I certainly wouldn't recommend it for a business, and I wouldn't do it myself -- not because I'm so worried about failures or incompatibilities but because $3500 is about $2500 more than I'm willing to spend on a PC nowadays -- but it's out there for those willing to do it. If you drop the CPU's to dual 244's then you can get OEM support in that price range.
show me ONE x86 compatible PC that beats a Dual-G5 machine at the same price point
Well, I thought the Polystation was, but I can't find whatever freaking model was used. The Polystation 2020 can't be configured with Opteron 246's. Whatever.
So I built one out from Newegg.com -- Dual Opteron 246 w/ MSI motherboard, full tower case (Antec Sonata), 380W PS, second fan, 1GB ECC registered PC-3200 memory (dual Corsair sticks), 160GB Samsung HD, Pioneer DVD+-RW/CD-RW, floppy, cheapo mouse and keyboard, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro w/ 128MB of memory, XP Pro.
Honestly, given that the MB is $450 and the CPU's are $800 ea. I didn't think I'd make the $3500 price point. And I didn't. It was only $3200 + shipping (an additonal $29 to my state).
Obviously you won't find such a system pre-assembled from an OEM for that price point. I won't question that. But it is doable if you don't need the OEM support, and I'd bet that the Opteron system will fall to $3500 from a major OEM by the end of the year. I doubt Apple will reduce the price anytime soon though.
The extra graphics memory may have had some kind of effect on the Quake III results, especially at the higher resolution of 1600x1200.
Well, I discounted the Q3A results anyway as utterly and completely meaningless -- as much as, if not more so than, the Word results. That said, it shouldn't have any affect -- Q3A was designed for 32MB cards. Benchmarking on the same platform, varying only the graphics card, shows equal (or worse) performance once you exceed 64MB of video RAM (depends on the card obviously, but often the larger memory sizes on the same chipset use slower RAM for price point and heat reasons).
And you're correct -- the G5 isn't lousy. Too strong a term on my behalf. But I do think the AMD64 chips (Athlon 64, Athlon FX, Opteron) give better price/performance ratios. As usual, however, what you should buy depends mostly on what you need to do, followed by what OS you want to run.
Oh, and I didn't mention that most of th PC's had double the graphics memory
Which affected what, exactly?
and had RAID as their primary storage.
The Opteron didn't. Many of the other systems did, but excepting the incredibly inane Word benchmark it doesn't appear to have affected anything (as to be expected). It's not like they were playing with any really huge files -- the 150 MB Photoshop test can be held entirely in memory after all.
As best I can tell they bought these systems with the criteria of having them all priced similarly -- right about $3500 (excepting the single CPU Apple system). Even the dual Opteron system is priced at that (check Polywell's site -- it's not listed in the article, showing just how top notch the journalism is a PC World). Your complaints about the other systems having more video memory, RAID, et. al. are just further proof of how insanely overpriced Apples are.
Were most of the benchmarks bullshit? Yeah. Most certainly. Is Apple's G5 vastly faster than the competiton? Nope. No way. In fact, it's probably slower than the AMD64 chips at most tasks. The SpecInt and SpecFP benchmarks that are currently available certainly don't make the G5 look like a speed demon. And when you factor in the price point, the G5 is looking lousier and lousier.
Harder to quantify = "Manager is without a clue about the technology."
You can read it that way, and it is that way sometimes, but realistically you can't tell me (me being a fellow coder, not a manager) that cleaning up the code will definitively improve release schedules in the future. If it's code that's crufty, but in a library that you merely call and don't have to modify then what difference does it make? If you never end up adding features to it then clearly there was no value add. If you don't revisit the code for another 6 months then what are the odds that you won't find it crufty at that point and want to revamp it again?
Honestly, the best way to deal with this kind of thing is to build the code revamp into estimates for new features. If you're going to have to play around in the code anyway then you may as well build in the time to clean it up. If it's a revamp of the entire codebase you're obviously screwed -- you should've done a better job in the first place -- but if it's a subsection then you can probably get away with doing it. Then it's up to the company to decide whether or not it's worth the time for that particular feature. Don't mention that you're cleaning up things; consider it a part of the job. It probably is. Don't budge on your estimate either.
Of course, that works best on smaller teams where the lead architect knows what the hell is going on and can provide a single front to project management. If you don't have a small enough team for that to occur, then you're probably screwed anyway.
Aside from the Comeau compiler, you have Microsoft's, Intel's, IBM's, and G++.
I believe that MS VC++ 7.0 (or whatever it's marketed under now) and G++ are the most compliant of the bunch. IBM's compiler may be standard, but their linker is anything but -- thanks to it we can't use dbx or gdb on our code base (both simply core either while loading the core image or when you do a "where"; IBM's dbx occasionally works but never gives proper symbol names and setting break points is impossible). I don't have any experience w/ Intel's compiler so I can't say there. HP's compiler is abysmal.
One interesting place to look at compatibility is the Boost library -- Boost is a rather large C++ library being developed by some of the big names in C++ that may wind up in the next standard -- and how well it compiles on various platforms and compilers. Check out the compiler status page. It's certainly not a definitive test of what is and is not standard, but it's a data point.
You're certainly correct in that C++ compilers and their STL libraries have come very far in the past couple of years. One of the worst (Microsoft) is now one of the best -- largely due to them hiring a project lead that's a STL advocate.
You can't discover that "wow, this legacy code is crap," throw the offending chunks away and write something that works correctly and is more stable and/or secure.
That's because there are tradeoffs in everything... if you've been told to "clean up the codebase", take a bit to look at the codebase, and tell your manager that it's going to take X amount of time to do that the manager has to decide whether or not it's worth the time to do so -- since otherwise your time could be spent doing other things. And odds are the cleaning up isn't going to show an immediate return to the company. Of course, there are other plusses to cleaning up code -- like doing it right may mean that you can implement future features in less time -- but those are harder to quantify.
