with simple scripting only, I have not had a 8 hour a day, 5 day a week Perl coding job.... Further when competing in an ACM Programming contest at college, of the 40 programmers who competed, I was 20th...so I have no delusions I know I am an average programmer and am okay with that. I always get the job done one way or another regardless.
Funny off-topic story...the ACM Programming contest: I finished my first problem in a little over 2 hours. A friend of mine who placed, with his team representing our university, second in the world at the international contest in a previous year, finished his first program and had it judged correct in 27 seconds. (Since he had already officially represented the University twice over the years, he was ineligible for that years team and was competing just for the fun of it.) They give you the programming packets and allow you to look at them 10 minutes before the official start time, thus when the clock started he started typing and he was much, much faster typist than my 30 wpm with 5 mistakes, lol. I have nothing but respect for all of you who can put me to shame with your incredibly fast and excellent programming skills. As f
If I owned a bar I'd tell BMI/ASCAP to "fuck off; I only play public domain stuff here". A commercial entity only has power over you if you give it to them. Don't give away your power so casually.
You hit the nail on the head. It's just a money grab by them and any university that falls for this legalized extortion should not be in the business of educating anyone.
If I buy it, I want to copy it and watch the copy...thus when the copy goes bad, I can make a new copy. If a movie or CD of songs will not allow me to do this, than I will NOT buy it until it is in the "sale" bin where I can get it for less than $5.00. That way when it goes bad I will not feel as ripped off.
I would never buy music from an online store that will not let me copy it for my own use. Based on what I have read online, many others will not either. One reason the Apple online store will ultimate fail...obviously Amazon understands this simple fact.
I will not buy movies from stores like Walmart that censor the movie. (There are better reasons never to shop at Walmart ever again, but that is off topic...see for yourself!
I can censor myself, don't need your help, no thank you no way. What I see, the language I hear, is up to me. If you are offended, don't buy it. Also don't tell me I cannot see or hear it. That last part reminds me of why I disliked Tipper Gore's censoring policies so much. Al Gore almost lost my vote, not that it did any good, because of his wife's anti-American censorship leanings and policies.
Walmart - off topic:
The best show highlighting problems at Walmart was on TV (60 minutes or more I believe). One segment noted that rain was causing fertilizer (broken bags in the back of the store, supposedly for sale) was polluting a towns only water source, it took months of complaints and finally legal action before Walmart would do anything...they were literally killing the town via its only water source, amazingly bad neighbor...I use to shop there, never again. Other issues in TV Show: Chinese work force - how mis-treated; Walmart Associates how mis-treated; Walmart Managers unable to run store due to inadequate budget; Medical so high its unaffordable for associates; Lists of communities that have already banned Walmarts coming into their area; and many, many more issues, sadly I do not know the name of this show that I saw on TV. Chances are the Youtube videos will give anyone who is uneducated as I was a clue...
Note: I am not trying to start a political war either mentioning the Gores, over the years I have voted for the lessor of two evils in every election, thus I have voted for both Republicans and Democrats over the years...anyone who reads my posts already knows this.
Political off topic:
After this next 4 years both the Democrats and Republicans will have had 12 years to make things better (since the elder Bush). If they continue to play partisan politics and ignore the rest of us, shouldn't we vote for anyone other than a Democrat or Republican in 2012? If Obama gets us on track in fixing things without extra taxes and business killing policies than I would be for giving him another 4 years, considering Democratic control of the House, the Senate and the White House, they have no excuses. First he must pass the line item veto to use a scalpel to remove the partisan politics injected into everything. However if they do not get us back on track and well on our way to recovery than neither party deserves any more chances.(Besides there is over a 74% chance you are neither a Democrat or Replubican...did you know that? World's Smallest Political Quiz!!)
I pay my US Bank CC bill with automatic withdrawal from my WAMU/CHASE bank account. Not sure what state your in, maybe it's a local thing... or maybe it's only if you already have a US Bank checking account, I do not.
I suppose you were not using WAMU a few years back when a software update resulted in no customer's automatic payments getting made via their automatic bill payment system.
