I'm getting so fucking sick and tired of Anonymous Cowards. Every time one of them responds to me they're dead wrong and unaccountable for it.
AC, whoever you are, I'll linux you under the table any day. I was rolling my own boxes without using a distro in 1994. I'm probably FAR more savvy than the average Gentoo-bashed like yourself. Gentoo gives me an excellent level of control for day-to-day use.
If you need to build a 5 meg webserver, or a tiny busybox-based install, or whatever - go do what you need to do, manually, or using LFS, or whatever. But for my main desktop/development machine, Gentoo is my distribution of choice, it kicks all the other's ass handily.
Yes, I take my box by its horns and teach it who's boss on a regular basis, with a soldering iron if need be. Why don't you post with some indentifying moniker and I'll come take your box by the horns too, you peice of shit AC whiner.
My current gentoo box is running gcc 3.2.1 and glibc-2.3.1. Everything on my box was compiled with either gcc-3.2 or 3.2.1, including that glibc. I'm not sure exactly when glibc-2.3.1 went into Gentoo, but the current ebuild (-r2, probably the third version) is dated Nov 18th.
Gentoo has a package for icc, as well as gcc. BTW they had a working autobuild for gcc 3.2.1 two days before the slashdot announcement of the release:)
The only thing cliche around here is your notion that being a geek precludes having a chick. If you'd actually respond from a named account with an email address I could send you something to prove my point, but as stated earlier, I'm not posting anything relevant here.
You're lost in a blizzard of buzzwords with no meaning, and acronyms for acronyms of buzzwords with no meaning. You need a vacation in a log cabin in the woods of Ohio with some deep technical books that they don't sell at Barns and Noble for a few weeks to get your feet grounded again. Your question is irrelevant. The real question you should be asking is, "Why would I ponder such a question?"
I'm not going to justify this with anything else but "you started it" You started in with the off-comment topic that I need to get out and meet a girl just because I had an insightful opinion about open source. It's only logical for me to back myself here. Unfortunately since you're an AC there's not much I can do to prove jack to you without compromising my privacy, but your claims are indeed false. My girlfreind is indeed a 21 year old drop-dead gorgeous model. I'm sorry this upsets you, get out and find your own.
As unbelieving as you may be, it's true. I'd point you to her portfolio at her photographer's website, but she doesn't need slashdot trash stalking her.
I have a girl, she's been living with me for a couple of years. She's a model. And I still get to be a geek and she loves it. Up yours, get yourself one:)
Yeah but the author claims he was happy with discrete speech processing on a 386-16 that we had back in the day. He doesn't want continuous speech that doesn't have to be trained and all that jazz - just simple old school voice recognition. Is it so much to ask that someone port the old algorithms to the palm?
Actually, some of the reasoning behind the Omaha location is along those lines in a way. Omaha is a great location for a stable datacenter. Low population density, cheap land, no political uprisings to speak of, no nearby coasts, no major wartime targets, etc, etc.... All in all it's a great place to build a mammoth highly-redundant datacenter, it just sucks trying to find good people willing to work out there (or even travel out there from time to time like I had to).
Our Omaha datacenter was very top notch by the way Designed to withstand tornado hits, heavy flooding, other random disasters. Security system (including external motion sensors and cameras) monitored locally and remotely in Dallas in realtime - one floor on ground level full of computer equipment on a 4 foot raised floor, and three underground floors housing the cooling, the generators, and the battery systems. Onsite deisel tanks to last days, 7 generators (5 needed, 2 for redundancy I believe), the bottom floor (batteries) designed with a 2 inch dip in the floor and a special rubber coating so that if all the battery acid leaked out it would be contained, etc... etc... Crazy over-engineering. The 4 foot raised floor is a geek's dream to work in. You can just hop down in there and work comformtably.
