Did you notice how the protagonist lived
in a world of plenty and lacked for nothing
and was protected from the problems of life by
his corporate job and consumptive lifestyle?
Just like the Buddha.
Then he can't deal with it anymore because
his job exposes him to the fact of death (in
motorcar collisions). Just like the Buddha.
Then he visits the real world and has the experience of living with the sufferers with
disease, and then lives in poverty, and then
joins a cult, and then in meditation (sorry,
no Bodhi Tree) finds enlightenment.
Just like the Buddha.
And enlightenment means understanding a
message of non-consumerism, inner peace,
non-attachment, releasing the ego, right
livlyhood, &c, &c. It's a modern Buddhist
message for the Twentyfirst Century that
values working in a community and favors
simplicity, riding the bus, getting in touch
with nature, gardening, walking, running,
sports (probably even boxing), and taking risks for what you believe in and opposes corporate art, chain stores, status motorcars, manipulative advertising, brand identification, and a comfortable but meaningless life.
The only way it could be more Buddhist is by
including a pamphlet with the Four Noble Truths
with every ticket.
And great special effects, too. Good looking
cast, fine acting, drama, amazing costuming. I
don't agree with Buddhism but a message movie
this powerful and coherent and consistent and
plot driven and beautiful on the screen is a piece of magic. Furthermore, every scene is
there for a reason and the reason relates to the ultimate message -- not like a jigsaw puzzle
or a proof but like a little decoration that
matches the aesthetic of the whole.
It is by far the greatest movie ever made.
-Brian
And there are so many riffs and philosophies and movements referenced I may have missed some...
Personally, a monitor gives me a headache after a while.
Please consider -- for your own sake -- getting a flat panel LCD, upgrading to a 75Hz or 80Hz refresh capable CRT, or getting your glasses prescription updated. One of those three solutions solves the headache problem for 95% of users.
And a real headache is nothing to live with.
-Brian, who thanks science every day since they cured migranes.
In fact, there is no computer that can play a known perfect game of checkers. Chinook, the current computer checkers champion, fought several matches against the greatest human player, the late Dr. Tinsley, to draws. There is speculation that both of them eventually learned usually to play perfect games.
But no computer ever defeated the best human player, and now Dr. Tinsley is no longer with us and Chinook is the champion.
The best chess players that the entire neural paradigm can offer are not neural networks at all, but humans such as Kasparov. And these guys are now routinely beaten by conventional von-Neumann devices that simply carry out brute-force analyses of the board.
This bit is simply inaccurate. The best meat-based chess players like Kramnik, Anand, and Kasparov still win overwhelmingly high puls scores against even the best silicon chess computers on offer today.
It's hard for many folks with fath in thecnology to appreciate, but even an array of fast precessors with the best algorithms and extensive databases of every possible endgame position (with its best moves) and all known opening moves cannot score 50-50 against a
run of the mill super grandmaster (FIDE ELO 2600+). There are now nearly a hundred known super grandmasters.
The Deep Blue event involved Kasparov (who did not defend his "title" for almost six years and refused the official qualfied opponents certified by his own organization) trying new and untested techniques designed to lure computers into mistakes and failing spectacularly. But humans immediately pointed out conventional winning techniques he could have used if he weren't committed to proving that computers are simply no good.
IBM noticed this and immediately disassembled DB and never again consdiered holding a match against Kasparov out of fear that he would shape up and play like a regular human. That's because IBM is aware that there are dozens and dozens of humans who can wipe out DB alive today.
The returns to brute force are less and less as the search deepens and the possible moves multiply. Computers continue to make advances but those advances are slowing and when Moore's Law peters out and stops handing a few more rating points to the silicon every year, it is entirely possible that human players will still be able to defeat silicon.
That tension, the possibility that there may not be a computer world champion in our lifetimes, is the tension that places computer chess among the most interesting developments to watch. Maybe the first computer WC will be a true AI, or maybe there will never be a computer that beats meat chess players.
And the question of what combination of subtle evaluations of shapes of pieces and patterns of play, and brute force human grandmasters use to play chess is a fascinating topic with many different answaers from different GMs. One thing common to top players is that they can think at least fifteen or twenty moves deep (sometimes as many as sixty or more) in the middlegame. Humans probably are not doing this by pure brute force like the machines (who thinik 15 to 20 moves deep also) but through a constant evaluation and pruning at evry step of the search tree and massive parallelism collapsing possibilities together into single computations. That's a software problem more than a hardware problem, and it makes computer chess seem much more fascinating and difficult.
Do you know of any countries in the western world, other than the United States, that do not have laws that prohibit certain kinds of
political speech regarding Jews?
Do you know of any countries in the western
world that have not participated in, condoned, or acquiesed in atrocities against jews, other than the United States?
Nazism includes not just anti-semitism but also state censorship of ideas. Those of us who never again want to see the atrocities of the 1930's and 1940's understand that banning Nazis is the first step in bringing them or their kind to power.
Except that the Fahrenheit system is based on
the freezing point of water. Zero degrees F is
the lowest temperature at which water is liquid when saturated with sea salt.
