Problem is ports are not easy to make stable due to a large number of different compiler settings and libraries. A CVSUP can screw up most FreeBSD systems for that reason.:-)
I like the fact that everything is tested with the same compiler settings and dependancies with binary distributions like Debian. if there is a conflict I assume the dependency is updated.
Sigh
Oddly this same argument is why I prefered source based operating sytems. Everyone has different packages installed. I take it instability can happen either way when taken to extremes.:-(
Why does Unix still have this problem? Its 2005. Windows has smart dll management today and dependancies are always including in install apps on MacOSX and Windows. Maybe Unix should include both local (to apps) and global dependancies and.so's instead of throwing everything in/usr/lib. But the dlls are linked to each program runned in Windows2000 and WindowsXP.
I have heard stories of apt-get breaking apps but its not very common since it deals with dependancies.
I remember reading about this on slashdot a few years ago. THe guidance computer is the same since the late 70's built on once popular cpu that I can not remember the name from. The 40k of ram works fine.
They wont fix it because the old one works and is safe. Why fix something that is broken?
I bet if you could take Ritchie and Thompson from the early 70's and put them in front of a macosx box they would be dumbfounded.
Even with a terminal session opened things are different besides the "ls" and "cd" commands.
Unrecognizable indeed compared to the ancient versions.
Also object oriented programing and languages like objective-c are newer concepts even though smalltalk has been in R&D from close to that time but in secret.
The source code for most user apps is radically different even if the only the kernel is written in C.
Actually people who would buy such systems with dual cpu's and video cards would be video production profesionals (the parent poster), cad and 3d modelers, and engineers. Such systems are not cheap for the average user.
At Liz Claiborne in the 90's when I worked there, the merhcandising team used dual vodoo's for studioMax when I worked there over the more pro video cards. They were very fast.
All these apps fly on Intel cpu's if you look at any benchmark. This is because they contain hand written assembly optimized for intel chips. They are multithreaded and designed to be smp ready.
But games it would be silly since they are not optimized for any one chip and are not smp ready.
My guess is these units for AMD might appeal to the gamer but the Intel ones will be used by the professionals. An SMP core as well would make it a kick ass workstation.
Also if you could obtain tracks illegally from a friend then why purchase through the Itune store?
I am not in favor of drm per say but if I worked at Apple I could understand their needs.
Files are too easy to copy and use illegally.
For example I can not just duplicate my car and sell it. Software is different because frankly it can be copied that easily.
What I would be in favor of would be drm but used in rights of copyright only.
For example you could make copies of your files which Itunes lets you do. Or shift your files to different media you own. Or even include parts of songs in a presentation at work under fair use. But making fully copying illegal.
The problem is the DVD consortorum has a monopoly on this and corrupt laws that overide fair use.
I am becoming more and more conservative myself with business owners having rights and do think they need to be compensated.
Copyright is a fair ballance. First off it gives owners the right to make money off their hardwork and it gives limited rights to consumers so they own what they bought. I should be able to qoute text from a book in a paper in english for example.
But what is happening is the law of first sale no longer applies and the media companies remain ownership of the product and how its used after I purchase it.
Software EULA's give you only a right to use a copy of a product that is not existant except where it came from. (confusing as that sounds)
EULA's are also debatable and is in court since no notary is present.
Movies are not licenses but products of artistic work.
We need to stop filesharing and stealing. I agree.
But how is not skipping commercials the same as spyware and aggressive telemarketers? Laws are finally coming out to stop that.
Well I hate to say it but we also keep critizing the RIAA for not following the market towards selling files online.
In some ways I want to support Itunes for that reason so they can understand that not all of us our thieves. A computer is a convient storage device and jukebox player.
My gf has over 100 cd's and can nto find anything anymore. I finally convinced her to buy a huge hard drive and digitize everything with a good quality pair of speakers for convience.
If only there was a way to stop illegal filetrading without limiting fair use. I admit I do p2p to hear some mp3's that are rare and to get porn. It would suck to lose it.
