Back in the days of the Mighty S100 bus, we were stuffing boards to get the IMSAI up to its maximum of 64KB. It took a while, since these were 8KB boards - at 1K bit per chip, 64KB covers a lot of board real estate!
So no shit, there I were, stuffing yet another board. Eric had liberated a bunch of RAM chips of uncertain pedigree from Moneywell, and prior experience indicated that we could expect one or two per board to fail on test. Desoldering chips from a double sided board being a pain in the ass, and having a tool that bent the leads for easy insertion without leaving them permanently deformed, so that they still sprung out firmly against the sides of the plated-through holes, I decided to try an experiment.
So all the chips get installed, and I solder the TTL logic chips that support the memory array; solder the other components (lots and lots of bypass caps, regulators, etc.)... and, for luck, the power and ground pins of each of the memory chips. Ooops, except that one that did get the pins too well straightened and was clearly not making any contact with most of them. Finally it's time for the smoke test... There were a couple more pins here and there that weren't making a solid contact, but with the memory test proggy pointing out where the errors were it was easy to spot them. A little solder on those chips, one recalcitrant chip replaced, and the board burned in overnight without any more errors.
So the next day I soldered the rest of the pins, because you just can't trust a non-soldered connection in the long run... and you really can't trust 1024 of them!
Here's the addition to my.Sig.d rotation the Master Card brouhaha inspired:
-- Threaten not the comic with your lawyers' bluster, all toothless to suppress parody and satire; for you will not amuse him, but you may inspire him.
Here's the deal: he wants patches released quickly to... wait for it... paid subscribers. Non-subscribers will have to wait for a later public release, with the same problem getting the patch installed before the exploit hits as now.
Say, you don't suppose he's got a patent application under way for this business model, do you?
The stunningly obvious hole in his his logic is the assumption that the subscriber-only release will never get into the hands of the exploiters. In other news, pigs have been reported sighted by flight crews of commercial aircraft...
Number one cause of sites being marked for disable CSS in Galeon: body text set to too small a size for pleasant reading. Remember the first rule of non-stupid markup: first, do no harm.
I will now repeat this for those of you who think that body {font-size : 90%;} is a good idea:
DON'T FUCK WITH THE DEFAULT BODY TEXT SIZE ON EVERYONE'S SCREEN IN ORDER TO AVOID SETTING THE SIZE YOU LIKE AS YOUR LOCAL DEFAULT. AT BEST THAT WILL CAUSE READERS TO DISABLE YOUR STUPID, ANNOYING MARKUP; AT WORST THEY WILL AVOID THE SITE. REDUCED FONT SIZES SHOULD BE USED, LIKE SMALL PRINT EVERYWHERE, FOR THINGS YOU WOULD JUST AS SOON FOLKS DIDN'T READ.
This free clue has been brought to you by people who like to read text on the web.
Forcing your personal preference in font family for running text is a lesser disrespect, but here again, do you really think we're all so stupid as to have a default font chosen that we find less pleasant to read than your favorite du jour?
So, okay, first I just have to point out that there are a bunch of replies but I haven't seen one Slashdottie paraphrase Euclid's famous sound bite - well, it woulda been a sound bite if they'd had The Evening News with Famous Talking Head and Sidekick back then, you know I'm right, get off that pot if you're not gonna shove hard - about learning Geometry. Whutta bunch of illiterate know-nothings you slackers are!
Speaking of slackers, what's with this question? Right, everybody wants to be Ptolemy, 'cause It Is Good To Be King. Except when the revolution is coming for you, dragging a frehly greased Guillotine to enliven the show. But most of you probably don't have clue number one what this bit is all about either, do you? Of course you don't! You're Slack-dotties, you can't be expected to have learned anything in school. You spent all your time trying to pretend you weren't in school, fuckheaded idiots that you were. I was like that too, but back in my day they'd tie you to the desk and keep you after school until... well, no, they didn't really do that. And that cliche about the rulers and your knuckles? Hardly ever. Really. Of course they didn't HAVE to rap most kids across the knuckles to get their attention back then. No one with that million-miles-away glazed look that says hey yeah, I like school so much better when I stuff the earbuds in and crank the mindless, mind-shredding noise up. Anything to avoid having to use the mind you've spent half your life trying to lose, right Slackies?
You young pukes make me sick!
