> Anyway, give me a study that shows that surgeons who play video games > have a lower mortality rate during surgery and I'll be impressed.
That would be a tough statistic to measure, as I suspect it is extremely uncommon for a surgeon to die while operating on a patient. You would need hundreds of years of clinical data collect enough data to be able to measure this.
I still have a couple of SFDs in my basement. 4,133 blocks free each, a hair over a meg. My 8050, bless it's soul, blew up in the early nineties. (8050 - two side-by-side single-sided SFDs in a 4040 chassis).
I also have a couple of 4040 chassis lying around intact (except for repairs -- they work), and one which was stuffed full of single-speed Sony CD-ROMs many many moons ago.
For the parent, The 1541 had 664 blocks free, or about 170K of usable storage. Unless you chose to use track 18 (the directory, track 40 on the SFD/8050), in which case you could eke out a little more disk space.
> crown colony who had to be forcefully weaned from the f*ing queen mum's > tit (and the bitch is still on their money!)
Actually, the Queen Mum is not on our money, and never has been.
The Queen has been on our since her coronation in what.. 1953?
That said, her latest portrait doesn't make her look very Queen-ly. More like an old hag. The current artist at the mint must be a staunch anti-monarchist.
RFC 822 *is* a standard. It is also known as STD 11, "Standard for the format of ARPA Internet text messages".
--------- *snip* ---------
6.3. RESERVED ADDRESS
It often is necessary to send mail to a site, without know-
ing any of its valid addresses. For example, there may be mail
system dysfunctions, or a user may wish to find out a person's
correct address, at that site.
This standard specifies a single, reserved mailbox address
(local-part) which is to be valid at each site. Mail sent to
that address is to be routed to a person responsible for the
site's mail system or to a person with responsibility for general
site operation. The name of the reserved local-part address is:
Postmaster
so that "Postmaster@domain" is required to be valid.
Note: This reserved local-part must be matched without sensi-
tivity to alphabetic case, so that "POSTMASTER", "postmas-
ter", and even "poStmASteR" is to be accepted.
> one has to wonder if this will affect tourism to this country.
I used to visit the excited snakes on a regular basis, both for tourism purposes and to purchase Big Iron. After my last trip (Jul 2002) resulted in an *enormous* hassle by US Customs, I'm really not keen in spending any more money down there. Haven't been back yet, may not ever be.
I didn't really there could be another group (outside of Redmond, WA) which would actually invest significant effort into making better browsers history.
It's like the programmer who spends six hours hand-optimizing the inside of a loop that gets called once a day and already executes in 10ms... but ignores the fact that the program takes 20 times longer to run than it should because of an inefficient algorithm. This programmer doesn't know *why* his program is slow, he's guessing, and he will almost always guess badly. This is why profiling was invented.
Look at it this way. Installing from the packages you get the following benefits:
- You save time compiling (multiply this by the number of patches you have to add over the box's life time)
- You save time tracking down dependencies
- You have a standard platform you can re-deploy at will
- You have something that another administrator can work on without asking where you shoved shit.
- You have a package database you can query for version information, dependencies, etc.
- You have an easily available source of "known good" binaries if you have a suspected intrusion problem.
- Depending on the package system you use, you might be able to stay on top of security vulnerabilities with very little (or no) work.
Now, installing from source, you get the following benefits:
- You can pick where the files go (whoopie)
- You tune the performance for your platform
- You can select specific features
- You can de-select specific features to save disk space
The only one which gains you a lot 99% of the time is where you can select specific features which are turned off in the standard package. If you need those options, you build it from source. If you're doing ten machines, though, you build it from source on *one* machine, package it up, burn it, and install it from YOUR package on all ten machines.
Saving a few CPU cycles is never worth saving a man-hour. You can use the man hour more productively on the macro-optimization level. Similarly, you can take the dollars that you would be pay the man and buy a new CPU with it.
The same argument goes for saving a kilobyte of disk space. If found out that any of my guys spent *any* significant time trying to cut less than a gigabyte out of our application footprint, I would give him a footprint of my own, right in the middle of his colon. Disk is cheap. People are not.
If you have an application is which is CPU-bound and running too slow, find out why (profile the system or binary), and build from sources only what you need to make your application conform to the target specification. Or, if that will take too long, just buy more CPU.
