Umm, Miata? There are many used models available for as cheap as you want. Light, good handling and reliable (for a sports car). If it's underpowered for you there are aftermarket kits from companies like Flyin' Miata to pump up the power. These things are actively raced all over the country so there's plenty of experience and go fast parts available.
I remember my friend Kristin (one of the coolest and smartest people I've known) told me about this site that her friend who was a Slackware maintainer had recommended. She suggested that I should check it out.
I did check it out and as a result, like many others,/. was my daily go to site for over a decade.
I remember that slashdot was one of the few 'news' outlets that were able to keep serving data and updates during 9/11. I remember the countless memes, the flirtation with creating stories (hello John Katz) instead of links and comments and the bazillion polls (hello Cowboy Neal). But most of all I remember and think of/. as the place to go to find out what was really happening in the nerd world. There are many other sites that have followed that built on what you all started but I will always think of your cool little site as the foundation of all the nerd news sites out there.
There aren't many folks that will have such an impact on so many people doing something they love. Though I am sorry to see you go I wish you the best of luck with whatever adventure awaits you.
"1080i looks great on a 1080i CRT display, but you can't buy one that has a HDMI connector. It is an old standard that is on its way out."
Actually you can buy 1080i CRT displays with HDMI connectors. I have one (Sony) sitting in my living room that I bought less than a month ago. A cursory look at HD crt tv's on BestBuy.com seems to indicate that all of them have HDMI inputs.
Don't be too sure that tube televisions are out yet. There are still significant advantages to a CRT in picture quality/set longevity/price over flat panel technologies. Of course there are also size/weight/coolness disadvantages so as in most things there are trade offs.
I've been using PythonWin for a couple of years for windows python development. I like it but I find it crashes and fubar's windows alot when I'm doing compute or io intensive projects.
Yes the final product is limited by the originals. However, the originals are on at least 35mm film. Even 20 yr old film has *much* more resolution than NTSC/PAL video or even HD video.
An non-interlaced (1/30 sec) frame of NTSC video is roughly 640x400 or.25 megapixels and has the added nastiness of a severely limited color space. Color film from the seventies is likely good for 3-5 megapixels of resolution (say 2500x1600) with a much larger color space.
The restoration process will likely fix color casts, remove noise and remove dust and scratches from the scans. My main hope is that they did the whole restoration in full resolution and are downsampling for dvd and HD releases.
Another benefit of this is that having Lucas go through this process further legitimizes the process and helps fund the development of new tools for restoring other films.
This is a link to a pdf listing the new features of R3 and what is and is not included in the open source release. http://opensource.ca.com/projects/ingres / documents/product/ingresr3/A001811E.pdf
It seems (from the document) that it's a pretty powerful product. I would hope that they would take the time to set up at least the basis of a support community like IBM did with eclipse.
To me, a dedicated staff is one that is willing to be available after hours. Making them pay for their connectivity is asinine. I don't know what the job market is like in your area but I think this is a strong sign to look elsewhere.
Doubtless other posters will say that if they don't pay for it then you shouldn't use those devices/services for company work. My advise is that if it's your dime, drop the expensive blackberry for a cheap ($5-$10) a month pager, change your cell phone number and don't give the new one to your employer, and begin the job hunt.
You *can* write both readable and "fast enough" code in one pass. Any good programmer does it on a regular basis.
I agree completely. Unfortunately not all of the programmers I deal with are experienced enough to do this well. I want them to err on the side of readability but I don't want them to do stupid excruciatingly slow things for absolute readability.
I should have indicated in my post that only the first paragraph was in response to your post. The rest of it was a small mini-rant based on my experience in maintaining production apps. Perhaps I'm overly sensitive as I've just been through a pretty disasterous production outage due to someones attempt to speed up code that didn't need speeding up. When the usage pattern changed from what was originally specced it brought down the whole app (java GC thrashing).
But a lot of times your code is performance critical, or at least will be in the future. Code has this tendancy to stick around once it's actually working. Too often have I seen code that, when it was written, was not getting used a lot. It worked, so nobody thought anything of it. As they scaled the system up, that code became a major bottleneck and eventually somebody had to go back and optimize the hell out of it, or simply throw it out and rewrite it to be fast.
