Everyone's benchmarking machines for framerates in games, but what I'd like to know is this: What is the smallest/cheapest machine that can compile KDE 3 (kdelibs, kdebase, kdenetwork and koffice) in one night (say 7 hours)? And: Have the OpenBSD folks fixed their toolchain so that linking KDE doesn't need 800 megs of virtual memory anymore?
A lot of times these methods result in getting a much lower quality piece of software/media than if it were simply bought. A lot of times (mostly with software) the result barely works at all.
Not so. Not in general. Back in the Amiga days, quite a few cracked games could be installed on hard disk, while the "simply bought" game couldn't. Sometimes the crackers did actual bug fixing. Today, in the copy-protected CD days, any CD-R can be played by the disc changer in my car, while there are "simply bought" CDs that can't. The industry has reached that point were the copy is not only cheaper, but also more useful than the original.
Don't form your image of Fortran after having a look at Numerical Recipes. I'm an undergrad, and I actually got to like Fortran after putting away NR and reading parts of Linpack (20 years old, with comments like 'LAST CARD OF SUBROUTINE whatnot' at the end of some files) along with Golub/van Loan's "Matrix computations" textbook. This combo is the best I'm aware of for learning about computational linear algebra, and because Linpack is built on BLAS, it's much easier to read than the code in the C version of Numerical Recipes. Really.
heapsort has its place. For one, it doesn't explode on presorted input data. And at least part of that "whole generation of FORTRAN coders" might have read other books apart from NR.
Sorry, this is so stupid it's not "Score 5, funny". AFAICT neither the OpenBSD 3.1 distribution nor the CVS repository are affected. This is strictly for people who are 'leet enough to build everything themselves, think that packaging or ports systems are for sissies, and at the same time dumb enough not to check signatures or MD5s from a trusted or at least different source.
If they were really out to build the golden ratio display, they'd remember their discrete math course (magic word:
Stern-Brocot tree) and find out that
Unless your definition of "techno" is "the stuff Moby does", Moby hasn't been doing techno for seven years or so. Early 90s Moby (Feeling so real, Go) was techno. When I was 15, I went to a concert where he played support for The Prodigy. (That was before they started that electro-punk thing and just did dance music.) Since then, Moby has been thoroughly reinventing himself with every new album, and Play happened to sell very well (as opposed to Animal Rights).
So the parent of this was rated as "funny". But seriously, I'm writing this in lynx, on the console. All I ever use X for is opening up a lot of xterms, but I can get the same effect by using the console and screen. And the latter is quite a bit faster on this Machine From The Last Century.
Folks, turn on your radios! It's a radio series. BBC World Service, sundays, 1300 GMT. But you've already missed quite a bit. Last week, they were near the beginning of "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", story-wise.
I could go the easy route and check every array index in the first array against every array index in all the other arrays. For all I know this is the most efficient way to do this.
But, instead I'm going to research some algorithm books and see if I can't find a more efficient way to retrieve the common elements.
Or find yourself a quiet corner and do a tiny little bit of thinking. Then do the equivalent of sort | uniq -d. Done. Time complexity: O(n log n).
Or save some bandwidth and point cvsup to the RELENG_4_5 branch on your local cvsup mirror.
Something the release notes don't mention: Could someone please clue me in on the state of native Java on FreeBSD? There was an announcement in late December but I haven't heard from it since then. Having to install the Linux JDK to build a FreeBSD JDK can't be the last word.
Exactly. Most of the Linux-related money I spent went to O'Reilly, and some to Addison-Wesley (they've got to thank W. Richard Stevens for that). All in all, I've spent more on Linux than on Windows, as I've bought one Linux distro in my life, but not one Windows. (Not even OEM versions; the last computer I didn't build from parts came with DOS).
Consider the words "Word", "Office", "Draw", "Sketch", "Paint", as examples. And then consider trying to create a word processor, an office suite or a drawing program without using any of these words in its name. It just isn't possible - these words describe the function of the program.
BS. Back in the eighties and early nineties there were many software packages whose names weren't just a variation on the verb that described what they were supposed to do. Some examples:
ConText, a german DOS word processor
Artisan, a great drawing package for the Acorn Archimedes (I think the remnants of its development team are now working on Xara)
Symphony, a precursor of what's now called an office suite, made by Lotus
Vitamin C, the best-named C compiler ever.
On the Unix side, I'm afraid grep was the last truly ingenious name for a program. (I believe in the "It does was `g/regular expression/p' does in ed" etymology.) After that, there's just this unhealthy obsession with recursive acronyms that's just as rampant (and unimaginative) as BiCapitalization was in the corporate world.