Long story short -- tuning of ANY kind should not be done at the micro-level across the board, that's just a waste of time. Tuning should be done by profiling the system as a whole, identifying the constrants, and relieving them. If that requires micro-tuning of a few things, that's fine... but squeezing every last little bit of performance out of absolutely everything is either impossible or incredibly time-prohibitive. And, of course, if you were going to spend that kind of time, you could either buy new hardware with the money (remember Moore's law), OR you example the system more closely at the macro level and come up with a better way to do things.
Damned straight. And WABI/Solaris + Office 4.3 would still be good enough for me, if they hadn't changed the format of the damned data files!! I had to buy a winblows box just so I could communicate with business partners. Argh.
When I set up a Windows box for a neophyte (admittedly, not often) I do everything I can to purge Internet Exploder from the system. Some might find this unjustifiable, but the only time I'm ever asked (begged) to help Windows is when a friend of my wife's computer is running badly due to six billion viruses and twenty-two trillion Spyware programs.
Anyhow. I hunt down all the shortcuts to IE and file associations to IE (i.e. as a viewer, default browser, blah blah blah) and replace them with Firebird. Then, I swap Firebird's icon with IE's icon. (I do a similar thing with with Lookout Express and ThunderBird). I used to even install the IE theme, but it's been busted for a while.
This will help to complete the illusion.
Of course, when I'm done, I just tell them I put on a new version of "The Internet" called Mozilla to help them not get viruses and spyware in the first place. I make sure they hear the brand at least a dozen times when I'm talking to them, because I want to build brand recognition. Maybe they'll tell their stupid friends how great Mozilla is and their friends will download it and use it. (Wishful thinking, I know).
But we all know that telling a Windows user to use Mozilla Fire* instead of IE will far on deaf ears; these people will click that stupid fuckin' blue E because they want to "get on the Internet". You have to make them use something else, or they WILL succumb to temptation and get infected again.
So far, nobody's come back. Either they hate me now, or they are relatively virus-free; I really don't care which.
At least my daughter was easier to set up. She knows to use Mozilla (full suite) instead of IE/OE. If she truly *needs* to use IE (i.e. one of her favourite sites doesn't work with Moz), she can ask me to add it to IE for her. I do this by modifying the automatic proxy configuration URL -- if it's on my safe site list, it points to Squid; otherwise it points to an inetd->shell hack which tells her to come and see me.
Your friend just needs to change the numbers on her house and any local signage for a few days. Then, call BellSouth and ask to be hooked up.
Tell 'em you just moved into an old abandonned farm or something. And make sure you rip out all signs of there having previously been telephone service at the house.
> The fun one is taking a pointer to a one-character > array, then when you know what size your objects > are going to be, cast the pointer to a pointer of > the correct size, then do pointer math on a big > chunk of memory to build an array of the new > objects.
This is still a useful technique -- at least in a common variant -- where you place a one-character [portable] or zero-character [GNU] array at the end of a structure, then cast the data you've been presented with to this struct..
Of course, if you're smart, you only write the code like that *once* (or maybe twice: read and write) and abstract away its use somehow.
myData = mmap(a big hunk of file); myData.dataLen = ntohl(dataLen); printf("The last byte of data is 0x%02x", myData.data[dataLen - 1]);...I suppose we could just read the bytes off the disk individually, malloc() enough ram to hold the data and read that in in a separate read call... but that would just plain suck, both from a code and performance point of view.
The example is obviously contrived, but is real-worldish. And sometimes, you don't have the luxury of seeking around a disk file as an alternative, you may be reading data from an I/O device or something similar. And, of course, there is no reason for data[] to be a char, it could just as easily by a four-dimensional array of fixed sized structures.
Slashdot Mirror
> Anyway, give me a study that shows that surgeons who play video games
> have a lower mortality rate during surgery and I'll be impressed.
That would be a tough statistic to measure, as I suspect it is extremely uncommon for a surgeon to die while operating on a patient. You would need hundreds of years of clinical data collect enough data to be able to measure this.
Damn straight.
I still have a couple of SFDs in my basement. 4,133 blocks free each, a hair over a meg. My 8050, bless it's soul, blew up in the early nineties. (8050 - two side-by-side single-sided SFDs in a 4040 chassis).
I also have a couple of 4040 chassis lying around intact (except for repairs -- they work), and one which was stuffed full of single-speed Sony CD-ROMs many many moons ago.
For the parent, The 1541 had 664 blocks free, or about 170K of usable storage. Unless you chose to use track 18 (the directory, track 40 on the SFD/8050), in which case you could eke out a little more disk space.
> crown colony who had to be forcefully weaned from the f*ing queen mum's
> tit (and the bitch is still on their money!)