Yes, he wrote a huge paper on related issues, all of which is quite accurate and good information. Link below brought to you by Karma Whores International:
Of course, when you think about it, there's really not much reason to go about it that way. If what you intend to do is take over a seemingly-abandoned project, it's more politically correct to start a new project "based on", and essentially you've got a new fork and the old code-base stays stale. On your project page put some big shiny info and links to the old project and state that it seems to be derelict and you're trying to replace it and keep yours up to date or whatever.
Eventually Google pageranking will start bringing you up on searches for their project anways as you supplant them in relevance - and most importantly if/when they come back to life they won't feel violated like they would if you had taken over the main branch of the product, original name and all, and named yourself head honcho.
While 6.5 miles may meet some statistical standard for insurers, it's not really sufficient in the individual company's case when planning to survive large natural disasters or civil disorder (or whatever else you haven't though of).
As an example from a large telco I worked for - data from Omaha, NE was offsited to Washington and vice-versa. Cross-country like that is your best bet.
First off, don't bother backing up your whole PC. Just backup the data you really need to keep (individual documents, financial info, source code, etc). This generally amounts to a small amount of data for most people. Compress it, and then encrypt it with a passphrase you can remember. Try not to forget the key.
Cheap public storage for bytes of computer data abounds. Once your small data is encrypted, you can essentially store it "publicly", all over the place. Open a junk hotmail account, set the password to something trivial you'll remember, and email as an attachment to that hotmail account. Do the same with a couple other free webmail systems. Mail a copy to a couple freinds, say "please save this file somewhere on your harddrive, in case I need it later" and leave it at that. Drop it in some public ftp upload area somewhere. Etc... etc...
Once you find a list of placse to drop your data off at, make the delivery part of your backup script, just automate sending the emails, etc...
Looking at their site, it seems that while the frame and rotors are pretty simplistic, there's a lot of novel and expensive design/engineering work in the enginer/transmission part that's in that little backpack on the back of the thing. They have a cutaway view of the transmission with a breif description. Once the R&D costs are gone and they begin mass manufacturing I bet they could get the price down to $10k or so.
It's not anything remotely like a human brain. They're making some rough analogy between storage size, processing speed, and the number and nature of neurons in the human skull. This is just a really really really fast/big version of existing machines.
Again, for those who haven't read Douglas Hofstadter's excellent books GEB and MMT - being human-like is a *really* tough thing for a computer, and we haven't even begun to figure out the basics of it on paper. Maybe in 100 years we'll understand the problem better, but I'll place my bets now that when we do we'll finally realize it's futile to try to mimic it.
1) Write a simple X replacement. It doesn't have to have all the fancy trimmings like direct rendering or opengl extensions and stuff immediately, those can come in time. A nice modern graphics hardware abstraction/acceleration layer that's networkable. Another big win would be if you could make it backwards-compatible with Xfree86 4.x's hardware driver module interface, so that you could steal their hardware support temporarily until the new things get enough popularity for people to tailor drivers to it for you.
2) Port gdk/gtk and qt to your replacement. Immediately a whole lot of linux desktop software now works fine.
3) Write an X compat library, possible stealing large amounts of X code in the process. This allows legacy X apps (those not written directly to gtk or qt) to be displayed.
Steps 1 and 3 are of course huge, but I think there's a number of projects in there that have done some work towards this type of goal, it just hasn't all come together yet.
1) They make signicant alterations to the veneer of things perhaps, but they rarely innovate, that's his point. Even when they seem to have innovated, if you dig deep enough you usually found it came from someone else legally or illegally.
2) Windows is not quality. Nobody believes windows is a quality peice of software. The reason people continue to use Windows is software compatibility and lock-in. Software compatibility is an issue because that's how they want it to be, they've built a monoplistic empire on making sure competitors can't compete on level footing because of compatibility problems. Any computer person with half a neuron knows that a linux kernel is vastly more "quality" than windows.
3) I won't flame too hard, but Linux is not just another offspring of 60's unix code. You could make a clearer case for that argument with the *BSD family, since they are actually derived from ancient BSD code. The linux kernel was a fresh start.
