Maybee I'm a bit of a n00b, but I thought the point of a 2.5 was for new development and experimental code. Bug fixes, stability, and tuning sound great in the 2.4.x series - I _USE_ that kernel series (usually a couple revs behind) for real development work, not just for play on a scratch box that can be fdisk'ed on a whim.
When the 2.5 stuff gets up to snuff, I'm sure we will see a 2.6 released (rebranded, perhaps). By moving stuff into dev that needs to be in dev, we might not have the LONG wait we like the 2.4 series did before it hit prime time.
3. Proprietary OS and software. Irix is a disgrace.
While networking Irix was a beast (way back when), my Indy is what I cut my teeth on for comercial coding and really learned vi (grin). We had RS/6000's running AIX too, so all the C code had to run on both platforms. C is C - if you stay away from hardware specific libraries, and for serious number crunching it was hard to beat what the Irix C compiler cranked out. Yes a Linux box can do Unix , but when you start hitting the _BIG_NUMBER_ stuff, there is a reason (beyond support contracts) why we have Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and even Irix. Yup, people have used Linux for rendering farms, but that is only one application.
Irix has fallen out of favor with even SGI, however, so its days are numbered. Real or not, that perception feeds the downward spiral. I suspect the same thing is happening with HP-UX. Course SGI did a lot of dumb things, like trying to switch everything over to NT and Intel - botching it, then jumping to Linux - TBD....
SGI had unholy graphics powers in the early 90's - It was just a pleasure to do molecular biology work on them. Compaired to my personal 486dx2/50 w/4M or the Mac in our lab, they set the high end of the delta between "workstation" and "personal" class computers for me.
As for upgrading - you ever see them "upgrade" an AIX box? They gut the thing and drop in all new parts. While you may get to stick some RAM in your sunblade 100, that's about it as you move into systems that the vendor has there but on the line from an uptime service agreement....
But ya, I'll miss them too. Every time I see an old Indy sitting unloved in one of those computer graveyard stores, I have to fight off the urge. From a comercial standpoint, they don't make the list anymore for the stuff I do today.
A dictionary only helps if you know you spelled something wrong. One of the things that helped me the most is the real time spell checking in Microsoft Office - it lets me know where I horked something up and lets me correct it.
I use Outlook because it has a spell checker in the office. It is poor form to not check your spelling in the work environment - expecially when I work with customers. Here on./ I don't give a rat's ass and just type in the input box... not that I would not use a checker if it had one. I have to spin up VMware _JUST_ for email at this point.
The brower has already won me back over from IE. It's close enough, and mimics most of the DOM that everyone seems to be coding to these days. Is it too much to want something more than pine?
I didn't see a mention of a good email client (Mozilla doesn't count)
The lack of a spell checker is a HUGE stumbling block for Mozilla. Other than send and receive mail, that is the ONLY feature _I_ really care about in an e-mail client. I was able to hack in the netscape spell checker into an earlier build, but that did not work in the last couple revs. Digging in deeper it looks like Netscape did/can't release that due to 3rd party problems. Got more info and it might be possible to use ispell or pspell, but seems know one knows if they can use it based on licenses or compatiblity issues. Moz will be at 1.0 long before I could puzzle out from ground zero how to add to the codebase (in a positive manner), but it looks like there is a vaccum there for someone to lead a team - expecially us mozilla newbies wanting to help.
Poke around... I was looking for 92-60 adapters.
http://www.cpufx.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Scree n= CTGY&Store_Code=o&Category_Code=FA1
http://www.hardcorecooling.com/index.htm has some too. Never ordered from them, however... Poke around on polycon? and a few others too.
I found most folks asking ~11USD for a 60-80mm adapter, most were pretty flimsy looking. The 92mm adapters were a bit more rare and pricy - and I have the stuff to build my own.
I can't speak for the KT266 chips, but the KT133A "can" run with just a heat sink on the Abit KT133A board. My chipset fan was squealing, and I ran a few weeks without while waiting for a replacement. I'm all SCSI and not overclocked on that box, however, so your mileage may vary. The chipset got hot to the touch using only a passive heat sink - probably a stability thing.
I added a 1.4 gHz AMD CPU and had to get a better heatsink / fan combo than the chrome orb I had used on the previous duron processor. I bought a copper heatsink kit that cooled well and fit my budget. What I did not know is how load the 47dB Ytech fan really is in practice. ARGH! I started shopping for a new fan based on amps, airflow, noise, and air pressure.
