I saw a discussion a few weeks back of an open distributed client, that researchers needing some computing power could just send out plugin for it, and anybody who wanted to contribute could just plug it in and go.
Sounds like a very cool idea - SETI@Home has already used over 11,000 years of CPU time that would have otherwise gone to waste. Imagine what could happen if any serious researcher who needed more power could plug into that?
Because 99.999999999% of the time, the format doesn't matter, the text matters. And if that's the case, plain text is a far better way of doing things. I'm sick and tired of getting a 12 Mb Word for Windows file that consists of two pages of 36 point text which could have fit into a 1K text message. Especially when the idiot manager in question includes a Word Macro Virus.
I use StarOffice on my computer at work. The machine is dual boot, and I'm allowed to use Linux most of the time because we're doing Java development. When some idiot^Wmanager sends a document in a Microsoft format, Star Office can handle it 99.99% of the time. When Star Office can't, I have the option of either asking for it again in RTF, or booting back into Windows NT and using Office. But a few weeks ago our idiot VP of Product Development sent out a document that included a Word Virus, and I was one of the few people not infected.
Run it with "-nice 19" and yes, it will take your load average up to 1.0. However, it will also get out of the way and not interfere with your work. I've found that large compiles are only slightly slower (like less than 1%).
>Drives: Think they could cram a non-development Linux setup into 340M?
My first Linux box had a 220Mb drive, and I had X, and full development with C and C++ and X development libraries. Mind you, this was SLS 1.03 with kernel 0.99pl14e
I'm a former civil engineer (structural). Now I'm a coder. Most of the comments here are from people who don't have a clue about how engineers work. For starters:
Engineering often presents you with many different ways of solving a problem, and the solution you choose will be based on your own aesthetic sense and other unmeasurable things.
Engineering technology changes daily too, and engineers have to study constantly to keep up. That doesn't invalidate their certificates, or the need for certification.
Engineers are under just as much time and money pressure as programmers, maybe even more so. Your boss might suggest a change that will give you some sleepless nights in order to shave a few weeks off the schedule - but imagine when he has the power over hundreds of thousands of dollars of materials costs, and you have to fight for the difference between good and good-enough!
The only engineers who get certification are the ones whose projects have to work right the first time, or people will die. Like structural engineers. Electrical engineers are more like most programmers, in that they can test their stuff in the lab first. I suspect that very few programmers will require certification if certification happens.
It works all right for me. Catting a file directly to/dev/audio just produces horrible noise, but using the "play" program works fine.
I tried to install real player 5.0, but it gets a segmentation fault while playing welcome.rm.
I also tried playing xboing with -sound, and the sound lagged severely behind the game. But I've never done that with a different audio card, so I don't know if that's a problem with the card driver or the game.
The author's solution, of always running the clients on one machine and using X windows to put the display on where-ever he's logged in, seems sub-optimal to me. I'd much rather run the clients locally, and use NFS mounted/home and/var/spool/mail so that my documents and mail are on any machine I'm on. Since you spend a lot more time editing without saving, I think my solution is considerably faster, too.
I recently borrowed a friend's Palm Pilot, and I tried to download some software for it. Just about everything I downloaded, however, was crippleware/annoyware. It was a huge cognative dissonance - here is the Linux system I use every day, with hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work that went into the creation of it, and nobody asked anything more in return than the approval of their fellow geeks. And here's some crappy little Palm Pilot application that probably took some guy a weekend to write, and he expects me to pay him $30 for it, and he won't even let me use the numbers 7, 8 and 9 until I do. Or he'll display some annoying banner for several seconds until I pay.
My reaction at first was "screw this, if I want an application to do foo I'll write my own". My second reaction was "wow, what a different world the DOS/Windows people must live in - everything for money, nothing for love".
It doesn't supprise me that with more DOS/Windows people getting into Unix that the money grubbing weasels with the shitty shareware would be moving in too.
This is a book which, as is hinted strongly in the RICERCAR, you get more out of each time you read it. I haven't read it in 4 or 5 years, so I should probably read it a few more times, but I used to make it a point to read it every year or so.
IP numbers are usually assigned dynamically with ISPs, so to track a particular crack attempt or spamming run to a specific user, you have to get the ISP's log of whom was logged in on that IP at that time.
Good points. I think you're right about DFC being more of a true parody, but don't you think that leads down a slippery slope if the courts have to rule on whether something is a parody or just uses the characters in an attempt to make humour?
