I was just getting ready to justify the expense of upgrading my 386-SX20 to one of those new high-end 486 chips, but now I don't need to. This is great...it makes my SX almost fell like a DX!!!
(Sad thing is I have people that work for me that would be lost in that. Then again, I did just get done playing Leisure Suit Larry I - original version.)
I agree with you. My best courses were based that way - interaction between the student and professor during class.
My two best classes were a history class and a religion class. Neither had a textbook. The history class consisted of a guy explaining history from his excellant memory and being able to answer any question thrown at him, followed by some essays on importance and effect of certain events. The religion class, taught by an ex-nun IIRC, took in all sorts of views on religion, including a lot of work by Joseph Campbell.
Bookstores are generally an auxillary service of the institution and are not supported by university funds - in other words, they have to foot their own bill. You' think that'd be somewhat easy as they usually do get resources from the university, such as power, network, space, but somehow they always need more.
As for the fin.aid. coming in late, that was probably not at all related. There are so many laws that cover all the financial aid stuff and other business policies that determine when they are distributed it'd make your head spin.
I'm not defending college bookstores - for the most part they are ripping people off. I remember their head of food services telling me my 32oz cup of soda cost them $1.09 to bring to me, which is why that is what the cost was. Never mind that circle K could do it for $0.49, or that I knew for about $2,000 of drink sales, it costs about $250.
Well, if the publisher puts out a new version of the book, do you think the bookstore will be able to get the older version of the book to sell to the students even if the prof didn't want to switch? Probably not...so everyone has to move forward at the publishers insistance.
As for the prof writing the book - why is that a conflict? You are going to college to have a professor impart knowledge upon you. If you just wanted to learn what the book said, you could buy the book and read it yourself.
Would you rather have a professor that didn't care too much for the book and didn't use it that much? Or contradicted it in his lessons and tests? or someone who knows the book and it's content and it lines up with what they are teaching?
From what I remember in college, I had one professor in a compiler class who wrote the book. It wasn't a published hardcover book - looked like something the dept. secretary put together with supplies from Office Depot. Only problem was that it feel apart easy, but great book.
Another professor had written a book for a course and the department chair would not approve it for use, so he had to select another one.
Another prof chose a book that had two editions. We would primarly learn out of the edition we had to buy, but he made copies of about 100 pages out of the other edition for us because he didn't think it right we buy two books. He was an older prof that probably didn't buy into the modern methods (well, 12 years ago.)
One other class we had to buy a $66 book for it. I never did, buy my roommate did. We were told to read the first chapter and the book was never mentioned again. On "sale back", my roommate was told the professor said he wasn't gonna use that next time, so they wouldn't buy it back.
I found a great way of getting some books was to dig thought the big trash cans outside the buyback line where people would throw the books away in disgust.
I know on a lot of campuses that the bookstore, cafeteria and other "money making" ventures are usually run by the same people, or overall department/manager. And every campus I've talked with employees, they all fee that
a) food costs way too damn much (our cafeteria had the Hershey's Chugs for $2.00, where I saw them at the supermarket that morning for $0.98)
b) they rip the students off with the books and buybacks.
I don't know about faculty, they don't seem to live in anything close to the real world.
The idea behind the microkernel is that you have the bare minimum in the microkernel - basically and endless loop that talks to other processes. It's been a while since I've read about it all so I don't remember what all is in the kernel vs. what is in a process.
But... In a microkernel, hard disk access would be done by a seperate process. If there is a bug in the code, the process dies but the kernel goes on. The console process would live and you could then kill off the hard drive process, debug, and restart it.
While you could insmod ide or something on Linux, that driver is now a part of the kernel, not a seperate process and has the ability to kill the whole system.
That is the main difference. It doesn't really matter if the code is added at kernel compile time, or at module insertion, you are still putting code into the kernel that is running as part of the kernel. With the Mach stuff, everything is running as a process ontop of the microkernel.
Look at it as GUI on Linux vs. Windows - on Linux it is a process that is running on top of the kernel. On windows it is part of the OS kernel, regardless of if it's a seperate program or not.
(okay...not 100% true, but close enough for the general idea.)
$399, after a $100 mail in rebate. Give me a fuckin break. I am so damn sick of seeing "after a mail-in rebate" everywhere. It's at the point where I choose not to do business with companies that pull that BS.
The only problem I see with all of the above is if the app that runs on the one "really nice machine" is graphics intensive. Say Maya or Gimp or something.