There are some good fans out there that fit the normal 60mm CPU mounts, but I'm also seeing some 60-80mm adapters used to match a larger, lower RPM fan to a cpu. Mind you, air pressure makes a difference. I'm building my own adapter now since I have a couple nice quiet 92mm fans that push/pull enough air (with ducting) to keep my CPU around 40c under load. Still tweaking the heat resistant foam ducting before I put on a coat of fiberglass. And to think we would never use our fluid mechanics outside the classroom!
As for the thermal paste... you don't need any if you use the thermal pad they leave on the CPU. You are a dead man if you take off (or re-use) the thermal pad and run the CPU bare back. Artic Silver is nice stuff, not only because of heat transfer, but it is non-conductive. Some do conduct electricity, which is generally a bad thing if it drips or leaks.
When I was going to school, I worked security - the non IS type - where the company had issues with folks stealing stuff. It was one of those home shopping networks, so they had jewelry, electronics, and all sorts of other stuff that got shuffled around from buyers, to the TV studios, to warehouses, and outlet stores.
As you might have guessed, some people would steal stuff. Every once in a while, we would catch them, we would call the cops, they would fill out a report, and that was the end of it. Termination, but no criminal prosecution... Some of these folks made off with a lot of stuff before you figured out how they were running off with it.
I suspect our police force is not interested in dealing with the "lowly" 13 year old script kiddies who would make a lousy public example. Lord knows they did not really care to prosecute when someone runs off with several thousand dollars worth of gold, confesses, and provides a verbal and written confession to the officers as well.
I also suspect these companies do care; they just realize the futility of trying to bring these "crackers" to justice....
Yah, I keep hearing this. Read the whole book - it recommends strong test plans, incremental development, pair programming, tons of snacks, and a maximum of a forty-hour work week. In itself, not a bad thing.
Interpreted by management?
They see the part about everything being stuck out in the open, with the computers set up in the center of the room - cubes are overrated, offices are evil
half as many boxes are required since you are "coding in tandem". See above for hint on how personal space is valued.
Demand complex test plans that will cure everything. These same people never have actual requirement documentation for what the code should do. Classic example? Validation rules for a phone number... gets ugly when someone wants to put in 1 800 FOO-BARR, add an extension, deal with international numbers. Think you can put together a test script? Got to have requirements first, and that is never a hard thing to get from the business (shudder).
I'm sure you have had complete management buy in on realistic time estimates now, so I wonder where the rumors come from that development tends to work more than an eight hour day. When they find out how long it will take to refactor the code base with through testing and daily updates, they will tell marketing and adjust the dates accordingly. Heck, I thought the Microsoft Project Plan defaulted to an eight-hour day - must be one of those rare Pentium errata issues that messes things up for me.
Not that I'm bitter, cause I'm not... but XP takes a handful of generally good practices and assumes perfect management buy-in and team communication. With any management support and teamwork, almost any method works.
I've found Solitare a great way to introduce the idea of double click, single click, and drag for those who really don't know beans about this computer thing. That app was the moment of zen for my Mom, and I hear others with similar stories.
Apparently MS realizes they made a wrong decision in their approach to security (trusting the sysadmin's dilligence), and they are making strong strides to change this now, and in the future.
Code of Conduct:
Microsoft Gold Certified Security Solutions Partners are leaders in the security industry, not only in their products and solutions, but also in their standards of behavior. All Microsoft Gold Certified Security Solutions Partners shall follow a code of conduct regarding the responsible handling of security vulnerabilities. This code of conduct is intended to allow a product vendor to address any individual vulnerability and issue a patch, workaround or other response to the public. Microsoft Gold Certified Security Solutions Partners shall take reasonable steps to ensure that they do not publicly disclose details that would directly allow an outside party to develop or execute an attack exploiting the vulnerability.
I see this time and time again. You give away software or development time (via low rate, etc), and it is perceived as not being worth as much. We tried to sell some software a few years back that took a couple weeks to pound out and we tried to sell it for $500, no takers - priced at the "enterprise" level of $15,000 (per CPU), it sold. Baffling....
That is not to say free software is worth nothing. The reverse it true - for my own personal use, I would not ever consider putting a Windows box on the other side of the firewall, even with the software in hand. Linux was an easy choise for my CS server - though I might run Solaris if that were an option.... Double that for even more important things like my development box!
Folks can be dumb, however.... expecially managment. When you shoot for the lowest common denominator, some times you prey on the divide by zero errors...