But yes its stealing and the media companies as greedy as they are need to be compensated. Just not through the extreme in which they are doing it.
Occasionally some of the past april fools spoofs have been funny. Creativity is lacking a little in some of the posts today though.
One of the worst april fools story was someone asking slashdot what kind of programing language turns them on sexually and sets the mood with their spouses.
If a project fails due to lack of specing, planing, and selling the stages of the solution then its the managers fault and not the programers. Too many incompentant managers are still employed and meanwhile everything is not planned but rather outsourced as a result.
MRP, ERP, and business process engineering should be taught at computer science and MIS students. Instead only MBA's know about them.
If the mechanic is a relative I suppose working on your car as a freebee would not be a problem unless it was really time consuming.
Same as any profession. At work we do expect results and waiters/waitresses to go at our whims. So does everyone including the higher ups at work because they are being paid.
Most people though who request help can not do it themselves. If I help a friend of my moms computer and can't fix it for some reason out of my control like a full backup, then I direct them to a professional. If its to install adaware I do not mind. People can fetch drinks themselves which is why they do not ask waiters to get them when they are not at work.
But really this guy mentioned above is understaffed. If I were him I would try to sell himself to his boss and management and ask for more workers. If they do not care then its time to update your resume and apply elsewhere. Let the inexperienced 10/hr highschool tech work for them if that is what they want.
I would kindly tell him that we need to do X. If he thinks he can hire someone else to do it then go do so.
I would assume such a boss would be unworkable for specing and planing. Either way I would assume I would be fired anyway for meeting such unrealistic expectations if this kind of thing was commonplace.
In the Guess-and-Check methodology I would give deadlines and processes of things that need to get done next. He just wanted to know what it would look like so that is what you did. Do not go into technical stuff with 3 tier platforms but explain this is what it will take to make sure it will be done properly.
If he is unsure about it give him the option to can the project after each stage. Never give an estimation of the whole thing but just explain the stages and how long it will take for the next stage. Sell it and explain its a whole "system" of ecommerce that needs to be properly designed and just some silly html tags.
If he refuses to listen or your boss is an idiot then I would look for work elsewhere. Its not your fault but theirs.
Upper management does not need to know technical stuff nor should they care.
Just like they do not need to know what kind of daily activies the marketing department is doing or what the salespeople actually do. What upper management does need is someone from each department tell them the stages and individual processes each step will take without going into details.
For example having our sales team focus more on model N and selling more to our Y specific set of customers. It will take X amount of time for the training and after that it will take Z amount of time to sell to all of Y.
If IT did this without specificing details it would be understood. Give the stages to show the higher ups what you are doing and to prove you are not goofing off.
I wish more IT guys had better communication skills. Its sometimes not an easy job.
Most projects fail due to lack of specing and planning.
Building a house is correct and they need to realize blueprinting is the hardest part.
This is advise from my old man who never failed an IT project in 20 years. Sell your solution in stages and always get the business/customer the option to quit at any stage. Never give an estimation of hte price unless they know how much money X will make or save but really you never do that. Just give a price for each stage and a timeframe. This will make risk obverent PHb's more comfortable.
People respect those on their level with common goals and ideas.
In the 90's more programing jobs delt with transforming how a business worked and integration. Now its maintance where we are an electrician or a mechanic. Sure they value as necessary, but also they look at you as under them.
Today we are cost centers who do not contribute to the bottom line. Actually we are "necessary" cost centers to keep things rolling but cost centers we are. We are valued only because they have to us and not for what we can do for the company.
Most of us can not sell ourselves and promote solutions to our employers or our bosses can not do it and we get shit on as a result.
90% of IT projects fail and outsourcing is a disiaster to all but QA.
My father use to implement projects and large software installations and never in 20 years missed a deadline. He knew how to sell himself and researched MRP, ERP, programing managment processes, and speced everything to death before having his programers write any code. Because he worked at being part of the business he moved up the chain and became a VP. Today businesses only care about price because they do not know any better.