Any large project -- be it OSS or closed source -- has to deal with these issues in one way or another. Sure... in OSS anyone (in theory) can decide to go off and clean up the code base. But unless it's done with the input from the team then that effort may be for naught -- unless you're communicating structural changes then merging the two code bases may prove impossible (since new features/bugfixes will have diverged the codebase), the rest of the team may not feel comfortable with the new structure as they are with the old (which is part of a larger issue -- if anyone feels like they "own" parts of the code then they may get offended if you say it's crap and rewrite it entirely -- which is one reason why code ownership is bad), or other issues. If you do do it with the blessing of the team, it still has to be done in a reasonable amount of time for it to be worthwhile -- otherwise the code will either diverge too far or the project will stagnate while waiting on the rewrite.
And, of course, any time you rewrite you run the risk (read: certainty) that you'll introduce new bugs in known, working code.
Open source projects are freed from the time == money constraint if they have no commercial interests whatsoever, but that isn't to say that time becomes free. It's just that it's not necessarily an overriding factor. (Oh, and it's not one at all companies either -- that's entirely up to your manager and the structure of project management; but the more rigorous the framework of management the more likely it is be one).
Finally I have some hard evidence for clients who keep wasting my time asking me to support SMB on my network
Wow, that's certainly damning evidence. A post from some random/.'er who makes a statement without any data to back it up. I'd print that post out and hand it to everyone who asks you to support SMB. With proof like that they won't ever think of questioning you again.
What are the differences between Samba and NFS security-wise? I need one more argument to my arsenal.
Ok. If you like having a largely insecure network that is extremely difficult to administer and has questionable reliability then your best bet is NFS.
On the other hand, if you'd like a wide selection of permissions on directories, users, and files, along with relatively easy and logical administration as well as high reliability (at least as far as networked file systems are concerned) then you should go with SMB.
Frankly, if I was a "client" and had to deal with you I'd either go to your boss to have your ass canned (if your "clients" are in fact coworkers) or simply move by business to someone who actually wanted to give me service for my money (if your clients are actually clients).
Oh, and before you even think of saying how I'm a MS lackey, I'm a Unix coder. There's SMB running around our network at work, but I pretty much never use it.
less monitors (to a minimum of one, obviously), more virtual desktops.
The two are not exclusive, nor do they replace one another.
And, frankly, this says little about virtual desktops and considerably more about your coworkers work habits. It also says absolutely nothing about Windows vs Linux, since there are tons of virtual desktop managers for Windows -- including my preferred one DeskWin. It's even GPL.
Virtual desktops are great when you can hide apps that you don't need to look at often, or can segment your work completely into independant groups. But it breaks down quickly when you need to work on things between two different desktops -- the time spent switching back and forth is a huge waste.
Multiple monitors solve that issue entirely, since it's simple to see two completely different desktops at once. Cut 'n' paste does not do the trick with a lot of these kinds of things, while having two monitors does.
Your coworkers maximixing every window is probably what's screwing them the most. If you have to have 3 windows, only have 2 monitors, and want everything maximized then you're not much better off than one monitor. They're not segmenting the work well.
I'm glad they eventually learned their lesson, but I'm with a lot of folks here on/. After being ripped off by Intuit once, why should I go back?
If Intuit had the only decent tax software out there then I (and probably many others) would go back. But Intuit did this at a time when they face rather stiff competition from TaxCut and other software. I found TaxCut just as easy to use as TurboTax, not to mention slightly cheaper. It also did my taxes right the first time -- my wife cross checked things by doing them online w/ TurboTax and we spent a couple days figuring out why they came up with different numbers.
Oh, and as it turns out, TurboTax did it wrong. And fixing it required you to start over from scratch.
Yeah, I think I'll be sticking with TaxCut for the forseeable future.
Well, first off you need to cut all of your windows in half horizontally -- since you're effectively doubling your horizontal resolution if you go dual head.
Next, don't think of the two monitors as one large desktop. Of course you wouldn't want a single window spanning two monitors. Instead think of them as separate desktops (I believe this is how it generally works as well). If you've ever used a virtual desktop manager (I recommend DeskWin for Windows -- it's even GPL) then you're used to this. You certainly wouldn't split a window across different virtual desktops (some do support it, but it's generally a PITA and a negative "feature"). Put different groups of programs in different desktops. At work I use 3 virtual desktops -- one for coding, one for surfing, and one for email. It'd be awfully nice at times to have the coding and email windows up at the same time or even the coding and surfing.
I may go dual monitor at home now... just moved our office to a new room, put in new desks, and have two 19" monitors sitting around doing nothing. Both my wife's and my own system can support it, and it'd be a nice thing to have when working from home or maybe even when playing some games.
The new-look (not the brand-new-look) currency has a high-contrast, big, blocky, really-hard-to-miss printing of the denomination in one corner
The common counterfeiting scheme is to overlay the numbers on the corners of a five dollar bill with twenty's. Since virtually everyone only looks at the corners and not at the printed "Twenty Dollars" (which is, admittedly in two moderately obvious places) or at the front and back emblems, it's a pretty effective scam. And by the sounds of it, you'd get caught by it as well.
On the other hand, if the bill is color coded then good bloody luck doing the same thing.
Changing the size of the bills here would meet with such outrage as hasn't been seen since the Susan B. Anthony dollar.
I don't recall a ton of outrage over either dollar coin -- merely apathy. The only outrage I've had over the Sacajawea dollar is that the postal service machines will happily issue it, but generally don't accept it (I think my mug is in a database somewhere for abusing the machine after that incident).
It is humorous, however, at how irate people get about changes to the currency. Especially when they make it easier to use -- can you really argue that differently colored bills will be harder to use? Can you do the same for differently sized ones (presuming the sizes are still kept reasonable, with the current size as an upper limit)? If not, then what's the big deal?
