It seems a bit cheap doesn't it?
on
Build Your Own ECG
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· Score: 4, Funny
I'm going to spring for the $30 ECG.
I learned my lesson with the $4 dentistry set, and even worse, the $4 electroshock therapy machine.
I STILL can't quite get my hair to stop standing on end. I can't even wear hats - hair pokes through like skewers through butter (which, incidentally, is one of the only things I can eat now thanks to the dentistry set).
I thank the lord I didn't invest in the $4 eye-surgery kit.
I have a Master's student friend in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He says that there are almost no girls in his department - that the ones that are there are treated like royalty because they're so few.
I've heard the same from an Electrical Engineering friend of mine.
Maybe it's because MIT is attempting to branch out in to other fields? They have a business department and a history department now, for instance.
Taking the 41% and 29% statistic at face value is stupid. Just because there are women at MIT doesn't mean that the guys who made the vest ever get to see them.
I personally go to a "well balanced" University myself (Purdue), and I know that my department, Electrical and Computer Engineers, has less than 10 female grad students, because they take all 500 of us grad/phd students and put us in the same room every now and again.
My experience with mainframes has been using ones that are designed to handle users. NOT user programs.
So all of the mainframes I've used have had all of these things I've mentioned as the main apps, and nearly all of them run Solaris.
I suppose there might be places where this isn't true, like I said. But I've always thought that there were more mainframes made for supporting users than there are for crunching numbers.
Yeah, thats it! I'll just buy myself a mainframe and...oh wait.
The problem is that the only way to get mainframe experience today is to have access to one.
Who does?
Still, I think the closest thing we can get is playing with Linux from the ground up. As a Solaris user, I can say that a lot of the internals are the same. Except, of course, that all the non-gnu versions of software suck compared to their Linux equivalents.
In fact, when I think about it, the biggest problem is employer disbelief. Can you admin Mainframes if you can admin Linux boxes? Pretty close: -You can know NFS,AFS, and Samba -You can know Apache -You can know X11 -You can know sendmail/postfix -You can know telnet/ssh/rsh -You can know how to install security updates
I could be wrong, but I think the stuff that you don't know beyond this boils down to quirks that are dependent upon the specific mainframe.
Unless, of course, you're talking about those really old mainframes that do less than my computers do (though they're more reliable), and serve only one very, very specific purpose. For those I should think it would be obvious why there aren't more people working on it. It's way too specialized. You want somebody that knows the accounting system for one bank on a VAX that was put there in 1975 and hasn't been changed since? Talk to the guy that wrote it. How will anyone else know?
I have a Microsoft reference driver for my soundcard (i.e. Microsoft made the driver and approved it themselves). I use it on my computer.
Unfortunately, two things cause it to fail. 1) It doesn't play nice with other drivers on the same IRQ. 2) Microsoft's advanced power management driver assigns it to the same IRQ as my USB port and my network card, and that can't be changed without a reinstall of Windows.
So basically, what happens is that the sound card will eventually crap out completely and never work again (until reboot) if it attempts to work at the same time either of the other two devices on that IRQ are working.
Keep in mind: 1) Microsoft knows about this bug 2) It causes system instability for lots of drivers - even certified ones
I should also mention that there is nowhere that this bug is reported by the OS; I had to find it through trial, error, and lots of research. Win2K is not as stable as you think
Re:The description is very vague
on
Gentoo Games
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If its hard, maybe it's not for you. I'm not exactly sure how you didn't understand the help for it, though. Its got an excellent install guide which includes examples.
I especially don't see how make.conf is hard to use. There's a guide specifically about that, too. It sounds like you haven't been reading.
Many of the developers have in mind that Gentoo should be what it claims to be - a metadisribution - which means that you use it to make other distributions.
Already, there is more work being done on cross-compiling with Gentoo than there has been in any other system. (Haven't gotten a cross of NetBSD working yet - if anybody has PLEASE respond). It's not unlikely that there will be a cross-package installation system as part of portage in the future.
Whatever happens, I believe that Gentoo is bound for success above other distros. There is more development, more documentation, and more user support than any other distro that exists currently.
You're assuming that the Widgets would have to be installed to work; this is an incorrect assumption. The idea is more akin to CORBA - the widget is "installed" onto your machine by the server itself.
We do use coins. Ever heard of silver dollars? Its what Americans call our dollar coins. If you buy stamps from a machine here, the change is in silver dollars (you can put a twenty in some of those machines to get $12 in stamps).
