With my bride and I both using cell phones as our primary line, I've put off canceling them on my POTS line for long distance service. Well no more - the $8USD/month (was $3, but it looks like it jumped up with extra fees) just to have the service is not a lot of cash, but at least I'll get a chance to give AT&T a big old FU and the horse you road in on. The rep had the brass to say this was something to strengthen my 'privacy', then started on a song and dance about September 11th.
For those in the US, 1-800-222-0300 option 6 gets you where you need to go. Expect a 30 minute (or more) wait time.
I was going to tag this as insightful, but figured I would add to it rather than mod.
On the ports, the biggest problem was applications (not necessarily the corba orb - don't remember from my one project with it) wanted a range of ports rather than a specific port. Had we been able to say port 4567 or something like that, our security folks would have been more than happy to open up the firewall a bit. Many of the product we were wanting to use would try to use ports 3000-4000 or something silly like that.
Congress = governement = no loss of Blackberries. They're exempt from anything inconvenient, didn't you know.
The actual folks who are employed by the government are quite few in number. There are armies of contractors doing most of the real work and very much part of the fabric of Congress and the rest. They were not exempt, and a blackberry loses much of its value when the people you are trying to ping can't respond back. It would have been chaos for them, even though the Senators, etc, would still have a functional device.
If you are looking for an electronic 'legit' version of the earlier stuff, see if you can find a 'core rules' CD ROM. They had a bunch of character editors, etc - but the real gold was the books were in RTF format! Easy enough to turn into PDF, but even better, you could mark them up with your notes, carve out sections you needed as player or DM.
Risk vs. Rewards. Most of the folks who end up with a Ferrari started off putting their house up at collateral to make the startup work. Better cash than a lot of worthless stock like many of us got in a startup...
Most of the nicer chassis don't have razor sharp edges on the inside. Spend $35 on a case and PS, and you may need a Band-Aid or two - but most folks who are building even mid range gaming rigs will spend money on a case.
I've already seen the AM2 x2 5000+ in a personal rig (not mine) last week, so I got to believe Intel could get their hands on one of the DDR2 using CPU's. I'm just wanting to find out if fast DDR2 makes a big impact. Not seeing a huge boost with the slower DDR2 over the AMD chips using DDR1.
As long as they are comparing CPU's that are a going to be launching, I was wondering why they did not use an AMD AM2 CPU that uses the same DDR2 RAM. "Typical" DDR2 is not very fast, thus the current real world comparisons of the 939/AM2 CPU's don't give a huge boost to the latest CPU. If DDR2-800 was common, the change over makes a bit more sense - possibly just what AMD was thinking as well.
And yes - you can dog a machine by tweaking the BIOS. Our kit was in a final bakeoff with a competitor - the customer was re-imaging the OS between installs, but we were last to use the server. The customer tried to drop a test file on the machine using a floppy disk and found the floppy missing. Went into the BIOS and we noticed 'someone' had set every possible BIOS setting to a worst-case condition. Turns a fairly fast machine into something not so quick. Won the gig, but I have to wonder how often this happens.
If you want a mainframe, snag http://www.hercules-390.org/ - the zSeries emulator. On current hardware it will run circles around those $500 zSeries boxes.
I did ~.5M miles/year the last few years in a row with wife and child, so I have a few thoughts on this. Just finished printing my boarding pass to Zurich tomorrow - missing out on a traditional three-day weekend here in the States - so yes, there is a dark side.
Traveling can be really hard on the marriage. Don't underestimate this. Be sure that is in solid ground first and foremost... We were married for about seven years before I became a road warrior, which helped some. It still was not easy. Due to my heavy travel, she ended up switching to a stay home Mom. (So much for having our cake and eating it too on the financial side. A few things help.)
When I'm not on the road, I work from home.
Massive investment on communication equipment. Unlimited cell plans, skype, sms, blackberries - all used every day.
She (and the child) gets my miles. Even flying from Minneapolis to New Delhi, I save my points to fly my Bride and little one whenever I can. Harder since my child is now in school, but much better spent to fly them then upgrade me.
Figure out the angles on points for hotel, airline, etc. My Bride gets to stay at a Marriot rather than her Mother-in-law on the holidays.
