When the ATI and nVidia say, we can't be bothered with writing Linux drivers anymore, but we still won't open the source, what are you going to do?
I'll only buy harware that has good drivers, that's what. And, as it happens, ATI falls into that category. The video drivers for ATI in XFree/Xorg are pretty darn good. I can play my tuxracer, bzflag, torcs, and a number of other great 3D games just fine. Thanks, X dudes!
I tried installing ATI's binary-only driver, and I couldn't get the stupid thing to work. What a waste of time that was. I hate having to install drivers. I love drivers that come complete w/ my OS!
You can fill out pdfs with flpsed. flpsed allows you add text to pdfs.
On another note xpdf is many times faster for small pdfs than acroread. However, if you zoom in on a big pdf (like a map) w/ xpdf it renders the whole thing to X as an image. If that image is bigger than your memory (regardless of the screen size), X swaps out and your machine is reduced to a crawl. Acroread, on the other hand, doesn't do that. It just renders the part of the screen that is visible, which is slower than keeping your image in memory, but much faster than reading swapped contents from disk.
And what's the problem w/ all of you? I just downloaded Reader 7 at 200kKB/s from adobe. Where's the slashdot effect?
One industry executive who requested not to be named said that IBM's push into PHP and scripting reflects IBM's disillusionment with the Java standardisation process and the industry's inability to make Java very easy to use.
"IBM's been so fed up with Java that they've been looking for alternatives for years," the executive said. "They want people to build applications quickly that tap into IBM back-ends... and with Java, it just isn't happening."
I wish he would have told us this earlier. I guess we should stop dropping $10Ks on that open source computing cluster support contract, and get Windows installed on all those machines.
Internet sucks, particularly outside of Beijing and Shanghai.
My best internet experience was in Suzhou, not Shanghai. In Shanghai I couldn't find a place to hook up my own laptop for a reasonable price. The best way to maintain internet freedom is to have a VPN or ssh accounts back here in the states. Tunnel through those.
Expect to be cold most of the time.
That's funny, it was warm and muggy when I was there.
The Chinese are very proud of Chinese herbal medicine.
This is true. Don't worry about taking your own medicine, however. The doctor we visited definitely knew what he was doing and laughed at the herbals that we had been given.
Our VMS administrator still uses telnet to do administration, thinking that it's secure enough. Personally I use ssh. However, in order to change our passwords once they expires, we have to use telnet. SSH stops working. Just because the bozo in the above story didn't know what to do once in was in the box, doesn't mean that other bozos won't be more ambitious or do more sniffing.
If you're already teaching your kids perl (for some strange reason), pdl adds vector numeric features and access to all sorts of numeric libraries. It's good for number crunching and data display.
To the person who claims it is a poor choice for High Schoolers, I disagree, especially if statistics is of interest. It forces you to actually THINK about what you are doing
I agree here. Many people are posting that these mathematical sorts of programs aren't for high schoolers. While it is true that such programs shouldn't be used as a crutch for passing math class, it is also important to teach students programming, in particular mathematical programming. For this R would be good.
Poor documentation
I'll have to disagree here. R is an implementation of the S language standards. There a number of good S language references out there. Also the help.search() facility is great and the R-help mailing list archives are google searchable.
R is very good for statistical coding. A good number of professional statiticians code for the project and an even greater number actually use it, and it will run almost any S code written.
I've used it since graduate school and in my two subsequent professional research jobs. Currently I use it for running statistical simulations in parallel across our 45 node cluster.
No kidding. I was watching late night TV in Germany and saw a couple having sex. The female was completely naked. But the best part was the little NBC peacock logo (with the letters NBC) in the lower right corner. I really wished I had a VCR so I could send it to the FCC and cause some higgledy-piggledy.
This reminds me of 20 years ago (anybody remember that long?) during Ed Meese's commission on pornography. Bunch of old white guys looking at porn and decrying it on your tax dollar.
I had set my parents up w/ a Linux box, which worked fine, then my Dad wanted a faster computer and has too much disposable income, so he bought one. Of course it came with Windows, so they started using that. Now it's so virus & spy-ware infested that they can't even use it (It won't even display images). I'm not going back for the holidays, but if I were, I'd clean house.
