I wonder how many slashdotters caught the reference.. and how many of them truly appreciate the depth of your joke.
Thanks,/. may be going down hill, but some of us here still laugh at clever posts like that.
And I still find the idea of Joan Collins watching a Clark Gable movie awfully funny. I'm not sure why that is, though.
Re:Correlation between memory and intelligence?
on
The Memory Masters
·
· Score: 1
> If hex is intuitive to you already, that's > even better for long binary numbers.
Not to mention being a hell of a lot easier to transliterate! (No coincidence there).
For the unwashed masses: one nibble = one hex digit.
I suppose the non-binary intuits could use binary coded decimal instead, but.. what if the string doesn't fit in BCD? You're remembering a shit pile of exceptions along with the numerical data..
I think the optimal way for that competition would be to memorize as large a set of words as you can (set size = even power of two), assign each member of the set a binary string, and decode/encode against your base-256 or whatever word list.
Re:I'm good at some not at list-based
on
The Memory Masters
·
· Score: 1
> Consider having to remember 5000 randomly choosen integers. >Now consider having to remember 500000 integers in order
Only for 500000 consecutive (or nearly consecutive) integers. 500000 ordered integers chosen randomly between 1 and a googleplex would be pretty freakin' tough.
I did kindergarten and grade on in French immersion. At least back then, French immersion was pure French for 99.999% of instruction (except for stuff like explaining fire drills and saying "don't shit in your desk!").
By the time I'd moved to Quebec in grade two, all I had to do was expand my vocabulary a little (learn how to swear) and fix my accent. But I was able to get along from day one.
And you're right. 30 minutes a day is almost useless. If they were serious about teaching French, classes like gym, art, and mathematics would be taught in French to supplement the 30 minutes. That should be enough to kick the retention up a notch.
> I always thought it would be a good idea for Wiki's to have a rating > system [...] If I like an article, I give it a high rating. > Likewise, bad articles receive low ratings.
Ohh, yeah! You could have end-user anonymous moderation, giving the posts scores with comments like "Informative" and "Funny"... frequent posters could rack up "Karma" which let them post with a score bonus.
I think that's a sure way to get a high-quality source of information.
Except, of course, people on that type of forum never read the articles!
> I should now throw the give-a-man-a-fish metaphore > in here, but you're guru enough to google for it
What, the one about giving up your monopoly on the fisheries?
My biggest beef with Linux (FWIW, I consider myself a UNIX guru) is that half (if not more) of the friggin' man pages say they're out of date, and to dig up the info documents.
Well, I don't like info. I like nroff -m an. What the fuck's wrong with man pages? And what the hell is point of support *two* types of documentation? If man is so bad (what, linux has a problem with the establishment?), ditch it entirely and make it a wrapper for the info utility -- and make info pages for everything.
But I truly prefer man, except maybe for things like the display filters in ethereal. Christ almight, there must be six thousand screens full of information there.
Goats, not goat. One letter, big difference in funny factor.
Imagine if JLP had said "bocoli" instead of "broccoli"? That wouldn't have been funny, either.
On a similar topic, my youngest daughter used to say "pissghetti" instead of "spaghetti" when I asked her what she wanted for supper. No amount of coaching could get her to change her pronounciation. Until I told her that pissghetti is made with piss.
No, but I'll bet my old Sun Ultra 5 can. I've been running the same build of FVWM 1.24 (with FVWM Pager, of course!!) since Oct 14, 1998. I ran FVWM for about 18 months before that under BSDI 2.1, but I've long since killed that machine (although the disk may still be in storage, intact...).
Wow, I can't believe I've been using the same desktop PC for five and a half years, and it still does everything I want it to. Good thing I'm not running Winblows. And I only installed the OS (Solaris 2.5.1 HW 11/97) once - when the box was new (it shipped with 2.6, but I needed a 2.5.1 dev environment).
It's incorrect in that you use the words "original file" like they have special meaning, but pretty well on track.
Okay. Here's basically how it works.
- When you create a file, you allocate a bunch of blocks on disk, and make a "hard link" to it. This "bunch of blocks" will be an inode, and some filesystem blocks (or block fragments). This "hard link" is just a directory entry. Also, the reference counter in the inode will be set to one.