Actually, the Queen Mum is not on our money, and never has been.
The Queen has been on our since her coronation in what.. 1953?
That said, her latest portrait doesn't make her look very Queen-ly. More like an old hag. The current artist at the mint must be a staunch anti-monarchist.
> Why, pray tell, is the Judge so hell-bent on ignoring the obvious conclusion?
Maybe it was his IP number?
>> postmaster@ is required (RFC822 6.3, C.6)
> Oh dear you thought they were standards,
RFC 822 *is* a standard. It is also known as STD 11, "Standard for the format of ARPA Internet text messages".
--------- *snip* ---------
6.3. RESERVED ADDRESS
It often is necessary to send mail to a site, without know-
ing any of its valid addresses. For example, there may be mail
system dysfunctions, or a user may wish to find out a person's
correct address, at that site.
This standard specifies a single, reserved mailbox address
(local-part) which is to be valid at each site. Mail sent to
that address is to be routed to a person responsible for the
site's mail system or to a person with responsibility for general
site operation. The name of the reserved local-part address is:
Postmaster
so that "Postmaster@domain" is required to be valid.
Note: This reserved local-part must be matched without sensi-
tivity to alphabetic case, so that "POSTMASTER", "postmas-
ter", and even "poStmASteR" is to be accepted.
..everybody knows it's spelled "Annoyed Grunt".
> one has to wonder if this will affect tourism to this country.
I used to visit the excited snakes on a regular basis, both for tourism purposes and to purchase Big Iron. After my last trip (Jul 2002) resulted in an *enormous* hassle by US Customs, I'm really not keen in spending any more money down there. Haven't been back yet, may not ever be.
Maybe not, but at least it has a spell checker!
...Gamebody Advance SP is reported to be dying.
I took a peek at the source code, and I have completely re-written it from scratch (without the use of emacs-lisp, imagine that!):
/bin/sh
#!
sed 's/\([A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9_-]*\)/GNU\/\1/g'
It sounds to me like he works for slashdot!
I didn't really there could be another group (outside of Redmond, WA) which would actually invest significant effort into making better browsers history.
..of time.
It's like the programmer who spends six hours hand-optimizing the inside of a loop that gets called once a day and already executes in 10ms... but ignores the fact that the program takes 20 times longer to run than it should because of an inefficient algorithm. This programmer doesn't know *why* his program is slow, he's guessing, and he will almost always guess badly. This is why profiling was invented.
Look at it this way. Installing from the packages you get the following benefits:
- You save time compiling (multiply this by the number of patches you have to add over the box's life time)
- You save time tracking down dependencies
- You have a standard platform you can re-deploy at will
- You have something that another administrator can work on without asking where you shoved shit.
- You have a package database you can query for version information, dependencies, etc.
- You have an easily available source of "known good" binaries if you have a suspected intrusion problem.
- Depending on the package system you use, you might be able to stay on top of security vulnerabilities with very little (or no) work.
Now, installing from source, you get the following benefits:
- You can pick where the files go (whoopie)
- You tune the performance for your platform
- You can select specific features
- You can de-select specific features to save disk space
The only one which gains you a lot 99% of the time is where you can select specific features which are turned off in the standard package. If you need those options, you build it from source. If you're doing ten machines, though, you build it from source on *one* machine, package it up, burn it, and install it from YOUR package on all ten machines.
Saving a few CPU cycles is never worth saving a man-hour. You can use the man hour more productively on the macro-optimization level. Similarly, you can take the dollars that you would be pay the man and buy a new CPU with it.
The same argument goes for saving a kilobyte of disk space. If found out that any of my guys spent *any* significant time trying to cut less than a gigabyte out of our application footprint, I would give him a footprint of my own, right in the middle of his colon. Disk is cheap. People are not.
If you have an application is which is CPU-bound and running too slow, find out why (profile the system or binary), and build from sources only what you need to make your application conform to the target specification. Or, if that will take too long, just buy more CPU.
Long story short -- tuning of ANY kind should not be done at the micro-level across the board, that's just a waste of time. Tuning should be done by profiling the system as a whole, identifying the constrants, and relieving them. If that requires micro-tuning of a few things, that's fine... but squeezing every last little bit of performance out of absolutely everything is either impossible or incredibly time-prohibitive. And, of course, if you were going to spend that kind of time, you could either buy new hardware with the money (remember Moore's law), OR you example the system more closely at the macro level and come up with a better way to do things.