A friend of mine was and when he contacted the bank, they refused to make any restitution of late fees or anything fees resulting from WAMU's mistake.
Personally I believe they should have taken responsibility for their actions, as the software update was their responsibility.
Just one more reason why I will not use automated bill payment via any of my checking accounts. (Yes I am a WAMU, now Chase customer, however I always have a backup bank, just to be safe. If one of those banks screws up my account, I will drop them and look for another second bank, allowing the current second bank to become my primary bank)
Having a minimum of two valid solvent bank accounts avoids have the check system issues of opening a new banking account after the credit reporting industry trashes your credit reputation. You can google that too, too many stories so no need for me to defend, support, etc...
I will not let anyone auto-draft from my account either. Too many horror stories and bad experiences out there about this mistake.
Fortunately there are other methods of online electronic payment, PayPal being one of them, that will allow you to make electronic payments without putting your bank account at risk.
Remember you can always use one account for all your electronic online needs, shuffling only enough money into it for your current needs, making sure that it cannot be overdrafted for any reason (get that in writing as you will probably need it), that way should the account get compromised it does not haunt you forever. That account can be closed in a heartbeat without impacting your primary accounts, where you have direct deposit for instance.
And without a copy of the bill to dispute these types of mistakes you are asking for problems eventually. I suppose you could get an electronic copy, however you better save it off to your own system to make sure it does not get changed. Which is a double edged sword as well, considering that the official record of a check USE TO BE the the paper check ONLY. For years after electronic statements the legal system refused to accept an electronic copy in lieu of a paper copy. My guess is that has changed by now (hopefully) and yes I can imagine the stories that many can tell because of this change.
In an honest world, you can do business with a handshake, how many lawyers would recommend that today, enough said.
In my opinion it all comes back to personal responsibility. Sadly others do not feel the same, thus you must protect yourself from them.
...Don't think any of the SSD based netbooks use swap at all and they get along just fine...
What is the best way to configure Linux on a sub 512MB RAM box, sub notebook, etc..., so that no matter how much you load (application wise) it will not die, although it might run slower should swapping occur? (The system seems to stop swapping as well when Free Memory falls below 10MB and really poorly when it falls below 5 MB. Ideally I would like to maintain 10 - 15 MB of Free RAM Memory available at all times.)
I know Linux can be configured to run in 128MB of RAM and love that...actually have a PC that I would like to configure and use with that low of RAM. (Intuitively I understand that if I can run with less RAM, when I purchase newer boxes with more RAM I should be able to run, much, much faster...the idea that a system for a normal Power user would ever get sluggish with over 1 GB of RAM is ridiculous in my opinion. If I purchase more RAM, I want my apps to benefit from that, not be required to have it just to function, but than my first work computer was an IBM mainframe with 32KB of RAM, an IBM 360.
My first desktop was the Radio Shack Model III, (4K RAM, Floppy drives, 12 inch B/W Monitor, keyboard, BASIC in ROM, TRS-DOS on disk, between $700 - $2,500 depending on config)my first IBM PC had either 16kB of RAM, 4.77 MHz Intel 8088, Floppy Disk Drive (credited with its business success per the wiki, aah the power of the floppy), 5 Bus slots (w/Expander in 1 of 5 - 8 more Bus Slots, slots used by Monitor, Hard Disk (if you had one, my first did not), I/O adapters, 3278/3279 Adapter - for moving up to 2 MB files to/from mainframe.), No hard disk for around $3,000. My first lug gable the IBM P70, OS/2 1.2 Extended Edition, MSDOS, Windows 3.1, Microsoft Word, Intel 9600 EX Modem, Hyper Access software, Token Ring Built in, slot for Ethernet, external monitor port (dual monitor mode), 8512 Color Monitor, floppy drive and hard disk (120 MB I believe) cost over $5,000. Made well over $15,000 working out of a hotel room on a consulting contract in a few weeks with that sexy heavy beast which was state of the art at the time. so was well worth the purchase.
A Intel Celeron M running at 900 MHz sub notebook, 512MB of RAM, 4GB SSD drive, 10/100 & WiFi built in; Web Cam, Audio and Mic ports, 3 USB ports, MMC.SD slot, external monitor port for $300 - $400 is something else... warning...slow loading flash; wiki page.
