I have installed Linux on the Mac, several times. I ended up with a slow Linux box. I'd consider it again if I were to ever buy a laptop. I like the iBook, and it's a good balance of design, size, weight, battery life, and CPU power for the price. On the desktop, I'm not constrained by those concerns, and I go for the most CPU cycles for the money.
There are a lot of great reasons to use a PC, beyond just being familiar with it, and I've been a daily Mac user since '87. I own an Athlon-based beige box, a mini-itx PC, and a blue and white G3 Mac. I'm probably going to upgrade the Mac to a mini this week if they're in stock, but I still won't use it as my primary machine. It will be for my iWife.
Why? I'm still getting more CPU cycles for my $$$ on the PC platform, and I still prefer Linux to OSX. I have a beige box that I've held on to for the last seven years, and I've upgraded the CPU, motherboard, and memory painlessly and inexpensively every year. For about $200 and an hour with a screwdriver, I double my CPU speed every year. Most of what I do with a PC is rip CDs, so CPU counts. I also use Fritz 8, which is both CPU hungry and not available for the Mac. Thanks to Wine, Fritz is almost fully functional on Linux. It would be 100% functional if it weren't copy protected.
On the Linux end, I like running apt-get and having the latest and best Linux software available for free, without waiting for a keynote speech or dropping $100 at the Apple store. I even prefer gtkpod over iTunes. On the low end, my mini-ITX box is easier to administer from the command line, it was cheaper than any Apple offering ($300), and it's completely fanless.
I'm not an Apple hater. I've owned a Mac since '95, I learned C with ThinkC, and in the early 90s I spent about a year programming 68000 assembler. I just stopped using Mac as my desktop box in about '97 when Linux took off and 3D gaming became possible.
Why is /. promoting Paul Graham so heavily?
on
Good Bad Attitude
·
· Score: 1
I've read the last few Paul Graham links on/., and I'm already tired of his longwinded and useless generalizations. The last one was essentially flaming Java, and this one seems to be little more than American chest thumping. For example:
It is greatly to America's advantage that it is a congenial atmosphere for the right sort of unruliness-- that it is a home not just for the smart, but for smart-alecks.
If I remember right, the OS I'm using was created by a guy in Helsinki and followed up by an international effort (not involving Lisp). One of the best cracks in recent history was hacking DVD encryption, not by a God-fearing 'merican, but by a kid in one of those stifling socialist countries (also without the help of Lisp).
Can someone tell me why I should care about what Paul Graham has to say, or is he just another Katz? When can I get a button to filter him out?
For the record, I'm a US citizen, and I'm fond of Scheme, though I can't say I use it very often.
It wasn't clear to me at all. I'm not serializing or deserializing big object graphs, so the problem of multiple references in graphs didn't occur to me. I appreciate your explanation of the problem, and if it was stated this clearly anywhere in the javadocs, it would have saved me a lot of time with the profiler.
I ran into a fabulous memory leak just last week thanks to Sun. I wrote a client that was accepting messages and persisting them using ObjectOutputStream. I persisted about 40,000 HashMaps, and next thing, my client was using 200M. I wasn't building any lists of the messages, so I was stumped, and I broke out the profiler.
I was surprised to find that the ObjectOutputStream has a static HandleTable inside it that creates an entry for each HashMap that I put through, and it keeps a reference to each HashMap. I searched around, and this is a common problem that is not mentioned at all in the javadocs. You're supposed to reset
the ObjectOutputStream periodically to free up the HandleTable. I had assumed that reset was like InputStream's reset and never would have guessed that it had to do with Object caching in the stream.
How are advertisers going to narrowcast effectively if they don't know the gender of the kid? These keys are going to be a boon to target marketers. They'll be able to get the age, gender, school district, and past browsing history easily, and with a little cross-referencing, ethnicity and family income.
Foucault would probably point out that technologies of control have always been inflicted on children first, always for their safety and well being. Verisign's obvious goal in this is to breed a generation of Internet users that are accustomed to using an ID with a computer. While this generation comes of age, Verisign will probably partner with Microsoft and legislators to make Verisign-issued IDs mandatory start a computer, first for children, then for the rest of us. It's not that far-fetched, and it ties in well with DRM.
As for girls (or boys, for that matter) discussing their private lives online, a less cynical and profit/control motivated educator would explain that you just don't discuss those things online. Kids should understand that they are publishing when they're writing in a chat room, whether it's run by the school or Mattel, and anything you say can be stored, copied, and republished outside of the context you wrote it in. These keys would obviously not keep a malicious child from copying sensitive text from a gender "locked" discussion board, complete with IDs, and text messaging it to the rest of the class.
