Yes, you too can _learn_ how to program in parallel. You're right, in that we fundamentally do things in a linear fashion. But, we can learn to think differently, and learn different methods that will work in a parallel way.
Taking your mathematical example, here's a parallel example of a change in thinking. At one stage, the concept of 'zero' was unfathomable. As little as over 2000 years ago, there was no zero. You could say that their brains weren't wired to think in zeroes. That's certainly changed these days. Once the concept was discovered, and taught, it eventually became instinctive for everyone.
We obviously haven't reached that stage with parallel programming, but all it takes is familiarity with the concepts and methods, and a bit of practice. I rate it up there with object oriented programming. In fact, they're both very suited for each other.
Hey, I could be wrong. The other poster could be wrong. It's all been hypothesis so far.
One thing I'll say in defence of my argument, what do you think would have less drag? A car travelling in a tube with other cars, or a car travelling in the open with other cars. According to the other poster, it would be the car in the open, because the compressive shock waves would dissipate into the open. I say that the car in the tube would have less drag, because of the energy that it, and other cars in front of it, have put into the air surrounding the car.
The only way we're going to figure out who is wrong or right, is ole scientific method. Not the postulation of a couple of a couple of Slashdot posters.
I'm not a physicist, but won't the turbines cause a drag effect on the cars, resulting in the cars burning more fuel?
You've got it right. The turbines would take energy from the air being pushed around by the cars, leading to the breeze around the car slowing down, and therefore exerting more drag on the car.
At the same time, this is a rather ingenious way of creating a virtual toll for roads. If the power gathered is then invested into a public transport system, then you'll end up having drivers subsidise public transport. The fuel savings with public transport may well offset the extra fuel burnt through the turbine induced drag.
'I found the most convincing part to be the working stiffs,' said Valenti of the PSA, 'the guys who have a modest home and kids who go to public schools. They make $75,000 to $100,000 a year. That's not much to live on.
Truly we are bereft of a visionary. Rest In Peace, Jack, 'cause we sure don't want another stiff to join the workforce.
I have heard that these "plants" are self-replicating, using the environment to spread their spawn. So this technology has the capability of overrunning the surface of the planet! You would have us wake up, only to discover that we are surrounded by "plants"! It's like something out of a bad sci-fi movie.
When, oh when, will these scientists ever think about the consequences of their discoveries.
Thanks for those links. You're right, as far as PAM is concerned. It's disappointing that Debian took so long to solve the issue, especially for so critical a bug. It looks like the maintainer did fix the issue quickly, but then seemed to disappear off the face of the planet without uploading an updated package.
Just a few thoughts in favour of Debian though...
The problems only affected people with a very specific configuration. Thus it was perfectly stable for most people. That explains how it got past unstable into testing, I suppose.
If you were feeling up to it, you could have downloaded the maintainer's patches, and compiled a new pam_tally module yourself.
You probably could have chased up the pam issue, and some Debian developer could have created a non-maintainer update.
I've never used pam_tally before, but I can think of a few workarounds. Create a script and use the pam_script module. If you're trying to restrict network login attempts, the iptables hashlimit module is very handy.
Debian is hardly as hopeless as you made it out to be in your post. Debian Testing is definitely as stable as any other linux distribution out there. Which is another way of saying that it has a few faults, but so do all other distributions (or proprietary systems for that matter).
Hey, but if you're happy using what you're using, that's all that matters. I'm not trying to convince you to move back to Debian.:)
PAM in Testing was broken for months, and X in testing was broken for a while after the changeover to X.org.
Really? Geez, how did I miss that?! I run Debian Testing on my laptop, and update every few weeks. I changed over to X.org pretty soon after it got into testing. I've never had problems with either X.org or PAM. Actually, the only problem I've ever had was with an upgrade to evolution-exchange.
You wouldn't have links to the Debian Bug page for these issues, would you? You've got me curious now.
If Adults always compromise, then the leaders we have would be ineffectual. If Children never compromise, then they would run rampant over their compromising parents. Becoming truly mature is learning Wisdom; knowing when to compromise, and when to stand firm.
Nice phrase though. Easily quotable, even if it does lack relevance to reality.
