Big O notation is a 'measure' (use that word very loosely) of how long an algorithm will take, depending on the number of inputs. For the scheduler, the number of inputs is the number of threads and processes. O(n) means that it has to loop over each process in order to make each scheduling decision. O(1) means that it's a constant time algorithm.
(For reference sorting an array of random numbers using bubble sort takes O(n^2), while using merge sort takes O(n*log(n)). Use google to see why. Also be aware that Big O is only a 'measure' of worst case time. Mergesort, if the data is in order takes O(n) (IIRC) )
You could throw 10 processes or 10 million at the O(1) scheduler, and it will still take the same time (witness the recent DSW of "I ran 1 million processes in parallel in 3 seconds!")
T-ranger writes: QT costs money for other platforms. GTK is free everywhere.
marm writes: Qt works properly on other platforms. GTK+ is broken everywhere except X11 (doesn't work, or is very buggy, doesn't look like a native app).
Methinks you misunderstand. For Sun to use QT/KDE in Solaris, they'd have to pay trolltech $BIG$MONEY$. GTK/gnome2 is free software. They could use it for free. And they are. And they're contributing a lot back to the project.
Assuming your statement about 'other platforms' is correct, it doesn't matter. Why? Because Solaris GTK/Gnome2 is going to be on top of X11 anyway.
I'm running the solaris8 gnome beta (gnome1.4) and it works really well. When I have some freetime at work, I'll install the gnome2 beta for solaris on top of it, and see how it does.
I use my palm to keep track of meetings and phone numbers.
Like everyone else.
However, the thing that keeps the palm in my pocket is a program called 'Pocket money'. For me, it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and arguably the best $30 I ever spent.
All I use it for is keeping track of my money. What's in savings, what did I write this check for, what was this charge on my credit card. And balancing (or reconciling) your accounts is very easy.
It has helped me catch someone who stole my credit card number, and it let me catch (just this month) a vendor who posted a charge several times to my account.
One day when I feel right about spending $50-$60 on a keyboard
I used to feel the same way, then someone asked me a profound question: What parts of the computer do you interact with the most?
the answer is the keyboard, the mouse and the monitor.
I contend that someone should spend a larger percentage of the computer cost on the keyboard and monitor. I love my logitec trackman wheel, and I love my old, IBM full clicky keyboard.
If I had to do it now, I'd spend money on one of those 'happy hacker' keyboards or something similar.
My source is my SO who works at my credit union. Her statement was "You really think we would not charge for it [atm charges] if we could?"
I do recall getting a charge for pulling out cash too many times in a month however... so maybe that's what the law states. I assume if you dig into the banking acts that deal with credit unions, you'll find it.
I can't recommend becoming a member of a credit union enough. Customer service is much better, true no fee's on checking, legaly can't charge you for the use of another banks ATM (the other bank can charge you though).
I've gotten approved for a $20k car loan in 2 meetings: 1 for pre-approval (took 10 minutes), one to get the cashiers check (20 minutes (mostly waiting on the check to print)).
If you're not an audiophile, or just don't quite know what he's looking for, give him an IOU. Something like:
"You can spend up to $200 on speakers for the computer". And let HIM agonize over it. (Audiophiles enjoy agonizing over these things)
I'm into highish end sound, and I'd trust my SO to get something like this, but that's only because she's a (self proclaimed) music snob, and has much better ears than I do. She played a large roll in my last speaker purchase.
Re:Will this work with any fast IP connection?
on
Xbox Live Goes Online
·
· Score: 2
It wouldn't supprise me if they had thought of this (mainly since so many DSL providers use the same practice: register your MAC address to use the internet)
They almost have to be targeting people with a Lynksys router (or linux box with IPmasq), since I know that I wouldn't want to re-cable everything depending on if I was gaming, or surfing...
I was sysadmin for a small company (really small... 8 employees counting management and the receptionist) for a while. I gave notice, but since I was the only one who knew how large swaths of the computing systems worked, I let them know that I'd be amiable to helping them.
Short version was 'I'll answer whatever questions you have. Just take me to lunch for it.' They knew if things got too bad, I'd be able to give a helping hand.