I could probably fit 9+ sub Notebooks the size of the Asus Eee PC in the IBM P70 leather carrying case, lol.
Thanks to the many great posts here I am learning this is a bit art as it is science and I do not mind experimenting with different configurations...
Read on if you need specifics about my configurations and PCs to help me...honestly looking for the right answers. I too would love to be able to set a MIN and MAX memory point (as another poster mentioned above) to begin swapping IN/OUT only allowing the swap if it is honestly required. Sounds like that is NOT possible at this time, though I sneakingly expect there might be a way...one day as I learn more...might be time to pick up programming in C again.
On my Asus EeePC I have noticed that my free memory continues to shrink, down to around 4 - 6KB free, at which point my performance suffers greatly. If an app fails or my Network Adapter hic ups when it is this low it can cause a lockup situation for me. I thought about swap space, but based on reading about hard disk performance issues, that does not sound like a good solution. ( Or is it?)
Now I do this to myself, I will often have
What about latency and reliability? I'm happy with 3.6 Mbit/s, or even lower, if I get a reliable connection with low latency. Rock solid 512 kbit/s with 20 ms latency would be preferable to anything available in the mobile market right now.
I will be happy when I get 100 MB / 100 MB bi-directional access to the internet for around $50 per month. Heck the Japanese have had this level since 2003 and now in 2008 they are migrating up to 1GB / 1Gb for less than $55.00 per month. How far behind do we have to fall anyway?
As for
Who cares about bandwidth?
I do!
I still want the same speed upstream as I am getting downstream. Enough excuses already time to honor your promises to the United States government and U.S. consumers. (Note: While some of the telcos that promised no longer exist, I would suggest that the homes and area that they serviced does still exist. The business that acquired their area, should also acquire responsibility to build out that area per the promises that the telco that was bought made. I would suggest that they bought both the assets and the liabilities. I believe this liability, a public trust if you will, should be passed on as it is attached to our tax dollars, fees-still-being-charged every month and government funding and therefore should not be ignored because the business was purchased and/or acquired....my .02 cents)
As of 2008, no US customers have the 45 Mbps bidirectional service to our homes and you guys promised to have 86 million customers receiving 45 Mbps by 2006. And certainly not for the expected cost of .50 cents per 1 Mbps of bi-directional bandwidth.
And do NOT state that you are providing high speed access to consumers based on the FCC definition of high speed internet, 200Kbps - try to run videos at that speed, high speed my behind....
Also about bandwidth, I want to be able to consume the total amount of bandwidth that I am (and have been) actually paying for. It's not my fault that the telcos and internet providers have taken money from consumers and the U.S. government (estimated at over $200 billion since early 1990s in the form of tax breaks; increases service fees and outright government funding) and used it for buying up companies rather than building out their infrastructures. ( Funny how similar the telcos reaction to receiving money was to the current financial companies and banks that received the buy in / bail out money by the government recently).
I am concerned that the wireless providers will play the same sleight of hand with or without the FCC for wireless internet that they have been playing with hard wired access. Surprised they are not asking for tax breaks, money or a bail out as well!
Now for a question to those of you who say reduce the latency and than work on speed, because I honestly do NOT know the answer. Here is the question:
If you had 100MB / 100MB (bi-directional) at how high a latency (how slow could it get) until you were as slow as what the average American high speed internet user gets today? (Assume an average bandwidth of 8.8 Mbps downstream (I do not get that either, but it is the average listed in the articl
Oh MAN, it's not gnu/Linux compatible... it's no wonder slashdotters aren't getting any!
Hey McNeely, you can always start the next Open Source project with it! ;-)
Then you can add in those body-sensor suits and expand the project to even more.
I don't know if you're being sarcastic.
No, I was quite serious. It's not often we get cool articles like this one, I do not often get a chance to discuss programming on-topic.
That said, OO seems to have some good tenets such as design patterns. So why is it that OO geeks seem to love piling layers upon layers?
It seems like a good idea at the time, especially to PHBs.