A session of Go-Kart racing will also affect your driving. One time, driving back home after having a Go-Kart session with friends, I took a right hand turn, kart style. The rear end of my car lost traction, and I power slid for a second. I have a front wheel drive car. It was on tar. I took extra care with my driving, for the rest of the journey. It frightened the hell out of me at the time. I'm just glad that I instinctively controlled the slide, there were not many cars on the road at the time, and there were no police either.
The US Govt hasn't been shopping around. The discount stores here sell brand new digital tuners (a.k.a set top boxes) for $48 AUS. That works out to be almost $38 US, in a country where the typical price of electronics is 50% higher than the US! For example, the Playstation 3 here will be $999 AUS, while the US is $599. And you think the PS3 is expensive in the US!
The price for digital tuners in the US should be much less than $40. Plus, once the analog frequency range becomes available, the US Govt will be able to sell it for much more than the cost of all these digital boxes. The article author has nothing to worry about. This will hardly send the US Govt into bankruptcy.
That's very cool, and very nerdy, of Opera to add the "/." egg. I'm now tempted into downloading Opera and trying it out.
I've often thought that the Slashdot name was an unfortunately mistyped unix dot slash (./). Fortunately, I've recently discovered that it was originally named to confuse people who tried to verbalise the URL (i.e http colon slash slash slash dot dot org). Thus now I am reassured of the proper geek foundations for this site.
It's still a little unfortunate that Rob didn't choose "dotSlash" for this site's name. That would have appealed to the unix crowd, and would have been almost as confusing when reading out the URL (http colon slash slash dot slash dot org). Too late to change now, I suppose.
Try FreeBSD. It's like slackware with documentation that works:)
Ugh! The reason why FreeBSD has good documentation, is because it would be unusable without it. Even with the documentation though, it's still a pain in the arse. WTF is up with installing ports packages to/usr/local?! I use that directory tree for when I manually compile from source. I don't want it hijacked by the OS. I keep on having to flit between/etc and/usr/local/etc to do anything with the system. Startup service scripts... it'd be nice to have them all in the/etc/rc.d directory.
Without the documentation, I'd be struggling to make sense of the whole thing
There's a FreeBSD guy at my work, who managed to convince us to install it on a few webservers. I thought it'd be great, because I've heard good things about FreeBSD and was curious about it. What a mistake! The Apache package will crash if we send it a HUP signal, with some error about the php module causing a fault. I spent a day trying to get java installed on it. The ports system generated errors for some java versions, and for others (after having to download some Sun packages), it tried installing X11 along with java. In the end, I had to download a binary package created by a specific sub-group of FreeBSD, only downloadable by a webpage that I had to search high and low for.
Then there's the compiling. Want to install anything? Use ports, download the source, and wait for it to compile. Any dependent packages? Download and compile them as well. Compiling everything annoys the hell out of me. Yeah, I know I can use pkg_add -r to install binary packages remotely, but I'm a believer in sticking to one type of packaging system. It's either ports or binary packages. Start mixing them up, and I'm sure there'd be issues in the future after upgrades. Plus, it just adds to the system administration nightmare, as the binary packages and ports packages have to be updated separately.
One nice thing about FreeBSD is that the kernel is more interactive by default, compared to Linux, during heavy IO. It's much nicer to use a system that seems to barely notice if you're untarring a huge file. You have to tweak Linux a bit to get the same feel.
Why is Ubuntu in that list? I may be misinformed, but it was my understanding that Ubuntu was based off of Debian.
You're not misinformed, although the author may still have a point of including it on the list of base distributions. There's a slew of Linux distributions based on Ubuntu. Still, you're right. The grandpappy of them all is Debian.
Until we don't have to use Terminal Services to connect to a Windows machine and run software or use applications that are tied to the proprietary functionality of Windows, Linux will be a less acceptable or unacceptable alternative.
I'll respectfully have to disagree with that, although I do understand where you're coming from. For me, using a Windows terminal server gives me the best of both worlds. I run a Linux desktop, and I have access to any Windows program. I'm essentially running as a thin client for Windows apps, and a smart client for Linux apps, with samba filesharing being the go-between. It's great, and I'm very happy with the result.
Besides, most of the time when I use rdesktop, it's to manage windows servers. So it matters little whether I run Linux or Windows in that case. Actually, I do prefer rdesktop over the Windows terminal client. It's much more configurable, and consequently I've written a script that will dynamically size a new rdesktop window to fill in my current Linux desktop, minus a strip on the left hand side to view/access Linux desktop objects. I just can't do that with the Windows client.
