[Red Hat 7.2] can be bought for $48.95 at buy.com.
I noticed at that buy.com page, under the section where it says "customers who bought this product also bought", the first thing listed is Microsoft Visual Basic C++ Std 6.0. There are some confused or soon-to-be-disappointed people out there.
I got my bachelor's degree in computer science (in 1990), then worked for a computer company for about 2 years. It was an interesting company, but still, I could see that wasn't the career for me.
I thought for a while about what I wanted to do, and decided mathematical biology seemed interesting. I had no idea if I could make a living at it, but figured I could always fall back on my computer skills to get a job if necessary, so I might as well "pursue my dreams".
Many years later, I've got a master's and a PhD in applied math, my particular application being mathematical ecology. I decided I love the academic life, love teaching way more than I expected, and enjoy my area of research. Plus, I still get to play around with computers and build simulation programs. I'm still not quite sure I'll be able to make a living at it (I'm currently in a temporary job), but it has been worth it.
So my advice: try to have a backup plan you can fall back on if necessary (it'll help you worry less), but go for whatever interests you. The future is so unpredictable anyway, no matter how much you try to plan things. I can't tell you how many tiny "chance events" totally turned my life around over the years.
They said that at Thinking Machines they built a super fast computer, but it required a new way of thinking about things in order to program it.
That caught my eye too, for a couple of reasons. First, I think in a way, Thinking Machines was a victim of its own success. At first, people thought they were nuts building computers with 65,536 processors in them. Then, when people realized hey, that's actually pretty handy, suddenly there was pretty intense competition for a relatively small market.
Second, what was a "new way of thinking" in the late 80's and 90's when Thinking Machines was doing their stuff, may now have become the norm (or at least "a norm"). A lot more people now think about parallel processing. So you're right, the first guy to do something may very well get burned, and after burning, can watch everyone else succeed.
Third, I think Brewster's sound bite about TMC (Thinking Machines Corp) came off sounding like he was selling them short. I used TMC's Connection Machines, along with parallel machines from other companies (one called Masspar comes to mind). The TMC software was pretty slick in its day. One really great feature it had, which others lacked, was that in the beginning of your program, you specified a "virtual processor geometry", i.e. you told the system "I want to run this program on an array of 1000x2000 processors". The software would then figure out, oh, this machine only has 65536 processors, not 2 million, and it would map the 2 million virtual processors onto the 65536 physical processors, and the programmer didn't have to worry about doing that mapping. It sounds simple, but again, I used other big parallel machines at the time which couldn't do it, which made things a pain (writing a chunk of code in every programming to do that mapping myself). You could take your code which requested 2 million virtual processors, and run it on Connection Machines with different numbers of processors, and it would Just Work.
You know, for sites like the wayback machine, google groups, etc., it would be nice to have another option. Rather than contacting them and saying "please remove this old embarassing crap of mine from your database," it would be great if one could instead tell them "please suppress this stuff for the next 60 years" (and have the request carry forward to whoever inherits the project). That way, people (historians) could still see all my old stupid stuff, but not until I'm dead or too senile to care.
Great, now you're slashdotting pages from the past. Even more ironic, you're slashdotting slashdot itself from 5 years ago. This is why many civilizations ban time travel.
From John's description of the car:
The stereo is in a hideaway spot in the center of the car so when someone looks in, it's not there.
Yeah, people often break the window of a $100,000 car just to steal the stereo. I'm glad whoever buys this car won't have to worry about that. He better also make sure he doesn't leave a $20 bill lying out in the open on the dashboard.
My old Toshiba laptop came with a sticker on it that said "Made for Windows 95" (although I installed Linux on it). I took the sticker off, and stuck it on my toilet.
From the article: The Moya this... The Moya that...
Her name is Moya. I think The Crichton and The Aeryn would slap them upside the head for calling her The Moya all the time.
Anyway, like many others, I don't have very high hopes for the game, but hey, maybe we'll get lucky and it'll be good. At least the actors from the show are apparently doing the voices, there's some small consolation.