Before you say it, I'll agree that in that case it would make sense to have a decent desktop for modeling and use the nice machine for rendering, but they were the only examples I could come up with.
Gimp isn't actually that bad across the network though! Better than tuxracer:)
Just out of curiosity, on average how many DVDs that you watch are made for regions other than the one you live in?
Zero. I don't have a way to play them. However, there are things I've wanted to purchase that were Region2. It has gotten a lot better over the last couple of years, with more stuff coming out over hear, but some doesn't.
A lot of people are setting up MythTV boxes to act as TiVo's - to hook them up to the TV to watch the shows. If you have no way of getting your video signal out of the computer into the TV, that becomes hard.
So with your splitter, you could have mythtv tune into one thing while watching another on TV, but when you want to watch what you recorded on the myth box, without TV out, you have to watch it on your computer monitor.
It eventually cost a bit more than buying a Tivo, but I use it as my DVD burning and mp3 jukebox in addition to MythTV.
I just had to spring for the PVR-250 card. I had all the other junk laying around the house. It'll probably cost more than a TiVo to start with nothing, but how many of us have an extra computer sitting around?:)
Also, you don't have to pay the $10/month cost for the TiVo schedules, so over time it'll eventually work out cheaper.
But the other thing you said I think is the biggest reason I love my MythTV box - I can do other things with it. Play MP3's, show slideshows, play videos, etc... and (assuming I could) the ability to add on other modules to do stuff I may need.
Lets get the lawmakers involved and ban academic material from the Internet so that students can download others papers.
I think the way that academic institutions are pushing the Internet towards some sort of academic or research network is not a good trend. AOL and MCI didn't put all this time and money into developing the Internet into what it is today and academia is trying to leach off this.;)
I guess I don't like the fact that they just work on one distribution and getting it to work elsewhere is a bit of a pain sometimes.
Though last time I ran the newest oracle application server on linux (based on Apache), it seemed they went out of their way to make it a daunting task. There are about 30 other things that start up with the app server and apache.
I guess I think of it as simple - client attaches to apache, apache module connects to oracle, but they are going gung-ho on having all the java stuff, and god knows what else built in. Way to much complexity and it caused nothing but trouble...actually had to back down a release.
It's saturday morning and I'm just ranting, but it seems to me that outside of the database server, which they do well, they do a terrible job of everything else.
Oracle Enterprise Manager is a good example. Used to ba an app that would connect to the database, let you manage it, etc... Now it's this huge Java thing, requires it's own database just to manage other databases, etc... and doesn't seem to work half the time.
I guess I've just had terrible luck with anything java based on Linux (or windows for that matter) - well, anything that goes beyond a simple app.
The reason for it is that Mars is too far away to manage the rover in real time - you have to wait 20 minuite to see the effects of your command.
So all we needs is some decent FPS game players that are used to working the lag. If anything goes wrong, they can just yell out that it was a wall hack by some camper.:)
When I was a kid I had this activity book that my parents go me. I don't remember if it was all science-fiction or all star wars, but they had a star wars crossword. One of the clues was "total number of movies to be made" and the answer was twelve.
Seem to remember hearing that somewhere else back then too.
We had some people try to deploy some MS certifcation testing on our campus. While we are not as big as MIT or have as many IP's, all of our IP's are on the public internet. A handful of devices are on a private vlan with private IP's.
But I digress. This company that provided the testing server, brought this box on campus and plugged it in....running w2k, iis, ALL unpatched. It took quite a while to get it through their head that
a) no, we wouldn't just NAT their machine and forward all vnc connections to it at the router.
b) we only would offer them a public IP.
c) they would have to patch it
d) because it was a public IP, they wouldn't have to VPN into their machine to get on the local network.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just getting ready to justify the expense of upgrading my 386-SX20 to one of those new high-end 486 chips, but now I don't need to. This is great...it makes my SX almost fell like a DX!!!
(Sad thing is I have people that work for me that would be lost in that. Then again, I did just get done playing Leisure Suit Larry I - original version.)
I agree with you. My best courses were based that way - interaction between the student and professor during class.
My two best classes were a history class and a religion class. Neither had a textbook. The history class consisted of a guy explaining history from his excellant memory and being able to answer any question thrown at him, followed by some essays on importance and effect of certain events. The religion class, taught by an ex-nun IIRC, took in all sorts of views on religion, including a lot of work by Joseph Campbell.