And if that bottleneck was clearly written it will likely be much easier to refactor/optimize. It's really hard without profiling to know which pieces of code will be the bottleneck with current usage and especially future usage. For any decently large program, optimizing the whole program is IMO a supreme waste of time and likely to make it late, brittle, and buggy.
If your code is performance critical now, write it simply, profile it's execution, fix the slow parts.
Don't spend alot of time optimizing code now that *might* be performance critical in the future. Chances are that it won't be or that the requirements will have changed enough so that the parts you spent all that time optimizing aren't the critical parts or need rewriting for functional changes anyway.
The strategy I've developed is as follows:
Make it work
Make it work right (fix the edge cases/unit tests)
If necessary, make it fast
It took me a long time to get over the notion that every program should be as efficient and fast as I could make it. But my code productivity, maintainability and correctness have improved noticably since I have.
Obligatory Quotes:
We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
- Donald Knuth
The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming.
-- C.A.R. Hoare
More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity.
- W.A. Wulf, A Case Against the GOTO
Rules of Optimization:
Rule 1: Don't do it.
Rule 2 (for experts only): Don't do it yet.
- Michael A. Jackson
I feel your pain. I was in the same boat a couple of weeks ago. I finally downloaded the Knoppix iso and did the hdinstall. Afterwards I went back with aptitude and got rid of the junk I didn't need.
Fortunately this wasn't on a critical box. I hope to move my other RH boxen over to a debian based distro soon. Good Luck.
If you are an amateur digital photographer then conversion speed may not be as important to you as it is to Mr. Galbraith. His site is for professional photographers. Folks that will, at times, takes thousands of photos in a week. For these people the speed of conversion is critical.
As an example, Micheal Reichman at the luminous landscape recently shot 1,700 frames (13 gig!) in less than four days. Each of those images has to be converted from raw format to a useable rgb format as well as the normal image editing processes (unsharp mask, levels, etc.). For Michael and for people like him, conversion and raw processing speed matters.
Benchmarks are only useful if they test something that is important or useful to you. This test was pretty well focused on the needs of digital photographers who have a high volume of images to process. If that's not you then no worries.
Hmm, perhaps (likely) the consensus of what is a compiler has changed since I was last writing them (circa 1990). I have always seen a program that parsed statements in one language and then generated the equivalent statements in another as a compiler. The fact that the languages roughly correspond to each other is not important for my definition.
The compiler definition I use is one I learned from my CS professor while taking compilers and advanced compilers. I wish I could find my dragon book for a more definitive answer..
I guess I'm not really trying to say that either you or the author is wrong (though my previous hastily written post above might appear to ) but that there are other educated people who would agree with the author.
Actually, a compiler is a program that translates code from one representation to another. The final representation does not have to be machine language. CFront, the original C++ compiler translated C++ code to (very ugly) C code. Java and various other language compilers translate to machine independant byte codes. Assemblers translate assembly code ( with macros, variables, etc. ) to machine code which makes them compilers. Regardless of what the book might say.
Umm, calculating the sales tax for all taxing jurisdictions in the US is not nearly as easy as looking up a zip code. Several issues come in to play here. First, tax jurisdiction boundaries do not correspond to zip codes. Second, there are many taxable categories of items that can be sold. Third, umpteen bajillion tax jurisdictions are constantly revising their tax code for unknown reasons. So, if you want to be in compliance with all state and local tax authorities and regulations you either hire a dedicated research staff to monitor taxation schedules or you buy software like Vertex (about $15,000/yr) which will do it for you.
Note that I am not a fan of Vertex but I work for a company that would rather not do online business than be perceived as a tax 'cheat'.
A rule of thumb for this might be... nothing to do with government is simple or easy.
The reason MySQL is so fast is that they made design decisions optimized for a read mostly database (Table level only locking, ISAM table structures, no transaction support, etc.). They also left out other 'key' RDBMS features (views, sub-selects, select into, foreign keys, stored procedures...).
If you can live without these features (and alot of website-web apps can) MySQL is a blazingly fast solution that scales reasonably well. However if you need any of the ACID stuff or if you have a high percentage of writes or deletes MySQL will absolutely suck. It is a special purpose tool and excels in doing the job it was designed for.
Oracle, MS SQL, Postgres, etc. are general purpose RDMS's and they are reasonably good at all aspects of database management but will rarely keep up with any narrowly focused app. I use MS SQL, MySQL and to a lesser degree Oracle all the time in my web development job. Each is appropriate for different clients depending on the clients individual needs (and the fatness of their wallet).
