For the past 15 years I've had an, let's call it unusual, job working in the astronomy department at the University of Arizona. First as a student employee (research assistant) and now for a private start-up, though my "office" unofficially remains on campus.
So, I've seen a lot of the goings on in the department, and while I'm certainly not plugged into the faculty grapevine, I see what goes on.
Fraud? No. It's a friendly and cordial place to work really. If there has been any fraud, it has been either very minor or done by people who weren't around very long. But, astronomy is not like physics or biology. Sure, the grants are still very competitive, but it is expected that you will be looking for the unknown, so somewhat fanciful ideas aren't immediately shunned. Maybe you wont get to use your first choice 10m telescope, but there are many others available.
The state of astronomy is changing, though. I had a lengthy chat with my boss about this recently. He's about to turn 80, so he's been at this since the Apollo days. Back then, space research got a lot of funding, but that's not true any more. Often, to get a grant you need to try to show how this idea of yours could conceivably help industry. The problem is that a lot of astronomy falls into the fundamental research category. You just want to see how the universe functions. It is a lot harder to get money for that these days. There are subcategories where it is easier, though. I work in the adaptive optics part of the department and this has obvious uses for, among others, the military. This means you can potentially get funding from the defense department, they get something they want, and you still get to do astronomy.
Having said all of that, do read what a lot of others have posted about the scarcity of jobs for scientists in academia. It's not good. My position is somewhat unique (in both good and bad ways that I wont get into here), so I haven't had to deal with this yet. And perhaps astronomy is somewhat more fortunate than regular physics in that there are fewer students trying to get PhDs, but getting a permanent job still isn't easy.
When I originally started my comp. sci. program at the U of Arizona back in 1997, one of the required classes was a systems class where we learned about some of the lower level bits done in an OS. It wasn't an OS class since we didn't create/modify an OS, but rather an overview of some OS topics (for example, we wrote a memory allocator in C).
For a week or two we learned about assembly language. Specifically, we were using ARM assembly and ran the small bits of code using SPIM (the MIPS emulator). These days... I don't know if such a thing is still required, but I'm fairly sure it's at least an option.
Personally, I had already done a fair bit of DOS x86 assembly in high school and wrote some simple programs and TSRs (Terminate and Stay Resident, if you remember those). And then later in college I did a fair bit of work in ARM assembly on actual hardware (a small embedded board). More recently, I've been working on a machine simulator for a stack based CPU (written in Java, too) and all of the code you execute in the simulator is written in the CPUs "stack assembly".
So, in my case, the small amount of assembly work done in class wasn't very useful since I already had more extensive prior experience. But, I definitely agree that it is a very useful topic for comp. sci. students to know about. Not because you're all that likely to actually use it, but more because it provides a more rounded understanding of what actually occurs in a computer.
Slashdot hates Java because they hate anything that isn't Pure GNU open source.
No, I think/. hates Java for many of the same reasons a lot of nerds and power users hate Java: perception.
As has already been mentioned, Java is extremely popular and taught to many students. The end result is a great number of people who know at least a little Java but who are not necessarily good programmers. These people either decide on their own or are told by employers to write program X in Java and the end result is a poor program. The outcome would largely be the same even if a language other than Java were used.
I've written a number of medium to large programs on a few different platforms using a few different languages. I find that I quite like Java. Obviously, it has got its own set of problems and peculiarities, but it is not inherently a bad language.
If you know what you're doing, you can write very effective Java programs that are even decent to look at. The Java language does not force an application to be bloated or use huge amounts of memory. Bad programming is responsible for those problems.
There may be something to the argument that writing bloated/memory hungry applications is easier in Java, but the fault still lies with poor programming from poor programmers.
That's a really good question. I first heard of this debacle about a month ago and it surprised the hell out of me. When I read it, my first thought was how could any employer think this was ethical or legal to begin with. And, failing that, why didn't this practice produce a deluge of lawsuits as soon as an employer tried it?
I suppose, for the second question, this tactic is preferentially used on prospective employees for lower wage jobs. Against people who either really need the job or don't have the means to file a lawsuit (or both).
Also, the percentage of workers in the US who are in a union is abyssmally low... I believe it's below 10% for the private sector. Without a group to look out for workers rights, who will? Without a union to pool the workers' resources, it is very unlikely an individual employee will be able to do it.