Slashdot editors posting an article about people who don't do adequate searches for prior things...
It would have been icing on the cake if this particular story had been submitted before, but this SciAm article is new. (Although the bustpatents web site has been mentioned before, more than a year ago.) Guess I'll have to post this again the next time this article appears on slashdot.
Right now you can save $9.50, it's only $20.49 over at buy.com (and I have not hidden any referrer ID in that link, so I don't get anything out of this). They've also got the season 1 Buffy DVD's for $29 ($11 off list price). I use buy.com a fair bit, and never had any trouble with them so far.
After all, I have been thinking of buying a home recently. I think it would do OK; the temperature where I live does stay between -70F and +130F, and there's generally less than 5 feet of water on the ground around here.
In Grand Theft Auto 3 on the PS2, as you're driving around in stolen cars, there's an SUV commercial on the radio sometimes that goes roughly "I live alone and commute to work by highway, so of course I need a vehicle that seats 12 and can drive across arctic tundra..." GTA3 rocks. They did so many things right in that game, e.g. totally nailing radio announcers and commercials.
As someone else mentioned, the first season of Buffy is also coming out on DVD. Also, a 20th anniversary edition of Tron is coming out, apparently with lots of extras. Dunno how that'll look after all these years; it's been quite a while since I saw it.
But I'm really waiting for the second season of Stargate on DVD. I got the first season, and it was very good, much better than the rough first season many shows have before they hit their stride. If you watched Stargate the movie and thought it was boring (I did), I recommend giving the series a chance. It's one of my favorite series now. You may find it a little jarring at first seeing Richard Dean Anderson ("McGuyver") running around with big guns though.:-)
...The only solution was to limit the total bandwidth for the dorms to 25Mb/s... The students were upset since their pipe was now slam full and they had trouble getting out, but the response basically was - stop running servers and stuff for music that suck up bandwidth and you'll be able to get on the Net to do the stuff you need to do.
Hmm, this relates to the other recent Slashdot article about people punishing others, and to the whole "tragedy of the commons" problem. If you've capped the bandwidth to the dorms as a whole, without identifying individuals who are hogging the pipe, what will happen? If everyone in the dorm decides to be "nice", then everyone will have fast 'net access. But someone is going to think "if I'm the only one who downloads a ton of stuff, it won't saturate the pipe." Except it won't be just one person who thinks that, so everyone in the dorm will be suffering with a full pipe and sluggish network connection, and the hogs will all be thinking "hey, those other people should lay off the filesharing apps!"
I'm curious if they'll settle down to always being up against the cap you've set (that's my bet), or if they will be collectively rational enough to curb their own behavior (ha!).
The maker of the Linux distribution that the Korean government is running this Hancom office suite under has made a $15 profit, as the Korean gov't bought one copy and then proceeded to legally make 119,999 copies of it for the rest of their machines.
Thanks for the tips; I was hoping someone would prove me wrong. I looked into this about 1.5 years ago and didn't find anything, and hadn't gone back searching again.
However: I installed dvipdfm, but found that it shifts included EPS files (after the first one) down so they overwrite the text. As for the info in the TeX FAQ, after trying various suggestions in it without success, it looks like I need to upgrade my version of Ghostscript. I'm running RH 6.2, and when I grabbed the RPM for Ghostscript 6.5, it failed on a whole pile of dependencies, so I guess I'll save that for a rainy weekend.
I also didn't know aobut epstopdf, and gave that a shot, and it worked beautifully (with pdflatex), so maybe I'll get in the habit of using that for now, until I get Ghostscript upgraded.
The NY Times had a cute little article about Amargosa Valley, which is apparently within sight of Yucca Mountain (although they point out you can see for 100 miles from Amargosa on a clear day, which is most days). They point out that the government is also looking at that area to set up a national training center for combating terrorism. They've been doing some kind of training there for several years.
By the way, I grew up in bumpkinville NY (house in a forest with the nearest neighbor about a mile away), but Amargosa Valley sounds pretty quiet even by my standards.