Same is true with us and management. We have a crises today in our universities. I am not just talking about computer science students who know only how to write a hello world program but MBA's and MIS majors. Folks in business think I.T. is just a maintance cost or programing is just something a guy does on the moment by himself with no specing. Outsourcing has really hurt IT for this reason since you can not spec if you are on the otherside of the world or know what the business needs. My guess is the new guys graduating gew up with computers and think pc's are just machines you plug in and packaged software takes care of everything.
Last, I disagree with a parent poster about earning respect. Some people just wont like you while some give you too much respect if you dont deserve it. That is life.
If you never get enough respect and can get it elsewhere I would look to work elsewhere. Let someone else less qualified take your job if that is what your boss wants due to his undervaluing.
TCP/IP was designed to be reduant incase of a nuclear war. It was never meant to be secure or high performance.
I think a new secure (non drm) and multimedia and fiber optic friendly replacement is needed. Also application level protocals could use some new standards as well.
For example Email is a problem that both phishers and spammers are taking advantage of. I heard about Dmail as a replacement for SMTP and Pop3.
I am thinking perhaps several levels of security servers similiar to dns servers producing encryption keys and authenticating phisher scams (maybe a legit business could get a unique key) and email addresses would be nice. Its also too easy to spoof an IP address. Maybe security in a new DNS model that hands out keys would be nice too.
However Internet2 which is being experimented with has its own set of problems. Internet2 mainly deals with IPV6. IPv6 supposed to be a little bit better but spammers and phishers could change their IP addresses by the hour to prevent being caught and being filtered out. We need a better replacement that is more secure and allows better application level embedding for external protocals.
If I were a politician I would do this just and have Darpa and a few companies and academics invest in a newer architecture.
More router friendly support would be nice too to deal with bandwith allocation for different kinds of services like VOIP and UDP media streaming.
I get errors from autoconf saying something about headers and not being able to retrieve something. The error messages i get are different.
They usually follow with something like studio.h can not cast because it conflicts with..otherlocation..studio.h or random.h. Its either not linking properly or something was not unemerged like a previous or conflicting library. My environmental variables could be out of whack too.
I have school and do not have time to fix it right now.
I will probably upgrade to 2005r1 when it comes out.
Well after downgrading from FBSD 4.10 to 5.3 I happen to disagree.:-(
I left FBSD and switched to Gentoo.
Gentoo is improving and it no longer is the POS it used to be. I was fine until about a week later when I did an emerge --sync and an emerge -u system. Now a week later after this, I can not compile any packages.
It appears I have to reinstall Gentoo since the bugfixes from autoconf or glibc (havent figured out which one yet) require a recompile which I can't do because of the bug.... hits head on table.
Gentoo can get better with a little better R&D between unstable and stable ports.
ALso I may add the FBSD ports can become unstable and nasty if you do a CVSUP. I have broken my FBSD many times as well over this. Also many ports like Java go unfixed for up to a month when I finally gave up. It would be nice if I could CVSUP into a bugfix/security branch for each release rather than -current. It would solve alot of problems and this is what Gentoo does. I emailed the FreeBSD team on that wishlist.
Slashdot Mirror
Laura DiDio is the one who agreed with SCO if I recall that Linus stole millions of lines of Unixware code and warned CIO's to stay clear from it.
Just take what she says wiuth a grain of salt.
Problem is ports are not easy to make stable due to a large number of different compiler settings and libraries. A CVSUP can screw up most FreeBSD systems for that reason. :-)
:-(
.so's instead of throwing everything in /usr/lib. But the dlls are linked to each program runned in Windows2000 and WindowsXP.
I like the fact that everything is tested with the same compiler settings and dependancies with binary distributions like Debian. if there is a conflict I assume the dependency is updated.
Sigh
Oddly this same argument is why I prefered source based operating sytems. Everyone has different packages installed. I take it instability can happen either way when taken to extremes.