- A directory entry is just a special file which says "okay.. this file starts here, this one starts there..."
- When you create a soft link, you're creating a file which basically says, "Hey, look at this file instead!". It is pretty much analogous to a 303 HTTP Redirect.
- When you create a hard link, you're creating another directory entry which points to the same inode as when you created the file. You also bump the reference counter.
Note that once you have a hard link, it is *indistiguishable* from the "original file".
- When you open a file, the kernel "mentally" bumps the reference counter.
- When you remove a soft link, nothing special happens, except the file containing the soft link is removed.
- When you remove a hard link ("# rm filename"), you just remove the directory entry and decrease the reference counter.
- When you close a file, the kernel "mentally" decreases the reference coutner.
- When the reference counter is zero, the file system is free to reallocate the data blocks (or block fragments) for other purposes, and the inode for another file.
Note that the open/close file behaviour is pretty important, too. This, for example, is why I like to erase temporary files as soon as create them.:) As soon as the file descriptor is closed *for any reason* the space becomes usable by the OS again. "any reason" can include the program puking, the power going out, etc.
If you're interested in more details w.r.t. UFS, "man -s4 fs_ufs" on a Solaris machine.
Yes, I am aware of that. I still haven't decided if it's worse than my nicotine addiction. It probably is, because I have been known to go for three or four days at a time without a cigarette, and I just get antsy (really antsy, mind you). Without caffeine, I am quite simply, totally disfunctional. So disfunctional, in fact, I have a hard time brewing a pot my head hurts so bad.. and then it takes several hours (and a lot of coffee) to get back to normal.
> Ease yourself off it.
Easier said than done. At the moment, I am trying to switch off to French Vanilla (fake) cappuccino in the afternoons, which is nice and sweet but contains less caffeine than coffee (it comes out of the Hot Chocolate machine, it's made from a mix).
This seems to be working all right, but I still must have that last cup of the real stuff before going to bed. At least I have a 1-cup-at-a-time brewer, so I'm not tempted to drink more.
It's actually bad enough that I've thought about seeing my doctor about it. But she'd probably just laugh at me. Well, that, and I hate doctors.
> UNIX systems that are BSD instead of SysV. > AIX is one example.
Let me get this straight. You believe that AIX is based of BSD UNIX?
I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but SCO is suing IBM, claiming they copied SVR4 code from AIX into Linux.
I know it's not common knowledge, but you can read all about it at this nifty website I know.. I forget the name.. Its slogan is News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters... SlapDash, or something like that. Maybe you can find it with Google.
> with a grocery bag full of spare parts (gbic cards, if you care). > the problem was solved in a total time of one hour.
I love A5x00s, great machines, easy to diagnose (SUNWstade and/or front LCD), easy to fix.. I have had major shit fail on those without a second of downtime or byte of data loss.
As for your grocery bag full of spare parts -- GBICs are only about half the size of a pack of cigarettes, and a full-to-the-tits A5200 will only hold two of them.
You're probably thinking IBs (Interface Boards), which connect from the backplane to the GBICs. Two GBICs per IB, two IBs per SENA. They are hot swap, and the coolest thing is that when you swap one in, the array automatically flashes the firmware on the IB before bringing it online!
Oh, and as for GBICs, you should always have two spares on hand per array. The LED lasers in them are like light bulbs, when they blow it tends to be when you powercycle the units -- it's not a common occurence, but it's not rare, either. They only run about fifty bucks US a pop if you don't buy them directly from Sun. Try and get IBM GBICs if you can, some of the earlier Vixel GBICs were recalled (search the Sun FINs if you're buying Vixel to make sure you don't get a defective rev.)
> While WINE is a nice attempt to make a Win32 compatability layer, it is just too > flakey to be used in a day-to-day business sense.
Not so. *Targeted* emulation is actually a great way to port certain types of software without access to the source code.
Listing the faults of a *general* emulator as faults that must exist with a *targeted* emulator is misleading, at best.
For example, many moons ago, there was a product called WABI, which is a lot like WINE except it only supported Win16 apps -- and not very many of them.