I agree with the article author about the evolution exchange connector. It still isn't fully featured, and I occasionally had glitches indicating that it wasn't very stable. Plus, the exchange web connector has to be enabled for it to work properly, which is not always the case for many workplaces.
Has anyone tried out the OMC exchange connector, also called Brutus? The website for this is at http://www.omesc.com/ . It's supposed to talk to the Exchange server directly using MAPI. That has to be much faster and more reliable than the exchange connector. Can anyone attest to its reliability?
I've been running Linux on my work PC for just over a year. I'm using smbfs for mounting windows shares, OpenOffice for reading and writing Word and Excel documents, and rdesktop to connect to a terminal server where I run essential windows software.
The Windows Start menu just seems so archaic, compared to clicking on the desktop background and selecting commonly run applications. Then there's the virtual desktops, which I move between by using Mouse Flip with a border resistance of zero. It's great just to flick between screens with the flick of a mouse. Lastly, the command line is just way faster than any gui configuration, and much more convenient, assuming you're already familiar with what you're configuring (that's the catch of course).
I actually get irritated using a Windows machine now. I find it a hindrance while working, having to click on menus, run through multiple levels of dialogs, to achieve something that would take me a second on the command line. Not that everything is initially streamlined on the Linux side, but the point is, you can change things in Linux. I've created any number of aliases and shell/perl scripts to help me out with things I do commonly. You just can't do that in Windows for the most part.
The only real issue with ebay is you have to watch out for the jerks that jack up the shipping and handling and sell low.
This happens all the time with sellers from Hong Kong, on the Australian Ebay website. They sell the item at $1, but the shipping is definitely high. Still, I can buy items that I can't find in the stores here, and it's still a good price in total. I've bought a few things from them, and haven't been disappointed with the product or price.
Psychonauts for the PS2 was ported by some third party developers. They were probably the cheapest quote, and it shows. While the game itself is playable for the most part, it has many bugs and issues. For example, while saving a game, the audio gets stuck in a loop. It's very annoying, especially with the long delay when saving. The game also froze up on me a few times, which was even more annoying, although much less frequent. Also, as you mention, the load times were pretty horrible. Quality assurance was sadly lacking in this port.
From all accounts, the PC and Xbox versions don't suffer these issues (plus the Xbox appears to be widescreen compatible, unlike the PS2). So basically avoid the PS2 version, unless you have no choice. If you have no choice, the game is still enjoyable to play, you just have to put up with the irritations in between the good bits.
As an aside, I enjoyed the difficulty of the Meat Circus level. While it didn't have the awesome originality of previous levels, it was a great challenge. I did retry it quite a few times, but I felt like I was progressing further almost every time.
If it doesn't exist already, create a dword called FilterFilesWithUnknownExtensions and set value to 1.
Brilliant! That works, thanks. I tried figuring out how to solve this issue, but I couldn't find anything in Google at the time. I also asked the resident Windows expert to try getting it to work, and it totally befuddled him as well. Never thought of asking Slashdot....;)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you too can _learn_ how to program in parallel. You're right, in that we fundamentally do things in a linear fashion. But, we can learn to think differently, and learn different methods that will work in a parallel way.
Taking your mathematical example, here's a parallel example of a change in thinking. At one stage, the concept of 'zero' was unfathomable. As little as over 2000 years ago, there was no zero. You could say that their brains weren't wired to think in zeroes. That's certainly changed these days. Once the concept was discovered, and taught, it eventually became instinctive for everyone.
We obviously haven't reached that stage with parallel programming, but all it takes is familiarity with the concepts and methods, and a bit of practice. I rate it up there with object oriented programming. In fact, they're both very suited for each other.
Hey, I could be wrong. The other poster could be wrong. It's all been hypothesis so far.
One thing I'll say in defence of my argument, what do you think would have less drag? A car travelling in a tube with other cars, or a car travelling in the open with other cars. According to the other poster, it would be the car in the open, because the compressive shock waves would dissipate into the open. I say that the car in the tube would have less drag, because of the energy that it, and other cars in front of it, have put into the air surrounding the car.
The only way we're going to figure out who is wrong or right, is ole scientific method. Not the postulation of a couple of a couple of Slashdot posters.
You've got it right. The turbines would take energy from the air being pushed around by the cars, leading to the breeze around the car slowing down, and therefore exerting more drag on the car.