Good thing I don't use M$ then. I currently have X windows from 6 different machines on my desktop, and 2 of them are running completely different operating systems (VMS) than I am.
And your system is crap. I work in a mid-to-large size goverment program that implements policies such as the ones you outline and this is what happens:
1. The process of getting applications approved is so slow and onerous that people just install the apps on local machines w/o the knowledge of IT. If they didn't, work would never get done.
2. Their network 'accredited'. So it's like everyone else's. Big whoop. They block outgoing ports, like ssh 22. That's just a pain in the ass. So I have to run my sshd at home on port 21 as well.
3. They install OS patches too, when they can. Of course everything is M$ (like I bet yours is), so sometimes those patches never appear or appear a year later. I laughed out loud when I got an email informing us that IE was vulnerable to certain web sites, so we should be careful about the web sites we visit and which emails we open. Now that's security!
Real security is not DITSCAP, IAVA, or ACERT, or any other dumb-ass acronym. It's using only secure operating systems like Linux with a simple firewall that allows only secure connections, like ssh or virtual private networks.
Sometimes hardware RAID does sucks. We had a HW controller (I think it was 3ware) that sometimes took 30 sec to delete a 100M file. We sent that one back.
Software RAID does have some real advantages, like speed. Put disks on multiple SCSI or IDE controllers with a dual CPU and you can _really_ fly. Also, you can recover from some really screwed up problems with mdadm, if you know what you're doing. Consult the linux raid mailing list: the feedback is great.
So the government can put up loud large TVs in any public place? How about a set of giant bright blaring TVs on the sidewalk oriented toward your residence 24 hours/day? I'm sure you wouldn't do anything about that.
Slashdot Mirror
When the ATI and nVidia say, we can't be bothered with writing Linux drivers anymore, but we still won't open the source, what are you going to do?
I'll only buy harware that has good drivers, that's what. And, as it happens, ATI falls into that category. The video drivers for ATI in XFree/Xorg are pretty darn good. I can play my tuxracer, bzflag, torcs, and a number of other great 3D games just fine. Thanks, X dudes!
I tried installing ATI's binary-only driver, and I couldn't get the stupid thing to work. What a waste of time that was. I hate having to install drivers. I love drivers that come complete w/ my OS!
You can fill out pdfs with flpsed. flpsed allows you add text to pdfs.
On another note xpdf is many times faster for small pdfs than acroread. However, if you zoom in on a big pdf (like a map) w/ xpdf it renders the whole thing to X as an image. If that image is bigger than your memory (regardless of the screen size), X swaps out and your machine is reduced to a crawl. Acroread, on the other hand, doesn't do that. It just renders the part of the screen that is visible, which is slower than keeping your image in memory, but much faster than reading swapped contents from disk.
And what's the problem w/ all of you? I just downloaded Reader 7 at 200kKB/s from adobe. Where's the slashdot effect?
Someone recommend me a good Canadian webhoster.
I'd like ssh and lots of other goodies.
One industry executive who requested not to be named said that IBM's push into PHP and scripting reflects IBM's disillusionment with the Java standardisation process and the industry's inability to make Java very easy to use.
"IBM's been so fed up with Java that they've been looking for alternatives for years," the executive said. "They want people to build applications quickly that tap into IBM back-ends... and with Java, it just isn't happening."
It took them this long?
I wish he would have told us this earlier. I guess we should stop dropping $10Ks on that open source computing cluster support contract, and get Windows installed on all those machines.
Internet sucks, particularly outside of Beijing and Shanghai.
My best internet experience was in Suzhou, not Shanghai. In Shanghai I couldn't find a place to hook up my own laptop for a reasonable price. The best way to maintain internet freedom is to have a VPN or ssh accounts back here in the states. Tunnel through those.
Expect to be cold most of the time.
That's funny, it was warm and muggy when I was there.
The Chinese are very proud of Chinese herbal medicine.
This is true. Don't worry about taking your own medicine, however. The doctor we visited definitely knew what he was doing and laughed at the herbals that we had been given.
I'd much rather wait who knows how many hours to get a tiny little poorly encoded pirated version than pay 2 bucks and get a quality download now!
Our VMS administrator still uses telnet to do administration, thinking that it's secure enough. Personally I use ssh. However, in order to change our passwords once they expires, we have to use telnet. SSH stops working.