No, my message (the first part at least) boils down to the reality that a misused tool, whether out of malice or ignorance, can do damage. The OP attempted to claim that space flight could do nothing but good, and that's just plain bullshit.
I didn't even state that the Chinese shouldn't have manned flight -- frankly I'm indifferent on the matter. Sure, I'd much rather see the US doing more in space, but I don't have any inherent objections to the Chinese (or Indians or whoever) doing it instead. The more the merrier -- as long as we all play nice. The same goes for nuclear power. Hell, the same goes for fire.
That, if something, is inane sophistry.
Then I suggest you study history more. Denying opponents critical advantages on the basis of right vs wrong has been a fundamental tenent of humanity for a few thousand years. It never works in the long run (unless you or another opponent of theirs manages to wipe them out), but that doesn't change reality.
And why is that? Developing space technology can only be a good thing.
Oh please. That's untrue. I can think of a number of ways that developing space technology can be bad -- lauching a man into orbit is essentially declaring that you have intercontinental ballistic missile technology (to some extent launching anything into orbit is, but putting a man up there means that you can carry a much larger payload and do so with high reliability -- both big points). You could also develop "space technology" toward the point of mass launchers which have the destruction potential of nuclear weapons with less radiation and other issues.
Is this the purpose behind China launching a man into orbit? I seriously doubt it. But blanket statements like that are silly. It's like saying that nuclear power is only a bad thing -- it's not the technology that is good or bad, it's the application there of. And pretty much any technology can be used for either.
If the US and Russia are too lazy to get off their collective asses and meet the challenge
Russia is a bit more concerned with how to feed itself and pay its people than with the space program. The US has other interests at the moment. Manned space programs are largely viewed as a black hole for public spending -- because while they do return benefits in the form of new technologies, they do so irregularly and with highly indirect benefits. It's unlikely that the manned space program will ever repay itself directly.
I'd like to see the human race off this single mudball as well, but inane sophistry like that doesn't help things.
Agreed, and they're willing to take down an entire industry to suit their needs. Ain't greed a fine thing?
Hopefully the courts will find against SCO... and perhaps (although unlikely) it will be determined that SCO and Canopus execs were involved in a variety of illegal businesses. I seriously doubt that though -- they're greedy, not stupid.
In Darl's contract, it states that he is in for a big payday if there are four consecutive quarters of profitability.
Not really. If you want the skinny on the stock options and incentives in Darl's contract, go read this.
In short -- Darl got 100,000 options after one year with SCO (which should have been on or about June 27, 2003). There are another 300,000 options that are vesting at a rate of 8333/month for 3 years. If SCO has 4 profitable quarters then Darl gets another 50,000 shared immediately, followed by 150,000 a year later.
By those numbers, he'd be well advised to keep the company around for at least a year after securing the 4 quarter deal -- he'd nearly double the shares.
On top of that, executives can't just call their broker and issue a sell order. Any insider must register for the purchase or sale of shares with the SEC. If you look at the execs of any large, successful company you'll see many have share sale orders out months or years in advance -- because they have to rebalance their portfolios.
I'm not saying this isn't pump 'n' dump or a variation thereof, but it's not as simple as some of the more ignorant/.ers would have you believe.
You may be right... certainly Verant has pulled similar tricks in the past with EQ. The biggest I can recall is Fiery Avenger, which was supposed to be the ultimate weapon for Paladins (when it finally came out it was pretty darn good, but was quickly eclipsed by stuff in expansions). The quest to get it was allegedly in the game from the start, but nobody could find it. They eventually completely revamped the quest and it became doable... and all indicators are that it simply didn't exist prior to that.
Similar situations have abounded later on in EQ... IIRC, one of the big end zones in Luclin wasn't even accessible until a month or so prior to Planes of Power being released.
Kicked the crack over a year and a half ago, so I'm hardly up to date on the latest crap that Verant is pulling.
Gods man, if you're going to try and bash the thing at least use an example that works.
The first page is full of useful results. Yes, there are two links at the top that are commercial. There's a bunch down the side that are commercial too. And it's pretty damned obvious that none of them are what you're looking for.
But the rest of the page has exactly what you're looking for -- online sites that go through how to fix a leaky faucet step by step, often including illustrations.
Until they quit making assumptions on what you are trying to say/look for, Searching for things on the internet will always suck.
Uh... how long have you been playing on the net? I remember when Yahoo! first came out (I also remember well before it did) and it was revolutionary! If it was on the net you could find it easily using Yahoo!. Of course, that's because there was all of jack and shit online. As the net grew Yahoo! became rapidly less and less useful, due not only to their poor search engine, the inobvious paid-for results, but also because Yahoo! didn't make any assumptions and tried the most blindingly stupid searches.
Google, on the other hand, does make assumptions and most of the time it makes the right ones, even to the point of suggesting correct spelling or punctuation. That's pretty damned impressive.
Are some things hard to search for in Google? Sure. I find it difficult to search for reviews of stuff for instance -- because if you include the name/brand/identifier of an object you'll get inundated with places to buy the thing. Even if you add "review" it doesn't get much better. But how is Google supposed to guess if I want to research a purchase or if I want to make a purchase? Without some additional information, provided by me, it can't.
Honestly, if you think the Internet will improve when search engines make less assumptions then you don't have a bloody clue about how much data is out there or how much the assumptions are helping you currently.
Why is it that when I buy a mcdonalds lunch I pay for the lunch, then I (as a taxpayer) pay for the landfill their disposable (and questionably useful) materials fill up?
What on earth makes you think that you do?
McDonalds, as well as every other business out there, pays a disposal fee to a (often commercial, not public) garbage company. They generally pay by the pound since most companies dispose considerably larger amounts of stuff than individuals do.
Oh, and individuals pay for garbage disposal in most communities as well. I get a bimonthly bill as part of my water bill. If I want to dispose of large objects then I have two choices -- take them to the landfill myself and pay by the half-ton (minimum fee $25), or get stickers from the city showing that I've paid for disposal (did that last week to dispose of two bookcases that were heavily damaged by mildew).