However, the calculation they were performing was addition, and I'm told that this is something slide rules can't calculate.
Addition is the fundamental operation on a slide rule. (1.27 inches plus 5.31 inches is 6.58 inches...that's what all the sliding is about!) Multiplication is done by adding logarithms.
Yeah, and little me, who's neither Chinese nor American, can't help wondering what would happen if Chinese spyplanes would routinely patrol the US coasts. I think the situation would be much worse than it is now. The USA just don't like to be treated like they themselves treat everyone else.
But get a kid with a math bent a job in an actuarial firm or a bank or a science lab.
Don't send anybody with a math bent to an actuarial firm or a bank! Accounting is mind-numbing and has nothing to do with math.
Send kids with an interest in math and science to a school with an interest in math and science. I'm from Germany, and I was lucky that in my city there is such a school. We weren't 30 kids in a room (more like 20), and we had teachers who cared--for their field as well as for us. You might think that this place was sort of a geek ghetto, but I don't think it was. In retrospect, I think that the university i'm at now could actually learn from that school.
Hello? Email has something to do with text entry, therefore my email client doesn't integrate a web browser with an insecure scripting system but is integrated in Emacs. That's reuse, too. If I get an HTML email (it does happen sometimes), it's automatically piped though lynx -dump and displayed. That's reuse, too. And a great feature is that I could use W3m if I would find out that lynx could be instructed to wipe out my disk^Whome directory with the right HTML input. That is real modularity. You don't need object orientation for that. And having these features is no excuse for security holes.
The only difference is that IP isn't physical. So what? It's still property.
Well, this is the difference that changes everything. Information can be copied at near zero cost today. What's called "IP theft" doesn't take anything away from anyone. If I write an LZW encoder today, nobody at Unisys will magically forget how it works. (But I'm pretty sure that Jacob Ziv can't freely distribute an LZW encoder he writes--that's what I'd call IP theft.)
Following the usual IP reasoning, if you'd have that little device that could replicate food at zero cost, you wouldn't give food away because you paid for the original template bread.
...but I have much greater respect for Greg Ubben's complete implementation of dc in sed. It comes with newer versions of GNU sed and therefore probably hides somewhere on your hard disk (try locate dc.sed). Or look here.
Imagine a smart shell: I type 'ls -<TAB>' and it shows me all the options to ls.
You mean tcsh or a newer bash? It's called programmable completion. Of course, if you configure the shell to do this yourself, by the time you're done you know the options to ls and don't need no completion. But perhaps some kind soul has already made something like this available (I honestly don't know).
Space Shuttles were moving into deployment and repair of communications sattelites for the most part. IIRC, the military had quite a lot to say in the space shuttle program. And I think that a few of the communication satellites were spy satellites.
I still don't get why satellite launches via shuttle were considered better (or even cheaper) than rocket launches. I don't have hard numbers, but I'm pretty sure that a satellite launch with a Russian `Proton' rocket was both cheaper and safer than a shuttle launch in the late 80's.
The Galileo probe (to Jupiter) was delayed for almost eight years because first they couldn't get a launch slot on a shuttle, then the Challenger catastrophe happened and there were no slots for years. Meanwhile, the planets had moved and Galileo had to take that wacky Earth-Venus-Earth-Earth tour to pick up enough speed to eventually reach Jupiter. Of course, they had to modify the craft because it wasn't built for the inner solar system. Wouldn't have happened if they had just launched the probe with a rocket in '82.
In 5-7 years, the programming style you use will look ugly and primitive compared to whatever the latest buzzword in computer science is.
There are no buzzwords in computer science. I know no term in computer science that has no real meaning and is constantly used by people who want to sound important. (Sadly, sometimes terms have real meaning and become pseudo-scientific babble nevertheless. Take...quantum physics. I've lost count of how often I have heard people without any clue draw analogies from something-or-other to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle <sigh>.)
I think you're confusing computer science with software engineering. (And yes, I know that the former is no real science and that no engineer would call the latter engineering.)
While I agree to your opinion that premature forking can be the root of all evil (or so), I somehow think that you arrive at the right conclusion for the wrong reasons.
Somebody changing the kernel APIs isn't that huge a problem, as long as there's a glibc port for the forked kernel. I'm pretty sure that most kernel API changes can be completely hidden behind the C library.