And human body temperature is 100 degrees
warmer than 0. Now that we have better and more
exact calibration methods we've defined the scale with freezing and boiling of distilled water at one atmosphere with 32 degrees and 212 degrees being defined as 180 degrees apart (180 degrees means the exact opposite in plane geometry). The recalibration has resulted in human body temperaure being inconveniently adjusted to only 99 degrees F.
-Brian@all.your.base.mesaurements.are.belong.to. na ture
I bought a 20G HD to have enough space to install Linux and switch over (if the fonts weren't so bad, I'd believe that it was a pure gain).
In order to have dual boot on my complicated notebook configuration, I tried using GNU Parted to resize the old drive and then installed a sliver installation in the space thus freed for Slackware 7.1. Then I tar and gzipped the whole Windows98 installation and copied it over to my sister's desktop pc running cygwin sshd. (How can unix net tools be consistently more stable and faster than Windows versions even when they run on top of Windows? Nevertheless, it moves.)
So then I installed the new laptop drive and skeptically tar -zxvf'd the 1.4GB.tar.gz file to my Windows partition. Wine took some tweaking (lots of tweaking!) and then ran okay. Later I decided to switch over (no Quicktime4 for Linux says Apple! Ever.) to boot Windows for once.
I started by booting my old boot floppy (made at Win98 installation two years ago) and using the sys command to install a boot sector on my C:\\ partition. Then I rebooted to see how badly things would crash on a new and different size drive with all sorts of things in new places on the drive and all that. Everything worked fine. The first time. It was quite amazing.
I know that's standard for *nix but it's pretty good when a closed source hack can deal with that. I found soon that I need to set up the swapfile again for Windows, but that's been the only problem.
Of course, since my job is mostly web development and I don't like FPS games, I have little need for Windows and I've only run it for a couple of hours since initial install.
The Microsoft fonts are really nice. Before I installed them, Konquorer in K2.1 was basically unusable. Now it's just a little uglier than
IE5.5 (and missing the 5th generation functionality, but that will come soon at this pace).
The worst is that there are a few places where KDE still wants to render in scaled bitmap fonts -- totally unreadable. But mostly now it's good.
One of the unreadable bits is ironically the winehq.org FAQ page. I have to fire up iexplore under Wine to read that one (but what if it doesn't work and I need to RTFM...).
I'd sure like to see a True Type engine for XFree86 that worked like the Microsoft Windows engine. Then I'd like to see one that allowed me to adjust leading to my own preference. Nowadays fonts are the only thing that make me want to go back (I don't play FPSs; they make me carsick even at high FPSs -- ooh, TLA collision! -- RPGs and strategy for me please, Xboard! FreeCiv!).
So how do I get my xterms to have a black
background and white foreground? I'm used to
Putty windows with nice coloring but now that I
have an X server, I'm baffled. For now, I
have to start up xterms from the command line
of another xterm to get sane colors that don't
burn my retinas.
but there must be some default file I can set somewhere. The 100pp of documentation don't ever clearly say "you can put this text in that file and it will work." But I've tried putting
xterm*background: black
xterm*foreground: white
in.Xdefaults-localhost and that doesn't do
a thing.
I'd like to get rid of overstrike bolding, too.
Man is that ever a bad idea.
my favotire thing about X is that now it's reasonable to have two xterms side by side at 1024x768. I complain about regular size X fonts all the time, but the small fonts beat Windoze Courier New and Terminal easily. The sizes are set right and the fonts are readable.
If you want to hack or build software primarily (and hardware is interesting but secondary) then you should eschew the formal CS/CE classes and major entirely.
Study something that will broaden your mind and teach you new ways to think (yes, you can learn new ways still for decades -- your education is only beginning, if you keep your mind open). I would suggest Maths, Organic Chemistry, Philosophy, Economics, or History. I'd like to suggest literature but I'm afraid that has become just a political subject at many schools and you need to check carefully.
And don't just fill the major in those subjects -- they're not as challenging as CS/CE or Physics and many people much less smart than you need to graduate in them so the requirements are easy. Demand the hardest courses, the broadest and deepest work, connections with allied fields, the most difficult teachers, and do a senior research project of some scope. It's more work to be a top star, but otherwise you're just stagnating in the easy subjects, so do it.
An ECE/CS education is worthwhile especially for hardware people but software you mostly teach yourself even when you major in it. And you can afford a nice linux box and some digital circuit toys and analysis tools for less than the tuition for one semester at a state school, so you don't need the school's equipment (but you can probably get it just by asking).
And if you do want a hardware course or three, take it. Ask nicely the teacher, know the background from reading, and the dean will allow you in.
But I suppose you MUST take 4 semesters of calculus (1,2, multivar, and diffeyQ), 2 of physics (calc based), and linear passive circuits (usually the first EE circuits course) just to be liberally educated in the sciences, no matter what. Unless you already did that stuff in high school. After that, you can teach yourself software; read books and read others' code and program, program, program, program!
Anti-advertising utilities are the best thing to happen to the Internet.
They are the way that we will stop banner ads. Then we will have given the folks with millions sunk into this business an incentive to really promote micropayments (or millipayments to subscribe to a collection of sites, more likely). As long as they think mindless ad blather can make money, that's what we'll get.