If you don't get an explicit bill, you can bet it's bundled as part of your taxes. Most likely property taxes (and if you rent then that becomes part of your rental fees, you just don't see them). But large users still get to pay per pound.
Why not require huggies to pay the cost of disposal?
Ok. Sure. BTW, when you have the diaper service come change your "environmentally friendly" cloth diapers, make sure that they charge you for the costs of all the water and chemical usage. Most diaper services are considerably less earth friendly than disposable diapers. Your only option here is to use cloth diapers and wash them yourself, as part of a large load of laundry in an environmentally-friendly washer/dryer (front loading washer and humidity sensitive dryer).
Why not require Dell to pay for the cost of disposal?
Because it's unreasonable to make assumptions on when the material will be disposed of?
heck, lets force them to make everything strictly either recyclable or biodegradable.
And at the same time we can completely eliminate that annoying "economy" thing at the same time! WOOHOO! Who the hell needs a job anyway?
Economically incentivize them to make useful, recyclable or biodegradable packaging.
That's fine by me. And it's being done -- largely by corporations without legislation requiring them to simply because it's cost effective now (didn't used to be) to use recycled/recyclable materials and it's a good PR win. There are still non-recyclable packaging materials being used in areas where it's not feasible to do otherwise. Nothing's available to replace styrofoam for large electronics shipping for instance. But the amount of styrofoam being used per package has significantly decreased over the past two decades.
Why do we continue giving corporations all the desireable rights of individuals, but deny them any of the responsibilities?
By and large we don't. Just because you don't have all the facts doesn't make it true.
In the US, generally speaking, the trash is the property of the trash company the moment it's put out at the curb.
You sure about that? I believe it's actually public property between the time you place it on the curb and it's picked up by the garbage company. That's why things like dumpster diving are legal, and do not require a search warrant if done by the police.
Even in the US there are people who will go scavenging for trash... they know the garbage routes and hit them before the garbage company does. When my father passed away we (my siblings and I) went through the house with a fine toothed comb a few weeks later to discard stuff. We wound up putting around 3-4 pickup loads of garbage out on the curb (the house is on a cul-de-sac). Someone came by in a pickup truck on garbage day and picked through it looking for anything of "value". It's apparantly fairly common place.
BTW, this is why you should invest in a good cross cut or confetti shredder to destroy important documents -- anything with your social, credit card numbers (even partials), etc. While certainly not a leading method of identity theft, it's still a possibility that's pretty well eliminated by a decent shred.
Having to enter registration keys is all very nice and not so much of a hassle except why aren't they printed on the fucking cd's.
Because it's awfully difficult to read the CD key while it's spinning around in the drive?
Although it'd be nice if it were printed on both the case and the CD, for the eventuality of losing or misplacing the case/docs.
Pretty well agree with you... I still buy and play new games, and deal with having to swap CDs and whatnot, but it pisses me off. I'm always glad to see a patch a few months down the line that removed the CD key check. Just wish more developers would do that.
The one in Los Alamos does that, while the Japanese one predicts weather.
Well they both do a good bit more than that... the project list for the Japanese one is really quite nifty (and I'm sure I could find an equivalent list for Los Alamos if I was sufficiently interested), and includes non-weather related research as well. Including nuclear energy research (not weapons related, but medical/energy/manufacturing).
As for Los Alamos -- the primary reason isn't to build bigger weapons, but to ensure that the ones that still exist are safe and usable. It'd really suck if the original design for some of the nuclear warheads was faulty and some component degenerated allowing the uranium to reach critical mass while still in strage (IIRC, not possible with h-bombs since they require an explosive charge to be compressed into critical mass -- there's not enough material there to cook off otherwise). It'd suck almost as much if the weapon was used and was faulty -- instead of the explosion intended you'd get a low yield detonation and one hell of a lot of dirty particulate -- effectively a high yield dirty bomb. No, I don't want to see nukes used ever again, nor does any other rational thinker, but if you're in a situation such that they must be used then they damn well better do the job right. A rather twisted look at it, but the dangers of having a dirty bomb of that size explode are rather catastrophic.
Hell, IIRC, they're even doing research as to how to dispose of the weapons safely... a lot of the nukes that both the US and the ex-USSR are decomissioning date back to the 50's and 60's. We don't really know how the materials have degraded over that time period, which makes disassembly dangerous as well.
I'm not going to argue that the Los Alamos simulator is serving a nobler purpose -- it isn't. But it's a better option than detonating old nukes -- even underground -- in order to do the same research. And that research does need to be done, sadly.
Believe so. I've most often experienced this with MS VC++ though, and it's a PITA to setup to issue all warnings (not to mention that doing so causes a few bazillion to issue from MSFC). Yet another reason I prefer coding for Unix.
Of course, now I'm in a different position... AIX is so fucked up that we can't even use a debugger (at least not dbx or gdb -- they both core), and we can't compile with optimizations on because our hardware is so slow (a P3-400 running RH7.3 compiles the codebase in roughly half the time in debug mode). Yes, we're fighting to get some cheap Linux hardware in to do development on. Blech.
There's also the issue that under some compilers there are different things that occur when you compile in debug mode and when you compile in "release" mode.
The most common one I've seen is that debug mode will automatically initialize variables to a known value (usually 0), while that's not done in release mode. This makes finding bugs that are exposed by this particularly fun to find (the most common issues are counters or pointers that are never initialized -- in debug they'll be nicely set to 0 or NULL, while in release they're filled with random values).
I don't know that this is an issue with OO.o... just more of a generalized issue that affects many programs. Realistically, I blame the compiler for doing too much when in debug mode.