OpenGL still not as popular as D3D? Excuse me, but D3D isn't popular outside of the Windows games market -- I've never seen a scientific visualization using D3D. And I don't know how this relates to your `changing APIs' point. OpenGL's API stability and flexibility is astonishing, considering how much hardware has changed since its inception. (D3D's API instability is astonishing, considering how little hardware has changed between any two incompatible iterations.)
So the Web was invented on a NeXT machine. That was new to me. What I missed in the article was another very significant NeXT user: id software. Doom was developed on NeXTs, and before Quake 2, all level design was apparently done on NeXTs: just have a look at the huge pile of Objective C that is QuakeEd. Carmack switched over to NT for Quake 2 development because you can't plug an OpenGL accelerator into a NeXT station. And IIRC, he wasn't too happy about it.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll have much more success looking for Emmy Noether and Lise Meitner.
Everyone's benchmarking machines for framerates in games, but what I'd like to know is this: What is the smallest/cheapest machine that can compile KDE 3 (kdelibs, kdebase, kdenetwork and koffice) in one night (say 7 hours)? And: Have the OpenBSD folks fixed their toolchain so that linking KDE doesn't need 800 megs of virtual memory anymore?
Not so. Not in general. Back in the Amiga days, quite a few cracked games could be installed on hard disk, while the "simply bought" game couldn't. Sometimes the crackers did actual bug fixing. Today, in the copy-protected CD days, any CD-R can be played by the disc changer in my car, while there are "simply bought" CDs that can't. The industry has reached that point were the copy is not only cheaper, but also more useful than the original.
Sorry, this is so stupid it's not "Score 5, funny". AFAICT neither the OpenBSD 3.1 distribution nor the CVS repository are affected. This is strictly for people who are 'leet enough to build everything themselves, think that packaging or ports systems are for sissies, and at the same time dumb enough not to check signatures or MD5s from a trusted or at least different source.
Unless your definition of "techno" is "the stuff Moby does", Moby hasn't been doing techno for seven years or so. Early 90s Moby (Feeling so real, Go) was techno. When I was 15, I went to a concert where he played support for The Prodigy. (That was before they started that electro-punk thing and just did dance music.) Since then, Moby has been thoroughly reinventing himself with every new album, and Play happened to sell very well (as opposed to Animal Rights).
So the parent of this was rated as "funny".
But seriously, I'm writing this in lynx, on the
console. All I ever use X for is opening up a
lot of xterms, but I can get the same effect by
using the console and screen. And the latter is
quite a bit faster on this Machine From The Last
Century.
Folks, turn on your radios! It's a radio series. BBC World Service, sundays, 1300 GMT. But you've already missed quite a bit. Last week, they were near the beginning of "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", story-wise.
I could go the easy route and check every array index in the first array against every array index in all the other arrays. For all I know this is the most efficient way to do this.
But, instead I'm going to research some algorithm books and see if I can't find a more efficient way to retrieve the common elements.
Or find yourself a quiet corner and do a tiny little bit of thinking. Then do the equivalent of sort | uniq -d. Done. Time complexity: O(n log n).Or save some bandwidth and point cvsup to the RELENG_4_5 branch on your local cvsup mirror.
Something the release notes don't mention: Could someone please clue me in on the state of native Java on FreeBSD? There was an announcement in late December but I haven't heard from it since then. Having to install the Linux JDK to build a FreeBSD JDK can't be the last word.
Exactly. Most of the Linux-related money I spent went to O'Reilly, and some to Addison-Wesley (they've got to thank W. Richard Stevens for that). All in all, I've spent more on Linux than on Windows, as I've bought one Linux distro in my life, but not one Windows. (Not even OEM versions; the last computer I didn't build from parts came with DOS).
Nobody ever blamed E for the overflowing toilets at the January 8, 1995 Boom Rave in Leipzig, Germany. That was just incredibly bad organization.
BS. Back in the eighties and early nineties there were many software packages whose names weren't just a variation on the verb that described what they were supposed to do. Some examples:
- ConText, a german DOS word processor
- Artisan, a great drawing package for the Acorn Archimedes (I think the remnants of its development team are now working on Xara)
- Symphony, a precursor of what's now called an office suite, made by Lotus
- Vitamin C, the best-named C compiler ever.
On the Unix side, I'm afraid grep was the last truly ingenious name for a program. (I believe in the "It does was `g/regular expression/p' does in ed" etymology.) After that, there's just this unhealthy obsession with recursive acronyms that's just as rampant (and unimaginative) as BiCapitalization was in the corporate world.Addition is the fundamental operation on a slide rule. (1.27 inches plus 5.31 inches is 6.58 inches...that's what all the sliding is about!) Multiplication is done by adding logarithms.