Fill up the gas tank every 3-4 weeks, as the airlines do most of the work
Oh ya, the money... Can't buy happiness, but beats being broke. (grin)
Being willing to be a road warrior was a fast track in on the corporate side. It was fun to 'travel the world' the first six months, but the thrill wears off quickly. One hotel/restaurant/card table at a customer is the same as another. I kept my job, while others did not, so that is worth a fair bit of stability on the home front. Risk vs. rewards, I also made more than those who followed a track that got them home each night.
Another thing to think about is staying in shape. Very easy to move into the plus sizes when you dine in a restaurant every night. The clean plate club is not a good idea. Much more work than I ever thought it would be.
I try to strike a balance these days. A few weeks of heavy travel, followed by a couple of weeks close to home.
I'd add a nice click through EULA to my page, were I a kid in that city. Let 'them' break the terms and try and hold it against me. The school is not going after things that you should send the cops after - not near as black and white - so no protection like if someone was bragging about rape or stealing a car. Then call the cops when they 'hack' your site or some other cyber-crime that seems to be the flavor of the month.
"The board of Community High School District 128 voted unanimously on Monday to require that all students participating in extracurricular activities sign a pledge agreeing that evidence of "illegal or inappropriate" behavior posted on the Internet could be grounds for disciplinary action."
Since when could a minor sign a binding contract?
Re:"Sorry, our program isn't designed for MinGW."
on
The CVS Cop-Out
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Unless it requires a compiler that costs $1,000 for one seat (unless you're affiliated with an accredited university) and takes over 1,000 MB of your hard drive.
So worst case the article writer is running an open source (not necessarily free as in beer) application that requires Microsoft Studio to compile. It is also an application that leverages something the free version of Visual Studio can't compile. They have to wait till someone gets around to creating and releasing a build that has something that 'may' have been fixed four months earlier!
The fact that if they had the right local environment is nothing more than a bonus. Just because it is an open source project does not entitle someone to nightly build binaries for their platform. I've not seen many OSS projects that require a specific commercial compiler, but if it did and the user could not do it themselves - or find *anyone else who could do it for them (for free or pay) - then how are they worse of from those who are waiting for 'official' releases of closed source programs?
If you need this service, I do have the full MSDN kit installed and can provide binaries of OSS projects that the free version of studio can't handle for a small monthly fee. No need to install anything on your HDD. (grin)
The author wants binaries...
on
The CVS Cop-Out
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· Score: 1
My take on the article was the author is looking for binaries rather than a source code pull, as that is what the typical 'user' wants. For the most part, he would be right. What was missed is if you take the time to figure out how to download a nightly, you can probably figure out how to compile it as well. Most of the projects I work on do a nightly build from the code repository. In some cases, like FireFox in the early days, I would set up my local environment to snag and built a clean cut each morning.
Now, even though internally we have nightly binaries, we don't release them to our QA group. We will tag milestones which get released to QA that have a series of enhancement/bug fixes in there. If someone needs something that was fixed, but did not get put into a formal build that we sent out to the unwashed masses, it is their option to download and build something a little closer to the bleeding edge (if the project has a public source repository) or wait for the milestone that contains the feature/fix they were after. He is lucky to even get this 'roll your own' option. If he can't, he waits like everyone else. Actually, he could even pay someone (like me) to to the builds for him or spend his time learning how to sort code to binary... if it was that important. Big customers can get special builds even in our closed source stuff.
Don't see the problem, other than having yet another option open to him.
I've seen the tadpole sparc based laptops before. (trade show 'server') It was a couple years back, but it could hold 6G of ram. Poked over to their website and it looks like they have a monster that can go up to 16G of RAM.
I'm flying VFR when I go up in my playboy. No flight plans required what so ever. Granted there is airspace I cannot fly in and altitudes I can't exceed, but she is build for (basic) acrobatics rather than actually going someplace. For private aircraft - especially the experimental stuff - tracking requirements are not required as 'basic' equipment. Since my plane is built to pull a few more G's than a typical Cessna, I'd call it 'safer' than an electrical laden counterpart under 10k'.