Anyway, like you I find this trend both apalling and unthinkable. Clearly, however, employers seem to think very differently. Upon further reflection, this seems to be another case of "it's different because it's on the Internet" when in reality the old rules don't go out the window just because you used a computer.
This is one of a very few social problems I actually wish I might encounter, just so I could raise a big stink.
I keep seeing the PSP's demise being mentioned and how rampant piracy has sped it along. I guess maybe I'm out of the loop, but I still see PSPs for sale and a whole shelf of games for them at the game store.
How has the PSP failed? Can anybody provide more information? Clearly, it's not as popular as the DS, but then few things are.
Connection multiplexing is great. I use it all the time when I connect to my machine at work from home since I'm very likely to scp files to/from that machine at the same time. The page you linked to gives simple and good instructions at the beginning on how to configure it.
I created a simple shell script to help automate the process. The advantage of the script is that it will take care of checking to see if the shared connection is already open, create a new connection if one does not exist, and then connect to the remote host.
The script includes a large comment block at the beginning which includes detailed instructions on how to configure SSH and how to use the script. After you have configured your ~/.ssh/config file for the server(s) in question and to create the multiplexing socket, you can use this script to connect to the machine. Put it in your user bin directory (~/bin) and then create a symlink to the script with the same name as the host alias you put in ~/.ssh/config. For example, if you have a "Host foo" line in your SSH config, name the symlink "foo". This way the script will automatically use the correct options from the config file.
I also have an alias to close the connection (for Bash):
Even better is the screen/tmux wrapper called byobu (https://launchpad.net/byobu). It puts a nice face on screen (and now also tmux) and greatly simplifies basic usage. It also has a large selection of status notifications that can be displayed on the bottom one or two lines of your terminal which show things like the current screens, load, time, etc.
The default key mapping uses the function keys for the most common commands. For example, F2 for a new window, F3/F4 for previous/next window, and so on. It provides a wrapper around the session handling as well, so that, in general, you can almost always just run "byobu" and get your session back or start a new one if there is none existing. And if it finds that you have more than one session running, it will ask you which one to connect to.
In the configuration menu (F9), the last item allows you to toggle auto-launching at login. Select it and it will add a line to the end of your shell's profile file to start byobu when you login.
Development has been proceeding at a very rapid pace over the past year and the feature set it quite nice. Recently, the default backend was switched from screen to tmux, but because byobu is a wrapper on top of those programs, I didn't need to learn a new set of keys... though it did help to read up on tmux to see what it could/couldn't do as compared to screen. For the most part, the change was transparent, though tmux only does one status line at the bottom of the terminal versus the two that you had with screen. One of the nicest changes is that tmux can determine what command you are executing in a window and it shows this in place of a window's generic title in the status line. Screen could do this too, but you had to jump though some hoops, change your shell prompt, and it didn't always work.
Anyway, with the additions byobu brings to screen/tmux, I always have it running which has the added benefit that in the (these days, not very likely) event of SSH dropping my connection, nothing is lost. I usually use it in local terminals too, so if X or my terminal ever crashes for some odd reason, I'm saved there, too.
What would be a better alternative be then? At home, I've got a Linux RAID-5 configuration running on my file/media server/MythBox. I built it several years ago with four 500 GB drives. Its performance has always been more than enough to handle standard-def MPEG2 recording from the TV encoder. Soon, though, I will need to upgrade it with larger drives and that would be a good time to switch from RAID-5.
At work, I'm about to build a new more powerful workstation/server. To say that my budget is constrained is putting it lightly. Currently, it has two 1 TB drives in a RAID-1 config. We had an external backup/snapshot drive, but it has since died. Our write speed requirements are not at all extreme, so current drive speeds should be fine.
I guess RAID-6 seems like a good alternative in these cases, supposing the array is built with a minimum of four 1 TB drives? I don't think I need the performance of RAID-10. At least, at home, I'd rather have the extra space. I'm also not considering SSD drives in these two machines as I can't justify the cost.
Let's not forget that, in general, Google must necessarily be involved in the matter at hand. You don't just start writing amicus briefs on a whim. If you want to have any impact at all, then it must be an issue that affects you and/or your company.
I'm sure Google could have their lawyers write up briefs and letters on any random topic, but if it is not relevant, why would the judge bother with it?
Oh, look! Google submitted a brief on the produce export restrictions. We'd better read it with the utmost scrutiny...