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I certainly wouldn't recommend it for a business, and I wouldn't do it myself -- not because I'm so worried about failures or incompatibilities but because $3500 is about $2500 more than I'm willing to spend on a PC nowadays -- but it's out there for those willing to do it. If you drop the CPU's to dual 244's then you can get OEM support in that price range.
show me ONE x86 compatible PC that beats a Dual-G5 machine at the same price point
Well, I thought the Polystation was, but I can't find whatever freaking model was used. The Polystation 2020 can't be configured with Opteron 246's. Whatever.
So I built one out from Newegg.com -- Dual Opteron 246 w/ MSI motherboard, full tower case (Antec Sonata), 380W PS, second fan, 1GB ECC registered PC-3200 memory (dual Corsair sticks), 160GB Samsung HD, Pioneer DVD+-RW/CD-RW, floppy, cheapo mouse and keyboard, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro w/ 128MB of memory, XP Pro.
Honestly, given that the MB is $450 and the CPU's are $800 ea. I didn't think I'd make the $3500 price point. And I didn't. It was only $3200 + shipping (an additonal $29 to my state).
Obviously you won't find such a system pre-assembled from an OEM for that price point. I won't question that. But it is doable if you don't need the OEM support, and I'd bet that the Opteron system will fall to $3500 from a major OEM by the end of the year. I doubt Apple will reduce the price anytime soon though.
The extra graphics memory may have had some kind of effect on the Quake III results, especially at the higher resolution of 1600x1200.
Well, I discounted the Q3A results anyway as utterly and completely meaningless -- as much as, if not more so than, the Word results. That said, it shouldn't have any affect -- Q3A was designed for 32MB cards. Benchmarking on the same platform, varying only the graphics card, shows equal (or worse) performance once you exceed 64MB of video RAM (depends on the card obviously, but often the larger memory sizes on the same chipset use slower RAM for price point and heat reasons).
And you're correct -- the G5 isn't lousy. Too strong a term on my behalf. But I do think the AMD64 chips (Athlon 64, Athlon FX, Opteron) give better price/performance ratios. As usual, however, what you should buy depends mostly on what you need to do, followed by what OS you want to run.
Oh, and I didn't mention that most of th PC's had double the graphics memory
Which affected what, exactly?
and had RAID as their primary storage.
The Opteron didn't. Many of the other systems did, but excepting the incredibly inane Word benchmark it doesn't appear to have affected anything (as to be expected). It's not like they were playing with any really huge files -- the 150 MB Photoshop test can be held entirely in memory after all.
As best I can tell they bought these systems with the criteria of having them all priced similarly -- right about $3500 (excepting the single CPU Apple system). Even the dual Opteron system is priced at that (check Polywell's site -- it's not listed in the article, showing just how top notch the journalism is a PC World). Your complaints about the other systems having more video memory, RAID, et. al. are just further proof of how insanely overpriced Apples are.
Were most of the benchmarks bullshit? Yeah. Most certainly. Is Apple's G5 vastly faster than the competiton? Nope. No way. In fact, it's probably slower than the AMD64 chips at most tasks. The SpecInt and SpecFP benchmarks that are currently available certainly don't make the G5 look like a speed demon. And when you factor in the price point, the G5 is looking lousier and lousier.
Harder to quantify = "Manager is without a clue about the technology."
You can read it that way, and it is that way sometimes, but realistically you can't tell me (me being a fellow coder, not a manager) that cleaning up the code will definitively improve release schedules in the future. If it's code that's crufty, but in a library that you merely call and don't have to modify then what difference does it make? If you never end up adding features to it then clearly there was no value add. If you don't revisit the code for another 6 months then what are the odds that you won't find it crufty at that point and want to revamp it again?
Honestly, the best way to deal with this kind of thing is to build the code revamp into estimates for new features. If you're going to have to play around in the code anyway then you may as well build in the time to clean it up. If it's a revamp of the entire codebase you're obviously screwed -- you should've done a better job in the first place -- but if it's a subsection then you can probably get away with doing it. Then it's up to the company to decide whether or not it's worth the time for that particular feature. Don't mention that you're cleaning up things; consider it a part of the job. It probably is. Don't budge on your estimate either.
Of course, that works best on smaller teams where the lead architect knows what the hell is going on and can provide a single front to project management. If you don't have a small enough team for that to occur, then you're probably screwed anyway.
Aside from the Comeau compiler, you have Microsoft's, Intel's, IBM's, and G++.
I believe that MS VC++ 7.0 (or whatever it's marketed under now) and G++ are the most compliant of the bunch. IBM's compiler may be standard, but their linker is anything but -- thanks to it we can't use dbx or gdb on our code base (both simply core either while loading the core image or when you do a "where"; IBM's dbx occasionally works but never gives proper symbol names and setting break points is impossible). I don't have any experience w/ Intel's compiler so I can't say there. HP's compiler is abysmal.
One interesting place to look at compatibility is the Boost library -- Boost is a rather large C++ library being developed by some of the big names in C++ that may wind up in the next standard -- and how well it compiles on various platforms and compilers. Check out the compiler status page. It's certainly not a definitive test of what is and is not standard, but it's a data point.
You're certainly correct in that C++ compilers and their STL libraries have come very far in the past couple of years. One of the worst (Microsoft) is now one of the best -- largely due to them hiring a project lead that's a STL advocate.
You can't discover that "wow, this legacy code is crap," throw the offending chunks away and write something that works correctly and is more stable and/or secure.
That's because there are tradeoffs in everything... if you've been told to "clean up the codebase", take a bit to look at the codebase, and tell your manager that it's going to take X amount of time to do that the manager has to decide whether or not it's worth the time to do so -- since otherwise your time could be spent doing other things. And odds are the cleaning up isn't going to show an immediate return to the company. Of course, there are other plusses to cleaning up code -- like doing it right may mean that you can implement future features in less time -- but those are harder to quantify.