They're only real mistake was hiring a paper sysadmin (one with lots of certs but no real experience or clue) to replace me. They did take me out to lunch once.
This is not very valid, since this is an exploit to attack DNS *SERVERS*. Not clients with the shared libs. Besides to attack a client, they first need to get you to go to some compromised DNS server, with an application utilizing the bad resolver libs.
Besides, there are some good security points you should be doing anyway on the server. Unless you must have it, turn off recursion:
He has the right idea. For the same $, you get a DTS projector. Effectivly arbitrary screen size (your 'pad' doesn't need a 40' projection), multi input, etc etc.
He even had the two tier couch thing going on for movie nights.
I saw him type on an 80x24 screen (at 8' x 5'), play nethack, the origional Zelda, and Gran Turismo. Anything you wanted.
About the only 'downside' is that you must have a decent receiver for your audio (and realistically, some of your video) switching, since your projector won't have any sound capability.
When the time comes for me to upgrade my 36", that's the route I'll go.
Economically, you'll save a lot of money if you buy a car at this time of year (at least in the US). Car sales are much lower in the November/December timeframe, and prices are lower to try and drive up sales. Dealers also have the incentive to clear their lots of the previous model year for the new one.
Granted, at least in the Northern US, there are good reasons to not buy a car just before winter begins (salt on the roads (due to snow) rusting out a new frame being the main one)
I remember the ecache issue quite well. I don't know if I'd call it underhanded on Sun's part, though maybe for IBM.
See, IBM sold Sun the cache for their CPU's, and never bothered to inform them that there was a rather high failure rate. And with Sun throwing 8 megs of cache on their chips, you're bound to run into that sooner rather than later.
BTW: this problem got fixed when they started the SAMBRA process (effectivly, 16 megs of cache, 8 megs, mirrored, any byte goes bad, and it's flagged, and the mirror is used only), and was wacked totally when they started using (Toshiba?) instead of IBM for cache.
Now, if you're refering to how they didn't exactly publicise the fact that there wre significant problems... you might have a point there. However, I can see how they only wanted to fix those who 1) Sun they had the supply for (it takes a while to ramp up a new design for the same processor) and 2) customers who had the most need of the new chips. If it hasn't failed yet, why change it?
My company was rather high on the list and Sun replaced every system board, and every stick of ram, and every CPU in both of our e10k's.
In general, I'm with you. The distribution should get out of my way, and let me get things done. I'll update it with security stuff, and have done.
However, the flip side of the coin is that it keeps your mind sharp. Learning how someone else solves the problem is a great exercise, especially for those of us who sysadmin for a living (or want to).
And I was never sold on the 'compile optimizes things greatly' point. I'm still not totally, but I have to admit that my gentoo laptop smoked my debian desktop with LAME (went from 2-2.5x to 4-5x MP3 encodes) even though the cpu is pretty close (800mhz P3 vs AMD 700mhz), much slower disk, and a quarter the ram.
One of my quibbles with gentoo is that it expects a lan connection. It pulls things down (by default) as you need them.
# emerge gnome pull down gnome panel compile gnome panel pull down gnome games compile gnome games
etc. However, you can do a 'emerge -f gnome'. The '-f' is 'fetchonly'. It will pull down everything you need. Then you 'emerge gnome' and you're off to the compiling races.
One of the things I do is leave a 2 gig or so partition around to 'fart around with'. That's enough space to do a full install of most distributions. This also lets me:
1) leveradge my existing linux swap partition 2) mount my home directory (though it might be in/mount/hda/home/zapman, I don't really care) 3) Learn a lot about other distributions without much cost. (2 gigs... come on.)
And with gentoo, you don't even have that cost... they have 'live cd's. Boot of the cd, and you have a working gentoo distribution in RAM. Great to play with. Great to play Unreal Tourny 2003 on linux! (that's the main point of the disk)
I was mostly focusing on the "comercial unix out of the box" space. The "appliance" space is a different ball of wax. BSDI does well there, as does FreeBSD and Linux. All three can be hardened to the gills, and you have all the code for 2 of them (and most of the code for the third).
I really think that the free unicies are going to continue to dominate the 'apliance' space. And I think the use of them will grow greatly over the next few years.