Wow. Kudos to you (Americano) and to omfgnosis for having a lengthy, reasonable, and civil discussion on the topic at hand. And though the comments on/. are miles above most other public sites of similar size, it is still somewhat rare to see a thread go this long with descending into a flame war.
New "team" network driver
on
Linux 3.3 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I am a bit confused with regards to the new team network driver which is going to eventually replace the current bonding net driver. The kernel newbies page says that it is user-space and uses libteam to do its work, but it also says that this new implementation will be more efficient.
How is this so? As network throughput keeps increasing, it is important to process each packet as quickly as possible. That's why network drivers and the packet filter are in the kernel. Wouldn't moving the new team/bonding work to user-space mean a lot more data for the kernel to copy back and forth between kernel and user spaces? And wouldn't this hurt efficiency? I'm sure the computer can keep up in most cases, but it seems this will require more CPU time to handle the work.
I use KeePassX, a derivative of the original KeePassX. It is also open and under the GPL. I gather that the major difference between it and the original KeePass is that its cross-platform nature is not dependent on Mono/.Net. The downside is that it does not yet support the KeePass 2.x DB format, but since I'm not using that, I don't mind.
I use KeePassX on Debian, the Windows port under Win7, and KeePassDroid on my phone. It all works really well. My only complaint with KeePassDroid is that it doesn't support file attachments that one can attach to an entry in the database. It doesn't appear to destroy them, it just ignore them right now. Other than that, it's great.
Humanity has almost always had a love of genuine artifacts, and that desire is practically universal. And to suppose that we could record perfect information about the original is laughable and completely ignores the intrinsic value of the original painting.
Concerning this new painting, I would very much like to see the new one, but destroying the outer painting is a terrible idea. I think that if they can gather enough evidence of a valid painting existing, then they will be able to gather enough funds to recover it safely.
Yeah, GutenPalm... right up until I received that stupid cease and desist letter from Palm when they decided that they owned the word. At least Android hasn't done something stupid like that.
And thanks for the reply. One of these days (again, Real Soon Now) I need to revist it and write an Android version. In general, I'm just as unhappy with the currently available reader programs for Android as I was back in the early Palm days, though for different reasons. Still, just as before, most reader apps have very little in the way of customization options for how the text is displayed. Considering that you spend 99% of your time in this mode of the app, you'd think it would receive a lot of the attention. Right now, I think that JReader is by far the best of the available apps (and it's OSS, too).
When I started with GutenPalm/Weasel Reader, wikis weren't really available. Of course, 12 years later the Internet has changed a whole lot. For something like a reader I would most likely go with the wiki model for writing the manual... and probably collect some/most of it into a single document for use with the reader itself.
Interestingly, there's still a handful of people who continue to use Weasel Reader. I hear from them from time to time. It certainly helps that they no longer make Palm devices for which I would need to test and/or update the code.
That's a shame. My last big OSS project, Weasel Reader, was a Palm OS program so it was, by nature of the OS, much simpler than a standard PC program. And, as well as the project turned out and for all the users I had, I have to admit that my biggest failure with it was the lack of external documentation.
The code was well documented and the program had useful in-app help texts and such. Also, I think there was sufficient web page documentation for the PC command line tool which generated the text/book databases the program read. But, while the entry bar to begin using the program was low enough that you really didn't need *any* documentation, there were enough extra features and things that could have been explained better that a solid user's manual would have been great.
I think part of the reason it never got done was that during the ten years, or so, that the program was a going concern I made a few proclimations that I would write a manual Real Soon Now. That may have put off others who might have been interested.
Still, though I did have numerous patches submitted along with a number of translations, if somebody had offered to write a manual, I would have jumped at the opportunity and done everything in my power to make the job easier. In the end, though, nobody (including myself) stepped forward. It's definitely something I won't make the mistake of doing in my next OSS project.
This is very true. Gaming is the only thing I use Windows for, too. I eventually turned my second screen off because most games ignored it and those that didn't usually did something incorrect with it.
Both screens work fine for most of my tasks in Debian. But, here too, games never seem to work properly with two screens. I usually have to temporarily disable one screen if I run a game. Then I must reposition a number of my desktop widgets when I turn it back on.