Any large project -- be it OSS or closed source -- has to deal with these issues in one way or another. Sure... in OSS anyone (in theory) can decide to go off and clean up the code base. But unless it's done with the input from the team then that effort may be for naught -- unless you're communicating structural changes then merging the two code bases may prove impossible (since new features/bugfixes will have diverged the codebase), the rest of the team may not feel comfortable with the new structure as they are with the old (which is part of a larger issue -- if anyone feels like they "own" parts of the code then they may get offended if you say it's crap and rewrite it entirely -- which is one reason why code ownership is bad), or other issues. If you do do it with the blessing of the team, it still has to be done in a reasonable amount of time for it to be worthwhile -- otherwise the code will either diverge too far or the project will stagnate while waiting on the rewrite.
And, of course, any time you rewrite you run the risk (read: certainty) that you'll introduce new bugs in known, working code.
Open source projects are freed from the time == money constraint if they have no commercial interests whatsoever, but that isn't to say that time becomes free. It's just that it's not necessarily an overriding factor. (Oh, and it's not one at all companies either -- that's entirely up to your manager and the structure of project management; but the more rigorous the framework of management the more likely it is be one).
Finally I have some hard evidence for clients who keep wasting my time asking me to support SMB on my network
/.'er who makes a statement without any data to back it up. I'd print that post out and hand it to everyone who asks you to support SMB. With proof like that they won't ever think of questioning you again.
Wow, that's certainly damning evidence. A post from some random
What are the differences between Samba and NFS security-wise? I need one more argument to my arsenal.
Ok. If you like having a largely insecure network that is extremely difficult to administer and has questionable reliability then your best bet is NFS.
On the other hand, if you'd like a wide selection of permissions on directories, users, and files, along with relatively easy and logical administration as well as high reliability (at least as far as networked file systems are concerned) then you should go with SMB.
Frankly, if I was a "client" and had to deal with you I'd either go to your boss to have your ass canned (if your "clients" are in fact coworkers) or simply move by business to someone who actually wanted to give me service for my money (if your clients are actually clients).
Oh, and before you even think of saying how I'm a MS lackey, I'm a Unix coder. There's SMB running around our network at work, but I pretty much never use it.
At least this post reminded me of the , which I hadn't read in a few weeks. Each element gets its own short story, which vary in quality wildly and relation to the subject matter. I'd say the first third of the table or so is worthwhile -- Mr. Swanwick struggled toward the end of the table though.
About the only one I'd recommend staying away from is arsenic... I've managed to block most of the memories of that story now.... ick.
less monitors (to a minimum of one, obviously), more virtual desktops.
The two are not exclusive, nor do they replace one another.
And, frankly, this says little about virtual desktops and considerably more about your coworkers work habits. It also says absolutely nothing about Windows vs Linux, since there are tons of virtual desktop managers for Windows -- including my preferred one DeskWin. It's even GPL.
Virtual desktops are great when you can hide apps that you don't need to look at often, or can segment your work completely into independant groups. But it breaks down quickly when you need to work on things between two different desktops -- the time spent switching back and forth is a huge waste.
Multiple monitors solve that issue entirely, since it's simple to see two completely different desktops at once. Cut 'n' paste does not do the trick with a lot of these kinds of things, while having two monitors does.
Your coworkers maximixing every window is probably what's screwing them the most. If you have to have 3 windows, only have 2 monitors, and want everything maximized then you're not much better off than one monitor. They're not segmenting the work well.
I'm glad they eventually learned their lesson, but I'm with a lot of folks here on /. After being ripped off by Intuit once, why should I go back?
If Intuit had the only decent tax software out there then I (and probably many others) would go back. But Intuit did this at a time when they face rather stiff competition from TaxCut and other software. I found TaxCut just as easy to use as TurboTax, not to mention slightly cheaper. It also did my taxes right the first time -- my wife cross checked things by doing them online w/ TurboTax and we spent a couple days figuring out why they came up with different numbers.
Oh, and as it turns out, TurboTax did it wrong. And fixing it required you to start over from scratch.
Yeah, I think I'll be sticking with TaxCut for the forseeable future.
Well, first off you need to cut all of your windows in half horizontally -- since you're effectively doubling your horizontal resolution if you go dual head.
Next, don't think of the two monitors as one large desktop. Of course you wouldn't want a single window spanning two monitors. Instead think of them as separate desktops (I believe this is how it generally works as well). If you've ever used a virtual desktop manager (I recommend DeskWin for Windows -- it's even GPL) then you're used to this. You certainly wouldn't split a window across different virtual desktops (some do support it, but it's generally a PITA and a negative "feature"). Put different groups of programs in different desktops. At work I use 3 virtual desktops -- one for coding, one for surfing, and one for email. It'd be awfully nice at times to have the coding and email windows up at the same time or even the coding and surfing.
I may go dual monitor at home now... just moved our office to a new room, put in new desks, and have two 19" monitors sitting around doing nothing. Both my wife's and my own system can support it, and it'd be a nice thing to have when working from home or maybe even when playing some games.
The new-look (not the brand-new-look) currency has a high-contrast, big, blocky, really-hard-to-miss printing of the denomination in one corner
The common counterfeiting scheme is to overlay the numbers on the corners of a five dollar bill with twenty's. Since virtually everyone only looks at the corners and not at the printed "Twenty Dollars" (which is, admittedly in two moderately obvious places) or at the front and back emblems, it's a pretty effective scam. And by the sounds of it, you'd get caught by it as well.
On the other hand, if the bill is color coded then good bloody luck doing the same thing.
Changing the size of the bills here would meet with such outrage as hasn't been seen since the Susan B. Anthony dollar.
I don't recall a ton of outrage over either dollar coin -- merely apathy. The only outrage I've had over the Sacajawea dollar is that the postal service machines will happily issue it, but generally don't accept it (I think my mug is in a database somewhere for abusing the machine after that incident).
It is humorous, however, at how irate people get about changes to the currency. Especially when they make it easier to use -- can you really argue that differently colored bills will be harder to use? Can you do the same for differently sized ones (presuming the sizes are still kept reasonable, with the current size as an upper limit)? If not, then what's the big deal?