When people pay for content, the content providers will really have an incentive to do good. It's like applying karma to the whole net.
The Wall Street Journal has been profitably charging for content since '95 or '96. They have a one-day (or is it one week?) subscription option on their site for a few dollars US. Also the yearly sub is about US$50. That's about what they get for the dead tree edition after overhead.
I don't think that slashdot could charge for content; maybe ads are the only way to go for Slash. But I'd be willing to pay to download, e.g. KDE2.1 on a fast line with no crowding. I'd even be willing to pay US$1 or US$2, which is about ten times what it would cost to provide the service. Likewise for RPM updates; the public servers are very slow and the downloads are big.
This will be a progessive and evolutionary process. There will be more and more minipayments, more subscription services (especialy as CNN or WashPost find that online content is a money loser with no reliable ad revenue), and more bandwidth guarantees out there as broadband, PayPal, and other technologies prosper or fail. And the system we get could be a combination of existing systems or something completely new.
I think that ad-blocking is great and will help promote some sort of realistic long term system for rewarding quality content. STop the ads and promote a sane net.
I wish I could stop the teevee ads, too. Why should I waste five miniutes on advertisments for unhealthful sugar water, expensive cheap shoes, and gigantic status motorcars every half hour on the teevee when I need only one minute to pee and get a glass of orange juice? It's insulting and a waste of my time.
How much would it cost to avoid the ads if everyone did it? Nothing, because I wouldn't have to pay he higher prices for things that pay for ad prices. Of course, it would cost more for me because the things on which general ad money is spent are all things I don't buy.
Targeted ads are another matter. Who can really be upset that Penguin is advertising hardware to the/.'ers? IT just makes sense.
Those will be a part of any future, because targeted advertising is a very good idea that won't go away no matter how irritating.
But my disorganized thesis here is just that the future will look different and maybe we will have more options. I hope those options will support better content. And I am certainly willing to pay a little for quality.
Borland did not own DBaseII, which was a dominant application. Borland bought DBaseIV
many years later after it had already started losing market chare to FoxPro and Paradox.
The Micros~1 unpublished APIs were never very useful. And they were always eventually published by someone else. Micros~1 even released the tools to scan their binaries for unpublished APIs in their SDKs.
Micros~1 access is worth $0 so "free" is the right price; I'm always disappointed when I find people using it. Paradox and DBase and StarSomething and Delphi are all available still and mostly cheaper.
I had access to a working Windows 95 installation over a year before the general public and NT 3.51 over two years before release.
And I'm jsut a run of the mill developer with no special relationship with MS. I just paid my US$300 to US$800 a year for my developer previews, multiplatform licenses, C++ updates and such.
Borland or Ashton-Tate did too.
-Brian@move.zag.for.US.Surpeme.Court.election.ju st ice
Now Utah has a whole load of programmers
available at cheap prices compared to Silicon
Valley, and it's not really much cheaper.
A lot of them want to live in LDS
(mormon) communities, which is why Novell and
Caldera and WP and so on all located in Utah Valley (not SLC), the most LDS place in the world
(90%+). I think the problem with Mr. Albertson is probably not that he can't find programmers, but that he doesn't like spending US$30 000 on a search and US$100 000 a year in wages, benefits, equipment, office rent, &c to have a programmer on staff. Even than, it's about 30% less costly than in Silicon Valley.
And like I said, the cost of living is not that
much cheaper (you'd give up 20% to 40% of your income to save US$500 to US$1500 a month in living expenses). And taxes are high, even higher than California for most citizens to support the corporate welfare for big industries and the USA's highest birthrate.
So the people who program in Orem/Provo are there beacuse they like it. Same for the sliver of industry in SLC where the main attraction is Skiing and the fantastic public domain federal lands. Money is not the key issue.
In fact, Utah is the most beautiful place on Earth and has some of the least crowded open spaces in the USA. Check out SUWA if you want to see it and how we're trying to save it.
Salt Lake City is very liberal and has a
small but reasonable club scene. SLC is
also less than 50% LDS and very diverse.
The morality police are in he southern suburbs
and in Utah Valley (90%+ LDS).
Most of the software development is a more than one hour commute south of SLC.
I think a breakup of Micros~1 is probably best for the shareholders. But it's not best for Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.
Remember the 1960s and 1970s conglomerates. Every exec wanted to run a bigger division of a bigger company so we saw consolidation everywhere. It turned out to be bad not just for quality and innovation, but for the profits of shareholders. In the 1980s many of them shrank or were broken up by leveraged buyouts. Well, LBOs require that the shareholders find a way to get more money for the broken up parts than the conglomerate execs were making with the huge whole. Part of the recovery from the stagnation of the 1970s was the fall of those big multi-industry firms and the rise of medium sized focused firms. And the computer industry propspered as just-in-time production and the integration of those firms was aided by IT.