But that's not what I came here to sing about. No, I came to sing the praises of some Good Books. I did see a few nods to Feynman, and a few of his essays are simple enough for even Slackdots to get the feeling that they sort of understood, or at least appreciated, whatever exactly he was going on about. But mostly you gotta have math, and to get math you gotta WORK AT IT.
'cause there still ain't no bloody god-be-damned royal road to mathematics. No Easy Street slide for slackers, neither.
You want to learn calculus? I mean learn it well enough to be able to start to learn about how it (and some harder maths as well, but calc will get you in the door of understanding; arithmetic and its yuppie cousin algebra just let you turn the cranks that were designed by people who had the chops) truly is the language of science, which ain't just a cute turn of a phrase, though it is that, but it's like a real, no false analogies here, metaphor for the way our understanding of the entire fucking universe has developed over the last few centuries. As oppposed to how you slackwits have closed your minds to any deeper understanding than the ability to catch a fly ball, and that, though you haven't the understanding to know it, has more to do with a few eons of evolutionary development of your central nervous system than it does with your brain, so called.
So You Want To Learn Math And Science?
Get thee to your community college; odds are damned good that they'll have the courses you need to fill in those gaps in your mental toolkit. Of course it's harder now - old brains are less flexible than young, but if you've reached the point that you can see the utter stupidity of your younger self who squandered those golden years, learning to be a twit instead of something worthwhile, something that might be useful for more than impressing your half-drunken friends that you're a wit - it's half true, after all - why, at that point you might be about to find that maturity does bring some compensation for the things you have to give up getting to it. If you haven't blanched and run away yet, back to your comfortable, mindless, slacking drift through life, you may be able to find the gumption to exert yourself and go to school in order to learn what you missed the first time around.
I mean, the odds aren't very good - if you're reading this, you're probably in the slacker half of the population, more inclined to rant and rail on the
TANSTAAFL, of course... although this is clearly "beer free". But then that's the kind of free that this item is all about.
To those hoping to have an option to turn the ads off: That's a big d'oh, good buddy. Having the ads playing is why it's (beer) free, so why in the world would they give you an option to turn off what's paying their bills? Right, they won't - and they certainly won't release the source to make it easy for someone to hack in such an option.
I wish I could recall where I saw a comment from a web site admin discussing the way the web ad business has evolved. The gist of it was that although there are 'way more ads, they pay 'way less each, so the revenue has been kept from falling only by placing ever more ads. This can't go on much longer - the ads will squeeze the content right off the screen pretty soon.
Random observation: if you run Linux it's almost trivially easy to get rid of most of those annoying ads. Your mantra is "junkbuster", available in easy-to-install packages for all the best distributions. I was finally moved to install this - or, rather, to get around to configuring it and using it, since it's been installed but not running for quite a while - when several sites I like to visit started attaching those damned looping GIFs. Sorry, Rob, but I have a nice, non-moving, zero download bandwidth cost "Internet JunkBuster" logo up there at the top of these pages, and on LWN and a bunch of other sites I would prefer not to block. But I get so damned tired waiting for those huge animated annoyances. Uhm, I used to get so annoyed, that is.
It's amazing how easy it is to squelch the majority of these things. Block doubleclick.com and blockstackers.com (or were they.net? the blockfile knows) and surprisingly few others and at least most of the places I regularly go load much faster and are free of annoying motion.
My web browser likes me when I point it at my JunkBuster proxy!
This arrived in my mailspool this morning. Dan Yocum is the Fermi (formerly Argonne) employee who setup Linus's side-trip there as well as the organizer of AALUG. I'm afraid this is The Real Story on this:
Hello all,
As you know, the talk is not open to the general public, otherwise I would have posted the info far and wide. This is at the request of the Comdex officials. It is only by their generosity that Linus and his family have been able to come to the Chicagoland area. They don't want people to go to the Fermi talk and skip his keynote at Comdex. This is a philosophy I must appreciate and respect.
For those of you who do not know, Linus' keynote is at 10:30 on Monday morning at Comdex, and is free to those who have registered (which is free if you do it via the net, see www.comdex.com for more details). There will also be a reception and LUG meetings which will be free later in the afternoon.
And as you all know there will be a CLC meeting on Tuesday at 5:30PM in room N133 at McCormick Place, which is open to everyone, i.e., no Comdex
pass is necessary to attend. The CLC is the Chicago Linux Consortium and this is our first meeting.