I wrote Weasel Reader for Palm OS (http://weaselreader.org) starting in 2000 mostly because I was dissatisfied with Peanut/Palm Reader as well as the program from Adobe. From early on, I had included an annotation feature because it was asked for and because most of the other readers did not include one. Annotations were anchored to a particular location in the text, had a title and body, and you could view a list of all annotations in a document. Aside from general thank yous, I probably received more specific thanks for that feature than any other.
But, as other comments have pointed out, this patent seems to focus primarily on shared annotations and keeping them in a central repository. Weasel never had any online features and annotations were stored in the document itself.
I still think this patent is entirely stupid, though...
Yes, this exactly. This post is perhaps one of ten actually congratulating CmdrTaco and pointing out some of the many positive features of Slashdot. Honestly, for how long can people continue to complain about Taco's iPod comment. Geeze.
The truth is that/. is still useful, has never been as bad as a lot of the haters would like everybody to think, and still attracts plenty of visitors. If people weren't coming, reading, and posting then there wouldn't be anybody around to whine...
The sad thing is that we're now in the position we were ~10 years ago with Netscape Navigator, except that this time Mozilla is playing the part of Netscape, and there's no Phoenix on the horizon...
I live in Tucson and Phoenix is on the horizon. And it's getting a little closer every day... :(
My dual core Atrix too does it, but most of the times it is due to high I/O load. Second core can't do much here. Is that the case with your phone as wel?
That could very well be, and I had even considered this... but I'm not sure how to check what the I/O load is on the phone or for a particular app.
System Tuner allows one to change the cache size for the SD card. On the Droid 3 it defaulted to 128 before I touched anything, and I have read that this is particularly low. So I set it to 2048 using the app. This is for the external SD card. For the internal SD card, the app shows the cache size at 1000000, and that seems quite high. Also, the value for the internal SD card always seems to reset to one million after a reboot, while the value I set for the external SD persists (there is an option in System Tuner to set this on boot).
Regardless, my playing with these values seems to have had little effect on the phone, good or bad.
In an update to my earlier post, another screen in System Tuner lists the amount of time the CPU has spent at each frequency level. Even though the bar graph still shows the second core as always offline, according to the frequency time breakdown, almost no time has been spent in the "offline" speed. This would seem to indicate that my forcing the second core to be online has had an effect. But, as I haven't noticed any difference in performance, perhaps I will put it back the way it was.
I guess if I really want some more speed, performance, or free memory on this device, I'll need to ditch the stock ROM and install a 3rd party ROM. I've got nothing against them, but I've been planning to wait under CyanogenMod 9 (ICS) is ready for Droid 3 use. That way I only need to change the ROM once.
Sadly, the Droid 3 has a locked bootloader, so even though I have rooted the phone, I cannot change the kernel. However, if it is using a userspace daemon, or even if it is a custom kernel interface, then surely System Tuner could use the same method to control the second core?
But, as others have pointed out, perhaps there is an error or bug with how System Tuner reports and/or controls the second core.
It's hard to say. But I have experienced periods where my phone becomes very sluggish and it *seems* to be caused by a single app becoming very busy for a period. I should think that in these instances the second core would become active and assist the system. Fortunately, I didn't buy the device for the dual-core feature, but it would be nice if it appeared to do more.
I'll have to do some more investigating, including trying the multi-core aware video decoder that was suggested.
The whole "core" obsession on mobile devices seems to be nothing but marketing talk. At least, as far as I have been able to determine.
I have a Droid 3 which has a dual-core CPU and using System Tuner I found that the second core was always shown as "offline". Doing some research online I found that the second core is kept offline to preserve battery life. Supposedly, it only comes online if the load is particularly high.
But, no matter what I did on the phone, I could never get the second core to come online. Using one of the tweaks available in System Tuner, I can apparently force both cores to be online all the time. However, the second core is still shown as offline and I still can't seem to get it to come online via high usage. Also, battery life doesn't seem to have changed.
So, this wonderful second core seems to be entirely useless and nothing but an item for the marketing checklist on the advertisements.
Was this an actual factual idea that Notch proposed? If so, I sure hope it goes somewhere. I love Psychonauts immensely and would be thrilled at the prospect of a sequel (still have it installed on my HDD even). And Mojang certainly has the cash to spare...
Slashdot Mirror
For the past 15 years I've had an, let's call it unusual, job working in the astronomy department at the University of Arizona. First as a student employee (research assistant) and now for a private start-up, though my "office" unofficially remains on campus.