I've been involved off and on, mostly on with "reusable" software projects at work for over 2 decades now. The only conclusion I've come to is that it sounds very, very good, but does not quite work out in practice.
I also love your quote:
Steve's Law - If a layer of abstraction is the right answer, you have probably asked the wrong question.
I am pleasantly surprised to read this, perhaps I have not read the right forums...many times it seems people will select the newest greatest fad, tool, package, framework, etc... not because it is the best to get the job done, but because its new and they want to do something new and different.
Than they leave the project and/or company and you are stuck with the mess they leave behind due to the choice they were able to get the manager to say Yes to.
Even worse are companies that have the golden project mentality. When the new project gets proposed and run with, that project gets the lions share of the funding, literally anything and everything that they want whether its needed or not. When the project falters, it seems that the Director / Managers are the first to jump ship...if they can so they will not be held responsible for their poor decision.
Even more amazing is those very same Managers are the ones that are in charge of the next Golden project.
With one company, in less than 6 years I saw the same set of Managers start and jump ship from two different huge Golden projects (both failures). I was always amazed at how personal never seemed to look at the employee turn-over they caused and do something about them.
I saw the company lose some very expert knowledge wise employees, however those managers never lost their jobs, even though the fault in both cases was easily partially their faults. When I finally gave my notice and left for greener pastures, those same managers were still there.
I am not suggesting always firing someone when they fail as some companies do, after all any time I have failed it has always been one heck of a learning experience. One that I did not repeat I might add.
At the very least, they should not be put in charge of the very next new project. Geez. The institutional memory at that place was amazingly bad.
I have always maintained that if a Manager has abnormally high turnover rates, perhaps they might be part of the problem. But no one seems to monitor that or at least it seems like most companies do NOT.
It's not rewriting code or reusing code that makes you a successful programmer: it's knowing when your project manager wants you to rewrite or reuse code for "business reasons". As I have found out to my cost in the past.
You are assuming that your project direction has not changed for you due to some external influence beyond your scope and/or control.
Often no matter how well designed, no matter how well coded, no matter how well managed, things happen, external influences that force changes to the end software product. This type of thing simply can NOT be planned for, especially if the market says No to your product due to missing critical features.
Not much better if you determine that features not planned until multiple releases away are suddenly determined to be more critical now than previously determined by sales, marketing and business units. Especially if you do not have the budget for additional resources.
That can happen even with good communication with your customers, the market and knowledge of the competition.
One external influence that I really loath is when you are dependent on a discontinued proprietary commercial library or a framework (that you did not select and that you do not have access to the source code for), but its critical to the success of your project. Often the company is unable to buy it so time to find something else or start coding. Even better if the company that discontinued the framework was the only one that would do the job for you.
Having access and ability to change the source has saved my bacon on more than one occasion. And no matter how well supported a framework or library is today, it might not be tomorrow.
Sign me as not a big fan of third party development tools that you cannot live without.
... I absolutely abhor doing something over and over, ... When one of my fellow employees quit, I took the majority of his work and turned into Perl scripts. Literally. What used to take him hours each day now takes minutes... And because I've made it so easy, others can do it as well.
Not only over and over, I don't even want to do it twice if I can avoid it. Though I will admit any time I rewrite code it is better the second time than the first.
My first programming job I replaced a guy who got fired because he could not get his own custom code to work. He was being cute with over 400 lines of logical ands and ors it was pathetic.
Being too new to know any better I first tried to make sense out of his code but simply could not it was just badly written.
I finally pulled myself away from his junk and thought about the problem. Controlling two sets of 8 switches to turn various things on and off at appropriate times based on sensors...no problem.
Once I determined the distinct set of codes to do everything I needed it to do, I proceeded to do them at appropriate places based on the data in the sensors.
Piece of cake, removed over 400 lines, replaced with a logical 30 - 50 lines of code and low and behold the entire software program worked like a champ.
I learned early on about keeping it simple. Works every time.
Sign me an average programmer and okay with that.
Censorship, separation of powers, I would suggest that this video issue touches on those and others and we need Net Neutrality to prevent the bigotry of others from impacting any of us.