4) Linux didn't start in 1995. I personally installed my first slackware linux in 1994, and at that time I remember playing with the 1.1.xx unstable kernel series that led up to linux-1.2. I'm pretty sure the first 0.x kernels were around 1991 or 1992.
I can see the cache thing making a performance boost versus SMP. I don't get the register-file sharing. How can two threads, even if they are in the same process, share register files? Each thread has it's own set of registers, and they can't see each others', as far as I'm aware. But SMP still wins in many cases because you can actually run two cpu-bound processes/threads full-on with 2 cpus - with hyperthreading instead of getting 2x you're getting 1.5x, or 1.1x, or 1.7x maybe depending on the nature of the two processes/threads. One is using the pipeline slack the other one leaves. If the tight loops in these threads/processes are hand-optimized asm that tries to make full use of the pipelines with careful instruction ordering, it would leave virtually zero free for another thread to use. For that matter, if the two threads are doing virtually the same thing, they're likely to get into lock-step with each other since they use the pipelines in a similar fashion.
Yes I use software available in source code form, what does that have to do with my statement that one should code parallelizable apps in multi-threaded style as appropriate regardless of hardware and it will always be of benefit.
I'm employed gainfully again now - but during the 9 months or so I was out of a job, if my former employer had asked me to come back to fix any sort of emergency, or even in general, I would have demanded double-pay for all the intervening time upfront, and then we could negotiate future price.
Good companies keep good employees. When a company hits a rough spot and it's good technical people are the first thing out the wdinow while the top executives still make enough anual salary to cover the wage-savings from all the layoffs combined, that means they just treated you like a dog. To go back without demanding respect and retribution is an insult to your humanity.
Slashdot Mirror
Does that include yours?
Don't go too far now. Quantum chips and True AI have very little to do with Intel's clockspeed mongerers. I'll buy the porno argument though.
Flamebait? Moron mods at it again.
I'm getting so fucking sick and tired of Anonymous Cowards. Every time one of them responds to me they're dead wrong and unaccountable for it.
AC, whoever you are, I'll linux you under the table any day. I was rolling my own boxes without using a distro in 1994. I'm probably FAR more savvy than the average Gentoo-bashed like yourself. Gentoo gives me an excellent level of control for day-to-day use.
If you need to build a 5 meg webserver, or a tiny busybox-based install, or whatever - go do what you need to do, manually, or using LFS, or whatever. But for my main desktop/development machine, Gentoo is my distribution of choice, it kicks all the other's ass handily.
Yes, I take my box by its horns and teach it who's boss on a regular basis, with a soldering iron if need be. Why don't you post with some indentifying moniker and I'll come take your box by the horns too, you peice of shit AC whiner.
You've got it wrong, sorry
My current gentoo box is running gcc 3.2.1 and glibc-2.3.1. Everything on my box was compiled with either gcc-3.2 or 3.2.1, including that glibc. I'm not sure exactly when glibc-2.3.1 went into Gentoo, but the current ebuild (-r2, probably the third version) is dated Nov 18th.
Gentoo has a package for icc, as well as gcc. BTW they had a working autobuild for gcc 3.2.1 two days before the slashdot announcement of the release
The only thing cliche around here is your notion that being a geek precludes having a chick. If you'd actually respond from a named account with an email address I could send you something to prove my point, but as stated earlier, I'm not posting anything relevant here.
I installed this on my Gentoo box two days ago, by typing "emerge -u gcc". Everyone else is hopelessly behind the curve
You're lost in a blizzard of buzzwords with no meaning, and acronyms for acronyms of buzzwords with no meaning. You need a vacation in a log cabin in the woods of Ohio with some deep technical books that they don't sell at Barns and Noble for a few weeks to get your feet grounded again. Your question is irrelevant. The real question you should be asking is, "Why would I ponder such a question?"