The trouble, though, is that silver engravings aren't very easy to read - at least not compared to paper. The main reason I've heard that they're not used more here is because they are roughly the size and shape of the much older and more highly recognized fifty-cent piece - and there is the dilemma. If we changed them, and made them smaller, they'd look like quarters. If we changed them and made them bigger, they'd weigh a LOT. Getting rid of the other conflicting coins isn't really an option, as the previous poster mentioned.
I think we should put a hole in them. That would make it easy to tell them apart.
First consider that there are a lot of commercial systems out there today - old systems that have lived for eons and eons - that currently use BSD.
Next consider that these old systems use old compilers because they haven't been updated in ages.
Finally consider that lowly users don't usually have access rights to upgrade such systems.
Given these three facts, it would seem that there is a need for cross-compilers from Linux and Windows (via cygwin or mingw, perhaps) to BSD, so that we can actually use these systems effectively. However, I have yet to find one good (i.e. that works) piece of information on the subject. Perhaps this isn't addressed in the book...but it is certainly an area to be addressed in SOME book about BSD.
So...what you're saying is that it's easy to peel open the light protection layer in RAM and expose it to a flash automatically? It's easy to build a physical mechanism to which includes moving parts and a flash bulb that actually does this?
Personally, I think that just hooking the data read/write head up to a high voltage source making it into a powerful electromagnet that will make all the data on the harddrive unreadable is a lot easier. You could even make the modification to existing designs without adding new parts. Nice thought though.
You know that nothing needs too be reimplemented, right? They are GIVING away their proxy client and server, which is the crux of all they have created. You don't need all the rest.
XDirectFB is an X server. I'm currently using it with Gnome to send this to you. The only requirement is that the apps are capable of communicating with an X server. It works.
Surely, it's not the answer to all the worlds problesm, but ssh has a built in option for X forwarding. It's built in!
Maybe they suck as a vpn solution, but they provide two kinds of public key encryption (the same kinds used by SSL), they come with built in compression, and most importantly, forwarding pretty much just works when you turn it on.
Also, with ssh, the end user doesn't have to worry about the cookie passing process or know what makes up an.Xauthority file. It's all done automatically.
By the way, the information is available to the user, though they don't authenticate on a per socket level - only once for the ssh client. At least, it is if you're using a *nix ssh client - there's a listing of public keys under.ssh, or if you use putty (search through the options).
So I'd say it works pretty well for X forwarding.
As far as VPN, my personal experience (which cannot be argued because it is not fact) is that it's much more flexible than anything else for VPN apps. My work only provides pptp for VPN, and that is incredibly slow, crashes A LOT, and provides no compression. SSH forwarding, on the other hand, is fast, never crashes (thanks to autossh), and compresses everything so much that it seems comparable to actually using the LAN.
If you have the luxury of getting apps that come with SSL, then by all means, use those.
"Hey...X doesn't work with IPv6. I'll just tunnel it through an IPv6 ssh tunnel. Problem solved."
I guess I won't have to worry much about that day.
Besides, if you're using X over the net WITHOUT ssh (the only place where IPv6 is necessarily needed, since everywhere else you can use private addresses), what are you thinking?!!!
It's WAY to slow without compressing, which means sending it through some kind of tunnel. Personally, I think it's way too slow anyway. RealVNC beats it for bandwidth usage and it's just a framebuffer, even compared to dxpc and lbxproxy (at least that has been my observation).
XDirectFB (not to be confused with DirectFB, which is the general library it uses) only has accelerated drivers for Matrox cards, and a few others.
The whole point of it is acceleration. Video cards that haven't released a single spec as to HOW to excelerate them can't really expect an accelerated driver, can they?
However, it works with any system that has a framebuffer, though it's slow as molasses. If you have openGL on your card, you can use it regardless of the type, so that should be pretty portable.
Macintosh: I made that stuff back in - Windows: Now slow, I say, slow down there just a second, boy, and lemme talk a little sense into ya! (If that boy don't stop talkin' he's gonna sunburn his tongue.) Macintosh:..but I already... Windows: Whoa there boy! (Nice kid, but he's about as thick as a whale omelette.) You can't, I say, you can't just take credit for things that ya didn't do! (This boy's about as sharp as a pound o' wet liver.) You can't just keep crowin' on about how young you feel and how hard you work. You just gotta start bein' the best boy you can be and show those folks you can do it just as good as them! Now go on, I say, go on boy, an' show 'em what you're made of! Now git! Macintosh: Ah..yeah. Later.
Building from source is a nice idea, but it takes a lot of effort to get to *BSD's quality level, and it will probably always have a few more install problems than a binary package system.