Why does Unix still have this problem? Its 2005. Windows has smart dll management today and dependancies are always including in install apps on MacOSX and Windows. Maybe Unix should include both local (to apps) and global dependancies and
I have heard stories of apt-get breaking apps but its not very common since it deals with dependancies.
I thought the ZSeries were based on the Xeon's and Pseries based on the power cpu's? Or are we talking about chipsets and other onboard features?
I still prefer FreeBSD but unfortunately 5.x shows it is not the great distro it used to be.
Gentoo is much better than it was back in 2002 when I tried it but its too easy to break and not quite as stable as I would want it.
I may try these debian based distro's. How stable are they? Are they relatively bugfree?
I remember reading about this on slashdot a few years ago. THe guidance computer is the same since the late 70's built on once popular cpu that I can not remember the name from. The 40k of ram works fine.
They wont fix it because the old one works and is safe. Why fix something that is broken?
I bet if you could take Ritchie and Thompson from the early 70's and put them in front of a macosx box they would be dumbfounded.
Even with a terminal session opened things are different besides the "ls" and "cd" commands.
Unrecognizable indeed compared to the ancient versions.
Also object oriented programing and languages like objective-c are newer concepts even though smalltalk has been in R&D from close to that time but in secret.
The source code for most user apps is radically different even if the only the kernel is written in C.
I re-edited two sentances which is why redundancy is present.
Actually people who would buy such systems with dual cpu's and video cards would be video production profesionals (the parent poster), cad and 3d modelers, and engineers. Such systems are not cheap for the average user.
At Liz Claiborne in the 90's when I worked there, the merhcandising team used dual vodoo's for studioMax when I worked there over the more pro video cards. They were very fast.
All these apps fly on Intel cpu's if you look at any benchmark. This is because they contain hand written assembly optimized for intel chips. They are multithreaded and designed to be smp ready.
But games it would be silly since they are not optimized for any one chip and are not smp ready.
My guess is these units for AMD might appeal to the gamer but the Intel ones will be used by the professionals. An SMP core as well would make it a kick ass workstation.
Well what do you expect them to do?
Piss of their customers (riiaa)?
Also if you could obtain tracks illegally from a friend then why purchase through the Itune store?
I am not in favor of drm per say but if I worked at Apple I could understand their needs.
Files are too easy to copy and use illegally.
For example I can not just duplicate my car and sell it. Software is different because frankly it can be copied that easily.
What I would be in favor of would be drm but used in rights of copyright only.
For example you could make copies of your files which Itunes lets you do. Or shift your files to different media you own. Or even include parts of songs in a presentation at work under fair use. But making fully copying illegal.
I think that is a fair ballance.
The problem is the DVD consortorum has a monopoly on this and corrupt laws that overide fair use.
I am becoming more and more conservative myself with business owners having rights and do think they need to be compensated.
Copyright is a fair ballance. First off it gives owners the right to make money off their hardwork and it gives limited rights to consumers so they own what they bought. I should be able to qoute text from a book in a paper in english for example.
But what is happening is the law of first sale no longer applies and the media companies remain ownership of the product and how its used after I purchase it.
Software EULA's give you only a right to use a copy of a product that is not existant except where it came from. (confusing as that sounds)
EULA's are also debatable and is in court since no notary is present.
Movies are not licenses but products of artistic work.
We need to stop filesharing and stealing. I agree.
But how is not skipping commercials the same as spyware and aggressive telemarketers? Laws are finally coming out to stop that.
To bad a fair compromise can not be worked out.
So he found a niche. Does everyone need college? No.
.com crunch.
I am 28 and back at school after the
I am glad I gained real world experience and going back to school later teaches maturity and also humility.
Maybe by my age Jon may go back to school and get his degree when he is ready.
We all dont need to go to school fresh out of highschool. I would encourage my future kids to do the same unless they are very driven.
Well I hate to say it but we also keep critizing the RIAA for not following the market towards selling files online.