All in all, it sounds like quite an interesting place to live!:-)
Even on radio, at least locally, there are bits that sound like "man at the field" reports, but are in fact paid ads for a car dealer or grocer.
On one of our local radio stations in Ithaca NY, they often do broadcasts from a local store (a different one each time). Good lord, the amount of blatant whoring by the announcer is embarassing and painful to hear. I mean, they go on and on for 10 minutes about the so-called bargains at that particular location, and how great the stuff is, no matter what kind of trivial crap they're selling. There is no attempt to disguise it. The announcer always pretends to be totally thrilled about the fact that the first 50 people who shop there will get a free T-shirt or fridge magnet. Every time they do it, I wonder how that guy can look anyone in the face afterwards. (Sorry for the mini-rant, I've had that bottled up for a while.)
On the other hand, I suppose on the positive side you could say at least they aren't trying to disguise it.
I've been using LaTeX for about 13 years or so, and really like it, now that I'm mostly past the learning curve.:-) I use it to write my research papers, as well as course materials. For my classes, since most of my students use Windows (but I use Linux), I recently started using ps2pdf to generate PDF output (after running latex, then dvips) to put on the course web page. But the output looks really horrible on-screen, although it prints out OK.
Anyway, I just tried pdflatex, it looks much better. However, I often include EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) files in my LaTeX documents, and pdflatex can't deal with them. The docs for dvipdfm also seem to indicate that it can't deal with embedded EPS files. So I guess I'm still stuck with ps2pdf...
Heh... I bet someone has done that at some point in Unix history. I've been using Linux for 4 years, and Unix in general for about 15 years, so that's one mistake I won't make.
Although I do have 2 accounts on my desktop at home with the same UID. I have 2 versions of my user account, one with a home directory on the local disk, and one (which I usually use) with an NFS-mounted home directory. Once in a while I boot windows on my file server to play a game. When I do, I use the "local" version of my account on my desktop, and the files I make are all accessible from my "regular" account (the one with the NFS home directory) when I login under that one again, since the accounts have the same UID. It works well enough for me.
Re:Running binaries as root
on
Linux Virus Alert
·
· Score: 3, Funny
How many times have you run "make install" as root?
No longer. You guys have got me so paranoid about running things as root now, I made a new account called "safe" to safely install programs. Although I found I had to make the UID of that account be 0 in order for it to work correctly...
...aren't most films enjoyable, as long as you don't expect much from it?
No, no, a thousand times no. If you go watch Platform, even after I tell you it's the most worthless film I've ever seen in my life, and that I can't imagine how they could make such a crappy film even if they tried, that when it was over I wanted to scream "WHY?!?!" so loudly that the theater lights all exploded and plunged the audience back into darkness (but thankfully a darkness without that movie playing), and that whatever judges awarded it "multiple awards" and whoever decided to mention that fact in the print ads I saw should be strapped down and forced to watch the movie non-stop for a month and then see if they can remember who all of the characters in the movie are (much less have any idea about the motivations for anything that any of those characters do)... where was I? Oh yeah, go see Platform with low expectations and tell me if you enjoy it. And you have to tell me you enjoyed it without tears of pain streaming down your face from the pure psychological torture of uttering the name of that movie, together with the word "enjoyed", within the same 1-week period.
My girlfriend will never forgive me for bring her to see this movie.
(And after reading the short review on imdb.com and the overall rating, my only conclusion is that I was somehow sucked into a bizarro universe after seeing the movie... good lord, 5.9 out of 10? What does a movie have to do to earn a -5000 out of 10, if this one didn't?)
Phew, I guess I needed to get that off my chest, no matter how many karma points it costs...
networldmap.com says that slashdot.org (64.28.67.150) is in Franklin, New Hampshire. Don't tell me all this time "VA" stands for "New Hampshire" and I didn't know it?
(OK, slashdot apparently has their bandwidth handled by exodus.net, whose contact information is in California. But is the bandwidth really going through NH, or is this just another example of NetWorldMap being wrong? It correctly got my IP address through RoadRunner as being in Ithaca, NY.)