Given the chaos that is the net, it is going to be tough for the search engine creators/programmers to deal with all the badly coded dynamic pages and properly index them.
Why not have a standard (something like using meta tags) to increase the relevance of keyword searches on your site. Also, why not have a standard (say a robots.txt file http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/rob ots.html) to indicate which parts of your site to not index. Put these and any other hints/standards in a public place and make it widely known that if you want the traffic a search engine can generate for your site, adhere to these guidelines.
I would hope that people that would take the time to build a database backed dynamic web site would do the small amount of extra work to make sure that people could actually find the information through a search engine.
Given the chaos that is the net, it is going to be tough for the search engine creators/programmers to deal with all the badly coded dynamic pages and properly index them.
Why not have a standard (something like meta tags to enhance the search hits of your page content) to identify keywords for the page. Why not have a standard to indicate which parts of the site not to search (say a robots.txt file http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/rob ots.html) to indicate which parts of your site to not index. Put these and any other hints/standards in a public place and make it widely known that if you want the traffic a search engine can generate for your site, adhere to these guidelines.
The biggest job I have as an implementor of EC software is convincing the clients that the hard part of electronic commerce is not the web site or the technology that runs it.
The hard part of setting up an electronic business is all the infrastructure stuff that has to go on in the background (ie. Shipping/Warehousing, Order Tracking, Customer Service, Credit Card Fraud investigations, Sales Tax accounting and payment (which can be a nightmare). Putting up a web site that displays your catalog of products, allows people to order from that catalog and takes and processes their credit card info is comparitively easy. Also, most commercial "EC" software solutions do none of the backend processes. They hook into what you already have (your accounting software does have public api's/views right?) with custom code (written by the vendor's $$$ consultants) and they are far from free (sometimes into $ millions).
OK, now to the free, open source E-commerce software running on a free, open source web server. First, read the article at http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/ecommerce. html. This provides far more detail than I have time to write here and is the best reading I could recommend to someone considering purchasing commercial EC software. Second you can get the software (it's all source code, it's in TCL) at http://arsdigita.com/free-tools/shoppe. html. Third, you can see the software in action on an ancient solaris box at http://mitpress.mit.edu.
I learned most of the stuff that Philip espouses the hard way. He is certainly not humble but I would have killed for that kind of info 18 months ago when I busted my toe on each and every stumbling block associated with online commerce!
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, Miata? There are many used models available for as cheap as you want. Light, good handling and reliable (for a sports car). If it's underpowered for you there are aftermarket kits from companies like Flyin' Miata to pump up the power. These things are actively raced all over the country so there's plenty of experience and go fast parts available.
I remember my friend Kristin (one of the coolest and smartest people I've known) told me about this site that her friend who was a Slackware maintainer had recommended. She suggested that I should check it out.
I did check it out and as a result, like many others, /. was my daily go to site for over a decade.
I remember that slashdot was one of the few 'news' outlets that were able to keep serving data and updates during 9/11. I remember the countless memes, the flirtation with creating stories (hello John Katz) instead of links and comments and the bazillion polls (hello Cowboy Neal). But most of all I remember and think of /. as the place to go to find out what was really happening in the nerd world. There are many other sites that have followed that built on what you all started but I will always think of your cool little site as the foundation of all the nerd news sites out there.
There aren't many folks that will have such an impact on so many people doing something they love. Though I am sorry to see you go I wish you the best of luck with whatever adventure awaits you.
Peace.
"1080i looks great on a 1080i CRT display, but you can't buy one that has a HDMI connector. It is an old standard that is on its way out."
Actually you can buy 1080i CRT displays with HDMI connectors. I have one (Sony) sitting in my living room that I bought less than a month ago. A cursory look at HD crt tv's on BestBuy.com seems to indicate that all of them have HDMI inputs.
Don't be too sure that tube televisions are out yet. There are still significant advantages to a CRT in picture quality/set longevity/price over flat panel technologies. Of course there are also size/weight/coolness disadvantages so as in most things there are trade offs.
There's a list of editors at the python wiki site http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEditors/ but no indication of which ones are actively developed.
Yes the final product is limited by the originals.
.25 megapixels and has the added nastiness of a severely limited color space. Color film from the seventies is likely good for 3-5 megapixels of resolution (say 2500x1600) with a much larger color space.