At the same time, this is a rather ingenious way of creating a virtual toll for roads. If the power gathered is then invested into a public transport system, then you'll end up having drivers subsidise public transport. The fuel savings with public transport may well offset the extra fuel burnt through the turbine induced drag.
'I found the most convincing part to be the working stiffs,' said Valenti of the PSA, 'the guys who have a modest home and kids who go to public schools. They make $75,000 to $100,000 a year. That's not much to live on.
Truly we are bereft of a visionary. Rest In Peace, Jack, 'cause we sure don't want another stiff to join the workforce.
I have heard that these "plants" are self-replicating, using the environment to spread their spawn. So this technology has the capability of overrunning the surface of the planet! You would have us wake up, only to discover that we are surrounded by "plants"! It's like something out of a bad sci-fi movie.
When, oh when, will these scientists ever think about the consequences of their discoveries.
Absolutely! Even more so, I would even consider getting a PS3 now, if they released special versions of Ico and Colossus for HD. Wow, Ico in HD
Surely the ultimate goal for these ultra-rapidly evolving machines is to be able to read and post on Slashdot. Maybe they're doing so already
You should know that 87% of all statistics are just plain made up.
At the time, England was the enemy of Sun Tsu.
It's a joke, people. Laugh!
Just a few thoughts in favour of Debian though
Debian is hardly as hopeless as you made it out to be in your post. Debian Testing is definitely as stable as any other linux distribution out there. Which is another way of saying that it has a few faults, but so do all other distributions (or proprietary systems for that matter).
Hey, but if you're happy using what you're using, that's all that matters. I'm not trying to convince you to move back to Debian.
Really? Geez, how did I miss that?! I run Debian Testing on my laptop, and update every few weeks. I changed over to X.org pretty soon after it got into testing. I've never had problems with either X.org or PAM. Actually, the only problem I've ever had was with an upgrade to evolution-exchange.
You wouldn't have links to the Debian Bug page for these issues, would you? You've got me curious now.
Alas, life is not as simple as that.
If Adults always compromise, then the leaders we have would be ineffectual.
If Children never compromise, then they would run rampant over their compromising parents.
Becoming truly mature is learning Wisdom; knowing when to compromise, and when to stand firm.
Nice phrase though. Easily quotable, even if it does lack relevance to reality.
A session of Go-Kart racing will also affect your driving. One time, driving back home after having a Go-Kart session with friends, I took a right hand turn, kart style. The rear end of my car lost traction, and I power slid for a second. I have a front wheel drive car. It was on tar. I took extra care with my driving, for the rest of the journey. It frightened the hell out of me at the time. I'm just glad that I instinctively controlled the slide, there were not many cars on the road at the time, and there were no police either.
The US Govt hasn't been shopping around. The discount stores here sell brand new digital tuners (a.k.a set top boxes) for $48 AUS. That works out to be almost $38 US, in a country where the typical price of electronics is 50% higher than the US! For example, the Playstation 3 here will be $999 AUS, while the US is $599. And you think the PS3 is expensive in the US!
The price for digital tuners in the US should be much less than $40. Plus, once the analog frequency range becomes available, the US Govt will be able to sell it for much more than the cost of all these digital boxes. The article author has nothing to worry about. This will hardly send the US Govt into bankruptcy.
That's very cool, and very nerdy, of Opera to add the "/." egg. I'm now tempted into downloading Opera and trying it out.
I've often thought that the Slashdot name was an unfortunately mistyped unix dot slash (./). Fortunately, I've recently discovered that it was originally named to confuse people who tried to verbalise the URL (i.e http colon slash slash slash dot dot org). Thus now I am reassured of the proper geek foundations for this site.
It's still a little unfortunate that Rob didn't choose "dotSlash" for this site's name. That would have appealed to the unix crowd, and would have been almost as confusing when reading out the URL (http colon slash slash dot slash dot org). Too late to change now, I suppose.
Ugh! The reason why FreeBSD has good documentation, is because it would be unusable without it. Even with the documentation though, it's still a pain in the arse. WTF is up with installing ports packages to
Without the documentation, I'd be struggling to make sense of the whole thing
There's a FreeBSD guy at my work, who managed to convince us to install it on a few webservers. I thought it'd be great, because I've heard good things about FreeBSD and was curious about it. What a mistake! The Apache package will crash if we send it a HUP signal, with some error about the php module causing a fault. I spent a day trying to get java installed on it. The ports system generated errors for some java versions, and for others (after having to download some Sun packages), it tried installing X11 along with java. In the end, I had to download a binary package created by a specific sub-group of FreeBSD, only downloadable by a webpage that I had to search high and low for.