Was it useful? Sure. Sun Microsystems took WABI, and made it run Office 4.3 (Word 6) and the standard minimalist Windows 3.1 stuff (File Manager, Program Manager, etc).
Stable? You bet your ass it was stable. So stable, in fact, I once kept an instance of Word 6 running on my Ultra 5 for about six months. Not on purpose, just 'cause I didn't need to close it, and it was handy to have instant-on-Word.
If it wasn't for the change in data file format, I would still be using Office 4.3. It was fast, stable, ran on my OS of choice, and allowed me to interchange documents with MS-laden clients.
Now I run a hardware card (original Sun PCi) that lets me do the same thing with Win98 + Office 97. It's not as reliable, but it's a whole lot faster than Star Office was the last time I ran it (admittedly, about 3-4 years ago).
If IBM decides to pick an application suite and make sure WINE works properly with every single OS call used by that application suite, then we'll have a winner.. and maybe even a better WINE.
Oh, did I mention how well WABI ran apps that *weren't* Office 4.3? Like shit! Maybe 10% of apps (maybe!) worked properly on it. But who cares, it was ostensibly meant to run Office (and a couple of others apps), and it did that well.
Obviously, Office 2000 will be trickier to provide emulation for than Office 4.3, but it could be done.
Slashdot Mirror
My Vax is Excellent, Microsoft Just Sucks. Unix Nerds Post on Slashdot.
> splitscreen stuff [...], then you utilize the horizontal IRQ
It's funny, I knew you were a VIC or VIC-II hacker before I even read your sig.
Jesus Christ, I'm pissing myself laughing!
I'd like to see the look on Harlan's face if you told him that in person. I think his head might explode.
I wonder how many slashdotters caught the reference.. and how many of them truly appreciate the depth of your joke.
/. may be going down hill, but some of us here still laugh at clever posts like that.
Thanks,
And I still find the idea of Joan Collins watching a Clark Gable movie awfully funny. I'm not sure why that is, though.
> If hex is intuitive to you already, that's
> even better for long binary numbers.
Not to mention being a hell of a lot easier to transliterate! (No coincidence there).
For the unwashed masses: one nibble = one hex digit.
I suppose the non-binary intuits could use binary coded decimal instead, but.. what if the string doesn't fit in BCD? You're remembering a shit pile of exceptions along with the numerical data..
I think the optimal way for that competition would be to memorize as large a set of words as you can (set size = even power of two), assign each member of the set a binary string, and decode/encode against your base-256 or whatever word list.
> Consider having to remember 5000 randomly choosen integers.
>Now consider having to remember 500000 integers in order
Only for 500000 consecutive (or nearly consecutive) integers. 500000 ordered integers chosen randomly between 1 and a googleplex would be pretty freakin' tough.
I did kindergarten and grade on in French immersion. At least back then, French immersion was pure French for 99.999% of instruction (except for stuff like explaining fire drills and saying "don't shit in your desk!").
By the time I'd moved to Quebec in grade two, all I had to do was expand my vocabulary a little (learn how to swear) and fix my accent. But I was able to get along from day one.
And you're right. 30 minutes a day is almost useless. If they were serious about teaching French, classes like gym, art, and mathematics would be taught in French to supplement the 30 minutes. That should be enough to kick the retention up a notch.
> Status: False.
I got that email a few years ago, and I disagree.
Status: Tasty!
> I always thought it would be a good idea for Wiki's to have a rating
> system [...] If I like an article, I give it a high rating.
> Likewise, bad articles receive low ratings.
Ohh, yeah! You could have end-user anonymous moderation, giving the posts scores with comments like "Informative" and "Funny"... frequent posters could rack up "Karma" which let them post with a score bonus.
I think that's a sure way to get a high-quality source of information.
Except, of course, people on that type of forum never read the articles!
> I should now throw the give-a-man-a-fish metaphore
> in here, but you're guru enough to google for it
What, the one about giving up your monopoly on the fisheries?
My biggest beef with Linux (FWIW, I consider myself a UNIX guru) is that half (if not more) of the friggin' man pages say they're out of date, and to dig up the info documents.