I'm not sure where it's going. I definatly see HP droping out of the comercial unix world over the next few months/years. The fact that they killed the project to migrate PHUX (sic) to itanium/merced, and killed the project for a new PA RISC chip (or whatever HP calles their unix chip) seems to prove this.
Tru64 and alpha are dying. This is beyond sad. The EV7 is supposed to trounce everything in it's path. However, it's being canabalized by AMD and Intel.
SCO/Caldera OpenServer et al have been decreasing in relevance for a while.
AFAICT, that leaves Solaris and AIX.
Solaris seems to have a good grip on the 'carrier grade' unix market. IBM is making a lot of good inroads here though.
IBM seems to have the smartest strategy: "you know your pc hardware pretty well. Here's a linux on it. It's pretty cheap. Oh, want something more robust/fault tolerant? Give us some more cash, and we'll give you something that runs either AIX (with linux compat) or Linux proper. Want 5 9s? Here's our mainframe."
That said, I disagree with madcalf (previous poster). AIX seems to do a unix stuff in a very non unix way. To be fair, I need to get better access to it... I havn't played with it recently. However, I'm confident that if I needed to, I could get pretty proficient at it in about 2 weeks of good hands on.
To sum up, Solaris is entrenched, but seems to not know what it's doing stratagy wise. IBM is making inroads, and has a solid stratagy, but it's the underdog, and IBM has never been able to sustain a marketing drive. Everyone else is dying.
Re:At the risk of being modded redundant. . .
on
Passport vs. Plan 9
·
· Score: 2
When Egghead was hacked I knew for a fact that I had to be concerned about *one* of my credit card accounts. I could watch that *one* like a hawk and the risk didn't steamroll through my whole life.
We're geeks. We're lazy. I hated reconciling (balancing) my checkbook and visa. So I didn't do it. Then I spent the best $30 I ever spent. I bought something called "pocketmoney" for my palm pilot.
I have control of my accounts now. I cought immediatly when my credit card number was stolen last year.
I can't recommend enough investing the time to reconcile things. No computer can replace your own diligence in these security and financial matters.
Well, if you read the article, these drives are aimed at the 'near line storage' space. The 320 gig version is only 5400RPM, and the 240g is 7200 rpm.
For your aplications that need speed, you don't want these devies. You want 'solid state' hard drives (aka gobs of RAM on an IDE/SCSI bus).
Besides, while I havn't run the numbers, I'd be willing to bet that a single 15k RPM drive can't fully utilize an ATA133 bus. (it may be able to burst that high, but I doubt it can sustain that rate in the real world.)
That's why scsi systems that are at 320 megaBYTES/sec usually have 14 devices on them.
Microsoft press has some good titles.
on
C# for Java Developers
·
· Score: 3, Informative
They're not Oreilly, but they do have a good reputation for quality books. Code Complete and Rapid Development are amazingly good books by Steve C McConnell, put out by MS press.
And that's a limited resource on planes, isn't it? What happens when you get 10-20 of these things going at once, and start using more O2 than was designed for? Or am I missing something fundamental? (like planes recycle air, or take air in from the atmosphere, and presurize it?)
I've got to argue with you on the descent bit. I played through every version (not the freespace ones though), and loved every minute. Is it as immersive as doom and counterstrike? No. However, the game play is amazing. Having full 3d, 3 axial rotation rocked.
Ultimatly, it depends on what you want. I value gameplay very highly. While your gravity bound FPS are cool, I find myself coming back to descent a lot. Not for the story, but for the running around backwards from those clawbots shooting at them.
Of course this probably explains why I have a GameCube.
Must.....Stop....Fist..of.......Death....
on
Meet the Spammers
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
{pause to let my boiling blood cool down}
Lets see: 1) you send mail people don't want. 2) they have to pay for it 3) it's legally questionable 4) (if you send porn) objectionable stuff will end up in front of children 5) And you're confused when we get pissed off.
DUH!