The impact on censorship is huge. No provider should ever be held liable for anyone's content. The fact that they are going after the company, in this case Google, and not the individuals that posted the content is bad enough in my opinion. If I were on a jury (of course in another country would you even have that option) I would want it thrown out based on censorship alone. You want to censor, go ahead and censor yourself if you want, but do NOT dare to decide for me or anyone else.
Bringing down the offending video should have been sufficient, but in this case appears not to have been. It should have been.
A good reason not to allow any court in any other country, NOT to have an impact in the country in which you live. We need to be held accountable to our laws alone, and many are bad enough without putting another countries garbage before our own.
Should this case or any case like it impact anyones freedom in the USA (or any other country); we all have additional problems. This must not be allowed to happen in the United States. (And no amount of fear should be acceptable to reduce an individuals rights as has been done here in the US by our own government in the last few years...sad but true for us.)
Another good reason for the separation of powers for any government. Two that come quickly to mind are legislative vs judicial and church vs state.
For legislative vs judicial, it seems simple enough, one group legislates, makes laws the other group bases their decisions on those laws. As I read this, this seems too simple a definition, perhaps someone with more legal expertise than I can add to this and make it better. Specifically, I do not have a problem as many do with the Supreme Court legislating from the Bench, is this not one thing they MUST do? Another thought, if you do not bring a decision up for them to decide than they cannot legislate from the bench can they? As I mention later this falls into the category of watching what you wish for as you just might get it. (Of course you can legislate morality, but SHOULD you? I would suggest that a wise person would NOT ever!)
For church vs state, it seems simple enough. If any of us want freedom of religion to worship and believe that this is a right given to us by our creator, than why allow any law to be made that will allow another group, no matter how well meaning, discriminate against our ability to worship (or not) as we see fit.
Yet many in this country, the good old USA, must really want to live under a theocracy as they consistently attempt to legislate religious activities, behavior, etc, you name it. Or perhaps many misguided Americans want to live under Despotism, our founding fathers understood what that meant as well. This is extremely short sighted and
How much does bandwidth actually cost for a major ISP? ... Imagine if the cable companies capped how much TV you could watch per month.
Less than $5.00 per month their cost, for what we would pay $50 or more for per month for. IMO $50 per month for 100MB / 100MB or .5 per Gig is too much. If only never-to-be-throttled 100MB / 100MB would be offered to us...
Of course 100 MB / 100 MB is not yet available to us here in the USA. But it is coming, and when it does watch out...
In Japan they have had, thanks to forced government de-regulation, 100MB / 100MB since 2000 for around $25 per month.
I liked this quote from the above link:
"Obviously, without the competition, we would not have done all this at this pace," said Hideki Ohmichi, NTT's senior manager for public relations.
I heard another Japanese telecom executive state that it cost them less than $5.00 to provide services to customers on a PBS show. You will not hear American executives telling American consumers that it costs them less than $5.00 per month. The American telecom executives on the show / panel had pained expressions on their faces. I am sure they are counting on their customers remaining oblivious to how much we are getting hurt by charging more for less; throttling services based on type of services; putting caps on services; etc....
If it costs less than $5.00 per month for a fiber link, than why is anyone, anywhere else in the world paying more for less. And once you learn of these facts, it really does make you mad when shills for the US cable and DSL companies come out complaining the opposite is true. I am sick of the lies and many innocent people jumping on the band wagon only because they are in the dark and do not know any better, WAKE UP please for all of our sakes.
Eventually there will be a company in your area offering uncapped, fiber-last-mile connection to your home, apartment, community and you will be able to thank your ISP for years of abuse by churning.
The more they piss off customers, the less sympathy any of us should have for them. I know I do not feel sorry for any of them. And marketing campaigns to buy American and get screwed will not work on me and many others either.
Now in Japan they are upgrading from 100MB / 100MB to 1GB / 1GB because their infrastructure, Fiber, will allow them to make this change simply by changing out the router on each end. Or if you already have a fiber router, just changing out the firmware in it. The expected cost for 1GB / 1Gb is expected to be less than $55.00 per month. Forum posts discussing the new technology; UK Inquirer article. I wish we had this available in the USA.