However, the originals are on at least 35mm film. Even 20 yr old film has *much* more resolution than NTSC/PAL video or even HD video.
An non-interlaced (1/30 sec) frame of NTSC video is roughly 640x400 or
The restoration process will likely fix color casts, remove noise and remove dust and scratches from the scans. My main hope is that they did the whole restoration in full resolution and are downsampling for dvd and HD releases.
Another benefit of this is that having Lucas go through this process further legitimizes the process and helps fund the development of new tools for restoring other films.
This is a link to a pdf listing the new features of R3 and what is and is not included in the open source release.s / documents/product/ingresr3/A001811E.pdf
http://opensource.ca.com/projects/ingre
It seems (from the document) that it's a pretty powerful product. I would hope that they would take the time to set up at least the basis of a support community like IBM did with eclipse.
To me, a dedicated staff is one that is willing to be available after hours. Making them pay for their connectivity is asinine. I don't know what the job market is like in your area but I think this is a strong sign to look elsewhere.
Doubtless other posters will say that if they don't pay for it then you shouldn't use those devices/services for company work. My advise is that if it's your dime, drop the expensive blackberry for a cheap ($5-$10) a month pager, change your cell phone number and don't give the new one to your employer, and begin the job hunt.
I agree completely. Unfortunately not all of the programmers I deal with are experienced enough to do this well. I want them to err on the side of readability but I don't want them to do stupid excruciatingly slow things for absolute readability.
I should have indicated in my post that only the first paragraph was in response to your post. The rest of it was a small mini-rant based on my experience in maintaining production apps. Perhaps I'm overly sensitive as I've just been through a pretty disasterous production outage due to someones attempt to speed up code that didn't need speeding up. When the usage pattern changed from what was originally specced it brought down the whole app (java GC thrashing).
And if that bottleneck was clearly written it will likely be much easier to refactor/optimize. It's really hard without profiling to know which pieces of code will be the bottleneck with current usage and especially future usage. For any decently large program, optimizing the whole program is IMO a supreme waste of time and likely to make it late, brittle, and buggy.
If your code is performance critical now, write it simply, profile it's execution, fix the slow parts.
Don't spend alot of time optimizing code now that *might* be performance critical in the future. Chances are that it won't be or that the requirements will have changed enough so that the parts you spent all that time optimizing aren't the critical parts or need rewriting for functional changes anyway.
The strategy I've developed is as follows:
It took me a long time to get over the notion that every program should be as efficient and fast as I could make it. But my code productivity, maintainability and correctness have improved noticably since I have.
Obligatory Quotes:
We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.- Donald Knuth
The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming.
-- C.A.R. Hoare
More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity.
- W.A. Wulf, A Case Against the GOTO
Rules of Optimization:
Rule 1: Don't do it.
Rule 2 (for experts only): Don't do it yet.
- Michael A. Jackson
I feel your pain. I was in the same boat a couple of weeks ago. I finally downloaded the Knoppix iso and did the hdinstall. Afterwards I went back with aptitude and got rid of the junk I didn't need.
Fortunately this wasn't on a critical box. I hope to move my other RH boxen over to a debian based distro soon. Good Luck.
If you are an amateur digital photographer then conversion speed may not be as important to you as it is to Mr. Galbraith. His site is for professional photographers. Folks that will, at times, takes thousands of photos in a week. For these people the speed of conversion is critical.
As an example, Micheal Reichman at the luminous landscape recently shot 1,700 frames (13 gig!) in less than four days. Each of those images has to be converted from raw format to a useable rgb format as well as the normal image editing processes (unsharp mask, levels, etc.). For Michael and for people like him, conversion and raw processing speed matters.
Benchmarks are only useful if they test something that is important or useful to you. This test was pretty well focused on the needs of digital photographers who have a high volume of images to process. If that's not you then no worries.
Hmm, perhaps (likely) the consensus of what is a compiler has changed since I was last writing them (circa 1990). I have always seen a program that parsed statements in one language and then generated the equivalent statements in another as a compiler. The fact that the languages roughly correspond to each other is not important for my definition.
The compiler definition I use is one I learned from my CS professor while taking compilers and advanced compilers. I wish I could find my dragon book for a more definitive answer..
I guess I'm not really trying to say that either you or the author is wrong (though my previous hastily written post above might appear to ) but that there are other educated people who would agree with the author.