I looked at all the Dilbert Hole cartoons, and all but one of them I could remember the Dilbert cartoon that they had used. They didn't even rearrange panels.
The Dysfunctional Family Circus has many of the same factors weighing against it (using the original strips with just the words replaced, racist, homophobic, etc), and yet it has managed to stay alive. Why?
BTW: I hope the UserFriendly/Segfault people realize that *this* is why we didn't like their AFJ - it's too damn true to life. And when the lawyers really do come for them, we're all going to sit back and say "nah, it's just another joke."
Interesting, but it's not *the* quote. He also seems to be trying to get credit for the hardware design of the IBM PC, which I think is revisionist. Like I said before, computers like the DEC Rainbow could address 768K in MS-DOS because they weren't laid out the same as IBM.
"don't defend the indefensible"? What the fuck are you talking about? I said that Bill Gates never said "640K is enough for anybody", because 640K was never an Microsoft limit, it was an IBM limit. MS-DOS 1.0 could address anything up to 1Mb if the hardware wasn't reserving it, and there were several machines where it did 768K.
fortune(1) is NOT a primary source. I'm asking for a primary source - the people who maintain the fortune database didn't interview Gates. If he really said it, then there will be a magazine or press release or book or something that people can point to where he says it right out. Whenever I put up my standard $100 for anybody who can provide proof that he said it, all I get are third person accounts.
Bullshit. There were several MS-DOS (but not PC-DOS) 8088 machines that could address 768K or more. The 640K limitation came from IBM's design, not from MS-DOS.
Where I come from, 64K is a pretty huge chunk of code to waste on something that doesn't add any functionality. But then I don't work for Microsoft, so producing small, fast applications that are stable and work well is a higher priority than you're probably used to.
My point exactly. They've been trained by the Microsoft Evil Empire to believe that lockups and crashes are normal behaviour, and just reboot and retype what you lost, ho hum. And they're so trained that they won't go to something else that promises crash free operation, even if it's just as whiz-bang and capable of what they want as the buggy crap from MS.
I don't understand it, myself, and the only explanation I've managed to find is "people are stupid".
It is impossible to prove that Bill Gates ever said that - he said he never said it, and nobody has been able to find a single source document (interview with him, news release, article about him) that has this quote as anything other than third hand. I defy you to prove that he did. Quoting "fortune" doesn't count - there's a lot of unsubstantiated crap in there.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw a discussion a few weeks back of an open distributed client, that researchers needing some computing power could just send out plugin for it, and anybody who wanted to contribute could just plug it in and go.
Sounds like a very cool idea - SETI@Home has already used over 11,000 years of CPU time that would have otherwise gone to waste. Imagine what could happen if any serious researcher who needed more power could plug into that?
Talk about going off half cocked. Can somebody please point me to the story?
Those are some of the ugliest things I've seen in a while. And I don't just mean the bunnypeople.
Because 99.999999999% of the time, the format doesn't matter, the text matters. And if that's the case, plain text is a far better way of doing things. I'm sick and tired of getting a 12 Mb Word for Windows file that consists of two pages of 36 point text which could have fit into a 1K text message. Especially when the idiot manager in question includes a Word Macro Virus.
I use StarOffice on my computer at work. The machine is dual boot, and I'm allowed to use Linux most of the time because we're doing Java development. When some idiot^Wmanager sends a document in a Microsoft format, Star Office can handle it 99.99% of the time. When Star Office can't, I have the option of either asking for it again in RTF, or booting back into Windows NT and using Office. But a few weeks ago our idiot VP of Product Development sent out a document that included a Word Virus, and I was one of the few people not infected.
This is the only thing keeping me back from installing RedHat 6.0. If it works on RedHat 6, I'll be very happy.
Run it with "-nice 19" and yes, it will take your load average up to 1.0. However, it will also get out of the way and not interfere with your work. I've found that large compiles are only slightly slower (like less than 1%).
I got through to both of those web sites just now.
Probably their power was out for a few hours last night, and people started stupid rumours.
>Drives: Think they could cram a non-development Linux setup into 340M?
My first Linux box had a 220Mb drive, and I had X, and full development with C and C++ and X development libraries. Mind you, this was SLS 1.03 with kernel 0.99pl14e
It works all right for me. Catting a file directly to /dev/audio just produces horrible noise, but using the "play" program works fine.