Two space shuttle disasters later we're reverting to Soviet-era technology to launch satellites, if not paying the Russians and Chinese outright to launch them.
I'd rather not have to use a Brita filter than give the NSA the ability to do
cat/dev/speech | grep -i bomb
The NSA should be forced to hold bake sales along with the Pentagon. A fat lot of good their intelligence gathering did here in New York three years ago.
Somebody mod the parent down. It's completely offtopic.
I'm a New Yorker and a protester who has appreciated past United for Peace and Justice efforts, I can assure you that they're paying more to the city to exercise constitutionally guaranteed rights than the RNC is paying for their publicity stunt.
The protesters don't owe the city anything. Bloomberg has done everything he can to shut down peaceful protest in the city. I've experienced it first hand. The biggest threat of violence at these rallies is always from the police.
The only agitators threating to shut down the subway and confuse bomb dogs are reporters at the Daily News. That story was entirely fabricated with the help of the NYPD.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of the posters here, including the parent, have a very superficial understanding of Java. There are "neat hacks" in Java, and B coders screw them up constantly and produce incredibly bad code.
Foremost, Java is a language for object oriented development, and all the hacks are in OO design and development. A lot of B coders screw up Java by writing it like C. The B coders screw it up even worse when they apply patterns incorrectly.
I'm dealing with both cases. I'm maintaining code that in some places uses lables and other places simple objects are created by builders that create factories that create abstracted objects that have to be cast to the object I want.
I spend all day refactoring, and that's where the neat hacks come in. I clean up the design and shrink the code without losing flexibilty or functionality.
Unfortunately, OOD is hard, and in Java, it's where all the creativity and 31337ness lies. Java coding is incredibly satisfying when you're able to break up a massive switch statement into meaningful classes or correctly apply a design pattern and watch a giant class indented to column 80 dissolve into a few cooperating objects.
When I do that, I understand that the Java community has done something incredible. It's made maintaining code a creative activity. I imagine many developers, especially ones who favor scripting languages, never make it this far along in the process.
One final and related reason that hackers may not like Java is because it requires the ability to communicate. For me, one of the hardest parts of OOD is naming my objects. Whereas in C or perl it's common to keep names at one or two letters, in Java you really have to name parts of your program, or everything becomes a meaningless mass of FactoryAdapterConstructorBuilders. I've found that poor naming leads directly to poor design, and that's just not something many programmers are good at.
Eclipse isn't that fast on Linux. Don't get me wrong, I use it daily, and I think Eclipse is one of the best arguments for coding in Java. However, it has its problems, especially on Linux. Ironically, I believe the slowness is due to Pango, which I'm pretty sure is written in C.
Aside from redraw, Eclipse is one of the slowest starting applications I've ever seen. It takes over 10 seconds to pull up the main window on a modern machine.
However, it's worth the wait for its refactoring capabilities.
I put some source to convert a single joystick button press to a mouse click in X up on my/. journal. I couldn't post it here because of the lameness filter.
It's pretty trivial to create keypresses in the same way, and chording would just be a matter of mapping out all the button combinations.
I can't find it anymore, but Adams used to include a bit in his bio about how typing was the most useful thing he learned in his entire education. If I remember right, he took typing his senior year of HS, while his contender for valedictorian took something like AP organic chemistry. He concluded with a taunt about how he ended up as valedictorian for acing typing, that he enjoys typing every day, and he never would have used organic chemistry.
I'm not so sure that Foster's comparison to food poisoning is apt. Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" states, "Every day in the United States, roughly 200,000 people are sickened by a foodborne disease, 900 are hopitalized, and fourteen die. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevenion (CDC), more than a quarter of the American population suffers a bout of food poisoning each year." More people die of food poisoning every year than died on 9/11, and we hear almost nothing about it. According to Schlosser, the USDA investigation and recall process takes so long that the recall is rarely issued before the majority of the meat is likely to have been consumed. Even in the case of major recalls, it's not likely to trickle down to the consumer. I've never seen any of the warnings that Foster mentions, and the Burger King case only made national news after several people died.
Here's a
recent example
taken from the USDA recall site. Did you know that Wolverine Packing Company is recalling 101,600 pounds of fresh ground beef products that may be contaminated with E. coli? These were shipped on June 15. I didn't hear anything about it. These were shipped nation wide to "foodservice distributors".
Since nobody is likely to die from a downloadable
virus, I doubt we'll see more accountability from
the IT world.
Until corporations are held accountable, don't use IE and don't eat ground beef.