Address book? This thing has enough power to play video or MAME! I picked up a ipaq 3670 (206mhz, 64M RAM, $300) and have had tons of fun with it. By default, half the ram goes to storage, half to running stuff (on wince) - less for apps if you use it for storing MP3's. If I can get this thing to run Tomcat, I'm set. (I know I could do some form of PocketIIS) Heck, with that much power, IBM's J9 JVM is snappy. Heck, I can even use C++, rather than the C toolkit I used for than my Palm III.
Mine filled up quick, though I'm the reason for quotas at our current shop (grin).
All right, I'll bite here... Unless things have changed alot in the last six months, settin up Oracle in Linux was a pain in the ass - since I did not use the SUSE distro... For me, it was hard. I won't pretend to know DB's either, I almost always work on the other side of the interface.... after much RTFM, newsgroups, reading, and messing with glibc I got it to work.
Access and SQL server for that matter was point and shoot. Run the setup.exe and you were ready to go. Much lower cost of entry. You can get the easy part up and running with very little work.
Going in the way-back machine, I remember my first time using Unix in a CS lab. VI baffled me, and emacs was even worse (for me). I was a BioChem major as were my cohorts, so all the help I got was a VI cheat sheet from one of the TA's. Nice. I found it easier to code on my dos box, follow a set of instructions to copy the file, strip the newlines, and compile the labs rather than debug with cc. It was a few more years before I discovered slackware and was able to really fiddle with *nix. Now, try to pry VI and a real shell from my cold dead fingers - though I still use an IDE for coding. Once you get past the low hanging fruit, I found out how powerful *nix really is. That, and supporting IIS 3 (shudder) let me see the other side too...
I think its one of the reason why there are so many terrible VB programmers out there too - the bar is way too low to filter out the kruft. It does leave an impression, however. It seems easy. That is OK.... the real world will teach them!
Amen! God, I wish I had some mod points for you. Is it too much to ask for a zip file of the dll's, inf files, etc? The install program (ensonic or 128) on Win98 and Win2k both run an EXE and try to set everything up for you. Sometimes yo win, sometimes you don't.
But everything must be perfect, damn the cost... reminds me so much of *my* dot-com days. I watched in wonder as they ordered Sun 250's for each mail server - light duty servers at that. Everything else got 450's.
It was perfect - and we became dot.compost at the end of the year....
Slashdot Mirror
Maybee I'm a bit of a n00b, but I thought the point of a 2.5 was for new development and experimental code. Bug fixes, stability, and tuning sound great in the 2.4.x series - I _USE_ that kernel series (usually a couple revs behind) for real development work, not just for play on a scratch box that can be fdisk'ed on a whim.
When the 2.5 stuff gets up to snuff, I'm sure we will see a 2.6 released (rebranded, perhaps). By moving stuff into dev that needs to be in dev, we might not have the LONG wait we like the 2.4 series did before it hit prime time.
While networking Irix was a beast (way back when), my Indy is what I cut my teeth on for comercial coding and really learned vi (grin). We had RS/6000's running AIX too, so all the C code had to run on both platforms. C is C - if you stay away from hardware specific libraries, and for serious number crunching it was hard to beat what the Irix C compiler cranked out. Yes a Linux box can do Unix , but when you start hitting the _BIG_NUMBER_ stuff, there is a reason (beyond support contracts) why we have Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and even Irix. Yup, people have used Linux for rendering farms, but that is only one application.
Irix has fallen out of favor with even SGI, however, so its days are numbered. Real or not, that perception feeds the downward spiral. I suspect the same thing is happening with HP-UX. Course SGI did a lot of dumb things, like trying to switch everything over to NT and Intel - botching it, then jumping to Linux - TBD....
SGI had unholy graphics powers in the early 90's - It was just a pleasure to do molecular biology work on them. Compaired to my personal 486dx2/50 w/4M or the Mac in our lab, they set the high end of the delta between "workstation" and "personal" class computers for me.
As for upgrading - you ever see them "upgrade" an AIX box? They gut the thing and drop in all new parts. While you may get to stick some RAM in your sunblade 100, that's about it as you move into systems that the vendor has there but on the line from an uptime service agreement....
But ya, I'll miss them too. Every time I see an old Indy sitting unloved in one of those computer graveyard stores, I have to fight off the urge. From a comercial standpoint, they don't make the list anymore for the stuff I do today.
Thank you! I never looked at anything but the C++ interface for ispell. Nifty GUI, I'll give it a whirl today.
Spoken by someone who can spell, I'm sure....
./ I don't give a rat's ass and just type in the input box... not that I would not use a checker if it had one. I have to spin up VMware _JUST_ for email at this point.