Quite the contrary. The article pointed out that the big problem with package management is getting the packages to work with the right libraries. Most of these dependency problems go away when you build the libraries from source.
They also included a system called "slots" which is for including multiple libraries on the same system. For example, I've got gcc2.95.3 and gcc3.2.2 on my system right now, and I use the former if a package is too old to work with the latter.
It is these things that let you do continuous updating, which is not very possible with binary systems - you usually have to upgrade all of your system at once if you want to ensure that everything works.
Of course, if you limit yourself to ONLY packages that your distro provides, and ONLY upgrade when they tell you it's safe, you might be able to get more stability. But that's like comparing apples and oranges since all the source distros use very modern versions of all the packages - you're comparing more stable binary installs to less stable source installs.
Also, I haven't met very many people who enjoy using the old, less featureful versions of packages. I myself run phoenix compiled from cvs, which, although it sometimes crashes, is much faster than Mozilla. Is that even available in any binary distros yet? What about winex from CVS?
IIRC someone invented a system of attaching watches to people's arms so that they could go anywhere and still tell time.
I believe they called the device a "strap." Yes, I'm sure that's it. It is a slight improvement over gluing things to your arms, especially when attempting take showers.
Perhaps that would be a better approach, if you can find such newfangled technologies.
When you can't tell what to listen for? You always can? Good for you.
But for everyone else, looking at the error spectrum for, say, random noise, will tell us what music to play to accentuate the error so that the listening test works, and what sound equipment to not use in order to hear the problems (we wouldn't want to have a low pass filter put on something that has problems in the high end, now would we)?
Look at spectral readouts for long enough, and you get some idea of what kind of artifacts you're going to hear, and you can listen for them and see how bad (what volume, how well they blend in, etc) they really are.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to spring for the $30 ECG.
I learned my lesson with the $4 dentistry set, and even worse, the $4 electroshock therapy machine.
I STILL can't quite get my hair to stop standing on end. I can't even wear hats - hair pokes through like skewers through butter (which, incidentally, is one of the only things I can eat now thanks to the dentistry set).
I thank the lord I didn't invest in the $4 eye-surgery kit.
I have a Master's student friend in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He says that there are almost no girls in his department - that the ones that are there are treated like royalty because they're so few.
I've heard the same from an Electrical Engineering friend of mine.
Maybe it's because MIT is attempting to branch out in to other fields? They have a business department and a history department now, for instance.
Taking the 41% and 29% statistic at face value is stupid. Just because there are women at MIT doesn't mean that the guys who made the vest ever get to see them.
I personally go to a "well balanced" University myself (Purdue), and I know that my department, Electrical and Computer Engineers, has less than 10 female grad students, because they take all 500 of us grad/phd students and put us in the same room every now and again.
Perhaps you're right.
My experience with mainframes has been using ones that are designed to handle users. NOT user programs.
So all of the mainframes I've used have had all of these things I've mentioned as the main apps, and nearly all of them run Solaris.
I suppose there might be places where this isn't true, like I said. But I've always thought that there were more mainframes made for supporting users than there are for crunching numbers.
maybe we can learn it on our own!
Yeah, thats it! I'll just buy myself a mainframe and...oh wait.
The problem is that the only way to get mainframe experience today is to have access to one.
Who does?
Still, I think the closest thing we can get is playing with Linux from the ground up. As a Solaris user, I can say that a lot of the internals are the same. Except, of course, that all the non-gnu versions of software suck compared to their Linux equivalents.
In fact, when I think about it, the biggest problem is employer disbelief. Can you admin Mainframes if you can admin Linux boxes? Pretty close:
-You can know NFS,AFS, and Samba
-You can know Apache
-You can know X11
-You can know sendmail/postfix
-You can know telnet/ssh/rsh
-You can know how to install security updates
I could be wrong, but I think the stuff that you don't know beyond this boils down to quirks that are dependent upon the specific mainframe.
Unless, of course, you're talking about those really old mainframes that do less than my computers do (though they're more reliable), and serve only one very, very specific purpose. For those I should think it would be obvious why there aren't more people working on it. It's way too specialized. You want somebody that knows the accounting system for one bank on a VAX that was put there in 1975 and hasn't been changed since? Talk to the guy that wrote it. How will anyone else know?
Sooner than I thought.
A better idea would be to actually make a watch capable of PDA operations.
Timex will be releasing that...sometime.
I have a Microsoft reference driver for my soundcard (i.e. Microsoft made the driver and approved it themselves). I use it on my computer.
Unfortunately, two things cause it to fail.
1) It doesn't play nice with other drivers on the same IRQ.