In some ways I want to support Itunes for that reason so they can understand that not all of us our thieves. A computer is a convient storage device and jukebox player.
My gf has over 100 cd's and can nto find anything anymore. I finally convinced her to buy a huge hard drive and digitize everything with a good quality pair of speakers for convience.
If only there was a way to stop illegal filetrading without limiting fair use. I admit I do p2p to hear some mp3's that are rare and to get porn. It would suck to lose it.
But yes its stealing and the media companies as greedy as they are need to be compensated. Just not through the extreme in which they are doing it.
Its been said this review is a little biased.
AMD's top of the line FX was not included. Most FX chipsets are not only the same class as the extreme Intel boards but many come with RAID 5 as well.
I am glad to help.
Here is a hint.
Look at the date?
Occasionally some of the past april fools spoofs have been funny. Creativity is lacking a little in some of the posts today though.
One of the worst april fools story was someone asking slashdot what kind of programing language turns them on sexually and sets the mood with their spouses.
Most intelligent comment I have read here so far.
If a project fails due to lack of specing, planing, and selling the stages of the solution then its the managers fault and not the programers. Too many incompentant managers are still employed and meanwhile everything is not planned but rather outsourced as a result.
MRP, ERP, and business process engineering should be taught at computer science and MIS students. Instead only MBA's know about them.
If the mechanic is a relative I suppose working on your car as a freebee would not be a problem unless it was really time consuming.
Same as any profession. At work we do expect results and waiters/waitresses to go at our whims. So does everyone including the higher ups at work because they are being paid.
Most people though who request help can not do it themselves. If I help a friend of my moms computer and can't fix it for some reason out of my control like a full backup, then I direct them to a professional. If its to install adaware I do not mind. People can fetch drinks themselves which is why they do not ask waiters to get them when they are not at work.
But really this guy mentioned above is understaffed. If I were him I would try to sell himself to his boss and management and ask for more workers. If they do not care then its time to update your resume and apply elsewhere. Let the inexperienced 10/hr highschool tech work for them if that is what they want.
I would kindly tell him that we need to do X. If he thinks he can hire someone else to do it then go do so.
I would assume such a boss would be unworkable for specing and planing. Either way I would assume I would be fired anyway for meeting such unrealistic expectations if this kind of thing was commonplace.
In the Guess-and-Check methodology I would give deadlines and processes of things that need to get done next. He just wanted to know what it would look like so that is what you did. Do not go into technical stuff with 3 tier platforms but explain this is what it will take to make sure it will be done properly.
If he is unsure about it give him the option to can the project after each stage. Never give an estimation of the whole thing but just explain the stages and how long it will take for the next stage. Sell it and explain its a whole "system" of ecommerce that needs to be properly designed and just some silly html tags.
If he refuses to listen or your boss is an idiot then I would look for work elsewhere. Its not your fault but theirs.
Upper management does not need to know technical stuff nor should they care.
Just like they do not need to know what kind of daily activies the marketing department is doing or what the salespeople actually do. What upper management does need is someone from each department tell them the stages and individual processes each step will take without going into details.
For example having our sales team focus more on model N and selling more to our Y specific set of customers. It will take X amount of time for the training and after that it will take Z amount of time to sell to all of Y.
If IT did this without specificing details it would be understood. Give the stages to show the higher ups what you are doing and to prove you are not goofing off.
I wish more IT guys had better communication skills. Its sometimes not an easy job.
Most projects fail due to lack of specing and planning.
Building a house is correct and they need to realize blueprinting is the hardest part.
This is advise from my old man who never failed an IT project in 20 years. Sell your solution in stages and always get the business/customer the option to quit at any stage. Never give an estimation of hte price unless they know how much money X will make or save but really you never do that. Just give a price for each stage and a timeframe. This will make risk obverent PHb's more comfortable.
You hit the glibc bug.
My box can not compile at all anymore and it was the result of an emerge -system on my box.
People respect those on their level with common goals and ideas.
