And you forgot to mention that it is the worst, nastiest, buggiest, clunkiest, and most limited mail client ever invented. I am forced to use it every day and it is a terrible step backwards from/bin/mail.
It doesn't really help that our fascist administrators won't let anyone but themselves use IMAP.
Then run Mail.app. Encrypted transport, and it goes right out the irritating corporate firewall which blocks IMAP. I've used Pine for about eight years on and off but OS X Mail has pretty much replaced it for me.
Re:From using MySQL/PostgreSQL and researching SAP
on
PostgreSQL vs. SAP?
·
· Score: 1
Out of curiosity, why do you refuse to look at Sybase? I have worked with it as well as Oracle and (gag) Ingres, and while real sequences are certainly nicer than identity columns, Sybase was generally pretty nice. DBA work definitely seems to be less hassle with Sybase than with Oracle.
Hmm. I downloaded it for free and read a chapter or two before deciding that it was so ugly and hard to read in Word that I might as well just buy it.
Much to my dismay, the paper version was also ugly and hard to read. I still read most of it, but Mr. Eckel should find himself a better publisher who will take the time to typeset his book decently.
Apart from the presentation, the book was mostly pretty decent. Unfortunately, the I/O chapter was a terrible introduction to Java's byzantine I/O system, and I found the threading chapter pretty unsatisfactory as well. That said, I don't know of a better introductory Java book, but it might be worth looking for one.
Er, as far as I know showing products to
%customer% is only possible with Windows.
$customer, on the other hand...
My vote is for dusting off Solaris for PowerPC (around the 2.5 timeframe if memory serves, it actually did ship) and bringing a Powerbook. Apple might be upset; I suspect Solaris would make OS X and Mach look pretty bad in the VM department.
Apple chose BSD and the Mach microkernel
because that's what Steve [Jobs] and Avie
[Tevanian] decided was the best possible
solution back when they were at NeXT, and
that's what NeXTStep/OpenStep were built on.
MacOS X is built on OpenStep. It would
probably take just as long to replace the
Mach/BSD foundations of OS X with an SVR4-based
kernel as it would to port Aqua/Cocoa/etc.
to Solaris.
It should be pointed out that OpenStep was ported to Solaris, HP-UX, and Windows NT along with the NeXT BSD platform. In fact, if you look closely at Sun hardware data sheets, you'll notice "OpenStep 1.0" listed as a supported environment. Dunno how to order it.:)
Also, I believe that WebObjects, at least in its Objective-C incarnation, contained almost the whole OpenStep system; I recall seeing it installed on NT and noticing a warning that the included developer tools were not licensed for developing standalone non-Web software.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that Apple quietly keeps Cocoa on Solaris working, if only as a way to avoid platform dependence. The developer docs do warn one to avoid using Mach message ports directly for just such reasons.
> So I was thinking about iBooks (hey, it's not OpenBSD, but it's BSD)
It can be.
http://www.openbsd.org/macppc.html
However, OS X rocks as a BSD environment. I run both on a daily basis, albeit OpenBSD on a SPARCstation LX, and OS X does all the userland Unix stuff I want. OpenBSD has pf, nat, and all that good stuff, but you're not going to use an iBook as a router, right?
Oh, and OS X + XDarwin = XEmacs on the same display as Mac IE and Mail.app.
What? People don't use AIX for CAD? You'd better tell Boeing! And ask IBM to stop selling Catia on RS/6000 bundles, too, since apparently nobody is using them.
Accidents per takeoff/landing probably have more to do with the airline and pilot than the aircraft manufacturer. Aircraft failures for which the manufacturer is culpable (that is, not due to poor maintenance) tend to be caused by factors like vibration and metal fatigue, which are a function of operating time.
Xinet (available for Solaris/SPARC and Irix) does use encrypted AFP passwords, and otherwise does an excellent job as a Unix AFP server. Helios, on the other hand, uses cleartext passwords. Xinet costs a bit of money, but might well be worth it.