Slashdot Mirror
[Red Hat 7.2] can be bought for $48.95 at buy.com.
I noticed at that buy.com page, under the section where it says "customers who bought this product also bought", the first thing listed is Microsoft Visual Basic C++ Std 6.0. There are some confused or soon-to-be-disappointed people out there.
I got my bachelor's degree in computer science (in 1990), then worked for a computer company for about 2 years. It was an interesting company, but still, I could see that wasn't the career for me.
I thought for a while about what I wanted to do, and decided mathematical biology seemed interesting. I had no idea if I could make a living at it, but figured I could always fall back on my computer skills to get a job if necessary, so I might as well "pursue my dreams".
Many years later, I've got a master's and a PhD in applied math, my particular application being mathematical ecology. I decided I love the academic life, love teaching way more than I expected, and enjoy my area of research. Plus, I still get to play around with computers and build simulation programs. I'm still not quite sure I'll be able to make a living at it (I'm currently in a temporary job), but it has been worth it.
So my advice: try to have a backup plan you can fall back on if necessary (it'll help you worry less), but go for whatever interests you. The future is so unpredictable anyway, no matter how much you try to plan things. I can't tell you how many tiny "chance events" totally turned my life around over the years.
They said that at Thinking Machines they built a super fast computer, but it required a new way of thinking about things in order to program it.
That caught my eye too, for a couple of reasons. First, I think in a way, Thinking Machines was a victim of its own success. At first, people thought they were nuts building computers with 65,536 processors in them. Then, when people realized hey, that's actually pretty handy, suddenly there was pretty intense competition for a relatively small market.
Second, what was a "new way of thinking" in the late 80's and 90's when Thinking Machines was doing their stuff, may now have become the norm (or at least "a norm"). A lot more people now think about parallel processing. So you're right, the first guy to do something may very well get burned, and after burning, can watch everyone else succeed.
Third, I think Brewster's sound bite about TMC (Thinking Machines Corp) came off sounding like he was selling them short. I used TMC's Connection Machines, along with parallel machines from other companies (one called Masspar comes to mind). The TMC software was pretty slick in its day. One really great feature it had, which others lacked, was that in the beginning of your program, you specified a "virtual processor geometry", i.e. you told the system "I want to run this program on an array of 1000x2000 processors". The software would then figure out, oh, this machine only has 65536 processors, not 2 million, and it would map the 2 million virtual processors onto the 65536 physical processors, and the programmer didn't have to worry about doing that mapping. It sounds simple, but again, I used other big parallel machines at the time which couldn't do it, which made things a pain (writing a chunk of code in every programming to do that mapping myself). You could take your code which requested 2 million virtual processors, and run it on Connection Machines with different numbers of processors, and it would Just Work.
You know, for sites like the wayback machine, google groups, etc., it would be nice to have another option. Rather than contacting them and saying "please remove this old embarassing crap of mine from your database," it would be great if one could instead tell them "please suppress this stuff for the next 60 years" (and have the request carry forward to whoever inherits the project). That way, people (historians) could still see all my old stupid stuff, but not until I'm dead or too senile to care.
Great, now you're slashdotting pages from the past. Even more ironic, you're slashdotting slashdot itself from 5 years ago. This is why many civilizations ban time travel.
From John's description of the car:
The stereo is in a hideaway spot in the center of the car so when someone looks in, it's not there.
Yeah, people often break the window of a $100,000 car just to steal the stereo. I'm glad whoever buys this car won't have to worry about that. He better also make sure he doesn't leave a $20 bill lying out in the open on the dashboard.
My old Toshiba laptop came with a sticker on it that said "Made for Windows 95" (although I installed Linux on it). I took the sticker off, and stuck it on my toilet.
Right now, 92% of people say he's a moron. The other 8% of people who voted are morons.
So, have you heard? RedHat is thinking of buying AOL... Let the flames begin!
From the article: The Moya this... The Moya that...