{goes rummaging for his clue-by-four and for the sourcecode for spamassasin... I need to tune my procmail filters anyway.}
Slashdot Mirror
Big O notation is a 'measure' (use that word very loosely) of how long an algorithm will take, depending on the number of inputs. For the scheduler, the number of inputs is the number of threads and processes. O(n) means that it has to loop over each process in order to make each scheduling decision. O(1) means that it's a constant time algorithm.
(For reference sorting an array of random numbers using bubble sort takes O(n^2), while using merge sort takes O(n*log(n)). Use google to see why. Also be aware that Big O is only a 'measure' of worst case time. Mergesort, if the data is in order takes O(n) (IIRC) )
You could throw 10 processes or 10 million at the O(1) scheduler, and it will still take the same time (witness the recent DSW of "I ran 1 million processes in parallel in 3 seconds!")
Nice troll!
T-ranger writes:
QT costs money for other platforms. GTK is free everywhere.
marm writes:
Qt works properly on other platforms. GTK+ is broken everywhere except X11 (doesn't work, or is very buggy, doesn't look like a native app).
Methinks you misunderstand. For Sun to use QT/KDE in Solaris, they'd have to pay trolltech $BIG$MONEY$. GTK/gnome2 is free software. They could use it for free. And they are. And they're contributing a lot back to the project.
Assuming your statement about 'other platforms' is correct, it doesn't matter. Why? Because Solaris GTK/Gnome2 is going to be on top of X11 anyway.
I'm running the solaris8 gnome beta (gnome1.4) and it works really well. When I have some freetime at work, I'll install the gnome2 beta for solaris on top of it, and see how it does.
I use my palm to keep track of meetings and phone numbers.
Like everyone else.
However, the thing that keeps the palm in my pocket is a program called 'Pocket money'. For me, it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and arguably the best $30 I ever spent.
All I use it for is keeping track of my money. What's in savings, what did I write this check for, what was this charge on my credit card. And balancing (or reconciling) your accounts is very easy.
It has helped me catch someone who stole my credit card number, and it let me catch (just this month) a vendor who posted a charge several times to my account.
www.catamount.com for more information.
One day when I feel right about spending $50-$60 on a keyboard
I used to feel the same way, then someone asked me a profound question: What parts of the computer do you interact with the most?
the answer is the keyboard, the mouse and the monitor.
I contend that someone should spend a larger percentage of the computer cost on the keyboard and monitor. I love my logitec trackman wheel, and I love my old, IBM full clicky keyboard.
If I had to do it now, I'd spend money on one of those 'happy hacker' keyboards or something similar.
My source is my SO who works at my credit union. Her statement was "You really think we would not charge for it [atm charges] if we could?"
I do recall getting a charge for pulling out cash too many times in a month however... so maybe that's what the law states. I assume if you dig into the banking acts that deal with credit unions, you'll find it.
I can't recommend becoming a member of a credit union enough. Customer service is much better, true no fee's on checking, legaly can't charge you for the use of another banks ATM (the other bank can charge you though).
I've gotten approved for a $20k car loan in 2 meetings: 1 for pre-approval (took 10 minutes), one to get the cashiers check (20 minutes (mostly waiting on the check to print)).
And it all depends on the ear.
If you're not an audiophile, or just don't quite know what he's looking for, give him an IOU. Something like:
"You can spend up to $200 on speakers for the computer". And let HIM agonize over it. (Audiophiles enjoy agonizing over these things)
I'm into highish end sound, and I'd trust my SO to get something like this, but that's only because she's a (self proclaimed) music snob, and has much better ears than I do. She played a large roll in my last speaker purchase.
It wouldn't supprise me if they had thought of this (mainly since so many DSL providers use the same practice: register your MAC address to use the internet)
They almost have to be targeting people with a Lynksys router (or linux box with IPmasq), since I know that I wouldn't want to re-cable everything depending on if I was gaming, or surfing...
I was sysadmin for a small company (really small... 8 employees counting management and the receptionist) for a while. I gave notice, but since I was the only one who knew how large swaths of the computing systems worked, I let them know that I'd be amiable to helping them.
Short version was 'I'll answer whatever questions you have. Just take me to lunch for it.' They knew if things got too bad, I'd be able to give a helping hand.
They're only real mistake was hiring a paper sysadmin (one with lots of certs but no real experience or clue) to replace me. They did take me out to lunch once.