2) Microsoft's advanced power management driver assigns it to the same IRQ as my USB port and my network card, and that can't be changed without a reinstall of Windows.
So basically, what happens is that the sound card will eventually crap out completely and never work again (until reboot) if it attempts to work at the same time either of the other two devices on that IRQ are working.
Keep in mind:
1) Microsoft knows about this bug
2) It causes system instability for lots of drivers - even certified ones
I should also mention that there is nowhere that this bug is reported by the OS; I had to find it through trial, error, and lots of research. Win2K is not as stable as you think
If its hard, maybe it's not for you. I'm not exactly sure how you didn't understand the help for it, though. Its got an excellent install guide which includes examples.
I especially don't see how make.conf is hard to use. There's a guide specifically about that, too. It sounds like you haven't been reading.
Many of the developers have in mind that Gentoo should be what it claims to be - a metadisribution - which means that you use it to make other distributions.
Already, there is more work being done on cross-compiling with Gentoo than there has been in any other system. (Haven't gotten a cross of NetBSD working yet - if anybody has PLEASE respond).
It's not unlikely that there will be a cross-package installation system as part of portage in the future.
Whatever happens, I believe that Gentoo is bound for success above other distros. There is more development, more documentation, and more user support than any other distro that exists currently.
You're assuming that the Widgets would have to be installed to work; this is an incorrect assumption. The idea is more akin to CORBA - the widget is "installed" onto your machine by the server itself.
I have long wondered why they don't give Phoenix/Firebird a name befitting it's position.
Firebird? What does that have to do with Mozilla?
I still think they should just change the name to "Zilla." That way, people can know that if Zilla is to lean for them, they can get Mo' Zilla.
I don't know about the rest of you, but when I got here all I saw was a large blue
"YES!"
right under the question, "is SCO litigating itself into irrelevance?"
(It's actually part of an Intel ad, but hey...it's a good magic-8 ball to me).
This company reminds me of this article. What makes them think they have enough clout to even attempt this? They're going to bully IBM?
We do use coins. Ever heard of silver dollars? Its what Americans call our dollar coins. If you buy stamps from a machine here, the change is in silver dollars (you can put a twenty in some of those machines to get $12 in stamps).
The trouble, though, is that silver engravings aren't very easy to read - at least not compared to paper. The main reason I've heard that they're not used more here is because they are roughly the size and shape of the much older and more highly recognized fifty-cent piece - and there is the dilemma. If we changed them, and made them smaller, they'd look like quarters. If we changed them and made them bigger, they'd weigh a LOT. Getting rid of the other conflicting coins isn't really an option, as the previous poster mentioned.
I think we should put a hole in them. That would make it easy to tell them apart.
First consider that there are a lot of commercial systems out there today - old systems that have lived for eons and eons - that currently use BSD.
Next consider that these old systems use old compilers because they haven't been updated in ages.
Finally consider that lowly users don't usually have access rights to upgrade such systems.
Given these three facts, it would seem that there is a need for cross-compilers from Linux and Windows (via cygwin or mingw, perhaps) to BSD, so that we can actually use these systems effectively. However, I have yet to find one good (i.e. that works) piece of information on the subject. Perhaps this isn't addressed in the book...but it is certainly an area to be addressed in SOME book about BSD.
So...what you're saying is that it's easy to peel open the light protection layer in RAM and expose it to a flash automatically? It's easy to build a physical mechanism to which includes moving parts and a flash bulb that actually does this?
Personally, I think that just hooking the data read/write head up to a high voltage source making it into a powerful electromagnet that will make all the data on the harddrive unreadable is a lot easier. You could even make the modification to existing designs without adding new parts. Nice thought though.
You know that nothing needs too be reimplemented, right? They are GIVING away their proxy client and server, which is the crux of all they have created. You don't need all the rest.
I'll give it a shot.
XDirectFB is an X server. I'm currently using it with Gnome to send this to you. The only requirement is that the apps are capable of communicating with an X server.
It works.
When did I say ssh was the best?
.Xauthority file. It's all done automatically.
.ssh, or if you use putty (search through the options).
Surely, it's not the answer to all the worlds problesm, but ssh has a built in option for X forwarding. It's built in!
Maybe they suck as a vpn solution, but they provide two kinds of public key encryption (the same kinds used by SSL), they come with built in compression, and most importantly, forwarding pretty much just works when you turn it on.
Also, with ssh, the end user doesn't have to worry about the cookie passing process or know what makes up an
By the way, the information is available to the user, though they don't authenticate on a per socket level - only once for the ssh client. At least, it is if you're using a *nix ssh client - there's a listing of public keys under
So I'd say it works pretty well for X forwarding.
