I don't really understand why someone would want to slow themselves down to the speed of speech (unless they're blind).
You might be surprised. I once got a personal demonstration by TV Ramen of his Emacspeak and was blown away. The speech output went out so fast I could not follow it.
Blind folks don't need to be handicapped on computers if idiot "web designers" would cooperate a bit more.
Sadly, TV Ramen was working for Adobe at the time, I do not know what he is doing now.
Or maybe, just maybe, Slashdot is fair and balanced, and Microsoft really is a nest of black-hearted villains.
"Fair and balanced" is probably never going to mean the same thing to two different people, especially your husband/wife/SO/etc.
I am not a big fan of Microsoft, all of their products had crippling bugs or limitations in them when I first started exploring there (Applesoft BASIC, PC DOS 2.0, etc.). I took a look at Microsoft Windows and OS/2 when they were first released and was unimpressed.
However, I have been impressed with Unix and its descendents since I first encountered them in college. The big Blue and Green books documenting Version 7 Unix were useful for everything Unixy at the time and I've always like the multiuser/multiprocessing aspect of the system. System V/R2 was a disaster on the order of Microsoft Windows XP (so I've read, I only used Microsoft Windows XP/SP2 for about half a year and it was only less stable than System V/R2 with patches), but it was released two decades earlier and since has all the problems worked out.
The Unix model, as first designed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie has withstood the test of time as no other software project ever has. They killed the proprietary O/S model on minis and mainframes. They killed the idea of non-portable OSes, though Microsoft has resurrected that idea. They so excited the minds and hearts of programmers that dozens of reimplemented spinoffs were done... and survive to this day.
On the other hand, Billg spent more on his two recent TV ads for an O/S that few want to buy than Thompson and Richie made in their lifetimes. Sigh.
You must be new here. I'm modded down all the time for insider Unix jokes or expressing a relatively mild opinion of what I feel about Microsoft Windows.
... and is the Fleming Cannon still there? I helped drag that bloody thing in the middle of the night through San Marino and was there at the reinstated inaugural firing towards PCC.
> But not in grade school. That option is not available.
It was at my high school up until like 8th week of term (terms were roughly 18 weeks incl. finals, forget exact length). Not as generous as Tech's
Yowza. Times have changed. I did not know one could drop classes in high school now.
And as to drop day at Caltech... it's a trap, but a reasonable one. Sometimes life changes require it. Carrying I's or F's for classes you cannot complete certainly doesn't enrich your life.
Say if you're a Darb, there's more than one reason to beware of drop day...
P.S. No offense intended to Dabney. They were next door neighbors after all. I could have written Page Sucks or piss on Page Wall. Is it still a Dabney tradition to go barefoot to class (and for Flems to piss on Page Wall)?
Ah, but you see, post-grad grades are awarded much like what were talking about in this article. You start with a 'B', and you have to really screw up to get less than that. That's why so many Masters people are not what you expect. If you get a masters, you have to redeem yourself by getting a PhD too.
No, the problem is academics can not prepare someone properly for the real world. It tends to only teach one how to kiss ass and not how to learn. Enforced testing and all the recent "innovations" in education in the US have had a deleterious effect.
You can only go so far kissing ass, then, well... read the news about what is happening in the US financial markets to see the ultimate result of that. Epic FAIL.
Perhaps the most insightful comment ever written about computer programming was written by Donald Knuth in his Art of Programming books. Restated, computer languages are a dime a dozen and you should be prepared to program in any one of them, maybe even all of them before lunch time.
Color me unimpressed with computer "science" education (though I'm prepared to have my mind changed - two of my finest former coworkers are currently working as instructors in Universities).
My workplace approved RHEL on the desktop that I use has never been rebooted for anything other than power failure.
hmm, given the energy issues going forward, isnt that a very big waste?
Given the cost of my time and the amount of time I save by having my virtual desktops exactly the way I left them the day before, nope. The monitor goes to sleep, the machine does not. That's good enough.