USA consumers should have had this back in 2000, perhaps as early as 1998 in some larger cities, definitely by 2003. Here it is 2008 and we still can't get service anywhere near 100MB / 100MB. Pathetic and definitely NOT FORGIVABLE! How many of you reading this understand that the telcos promised higher speeds and collected money for those promises that they reneged on?
We, the USA High Speed Internet consumer, have been getting screwed for years. Our only chance will be if government steps in as they did in Japan and forces the hands of the major telcos, cable companies and related telecommunications companies. Normally I am NOT for government regulation however, as Japan has proved and the US telcos have shown by their lack of keeping promises they made, in thi
... Nethack is from 1987, and is based on hack from 1985.
If you install `bsdgames' on debian/ubuntu, you can play hack, the precursor to nethack....
First played Rogue on a DOS PC around that same time frame. It ran just fine on that old PC. I will have to give the debian/ubuntu version a try one day. Back than we were playing Chess, Othello, Go and Solitare on the PCs as well.
One of the better programmers (he was on a team that placed 2nd in the ACM's international programming contest a year or so later) stayed in one of the university computer labs all night long playing Rogue. His goal at that time was to do it in one pass without stopping, no saves, just playing all night long. He managed to do it too! He was also doing some pretty interesting stuff on a VAX with Fractiles also.
Sadly I never made it all the way to the Amulet, nor did I try to cheat. Perhaps one day I will give it another try. And yes I will look over the hints before I do, lol.
Got to play Apache on the MacIntosh within a year or two of that same time period, flying a helicopter through the city and shooting at things was a blast compared to the pixel computer games I was use too.
It was years later that I got to play BattleZone on an IBM PC. I remember being sad that I had finished all of the missions and wanted to play more. That was before having kids of course when I had more time. I first played the Arcade version of BattleZone for a quarter; the PC version with missions was so much better than the Arcade version that only gave you a screen you could pivot and move.
Two of my favorite really old games, pre PC; pre MacIntosh because they did not cost me a quarter like Missile Command did in the arcade, were played in 1979 with a TSO account on an IBM 360 and Amdhal 470 with not enough system RAM memory so that only two or three players could play at the same time. That system RAM was of coursed shared by everyone and everything running on the system at that time. Adventure and Empire. I believe they were written in Fortran, but honestly do not remember...its been a couple of years.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike
Found a link with a map of another game, Zork, but it is similar enough to give someone who has never seen it an idea. We would take our printouts (remember that green and white banded paper from the mainframe days) and make maps like these. Since the TSO account playing the game took up so many system resources, I had to promise that I would only play it on the weekends after 10pm or risk losing my TSO access. There were 9 or 10 accout levels, with TSO access not being granted until either level 6 or level 8 and I was not going to blow it.
One of the systems programmers had managed to get through Adventure to the end, but he told me that he went through the code to learn more about the game to do it. He told me what he did to win it and what he did when all the dwarfs woke up, lol, but I do not remember exactly what he said now. I got killed by waking up the dwarfs more than once.
Empire was fun, the world was randomly generated each time, so you explored and learned the lay of the land as you played the game. Battle was simple, you had a 50/50 shot when your pixel Army or Fighter encountered a city (or the enemyA) and 10 turns to build a Fighter (F) plane. While I never played long enough to build them, you could build Troop Transports (T), Aircraft carrieer's and Submarines (S) also. Of course they took longer to build, but you would need them to cross a body of water and only Cities next to a body of water could build them. In the time it would take to build one fighter, you could have built 5 Armies, so the more
Yeah, because no-one did payroll before clusters of P4s. Those IBM and UNISYS mainframe timetracking apps must have been figments of my imagination. I confess I don't know how many MIPS the mainframes had, but the keyboard I used looked like this.
I worked in a data center with an IBM 370 and it had 32K or RAM...lol, have no idea if it had even 1 MIP. Based on this blog post it probably had 1 MIP or less. The quote in the blog that I saw was
The years was 1979...And with the older IBM 370/158 rated as a 1.0 âoeold styleâ MIPS machine (based on IBMâ(TM)s figures of a cycle time of 115 nanoseconds, which is about 8.7 MHz.), this new one, the 4331 mainframe, rated at about .3 MIP, and its big brother, the 4341, at a shade under 1 MIP â" an incredible price/performance achievement at the time.