Examine a 68k-era Macintosh. Note that the video connector is DB15 female, just like a standard AUI connector. And if you think nobody could be stupid enough to plug a monitor into an Ethernet card, well, I've seen it done (and had to drive out and fix it, since the thing wouldn't boot). Hence the funky little AAUI connector.
Strunk and White's Elements of Style should be on the bookshelf of every English speaker, but especially the shelves of most of the programmers I've known. We've all read comments that were as mystifying as the code they were in. Elements of Style is an invaluable guide to concise and effective communication, beloved of English teachers and editors the world over.
Perhaps someone should send a few of them to Slashdot HQ, while we're on the subject.
MP3 players are all the rage, but everyone seems to be overlooking one major flaw: flash memory is really expensive. 64 MB of songs just isn't enough, even for a bus ride to work. What you need is a format that is cheaper than flash, but just as portable and durable.
Independent-minded techies will want to take a good, long look at getting their hands on MiniDisc hardware. Tiny, durable, long battery life, and $2.50 for 74 min. of nearly indestructible, rewritable, random-access storage is hard to beat. The sound quality on recent units is really CD-quality, considerably better than 128Kbps MP3. 12 hour battery life is nothing to sneeze at, either.
Portable recorder units like the Sony MZ-R90 can be had for around $320, while a player like the E60 or E75 is around $200. Pick up a home deck to go with a player-only model, and you're set. Minidisco and Planet MiniDisc are good sources of equipment and discs.
If you're in the Playstation-2-on-eBay price range, then the Ghibli ga Ippai, or Full of Ghibli, laserdisc boxed set is what you need. All of Studio Ghibli's wonderful films (except Princess Mononoke, which it predates) are collected in one box, with high-quality laserdisc transfers. No subtitles, though; you'll have to print out translated scripts unless your Japanese is really good. A new set would have cost Y98000, or about $1000. Unfortunately, it is now out of print, so you will have to either a) check eBay daily or b) get friends in Japan to scour the dusty back shelves of anime shops. Good luck. (Selling one?)
How about clustering and DB replication?
on
RAID2 Over TCP/IP?
·
· Score: 1
At least for databases, a conceptually similar scheme exists. Most real database systems (Sybase, Oracle, Informix, etc.) can replicate all their data to a standby server. If the primary server fails, clients will automatically switch to the standby server without data loss.
This can also be accomplished with shared disks and OS failover solutions like IBM's HACMP, but I think you were looking for something that didn't require shared hardware.
I don't know of anything similar for filesystems; databases naturally have a transaction model which provides atomic updates, guaranteeing against data loss. Implementing something similar at the filesystem level would probably take some serious kernel hacking.
On the other hand, distributed filesystems like Coda, GFS, AFS, etc. might have failover capabilities.
> It's a bit hard to believe more American would die than died while fighting > in Europe, when the US was fighting on two fronts.
>...
> And the allied forces defeated the Nazi's without the use of atomic weapons.
The reason for the ridiculously low casualties sustained by the Western Allies in Europe, 1943-45, was that the overwhelming majority of German forces were on the Eastern front. Most of the top-notch commanders were in the East, along with most of the elite units, both Wehrmacht and SS. The Soviets absorbed most of the effort that otherwise would have gone to pushing the Allies back into the sea; note that while German casualty estimates were, if memory serves, ~6 million, Soviet casualties totalled over 30 million for civilian and military, combined. Those figures are for the entire war, not just the Eastern Front.
If the USSR had fallen before the Normandy invasion, America and Britain would have had an impossible task on their hands, and would have probably had to wait until 1945 or 1946 to invade, or else nuke their way into Europe.
The American and British casualty figures are in no way representative of the difficulty of a full-scale invasion of either Europe or Japan. While Japan's army was puny compared to the Wehrmacht, the mountainous terrain of Japan makes it much harder to invade than France or Germany. Switzerland or Sweden would be more comparable in terms of terrain.
The size and determination of the Japanese population cannot be overlooked, either. Remember that during the invasion of Saipan, the Japanese civilians committed suicide, almost to a man, rather than surrender to the American forces.
Well, that's what recon satellites were invented for. Think of this as a pay-as-you-go intelligence branch. Heh, Kinko's meets the NRO (National Reconaissance Office).