Now we see Micros~1 is really two companies, Operating Systems and Applications. Micros~1 has made more money off the applications sold to the average Mac user than in OS plus applications sold to the avarage Wintel user for fifteen years now. In servers and applications, Micros~1 has been held back by the need to keep the desktop monopoly proprietary. Surely the server developers at Micros~1 would love to be developing on Linux or FreeBSD or Slowaris (I've been on both sides and I know that the desktop side of NT servers is a major hassle). The application developers want to run the latest IE and Active/.NET whatever on *nix and Macintosh machines, too. Why give up 15% of a multi-billion dollar market?
Remember the VC++4 Macintosh cross compiler that made Mac programs look just like MFC programs in Win95/NT3.51? When Word 6 was rejected under that piece of garbage, the application folks had a Mac specific port up their sleeves. The OS divison made them do something stupid and they were ready to stop.
Now consider the possibilites if the OS division is separated from the Applications division. Real OS innovation and a real chance to capture new markets will provide the application division with chances to grow. A small device strategy that doesn't revolve around some nasty WindozeCE thing will be a chance to really embed the world. And the industry will benefit along with Micros~1 Applications Co.
The OS division would be freed, too. The internals of NT are a fine OS and 9X is a piece of work but the application monopoly has been making those guys complascent. Where is the innovation? Without the management knowledge that applications make the money, MS/OS could really try to change our paradigm with a.NET the redefines the way data interoperates around the world. Sun tried with Java, but few people took up their slooow toolkit for client side because of a few bad design decisions (though it prospers as a server rapid development environment). There area lot of bright folks focusing their energy on creating incompatibilities to harness you to Windoze and MS Apps (do your really want Outlook Server???). What if those folks could try creating a real internet services environment focused on usability and creativity and interoperatbility and simplicity and transparency rather than simply extending the MS/OS monopoly? They really could change the world.
Micros~1 might be richer split. The shareholders would be better off with the opportunity to invest in the companty they want. The whole world would be better off with two Micros~1's.
But what about Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer? They would have to really work again and probably they would have to work against each other in different companies. Why should decabillionaires have to struggle like nimble little kids again with only half the power and prestige?
Of course, the secret ebenfit for Gates is the opportunity to prove that he can do it again at 40.
But it's not really an antitrust case; Micros~1 should be broken up beacuse it's good for the shareholders.
I run glibc-2.1.2 on linux. Stripped the lib
is about 1MB. For Oracle to insist on their own particular version of shared glibc to be installed as your system default in their multi-CD product is pathetic.
Oracle should just link statically. So shold most large commercial products that distribute as object code only with no source.
Whether it makes any sense for there to be commercial products which distribute only in binary is another matter. The copyright cannot be extended under law or even the US Constitution to cover a work whose details remain secret.
Copyright covers published work; trade secret law is an entirely different and weaker area. The US Constitution allows copyright only when intended to "promote the progress of science and useful arts". So there is really no room for closed cource intellectual property.
And only a Bush Supreme Court style fiasco could result in DCMA's anti-reverse-engineering provisions working.
I tried to run commercial SSH because it was the first SSH I found. It didn't work well. With any network delays it would log me out and it ran kind of unstable. The settings were a bit touchy also and I seem to recall that it wasn't easy to install on RHL6.1.
Then I tried OpenSSH. It worked like a charm, I get the source and the right to change it, nobody is going to try to make me pay a license fee for support I don't need, and it's rock solid.
Maybe Commercial SSH should try selling commercial support for OpenSSH instead of their own broken implementation. Too bad that the top notch quality and simple setup of OpenSSH will no tempt many to buy support.
Since SSH is a necessity of existence like air and water, it should just install and run instantly like telnet does on most unicies. OpenSSH is a community effort that can make it a reality. Commercial SSH seems to have a different set of goals that don't include ease of use.
-Brian
Re:The natural evolution of this...
on
License to Sit
·
· Score: 1
Pay toilets are part of the mayor's initiative to make newspaper rack space harder to get for free papers in San Francisco. In order to get the racks installed, the parisian manufacturer had to agree to put in for-pay public toilets.
The toilets are nice, but with the ADA requiring that EVERY toilet be wheelchair accessible (not just one at each stand) there has never been enough room to make the sytem work.
In the whole country of México most big bus stations have both free and pay toilets. They're both fine to use, but the pay ones have toilet paper (save NP$2 by bringing your own) and are cleaned somewhat more often.
I have a friend who supported himself for years by offering to come to a person's house and solve any computer problem he had. He had a lot of customers and a simple pricing plan -- US$50 if he could fix your problem and US$0 if he couldn't.
And there are more people every day who need that kind of support. More people are using computers now that the internet is a necessity and most of them are running Windoze. Windoze requires quite a bit of care and attention to work consistently and service will be a great offering point.
Quality hardware and installation support for systems and perhipherals should be a profitable point if you can persuade people that higher prices are worth it. But that's a hard road to go down. And if they were really willing to believe that, shouldn't they be buying Macintosh?
-Brian
I can't see it but my migranes dropped to about half as frequent (1/four months vs. 1/two months) when I switched to a LCD screen from 72Hx CRT.
If you've ever had a migrane you know that was US$2000 very, very well spent.
Even now that they're controllable with Imitrex (tm) (q.v.) it's worth it.