I put my machines at "home" to sleep when not in use, but that's only to save on the equipment itself. I don't have an electric bill at the place I sleep when I'm working and at home, most of the electricity is generated from geothermal sources, but I can't leave stuff on and running because of the heat and humidity.
I googled Blue Gene/P after posting that. It's from IBM, it's a supercomputer. Duh. What else would it be running?
The article quotes on of the leads as saying that they have no legacy restrictions, so they are probably going to go with something very fast and very state of the art.
The Blue Gene supercomputer operating system is based on the open-source Linux operating system. Applications are written in common languages such as Fortran, C and C++ using standards-based MPI communications protocols. The Blue Gene/P supercomputer is compatible with the diverse applications currently running on the Blue Gene/L supercomputer, including leading research in physics, chemistry, biology, aerospace, astrophysics, genetics, materials science, cosmology and seismology.
"Elements of Programming Style" is probably a better starting place (I hope it's still in print). Whatever language you are programming in is (or should be) irrelevant. For any worthwhile piece of code, development cost is essentially 0 compared to lifecycle costs.
Errors in code are human. Practice the egoless programming methodology and have your work reviewed by everyone you possibly can, listen to what you are being told. Not all of it will be correct, but you have to develop what Linus Torvalds calls "taste" in programming in somewhere and the more opinions you collect, the better off your code will be.
Reading (and understanding) other's source code is always important and it's good resume material and good experience to get involved with an open source software project (at whatever level). As maintainer of XEmacs, I wrote letters of recommendation, offered myself as a reference etc. for contributors who wanted that sort of thing.
And always remember, programming is fun! If it isn't fun for you, then perhaps you pursuing the wrong line of work.
As an OSS advocate and 20+ year SunOS/Solaris admin I will welcome both operating systems in my home and data center. Like the man said above, you know one, you practically know the other.
It's too bad in a way that you did not have a good experience with RHEL. My workplace approved RHEL on the desktop that I use has never been rebooted for anything other than power failure. My older Solaris workstation has, but that was only because I was unfamiliar with the system and did not know how to get it to use a decent bit depth for the X display.
It's all *nix in the end.
Yup. Absolutely works for me, the 20+ year Unix and descendents user at home.
-sb (Penguin advocate, but as long as it's something Unixy, I can live with that.)
Why do people automatically assume the UN will fuck it up, when the UN has operated the international phone network competently for decades? Is it just this weird anti-UN propaganda that the people in the USA are subjected to?
The U.N. doesn't "operate" squat. They have oversight over the international standards body that specifies how the various national phone systems interact. That's about it.
My answer to the AC is, how many international phone calls do you make per day? The system is very screwed up. Disconnects, bad connections, wrong numbers are very very common.
Your answer is probably correct, but now who do I blame?
I'm a zsh kind of guy and I keep my PS1 to a basic, comforting, but colored `$ '. I set RPS1 to loginname and hostname and the window frame label (if it exists) to the host and current directory. I have to dumb down my prompts if I'm going to go to a bash based login. Sadly,/bin/sh is bash in OS X.
Left side prompts like `~steve/src/xemacs> ' or (worse, the copycat) `C:\> ' are lame - come on folks, directory names can be long and that went out of style before most of you were born...
and to get back on-topic, the (shell) error message `no match' is perhaps the lamest error message of all, especially being a feature not worth implementing in the first place.
Dave, the default prompts for the traditional Bourne shell are `$' as a regular user and `#' as root. And I'll resist a "I cannot let you do that, Dave (as root)".
The posts in this article and from the FTFA itself, certainly refute a general Unix or Linux bias in/..
But consider how things have changed. It used to be cool to deliberately run `rm -rf/' as root knowing full well what it was going to do.
I'd consider it a bonus question if someone could tell me what happens when you do that on Linux, but all the pseudo filesystem crap and and stuff like/dev/zero have made it basically a crap shoot. Sigh.