I'd look at it much like a neverlost in a car. Nice to have, not a must have, and definitely not a federal mandate that every vehicle broadcast real time locations. Maybe a better example is an ipass transponder. If you are driving on the toll way, you need one. On the normal streets it is not required. So yeah, uncontrolled airspace the rules are a bit different. I spent about $6.5k to buy and restore my plane. A transponder last time I looked that had a battery pack (ala for folks doing ballooning) was about $1.5k and nothing I care about due to not flying on the flight 'traffic' routes. Never mind the weight, mounting, and storage. I did spend money (due to aerobatic requirements) on a parachute. Dang if that did not make people nervous on NWA when I packed it as carry-on luggage going home.
I'd also argue an SUV has much more potential payload than my aircraft which can only carry a couple hundred pounds (mostly pilot, tragically). You could possibly fly very large aircraft under VFR (and without transponder), but most folks don't. Much like trying to buy a one ton pickup without cruise control.
Take a look at the Thinkpad t60p series. Dual core, 4G of RAM, SATA drives... The bloody machine was a substantial jump forward from just about any workstation (or gaming rig) I've ever had. Doing development on my main box while running the application server stack on a VMWare image. Make sure you run Linux or Win64, or you might as well config it with 3G of RAM however.
There is NO excuse, in this day and age of multiple civilian navigation and communication technologies, for having an aircraft off course and not responding to communications. Add to that a flight path into restricted airspace after intercept- and I want those soldiers shooting first, not asking questions of the chain of command.
True for commercial craft, but there is a lot of variety on the non-commercial stuff. I've got an old Stitts - basically a J3 Cub with low wings - that does not have any electrical system. It prop starts, has a float and a stick for a gas gauge, and some basic instrumentation. It does it not have a transponder, radio, or GPS - just basic compass and elevation. And yes - it is possible to get lost if you are not careful. Not that something like that is a threat...but it is an excuse. (grin)
Most small companies cannot do the creative accounting the larger companies can do. Many of the large companies seem to not 'make' any taxable revenue... go figure. The little ones can't do it as easily as the multi nationals. Also, it does not take that many employees to do the health insurance thing. I know of several local 20 person engineering shops that have the same BCBS coverage I have in the 500 person, 120M/year shop I work at. (now large enough to call medium I guess, but started small). It adds up...
The problem with these potential yak-fests by seatmates and by nearby or loud passengers is being unable to escape from them.
I'd wager those same annoying passengers will talk loudly regardless of if they are on the phone or not. I just flew CDG > DWT > SFO, and each leg the person sitting next to me thought they should have a conversation with me anytime I opened a laptop - even if I had headphones on. Them talking to someone else on the phone would be a good thing. Hell, I would have paid $20 to have them talk to someone else over the phone rather than tell me about the mundane details of their life. They don't keep their mouth shut either way..
I suspect people will treat the phone like they do a movie - not interrupt someone who is engaged in that type of activity.
Similarly, the embedded controller in my mouse is not the hardware you want when it comes to getting the math on.
But what was your point?
When I was doing bioinformatics work, it was Math intensive... The loading of large datasets was a small part of the time involved. No point other than a mainframe is not the right tool for the job (from my experience). Reading up the thread, that was what the OP was wondering about.
if you're interested in finding out what the older mainframe OSes were like, check out the Hercules IBM mainframe emulator here. (http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules/)
It is worth adding that this emulator lets you run 31 (not a typo) and 64-bit zSeries Linux distributions as well. Very cool stuff.
*cou-- massively parrellel processing with nonexistant downtime --ough*
Exactly - this is the wrong tool for the job. The hardware is fantastic - and yes, I've never seen a hardware problem, though crappy code (waves hand) can hork an instance. One of the machines I use is a eServer zSeries 900. Max of 16 CPU's, and this one has less than that - think it has 6, but not sure. Not that they would ever *allocate* all the MIPS my direction.
But lets say I had some stupid money. From the website, the latest greatest box...
The following models were announced on July 26, 2005: * A z9-109 S08 model can be a 1-way through 8-way - which means there are 8 processor units or PUs contained on one book. * A z9-109 S18 model can be a 1-way through 18-way (18 PUs) contained on two books. * A z9-109 S28 model can be a 1-way through 28-way (28 PUs) contained on three books. * A z9-109 S38 model can be a 1-way through 38-way (38 PUs) contained on four books. * A z9-109 S54 model can be a 1-way through 54-way (54 PUs) contained on four books.