And fonts are very viewable at small sizes with a good renderer (Windoze) rather than AA -- even on a square pixel LCD.
-Brian
Slashdot Mirror
Did you notice how the protagonist lived in a world of plenty and lacked for nothing and was protected from the problems of life by his corporate job and consumptive lifestyle? Just like the Buddha.
Then he can't deal with it anymore because his job exposes him to the fact of death (in motorcar collisions). Just like the Buddha.
Then he visits the real world and has the experience of living with the sufferers with disease, and then lives in poverty, and then joins a cult, and then in meditation (sorry, no Bodhi Tree) finds enlightenment. Just like the Buddha.
And enlightenment means understanding a message of non-consumerism, inner peace, non-attachment, releasing the ego, right livlyhood, &c, &c. It's a modern Buddhist message for the Twentyfirst Century that values working in a community and favors simplicity, riding the bus, getting in touch with nature, gardening, walking, running, sports (probably even boxing), and taking risks for what you believe in and opposes corporate art, chain stores, status motorcars, manipulative advertising, brand identification, and a comfortable but meaningless life.
The only way it could be more Buddhist is by including a pamphlet with the Four Noble Truths with every ticket.
And great special effects, too. Good looking cast, fine acting, drama, amazing costuming. I don't agree with Buddhism but a message movie this powerful and coherent and consistent and plot driven and beautiful on the screen is a piece of magic. Furthermore, every scene is there for a reason and the reason relates to the ultimate message -- not like a jigsaw puzzle or a proof but like a little decoration that matches the aesthetic of the whole.
It is by far the greatest movie ever made.
-Brian
And there are so many riffs and philosophies and movements referenced I may have missed some...
C-octothorpe is Java without all the clean object oriented design inherited from SmallTalk or the flexibility of C++.
The .NET engine is just Java without guaranteed buffer and pointer safety from Pascal.
The .NET environment is simply a tool to extend the Desktop monopoly.
-Brian@will.soon.be.forced.to.use.C#.as.it.will. be .the.only.desktop.environment.out.there
Please consider -- for your own sake -- getting a flat panel LCD, upgrading to a 75Hz or 80Hz refresh capable CRT, or getting your glasses prescription updated. One of those three solutions solves the headache problem for 95% of users.
And a real headache is nothing to live with.
-Brian, who thanks science every day since they cured migranes.
But no computer ever defeated the best human player, and now Dr. Tinsley is no longer with us and Chinook is the champion.
-B. Earl
This bit is simply inaccurate. The best meat-based chess players like Kramnik, Anand, and Kasparov still win overwhelmingly high puls scores against even the best silicon chess computers on offer today.
It's hard for many folks with fath in thecnology to appreciate, but even an array of fast precessors with the best algorithms and extensive databases of every possible endgame position (with its best moves) and all known opening moves cannot score 50-50 against a run of the mill super grandmaster (FIDE ELO 2600+). There are now nearly a hundred known super grandmasters.
The Deep Blue event involved Kasparov (who did not defend his "title" for almost six years and refused the official qualfied opponents certified by his own organization) trying new and untested techniques designed to lure computers into mistakes and failing spectacularly. But humans immediately pointed out conventional winning techniques he could have used if he weren't committed to proving that computers are simply no good.
IBM noticed this and immediately disassembled DB and never again consdiered holding a match against Kasparov out of fear that he would shape up and play like a regular human. That's because IBM is aware that there are dozens and dozens of humans who can wipe out DB alive today.
The returns to brute force are less and less as the search deepens and the possible moves multiply. Computers continue to make advances but those advances are slowing and when Moore's Law peters out and stops handing a few more rating points to the silicon every year, it is entirely possible that human players will still be able to defeat silicon.
That tension, the possibility that there may not be a computer world champion in our lifetimes, is the tension that places computer chess among the most interesting developments to watch. Maybe the first computer WC will be a true AI, or maybe there will never be a computer that beats meat chess players.
And the question of what combination of subtle evaluations of shapes of pieces and patterns of play, and brute force human grandmasters use to play chess is a fascinating topic with many different answaers from different GMs. One thing common to top players is that they can think at least fifteen or twenty moves deep (sometimes as many as sixty or more) in the middlegame. Humans probably are not doing this by pure brute force like the machines (who thinik 15 to 20 moves deep also) but through a constant evaluation and pruning at evry step of the search tree and massive parallelism collapsing possibilities together into single computations. That's a software problem more than a hardware problem, and it makes computer chess seem much more fascinating and difficult.
-B. Earl
Do you know of any countries in the western world, other than the United States, that do not have laws that prohibit certain kinds of political speech regarding Jews?
Do you know of any countries in the western world that have not participated in, condoned, or acquiesed in atrocities against jews, other than the United States?
Nazism includes not just anti-semitism but also state censorship of ideas. Those of us who never again want to see the atrocities of the 1930's and 1940's understand that banning Nazis is the first step in bringing them or their kind to power.
-B. Earl Watkins
Except that the Fahrenheit system is based on the freezing point of water. Zero degrees F is the lowest temperature at which water is liquid when saturated with sea salt.
