You see, NEC was convicted of a felony. The distinction between a felony & a misdemenor is that a felony implies an extended prison term & loss of various rights (voting, firearm ownership, some cases of free assembly).
At least this is how it works for people. If I had been convicted of this level of fraud, as a private person, I'd be sitting in prison. I guess the trick is to commit fraud while working for a large corporation & then embezzling the money from them by way of a 2nd corporation, so that you, personally, are never actually a private citizen acting on their own along the way.
I think you miss the point. The 'large powerful gentlemen of ambivalent sexuality' are the other prisoners. It's well known that rich white-collar criminals seldom get put in the same prisons as poor people. If they not only had to face prison time but also knew that they wouldn't get put up in a 'club fed' that's probably a nicer place to live than where most criminals ever lived, it might have some sort of effect.
And what's with a German getting all self-rightous about unreasonable prison conditions? There's still people alive that can remind you of a few things...
The money isn't really part of the school's budget in the sense that it's money that could have gone towards anything else. It's more like giving the schools a rich uncle that says "If you want to get yourself a network, tell me how much it costs & I'll send you the money". This is why nobody in the schools really cares ho wmuch they're spending.
Seems like bootstrapping such a system would be excessively time consuming. I can't really see this being any use except for all but the most security sensitive applications.
Unless I'm intentionally writing a fork bomb, I almost never see them on my system. If you're arguing for some sort of multi-user system, use resource quotas. Limiting swap is not the right way to solve this problem.
Probably not a very efficient cluster for actually doing calculations on but it'd be great for prototyping. I could see having the head node segmenting it off into a number of smaller clusters be a useful approach for teaching purposes.
Currently we (computer support for state university EE/CE dept) are looking into picking up some Athlon64 machines. The machines will be dual-booting Windows and Linux, most likely being used as fast 32bit machines.
The problem is that The Powers That Be insist on us purchasing the systems from a large vendor (Dell, HP, etc) and, from what I can tell, none of the large established vendors have Athlon64 systems available (HPaq has one, but it's in their 'home line' and not actually sold through their business division).
Plenty of people offer Opteron systems, but we're looking for a good vendor to pick up some Athlon64 systems from, does anyone know of one?
Last I checked, academics that wanted to change the world didn't write manifestos, they wrote reference implementations. Do you think we'd have garbage collected, object-oriented GUI-capable programming systems today if some twit up in his ivory tower said "Everyone should go build these"?
I doubt it. The only way these ideas get into the mainstream & accepted is with implementations that have the 'hard problems' solved & prove that the idea works. Looking over this guy's website, it doesn't look like he's willing to put his money where his mouth is.
a) Why bother building a cluster out of "old & weird" hardware? If you're going to build a cluster you're going to make damned sure that your hardware is suppored and compatable.
If you really want to learn about administration, go look for somewhere else to work, preferably someplace with a senior admin that knows what he's doing and will be able to show you the ropes. It's a lot easier to learn the Right Way to do things when you can watch somebody else do them than when you're frantically running around trying to figure out how to bring a mission-critical server (and to every user, their server is) back up.
Not to knock your intelligence but your little bit of Unix experience isn't going to help much here. Putting you in this position is like entering a 16-year-old who just got his drivers licence in the Indy 500; you might understand the basics but there's a lot things that crawl around under the surface of a well-functioning system that you probably don't know exist.
With that out of the way, a few things:
If "Redhat" means "Redhat 9" and not "RHEL", start making plans to migrate to something else; Debian is an excellent system to admin (especially after you set up a local mirror or debian proxy).
Document everything. Not only will you find it usefull being able to look up the compile flags you used to build whatever software you're using , your successor will be dead in the water without it. Textfiles are nice, a wiki is nicer.
Learn to automate regular tasks. Scripting is invaluable. Bourne shell, Python or Perl, it's your call, but try to comment & document the scripts & write them cleanly.
On the automation tip, something like Cfengine (coupled with some NFS mounted volume) will make it a lot easier to perform updates that you need to put on every system.
Be able to undo anything that you do. Backing up config files before you change them is nice, CVS can be nicer.