This is not very valid, since this is an exploit to attack DNS *SERVERS*. Not clients with the shared libs. Besides to attack a client, they first need to get you to go to some compromised DNS server, with an application utilizing the bad resolver libs.
Besides, there are some good security points you should be doing anyway on the server. Unless you must have it, turn off recursion:
acl safenets { 127.0.0.1/32; your.internal.ips/??;}
options {
allow-transfer { safenets; };
allow-recursion { safenets; };
}
between that, a solid chroot, and a solid setuid, you'll have beaten 99% of the bind problems you'll have.
He has the right idea. For the same $, you get a DTS projector. Effectivly arbitrary screen size (your 'pad' doesn't need a 40' projection), multi input, etc etc.
He even had the two tier couch thing going on for movie nights.
I saw him type on an 80x24 screen (at 8' x 5'), play nethack, the origional Zelda, and Gran Turismo. Anything you wanted.
About the only 'downside' is that you must have a decent receiver for your audio (and realistically, some of your video) switching, since your projector won't have any sound capability.
When the time comes for me to upgrade my 36", that's the route I'll go.
Economically, you'll save a lot of money if you buy a car at this time of year (at least in the US). Car sales are much lower in the November/December timeframe, and prices are lower to try and drive up sales. Dealers also have the incentive to clear their lots of the previous model year for the new one.
Granted, at least in the Northern US, there are good reasons to not buy a car just before winter begins (salt on the roads (due to snow) rusting out a new frame being the main one)
I remember the ecache issue quite well. I don't know if I'd call it underhanded on Sun's part, though maybe for IBM.
See, IBM sold Sun the cache for their CPU's, and never bothered to inform them that there was a rather high failure rate. And with Sun throwing 8 megs of cache on their chips, you're bound to run into that sooner rather than later.
BTW: this problem got fixed when they started the SAMBRA process (effectivly, 16 megs of cache, 8 megs, mirrored, any byte goes bad, and it's flagged, and the mirror is used only), and was wacked totally when they started using (Toshiba?) instead of IBM for cache.
Now, if you're refering to how they didn't exactly publicise the fact that there wre significant problems... you might have a point there. However, I can see how they only wanted to fix those who 1) Sun they had the supply for (it takes a while to ramp up a new design for the same processor) and 2) customers who had the most need of the new chips. If it hasn't failed yet, why change it?
My company was rather high on the list and Sun replaced every system board, and every stick of ram, and every CPU in both of our e10k's.
For free.
All we had to do was schedule the downtime.
In general, I'm with you. The distribution should get out of my way, and let me get things done. I'll update it with security stuff, and have done.
However, the flip side of the coin is that it keeps your mind sharp. Learning how someone else solves the problem is a great exercise, especially for those of us who sysadmin for a living (or want to).
And I was never sold on the 'compile optimizes things greatly' point. I'm still not totally, but I have to admit that my gentoo laptop smoked my debian desktop with LAME (went from 2-2.5x to 4-5x MP3 encodes) even though the cpu is pretty close (800mhz P3 vs AMD 700mhz), much slower disk, and a quarter the ram.
One of my quibbles with gentoo is that it expects a lan connection. It pulls things down (by default) as you need them.
# emerge gnome
pull down gnome panel
compile gnome panel
pull down gnome games
compile gnome games
etc. However, you can do a 'emerge -f gnome'. The '-f' is 'fetchonly'. It will pull down everything you need. Then you 'emerge gnome' and you're off to the compiling races.
One of the things I do is leave a 2 gig or so partition around to 'fart around with'. That's enough space to do a full install of most distributions. This also lets me:
/mount/hda/home/zapman, I don't really care)
1) leveradge my existing linux swap partition
2) mount my home directory (though it might be in
3) Learn a lot about other distributions without much cost. (2 gigs... come on.)
And with gentoo, you don't even have that cost... they have 'live cd's. Boot of the cd, and you have a working gentoo distribution in RAM. Great to play with. Great to play Unreal Tourny 2003 on linux! (that's the main point of the disk)
I was mostly focusing on the "comercial unix out of the box" space. The "appliance" space is a different ball of wax. BSDI does well there, as does FreeBSD and Linux. All three can be hardened to the gills, and you have all the code for 2 of them (and most of the code for the third).