Just because the bozo in the above story didn't know what to do once in was in the box, doesn't mean that other bozos won't be more ambitious or do more sniffing.
This just in! "Hello world" has 0 bugs per three lines of code! Most stable and secure software ever devised!
This case is not interesting. The code is not useful and no one would expect any bugs:
25/1000*3 = 0.075 1
http://pdl.perl.org/
If you're already teaching your kids perl (for some strange reason), pdl adds vector numeric features and access to all sorts of numeric libraries.
It's good for number crunching and data display.
To the person who claims it is a poor choice for High Schoolers, I disagree, especially if statistics is of interest. It forces you to actually THINK about what you are doing
I agree here. Many people are posting that these mathematical sorts of programs aren't for high schoolers. While it is true that such programs shouldn't be used as a crutch for passing math class, it is also important to teach students programming, in particular mathematical programming. For this R would be good.
Poor documentation
I'll have to disagree here. R is an implementation of the S language standards. There a number of good S language references out there. Also the help.search() facility is great and the R-help mailing list archives are google searchable.
R is very good for statistical coding. A good number of professional statiticians code for the project and an even greater number actually use it, and it will run almost any S code written.
I've used it since graduate school and in my two subsequent professional research jobs. Currently I use it for running statistical simulations in parallel across our 45 node cluster.
Some splashscreens are even always on top ...
You should be able to set your window manager so this can't happen. If no, get a better window manager.
I can't get w3m to be exploited either.
No kidding. I was watching late night TV in Germany and saw a couple having sex. The female was completely naked. But the best part was the little NBC peacock logo (with the letters NBC) in the lower right corner. I really wished I had a VCR so I could send it to the FCC and cause some higgledy-piggledy.
Kiddie Porn?
These people need help.
Regular Porn?
Everyone has that.
Nazi/Skinhead sites?
These people need some education and understanding.
Business competitors?
No, everybody is a competitor to someone else. Some people just need to be less competitive.
Spammers
These people need to die.
This reminds me of 20 years ago (anybody remember that long?) during Ed Meese's commission on pornography. Bunch of old white guys looking at porn and decrying it on your tax dollar.
I had set my parents up w/ a Linux box, which worked fine, then my Dad wanted a faster computer and has too much disposable income, so he bought one. Of course it came with Windows, so they started using that. Now it's so virus & spy-ware infested that they can't even use it (It won't even display images). I'm not going back for the holidays, but if I were, I'd clean house.
-Frank
Isn't that the fluke rather than the fin
they're talking about?
Good thing I don't use M$ then. I currently have X windows from 6 different machines on my desktop, and 2 of them are running completely different operating systems (VMS) than I am.
And your system is crap. I work in a mid-to-large size goverment program that implements policies such as the ones you outline and this is what happens:
1. The process of getting applications approved is so slow and onerous that people just install the apps on local machines w/o the knowledge of IT. If they didn't, work would never get done.
2. Their network 'accredited'. So it's like everyone else's. Big whoop. They block outgoing ports, like ssh 22. That's just a pain in the ass. So I have to run my sshd at home on port 21 as well.
3. They install OS patches too, when they can. Of course everything is M$ (like I bet yours is), so sometimes those patches never appear or appear a year later. I laughed out loud when I got an email informing us that IE was vulnerable to certain web sites, so we should be careful about the web sites we visit
and which emails we open. Now that's security!
Real security is not DITSCAP, IAVA, or ACERT, or any other dumb-ass acronym. It's using only secure operating systems like Linux with a simple firewall that allows only secure connections, like ssh or virtual private networks.
Sometimes hardware RAID does sucks. We had a HW controller (I think it was 3ware) that sometimes took 30 sec to delete a 100M file. We sent that one back.
Software RAID does have some real advantages, like speed. Put disks on multiple SCSI or IDE controllers with a dual CPU and you can _really_ fly. Also, you can recover from some really screwed up problems with mdadm, if you know what you're doing. Consult the linux raid mailing list: the feedback is great.
That said, hardware raid is much easier.
So the government can put up loud large TVs in any public place? How about a set of giant bright blaring TVs on the sidewalk oriented toward your residence 24 hours/day? I'm sure you wouldn't do anything about that.
And they have oggs!
You can use
ping -s 4096
to increase the packet size to bring up the load.