Backups. Really, do them all the time. Unless you built the systems yourself, if one loses a drive, you will not be able to rebuild it exactly the same as it was before; much better to just reimage a drive & bring it back online.
if she wanted to host a mail server that I set up for her home business, which I'll be doing next month...which is already against their TOS. Besides, why would anyone host anything as important as their mail server on a connection that's as unreliable as Comcast's networK?
Doesn't putting the song on your ringtone & turning the volume up to 10 (as everyone who has obnoxious ringtones invariably does) meet the defination of a public performance? You're lucky they're trying to let you get by with a one-time fee rather than sending you a monthly bill as you'd recieve if you had a jukebox, radio station or played music in a restraunt...
...is to use a language that's not going to get bogged down in the mess of portability. Java's a good example in theory but in practice is known to be somewhat brittle. Python/Perl/Mozilla seem to be a much better example in practice.
This, of course, limits you to systems on which the language has been implemented but it allows you to push the burden of portability onto somebody else.
Don't go with OpenBSD. OpenBSD has many noble design philosophies however "make the system usable" is possibly at the bottom of their list. I think they view "unusable base system" as the same thing as "confuses hackers if they get in & prevents them from doing any damage".
FreeBSD is considerably better but I'd still not suggest it for a unix newbie.
As far as user-friendly Linux distros go, I've had good luck sending friends to Redhat/Fedora and Mandrake (I'd assume SuSE is in the same boat but I've never given any real consideration to dropping the $$$ for it). Currently, I'd say that Fedora's the strongest option, it's more recent & seems to have more development energy than Mandrake.
Your best bet, however, would be to bite the bullet and go for Debian (or try a HDD install of Knoppix); once you actually get it up it should stay up & up to date (unless you're running unstable and try to update on a day when they're pushing seriously broken packages...).
I remember some previous attempt to do Python under.NET that was painfully slow & eventually written off as a failure and blamed on.NET's inability to handle the level of dynamism required to implement Python. What's changed since then?
Are we looking at some sort of fundamental breakthrough in working with the CLR here or was the problem simply tackled by a more experienced/insightful developer?
The win32 times your comparing to are probably using binaries with some sort of MMX/SSE/SSE2 optimizatoins. Try optimizing your build & supporting your CPUs instructions, maybe even using the Intel C Compiler...
Slashdot Mirror
Why not just move everything over to Sourceforge and not worry about hosting costs?
and an excellent way to get randomly beaten by rednecks, fratboys & highschoolers looking for a good time.
At that point, wouldn't it just be easier to carry a baseball bat?
Actually, if you went to a school that could afford keyboards with enter keys, I think you would've been much better off.
Uhh... no.
You see, NEC was convicted of a felony. The distinction between a felony & a misdemenor is that a felony implies an extended prison term & loss of various rights (voting, firearm ownership, some cases of free assembly).
At least this is how it works for people. If I had been convicted of this level of fraud, as a private person, I'd be sitting in prison. I guess the trick is to commit fraud while working for a large corporation & then embezzling the money from them by way of a 2nd corporation, so that you, personally, are never actually a private citizen acting on their own along the way.
Unfortunately, in a corporate buerocracy, it's easy enough to pin the blame on some underling of the person really responsible.
I think you miss the point. The 'large powerful gentlemen of ambivalent sexuality' are the other prisoners. It's well known that rich white-collar criminals seldom get put in the same prisons as poor people. If they not only had to face prison time but also knew that they wouldn't get put up in a 'club fed' that's probably a nicer place to live than where most criminals ever lived, it might have some sort of effect.
And what's with a German getting all self-rightous about unreasonable prison conditions? There's still people alive that can remind you of a few things...
The money isn't really part of the school's budget in the sense that it's money that could have gone towards anything else. It's more like giving the schools a rich uncle that says "If you want to get yourself a network, tell me how much it costs & I'll send you the money". This is why nobody in the schools really cares ho wmuch they're spending.
Seems like bootstrapping such a system would be excessively time consuming. I can't really see this being any use except for all but the most security sensitive applications.
What's this obsession with "runaway processes"?
Unless I'm intentionally writing a fork bomb, I almost never see them on my system. If you're arguing for some sort of multi-user system, use resource quotas. Limiting swap is not the right way to solve this problem.
greatest common denomonator & fibonacci's commute.
gcd(x,y) = greatest common denomonator of x & y
fib(x) = the xth fibonacci number
fib(gcd(x,y)) = gcd(fib(x), fib(y))
Probably not a very efficient cluster for actually doing calculations on but it'd be great for prototyping. I could see having the head node segmenting it off into a number of smaller clusters be a useful approach for teaching purposes.