I really think that the free unicies are going to continue to dominate the 'apliance' space. And I think the use of them will grow greatly over the next few years.
I'm not sure where it's going. I definatly see HP droping out of the comercial unix world over the next few months/years. The fact that they killed the project to migrate PHUX (sic) to itanium/merced, and killed the project for a new PA RISC chip (or whatever HP calles their unix chip) seems to prove this.
Tru64 and alpha are dying. This is beyond sad. The EV7 is supposed to trounce everything in it's path. However, it's being canabalized by AMD and Intel.
SCO/Caldera OpenServer et al have been decreasing in relevance for a while.
AFAICT, that leaves Solaris and AIX.
Solaris seems to have a good grip on the 'carrier grade' unix market. IBM is making a lot of good inroads here though.
IBM seems to have the smartest strategy: "you know your pc hardware pretty well. Here's a linux on it. It's pretty cheap. Oh, want something more robust/fault tolerant? Give us some more cash, and we'll give you something that runs either AIX (with linux compat) or Linux proper. Want 5 9s? Here's our mainframe."
That said, I disagree with madcalf (previous poster). AIX seems to do a unix stuff in a very non unix way. To be fair, I need to get better access to it... I havn't played with it recently. However, I'm confident that if I needed to, I could get pretty proficient at it in about 2 weeks of good hands on.
To sum up, Solaris is entrenched, but seems to not know what it's doing stratagy wise. IBM is making inroads, and has a solid stratagy, but it's the underdog, and IBM has never been able to sustain a marketing drive. Everyone else is dying.
When Egghead was hacked I knew for a fact that I had to be concerned about *one* of my credit card accounts. I could watch that *one* like a hawk and the risk didn't steamroll through my whole life.
We're geeks. We're lazy. I hated reconciling (balancing) my checkbook and visa. So I didn't do it. Then I spent the best $30 I ever spent. I bought something called "pocketmoney" for my palm pilot.
I have control of my accounts now. I cought immediatly when my credit card number was stolen last year.
I can't recommend enough investing the time to reconcile things. No computer can replace your own diligence in these security and financial matters.
Well, if you read the article, these drives are aimed at the 'near line storage' space. The 320 gig version is only 5400RPM, and the 240g is 7200 rpm.
For your aplications that need speed, you don't want these devies. You want 'solid state' hard drives (aka gobs of RAM on an IDE/SCSI bus).
Besides, while I havn't run the numbers, I'd be willing to bet that a single 15k RPM drive can't fully utilize an ATA133 bus. (it may be able to burst that high, but I doubt it can sustain that rate in the real world.)
That's why scsi systems that are at 320 megaBYTES/sec usually have 14 devices on them.
They're not Oreilly, but they do have a good reputation for quality books. Code Complete and Rapid Development are amazingly good books by Steve C McConnell, put out by MS press.
And that's a limited resource on planes, isn't it? What happens when you get 10-20 of these things going at once, and start using more O2 than was designed for? Or am I missing something fundamental? (like planes recycle air, or take air in from the atmosphere, and presurize it?)
Dude... I'm having a heart attack just THINKING about "Nuclear Dew Tang".
I've got to argue with you on the descent bit. I played through every version (not the freespace ones though), and loved every minute. Is it as immersive as doom and counterstrike? No. However, the game play is amazing. Having full 3d, 3 axial rotation rocked.
Ultimatly, it depends on what you want. I value gameplay very highly. While your gravity bound FPS are cool, I find myself coming back to descent a lot. Not for the story, but for the running around backwards from those clawbots shooting at them.
Of course this probably explains why I have a GameCube.
{pause to let my boiling blood cool down}
Lets see:
1) you send mail people don't want.
2) they have to pay for it
3) it's legally questionable
4) (if you send porn) objectionable stuff will end up in front of children
5) And you're confused when we get pissed off.
DUH!
{goes rummaging for his clue-by-four and for the sourcecode for spamassasin... I need to tune my procmail filters anyway.}