And human body temperature is 100 degrees warmer than 0. Now that we have better and more exact calibration methods we've defined the scale with freezing and boiling of distilled water at one atmosphere with 32 degrees and 212 degrees being defined as 180 degrees apart (180 degrees means the exact opposite in plane geometry). The recalibration has resulted in human body temperaure being inconveniently adjusted to only 99 degrees F.
-Brian@all.your.base.mesaurements.are.belong.to. na ture
In order to have dual boot on my complicated notebook configuration, I tried using GNU Parted to resize the old drive and then installed a sliver installation in the space thus freed for Slackware 7.1. Then I tar and gzipped the whole Windows98 installation and copied it over to my sister's desktop pc running cygwin sshd. (How can unix net tools be consistently more stable and faster than Windows versions even when they run on top of Windows? Nevertheless, it moves.)
So then I installed the new laptop drive and skeptically tar -zxvf'd the 1.4GB .tar.gz file to my Windows partition. Wine took some tweaking (lots of tweaking!) and then ran okay. Later I decided to switch over (no Quicktime4 for Linux says Apple! Ever.) to boot Windows for once.
I started by booting my old boot floppy (made at Win98 installation two years ago) and using the sys command to install a boot sector on my C:\\ partition. Then I rebooted to see how badly things would crash on a new and different size drive with all sorts of things in new places on the drive and all that. Everything worked fine. The first time. It was quite amazing.
I know that's standard for *nix but it's pretty good when a closed source hack can deal with that. I found soon that I need to set up the swapfile again for Windows, but that's been the only problem.
Of course, since my job is mostly web development and I don't like FPS games, I have little need for Windows and I've only run it for a couple of hours since initial install.
-B. Earl
The Microsoft fonts are really nice. Before I installed them, Konquorer in K2.1 was basically unusable. Now it's just a little uglier than IE5.5 (and missing the 5th generation functionality, but that will come soon at this pace). The worst is that there are a few places where KDE still wants to render in scaled bitmap fonts -- totally unreadable. But mostly now it's good. One of the unreadable bits is ironically the winehq.org FAQ page. I have to fire up iexplore under Wine to read that one (but what if it doesn't work and I need to RTFM...). I'd sure like to see a True Type engine for XFree86 that worked like the Microsoft Windows engine. Then I'd like to see one that allowed me to adjust leading to my own preference. Nowadays fonts are the only thing that make me want to go back (I don't play FPSs; they make me carsick even at high FPSs -- ooh, TLA collision! -- RPGs and strategy for me please, Xboard! FreeCiv!).
So how do I get my xterms to have a black background and white foreground? I'm used to Putty windows with nice coloring but now that I have an X server, I'm baffled. For now, I have to start up xterms from the command line of another xterm to get sane colors that don't burn my retinas.
but there must be some default file I can set somewhere. The 100pp of documentation don't ever clearly say "you can put this text in that file and it will work." But I've tried putting
in .Xdefaults-localhost and that doesn't do
a thing.
I'd like to get rid of overstrike bolding, too. Man is that ever a bad idea.
my favotire thing about X is that now it's reasonable to have two xterms side by side at 1024x768. I complain about regular size X fonts all the time, but the small fonts beat Windoze Courier New and Terminal easily. The sizes are set right and the fonts are readable.
Brian
If you want to hack or build software primarily (and hardware is interesting but secondary) then you should eschew the formal CS/CE classes and major entirely.
Study something that will broaden your mind and teach you new ways to think (yes, you can learn new ways still for decades -- your education is only beginning, if you keep your mind open). I would suggest Maths, Organic Chemistry, Philosophy, Economics, or History. I'd like to suggest literature but I'm afraid that has become just a political subject at many schools and you need to check carefully.
And don't just fill the major in those subjects -- they're not as challenging as CS/CE or Physics and many people much less smart than you need to graduate in them so the requirements are easy. Demand the hardest courses, the broadest and deepest work, connections with allied fields, the most difficult teachers, and do a senior research project of some scope. It's more work to be a top star, but otherwise you're just stagnating in the easy subjects, so do it.
An ECE/CS education is worthwhile especially for hardware people but software you mostly teach yourself even when you major in it. And you can afford a nice linux box and some digital circuit toys and analysis tools for less than the tuition for one semester at a state school, so you don't need the school's equipment (but you can probably get it just by asking).
And if you do want a hardware course or three, take it. Ask nicely the teacher, know the background from reading, and the dean will allow you in.
But I suppose you MUST take 4 semesters of calculus (1,2, multivar, and diffeyQ), 2 of physics (calc based), and linear passive circuits (usually the first EE circuits course) just to be liberally educated in the sciences, no matter what. Unless you already did that stuff in high school. After that, you can teach yourself software; read books and read others' code and program, program, program, program!
And learn to think.
-Brian
Anti-advertising utilities are the best thing to happen to the Internet.
They are the way that we will stop banner ads. Then we will have given the folks with millions sunk into this business an incentive to really promote micropayments (or millipayments to subscribe to a collection of sites, more likely). As long as they think mindless ad blather can make money, that's what we'll get.