Currently we (computer support for state university EE/CE dept) are looking into picking up some Athlon64 machines. The machines will be dual-booting Windows and Linux, most likely being used as fast 32bit machines.
The problem is that The Powers That Be insist on us purchasing the systems from a large vendor (Dell, HP, etc) and, from what I can tell, none of the large established vendors have Athlon64 systems available (HPaq has one, but it's in their 'home line' and not actually sold through their business division).
Plenty of people offer Opteron systems, but we're looking for a good vendor to pick up some Athlon64 systems from, does anyone know of one?
Last I checked, academics that wanted to change the world didn't write manifestos, they wrote reference implementations. Do you think we'd have garbage collected, object-oriented GUI-capable programming systems today if some twit up in his ivory tower said "Everyone should go build these"?
I doubt it. The only way these ideas get into the mainstream & accepted is with implementations that have the 'hard problems' solved & prove that the idea works. Looking over this guy's website, it doesn't look like he's willing to put his money where his mouth is.
How do you pluralize and adjective?
The interesting thing to point out is that the plural of anecdote(n.) is not data...
a) Why bother building a cluster out of "old & weird" hardware? If you're going to build a cluster you're going to make damned sure that your hardware is suppored and compatable.
b) WTF would you put a sound card in a cluster?
Not to knock your intelligence but your little bit of Unix experience isn't going to help much here. Putting you in this position is like entering a 16-year-old who just got his drivers licence in the Indy 500; you might understand the basics but there's a lot things that crawl around under the surface of a well-functioning system that you probably don't know exist.
With that out of the way, a few things
if she wanted to host a mail server that I set up for her home business, which I'll be doing next month ...which is already against their TOS. Besides, why would anyone host anything as important as their mail server on a connection that's as unreliable as Comcast's networK?
Doesn't putting the song on your ringtone & turning the volume up to 10 (as everyone who has obnoxious ringtones invariably does) meet the defination of a public performance? You're lucky they're trying to let you get by with a one-time fee rather than sending you a monthly bill as you'd recieve if you had a jukebox, radio station or played music in a restraunt...
I didn't get a chance to drop this one...
NetBSD is a great OS if you want to run it on the kind of hardware you're likely to find in the 3rd world. Or on a toaster.
...is to use a language that's not going to get bogged down in the mess of portability. Java's a good example in theory but in practice is known to be somewhat brittle. Python/Perl/Mozilla seem to be a much better example in practice.
This, of course, limits you to systems on which the language has been implemented but it allows you to push the burden of portability onto somebody else.
Don't go with OpenBSD. OpenBSD has many noble design philosophies however "make the system usable" is possibly at the bottom of their list. I think they view "unusable base system" as the same thing as "confuses hackers if they get in & prevents them from doing any damage".
FreeBSD is considerably better but I'd still not suggest it for a unix newbie.
As far as user-friendly Linux distros go, I've had good luck sending friends to Redhat/Fedora and Mandrake (I'd assume SuSE is in the same boat but I've never given any real consideration to dropping the $$$ for it). Currently, I'd say that Fedora's the strongest option, it's more recent & seems to have more development energy than Mandrake.
Your best bet, however, would be to bite the bullet and go for Debian (or try a HDD install of Knoppix); once you actually get it up it should stay up & up to date (unless you're running unstable and try to update on a day when they're pushing seriously broken packages...).
What's wrong with the torrents?
It'd make a lot more sense to start up a BT client and seed than to sacrifice your bandwidth to FTPs..
I remember some previous attempt to do Python under .NET that was painfully slow & eventually written off as a failure and blamed on .NET's inability to handle the level of dynamism required to implement Python. What's changed since then?
Are we looking at some sort of fundamental breakthrough in working with the CLR here or was the problem simply tackled by a more experienced/insightful developer?
The win32 times your comparing to are probably using binaries with some sort of MMX/SSE/SSE2 optimizatoins. Try optimizing your build & supporting your CPUs instructions, maybe even using the Intel C Compiler...