In the 90's more programing jobs delt with transforming how a business worked and integration. Now its maintance where we are an electrician or a mechanic. Sure they value as necessary, but also they look at you as under them.
Today we are cost centers who do not contribute to the bottom line. Actually we are "necessary" cost centers to keep things rolling but cost centers we are. We are valued only because they have to us and not for what we can do for the company.
Most of us can not sell ourselves and promote solutions to our employers or our bosses can not do it and we get shit on as a result.
90% of IT projects fail and outsourcing is a disiaster to all but QA.
My father use to implement projects and large software installations and never in 20 years missed a deadline. He knew how to sell himself and researched MRP, ERP, programing managment processes, and speced everything to death before having his programers write any code. Because he worked at being part of the business he moved up the chain and became a VP. Today businesses only care about price because they do not know any better.
Same is true with us and management. We have a crises today in our universities. I am not just talking about computer science students who know only how to write a hello world program but MBA's and MIS majors. Folks in business think I.T. is just a maintance cost or programing is just something a guy does on the moment by himself with no specing. Outsourcing has really hurt IT for this reason since you can not spec if you are on the otherside of the world or know what the business needs. My guess is the new guys graduating gew up with computers and think pc's are just machines you plug in and packaged software takes care of everything.
Last, I disagree with a parent poster about earning respect. Some people just wont like you while some give you too much respect if you dont deserve it. That is life.
If you never get enough respect and can get it elsewhere I would look to work elsewhere. Let someone else less qualified take your job if that is what your boss wants due to his undervaluing.
TCP/IP was designed to be reduant incase of a nuclear war. It was never meant to be secure or high performance.
I think a new secure (non drm) and multimedia and fiber optic friendly replacement is needed. Also application level protocals could use some new standards as well.
For example Email is a problem that both phishers and spammers are taking advantage of. I heard about Dmail as a replacement for SMTP and Pop3.
I am thinking perhaps several levels of security servers similiar to dns servers producing encryption keys and authenticating phisher scams (maybe a legit business could get a unique key) and email addresses would be nice. Its also too easy to spoof an IP address. Maybe security in a new DNS model that hands out keys would be nice too.
However Internet2 which is being experimented with has its own set of problems. Internet2 mainly deals with IPV6. IPv6 supposed to be a little bit better but spammers and phishers could change their IP addresses by the hour to prevent being caught and being filtered out. We need a better replacement that is more secure and allows better application level embedding for external protocals.
If I were a politician I would do this just and have Darpa and a few companies and academics invest in a newer architecture.
More router friendly support would be nice too to deal with bandwith allocation for different kinds of services like VOIP and UDP media streaming.
Hmm I do wonder.
..otherlocation..studio.h or random.h. Its either not linking properly or something was not unemerged like a previous or conflicting library. My environmental variables could be out of whack too.
I get errors from autoconf saying something about headers and not being able to retrieve something. The error messages i get are different.
They usually follow with something like studio.h can not cast because it conflicts with
I have school and do not have time to fix it right now.
I will probably upgrade to 2005r1 when it comes out.
Well after downgrading from FBSD 4.10 to 5.3 I happen to disagree. :-(
... hits head on table.
I left FBSD and switched to Gentoo.
Gentoo is improving and it no longer is the POS it used to be. I was fine until about a week later when I did an emerge --sync and an emerge -u system. Now a week later after this, I can not compile any packages.
It appears I have to reinstall Gentoo since the bugfixes from autoconf or glibc (havent figured out which one yet) require a recompile which I can't do because of the bug.
Gentoo can get better with a little better R&D between unstable and stable ports.
ALso I may add the FBSD ports can become unstable and nasty if you do a CVSUP. I have broken my FBSD many times as well over this. Also many ports like Java go unfixed for up to a month when I finally gave up. It would be nice if I could CVSUP into a bugfix/security branch for each release rather than -current. It would solve alot of problems and this is what Gentoo does. I emailed the FreeBSD team on that wishlist.
Neither distro is perfect.