Well, I don't like info. I like nroff -m an. What the fuck's wrong with man pages? And what the hell is point of support *two* types of documentation? If man is so bad (what, linux has a problem with the establishment?), ditch it entirely and make it a wrapper for the info utility -- and make info pages for everything.
But I truly prefer man, except maybe for things like the display filters in ethereal. Christ almight, there must be six thousand screens full of information there.
> Oh. No. I thought you said 'goat'...
Goats, not goat. One letter, big difference in funny factor.
Imagine if JLP had said "bocoli" instead of "broccoli"? That wouldn't have been funny, either.
On a similar topic, my youngest daughter used to say "pissghetti" instead of "spaghetti" when I asked her what she wanted for supper. No amount of coaching could get her to change her pronounciation. Until I told her that pissghetti is made with piss.
> pennies dated after 1982 (when they changed the alloy)
Hmm, you must be Canadian.
Either that, or the price of copper changed dramatically, world wide, around 1982.
Wes
Yeah, the client was called "Netscape 1.2"
I wonder why the hell they dropped server push?
> Can a dream constitute prior art?
No, but I'll bet my old Sun Ultra 5 can. I've been running the same build of FVWM 1.24 (with FVWM Pager, of course!!) since Oct 14, 1998. I ran FVWM for about 18 months before that under BSDI 2.1, but I've long since killed that machine (although the disk may still be in storage, intact...).
Wow, I can't believe I've been using the same desktop PC for five and a half years, and it still does everything I want it to. Good thing I'm not running Winblows. And I only installed the OS (Solaris 2.5.1 HW 11/97) once - when the box was new (it shipped with 2.6, but I needed a 2.5.1 dev environment).
It's incorrect in that you use the words "original file" like they have special meaning, but pretty well on track.
:) As soon as the file descriptor is closed *for any reason* the space becomes usable by the OS again. "any reason" can include the program puking, the power going out, etc.
Okay. Here's basically how it works.
- When you create a file, you allocate a bunch of blocks on disk, and make a "hard link" to it. This "bunch of blocks" will be an inode, and some filesystem blocks (or block fragments). This "hard link" is just a directory entry. Also, the reference counter in the inode will be set to one.
- A directory entry is just a special file which says "okay.. this file starts here, this one starts there..."
- When you create a soft link, you're creating a file which basically says, "Hey, look at this file instead!". It is pretty much analogous to a 303 HTTP Redirect.
- When you create a hard link, you're creating another directory entry which points to the same inode as when you created the file. You also bump the reference counter.
Note that once you have a hard link, it is *indistiguishable* from the "original file".
- When you open a file, the kernel "mentally" bumps the reference counter.
- When you remove a soft link, nothing special happens, except the file containing the soft link is removed.
- When you remove a hard link ("# rm filename"), you just remove the directory entry and decrease the reference counter.
- When you close a file, the kernel "mentally" decreases the reference coutner.
- When the reference counter is zero, the file system is free to reallocate the data blocks (or block fragments) for other purposes, and the inode for another file.
Note that the open/close file behaviour is pretty important, too. This, for example, is why I like to erase temporary files as soon as create them.
If you're interested in more details w.r.t. UFS, "man -s4 fs_ufs" on a Solaris machine.
> The older Fords I remember weren't a two tug system.
> It was just, pull the handle, and roll out the door.
It was more like two-stage. Pull halfway, door unlocks. Pull all the way, door opens. Of course, you could just pull up on the button, too.
Or at least that's how it was in the 1980 Ford Fairlane / Mercury Zephyr.
> OPEN15,8,15,"N0:XYZZY,04":CLOSE15
;)
Oh, man, I typed that in and formatted my Zork floppy!
> You have a real, serious, caffine addiction
Yes, I am aware of that. I still haven't decided if it's worse than my nicotine addiction. It probably is, because I have been known to go for three or four days at a time without a cigarette, and I just get antsy (really antsy, mind you). Without caffeine, I am quite simply, totally disfunctional. So disfunctional, in fact, I have a hard time brewing a pot my head hurts so bad.. and then it takes several hours (and a lot of coffee) to get back to normal.
> Ease yourself off it.