I'm pretty happy being a programmer and a parent. I have flexible hours, so I can take my older daughter to kindergarten in the morning and spend some time with her there before school starts. I've volunteered a couple times to help in her classroom. When my older daughter was in the hospital last year, I worked part time so I could trade shifts with my wife. I could have taken time off, but she was in there for a while.
I rarely have to work more than an 8 hour shift. I telecommute when I have to work weekends, which isn't often. My biggest problem is telling myself to stop working and go home when I know the house is a mess and the kids are guaranteed to be tired and cranky.
A job that's bad for your family is going to be bad for you in the long run, anyway, so you should start looking around if you're pushed too hard. I'm working in finance and found the right niche. You can find one too if you look.
Imagine a single, practically borderless market containing 1 billion people. Now imagine two of them. Now look where all of our outsourcing is going. Now look at all the faces in US engineering schools, especially at the masters and PHD level.
It looks to me like not only do China and India have the same huge advantage, theirs are three times as large. When the dollar bubble completely pops, you might be surprised how much purchasing power they have. We might also be surprised that they start trading with each other directly, bypassing the middleman in America. Russia and China are already doing that.
Not quite. The only reason LPFM got anywhere with the FCC is because of the vast number of Jesus freaks wanting access to the airwaves, especially in small communities where there's a lot of open frequencies. If you look at who applied for LPFM stations a vast number were religious organizations. While Berkeley may be educating the kids in combat boots, the other side of the spectrum, if you will, is in on it as well.
I have a bunch of CDs from the LAYLAH label that are rotting. The label has acknowledged this, and its disc supplier offers a replacement plan for discs that are still in print. specifically reissuing CDs that are known to rot. Mine still play, so I haven't tried to replace them yet. I own about half the CDs on their list.
Re:SIlence is a pipe dream for me
on
A Silent PC Solution?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I got a second machine to use as a server. I have a fast, noisy machine I use for development, and a quiet, slow machine I use as a webserver. The quiet machine is built on the mini ITX VIA Eden fanless CPU/mainboard combo, it has a Seagate Barracuda IV HD, and an external brick power supply. It makes absolutely no noise, and it's powerful enough to handle as my mail, file, and printserver. I could probably spin the drive down when it's inactive, and it really wouldn't make any noise at all. The mini-ITX setup cost me around $350, total.
If video games were "art" ...
on
Videogames as Art
·
· Score: 4, Funny
The best games would only be available a couple times in your life at blockbuster museum shows. You'd have to pay admission, wait in line, and then only get a glimpse of the game from behind someone's head for a few minutes.
Lesser games would be scattered across the US at regional musuems. In the Southwest, you'd only be able to see Deerhunter and Redneck Rampage.
Only a select few people would be wealthy enough to own games and actually play them on demand. Everyone else would own demos or screenshots. Full games would be limited to editions of a few dozen and distributed through galleries. They would be prohibitively expensive. To have good access to a variety of games, you'd have to move to New York. Fans of vintage games would be advised to move to Paris. Games would rarely be available at night or on Mondays.
Most people would experience games through expensive coffee table books filled with screen shots. Books on all the cool games would either be perpetually checked out from the library or stolen. Screen shots would not be available on the Internet, and game digital reproduction rights would be carefully controlled by Bill Gates or Mark Getty.
Video game developers would be ignored or considered outsiders unless they have a master's degree from Yale or UCLA. Most developers would have to move to New York or LA if they wanted to be taken seriously. When their most challenging work was attacked by policy-makers, they wouldn't have a billion-dollar industry to lobby for their rights or foot their legal bills. Only a handful of developers would ever make a steady income writing games, and even the best would be obscure until they're nearly dead. The biggest distributors would tacitly refuse to release their work until they're dead or so mentally disabled as to be considered dead. Developers would resort to providing cheap wine and triscuits to get people to play their games.
Slashdot Mirror
Intel didn't deliver.
I have installed Linux on the Mac, several times. I ended up with a slow Linux box. I'd consider it again if I were to ever buy a laptop. I like the iBook, and it's a good balance of design, size, weight, battery life, and CPU power for the price. On the desktop, I'm not constrained by those concerns, and I go for the most CPU cycles for the money.
Why? I'm still getting more CPU cycles for my $$$ on the PC platform, and I still prefer Linux to OSX. I have a beige box that I've held on to for the last seven years, and I've upgraded the CPU, motherboard, and memory painlessly and inexpensively every year. For about $200 and an hour with a screwdriver, I double my CPU speed every year. Most of what I do with a PC is rip CDs, so CPU counts. I also use Fritz 8, which is both CPU hungry and not available for the Mac. Thanks to Wine, Fritz is almost fully functional on Linux. It would be 100% functional if it weren't copy protected.