A dictionary only helps if you know you spelled something wrong. One of the things that helped me the most is the real time spell checking in Microsoft Office - it lets me know where I horked something up and lets me correct it.
I use Outlook because it has a spell checker in the office. It is poor form to not check your spelling in the work environment - expecially when I work with customers. Here on
The brower has already won me back over from IE. It's close enough, and mimics most of the DOM that everyone seems to be coding to these days. Is it too much to want something more than pine?
The lack of a spell checker is a HUGE stumbling block for Mozilla. Other than send and receive mail, that is the ONLY feature _I_ really care about in an e-mail client. I was able to hack in the netscape spell checker into an earlier build, but that did not work in the last couple revs. Digging in deeper it looks like Netscape did/can't release that due to 3rd party problems. Got more info and it might be possible to use ispell or pspell, but seems know one knows if they can use it based on licenses or compatiblity issues. Moz will be at 1.0 long before I could puzzle out from ground zero how to add to the codebase (in a positive manner), but it looks like there is a vaccum there for someone to lead a team - expecially us mozilla newbies wanting to help.
Poke around... I was looking for 92-60 adapters.e n= CTGY&Store_Code=o&Category_Code=FA1
http://www.cpufx.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Scre
http://www.hardcorecooling.com/index.htm has some too. Never ordered from them, however... Poke around on polycon? and a few others too.
I found most folks asking ~11USD for a 60-80mm adapter, most were pretty flimsy looking. The 92mm adapters were a bit more rare and pricy - and I have the stuff to build my own.
Dude, you got a Dell.... (snicker)
I can't speak for the KT266 chips, but the KT133A "can" run with just a heat sink on the Abit KT133A board. My chipset fan was squealing, and I ran a few weeks without while waiting for a replacement. I'm all SCSI and not overclocked on that box, however, so your mileage may vary. The chipset got hot to the touch using only a passive heat sink - probably a stability thing.
I added a 1.4 gHz AMD CPU and had to get a better heatsink / fan combo than the chrome orb I had used on the previous duron processor. I bought a copper heatsink kit that cooled well and fit my budget. What I did not know is how load the 47dB Ytech fan really is in practice. ARGH! I started shopping for a new fan based on amps, airflow, noise, and air pressure.
There are some good fans out there that fit the normal 60mm CPU mounts, but I'm also seeing some 60-80mm adapters used to match a larger, lower RPM fan to a cpu. Mind you, air pressure makes a difference. I'm building my own adapter now since I have a couple nice quiet 92mm fans that push/pull enough air (with ducting) to keep my CPU around 40c under load. Still tweaking the heat resistant foam ducting before I put on a coat of fiberglass. And to think we would never use our fluid mechanics outside the classroom!
As for the thermal paste... you don't need any if you use the thermal pad they leave on the CPU. You are a dead man if you take off (or re-use) the thermal pad and run the CPU bare back. Artic Silver is nice stuff, not only because of heat transfer, but it is non-conductive. Some do conduct electricity, which is generally a bad thing if it drips or leaks.
Helix1 said...
I wish I had mod points... thanks for the laugh! Now to clean the coffee from my screen.
(Score:1, Redundant)
NewbieSpaz said...
Mod the above up (#,Funny)
If you're a Redhatter (Mandraker, SuSe'er):
rpm -ivh cs-degree..rpm
(Score:1, Redundant)
Someone wasted two mod points to drop us down, rather than modding up the root comment. Good Lord people. Give the original poster some love...
I wish I had mod points... thanks for the laugh! Now to clean the coffee from my screen.
When I was going to school, I worked security - the non IS type - where the company had issues with folks stealing stuff. It was one of those home shopping networks, so they had jewelry, electronics, and all sorts of other stuff that got shuffled around from buyers, to the TV studios, to warehouses, and outlet stores.
As you might have guessed, some people would steal stuff. Every once in a while, we would catch them, we would call the cops, they would fill out a report, and that was the end of it. Termination, but no criminal prosecution... Some of these folks made off with a lot of stuff before you figured out how they were running off with it.
I suspect our police force is not interested in dealing with the "lowly" 13 year old script kiddies who would make a lousy public example. Lord knows they did not really care to prosecute when someone runs off with several thousand dollars worth of gold, confesses, and provides a verbal and written confession to the officers as well.
I also suspect these companies do care; they just realize the futility of trying to bring these "crackers" to justice....
Interpreted by management?