Back to Linus at Fermilab: this remains to be a non-public talk, so don't think that just because you saw it on Slashdot, you're allowed to come to the talk.
I have talked to the AALUG members and Simon has talked to the CLUG people: the same information that was passed along to those people stands today.
Thank you for your support and consideration in this matter, and please re-post this message freely.
Dan
________________________________________________ ___________________________ Dan Yocum | Phone: (630) 840-8525 Linux/Unix System Administrator | Fax: (630) 840-6345 Computing Division OSS/FSS | email: yocum@fnal.gov.~. L Fermi National Accelerator Lab | WWW: www-oss.fnal.gov/~yocum//V\ I P.O. Box 500 |// \\ N Batavia, IL 60510 | "TANSTAAFL"/( )\ U ________________________________|_______________ __________________ ^`~'^__X_
Fermi doesn't have a cluster of Linux machines, but that's because the bulk of their processing needs fit a model that is better served by non-clustered machines. (the description as best I recall it is "download a dataset of about 1G; process real hard for half a day; return the results of that batch; repeat") What Fermi has is the most amazing assortment of machines from olde Vaxen (still in active use), a large custom parallel-processor array, the occasional SGI Challenger (I think), to several "farms" comprised of Linux on Intel. Again, as best I recall, there's one production farm of somewhere around 100 processors (in dual-processor rackmount boxes) and at least one smaller "experimental" farm that is in active service. Another even large farm is in progress. FWIW, they find standard cases on industrial shelving more cost-effective for this than racks, so it won't perhaps be one of the more photogenic processor heaps.
There's a LUG based out at Fermi, named, for historical reasons, AALUG (Argonne Area). My probably not quite correct descriptions of the Linux farms caomes from a walk-through of the processing center that was the prequel to AALUG's last installfest. There's a somewhat out of date web page for the group at www.aalug.org
There are several other active LUGs in and around Chicago, and a recently-hatched plan to form a loose "all of us LUGgers" group that is having its first meeting, so-called, somewhere in the swirl of activity surrounding Comdex.... uhm, here, the CLC meeting is mentioned on this page: clug.chicago.il.us/comdex/
Slashdot Mirror
"It is what IT is."
So no shit, there I were, stuffing yet another board. Eric had liberated a bunch of RAM chips of uncertain pedigree from Moneywell, and prior experience indicated that we could expect one or two per board to fail on test. Desoldering chips from a double sided board being a pain in the ass, and having a tool that bent the leads for easy insertion without leaving them permanently deformed, so that they still sprung out firmly against the sides of the plated-through holes, I decided to try an experiment.
So all the chips get installed, and I solder the TTL logic chips that support the memory array; solder the other components (lots and lots of bypass caps, regulators, etc.)... and, for luck, the power and ground pins of each of the memory chips. Ooops, except that one that did get the pins too well straightened and was clearly not making any contact with most of them. Finally it's time for the smoke test... There were a couple more pins here and there that weren't making a solid contact, but with the memory test proggy pointing out where the errors were it was easy to spot them. A little solder on those chips, one recalcitrant chip replaced, and the board burned in overnight without any more errors.
So the next day I soldered the rest of the pins, because you just can't trust a non-soldered connection in the long run... and you really can't trust 1024 of them!
Here's the addition to my .Sig.d rotation the Master Card brouhaha inspired:
--
Threaten not the comic with your lawyers' bluster,
all toothless to suppress parody and satire;
for you will not amuse him, but you may inspire him.
Say, you don't suppose he's got a patent application under way for this business model, do you?
The stunningly obvious hole in his his logic is the assumption that the subscriber-only release will never get into the hands of the exploiters. In other news, pigs have been reported sighted by flight crews of commercial aircraft...
I will now repeat this for those of you who think that body {font-size : 90%;} is a good idea:
DON'T FUCK WITH THE DEFAULT BODY TEXT SIZE ON EVERYONE'S SCREEN IN ORDER TO AVOID SETTING THE SIZE YOU LIKE AS YOUR LOCAL DEFAULT. AT BEST THAT WILL CAUSE READERS TO DISABLE YOUR STUPID, ANNOYING MARKUP; AT WORST THEY WILL AVOID THE SITE. REDUCED FONT SIZES SHOULD BE USED, LIKE SMALL PRINT EVERYWHERE, FOR THINGS YOU WOULD JUST AS SOON FOLKS DIDN'T READ.