Her name is Moya. I think The Crichton and The Aeryn would slap them upside the head for calling her The Moya all the time.
Anyway, like many others, I don't have very high hopes for the game, but hey, maybe we'll get lucky and it'll be good. At least the actors from the show are apparently doing the voices, there's some small consolation.
Slashdot editors posting an article about people who don't do adequate searches for prior things...
It would have been icing on the cake if this particular story had been submitted before, but this SciAm article is new. (Although the bustpatents web site has been mentioned before, more than a year ago.) Guess I'll have to post this again the next time this article appears on slashdot.
Right now you can save $9.50, it's only $20.49 over at buy.com (and I have not hidden any referrer ID in that link, so I don't get anything out of this). They've also got the season 1 Buffy DVD's for $29 ($11 off list price). I use buy.com a fair bit, and never had any trouble with them so far.
After all, I have been thinking of buying a home recently. I think it would do OK; the temperature where I live does stay between -70F and +130F, and there's generally less than 5 feet of water on the ground around here.
In Grand Theft Auto 3 on the PS2, as you're driving around in stolen cars, there's an SUV commercial on the radio sometimes that goes roughly "I live alone and commute to work by highway, so of course I need a vehicle that seats 12 and can drive across arctic tundra..." GTA3 rocks. They did so many things right in that game, e.g. totally nailing radio announcers and commercials.
As someone else mentioned, the first season of Buffy is also coming out on DVD. Also, a 20th anniversary edition of Tron is coming out, apparently with lots of extras. Dunno how that'll look after all these years; it's been quite a while since I saw it.
:-)
But I'm really waiting for the second season of Stargate on DVD. I got the first season, and it was very good, much better than the rough first season many shows have before they hit their stride. If you watched Stargate the movie and thought it was boring (I did), I recommend giving the series a chance. It's one of my favorite series now. You may find it a little jarring at first seeing Richard Dean Anderson ("McGuyver") running around with big guns though.
Hmm, this relates to the other recent Slashdot article about people punishing others, and to the whole "tragedy of the commons" problem. If you've capped the bandwidth to the dorms as a whole, without identifying individuals who are hogging the pipe, what will happen? If everyone in the dorm decides to be "nice", then everyone will have fast 'net access. But someone is going to think "if I'm the only one who downloads a ton of stuff, it won't saturate the pipe." Except it won't be just one person who thinks that, so everyone in the dorm will be suffering with a full pipe and sluggish network connection, and the hogs will all be thinking "hey, those other people should lay off the filesharing apps!"
I'm curious if they'll settle down to always being up against the cap you've set (that's my bet), or if they will be collectively rational enough to curb their own behavior (ha!).
The maker of the Linux distribution that the Korean government is running this Hancom office suite under has made a $15 profit, as the Korean gov't bought one copy and then proceeded to legally make 119,999 copies of it for the rest of their machines.
Thanks for the tips; I was hoping someone would prove me wrong. I looked into this about 1.5 years ago and didn't find anything, and hadn't gone back searching again.
However: I installed dvipdfm, but found that it shifts included EPS files (after the first one) down so they overwrite the text. As for the info in the TeX FAQ, after trying various suggestions in it without success, it looks like I need to upgrade my version of Ghostscript. I'm running RH 6.2, and when I grabbed the RPM for Ghostscript 6.5, it failed on a whole pile of dependencies, so I guess I'll save that for a rainy weekend.
I also didn't know aobut epstopdf, and gave that a shot, and it worked beautifully (with pdflatex), so maybe I'll get in the habit of using that for now, until I get Ghostscript upgraded.
The NY Times had a cute little article about Amargosa Valley, which is apparently within sight of Yucca Mountain (although they point out you can see for 100 miles from Amargosa on a clear day, which is most days). They point out that the government is also looking at that area to set up a national training center for combating terrorism. They've been doing some kind of training there for several years.
:-)
By the way, I grew up in bumpkinville NY (house in a forest with the nearest neighbor about a mile away), but Amargosa Valley sounds pretty quiet even by my standards.