I'm not going to justify this with anything else but "you started it" You started in with the off-comment topic that I need to get out and meet a girl just because I had an insightful opinion about open source. It's only logical for me to back myself here. Unfortunately since you're an AC there's not much I can do to prove jack to you without compromising my privacy, but your claims are indeed false. My girlfreind is indeed a 21 year old drop-dead gorgeous model. I'm sorry this upsets you, get out and find your own.
As unbelieving as you may be, it's true. I'd point you to her portfolio at her photographer's website, but she doesn't need slashdot trash stalking her.
I have a girl, she's been living with me for a couple of years. She's a model. And I still get to be a geek and she loves it. Up yours, get yourself one
Yeah but the author claims he was happy with discrete speech processing on a 386-16 that we had back in the day. He doesn't want continuous speech that doesn't have to be trained and all that jazz - just simple old school voice recognition. Is it so much to ask that someone port the old algorithms to the palm?
Actually, some of the reasoning behind the Omaha location is along those lines in a way. Omaha is a great location for a stable datacenter. Low population density, cheap land, no political uprisings to speak of, no nearby coasts, no major wartime targets, etc, etc.... All in all it's a great place to build a mammoth highly-redundant datacenter, it just sucks trying to find good people willing to work out there (or even travel out there from time to time like I had to).
Our Omaha datacenter was very top notch by the way Designed to withstand tornado hits, heavy flooding, other random disasters. Security system (including external motion sensors and cameras) monitored locally and remotely in Dallas in realtime - one floor on ground level full of computer equipment on a 4 foot raised floor, and three underground floors housing the cooling, the generators, and the battery systems. Onsite deisel tanks to last days, 7 generators (5 needed, 2 for redundancy I believe), the bottom floor (batteries) designed with a 2 inch dip in the floor and a special rubber coating so that if all the battery acid leaked out it would be contained, etc... etc... Crazy over-engineering. The 4 foot raised floor is a geek's dream to work in. You can just hop down in there and work comformtably.
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/h omesteading
Of course, when you think about it, there's really not much reason to go about it that way. If what you intend to do is take over a seemingly-abandoned project, it's more politically correct to start a new project "based on", and essentially you've got a new fork and the old code-base stays stale. On your project page put some big shiny info and links to the old project and state that it seems to be derelict and you're trying to replace it and keep yours up to date or whatever.
Eventually Google pageranking will start bringing you up on searches for their project anways as you supplant them in relevance - and most importantly if/when they come back to life they won't feel violated like they would if you had taken over the main branch of the product, original name and all, and named yourself head honcho.
While 6.5 miles may meet some statistical standard for insurers, it's not really sufficient in the individual company's case when planning to survive large natural disasters or civil disorder (or whatever else you haven't though of).
As an example from a large telco I worked for - data from Omaha, NE was offsited to Washington and vice-versa. Cross-country like that is your best bet.
First off, don't bother backing up your whole PC. Just backup the data you really need to keep (individual documents, financial info, source code, etc). This generally amounts to a small amount of data for most people. Compress it, and then encrypt it with a passphrase you can remember. Try not to forget the key.
Cheap public storage for bytes of computer data abounds. Once your small data is encrypted, you can essentially store it "publicly", all over the place. Open a junk hotmail account, set the password to something trivial you'll remember, and email as an attachment to that hotmail account. Do the same with a couple other free webmail systems. Mail a copy to a couple freinds, say "please save this file somewhere on your harddrive, in case I need it later" and leave it at that. Drop it in some public ftp upload area somewhere. Etc... etc...
Once you find a list of placse to drop your data off at, make the delivery part of your backup script, just automate sending the emails, etc...
Looking at their site, it seems that while the frame and rotors are pretty simplistic, there's a lot of novel and expensive design/engineering work in the enginer/transmission part that's in that little backpack on the back of the thing. They have a cutaway view of the transmission with a breif description. Once the R&D costs are gone and they begin mass manufacturing I bet they could get the price down to $10k or so.
