...but only on OS X. We bought it because of it's cross-platform capabilities, but never ended up taking advantage of them.
The features are pretty good, in that I don't often want to scream at it and torch the hardware it's running on, like I do most software I use. My wife does most of the finances (whew!), and she seems to like it. I can't compare it to Quicken or whatever, because I haven't used them, but we always import our Quicken-formatted bank statements into MoneyDance with no problems.
Sorry I can't provide a more helpful review, but I just wanted to drop a "Hey, I'm using it, and it's at least decent" note, since no one else appears to have actually used it.
No, I don't really have any urls. If you search around for "xinerama", you'll find people struggling to get exactly what you have.
Basically, it's a pain to get X to load correctly with two devices sometimes (I've only done it on Solaris), but once you get that, you'll definitely have to start a second WM on the other card. I have a short script that does this for me (sets DISPLAY to:0.1, starts stuff).
People keep talking about Gnome eventually supporting multiple monitors, but I don't think it's that big of a deal.
BTW, I run this on Solaris, with two video cards. Although I could make those two monitors look like one big workspace with the xinerama extension, but I like it better with the monitors being completely independent. I run Gnome on one monitor (although it's lame enough that I constantly think of just switching back to Afterstep) and something simple like Afterstep on the other monitor.
I have very simple needs in terms of my interfaces; I usually bind a few of the F keys to do things like lock my workstation, open 1-3 terminals (usually in a fixed configuration), and skip songs in xmms. Other than that, I don't use any features of my window manager. This means that WMs like Gnome cause a big burden in terms of management and performance, whereas with Afterstep or FVWM2, I get it right once and I know it's always right, I don't ever have to fight with it. And Afterstep can take very little screen space to do it's job. No, I never use the start key on Gnome. I only use about 6 different windowing apps at work, so I don't need menus for them.
i *wish* i had the ability to view the two screens as independant screens with virtual desktops for each, so i could keep the code on the main screen and switch the other from compile to testing.
If you're using linux, this is quite easy--just get another video card. It's nearly impossible not to set Unix up this way with multiple cards. I usually run Gnome on one card and something simple like Afterstep on the other card, and I have that flexibility.
Two 19" monitors might run you $350-$500 (depending on which screens you get... you could even get it under $300)... one 21" monitor will run you $300+... and one 24" will run you $1200...
I would never in my life use a 21" monitor that only cost $300. *shudder* Can people actually use those crappy monitors? If I don't have a Trinitron or better, I go home with headaches every day. It would cost me about $600 for a 21" Trinitron, which is only $200 cheaper than a 19" LCD, so there isn't that much cost difference if you buy a decent monitor.
I just don't understand this whole "CRTs are really cheap" thing; it astounds me that people actually buy monitors that cheap. My wife's boss buys her monitors at Costco, and I get a headache every time I have to use them. Yuck.
I've been using multiple monitors for around 5 years at work now, and hopefully soon at home, too, and this is my experience so far. For the record, I'm a sysadmin, but I spend most of my time coding.
First and probably foremost, like all things, it will vary by the person. I've known people who couldn't effectively use two monitors' worth of space and who just did one thing on one monitor and another on the second, so they might as well have just switched workspaces.
However, I find multiple monitors to be largely indispensable. I can fake it with multiple workspaces, but then I waste a lot of time trying to find the right workspace sometimes, and it's much more difficult.
I code almost entirely in perl, using gvim. I usually do my main coding on the left monitor, and I usually have 1-2 other gvim windows open in the other monitor (does anybody code completely independent files anymore? there are always other files I need to look at), and that leaves me 1-4 other small terminals (I use two small and three large terminals on my 21" monitors) for things like tailing the apache logs (if I'm doing web development), tailing system logs, that kind of thing.
As a sysadmin, I also find that the extra screen space means that I can throw away space that I wouldn't otherwise be able to do--I have a portion of screen space permanently dedicated to a small window tailing a combined syslog from my entire network, and another window dedicated to an IRC session with everyone else in my group. If I only had one monitor, I could not afford this space, and thus would be constantly switching over to check for IRC or syslogs.
If you usually do or should work with multiple windows at once, then you will probably find multiple monitors to be useful. You can usually do without them, but it makes a big difference. I don't know exactly how to measure my productivity, but I do know that if I don't have multiple monitors, I spend a lot more time flipping back and forth doing large context switches, whereas with multiple monitors, I only actually flip around when I'm changing tasks. This is especially true with web development, because web browsers are so large relative to other windows.