Easier said than done. At the moment, I am trying to switch off to French Vanilla (fake) cappuccino in the afternoons, which is nice and sweet but contains less caffeine than coffee (it comes out of the Hot Chocolate machine, it's made from a mix).
This seems to be working all right, but I still must have that last cup of the real stuff before going to bed. At least I have a 1-cup-at-a-time brewer, so I'm not tempted to drink more.
It's actually bad enough that I've thought about seeing my doctor about it. But she'd probably just laugh at me. Well, that, and I hate doctors.
..stop smoking crack before posting to slashdot!
Thank you.
...was 2.5.1 odd or even?
'cause lemme tell ya, it was leaps and bounds better than 2.4.
> UNIX systems that are BSD instead of SysV.
> AIX is one example.
Let me get this straight. You believe that AIX is based of BSD UNIX?
I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but SCO is suing IBM, claiming they copied SVR4 code from AIX into Linux.
I know it's not common knowledge, but you can read all about it at this nifty website I know.. I forget the name.. Its slogan is News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters... SlapDash, or something like that. Maybe you can find it with Google.
s/hold two of them/hold four of them/
> with a grocery bag full of spare parts (gbic cards, if you care).
> the problem was solved in a total time of one hour.
I love A5x00s, great machines, easy to diagnose (SUNWstade and/or front LCD), easy to fix.. I have had major shit fail on those without a second of downtime or byte of data loss.
As for your grocery bag full of spare parts -- GBICs are only about half the size of a pack of cigarettes, and a full-to-the-tits A5200 will only hold two of them.
You're probably thinking IBs (Interface Boards), which connect from the backplane to the GBICs. Two GBICs per IB, two IBs per SENA. They are hot swap, and the coolest thing is that when you swap one in, the array automatically flashes the firmware on the IB before bringing it online!
Oh, and as for GBICs, you should always have two spares on hand per array. The LED lasers in them are like light bulbs, when they blow it tends to be when you powercycle the units -- it's not a common occurence, but it's not rare, either. They only run about fifty bucks US a pop if you don't buy them directly from Sun. Try and get IBM GBICs if you can, some of the earlier Vixel GBICs were recalled (search the Sun FINs if you're buying Vixel to make sure you don't get a defective rev.)
> What was the real problem?
> I'm sensitive to caffeine.
That's funny, before I scrolled down to see your answer, I figured you were drinking too much caffeine.
If I don't have a coffee before bed, I wake up feeling like I slept with my head in a hydraulic press.
Why? Because I drink too much coffee. Oh, viscous cycle, how I abhor thee.
> While WINE is a nice attempt to make a Win32 compatability layer, it is just too
> flakey to be used in a day-to-day business sense.
Not so. *Targeted* emulation is actually a great way to port certain types of software without access to the source code.
Listing the faults of a *general* emulator as faults that must exist with a *targeted* emulator is misleading, at best.
For example, many moons ago, there was a product called WABI, which is a lot like WINE except it only supported Win16 apps -- and not very many of them.
Was it useful? Sure. Sun Microsystems took WABI, and made it run Office 4.3 (Word 6) and the standard minimalist Windows 3.1 stuff (File Manager, Program Manager, etc).
Stable? You bet your ass it was stable. So stable, in fact, I once kept an instance of Word 6 running on my Ultra 5 for about six months. Not on purpose, just 'cause I didn't need to close it, and it was handy to have instant-on-Word.
If it wasn't for the change in data file format, I would still be using Office 4.3. It was fast, stable, ran on my OS of choice, and allowed me to interchange documents with MS-laden clients.
Now I run a hardware card (original Sun PCi) that lets me do the same thing with Win98 + Office 97. It's not as reliable, but it's a whole lot faster than Star Office was the last time I ran it (admittedly, about 3-4 years ago).
If IBM decides to pick an application suite and make sure WINE works properly with every single OS call used by that application suite, then we'll have a winner.. and maybe even a better WINE.
Oh, did I mention how well WABI ran apps that *weren't* Office 4.3? Like shit! Maybe 10% of apps (maybe!) worked properly on it. But who cares, it was ostensibly meant to run Office (and a couple of others apps), and it did that well.
Obviously, Office 2000 will be trickier to provide emulation for than Office 4.3, but it could be done.