So, I've seen a lot of the goings on in the department, and while I'm certainly not plugged into the faculty grapevine, I see what goes on.
Fraud? No. It's a friendly and cordial place to work really. If there has been any fraud, it has been either very minor or done by people who weren't around very long. But, astronomy is not like physics or biology. Sure, the grants are still very competitive, but it is expected that you will be looking for the unknown, so somewhat fanciful ideas aren't immediately shunned. Maybe you wont get to use your first choice 10m telescope, but there are many others available.
The state of astronomy is changing, though. I had a lengthy chat with my boss about this recently. He's about to turn 80, so he's been at this since the Apollo days. Back then, space research got a lot of funding, but that's not true any more. Often, to get a grant you need to try to show how this idea of yours could conceivably help industry. The problem is that a lot of astronomy falls into the fundamental research category. You just want to see how the universe functions. It is a lot harder to get money for that these days. There are subcategories where it is easier, though. I work in the adaptive optics part of the department and this has obvious uses for, among others, the military. This means you can potentially get funding from the defense department, they get something they want, and you still get to do astronomy.
Having said all of that, do read what a lot of others have posted about the scarcity of jobs for scientists in academia. It's not good. My position is somewhat unique (in both good and bad ways that I wont get into here), so I haven't had to deal with this yet. And perhaps astronomy is somewhat more fortunate than regular physics in that there are fewer students trying to get PhDs, but getting a permanent job still isn't easy.
When I originally started my comp. sci. program at the U of Arizona back in 1997, one of the required classes was a systems class where we learned about some of the lower level bits done in an OS. It wasn't an OS class since we didn't create/modify an OS, but rather an overview of some OS topics (for example, we wrote a memory allocator in C).
For a week or two we learned about assembly language. Specifically, we were using ARM assembly and ran the small bits of code using SPIM (the MIPS emulator). These days... I don't know if such a thing is still required, but I'm fairly sure it's at least an option.
Personally, I had already done a fair bit of DOS x86 assembly in high school and wrote some simple programs and TSRs (Terminate and Stay Resident, if you remember those). And then later in college I did a fair bit of work in ARM assembly on actual hardware (a small embedded board). More recently, I've been working on a machine simulator for a stack based CPU (written in Java, too) and all of the code you execute in the simulator is written in the CPUs "stack assembly".
So, in my case, the small amount of assembly work done in class wasn't very useful since I already had more extensive prior experience. But, I definitely agree that it is a very useful topic for comp. sci. students to know about. Not because you're all that likely to actually use it, but more because it provides a more rounded understanding of what actually occurs in a computer.
Slashdot hates Java because they hate anything that isn't Pure GNU open source.
No, I think /. hates Java for many of the same reasons a lot of nerds and power users hate Java: perception.
As has already been mentioned, Java is extremely popular and taught to many students. The end result is a great number of people who know at least a little Java but who are not necessarily good programmers. These people either decide on their own or are told by employers to write program X in Java and the end result is a poor program. The outcome would largely be the same even if a language other than Java were used.
I've written a number of medium to large programs on a few different platforms using a few different languages. I find that I quite like Java. Obviously, it has got its own set of problems and peculiarities, but it is not inherently a bad language.
If you know what you're doing, you can write very effective Java programs that are even decent to look at. The Java language does not force an application to be bloated or use huge amounts of memory. Bad programming is responsible for those problems.
There may be something to the argument that writing bloated/memory hungry applications is easier in Java, but the fault still lies with poor programming from poor programmers.
That's a really good question. I first heard of this debacle about a month ago and it surprised the hell out of me. When I read it, my first thought was how could any employer think this was ethical or legal to begin with. And, failing that, why didn't this practice produce a deluge of lawsuits as soon as an employer tried it?
I suppose, for the second question, this tactic is preferentially used on prospective employees for lower wage jobs. Against people who either really need the job or don't have the means to file a lawsuit (or both).
Also, the percentage of workers in the US who are in a union is abyssmally low... I believe it's below 10% for the private sector. Without a group to look out for workers rights, who will? Without a union to pool the workers' resources, it is very unlikely an individual employee will be able to do it.
Anyway, like you I find this trend both apalling and unthinkable. Clearly, however, employers seem to think very differently. Upon further reflection, this seems to be another case of "it's different because it's on the Internet" when in reality the old rules don't go out the window just because you used a computer.