No, my message (the first part at least) boils down to the reality that a misused tool, whether out of malice or ignorance, can do damage. The OP attempted to claim that space flight could do nothing but good, and that's just plain bullshit.
I didn't even state that the Chinese shouldn't have manned flight -- frankly I'm indifferent on the matter. Sure, I'd much rather see the US doing more in space, but I don't have any inherent objections to the Chinese (or Indians or whoever) doing it instead. The more the merrier -- as long as we all play nice. The same goes for nuclear power. Hell, the same goes for fire.
That, if something, is inane sophistry.
Then I suggest you study history more. Denying opponents critical advantages on the basis of right vs wrong has been a fundamental tenent of humanity for a few thousand years. It never works in the long run (unless you or another opponent of theirs manages to wipe them out), but that doesn't change reality.
And why is that? Developing space technology can only be a good thing.
Oh please. That's untrue. I can think of a number of ways that developing space technology can be bad -- lauching a man into orbit is essentially declaring that you have intercontinental ballistic missile technology (to some extent launching anything into orbit is, but putting a man up there means that you can carry a much larger payload and do so with high reliability -- both big points). You could also develop "space technology" toward the point of mass launchers which have the destruction potential of nuclear weapons with less radiation and other issues.
Is this the purpose behind China launching a man into orbit? I seriously doubt it. But blanket statements like that are silly. It's like saying that nuclear power is only a bad thing -- it's not the technology that is good or bad, it's the application there of. And pretty much any technology can be used for either.
If the US and Russia are too lazy to get off their collective asses and meet the challenge
Russia is a bit more concerned with how to feed itself and pay its people than with the space program. The US has other interests at the moment. Manned space programs are largely viewed as a black hole for public spending -- because while they do return benefits in the form of new technologies, they do so irregularly and with highly indirect benefits. It's unlikely that the manned space program will ever repay itself directly.
I'd like to see the human race off this single mudball as well, but inane sophistry like that doesn't help things.
Agreed, and they're willing to take down an entire industry to suit their needs. Ain't greed a fine thing?
Hopefully the courts will find against SCO... and perhaps (although unlikely) it will be determined that SCO and Canopus execs were involved in a variety of illegal businesses. I seriously doubt that though -- they're greedy, not stupid.
In Darl's contract, it states that he is in for a big payday if there are four consecutive quarters of profitability.
/.ers would have you believe.
Not really. If you want the skinny on the stock options and incentives in Darl's contract, go read this.
In short -- Darl got 100,000 options after one year with SCO (which should have been on or about June 27, 2003). There are another 300,000 options that are vesting at a rate of 8333/month for 3 years. If SCO has 4 profitable quarters then Darl gets another 50,000 shared immediately, followed by 150,000 a year later.
By those numbers, he'd be well advised to keep the company around for at least a year after securing the 4 quarter deal -- he'd nearly double the shares.
On top of that, executives can't just call their broker and issue a sell order. Any insider must register for the purchase or sale of shares with the SEC. If you look at the execs of any large, successful company you'll see many have share sale orders out months or years in advance -- because they have to rebalance their portfolios.
I'm not saying this isn't pump 'n' dump or a variation thereof, but it's not as simple as some of the more ignorant
You may be right... certainly Verant has pulled similar tricks in the past with EQ. The biggest I can recall is Fiery Avenger, which was supposed to be the ultimate weapon for Paladins (when it finally came out it was pretty darn good, but was quickly eclipsed by stuff in expansions). The quest to get it was allegedly in the game from the start, but nobody could find it. They eventually completely revamped the quest and it became doable... and all indicators are that it simply didn't exist prior to that.
Similar situations have abounded later on in EQ... IIRC, one of the big end zones in Luclin wasn't even accessible until a month or so prior to Planes of Power being released.
Kicked the crack over a year and a half ago, so I'm hardly up to date on the latest crap that Verant is pulling.
Gods man, if you're going to try and bash the thing at least use an example that works.
The first page is full of useful results. Yes, there are two links at the top that are commercial. There's a bunch down the side that are commercial too. And it's pretty damned obvious that none of them are what you're looking for.
But the rest of the page has exactly what you're looking for -- online sites that go through how to fix a leaky faucet step by step, often including illustrations.
Until they quit making assumptions on what you are trying to say/look for, Searching for things on the internet will always suck.
Uh... how long have you been playing on the net? I remember when Yahoo! first came out (I also remember well before it did) and it was revolutionary! If it was on the net you could find it easily using Yahoo!. Of course, that's because there was all of jack and shit online. As the net grew Yahoo! became rapidly less and less useful, due not only to their poor search engine, the inobvious paid-for results, but also because Yahoo! didn't make any assumptions and tried the most blindingly stupid searches.
Google, on the other hand, does make assumptions and most of the time it makes the right ones, even to the point of suggesting correct spelling or punctuation. That's pretty damned impressive.
Are some things hard to search for in Google? Sure. I find it difficult to search for reviews of stuff for instance -- because if you include the name/brand/identifier of an object you'll get inundated with places to buy the thing. Even if you add "review" it doesn't get much better. But how is Google supposed to guess if I want to research a purchase or if I want to make a purchase? Without some additional information, provided by me, it can't.
Honestly, if you think the Internet will improve when search engines make less assumptions then you don't have a bloody clue about how much data is out there or how much the assumptions are helping you currently.
Why is it that when I buy a mcdonalds lunch I pay for the lunch, then I (as a taxpayer) pay for the landfill their disposable (and questionably useful) materials fill up?
What on earth makes you think that you do?
McDonalds, as well as every other business out there, pays a disposal fee to a (often commercial, not public) garbage company. They generally pay by the pound since most companies dispose considerably larger amounts of stuff than individuals do.