I tried to install real player 5.0, but it gets a segmentation fault while playing welcome.rm.
I also tried playing xboing with -sound, and the sound lagged severely behind the game. But I've never done that with a different audio card, so I don't know if that's a problem with the card driver or the game.
The author's solution, of always running the clients on one machine and using X windows to put the display on where-ever he's logged in, seems sub-optimal to me. I'd much rather run the clients locally, and use NFS mounted /home and /var/spool/mail so that my documents and mail are on any machine I'm on. Since you spend a lot more time editing without saving, I think my solution is considerably faster, too.
I recently borrowed a friend's Palm Pilot, and I tried to download some software for it. Just about everything I downloaded, however, was crippleware/annoyware. It was a huge cognative dissonance - here is the Linux system I use every day, with hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work that went into the creation of it, and nobody asked anything more in return than the approval of their fellow geeks. And here's some crappy little Palm Pilot application that probably took some guy a weekend to write, and he expects me to pay him $30 for it, and he won't even let me use the numbers 7, 8 and 9 until I do. Or he'll display some annoying banner for several seconds until I pay.
My reaction at first was "screw this, if I want an application to do foo I'll write my own". My second reaction was "wow, what a different world the DOS/Windows people must live in - everything for money, nothing for love".
It doesn't supprise me that with more DOS/Windows people getting into Unix that the money grubbing weasels with the shitty shareware would be moving in too.
This is a book which, as is hinted strongly in the RICERCAR, you get more out of each time you read it. I haven't read it in 4 or 5 years, so I should probably read it a few more times, but I used to make it a point to read it every year or so.
IP numbers are usually assigned dynamically with ISPs, so to track a particular crack attempt or spamming run to a specific user, you have to get the ISP's log of whom was logged in on that IP at that time.
Good points. I think you're right about DFC being more of a true parody, but don't you think that leads down a slippery slope if the courts have to rule on whether something is a parody or just uses the characters in an attempt to make humour?
I looked at all the Dilbert Hole cartoons, and all but one of them I could remember the Dilbert cartoon that they had used. They didn't even rearrange panels.
The Dysfunctional Family Circus has many of the same factors weighing against it (using the original strips with just the words replaced, racist, homophobic, etc), and yet it has managed to stay alive. Why?
BTW: I hope the UserFriendly/Segfault people realize that *this* is why we didn't like their AFJ - it's too damn true to life. And when the lawyers really do come for them, we're all going to sit back and say "nah, it's just another joke."
Interesting, but it's not *the* quote. He also seems to be trying to get credit for the hardware design of the IBM PC, which I think is revisionist. Like I said before, computers like the DEC Rainbow could address 768K in MS-DOS because they weren't laid out the same as IBM.
"don't defend the indefensible"? What the fuck are you talking about? I said that Bill Gates never said "640K is enough for anybody", because 640K was never an Microsoft limit, it was an IBM limit. MS-DOS 1.0 could address anything up to 1Mb if the hardware wasn't reserving it, and there were several machines where it did 768K.
fortune(1) is NOT a primary source. I'm asking for a primary source - the people who maintain the fortune database didn't interview Gates. If he really said it, then there will be a magazine or press release or book or something that people can point to where he says it right out. Whenever I put up my standard $100 for anybody who can provide proof that he said it, all I get are third person accounts.
Bullshit. There were several MS-DOS (but not PC-DOS) 8088 machines that could address 768K or more. The 640K limitation came from IBM's design, not from MS-DOS.
Where I come from, 64K is a pretty huge chunk of code to waste on something that doesn't add any functionality. But then I don't work for Microsoft, so producing small, fast applications that are stable and work well is a higher priority than you're probably used to.
My point exactly. They've been trained by the Microsoft Evil Empire to believe that lockups and crashes are normal behaviour, and just reboot and retype what you lost, ho hum. And they're so trained that they won't go to something else that promises crash free operation, even if it's just as whiz-bang and capable of what they want as the buggy crap from MS.
I don't understand it, myself, and the only explanation I've managed to find is "people are stupid".
It is impossible to prove that Bill Gates ever said that - he said he never said it, and nobody has been able to find a single source document (interview with him, news release, article about him) that has this quote as anything other than third hand. I defy you to prove that he did. Quoting "fortune" doesn't count - there's a lot of unsubstantiated crap in there.