In the early 80s I worked with the IBM 4341, 61 and 81s. Back closer to 79 it was an IBM 360, so my guess is we had 1 MIP or less on that 32MB of RAM box.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane...
...On my eee PC with a stock hardware configuration, I go from a cold boot to the desktop in around 40 seconds whereas with XP it was taking about 3 minutes on average...
On my Asus EeePC (the Surf, a 901 w/out the webcam...should have got the webcam, running debian Linux 2.6.21.4-eeepc i686) I boot up between 10 - 23 secs. I will double check that and try to remember to come back and edit it this post.
On my Windows 2000 PC I counted to 110 seconds (1001, 1002, 1003 ... 1109, 1110) before I had the desktop up. I am getting up a couple of Linux servers, perhaps after I get them up I will reinstall my Windows 2000 from scratch to speed it back up. But I doubt that it will boot up faster then 50 - 60 seconds no matter what I do to it.
My windows 2000 box is only an IBM 6565 w/ 667 Pentium III processor, I got three of them for about $100 per quite a few years ago. With cheap, cheap memory they make a very workable Linux servers for under $250.
Heck i just got 1 GB or RAM (2 X 512 MB) on sale for $39.00 and a 500 GB drive for $109, looking forward to setting up my own distributed server machine and see how many different distros I can run on it at the same time. I have been pleasantly pleased what I can do with only 128 MB of RAM, bump that up to either 256MB or only 512MB of RAM and you have a very workable home server.
Thanks to Linux, I can turn one of them into a very fast custom DVD player, (maybe even put in my own internal fiber), currently running a gigabit network which of course is faster then my ISP provided router and connection anyway.
Not a big fan of WINE and would like to run a virtualized Windows 98, 2000 or XP in its own slice one day. Put it in its own sandbox just for the heck of it. (Either that or just stop buying Microsoft games all together. That is all I ever use Microsoft at home for anymore anyway is Microsoft specific games; fortunately I am not a big gamer anyway).
Hoping that my next job will have me in either a Linux only or at least a dual Linux / Microsoft environment. Best of all would be a Linux / Mac / Microsoft environment, but that is probably too much to hope for!
... 1) private and secure 3) available to your apps 4) backed up....
I would add #5) Able to restore from backups.
While working at a telco, with a commercial backup package, not going to mention the name, everyone thought we were getting good backups.
Until we could not restore a file, after it had been modified by others, needed by one of the executives in the company. He needed information that had been removed and did not have backups of the file he sent to be modified. (...I know, I know...how could he not had a backup of the old file, well he did not)
At that time we had been performing backups for a long time with out needing to restore data from the LAN/WAN servers... The backups were checked every day to make sure that they ran and completed successfully, they did or so we thought from what the reports revealed. We ran full backups once a week and an incremental backup on the other days of the week. This was back in the days when the mainframe data center staff looked at PCs as nothing more than toys...so the LAN/WAN server room was not even in the hardened data center.
It was not fun to tell him that not only could we not restore the file, but we had no faith in our backups.
Our short term solution, while we looked for a new backup software package; was to use a very large harddisk and xcopy data files across the network to it at night. Something you could do back in the NT, OS/2 and early Lotus Notes days.
I doubt that would be possible today with companies regularly backing up terabytes of data every day.
It was a good lesson for me early in my career, you don't know if you have backups if you have not successfully restored from them.
We were lucky it happened when it did as the very next day after implementing xcopy from a command prompt and copying data to the hard drives another group lost an entire subdirectory of information when the hard disk got corrupted, don't remember how or why, just that it did. They were working on a multi million dollar proposal when they lost everything. We were able to restore the entire subdirectory over for them with one copy command. It was so much faster simply copying the files from one disk on the backup machine to the server as a restore process compared to putting in a dat tape, searching through it for a file and if the file was found restoring the file.
The user only had to provide us with the domain name, filename and the path. It was real fast as compared to searching through a tape backup system.