This is one of a very few social problems I actually wish I might encounter, just so I could raise a big stink.
I keep seeing the PSP's demise being mentioned and how rampant piracy has sped it along. I guess maybe I'm out of the loop, but I still see PSPs for sale and a whole shelf of games for them at the game store.
How has the PSP failed? Can anybody provide more information? Clearly, it's not as popular as the DS, but then few things are.
Connection multiplexing is great. I use it all the time when I connect to my machine at work from home since I'm very likely to scp files to/from that machine at the same time. The page you linked to gives simple and good instructions at the beginning on how to configure it.
I created a simple shell script to help automate the process. The advantage of the script is that it will take care of checking to see if the shared connection is already open, create a new connection if one does not exist, and then connect to the remote host.
ssh-shared.sh
The script includes a large comment block at the beginning which includes detailed instructions on how to configure SSH and how to use the script. After you have configured your ~/.ssh/config file for the server(s) in question and to create the multiplexing socket, you can use this script to connect to the machine. Put it in your user bin directory (~/bin) and then create a symlink to the script with the same name as the host alias you put in ~/.ssh/config. For example, if you have a "Host foo" line in your SSH config, name the symlink "foo". This way the script will automatically use the correct options from the config file.
I also have an alias to close the connection (for Bash):
alias ssh-exit='ssh -O exit'
Now, a session will look like this:
$ foo
--SSH session starts/ends--
$ ssh-exit foo
Even better is the screen/tmux wrapper called byobu (https://launchpad.net/byobu). It puts a nice face on screen (and now also tmux) and greatly simplifies basic usage. It also has a large selection of status notifications that can be displayed on the bottom one or two lines of your terminal which show things like the current screens, load, time, etc.
The default key mapping uses the function keys for the most common commands. For example, F2 for a new window, F3/F4 for previous/next window, and so on. It provides a wrapper around the session handling as well, so that, in general, you can almost always just run "byobu" and get your session back or start a new one if there is none existing. And if it finds that you have more than one session running, it will ask you which one to connect to.
In the configuration menu (F9), the last item allows you to toggle auto-launching at login. Select it and it will add a line to the end of your shell's profile file to start byobu when you login.
Development has been proceeding at a very rapid pace over the past year and the feature set it quite nice. Recently, the default backend was switched from screen to tmux, but because byobu is a wrapper on top of those programs, I didn't need to learn a new set of keys... though it did help to read up on tmux to see what it could/couldn't do as compared to screen. For the most part, the change was transparent, though tmux only does one status line at the bottom of the terminal versus the two that you had with screen. One of the nicest changes is that tmux can determine what command you are executing in a window and it shows this in place of a window's generic title in the status line. Screen could do this too, but you had to jump though some hoops, change your shell prompt, and it didn't always work.
Anyway, with the additions byobu brings to screen/tmux, I always have it running which has the added benefit that in the (these days, not very likely) event of SSH dropping my connection, nothing is lost. I usually use it in local terminals too, so if X or my terminal ever crashes for some odd reason, I'm saved there, too.
Okay, I'm sold. :)
What would be a better alternative be then? At home, I've got a Linux RAID-5 configuration running on my file/media server/MythBox. I built it several years ago with four 500 GB drives. Its performance has always been more than enough to handle standard-def MPEG2 recording from the TV encoder. Soon, though, I will need to upgrade it with larger drives and that would be a good time to switch from RAID-5.
At work, I'm about to build a new more powerful workstation/server. To say that my budget is constrained is putting it lightly. Currently, it has two 1 TB drives in a RAID-1 config. We had an external backup/snapshot drive, but it has since died. Our write speed requirements are not at all extreme, so current drive speeds should be fine.
I guess RAID-6 seems like a good alternative in these cases, supposing the array is built with a minimum of four 1 TB drives? I don't think I need the performance of RAID-10. At least, at home, I'd rather have the extra space. I'm also not considering SSD drives in these two machines as I can't justify the cost.
So much to consider...
Let's not forget that, in general, Google must necessarily be involved in the matter at hand. You don't just start writing amicus briefs on a whim. If you want to have any impact at all, then it must be an issue that affects you and/or your company.
I'm sure Google could have their lawyers write up briefs and letters on any random topic, but if it is not relevant, why would the judge bother with it?
Oh, look! Google submitted a brief on the produce export restrictions. We'd better read it with the utmost scrutiny...