Damned straight. And WABI/Solaris + Office 4.3 would still be good enough for me, if they hadn't changed the format of the damned data files!! I had to buy a winblows box just so I could communicate with business partners. Argh.
...six months to go... I rue the day.
A very valid point.
That's why they are trained to say "so and so set me up" when talking to tech support; I know the techs at the local ISP.
But even so, yeah, I admit this could cause some problems, but a clever tech will out what's going on anyhow.
The main point being, they don't call *me*. LOL.
Why, you ask?
When I set up a Windows box for a neophyte (admittedly, not often) I do everything I can to purge Internet Exploder from the system. Some might find this unjustifiable, but the only time I'm ever asked (begged) to help Windows is when a friend of my wife's computer is running badly due to six billion viruses and twenty-two trillion Spyware programs.
Anyhow. I hunt down all the shortcuts to IE and file associations to IE (i.e. as a viewer, default browser, blah blah blah) and replace them with Firebird. Then, I swap Firebird's icon with IE's icon. (I do a similar thing with with Lookout Express and ThunderBird). I used to even install the IE theme, but it's been busted for a while.
This will help to complete the illusion.
Of course, when I'm done, I just tell them I put on a new version of "The Internet" called Mozilla to help them not get viruses and spyware in the first place. I make sure they hear the brand at least a dozen times when I'm talking to them, because I want to build brand recognition. Maybe they'll tell their stupid friends how great Mozilla is and their friends will download it and use it. (Wishful thinking, I know).
But we all know that telling a Windows user to use Mozilla Fire* instead of IE will far on deaf ears; these people will click that stupid fuckin' blue E because they want to "get on the Internet". You have to make them use something else, or they WILL succumb to temptation and get infected again.
So far, nobody's come back. Either they hate me now, or they are relatively virus-free; I really don't care which.
At least my daughter was easier to set up. She knows to use Mozilla (full suite) instead of IE/OE. If she truly *needs* to use IE (i.e. one of her favourite sites doesn't work with Moz), she can ask me to add it to IE for her. I do this by modifying the automatic proxy configuration URL -- if it's on my safe site list, it points to Squid; otherwise it points to an inetd->shell hack which tells her to come and see me.
Hmm, my mother told me salt was iodized to prevent goiters.
Your friend just needs to change the numbers on her house and any local signage for a few days. Then, call BellSouth and ask to be hooked up.
Tell 'em you just moved into an old abandonned farm or something. And make sure you rip out all signs of there having previously been telephone service at the house.
If I was your friend, I'd rent a ditch witch, buy some underground cable, and fix the goddamned problem myself.
Assuming, of course, the neighbours 220 yards away are cooperative.
Electrons moving in a wire exert a magnetic force.
A lot of electrons moving in a wire exert a lot of magnetic force.
If you use coiled wires, you get a cylindrical magnetic field.
If you put a coin inside a coiled wire with a lot of electrons moving through it, it gets smooshed.
> The fun one is taking a pointer to a one-character
...I suppose we could just read the bytes off the disk individually, malloc() enough ram to hold the data and read that in in a separate read call... but that would just plain suck, both from a code and performance point of view.
> array, then when you know what size your objects
> are going to be, cast the pointer to a pointer of
> the correct size, then do pointer math on a big
> chunk of memory to build an array of the new
> objects.
This is still a useful technique -- at least in a common variant -- where you place a one-character [portable] or zero-character [GNU] array at the end of a structure, then cast the data you've been presented with to this struct..
Of course, if you're smart, you only write the code like that *once* (or maybe twice: read and write) and abstract away its use somehow.
i.e. this contrived example in GNU C:
typedef struct sdata
{
uint_16_t field_one;
uint_16_t field_two;
uint_32_t dataLen;
char data[0];
} data_t __attribute__((packed, aligned));
data_t *myData;
myData = mmap(a big hunk of file);
myData.dataLen = ntohl(dataLen);
printf("The last byte of data is 0x%02x", myData.data[dataLen - 1]);
The example is obviously contrived, but is real-worldish. And sometimes, you don't have the luxury of seeking around a disk file as an alternative, you may be reading data from an I/O device or something similar. And, of course, there is no reason for data[] to be a char, it could just as easily by a four-dimensional array of fixed sized structures.
I'd like to see it try and understand Boomhower!
Sounds like Hawking would be a *prime* candidate for those implants Crusher wanted to put into Worf.
Good thing they grew him a new spine, or we would've missed all the Jadzia action.
This sounds like a problem which could be solved by automountd. Maybe the RhythmBox guys could sort that out instead of re-inventing the wheel.