When people pay for content, the content providers will really have an incentive to do good. It's like applying karma to the whole net.
-Brian
The Wall Street Journal has been profitably charging for content since '95 or '96. They have a one-day (or is it one week?) subscription option on their site for a few dollars US. Also the yearly sub is about US$50. That's about what they get for the dead tree edition after overhead.
I don't think that slashdot could charge for content; maybe ads are the only way to go for Slash. But I'd be willing to pay to download, e.g. KDE2.1 on a fast line with no crowding. I'd even be willing to pay US$1 or US$2, which is about ten times what it would cost to provide the service. Likewise for RPM updates; the public servers are very slow and the downloads are big.
This will be a progessive and evolutionary process. There will be more and more minipayments, more subscription services (especialy as CNN or WashPost find that online content is a money loser with no reliable ad revenue), and more bandwidth guarantees out there as broadband, PayPal, and other technologies prosper or fail. And the system we get could be a combination of existing systems or something completely new.
I think that ad-blocking is great and will help promote some sort of realistic long term system for rewarding quality content. STop the ads and promote a sane net.
I wish I could stop the teevee ads, too. Why should I waste five miniutes on advertisments for unhealthful sugar water, expensive cheap shoes, and gigantic status motorcars every half hour on the teevee when I need only one minute to pee and get a glass of orange juice? It's insulting and a waste of my time.
How much would it cost to avoid the ads if everyone did it? Nothing, because I wouldn't have to pay he higher prices for things that pay for ad prices. Of course, it would cost more for me because the things on which general ad money is spent are all things I don't buy.
Targeted ads are another matter. Who can really be upset that Penguin is advertising hardware to the /.'ers? IT just makes sense.
Those will be a part of any future, because targeted advertising is a very good idea that won't go away no matter how irritating.
But my disorganized thesis here is just that the future will look different and maybe we will have more options. I hope those options will support better content. And I am certainly willing to pay a little for quality.
-Brian
-Brian@move.zag.for.US.Surpeme.Court.election.ju st ice
Now Utah has a whole load of programmers available at cheap prices compared to Silicon Valley, and it's not really much cheaper.
A lot of them want to live in LDS (mormon) communities, which is why Novell and Caldera and WP and so on all located in Utah Valley (not SLC), the most LDS place in the world (90%+). I think the problem with Mr. Albertson is probably not that he can't find programmers, but that he doesn't like spending US$30 000 on a search and US$100 000 a year in wages, benefits, equipment, office rent, &c to have a programmer on staff. Even than, it's about 30% less costly than in Silicon Valley.
And like I said, the cost of living is not that much cheaper (you'd give up 20% to 40% of your income to save US$500 to US$1500 a month in living expenses). And taxes are high, even higher than California for most citizens to support the corporate welfare for big industries and the USA's highest birthrate.
So the people who program in Orem/Provo are there beacuse they like it. Same for the sliver of industry in SLC where the main attraction is Skiing and the fantastic public domain federal lands. Money is not the key issue.
In fact, Utah is the most beautiful place on Earth and has some of the least crowded open spaces in the USA. Check out SUWA if you want to see it and how we're trying to save it.
-Brian@slc
Salt Lake City is very liberal and has a small but reasonable club scene. SLC is also less than 50% LDS and very diverse. The morality police are in he southern suburbs and in Utah Valley (90%+ LDS).
Most of the software development is a more than one hour commute south of SLC.
-Brian@slc
Where can I download a good Windows Media player for Linux so that I can watch RedHat attack Micros~1?
-Brian
The way I recall it, Sun releases the source of their key operating system (Slowaris) to everyone with a license, almost like GPL.
And Sun supports open standards. They pour money into Java and OpenOffice and various other initiatives.
The hardware is expensive, sure, but it's really good, too.
And Sun's business model is the classic open model. They sell hardware and make money doing support for the software.
But I'll agree that I want to see an even more powerful Micros~1. I'd just like to see it in two or three pieces.
-Brian
I've used OpenOffice/StarOffice and M$ Office and I can tell you that Micros~1 Office is just not nearly as solid and well designed as SO/OO.
-Brian
I think a breakup of Micros~1 is probably best for the shareholders. But it's not best for Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.
Remember the 1960s and 1970s conglomerates. Every exec wanted to run a bigger division of a bigger company so we saw consolidation everywhere. It turned out to be bad not just for quality and innovation, but for the profits of shareholders. In the 1980s many of them shrank or were broken up by leveraged buyouts. Well, LBOs require that the shareholders find a way to get more money for the broken up parts than the conglomerate execs were making with the huge whole. Part of the recovery from the stagnation of the 1970s was the fall of those big multi-industry firms and the rise of medium sized focused firms. And the computer industry propspered as just-in-time production and the integration of those firms was aided by IT.
Now we see Micros~1 is really two companies, Operating Systems and Applications. Micros~1 has made more money off the applications sold to the average Mac user than in OS plus applications sold to the avarage Wintel user for fifteen years now. In servers and applications, Micros~1 has been held back by the need to keep the desktop monopoly proprietary. Surely the server developers at Micros~1 would love to be developing on Linux or FreeBSD or Slowaris (I've been on both sides and I know that the desktop side of NT servers is a major hassle). The application developers want to run the latest IE and Active/.NET whatever on *nix and Macintosh machines, too. Why give up 15% of a multi-billion dollar market?