Cheers.
Actually, a compiler is a program that translates code from one representation to another. The final representation does not have to be machine language. CFront, the original C++ compiler translated C++ code to (very ugly) C code. Java and various other language compilers translate to machine independant byte codes. Assemblers translate assembly code ( with macros, variables, etc. ) to machine code which makes them compilers. Regardless of what the book might say.
Umm, calculating the sales tax for all taxing jurisdictions in the US is not nearly as easy as looking up a zip code. Several issues come in to play here. First, tax jurisdiction boundaries do not correspond to zip codes. Second, there are many taxable categories of items that can be sold. Third, umpteen bajillion tax jurisdictions are constantly revising their tax code for unknown reasons. So, if you want to be in compliance with all state and local tax authorities and regulations you either hire a dedicated research staff to monitor taxation schedules or you buy software like Vertex (about $15,000/yr) which will do it for you.
... nothing to do with government is simple or easy.
Note that I am not a fan of Vertex but I work for a company that would rather not do online business than be perceived as a tax 'cheat'.
A rule of thumb for this might be
The reason MySQL is so fast is that they made design decisions optimized for a read mostly database (Table level only locking, ISAM table structures, no transaction support, etc.). They also left out other 'key' RDBMS features (views, sub-selects, select into, foreign keys, stored procedures...).
If you can live without these features (and alot of website-web apps can) MySQL is a blazingly fast solution that scales reasonably well. However if you need any of the ACID stuff or if you have a high percentage of writes or deletes MySQL will absolutely suck. It is a special purpose tool and excels in doing the job it was designed for.
Oracle, MS SQL, Postgres, etc. are general purpose RDMS's and they are reasonably good at all aspects of database management but will rarely keep up with any narrowly focused app.
I use MS SQL, MySQL and to a lesser degree Oracle all the time in my web development job. Each is appropriate for different clients depending on the clients individual needs (and the fatness of their wallet).
Given the chaos that is the net, it is going to be tough for the search engine creators/programmers to deal with all the badly coded dynamic pages and properly index them.
b ots.html) to indicate which parts of your site to not index. Put these and any other hints/standards in a public place and make it widely known that if you want the traffic a search engine can generate for your site, adhere to these guidelines.
Why not have a standard (something like using meta tags) to increase the relevance of keyword searches on your site. Also, why not have a standard (say a robots.txt file http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/ro
I would hope that people that would take the time to build a database backed dynamic web site would do the small amount of extra work to make sure that people could actually find the information through a search engine.
Given the chaos that is the net, it is going to be tough for the search engine creators/programmers to deal with all the badly coded dynamic pages and properly index them.
b ots.html) to indicate which parts of your site to not index. Put these and any other hints/standards in a public place and make it widely known that if you want the traffic a search engine can generate for your site, adhere to these guidelines.
Why not have a standard (something like meta tags to enhance the search hits of your page content) to identify keywords for the page. Why not have a standard to indicate which parts of the site not to search (say a robots.txt file http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/ro
The biggest job I have as an implementor of EC software is convincing the clients that the hard part of electronic commerce is not the web site or the technology that runs it.
The hard part of setting up an electronic business is all the infrastructure stuff that has to go on in the background (ie. Shipping/Warehousing, Order Tracking, Customer Service, Credit Card Fraud investigations, Sales Tax accounting and payment (which can be a nightmare). Putting up a web site that displays your catalog of products, allows people to order from that catalog and takes and processes their credit card info is comparitively easy. Also, most commercial "EC" software solutions do none of the backend processes. They hook into what you already have (your accounting software does have public api's/views right?) with custom code (written by the vendor's $$$ consultants) and they are far from free (sometimes into $ millions).
OK, now to the free, open source E-commerce software running on a free, open source web server. First, read the article at http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/ecommerce. html. This provides far more detail than I have time to write here and is the best reading I could recommend to someone considering purchasing commercial EC software. Second you can get the software (it's all source code, it's in TCL) at http://arsdigita.com/free-tools/shoppe. html. Third, you can see the software in action on an ancient solaris box at http://mitpress.mit.edu.
I learned most of the stuff that Philip espouses the hard way. He is certainly not humble but I would have killed for that kind of info 18 months ago when I busted my toe on each and every stumbling block associated with online commerce!
Oh, and it all runs on Linux as well.