Wow. Kudos to you (Americano) and to omfgnosis for having a lengthy, reasonable, and civil discussion on the topic at hand. And though the comments on /. are miles above most other public sites of similar size, it is still somewhat rare to see a thread go this long with descending into a flame war.
Good show.
Ah, okay. That makes a lot more sense. Thanks!
I am a bit confused with regards to the new team network driver which is going to eventually replace the current bonding net driver. The kernel newbies page says that it is user-space and uses libteam to do its work, but it also says that this new implementation will be more efficient.
How is this so? As network throughput keeps increasing, it is important to process each packet as quickly as possible. That's why network drivers and the packet filter are in the kernel. Wouldn't moving the new team/bonding work to user-space mean a lot more data for the kernel to copy back and forth between kernel and user spaces? And wouldn't this hurt efficiency? I'm sure the computer can keep up in most cases, but it seems this will require more CPU time to handle the work.
Just curious...
I use KeePassX, a derivative of the original KeePassX. It is also open and under the GPL. I gather that the major difference between it and the original KeePass is that its cross-platform nature is not dependent on Mono/.Net. The downside is that it does not yet support the KeePass 2.x DB format, but since I'm not using that, I don't mind.
I use KeePassX on Debian, the Windows port under Win7, and KeePassDroid on my phone. It all works really well. My only complaint with KeePassDroid is that it doesn't support file attachments that one can attach to an entry in the database. It doesn't appear to destroy them, it just ignore them right now. Other than that, it's great.
Seriously?
Humanity has almost always had a love of genuine artifacts, and that desire is practically universal. And to suppose that we could record perfect information about the original is laughable and completely ignores the intrinsic value of the original painting.
Concerning this new painting, I would very much like to see the new one, but destroying the outer painting is a terrible idea. I think that if they can gather enough evidence of a valid painting existing, then they will be able to gather enough funds to recover it safely.
Yeah, GutenPalm... right up until I received that stupid cease and desist letter from Palm when they decided that they owned the word. At least Android hasn't done something stupid like that.
And thanks for the reply. One of these days (again, Real Soon Now) I need to revist it and write an Android version. In general, I'm just as unhappy with the currently available reader programs for Android as I was back in the early Palm days, though for different reasons. Still, just as before, most reader apps have very little in the way of customization options for how the text is displayed. Considering that you spend 99% of your time in this mode of the app, you'd think it would receive a lot of the attention. Right now, I think that JReader is by far the best of the available apps (and it's OSS, too).
When I started with GutenPalm/Weasel Reader, wikis weren't really available. Of course, 12 years later the Internet has changed a whole lot. For something like a reader I would most likely go with the wiki model for writing the manual... and probably collect some/most of it into a single document for use with the reader itself.
Interestingly, there's still a handful of people who continue to use Weasel Reader. I hear from them from time to time. It certainly helps that they no longer make Palm devices for which I would need to test and/or update the code.
Better still:
"We am thy freighter Ursva, six weeks out of Kronos. Over.
We is condemning food, things and... supplies."
I haven't thought about that in years...
That's a shame. My last big OSS project, Weasel Reader, was a Palm OS program so it was, by nature of the OS, much simpler than a standard PC program. And, as well as the project turned out and for all the users I had, I have to admit that my biggest failure with it was the lack of external documentation.
The code was well documented and the program had useful in-app help texts and such. Also, I think there was sufficient web page documentation for the PC command line tool which generated the text/book databases the program read. But, while the entry bar to begin using the program was low enough that you really didn't need *any* documentation, there were enough extra features and things that could have been explained better that a solid user's manual would have been great.
I think part of the reason it never got done was that during the ten years, or so, that the program was a going concern I made a few proclimations that I would write a manual Real Soon Now. That may have put off others who might have been interested.
Still, though I did have numerous patches submitted along with a number of translations, if somebody had offered to write a manual, I would have jumped at the opportunity and done everything in my power to make the job easier. In the end, though, nobody (including myself) stepped forward. It's definitely something I won't make the mistake of doing in my next OSS project.
This is very true. Gaming is the only thing I use Windows for, too. I eventually turned my second screen off because most games ignored it and those that didn't usually did something incorrect with it.
Both screens work fine for most of my tasks in Debian. But, here too, games never seem to work properly with two screens. I usually have to temporarily disable one screen if I run a game. Then I must reposition a number of my desktop widgets when I turn it back on.