The z9 EC will provide all these same models. The PUs can be configured as general purpose processors (CPs), Integrated Facilities for Linux (IFLs), System z Application Assist Processors (zAAPs), System z9 Integrated Information Processors (zIIPs), additional System Assist Processors (SAPs), or used as additional spares. Only eight subcapacity processors can be active on the server (and it doesn't matter which model you have). When more than eight CPs have been purchased on servers that have more than one book, a selection can be made to activate only 8 or fewer subcapacity features. This means that the new subcapacity settings are available on any of the models as long as they are configured (not the same as purchased) with eight or fewer general purpose processors.
If you need to crunch hard numbers - especially in parallel - there are much better options out there for the money. The folks a few miles down the road from me do a fantastic job with large Opteron clusters (waves to Malice). The mainframe is not the hardware you want when it comes to getting the math on.
Slashdot Mirror
With my bride and I both using cell phones as our primary line, I've put off canceling them on my POTS line for long distance service. Well no more - the $8USD/month (was $3, but it looks like it jumped up with extra fees) just to have the service is not a lot of cash, but at least I'll get a chance to give AT&T a big old FU and the horse you road in on. The rep had the brass to say this was something to strengthen my 'privacy', then started on a song and dance about September 11th.
For those in the US, 1-800-222-0300 option 6 gets you where you need to go. Expect a 30 minute (or more) wait time.
Fuckers...
I was going to tag this as insightful, but figured I would add to it rather than mod.
On the ports, the biggest problem was applications (not necessarily the corba orb - don't remember from my one project with it) wanted a range of ports rather than a specific port. Had we been able to say port 4567 or something like that, our security folks would have been more than happy to open up the firewall a bit. Many of the product we were wanting to use would try to use ports 3000-4000 or something silly like that.
Congress = governement = no loss of Blackberries. They're exempt from anything inconvenient, didn't you know.
The actual folks who are employed by the government are quite few in number. There are armies of contractors doing most of the real work and very much part of the fabric of Congress and the rest. They were not exempt, and a blackberry loses much of its value when the people you are trying to ping can't respond back. It would have been chaos for them, even though the Senators, etc, would still have a functional device.
If you are looking for an electronic 'legit' version of the earlier stuff, see if you can find a 'core rules' CD ROM. They had a bunch of character editors, etc - but the real gold was the books were in RTF format! Easy enough to turn into PDF, but even better, you could mark them up with your notes, carve out sections you needed as player or DM.
I got a fair salary
Risk vs. Rewards. Most of the folks who end up with a Ferrari started off putting their house up at collateral to make the startup work. Better cash than a lot of worthless stock like many of us got in a startup...
Just look at what the wonders of in game ads do to an old classic. I'm getting hungry just looking a the glock.
a te-counter-strike/
http://joystiq.com/2006/01/11/in-game-ads-infiltr
Most of the nicer chassis don't have razor sharp edges on the inside. Spend $35 on a case and PS, and you may need a Band-Aid or two - but most folks who are building even mid range gaming rigs will spend money on a case.
I've already seen the AM2 x2 5000+ in a personal rig (not mine) last week, so I got to believe Intel could get their hands on one of the DDR2 using CPU's. I'm just wanting to find out if fast DDR2 makes a big impact. Not seeing a huge boost with the slower DDR2 over the AMD chips using DDR1.
As long as they are comparing CPU's that are a going to be launching, I was wondering why they did not use an AMD AM2 CPU that uses the same DDR2 RAM. "Typical" DDR2 is not very fast, thus the current real world comparisons of the 939/AM2 CPU's don't give a huge boost to the latest CPU. If DDR2-800 was common, the change over makes a bit more sense - possibly just what AMD was thinking as well.
And yes - you can dog a machine by tweaking the BIOS. Our kit was in a final bakeoff with a competitor - the customer was re-imaging the OS between installs, but we were last to use the server. The customer tried to drop a test file on the machine using a floppy disk and found the floppy missing. Went into the BIOS and we noticed 'someone' had set every possible BIOS setting to a worst-case condition. Turns a fairly fast machine into something not so quick. Won the gig, but I have to wonder how often this happens.
If you want a mainframe, snag http://www.hercules-390.org/ - the zSeries emulator. On current hardware it will run circles around those $500 zSeries boxes.