Remember the VC++4 Macintosh cross compiler that made Mac programs look just like MFC programs in Win95/NT3.51? When Word 6 was rejected under that piece of garbage, the application folks had a Mac specific port up their sleeves. The OS divison made them do something stupid and they were ready to stop.
Now consider the possibilites if the OS division is separated from the Applications division. Real OS innovation and a real chance to capture new markets will provide the application division with chances to grow. A small device strategy that doesn't revolve around some nasty WindozeCE thing will be a chance to really embed the world. And the industry will benefit along with Micros~1 Applications Co.
The OS division would be freed, too. The internals of NT are a fine OS and 9X is a piece of work but the application monopoly has been making those guys complascent. Where is the innovation? Without the management knowledge that applications make the money, MS/OS could really try to change our paradigm with a .NET the redefines the way data interoperates around the world. Sun tried with Java, but few people took up their slooow toolkit for client side because of a few bad design decisions (though it prospers as a server rapid development environment). There area lot of bright folks focusing their energy on creating incompatibilities to harness you to Windoze and MS Apps (do your really want Outlook Server???). What if those folks could try creating a real internet services environment focused on usability and creativity and interoperatbility and simplicity and transparency rather than simply extending the MS/OS monopoly? They really could change the world.
Micros~1 might be richer split. The shareholders would be better off with the opportunity to invest in the companty they want. The whole world would be better off with two Micros~1's.
But what about Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer? They would have to really work again and probably they would have to work against each other in different companies. Why should decabillionaires have to struggle like nimble little kids again with only half the power and prestige?
Of course, the secret ebenfit for Gates is the opportunity to prove that he can do it again at 40.
But it's not really an antitrust case; Micros~1 should be broken up beacuse it's good for the shareholders.
-Brian
I run glibc-2.1.2 on linux. Stripped the lib is about 1MB. For Oracle to insist on their own particular version of shared glibc to be installed as your system default in their multi-CD product is pathetic.
Oracle should just link statically. So shold most large commercial products that distribute as object code only with no source.
Whether it makes any sense for there to be commercial products which distribute only in binary is another matter. The copyright cannot be extended under law or even the US Constitution to cover a work whose details remain secret.
Copyright covers published work; trade secret law is an entirely different and weaker area. The US Constitution allows copyright only when intended to "promote the progress of science and useful arts". So there is really no room for closed cource intellectual property.
And only a Bush Supreme Court style fiasco could result in DCMA's anti-reverse-engineering provisions working.
But we do have such a court...
-Brian
I tried to run commercial SSH because it was the first SSH I found. It didn't work well. With any network delays it would log me out and it ran kind of unstable. The settings were a bit touchy also and I seem to recall that it wasn't easy to install on RHL6.1.
Then I tried OpenSSH. It worked like a charm, I get the source and the right to change it, nobody is going to try to make me pay a license fee for support I don't need, and it's rock solid.
Maybe Commercial SSH should try selling commercial support for OpenSSH instead of their own broken implementation. Too bad that the top notch quality and simple setup of OpenSSH will no tempt many to buy support.
Since SSH is a necessity of existence like air and water, it should just install and run instantly like telnet does on most unicies. OpenSSH is a community effort that can make it a reality. Commercial SSH seems to have a different set of goals that don't include ease of use.
-Brian
Pay toilets are part of the mayor's initiative to make newspaper rack space harder to get for free papers in San Francisco. In order to get the racks installed, the parisian manufacturer had to agree to put in for-pay public toilets.
The toilets are nice, but with the ADA requiring that EVERY toilet be wheelchair accessible (not just one at each stand) there has never been enough room to make the sytem work.
In the whole country of México most big bus stations have both free and pay toilets. They're both fine to use, but the pay ones have toilet paper (save NP$2 by bringing your own) and are cleaned somewhat more often.
-Brian
Yes, support.
I have a friend who supported himself for years by offering to come to a person's house and solve any computer problem he had. He had a lot of customers and a simple pricing plan -- US$50 if he could fix your problem and US$0 if he couldn't.
And there are more people every day who need that kind of support. More people are using computers now that the internet is a necessity and most of them are running Windoze. Windoze requires quite a bit of care and attention to work consistently and service will be a great offering point.
Quality hardware and installation support for systems and perhipherals should be a profitable point if you can persuade people that higher prices are worth it. But that's a hard road to go down. And if they were really willing to believe that, shouldn't they be buying Macintosh? -Brian
Be-fan can see flicker at 85Hz.
I can't see it but my migranes dropped to about half as frequent (1/four months vs. 1/two months) when I switched to a LCD screen from 72Hx CRT. If you've ever had a migrane you know that was US$2000 very, very well spent.
Even now that they're controllable with Imitrex (tm) (q.v.) it's worth it.
And fonts are very viewable at small sizes with a good renderer (Windoze) rather than AA -- even on a square pixel LCD. -Brian