I wrote Weasel Reader for Palm OS (http://weaselreader.org) starting in 2000 mostly because I was dissatisfied with Peanut/Palm Reader as well as the program from Adobe. From early on, I had included an annotation feature because it was asked for and because most of the other readers did not include one. Annotations were anchored to a particular location in the text, had a title and body, and you could view a list of all annotations in a document. Aside from general thank yous, I probably received more specific thanks for that feature than any other.
But, as other comments have pointed out, this patent seems to focus primarily on shared annotations and keeping them in a central repository. Weasel never had any online features and annotations were stored in the document itself.
I still think this patent is entirely stupid, though...
Yes, this exactly. This post is perhaps one of ten actually congratulating CmdrTaco and pointing out some of the many positive features of Slashdot. Honestly, for how long can people continue to complain about Taco's iPod comment. Geeze.
The truth is that /. is still useful, has never been as bad as a lot of the haters would like everybody to think, and still attracts plenty of visitors. If people weren't coming, reading, and posting then there wouldn't be anybody around to whine...
The sad thing is that we're now in the position we were ~10 years ago with Netscape Navigator, except that this time Mozilla is playing the part of Netscape, and there's no Phoenix on the horizon...
I live in Tucson and Phoenix is on the horizon. And it's getting a little closer every day...
:(
My dual core Atrix too does it, but most of the times it is due to high I/O load. Second core can't do much here. Is that the case with your phone as wel?
That could very well be, and I had even considered this... but I'm not sure how to check what the I/O load is on the phone or for a particular app.
System Tuner allows one to change the cache size for the SD card. On the Droid 3 it defaulted to 128 before I touched anything, and I have read that this is particularly low. So I set it to 2048 using the app. This is for the external SD card. For the internal SD card, the app shows the cache size at 1000000, and that seems quite high. Also, the value for the internal SD card always seems to reset to one million after a reboot, while the value I set for the external SD persists (there is an option in System Tuner to set this on boot).
Regardless, my playing with these values seems to have had little effect on the phone, good or bad.
In an update to my earlier post, another screen in System Tuner lists the amount of time the CPU has spent at each frequency level. Even though the bar graph still shows the second core as always offline, according to the frequency time breakdown, almost no time has been spent in the "offline" speed. This would seem to indicate that my forcing the second core to be online has had an effect. But, as I haven't noticed any difference in performance, perhaps I will put it back the way it was.
I guess if I really want some more speed, performance, or free memory on this device, I'll need to ditch the stock ROM and install a 3rd party ROM. I've got nothing against them, but I've been planning to wait under CyanogenMod 9 (ICS) is ready for Droid 3 use. That way I only need to change the ROM once.
Sadly, the Droid 3 has a locked bootloader, so even though I have rooted the phone, I cannot change the kernel. However, if it is using a userspace daemon, or even if it is a custom kernel interface, then surely System Tuner could use the same method to control the second core?
But, as others have pointed out, perhaps there is an error or bug with how System Tuner reports and/or controls the second core.
It's hard to say. But I have experienced periods where my phone becomes very sluggish and it *seems* to be caused by a single app becoming very busy for a period. I should think that in these instances the second core would become active and assist the system. Fortunately, I didn't buy the device for the dual-core feature, but it would be nice if it appeared to do more.
I'll have to do some more investigating, including trying the multi-core aware video decoder that was suggested.
The whole "core" obsession on mobile devices seems to be nothing but marketing talk. At least, as far as I have been able to determine.
I have a Droid 3 which has a dual-core CPU and using System Tuner I found that the second core was always shown as "offline". Doing some research online I found that the second core is kept offline to preserve battery life. Supposedly, it only comes online if the load is particularly high.
But, no matter what I did on the phone, I could never get the second core to come online. Using one of the tweaks available in System Tuner, I can apparently force both cores to be online all the time. However, the second core is still shown as offline and I still can't seem to get it to come online via high usage. Also, battery life doesn't seem to have changed.
So, this wonderful second core seems to be entirely useless and nothing but an item for the marketing checklist on the advertisements.
Bah...
Was this an actual factual idea that Notch proposed? If so, I sure hope it goes somewhere. I love Psychonauts immensely and would be thrilled at the prospect of a sequel (still have it installed on my HDD even). And Mojang certainly has the cash to spare...