Traveling can be really hard on the marriage. Don't underestimate this. Be sure that is in solid ground first and foremost... We were married for about seven years before I became a road warrior, which helped some. It still was not easy. Due to my heavy travel, she ended up switching to a stay home Mom. (So much for having our cake and eating it too on the financial side. A few things help.)
Being willing to be a road warrior was a fast track in on the corporate side. It was fun to 'travel the world' the first six months, but the thrill wears off quickly. One hotel/restaurant/card table at a customer is the same as another. I kept my job, while others did not, so that is worth a fair bit of stability on the home front. Risk vs. rewards, I also made more than those who followed a track that got them home each night.
Another thing to think about is staying in shape. Very easy to move into the plus sizes when you dine in a restaurant every night. The clean plate club is not a good idea. Much more work than I ever thought it would be.
I try to strike a balance these days. A few weeks of heavy travel, followed by a couple of weeks close to home.
Not that I mind that these amoral scum got bitten.
But did they? I mean, if I wanted to sow disinformation, hiding something with the intent it might be found is a great way to it.
(/me double checks tinfoil hat... and peeks outside for black helicopters)
I'd add a nice click through EULA to my page, were I a kid in that city. Let 'them' break the terms and try and hold it against me. The school is not going after things that you should send the cops after - not near as black and white - so no protection like if someone was bragging about rape or stealing a car. Then call the cops when they 'hack' your site or some other cyber-crime that seems to be the flavor of the month.
"The board of Community High School District 128 voted unanimously on Monday to require that all students participating in extracurricular activities sign a pledge agreeing that evidence of "illegal or inappropriate" behavior posted on the Internet could be grounds for disciplinary action."
Since when could a minor sign a binding contract?
Unless it requires a compiler that costs $1,000 for one seat (unless you're affiliated with an accredited university) and takes over 1,000 MB of your hard drive.
So worst case the article writer is running an open source (not necessarily free as in beer) application that requires Microsoft Studio to compile. It is also an application that leverages something the free version of Visual Studio can't compile. They have to wait till someone gets around to creating and releasing a build that has something that 'may' have been fixed four months earlier!
The fact that if they had the right local environment is nothing more than a bonus. Just because it is an open source project does not entitle someone to nightly build binaries for their platform. I've not seen many OSS projects that require a specific commercial compiler, but if it did and the user could not do it themselves - or find *anyone else who could do it for them (for free or pay) - then how are they worse of from those who are waiting for 'official' releases of closed source programs?
If you need this service, I do have the full MSDN kit installed and can provide binaries of OSS projects that the free version of studio can't handle for a small monthly fee. No need to install anything on your HDD. (grin)
My take on the article was the author is looking for binaries rather than a source code pull, as that is what the typical 'user' wants. For the most part, he would be right. What was missed is if you take the time to figure out how to download a nightly, you can probably figure out how to compile it as well. Most of the projects I work on do a nightly build from the code repository. In some cases, like FireFox in the early days, I would set up my local environment to snag and built a clean cut each morning.
Now, even though internally we have nightly binaries, we don't release them to our QA group. We will tag milestones which get released to QA that have a series of enhancement/bug fixes in there. If someone needs something that was fixed, but did not get put into a formal build that we sent out to the unwashed masses, it is their option to download and build something a little closer to the bleeding edge (if the project has a public source repository) or wait for the milestone that contains the feature/fix they were after. He is lucky to even get this 'roll your own' option. If he can't, he waits like everyone else. Actually, he could even pay someone (like me) to to the builds for him or spend his time learning how to sort code to binary... if it was that important. Big customers can get special builds even in our closed source stuff.
Don't see the problem, other than having yet another option open to him.
I've seen the tadpole sparc based laptops before. (trade show 'server') It was a couple years back, but it could hold 6G of ram. Poked over to their website and it looks like they have a monster that can go up to 16G of RAM.
r og-dual/
http://www.tadpole.com/html/products/mobile/bullf
I've never seen any x86 laptop that could do more than 4G yet.
I'm flying VFR when I go up in my playboy. No flight plans required what so ever. Granted there is airspace I cannot fly in and altitudes I can't exceed, but she is build for (basic) acrobatics rather than actually going someplace. For private aircraft - especially the experimental stuff - tracking requirements are not required as 'basic' equipment. Since my plane is built to pull a few more G's than a typical Cessna, I'd call it 'safer' than an electrical laden counterpart under 10k'.