It's not anything remotely like a human brain. They're making some rough analogy between storage size, processing speed, and the number and nature of neurons in the human skull. This is just a really really really fast/big version of existing machines.
Again, for those who haven't read Douglas Hofstadter's excellent books GEB and MMT - being human-like is a *really* tough thing for a computer, and we haven't even begun to figure out the basics of it on paper. Maybe in 100 years we'll understand the problem better, but I'll place my bets now that when we do we'll finally realize it's futile to try to mimic it.
Moron. This guy's got skills, and you don't even see it. These tools are very impressive. Paketto Kieretsu is to nmap what a Ferrari is to a Pinto.
A good step in the right direction would be:
1) Write a simple X replacement. It doesn't have to have all the fancy trimmings like direct rendering or opengl extensions and stuff immediately, those can come in time. A nice modern graphics hardware abstraction/acceleration layer that's networkable. Another big win would be if you could make it backwards-compatible with Xfree86 4.x's hardware driver module interface, so that you could steal their hardware support temporarily until the new things get enough popularity for people to tailor drivers to it for you.
2) Port gdk/gtk and qt to your replacement. Immediately a whole lot of linux desktop software now works fine.
3) Write an X compat library, possible stealing large amounts of X code in the process. This allows legacy X apps (those not written directly to gtk or qt) to be displayed.
Steps 1 and 3 are of course huge, but I think there's a number of projects in there that have done some work towards this type of goal, it just hasn't all come together yet.
1) They make signicant alterations to the veneer of things perhaps, but they rarely innovate, that's his point. Even when they seem to have innovated, if you dig deep enough you usually found it came from someone else legally or illegally.
2) Windows is not quality. Nobody believes windows is a quality peice of software. The reason people continue to use Windows is software compatibility and lock-in. Software compatibility is an issue because that's how they want it to be, they've built a monoplistic empire on making sure competitors can't compete on level footing because of compatibility problems. Any computer person with half a neuron knows that a linux kernel is vastly more "quality" than windows.
3) I won't flame too hard, but Linux is not just another offspring of 60's unix code. You could make a clearer case for that argument with the *BSD family, since they are actually derived from ancient BSD code. The linux kernel was a fresh start.
4) Linux didn't start in 1995. I personally installed my first slackware linux in 1994, and at that time I remember playing with the 1.1.xx unstable kernel series that led up to linux-1.2. I'm pretty sure the first 0.x kernels were around 1991 or 1992.
I can see the cache thing making a performance boost versus SMP. I don't get the register-file sharing. How can two threads, even if they are in the same process, share register files? Each thread has it's own set of registers, and they can't see each others', as far as I'm aware. But SMP still wins in many cases because you can actually run two cpu-bound processes/threads full-on with 2 cpus - with hyperthreading instead of getting 2x you're getting 1.5x, or 1.1x, or 1.7x maybe depending on the nature of the two processes/threads. One is using the pipeline slack the other one leaves. If the tight loops in these threads/processes are hand-optimized asm that tries to make full use of the pipelines with careful instruction ordering, it would leave virtually zero free for another thread to use. For that matter, if the two threads are doing virtually the same thing, they're likely to get into lock-step with each other since they use the pipelines in a similar fashion.
Yes I use software available in source code form, what does that have to do with my statement that one should code parallelizable apps in multi-threaded style as appropriate regardless of hardware and it will always be of benefit.
I'm employed gainfully again now - but during the 9 months or so I was out of a job, if my former employer had asked me to come back to fix any sort of emergency, or even in general, I would have demanded double-pay for all the intervening time upfront, and then we could negotiate future price.
Good companies keep good employees. When a company hits a rough spot and it's good technical people are the first thing out the wdinow while the top executives still make enough anual salary to cover the wage-savings from all the layoffs combined, that means they just treated you like a dog. To go back without demanding respect and retribution is an insult to your humanity.