You can bet we double checked our server backups with the new system on a test server before implementing it. If memory serves, we kept xcopying data to the backup machine and archiving to tape until the hard disks in the server got too large to make that practical. It was nice being able to simply copy to restore while it lasted, it was a lot faster than restoring from tape.
Even today at home, as soon as I get a new computer system, (I usually buy two or three at a time just to have extra parts, down the road, in an emergency) if I have two identical systems, I will try to blow one away, reformat and reinstall from scratch to make sure that I can. Better to know you can when you do not have too, rather than finding out you can NOT when you need too.
One manager had been compressing data files with a password and hiding not only the files, but the subdirectory structure as well. I guess he thought noone would find hidden subdirectories with hidden files. We just let him continue to think his method was secure and unknown to anyone but him. No point in stirring up the pot, we honestly could have cared less, we had more than enough work to do.
As interesting (and also not surprising at all) is the quote from the article,
The LEADS system also can be used to check for warrants and criminal histories, but such checks would not be reflected on the records obtained by The Dispatch
Why anyone would trust any online system with anything that could cost them a job, impact their credit, prevent them from receiving health insurance, prevent them from being considered from a job, put-your-privacy-concern-here, etc.... is beyond me.
Sure it will be secure, sure it will....
... Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has claimed that Linux violates 235 Microsoft patents. If he wasn't trying to sow doubt amongst enterprises as to the long term viability of Linux, why would he do such a thing? Lets also not forget Microsoft's aid in arranging funding for SCO. So, while Microsoft hasn't gone after anyone directly for patent issues, they've certainly done so indirectly.
I have read through many of the documents, especially the EU Ct. of 1st Instance: Microsoft Abused its Dominant Position - Updated This link has the not only the conversation after the court decision but links to videos and a recording of the conversation (Sean Daly, Georg Greve of FSFE, Jeremy Allison and Volker Lendecke of Samba, and Carlo Piana, their lawyer of record in the case) so you can here it in their words. Thank you for posting the link!
Microsoft's blue and green bubble defense is laughable and fortunately for all of us, at least the EU courts saw through it. It is telling that Microsoft's lawyer submitted 258 pages only about one hour before the case for review and that per Volker Lendecke, Microsoft deliberately muddied the waters with the term intellectual property in such a way that it was not clear whether they were talking about copyrights or patents or what. Very telling and sadly not surprising.
To think of those companies that actually got scared and agreed to settle with Microsoft, per Georg Greve, to the tune of ($3.6 million for Sun, Novell, REal and CCIA who were all bought out of the case). And how about those companies that actually bought worthless coupons out of fear of being sued, from Novell. Talk about a waste of money and we are not talking thousands or millions, but billions. In the first six months, Novell sold coupons to such marquee clients as Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, AIG Technologies, HSBC, Wal-Mart, Dell and Reed Elsevier have all acquired Novell Linux coupons from Microsoft."
If I were they, I think I would want my money back.
I find it interesting that Thomas Vinje, actually stated that "if you think about any of these markets, who were the innovators? Novell was the innovator. Novell created singlhandedly the workgroup server market. It was taken away from them by the monopoly." Real created streaming media, innovating and creating the streaming media market and they're gone now, at least fewer people use it these days. Netscape and browsers...of course there are many others.
Yes excellent article thanks for posting! It will be interesting to see how many of the companies that have outstanding court cases with Microsoft might try to force them to an earlier resolution now...I for one will not hold my breath.
...I think they are looking for people with older cars because they usually have less money to fight back against them with. Preying on the weak, these people are really scum.
-molo
I too was thinking, why, if you check online there are many people getting these calls and many of them do NOT have cars...so what is the motivation?
Perhaps to get a list of numbers to call for another reason? (ie. perceived to be poor)
Perhaps simply because you answered the phone. I have noticed comments that the caller hung up when a person answered?
Perhaps an automated system gathering information to be sold to someone else?
I can honestly think of no reason to legitimately answering the phone. With VoIP at least you are NOT getting charged for the call as you will if you exceed your plan with a cellular phone. Either way, just hitting the red hangup button would cut that call.
Way to play the game....