On the Linux end, I like running apt-get and having the latest and best Linux software available for free, without waiting for a keynote speech or dropping $100 at the Apple store. I even prefer gtkpod over iTunes. On the low end, my mini-ITX box is easier to administer from the command line, it was cheaper than any Apple offering ($300), and it's completely fanless.
I'm not an Apple hater. I've owned a Mac since '95, I learned C with ThinkC, and in the early 90s I spent about a year programming 68000 assembler. I just stopped using Mac as my desktop box in about '97 when Linux took off and 3D gaming became possible.
I've read the last few Paul Graham links on /., and I'm already tired of his longwinded and useless generalizations. The last one was essentially flaming Java, and this one seems to be little more than American chest thumping. For example:
If I remember right, the OS I'm using was created by a guy in Helsinki and followed up by an international effort (not involving Lisp). One of the best cracks in recent history was hacking DVD encryption, not by a God-fearing 'merican, but by a kid in one of those stifling socialist countries (also without the help of Lisp).
Can someone tell me why I should care about what Paul Graham has to say, or is he just another Katz? When can I get a button to filter him out?
For the record, I'm a US citizen, and I'm fond of Scheme, though I can't say I use it very often.
It wasn't clear to me at all. I'm not serializing or deserializing big object graphs, so the problem of multiple references in graphs didn't occur to me. I appreciate your explanation of the problem, and if it was stated this clearly anywhere in the javadocs, it would have saved me a lot of time with the profiler.
I was surprised to find that the ObjectOutputStream has a static HandleTable inside it that creates an entry for each HashMap that I put through, and it keeps a reference to each HashMap. I searched around, and this is a common problem that is not mentioned at all in the javadocs. You're supposed to reset the ObjectOutputStream periodically to free up the HandleTable. I had assumed that reset was like InputStream's reset and never would have guessed that it had to do with Object caching in the stream.
Foucault would probably point out that technologies of control have always been inflicted on children first, always for their safety and well being. Verisign's obvious goal in this is to breed a generation of Internet users that are accustomed to using an ID with a computer. While this generation comes of age, Verisign will probably partner with Microsoft and legislators to make Verisign-issued IDs mandatory start a computer, first for children, then for the rest of us. It's not that far-fetched, and it ties in well with DRM.
As for girls (or boys, for that matter) discussing their private lives online, a less cynical and profit/control motivated educator would explain that you just don't discuss those things online. Kids should understand that they are publishing when they're writing in a chat room, whether it's run by the school or Mattel, and anything you say can be stored, copied, and republished outside of the context you wrote it in. These keys would obviously not keep a malicious child from copying sensitive text from a gender "locked" discussion board, complete with IDs, and text messaging it to the rest of the class.
Two space shuttle disasters later we're reverting to Soviet-era technology to launch satellites, if not paying the Russians and Chinese outright to launch them.
I'd rather not have to use a Brita filter than give the NSA the ability to do
The NSA should be forced to hold bake sales along with the Pentagon. A fat lot of good their intelligence gathering did here in New York three years ago.I'm a New Yorker and a protester who has appreciated past United for Peace and Justice efforts, I can assure you that they're paying more to the city to exercise constitutionally guaranteed rights than the RNC is paying for their publicity stunt.
The protesters don't owe the city anything. Bloomberg has done everything he can to shut down peaceful protest in the city. I've experienced it first hand. The biggest threat of violence at these rallies is always from the police.
The only agitators threating to shut down the subway and confuse bomb dogs are reporters at the Daily News. That story was entirely fabricated with the help of the NYPD.
Foremost, Java is a language for object oriented development, and all the hacks are in OO design and development. A lot of B coders screw up Java by writing it like C. The B coders screw it up even worse when they apply patterns incorrectly.
I'm dealing with both cases. I'm maintaining code that in some places uses lables and other places simple objects are created by builders that create factories that create abstracted objects that have to be cast to the object I want.
I spend all day refactoring, and that's where the neat hacks come in. I clean up the design and shrink the code without losing flexibilty or functionality.
Unfortunately, OOD is hard, and in Java, it's where all the creativity and 31337ness lies. Java coding is incredibly satisfying when you're able to break up a massive switch statement into meaningful classes or correctly apply a design pattern and watch a giant class indented to column 80 dissolve into a few cooperating objects.
When I do that, I understand that the Java community has done something incredible. It's made maintaining code a creative activity. I imagine many developers, especially ones who favor scripting languages, never make it this far along in the process.