I'd look at it much like a neverlost in a car. Nice to have, not a must have, and definitely not a federal mandate that every vehicle broadcast real time locations. Maybe a better example is an ipass transponder. If you are driving on the toll way, you need one. On the normal streets it is not required. So yeah, uncontrolled airspace the rules are a bit different. I spent about $6.5k to buy and restore my plane. A transponder last time I looked that had a battery pack (ala for folks doing ballooning) was about $1.5k and nothing I care about due to not flying on the flight 'traffic' routes. Never mind the weight, mounting, and storage. I did spend money (due to aerobatic requirements) on a parachute. Dang if that did not make people nervous on NWA when I packed it as carry-on luggage going home.
I'd also argue an SUV has much more potential payload than my aircraft which can only carry a couple hundred pounds (mostly pilot, tragically). You could possibly fly very large aircraft under VFR (and without transponder), but most folks don't. Much like trying to buy a one ton pickup without cruise control.
Take a look at the Thinkpad t60p series. Dual core, 4G of RAM, SATA drives... The bloody machine was a substantial jump forward from just about any workstation (or gaming rig) I've ever had. Doing development on my main box while running the application server stack on a VMWare image. Make sure you run Linux or Win64, or you might as well config it with 3G of RAM however.
There is NO excuse, in this day and age of multiple civilian navigation and communication technologies, for having an aircraft off course and not responding to communications. Add to that a flight path into restricted airspace after intercept- and I want those soldiers shooting first, not asking questions of the chain of command.
True for commercial craft, but there is a lot of variety on the non-commercial stuff. I've got an old Stitts - basically a J3 Cub with low wings - that does not have any electrical system. It prop starts, has a float and a stick for a gas gauge, and some basic instrumentation. It does it not have a transponder, radio, or GPS - just basic compass and elevation. And yes - it is possible to get lost if you are not careful. Not that something like that is a threat...but it is an excuse. (grin)
Most small companies cannot do the creative accounting the larger companies can do. Many of the large companies seem to not 'make' any taxable revenue... go figure. The little ones can't do it as easily as the multi nationals. Also, it does not take that many employees to do the health insurance thing. I know of several local 20 person engineering shops that have the same BCBS coverage I have in the 500 person, 120M/year shop I work at. (now large enough to call medium I guess, but started small). It adds up...
The problem with these potential yak-fests by seatmates and by nearby or loud passengers is being unable to escape from them.
I'd wager those same annoying passengers will talk loudly regardless of if they are on the phone or not. I just flew CDG > DWT > SFO, and each leg the person sitting next to me thought they should have a conversation with me anytime I opened a laptop - even if I had headphones on. Them talking to someone else on the phone would be a good thing. Hell, I would have paid $20 to have them talk to someone else over the phone rather than tell me about the mundane details of their life. They don't keep their mouth shut either way..
I suspect people will treat the phone like they do a movie - not interrupt someone who is engaged in that type of activity.
Similarly, the embedded controller in my mouse is not the hardware you want when it comes to getting the math on.
But what was your point?
When I was doing bioinformatics work, it was Math intensive... The loading of large datasets was a small part of the time involved. No point other than a mainframe is not the right tool for the job (from my experience). Reading up the thread, that was what the OP was wondering about.
if you're interested in finding out what the older mainframe OSes were like, check out the Hercules IBM mainframe emulator here. (http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules/)
It is worth adding that this emulator lets you run 31 (not a typo) and 64-bit zSeries Linux distributions as well. Very cool stuff.
Exactly - this is the wrong tool for the job. The hardware is fantastic - and yes, I've never seen a hardware problem, though crappy code (waves hand) can hork an instance. One of the machines I use is a eServer zSeries 900. Max of 16 CPU's, and this one has less than that - think it has 6, but not sure. Not that they would ever *allocate* all the MIPS my direction.
But lets say I had some stupid money. From the website, the latest greatest box...
If you need to crunch hard numbers - especially in parallel - there are much better options out there for the money. The folks a few miles down the road from me do a fantastic job with large Opteron clusters (waves to Malice). The mainframe is not the hardware you want when it comes to getting the math on.
IO and uptime... that is another story...