Really, this puts an interesting spin on the concept of being a mercenary. I wonder if the outfit doing this will refuse to take pictures of war zones lest they get their satellite disabled by the big boys.
This is only tangentially related, but can you swap an iBook's battery easily? That is, without pulling out the hard drive or lifting up the (admittedly very cool) lift-off keyboard?
Well, they're not all rabid idiots. Actually, I'm in almost the opposite position. I've used Linux for years and am planning on getting a Mac soon, for almost the opposite reason. I admit, I don't get religious over source code licensing; I use Linux because it makes a first-rate server machine. However, several months of doing Real Work on a Mac was enough to convert me. It's a lousy platform for tinkering, but unbeatable for actually doing work. The interface is light years ahead of KDE, Windowmaker, or anything else that Linux has. When I can get the MacOS interface with the stability of Unix, with bash and friends thrown in, I'm buying it. (Unless it costs $500.) Which means I'm buying MacOS X Desktop and a Mac to coexist with the Linux box in the closet. The Gimp, Gnome, StarOffice, etc. are not going to be a real competitor to something as polished and well-thought-out as the MacOS with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Word. I'll let Linux do what it's good at: being a server. And I'll keep a Mac on my desk.
Amazing how many people bought the Soviet propaganda line on neutron bombs. The point of them was not to kill the Soviet population so we could take their cities. They were invented by NATO to stop the Red Army pouring through the Fulda Gap without turning Germany into a radioactive wasteland. (Although Soviet doctrine called for massive nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks throughout Western Europe at the beginning of a land war.) The Soviets realized that propaganda was cheaper than countermeasures, and bamboozled the Greens, etc. into believing that they were an evil imperialist weapon. They succeeded--misguided public outcry prevented NATO from ever deploying them. Score one for the Soviets.
I remember reading about Microsoft bringing Office up to speed with XML in the next release. IIRC, Excel would be able to save / load in XML as a native format (no loss of information), and I expect the same would be true of Word. Anyone have any concrete information on this?
Slashdot Mirror
Huh. The IETF might disagree...
And you forgot to mention that it is the worst, nastiest, buggiest, clunkiest, and most limited mail client ever invented. I am forced to use it every day and it is a terrible step backwards from /bin/mail.
It doesn't really help that our fascist administrators won't let anyone but themselves use IMAP.
At work we have a production system which is a SPARCstation 10 running a node-locked copy of WAIS. I hope it doesn't die...
> And one of these guys was from IBM...you'd
> figure they'd at least have email working.
Nah, last I heard they have to use Notes.
ssh -N -f -L 7143:127.0.0.1:143 mail.mydomain.com
Then run Mail.app. Encrypted transport, and it goes right out the irritating corporate firewall which blocks IMAP. I've used Pine for about eight years on and off but OS X Mail has pretty much replaced it for me.
Out of curiosity, why do you refuse to look at Sybase? I have worked with it as well as Oracle and (gag) Ingres, and while real sequences are certainly nicer than identity columns, Sybase was generally pretty nice. DBA work definitely seems to be less hassle with Sybase than with Oracle.
Hmm. I downloaded it for free and read a chapter or two before deciding that it was so ugly and hard to read in Word that I might as well just buy it.
Much to my dismay, the paper version was also ugly and hard to read. I still read most of it, but Mr. Eckel should find himself a better publisher who will take the time to typeset his book decently.
Apart from the presentation, the book was mostly pretty decent. Unfortunately, the I/O chapter was a terrible introduction to Java's byzantine I/O system, and I found the threading chapter pretty unsatisfactory as well. That said, I don't know of a better introductory Java book, but it might be worth looking for one.
Ahem? Shallow Xlib port? Please, please, show me how to do a shallow port of an Xlib program to OS X without using an X server.
Er, as far as I know showing products to %customer% is only possible with Windows.
$customer, on the other hand...
My vote is for dusting off Solaris for PowerPC (around the 2.5 timeframe if memory serves, it actually did ship) and bringing a Powerbook. Apple might be upset; I suspect Solaris would make OS X and Mach look pretty bad in the VM department.