One final and related reason that hackers may not like Java is because it requires the ability to communicate. For me, one of the hardest parts of OOD is naming my objects. Whereas in C or perl it's common to keep names at one or two letters, in Java you really have to name parts of your program, or everything becomes a meaningless mass of FactoryAdapterConstructorBuilders. I've found that poor naming leads directly to poor design, and that's just not something many programmers are good at.
Aside from redraw, Eclipse is one of the slowest starting applications I've ever seen. It takes over 10 seconds to pull up the main window on a modern machine.
However, it's worth the wait for its refactoring capabilities.
It's pretty trivial to create keypresses in the same way, and chording would just be a matter of mapping out all the button combinations.
I can't find it anymore, but Adams used to include a bit in his bio about how typing was the most useful thing he learned in his entire education. If I remember right, he took typing his senior year of HS, while his contender for valedictorian took something like AP organic chemistry. He concluded with a taunt about how he ended up as valedictorian for acing typing, that he enjoys typing every day, and he never would have used organic chemistry.
Here's a recent example taken from the USDA recall site. Did you know that Wolverine Packing Company is recalling 101,600 pounds of fresh ground beef products that may be contaminated with E. coli? These were shipped on June 15. I didn't hear anything about it. These were shipped nation wide to "foodservice distributors".
Since nobody is likely to die from a downloadable virus, I doubt we'll see more accountability from the IT world.
Until corporations are held accountable, don't use IE and don't eat ground beef.
with Robin Williams for a long time.
Bas Jan Ader made a fatal attempt in 1975 to cross the Atlantic as performance art.
I rarely have to work more than an 8 hour shift. I telecommute when I have to work weekends, which isn't often. My biggest problem is telling myself to stop working and go home when I know the house is a mess and the kids are guaranteed to be tired and cranky.
A job that's bad for your family is going to be bad for you in the long run, anyway, so you should start looking around if you're pushed too hard. I'm working in finance and found the right niche. You can find one too if you look.
Noise cancellation == death!
It looks to me like not only do China and India have the same huge advantage, theirs are three times as large. When the dollar bubble completely pops, you might be surprised how much purchasing power they have. We might also be surprised that they start trading with each other directly, bypassing the middleman in America. Russia and China are already doing that.
Not quite. The only reason LPFM got anywhere with the FCC is because of the vast number of Jesus freaks wanting access to the airwaves, especially in small communities where there's a lot of open frequencies. If you look at who applied for LPFM stations a vast number were religious organizations. While Berkeley may be educating the kids in combat boots, the other side of the spectrum, if you will, is in on it as well.
I have a bunch of CDs from the LAYLAH label that are rotting. The label has acknowledged this, and its disc supplier offers a replacement plan for discs that are still in print. specifically reissuing CDs that are known to rot. Mine still play, so I haven't tried to replace them yet. I own about half the CDs on their list.
I got a second machine to use as a server. I have a fast, noisy machine I use for development, and a quiet, slow machine I use as a webserver. The quiet machine is built on the mini ITX VIA Eden fanless CPU/mainboard combo, it has a Seagate Barracuda IV HD, and an external brick power supply. It makes absolutely no noise, and it's powerful enough to handle as my mail, file, and printserver. I could probably spin the drive down when it's inactive, and it really wouldn't make any noise at all. The mini-ITX setup cost me around $350, total.
This is by far the best web tour of the area.
Lesser games would be scattered across the US at regional musuems. In the Southwest, you'd only be able to see Deerhunter and Redneck Rampage.
Only a select few people would be wealthy enough to own games and actually play them on demand. Everyone else would own demos or screenshots. Full games would be limited to editions of a few dozen and distributed through galleries. They would be prohibitively expensive. To have good access to a variety of games, you'd have to move to New York. Fans of vintage games would be advised to move to Paris. Games would rarely be available at night or on Mondays.
Most people would experience games through expensive coffee table books filled with screen shots. Books on all the cool games would either be perpetually checked out from the library or stolen. Screen shots would not be available on the Internet, and game digital reproduction rights would be carefully controlled by Bill Gates or Mark Getty.
Video game developers would be ignored or considered outsiders unless they have a master's degree from Yale or UCLA. Most developers would have to move to New York or LA if they wanted to be taken seriously. When their most challenging work was attacked by policy-makers, they wouldn't have a billion-dollar industry to lobby for their rights or foot their legal bills. Only a handful of developers would ever make a steady income writing games, and even the best would be obscure until they're nearly dead. The biggest distributors would tacitly refuse to release their work until they're dead or so mentally disabled as to be considered dead. Developers would resort to providing cheap wine and triscuits to get people to play their games.
Is this the infamous missing rocket belt?