All in all, it sounds like quite an interesting place to live!
Even on radio, at least locally, there are bits that sound like "man at the field" reports, but are in fact paid ads for a car dealer or grocer.
On one of our local radio stations in Ithaca NY, they often do broadcasts from a local store (a different one each time). Good lord, the amount of blatant whoring by the announcer is embarassing and painful to hear. I mean, they go on and on for 10 minutes about the so-called bargains at that particular location, and how great the stuff is, no matter what kind of trivial crap they're selling. There is no attempt to disguise it. The announcer always pretends to be totally thrilled about the fact that the first 50 people who shop there will get a free T-shirt or fridge magnet. Every time they do it, I wonder how that guy can look anyone in the face afterwards. (Sorry for the mini-rant, I've had that bottled up for a while.)
On the other hand, I suppose on the positive side you could say at least they aren't trying to disguise it.
I've been using LaTeX for about 13 years or so, and really like it, now that I'm mostly past the learning curve. :-) I use it to write my research papers, as well as course materials. For my classes, since most of my students use Windows (but I use Linux), I recently started using ps2pdf to generate PDF output (after running latex, then dvips) to put on the course web page. But the output looks really horrible on-screen, although it prints out OK.
Anyway, I just tried pdflatex, it looks much better. However, I often include EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) files in my LaTeX documents, and pdflatex can't deal with them. The docs for dvipdfm also seem to indicate that it can't deal with embedded EPS files. So I guess I'm still stuck with ps2pdf...
alright alright... you got me...
Heh... I bet someone has done that at some point in Unix history. I've been using Linux for 4 years, and Unix in general for about 15 years, so that's one mistake I won't make.
Although I do have 2 accounts on my desktop at home with the same UID. I have 2 versions of my user account, one with a home directory on the local disk, and one (which I usually use) with an NFS-mounted home directory. Once in a while I boot windows on my file server to play a game. When I do, I use the "local" version of my account on my desktop, and the files I make are all accessible from my "regular" account (the one with the NFS home directory) when I login under that one again, since the accounts have the same UID. It works well enough for me.
How many times have you run "make install" as root?
No longer. You guys have got me so paranoid about running things as root now, I made a new account called "safe" to safely install programs. Although I found I had to make the UID of that account be 0 in order for it to work correctly...
...aren't most films enjoyable, as long as you don't expect much from it?
No, no, a thousand times no. If you go watch Platform, even after I tell you it's the most worthless film I've ever seen in my life, and that I can't imagine how they could make such a crappy film even if they tried, that when it was over I wanted to scream "WHY?!?!" so loudly that the theater lights all exploded and plunged the audience back into darkness (but thankfully a darkness without that movie playing), and that whatever judges awarded it "multiple awards" and whoever decided to mention that fact in the print ads I saw should be strapped down and forced to watch the movie non-stop for a month and then see if they can remember who all of the characters in the movie are (much less have any idea about the motivations for anything that any of those characters do)... where was I? Oh yeah, go see Platform with low expectations and tell me if you enjoy it. And you have to tell me you enjoyed it without tears of pain streaming down your face from the pure psychological torture of uttering the name of that movie, together with the word "enjoyed", within the same 1-week period.
My girlfriend will never forgive me for bring her to see this movie.
(And after reading the short review on imdb.com and the overall rating, my only conclusion is that I was somehow sucked into a bizarro universe after seeing the movie... good lord, 5.9 out of 10? What does a movie have to do to earn a -5000 out of 10, if this one didn't?)
Phew, I guess I needed to get that off my chest, no matter how many karma points it costs...
networldmap.com says that slashdot.org (64.28.67.150) is in Franklin, New Hampshire. Don't tell me all this time "VA" stands for "New Hampshire" and I didn't know it?
(OK, slashdot apparently has their bandwidth handled by exodus.net, whose contact information is in California. But is the bandwidth really going through NH, or is this just another example of NetWorldMap being wrong? It correctly got my IP address through RoadRunner as being in Ithaca, NY.)