Then there's the compiling. Want to install anything? Use ports, download the source, and wait for it to compile. Any dependent packages? Download and compile them as well. Compiling everything annoys the hell out of me. Yeah, I know I can use pkg_add -r to install binary packages remotely, but I'm a believer in sticking to one type of packaging system. It's either ports or binary packages. Start mixing them up, and I'm sure there'd be issues in the future after upgrades. Plus, it just adds to the system administration nightmare, as the binary packages and ports packages have to be updated separately.
One nice thing about FreeBSD is that the kernel is more interactive by default, compared to Linux, during heavy IO. It's much nicer to use a system that seems to barely notice if you're untarring a huge file. You have to tweak Linux a bit to get the same feel.
You're not misinformed, although the author may still have a point of including it on the list of base distributions. There's a slew of Linux distributions based on Ubuntu. Still, you're right. The grandpappy of them all is Debian.
Here's a fairly comprehensive list of these distributions.
Europe has got it right. Sites like these should be eradicated from the face of the internet. Please, think of the children!
Besides, most of the time when I use rdesktop, it's to manage windows servers. So it matters little whether I run Linux or Windows in that case. Actually, I do prefer rdesktop over the Windows terminal client. It's much more configurable, and consequently I've written a script that will dynamically size a new rdesktop window to fill in my current Linux desktop, minus a strip on the left hand side to view/access Linux desktop objects. I just can't do that with the Windows client.
I agree with the article author about the evolution exchange connector. It still isn't fully featured, and I occasionally had glitches indicating that it wasn't very stable. Plus, the exchange web connector has to be enabled for it to work properly, which is not always the case for many workplaces.
Has anyone tried out the OMC exchange connector, also called Brutus? The website for this is at http://www.omesc.com/ . It's supposed to talk to the Exchange server directly using MAPI. That has to be much faster and more reliable than the exchange connector. Can anyone attest to its reliability?
I've been running Linux on my work PC for just over a year. I'm using smbfs for mounting windows shares, OpenOffice for reading and writing Word and Excel documents, and rdesktop to connect to a terminal server where I run essential windows software.
The Windows Start menu just seems so archaic, compared to clicking on the desktop background and selecting commonly run applications. Then there's the virtual desktops, which I move between by using Mouse Flip with a border resistance of zero. It's great just to flick between screens with the flick of a mouse. Lastly, the command line is just way faster than any gui configuration, and much more convenient, assuming you're already familiar with what you're configuring (that's the catch of course).
I actually get irritated using a Windows machine now. I find it a hindrance while working, having to click on menus, run through multiple levels of dialogs, to achieve something that would take me a second on the command line. Not that everything is initially streamlined on the Linux side, but the point is, you can change things in Linux. I've created any number of aliases and shell/perl scripts to help me out with things I do commonly. You just can't do that in Windows for the most part.
Never assume malice, when incompetence will suffice.
Psychonauts for the PS2 was ported by some third party developers. They were probably the cheapest quote, and it shows. While the game itself is playable for the most part, it has many bugs and issues. For example, while saving a game, the audio gets stuck in a loop. It's very annoying, especially with the long delay when saving. The game also froze up on me a few times, which was even more annoying, although much less frequent. Also, as you mention, the load times were pretty horrible. Quality assurance was sadly lacking in this port.
From all accounts, the PC and Xbox versions don't suffer these issues (plus the Xbox appears to be widescreen compatible, unlike the PS2). So basically avoid the PS2 version, unless you have no choice. If you have no choice, the game is still enjoyable to play, you just have to put up with the irritations in between the good bits.
As an aside, I enjoyed the difficulty of the Meat Circus level. While it didn't have the awesome originality of previous levels, it was a great challenge. I did retry it quite a few times, but I felt like I was progressing further almost every time.
Brilliant! That works, thanks. I tried figuring out how to solve this issue, but I couldn't find anything in Google at the time. I also asked the resident Windows expert to try getting it to work, and it totally befuddled him as well. Never thought of asking Slashdot