Bookstores are generally an auxillary service of the institution and are not supported by university funds - in other words, they have to foot their own bill. You' think that'd be somewhat easy as they usually do get resources from the university, such as power, network, space, but somehow they always need more.
:(
As for the fin.aid. coming in late, that was probably not at all related. There are so many laws that cover all the financial aid stuff and other business policies that determine when they are distributed it'd make your head spin.
I'm not defending college bookstores - for the most part they are ripping people off. I remember their head of food services telling me my 32oz cup of soda cost them $1.09 to bring to me, which is why that is what the cost was. Never mind that circle K could do it for $0.49, or that I knew for about $2,000 of drink sales, it costs about $250.
And we don't even have good food
Well, if the publisher puts out a new version of the book, do you think the bookstore will be able to get the older version of the book to sell to the students even if the prof didn't want to switch? Probably not...so everyone has to move forward at the publishers insistance.
As for the prof writing the book - why is that a conflict? You are going to college to have a professor impart knowledge upon you. If you just wanted to learn what the book said, you could buy the book and read it yourself.
Would you rather have a professor that didn't care too much for the book and didn't use it that much? Or contradicted it in his lessons and tests? or someone who knows the book and it's content and it lines up with what they are teaching?
From what I remember in college, I had one professor in a compiler class who wrote the book. It wasn't a published hardcover book - looked like something the dept. secretary put together with supplies from Office Depot. Only problem was that it feel apart easy, but great book.
Another professor had written a book for a course and the department chair would not approve it for use, so he had to select another one.
Another prof chose a book that had two editions. We would primarly learn out of the edition we had to buy, but he made copies of about 100 pages out of the other edition for us because he didn't think it right we buy two books. He was an older prof that probably didn't buy into the modern methods (well, 12 years ago.)
One other class we had to buy a $66 book for it. I never did, buy my roommate did. We were told to read the first chapter and the book was never mentioned again. On "sale back", my roommate was told the professor said he wasn't gonna use that next time, so they wouldn't buy it back.
I found a great way of getting some books was to dig thought the big trash cans outside the buyback line where people would throw the books away in disgust.
I know on a lot of campuses that the bookstore, cafeteria and other "money making" ventures are usually run by the same people, or overall department/manager. And every campus I've talked with employees, they all fee that
a) food costs way too damn much (our cafeteria had the Hershey's Chugs for $2.00, where I saw them at the supermarket that morning for $0.98)
b) they rip the students off with the books and buybacks.
I don't know about faculty, they don't seem to live in anything close to the real world.
The idea behind the microkernel is that you have the bare minimum in the microkernel - basically and endless loop that talks to other processes. It's been a while since I've read about it all so I don't remember what all is in the kernel vs. what is in a process.
But... In a microkernel, hard disk access would be done by a seperate process. If there is a bug in the code, the process dies but the kernel goes on. The console process would live and you could then kill off the hard drive process, debug, and restart it.
While you could insmod ide or something on Linux, that driver is now a part of the kernel, not a seperate process and has the ability to kill the whole system.
That is the main difference. It doesn't really matter if the code is added at kernel compile time, or at module insertion, you are still putting code into the kernel that is running as part of the kernel. With the Mach stuff, everything is running as a process ontop of the microkernel.
Look at it as GUI on Linux vs. Windows - on Linux it is a process that is running on top of the kernel. On windows it is part of the OS kernel, regardless of if it's a seperate program or not.
(okay...not 100% true, but close enough for the general idea.)
Glad I'm not the only one that read it ast astrolube!
Look into netreg by CMU.
http://www.net.cmu.edu/netreg
It is quite widely used.
$399, after a $100 mail in rebate. Give me a fuckin break. I am so damn sick of seeing "after a mail-in rebate" everywhere. It's at the point where I choose not to do business with companies that pull that BS.
The only problem I see with all of the above is if the app that runs on the one "really nice machine" is graphics intensive. Say Maya or Gimp or something.
:)
Before you say it, I'll agree that in that case it would make sense to have a decent desktop for modeling and use the nice machine for rendering, but they were the only examples I could come up with.
Gimp isn't actually that bad across the network though! Better than tuxracer
Just out of curiosity, on average how many DVDs that you watch are made for regions other than the one you live in?
Zero. I don't have a way to play them. However, there are things I've wanted to purchase that were Region2. It has gotten a lot better over the last couple of years, with more stuff coming out over hear, but some doesn't.