As far as VPN, my personal experience (which cannot be argued because it is not fact) is that it's much more flexible than anything else for VPN apps. My work only provides pptp for VPN, and that is incredibly slow, crashes A LOT, and provides no compression. SSH forwarding, on the other hand, is fast, never crashes (thanks to autossh), and compresses everything so much that it seems comparable to actually using the LAN.
If you have the luxury of getting apps that come with SSL, then by all means, use those.
I can think of what that will be like.
"Hey...X doesn't work with IPv6. I'll just tunnel it through an IPv6 ssh tunnel. Problem solved."
I guess I won't have to worry much about that day.
Besides, if you're using X over the net WITHOUT ssh (the only place where IPv6 is necessarily needed, since everywhere else you can use private addresses), what are you thinking?!!!
It's WAY to slow without compressing, which means sending it through some kind of tunnel. Personally, I think it's way too slow anyway. RealVNC beats it for bandwidth usage and it's just a framebuffer, even compared to dxpc and lbxproxy (at least that has been my observation).
XDirectFB (not to be confused with DirectFB, which is the general library it uses) only has accelerated drivers for Matrox cards, and a few others.
The whole point of it is acceleration. Video cards that haven't released a single spec as to HOW to excelerate them can't really expect an accelerated driver, can they?
However, it works with any system that has a framebuffer, though it's slow as molasses. If you have openGL on your card, you can use it regardless of the type, so that should be pretty portable.
The real question that comes to mind is why is this better than ssh'ing to my home box and pulling up stuff using realVNC?
My home box has a heck of a lot more processing power and storage space than this thing.
I always thought that the only advantage a PDA had over this approach was that you could access it without having to use another big machine...
Macintosh: I made that stuff back in - ..but I already...
Windows:
Now slow, I say, slow down there just a second, boy, and lemme talk a little sense into ya! (If that boy don't stop talkin' he's gonna sunburn his tongue.)
Macintosh:
Windows: Whoa there boy! (Nice kid, but he's about as thick as a whale omelette.) You can't, I say, you can't just take credit for things that ya didn't do! (This boy's about as sharp as a pound o' wet liver.) You can't just keep crowin' on about how young you feel and how hard you work. You just gotta start bein' the best boy you can be and show those folks you can do it just as good as them!
Now go on, I say, go on boy, an' show 'em what you're made of! Now git!
Macintosh: Ah..yeah. Later.
Building from source is a nice idea, but it takes a lot of effort to get to *BSD's quality level, and it will probably always have a few more install problems than a binary package system.
Quite the contrary. The article pointed out that the big problem with package management is getting the packages to work with the right libraries. Most of these dependency problems go away when you build the libraries from source.
They also included a system called "slots" which is for including multiple libraries on the same system. For example, I've got gcc2.95.3 and gcc3.2.2 on my system right now, and I use the former if a package is too old to work with the latter.
It is these things that let you do continuous updating, which is not very possible with binary systems - you usually have to upgrade all of your system at once if you want to ensure that everything works.
Of course, if you limit yourself to ONLY packages that your distro provides, and ONLY upgrade when they tell you it's safe, you might be able to get more stability. But that's like comparing apples and oranges since all the source distros use very modern versions of all the packages - you're comparing more stable binary installs to less stable source installs.
Also, I haven't met very many people who enjoy using the old, less featureful versions of packages. I myself run phoenix compiled from cvs, which, although it sometimes crashes, is much faster than Mozilla.
Is that even available in any binary distros yet?
What about winex from CVS?
The problems plagueing X11 right now - namely an API that is being used with graphics primitives that are, well...TOO primitive for normal use.
The code is huge, the programs that use it are huge, and it runs very slowly.
All to support backward compatibility.
IIRC someone invented a system of attaching watches to people's arms so that they could go anywhere and still tell time.
I believe they called the device a "strap." Yes, I'm sure that's it. It is a slight improvement over gluing things to your arms, especially when attempting take showers.
Perhaps that would be a better approach, if you can find such newfangled technologies.
When you can't tell what to listen for?
You always can? Good for you.
But for everyone else, looking at the error spectrum for, say, random noise, will tell us what music to play to accentuate the error so that the listening test works, and what sound equipment to not use in order to hear the problems (we wouldn't want to have a low pass filter put on something that has problems in the high end, now would we)?
Look at spectral readouts for long enough, and you get some idea of what kind of artifacts you're going to hear, and you can listen for them and see how bad (what volume, how well they blend in, etc) they really are.
They are not useless; they are a good first step.