Apologies wanderingknight. I'll get off your lawn now.
I've done it several times - to systems that I am about to reinstall. I don't reinstall Unix/Linux systems very often and I've had limited opportunities. The first time I ever saw it done was at school by the admin about to reinstall the system - "You don't get a chance to do this very often".
The `rmdir not found' message will not happen in a modern system. System V & earlier systems from AT&T didn't have an rmdir system call, so the rm program would fork/exec rmdir (and/bin/rmdir had to be setuid root) when it was time to remove a directory.
Writing as someone who achieved marks like that (either all A/A+s or Fs) in a term, I can say... the educational system in the US sucks. I refuse to kiss someone's ass for an A (or a boss's ass for that matter).
The only time I was employed doing kernel hacking was at NEC and the "big" machine they gave me for testing had ~1GB with 2 CPUS (in 2002). Sigh. Gone are the days...
Subject mastery is not boolean. I certainly don't want to hire anyone who got a grade of "pass" for my project team. I want to hire only "A" students.
I sure do not want to work for you.
I'd rather have people working (for me, or above me) who are open to learning and can do so. I have found formal education, particularly in the masters+ of CS level to be epic FAIL, but your mileage may vary.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't really understand why someone would want to slow themselves down to the speed of speech (unless they're blind).
You might be surprised. I once got a personal demonstration by TV Ramen of his Emacspeak and was blown away. The speech output went out so fast I could not follow it.
Blind folks don't need to be handicapped on computers if idiot "web designers" would cooperate a bit more.
Sadly, TV Ramen was working for Adobe at the time, I do not know what he is doing now.
Or maybe, just maybe, Slashdot is fair and balanced, and Microsoft really is a nest of black-hearted villains.
"Fair and balanced" is probably never going to mean the same thing to two different people, especially your husband/wife/SO/etc.
I am not a big fan of Microsoft, all of their products had crippling bugs or limitations in them when I first started exploring there (Applesoft BASIC, PC DOS 2.0, etc.). I took a look at Microsoft Windows and OS/2 when they were first released and was unimpressed.
However, I have been impressed with Unix and its descendents since I first encountered them in college. The big Blue and Green books documenting Version 7 Unix were useful for everything Unixy at the time and I've always like the multiuser/multiprocessing aspect of the system. System V/R2 was a disaster on the order of Microsoft Windows XP (so I've read, I only used Microsoft Windows XP/SP2 for about half a year and it was only less stable than System V/R2 with patches), but it was released two decades earlier and since has all the problems worked out.
The Unix model, as first designed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie has withstood the test of time as no other software project ever has. They killed the proprietary O/S model on minis and mainframes. They killed the idea of non-portable OSes, though Microsoft has resurrected that idea. They so excited the minds and hearts of programmers that dozens of reimplemented spinoffs were done ... and survive to this day.
On the other hand, Billg spent more on his two recent TV ads for an O/S that few want to buy than Thompson and Richie made in their lifetimes. Sigh.
Slashdot has always been biased towards Linux.
You must be new here. I'm modded down all the time for insider Unix jokes or expressing a relatively mild opinion of what I feel about Microsoft Windows.
This is not your Father's slashdot.
... and is the Fleming Cannon still there? I helped drag that bloody thing in the middle of the night through San Marino and was there at the reinstated inaugural firing towards PCC.
> But not in grade school. That option is not available.
It was at my high school up until like 8th week of term (terms were roughly 18 weeks incl. finals, forget exact length). Not as generous as Tech's
Yowza. Times have changed. I did not know one could drop classes in high school now.
And as to drop day at Caltech ... it's a trap, but a reasonable one. Sometimes life changes require it. Carrying I's or F's for classes you cannot complete certainly doesn't enrich your life.
Say if you're a Darb, there's more than one reason to beware of drop day...
P.S. No offense intended to Dabney. They were next door neighbors after all. I could have written Page Sucks or piss on Page Wall. Is it still a Dabney tradition to go barefoot to class (and for Flems to piss on Page Wall)?