Oh, and individuals pay for garbage disposal in most communities as well. I get a bimonthly bill as part of my water bill. If I want to dispose of large objects then I have two choices -- take them to the landfill myself and pay by the half-ton (minimum fee $25), or get stickers from the city showing that I've paid for disposal (did that last week to dispose of two bookcases that were heavily damaged by mildew).
If you don't get an explicit bill, you can bet it's bundled as part of your taxes. Most likely property taxes (and if you rent then that becomes part of your rental fees, you just don't see them). But large users still get to pay per pound.
Why not require huggies to pay the cost of disposal?
Ok. Sure. BTW, when you have the diaper service come change your "environmentally friendly" cloth diapers, make sure that they charge you for the costs of all the water and chemical usage. Most diaper services are considerably less earth friendly than disposable diapers. Your only option here is to use cloth diapers and wash them yourself, as part of a large load of laundry in an environmentally-friendly washer/dryer (front loading washer and humidity sensitive dryer).
Why not require Dell to pay for the cost of disposal?
Because it's unreasonable to make assumptions on when the material will be disposed of?
heck, lets force them to make everything strictly either recyclable or biodegradable.
And at the same time we can completely eliminate that annoying "economy" thing at the same time! WOOHOO! Who the hell needs a job anyway?
Economically incentivize them to make useful, recyclable or biodegradable packaging.
That's fine by me. And it's being done -- largely by corporations without legislation requiring them to simply because it's cost effective now (didn't used to be) to use recycled/recyclable materials and it's a good PR win. There are still non-recyclable packaging materials being used in areas where it's not feasible to do otherwise. Nothing's available to replace styrofoam for large electronics shipping for instance. But the amount of styrofoam being used per package has significantly decreased over the past two decades.
Why do we continue giving corporations all the desireable rights of individuals, but deny them any of the responsibilities?
By and large we don't. Just because you don't have all the facts doesn't make it true.
In the US, generally speaking, the trash is the property of the trash company the moment it's put out at the curb.
You sure about that? I believe it's actually public property between the time you place it on the curb and it's picked up by the garbage company. That's why things like dumpster diving are legal, and do not require a search warrant if done by the police.
Even in the US there are people who will go scavenging for trash... they know the garbage routes and hit them before the garbage company does. When my father passed away we (my siblings and I) went through the house with a fine toothed comb a few weeks later to discard stuff. We wound up putting around 3-4 pickup loads of garbage out on the curb (the house is on a cul-de-sac). Someone came by in a pickup truck on garbage day and picked through it looking for anything of "value". It's apparantly fairly common place.
BTW, this is why you should invest in a good cross cut or confetti shredder to destroy important documents -- anything with your social, credit card numbers (even partials), etc. While certainly not a leading method of identity theft, it's still a possibility that's pretty well eliminated by a decent shred.
Having to enter registration keys is all very nice and not so much of a hassle except why aren't they printed on the fucking cd's.
Because it's awfully difficult to read the CD key while it's spinning around in the drive?
Although it'd be nice if it were printed on both the case and the CD, for the eventuality of losing or misplacing the case/docs.
Pretty well agree with you... I still buy and play new games, and deal with having to swap CDs and whatnot, but it pisses me off. I'm always glad to see a patch a few months down the line that removed the CD key check. Just wish more developers would do that.
The one in Los Alamos does that, while the Japanese one predicts weather.
Well they both do a good bit more than that... the project list for the Japanese one is really quite nifty (and I'm sure I could find an equivalent list for Los Alamos if I was sufficiently interested), and includes non-weather related research as well. Including nuclear energy research (not weapons related, but medical/energy/manufacturing).
As for Los Alamos -- the primary reason isn't to build bigger weapons, but to ensure that the ones that still exist are safe and usable. It'd really suck if the original design for some of the nuclear warheads was faulty and some component degenerated allowing the uranium to reach critical mass while still in strage (IIRC, not possible with h-bombs since they require an explosive charge to be compressed into critical mass -- there's not enough material there to cook off otherwise). It'd suck almost as much if the weapon was used and was faulty -- instead of the explosion intended you'd get a low yield detonation and one hell of a lot of dirty particulate -- effectively a high yield dirty bomb. No, I don't want to see nukes used ever again, nor does any other rational thinker, but if you're in a situation such that they must be used then they damn well better do the job right. A rather twisted look at it, but the dangers of having a dirty bomb of that size explode are rather catastrophic.
Hell, IIRC, they're even doing research as to how to dispose of the weapons safely... a lot of the nukes that both the US and the ex-USSR are decomissioning date back to the 50's and 60's. We don't really know how the materials have degraded over that time period, which makes disassembly dangerous as well.
I'm not going to argue that the Los Alamos simulator is serving a nobler purpose -- it isn't. But it's a better option than detonating old nukes -- even underground -- in order to do the same research. And that research does need to be done, sadly.
Believe so. I've most often experienced this with MS VC++ though, and it's a PITA to setup to issue all warnings (not to mention that doing so causes a few bazillion to issue from MSFC). Yet another reason I prefer coding for Unix.
Of course, now I'm in a different position... AIX is so fucked up that we can't even use a debugger (at least not dbx or gdb -- they both core), and we can't compile with optimizations on because our hardware is so slow (a P3-400 running RH7.3 compiles the codebase in roughly half the time in debug mode). Yes, we're fighting to get some cheap Linux hardware in to do development on. Blech.
There's also the issue that under some compilers there are different things that occur when you compile in debug mode and when you compile in "release" mode.
The most common one I've seen is that debug mode will automatically initialize variables to a known value (usually 0), while that's not done in release mode. This makes finding bugs that are exposed by this particularly fun to find (the most common issues are counters or pointers that are never initialized -- in debug they'll be nicely set to 0 or NULL, while in release they're filled with random values).
I don't know that this is an issue with OO.o... just more of a generalized issue that affects many programs. Realistically, I blame the compiler for doing too much when in debug mode.