Not that I'm bitter, cause I'm not... but XP takes a handful of generally good practices and assumes perfect management buy-in and team communication. With any management support and teamwork, almost any method works.
people still click email attachments called FOO.MP3.exe
Joe six-pack does not know to turn off hidden file extentions - thus they see FOO.MP3, which looks safe to them.
Don't worry - Microsoft built an Outlook Express client for Solaris too.
I thought it was funny - if the thought counts. Got nailed myself the other day on a joke that was modded poorly (IMHO).
I've found Solitare a great way to introduce the idea of double click, single click, and drag for those who really don't know beans about this computer thing. That app was the moment of zen for my Mom, and I hear others with similar stories.
No quantifiable deliverables, telecommuting, and direct deposit. - Dogbert (paraphrased)
You think they are making strides to clean this up? Looks like patching the PR to me. Take a look at this...
MS rolls out security obscurity bribe program
Code of Conduct:
Microsoft Gold Certified Security Solutions Partners are leaders in the security industry, not only in their products and solutions, but also in their standards of behavior. All Microsoft Gold Certified Security Solutions Partners shall follow a code of conduct regarding the responsible handling of security vulnerabilities. This code of conduct is intended to allow a product vendor to address any individual vulnerability and issue a patch, workaround or other response to the public. Microsoft Gold Certified Security Solutions Partners shall take reasonable steps to ensure that they do not publicly disclose details that would directly allow an outside party to develop or execute an attack exploiting the vulnerability.
I see this time and time again. You give away software or development time (via low rate, etc), and it is perceived as not being worth as much. We tried to sell some software a few years back that took a couple weeks to pound out and we tried to sell it for $500, no takers - priced at the "enterprise" level of $15,000 (per CPU), it sold. Baffling....
That is not to say free software is worth nothing. The reverse it true - for my own personal use, I would not ever consider putting a Windows box on the other side of the firewall, even with the software in hand. Linux was an easy choise for my CS server - though I might run Solaris if that were an option.... Double that for even more important things like my development box!
Folks can be dumb, however.... expecially managment. When you shoot for the lowest common denominator, some times you prey on the divide by zero errors...
Address book? This thing has enough power to play video or MAME! I picked up a ipaq 3670 (206mhz, 64M RAM, $300) and have had tons of fun with it. By default, half the ram goes to storage, half to running stuff (on wince) - less for apps if you use it for storing MP3's. If I can get this thing to run Tomcat, I'm set. (I know I could do some form of PocketIIS) Heck, with that much power, IBM's J9 JVM is snappy. Heck, I can even use C++, rather than the C toolkit I used for than my Palm III.
Mine filled up quick, though I'm the reason for quotas at our current shop (grin).
All right, I'll bite here... Unless things have changed alot in the last six months, settin up Oracle in Linux was a pain in the ass - since I did not use the SUSE distro... For me, it was hard. I won't pretend to know DB's either, I almost always work on the other side of the interface.... after much RTFM, newsgroups, reading, and messing with glibc I got it to work.
Access and SQL server for that matter was point and shoot. Run the setup.exe and you were ready to go. Much lower cost of entry. You can get the easy part up and running with very little work.
Going in the way-back machine, I remember my first time using Unix in a CS lab. VI baffled me, and emacs was even worse (for me). I was a BioChem major as were my cohorts, so all the help I got was a VI cheat sheet from one of the TA's. Nice. I found it easier to code on my dos box, follow a set of instructions to copy the file, strip the newlines, and compile the labs rather than debug with cc. It was a few more years before I discovered slackware and was able to really fiddle with *nix. Now, try to pry VI and a real shell from my cold dead fingers - though I still use an IDE for coding. Once you get past the low hanging fruit, I found out how powerful *nix really is. That, and supporting IIS 3 (shudder) let me see the other side too...
I think its one of the reason why there are so many terrible VB programmers out there too - the bar is way too low to filter out the kruft. It does leave an impression, however. It seems easy. That is OK.... the real world will teach them!
And, as a reminder... never, never, ever put your bag of holding in a portable hole..
Amen! God, I wish I had some mod points for you. Is it too much to ask for a zip file of the dll's, inf files, etc? The install program (ensonic or 128) on Win98 and Win2k both run an EXE and try to set everything up for you. Sometimes yo win, sometimes you don't.
But everything must be perfect, damn the cost... reminds me so much of *my* dot-com days. I watched in wonder as they ordered Sun 250's for each mail server - light duty servers at that. Everything else got 450's.
It was perfect - and we became dot.compost at the end of the year....
would be a library?