Ah, but you see, post-grad grades are awarded much like what were talking about in this article. You start with a 'B', and you have to really screw up to get less than that. That's why so many Masters people are not what you expect. If you get a masters, you have to redeem yourself by getting a PhD too.
No, the problem is academics can not prepare someone properly for the real world. It tends to only teach one how to kiss ass and not how to learn. Enforced testing and all the recent "innovations" in education in the US have had a deleterious effect.
You can only go so far kissing ass, then, well ... read the news about what is happening in the US financial markets to see the ultimate result of that. Epic FAIL.
Perhaps the most insightful comment ever written about computer programming was written by Donald Knuth in his Art of Programming books. Restated, computer languages are a dime a dozen and you should be prepared to program in any one of them, maybe even all of them before lunch time.
Color me unimpressed with computer "science" education (though I'm prepared to have my mind changed - two of my finest former coworkers are currently working as instructors in Universities).
My workplace approved RHEL on the desktop that I use has never been rebooted for anything other than power failure.
hmm, given the energy issues going forward, isnt that a very big waste?
Given the cost of my time and the amount of time I save by having my virtual desktops exactly the way I left them the day before, nope. The monitor goes to sleep, the machine does not. That's good enough.
I put my machines at "home" to sleep when not in use, but that's only to save on the equipment itself. I don't have an electric bill at the place I sleep when I'm working and at home, most of the electricity is generated from geothermal sources, but I can't leave stuff on and running because of the heat and humidity.
I googled Blue Gene/P after posting that. It's from IBM, it's a supercomputer. Duh. What else would it be running?
The article quotes on of the leads as saying that they have no legacy restrictions, so they are probably going to go with something very fast and very state of the art.
From http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/21791.wss
The Blue Gene supercomputer operating system is based on the open-source Linux operating system. Applications are written in common languages such as Fortran, C and C++ using standards-based MPI communications protocols. The Blue Gene/P supercomputer is compatible with the diverse applications currently running on the Blue Gene/L supercomputer, including leading research in physics, chemistry, biology, aerospace, astrophysics, genetics, materials science, cosmology and seismology.
TFA does not name the O/S it runs, though a linked article from TFA says the Iranian's supercomputer runs Linux.
Inquiring minds want to know, I think.
"Elements of Programming Style" is probably a better starting place (I hope it's still in print). Whatever language you are programming in is (or should be) irrelevant. For any worthwhile piece of code, development cost is essentially 0 compared to lifecycle costs.
Errors in code are human. Practice the egoless programming methodology and have your work reviewed by everyone you possibly can, listen to what you are being told. Not all of it will be correct, but you have to develop what Linus Torvalds calls "taste" in programming in somewhere and the more opinions you collect, the better off your code will be.
Reading (and understanding) other's source code is always important and it's good resume material and good experience to get involved with an open source software project (at whatever level). As maintainer of XEmacs, I wrote letters of recommendation, offered myself as a reference etc. for contributors who wanted that sort of thing.
And always remember, programming is fun! If it isn't fun for you, then perhaps you pursuing the wrong line of work.
As an OSS advocate and 20+ year SunOS/Solaris admin I will welcome both operating systems in my home and data center. Like the man said above, you know one, you practically know the other.
It's too bad in a way that you did not have a good experience with RHEL. My workplace approved RHEL on the desktop that I use has never been rebooted for anything other than power failure. My older Solaris workstation has, but that was only because I was unfamiliar with the system and did not know how to get it to use a decent bit depth for the X display.
It's all *nix in the end.
Yup. Absolutely works for me, the 20+ year Unix and descendents user at home.
-sb (Penguin advocate, but as long as it's something Unixy, I can live with that.)
Why do people automatically assume the UN will fuck it up, when the UN has operated the international phone network competently for decades? Is it just this weird anti-UN propaganda that the people in the USA are subjected to?