Yeah, and little me, who's neither Chinese nor American, can't help wondering what would happen if Chinese spyplanes would routinely patrol the US coasts. I think the situation would be much worse than it is now. The USA just don't like to be treated like they themselves treat everyone else.
Don't send anybody with a math bent to an actuarial firm or a bank! Accounting is mind-numbing and has nothing to do with math.
Send kids with an interest in math and science to a school with an interest in math and science. I'm from Germany, and I was lucky that in my city there is such a school. We weren't 30 kids in a room (more like 20), and we had teachers who cared--for their field as well as for us. You might think that this place was sort of a geek ghetto, but I don't think it was. In retrospect, I think that the university i'm at now could actually learn from that school.
Hello? Email has something to do with text entry, therefore my email client doesn't integrate a web browser with an insecure scripting system but is integrated in Emacs. That's reuse, too. If I get an HTML email (it does happen sometimes), it's automatically piped though lynx -dump and displayed. That's reuse, too. And a great feature is that I could use W3m if I would find out that lynx could be instructed to wipe out my disk^Whome directory with the right HTML input. That is real modularity. You don't need object orientation for that. And having these features is no excuse for security holes.
Well, this is the difference that changes everything. Information can be copied at near zero cost today. What's called "IP theft" doesn't take anything away from anyone. If I write an LZW encoder today, nobody at Unisys will magically forget how it works. (But I'm pretty sure that Jacob Ziv can't freely distribute an LZW encoder he writes--that's what I'd call IP theft.)
Following the usual IP reasoning, if you'd have that little device that could replicate food at zero cost, you wouldn't give food away because you paid for the original template bread.
...but I have much greater respect for Greg Ubben's complete implementation of dc in sed. It comes with newer versions of GNU sed and therefore probably hides somewhere on your hard disk (try locate dc.sed). Or look here.
You mean tcsh or a newer bash? It's called programmable completion. Of course, if you configure the shell to do this yourself, by the time you're done you know the options to ls and don't need no completion. But perhaps some kind soul has already made something like this available (I honestly don't know).
IIRC, the military had quite a lot to say in the space shuttle program. And I think that a few of the communication satellites were spy satellites.
I still don't get why satellite launches via shuttle were considered better (or even cheaper) than rocket launches. I don't have hard numbers, but I'm pretty sure that a satellite launch with a Russian `Proton' rocket was both cheaper and safer than a shuttle launch in the late 80's.
The Galileo probe (to Jupiter) was delayed for almost eight years because first they couldn't get a launch slot on a shuttle, then the Challenger catastrophe happened and there were no slots for years. Meanwhile, the planets had moved and Galileo had to take that wacky Earth-Venus-Earth-Earth tour to pick up enough speed to eventually reach Jupiter. Of course, they had to modify the craft because it wasn't built for the inner solar system. Wouldn't have happened if they had just launched the probe with a rocket in '82.
There are no buzzwords in computer science. I know no term in computer science that has no real meaning and is constantly used by people who want to sound important. (Sadly, sometimes terms have real meaning and become pseudo-scientific babble nevertheless. Take...quantum physics. I've lost count of how often I have heard people without any clue draw analogies from something-or-other to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle <sigh>.)
I think you're confusing computer science with software engineering. (And yes, I know that the former is no real science and that no engineer would call the latter engineering.)
Somebody changing the kernel APIs isn't that huge a problem, as long as there's a glibc port for the forked kernel. I'm pretty sure that most kernel API changes can be completely hidden behind the C library.
OpenGL still not as popular as D3D? Excuse me, but D3D isn't popular outside of the Windows games market -- I've never seen a scientific visualization using D3D. And I don't know how this relates to your `changing APIs' point. OpenGL's API stability and flexibility is astonishing, considering how much hardware has changed since its inception. (D3D's API instability is astonishing, considering how little hardware has changed between any two incompatible iterations.)
So the Web was invented on a NeXT machine. That was new to me. What I missed in the article was another very significant NeXT user: id software. Doom was developed on NeXTs, and before Quake 2, all level design was apparently done on NeXTs: just have a look at the huge pile of Objective C that is QuakeEd. Carmack switched over to NT for Quake 2 development because you can't plug an OpenGL accelerator into a NeXT station. And IIRC, he wasn't too happy about it.