This free clue has been brought to you by people who like to read text on the web. Forcing your personal preference in font family for running text is a lesser disrespect, but here again, do you really think we're all so stupid as to have a default font chosen that we find less pleasant to read than your favorite du jour?
What's that in slashdot years?
Speaking of slackers, what's with this question? Right, everybody wants to be Ptolemy, 'cause It Is Good To Be King. Except when the revolution is coming for you, dragging a frehly greased Guillotine to enliven the show. But most of you probably don't have clue number one what this bit is all about either, do you? Of course you don't! You're Slack-dotties, you can't be expected to have learned anything in school. You spent all your time trying to pretend you weren't in school, fuckheaded idiots that you were. I was like that too, but back in my day they'd tie you to the desk and keep you after school until... well, no, they didn't really do that. And that cliche about the rulers and your knuckles? Hardly ever. Really. Of course they didn't HAVE to rap most kids across the knuckles to get their attention back then. No one with that million-miles-away glazed look that says hey yeah, I like school so much better when I stuff the earbuds in and crank the mindless, mind-shredding noise up. Anything to avoid having to use the mind you've spent half your life trying to lose, right Slackies?
You young pukes make me sick!
But that's not what I came here to sing about. No, I came to sing the praises of some Good Books. I did see a few nods to Feynman, and a few of his essays are simple enough for even Slackdots to get the feeling that they sort of understood, or at least appreciated, whatever exactly he was going on about. But mostly you gotta have math, and to get math you gotta WORK AT IT.
'cause there still ain't no bloody god-be-damned royal road to mathematics. No Easy Street slide for slackers, neither.
You want to learn calculus? I mean learn it well enough to be able to start to learn about how it (and some harder maths as well, but calc will get you in the door of understanding; arithmetic and its yuppie cousin algebra just let you turn the cranks that were designed by people who had the chops) truly is the language of science, which ain't just a cute turn of a phrase, though it is that, but it's like a real, no false analogies here, metaphor for the way our understanding of the entire fucking universe has developed over the last few centuries. As oppposed to how you slackwits have closed your minds to any deeper understanding than the ability to catch a fly ball, and that, though you haven't the understanding to know it, has more to do with a few eons of evolutionary development of your central nervous system than it does with your brain, so called.
So You Want To Learn Math And Science?
Get thee to your community college; odds are damned good that they'll have the courses you need to fill in those gaps in your mental toolkit. Of course it's harder now - old brains are less flexible than young, but if you've reached the point that you can see the utter stupidity of your younger self who squandered those golden years, learning to be a twit instead of something worthwhile, something that might be useful for more than impressing your half-drunken friends that you're a wit - it's half true, after all - why, at that point you might be about to find that maturity does bring some compensation for the things you have to give up getting to it. If you haven't blanched and run away yet, back to your comfortable, mindless, slacking drift through life, you may be able to find the gumption to exert yourself and go to school in order to learn what you missed the first time around.
I mean, the odds aren't very good - if you're reading this, you're probably in the slacker half of the population, more inclined to rant and rail on the
TANSTAAFL, of course... although this is clearly "beer free". But then that's the kind of free that this item is all about.
.net? the blockfile knows) and surprisingly few others and at least most of the places I regularly go load much faster and are free of annoying motion.
To those hoping to have an option to turn the ads off: That's a big d'oh, good buddy. Having the ads playing is why it's (beer) free, so why in the world would they give you an option to turn off what's paying their bills? Right, they won't - and they certainly won't release the source to make it easy for someone to hack in such an option.
I wish I could recall where I saw a comment from a web site admin discussing the way the web ad business has evolved. The gist of it was that although there are 'way more ads, they pay 'way less each, so the revenue has been kept from falling only by placing ever more ads. This can't go on much longer - the ads will squeeze the content right off the screen pretty soon.
Random observation: if you run Linux it's almost trivially easy to get rid of most of those annoying ads. Your mantra is "junkbuster", available in easy-to-install packages for all the best distributions. I was finally moved to install this - or, rather, to get around to configuring it and using it, since it's been installed but not running for quite a while - when several sites I like to visit started attaching those damned looping GIFs. Sorry, Rob, but I have a nice, non-moving, zero download bandwidth cost "Internet JunkBuster" logo up there at the top of these pages, and on LWN and a bunch of other sites I would prefer not to block. But I get so damned tired waiting for those huge animated annoyances. Uhm, I used to get so annoyed, that is.