The U.N. doesn't "operate" squat. They have oversight over the international standards body that specifies how the various national phone systems interact. That's about it.
My answer to the AC is, how many international phone calls do you make per day? The system is very screwed up. Disconnects, bad connections, wrong numbers are very very common.
Your answer is probably correct, but now who do I blame?
Bash is just smart enough to be very stupid.
I'm a zsh kind of guy and I keep my PS1 to a basic, comforting, but colored `$ '. I set RPS1 to loginname and hostname and the window frame label (if it exists) to the host and current directory. I have to dumb down my prompts if I'm going to go to a bash based login. Sadly, /bin/sh is bash in OS X.
Left side prompts like `~steve/src/xemacs> ' or (worse, the copycat) `C:\> ' are lame - come on folks, directory names can be long and that went out of style before most of you were born ...
and to get back on-topic, the (shell) error message `no match' is perhaps the lamest error message of all, especially being a feature not worth implementing in the first place.
Look, I just happened to point out that this commercial entity just happens to have one of those! Own your own!"
Hey! It works for the Microsoft Windows guys.
The correct error message is `rmdir(2): syscall not found', but thank you for playing.
No, no, no!
This is slashdot and the big questions are:
does it run Linux?
FTFA:
IBM said its new server, which runs Linux and is based on Intel's quad-core Xeon processors
W00t!
Can you imagine a Beowolf cluster of these things and can you give me a car analogy of how fast these things run?
I, for one, welcome our new IBM iDataPlex overlords.
Dave, the default prompts for the traditional Bourne shell are `$' as a regular user and `#' as root. And I'll resist a "I cannot let you do that, Dave (as root)".
The posts in this article and from the FTFA itself, certainly refute a general Unix or Linux bias in /..
But consider how things have changed. It used to be cool to deliberately run `rm -rf /' as root knowing full well what it was going to do.
I'd consider it a bonus question if someone could tell me what happens when you do that on Linux, but all the pseudo filesystem crap and and stuff like /dev/zero have made it basically a crap shoot. Sigh.
Apologies wanderingknight. I'll get off your lawn now.
I've done it several times - to systems that I am about to reinstall. I don't reinstall Unix/Linux systems very often and I've had limited opportunities. The first time I ever saw it done was at school by the admin about to reinstall the system - "You don't get a chance to do this very often".
The `rmdir not found' message will not happen in a modern system. System V & earlier systems from AT&T didn't have an rmdir system call, so the rm program would fork/exec rmdir (and /bin/rmdir had to be setuid root) when it was time to remove a directory.
Now, get off my lawn.
The kernel message was "Fucking Sun blows me".
My favorites:
$ ar t God
God does not exist
$ make love
make: don't know how to make love
and of course: /bin/rm -rf /
#
rmdir: command not found
100% (A) + 0% (F) yields a 45% ave. (F)
Writing as someone who achieved marks like that (either all A/A+s or Fs) in a term, I can say ... the educational system in the US sucks. I refuse to kiss someone's ass for an A (or a boss's ass for that matter).
I agree. That is brilliant, wish I had thought of it myself.
Does anyone else notice that things are going downhill? And they're speeding up?
Dumb question. I refuse to let^H^H^Hforce my children to go to school in California.
Things have been getting worse, a looooong time.
The only time I was employed doing kernel hacking was at NEC and the "big" machine they gave me for testing had ~1GB with 2 CPUS (in 2002). Sigh. Gone are the days...
Subject mastery is not boolean. I certainly don't want to hire anyone who got a grade of "pass" for my project team. I want to hire only "A" students.
I sure do not want to work for you.
I'd rather have people working (for me, or above me) who are open to learning and can do so. I have found formal education, particularly in the masters+ of CS level to be epic FAIL, but your mileage may vary.
The concept of having a 70-point spread for failing students, and a 30-point spread for passing students (on a scale of 100) is fundamentally flawed.
I never thought of it that way, but that is correct. May I ask why don't you grade on a bell curve?