It should be pointed out that OpenStep was ported to Solaris, HP-UX, and Windows NT along with the NeXT BSD platform. In fact, if you look closely at Sun hardware data sheets, you'll notice "OpenStep 1.0" listed as a supported environment. Dunno how to order it. :)
Also, I believe that WebObjects, at least in its Objective-C incarnation, contained almost the whole OpenStep system; I recall seeing it installed on NT and noticing a warning that the included developer tools were not licensed for developing standalone non-Web software.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that Apple quietly keeps Cocoa on Solaris working, if only as a way to avoid platform dependence. The developer docs do warn one to avoid using Mach message ports directly for just such reasons.
> Um, MIT invented krb, it can't suck ;)
Two words: Athena widgets.
> So I was thinking about iBooks (hey, it's not OpenBSD, but it's BSD)
It can be.
http://www.openbsd.org/macppc.html
However, OS X rocks as a BSD environment. I run both on a daily basis, albeit OpenBSD on a SPARCstation LX, and OS X does all the userland Unix stuff I want. OpenBSD has pf, nat, and all that good stuff, but you're not going to use an iBook as a router, right?
Oh, and OS X + XDarwin = XEmacs on the same display as Mac IE and Mail.app.
What? People don't use AIX for CAD? You'd better tell Boeing! And ask IBM to stop selling Catia on RS/6000 bundles, too, since apparently nobody is using them.
Accidents per takeoff/landing probably have more to do with the airline and pilot than the aircraft manufacturer. Aircraft failures for which the manufacturer is culpable (that is, not due to poor maintenance) tend to be caused by factors like vibration and metal fatigue, which are a function of operating time.
Xinet (available for Solaris/SPARC and Irix) does use encrypted AFP passwords, and otherwise does an excellent job as a Unix AFP server. Helios, on the other hand, uses cleartext passwords. Xinet costs a bit of money, but might well be worth it.
Examine a 68k-era Macintosh. Note that the video connector is DB15 female, just like a standard AUI connector. And if you think nobody could be stupid enough to plug a monitor into an Ethernet card, well, I've seen it done (and had to drive out and fix it, since the thing wouldn't boot). Hence the funky little AAUI connector.
Strunk and White's Elements of Style should be on the bookshelf of every English speaker, but especially the shelves of most of the programmers I've known. We've all read comments that were as mystifying as the code they were in. Elements of Style is an invaluable guide to concise and effective communication, beloved of English teachers and editors the world over.
Perhaps someone should send a few of them to Slashdot HQ, while we're on the subject.
MP3 players are all the rage, but everyone seems to be overlooking one major flaw: flash memory is really expensive. 64 MB of songs just isn't enough, even for a bus ride to work. What you need is a format that is cheaper than flash, but just as portable and durable.
Independent-minded techies will want to take a good, long look at getting their hands on MiniDisc hardware. Tiny, durable, long battery life, and $2.50 for 74 min. of nearly indestructible, rewritable, random-access storage is hard to beat. The sound quality on recent units is really CD-quality, considerably better than 128Kbps MP3. 12 hour battery life is nothing to sneeze at, either.
Portable recorder units like the Sony MZ-R90 can be had for around $320, while a player like the E60 or E75 is around $200. Pick up a home deck to go with a player-only model, and you're set. Minidisco and Planet MiniDisc are good sources of equipment and discs.
If you're in the Playstation-2-on-eBay price range, then the Ghibli ga Ippai, or Full of Ghibli, laserdisc boxed set is what you need. All of Studio Ghibli's wonderful films (except Princess Mononoke, which it predates) are collected in one box, with high-quality laserdisc transfers. No subtitles, though; you'll have to print out translated scripts unless your Japanese is really good. A new set would have cost Y98000, or about $1000. Unfortunately, it is now out of print, so you will have to either a) check eBay daily or b) get friends in Japan to scour the dusty back shelves of anime shops. Good luck. (Selling one?)