It's amazing how easy it is to squelch the majority of these things. Block doubleclick.com and blockstackers.com (or were they
My web browser likes me when I point it at my JunkBuster proxy!
# blockfile for junkbuster at two14.lan
# obnoxious purveyors of bandwidth-wasting adverts
ad-up.com
adclub.net
ads.intellicast.com
ads.msn.net
ads2.zdnet.com
blockstackers.com
burstnet.com
click2net.com
cmp.net/ads/
doubleclick.net
easyscopes.com
eimg.com
focalink.com
hitbox.com
inet1.com
linkexchange.com
linuxtoday.com/pics/
lwn.net/images/
imgis.com
media.preferences.com
skygate.co.uk
songline.com
theonion.com/adframes
theonion.com/ad_
valueclick.com
wired.com/advertising
www.news.com/Ads/
www.sfgate.com/place-ads
# some brute-force for some brutish louts
/adimages/
/ads/
/adverts/
This arrived in my mailspool this morning. Dan Yocum is the Fermi (formerly Argonne) employee who setup Linus's side-trip there as well as the organizer of AALUG. I'm afraid this is The Real Story on this:
_ ___________________________ .~. L /V\ I // \\ N /( )\ U _ __________________ ^`~'^__X_
Hello all,
As you know, the talk is not open to the general public, otherwise I would
have posted the info far and wide. This is at the request of the Comdex
officials. It is only by their generosity that Linus and his family have
been able to come to the Chicagoland area. They don't want people to go
to the Fermi talk and skip his keynote at Comdex. This is a philosophy I
must appreciate and respect.
For those of you who do not know, Linus' keynote is at 10:30 on Monday
morning at Comdex, and is free to those who have registered (which is free
if you do it via the net, see www.comdex.com for more details). There
will also be a reception and LUG meetings which will be free later in the
afternoon.
And as you all know there will be a CLC meeting on Tuesday at 5:30PM in
room N133 at McCormick Place, which is open to everyone, i.e., no Comdex
pass is necessary to attend. The CLC is the Chicago Linux Consortium and
this is our first meeting.
Back to Linus at Fermilab: this remains to be a non-public talk, so don't
think that just because you saw it on Slashdot, you're allowed to come to
the talk.
I have talked to the AALUG members and Simon has talked to the CLUG
people: the same information that was passed along to those people stands
today.
Thank you for your support and consideration in this matter, and please
re-post this message freely.
Dan
_______________________________________________
Dan Yocum | Phone: (630) 840-8525
Linux/Unix System Administrator | Fax: (630) 840-6345
Computing Division OSS/FSS | email: yocum@fnal.gov
Fermi National Accelerator Lab | WWW: www-oss.fnal.gov/~yocum/
P.O. Box 500 |
Batavia, IL 60510 | "TANSTAAFL"
________________________________|______________
Fermi doesn't have a cluster of Linux machines, but that's because the bulk of their processing needs fit a model that is better served by non-clustered machines. (the description as best I recall it is "download a dataset of about 1G; process real hard for half a day; return the results of that batch; repeat") What Fermi has is the most amazing assortment of machines from olde Vaxen (still in active use), a large custom parallel-processor array, the occasional SGI Challenger (I think), to several "farms" comprised of Linux on Intel. Again, as best I recall, there's one production farm of somewhere around 100 processors (in dual-processor rackmount boxes) and at least one smaller "experimental" farm that is in active service. Another even large farm is in progress. FWIW, they find standard cases on industrial shelving more cost-effective for this than racks, so it won't perhaps be one of the more photogenic processor heaps.
There's a LUG based out at Fermi, named, for historical reasons, AALUG (Argonne Area). My probably not quite correct descriptions of the Linux farms caomes from a walk-through of the processing center that was the prequel to AALUG's last installfest. There's a somewhat out of date web page for the group at www.aalug.org
There are several other active LUGs in and around Chicago, and a recently-hatched plan to form a loose "all of us LUGgers" group that is having its first meeting, so-called, somewhere in the swirl of activity surrounding Comdex.... uhm, here, the CLC meeting is mentioned on this page: clug.chicago.il.us/comdex/