And if Linux gaming keeps picking up the way it has, you can kiss that Xbox goodbye too.
:)
It's a little hard playing games with the little grey remove in the pvr-250. Though I think it does have less buttons than an xbox controller
A lot of people are setting up MythTV boxes to act as TiVo's - to hook them up to the TV to watch the shows. If you have no way of getting your video signal out of the computer into the TV, that becomes hard.
So with your splitter, you could have mythtv tune into one thing while watching another on TV, but when you want to watch what you recorded on the myth box, without TV out, you have to watch it on your computer monitor.
It eventually cost a bit more than buying a Tivo, but I use it as my DVD burning and mp3 jukebox in addition to MythTV.
:)
I just had to spring for the PVR-250 card. I had all the other junk laying around the house. It'll probably cost more than a TiVo to start with nothing, but how many of us have an extra computer sitting around?
Also, you don't have to pay the $10/month cost for the TiVo schedules, so over time it'll eventually work out cheaper.
But the other thing you said I think is the biggest reason I love my MythTV box - I can do other things with it. Play MP3's, show slideshows, play videos, etc... and (assuming I could) the ability to add on other modules to do stuff I may need.
SSSTTTTTOOOOOPPPPP!!!!!
This is getting real bad. I think I wanna go home.
uncomfortable place, not odd place.
The BSD and GPL licenses have been encouraging people to plagarise the works of others for years now.
Just ask Darl McBride - Linux has been plagarizing SCO for quite a while.
(okay...I know McGill is in Canada)
;)
Lets get the lawmakers involved and ban academic material from the Internet so that students can download others papers.
I think the way that academic institutions are pushing the Internet towards some sort of academic or research network is not a good trend. AOL and MCI didn't put all this time and money into developing the Internet into what it is today and academia is trying to leach off this.
I guess I don't like the fact that they just work on one distribution and getting it to work elsewhere is a bit of a pain sometimes.
Though last time I ran the newest oracle application server on linux (based on Apache), it seemed they went out of their way to make it a daunting task. There are about 30 other things that start up with the app server and apache.
I guess I think of it as simple - client attaches to apache, apache module connects to oracle, but they are going gung-ho on having all the java stuff, and god knows what else built in. Way to much complexity and it caused nothing but trouble...actually had to back down a release.
It's saturday morning and I'm just ranting, but it seems to me that outside of the database server, which they do well, they do a terrible job of everything else.
Oracle Enterprise Manager is a good example. Used to ba an app that would connect to the database, let you manage it, etc... Now it's this huge Java thing, requires it's own database just to manage other databases, etc... and doesn't seem to work half the time.
I guess I've just had terrible luck with anything java based on Linux (or windows for that matter) - well, anything that goes beyond a simple app.
Simple one - they ran SCO
LIT-I-GATE!!! LIT-I-GATE!!! Linux is the enemy!!! It must be LIT-I-GATED!!!
Damn stupid lameness filter blocking out my joke.
The reason for it is that Mars is too far away to manage the rover in real time - you have to wait 20 minuite to see the effects of your command.
:)
So all we needs is some decent FPS game players that are used to working the lag. If anything goes wrong, they can just yell out that it was a wall hack by some camper.
Not a poli-sci person, but I'm thinking NASA will have until 2009 to get well entrenched with the overall way things are looking.
:)
Still seems like a waste not to have one more mission to keep it going a bit longer. Think of all the desktop images that we'll miss
When I was a kid I had this activity book that my parents go me. I don't remember if it was all science-fiction or all star wars, but they had a star wars crossword. One of the clues was "total number of movies to be made" and the answer was twelve.
Seem to remember hearing that somewhere else back then too.
#3 is simple: when your stock price raise on speculation of merits to your latest claims, dump it!!!
We had some people try to deploy some MS certifcation testing on our campus. While we are not as big as MIT or have as many IP's, all of our IP's are on the public internet. A handful of devices are on a private vlan with private IP's.
But I digress. This company that provided the testing server, brought this box on campus and plugged it in....running w2k, iis, ALL unpatched. It took quite a while to get it through their head that
a) no, we wouldn't just NAT their machine and forward all vnc connections to it at the router.
b) we only would offer them a public IP.
c) they would have to patch it
d) because it was a public IP, they wouldn't have to VPN into their machine to get on the local network.
Welcome to the real internet boys and girls