At least for databases, a conceptually similar scheme exists. Most real database systems (Sybase, Oracle, Informix, etc.) can replicate all their data to a standby server. If the primary server fails, clients will automatically switch to the standby server without data loss.
This can also be accomplished with shared disks and OS failover solutions like IBM's HACMP, but I think you were looking for something that didn't require shared hardware.
I don't know of anything similar for filesystems; databases naturally have a transaction model which provides atomic updates, guaranteeing against data loss. Implementing something similar at the filesystem level would probably take some serious kernel hacking.
On the other hand, distributed filesystems like Coda, GFS, AFS, etc. might have failover capabilities.
> It's a bit hard to believe more American would die than died while fighting
...
> in Europe, when the US was fighting on two fronts.
>
> And the allied forces defeated the Nazi's without the use of atomic weapons.
The reason for the ridiculously low casualties sustained by the Western Allies
in Europe, 1943-45, was that the overwhelming majority of German forces were on
the Eastern front. Most of the top-notch commanders were in the East, along
with most of the elite units, both Wehrmacht and SS. The Soviets absorbed most
of the effort that otherwise would have gone to pushing the Allies back into
the sea; note that while German casualty estimates were, if memory serves, ~6
million, Soviet casualties totalled over 30 million for civilian and military,
combined. Those figures are for the entire war, not just the Eastern Front.
If the USSR had fallen before the Normandy invasion, America and Britain would
have had an impossible task on their hands, and would have probably had to wait
until 1945 or 1946 to invade, or else nuke their way into Europe.
The American and British casualty figures are in no way representative of the
difficulty of a full-scale invasion of either Europe or Japan. While Japan's
army was puny compared to the Wehrmacht, the mountainous terrain of Japan makes
it much harder to invade than France or Germany. Switzerland or Sweden would be
more comparable in terms of terrain.
The size and determination of the Japanese population cannot be overlooked,
either. Remember that during the invasion of Saipan, the Japanese civilians
committed suicide, almost to a man, rather than surrender to the American
forces.
Well, that's what recon satellites were invented for. Think of this as a pay-as-you-go intelligence branch. Heh, Kinko's meets the NRO (National Reconaissance Office).
Really, this puts an interesting spin on the concept of being a mercenary. I wonder if the outfit doing this will refuse to take pictures of war zones lest they get their satellite disabled by the big boys.
This is only tangentially related, but can you swap an iBook's battery easily? That is, without pulling out the hard drive or lifting up the (admittedly very cool) lift-off keyboard?
Well, they're not all rabid idiots. Actually, I'm in almost the opposite position. I've used Linux for years and am planning on getting a Mac soon, for almost the opposite reason.
I admit, I don't get religious over source code licensing; I use Linux because it makes a first-rate server machine. However, several months of doing Real Work on a Mac was enough to convert me. It's a lousy platform for tinkering, but unbeatable for actually doing work. The interface is light years ahead of KDE, Windowmaker, or anything else that Linux has.
When I can get the MacOS interface with the stability of Unix, with bash and friends thrown in, I'm buying it. (Unless it costs $500.) Which means I'm buying MacOS X Desktop and a Mac to coexist with the Linux box in the closet.
The Gimp, Gnome, StarOffice, etc. are not going to be a real competitor to something as polished and well-thought-out as the MacOS with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Word. I'll let Linux do what it's good at: being a server. And I'll keep a Mac on my desk.
Amazing how many people bought the Soviet propaganda line on neutron bombs. The point of them was not to kill the Soviet population so we could take their cities. They were invented by NATO to stop the Red Army pouring through the Fulda Gap without turning Germany into a radioactive wasteland. (Although Soviet doctrine called for massive nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks throughout Western Europe at the beginning of a land war.) The Soviets realized that propaganda was cheaper than countermeasures, and bamboozled the Greens, etc. into believing that they were an evil imperialist weapon. They succeeded--misguided public outcry prevented NATO from ever deploying them. Score one for the Soviets.
I remember reading about Microsoft bringing Office up to speed with XML in the next release. IIRC, Excel would be able to save / load in XML as a native format (no loss of information), and I expect the same would be true of Word.
Anyone have any concrete information on this?