And if you happen to be a sysadmin, I think it's an even easier proof, because there are usually multiple things you need to be paying attention to all of the time, and you are also usually at least partially working on more than one thing at once. I love starting a long task in one window while doing development in three other windows, tailing the log files, and watching IRC, all at the same time. I don't ever context switch out of development unless one of the other windows moves, and it takes very little effort to assess whether that new information deserves a full context switch or can just be ignored or whatever.
At this point, if I ever work for a company that won't buy me the extra monitor, I'll buy it for myself; it's only a couple days of work for me, and it's definitely worth the money to me.
Someone who actually understands the issue at hand, in context, even, and is able to give a relatively straightforward and largely unbiased review of what has occurred and why you should care. Crazy!
And for the record, if there were a GNU-AirTraffic piece of software, it would take about 10 years to get to anything resembling 2.7; it would probably spend most of that ten years at version 0.9.x or whatever. What is up with OS projects being totally unwilling to actually go up in versions? Sheesh.
CodeTek has a multiple workspace app for OS X that isn't a hack. It behaves exactly as you expect from the Unix world, and even works well with XDarwin (Xwindows on OS X). You can drag windows however you want, use the mouse to flip workspaces, autoselects the appropriate app when you switch workspaces, etc.
It's not freeware (god forbid you have to pay for something), but I've been using it for a couple months and it's roughly a billion times better than the Space app.
Microsoft has a lot of branches that make losses and their stubbornness concerning XBox (it's so clear that it won't topple PS2, yet they keep pumping money in it without the remote chance of getting it back) will cost them fortunes.
Wow, people's ignorance and lack of perspective continually astound me.
How many versions did it take for Windows to make money? 4? What about Microsoft Word? What about DOS? Come on, guys, Microsoft has never succeeded on the first try, but they have pretty consistently gotten the last word in eventually. Because they can afford to keep trying.
Microsoft doesn't give a crap about video games. Video games are merely a foothold. Yah, you just bought an Xbox, so what. Well, with a short download you also have a TiVo-like player. Oh, you also have a WAP with this little wireless card. Oh, and you also have crappy video conferencing, if you just add this wireless camera. Oh, since you've got a WAP all set up running M$, you might as well buy this $100 kitchen appliance for your grocery list, and it will automagically sync to your server on your Xbox, which will sync with your palm.
Yeah, that's a long ways out, but you're crazy if you think Microsoft isn't taking the long view on this.
I think that anything so straightforward as a direct hack would probably be caught relatively quickly, such as someone hacking SourceForge and modifying code.
But things like Ken Thompson's compiler hack take it to another level, and would be much more difficult to catch.
I'm not sure where exactly a hack of this level could be inserted into the current environment--gcc, the linux kernel, and glibc are all probably a bit obvious at this point--but how many different programs are there out there that are depended on by lots of other programs to convert from source to a running executable?
Somebody in a below post mentions inserting a hack into an Apache module; I don't think that would be enough. It would have to be something like insert a hack into an Apache library such that, when a certain module was compiled, it was compiled with a door enabled.
Could something like that make it past the many readers out there? If so, in which projects, and how nasty would it be?
I think it could happen, but it would have to be somebody who really had something to prove, and was a Roaring BadAss like Ken Thompson was. Who doesn't think Linux could hack the linux kernel to his own benefit?
Novell _really_ makes things easier than ever. Where I work we manage 30k+ accounts and 1500 stations with only a handful of IT staff (under 30). I'd be surprised if this were possible with all Sun workstations.
You know how everyone has been saying "Sun has been doing this for 20 years"? Well, it's because they have. Have you ever managed a Unix network? Have you ever compared them? Do you know where Novell got its inspiration to give you these abilities? Oh, that's right, Sun!
I don't even need SunRays to beat that. If it took me more than about five people to manage 1500 workstations (not including managing the users) I would be pretty pissed; it's trivially easy to replace any of the physical workstations, of course, but it's also trivially easy to rebuild them over the network.
Oops, did I say network? Yes, I did. Notice the total lack of mention of a "boot disk"; I'm not even sure what that is. I can rebuild a Solaris box in, oh, about 15 minutes over 100Mbit Enet. Without ever touching the stupid thing. And all of the actual applications and user data is stored on a central NFS server, so it's never lost and does not have to be copied to 1500 workstations.
But wait, let's say I don't want to do that! Let's say that I don't feel like even having a local copy of the OS! I can even do _that_ without SunRays! I can netboot all of my workstations by default, and all I have to have is a decent NFS server. Then if there's ever a problem, the user just powers the stupid thing off, and powers it back on.
You give power users local copies, as long as they understand that any local data (which _never_ includes/home) can and will be easily removed, and everyone else gets netboot.
The reality is, spanky, if you are impressed by new technology which allows you to manage workstations, you are not using Unix and are not aware of Unix. The windows tools are still just a "ghost" of what Unix tools are available, and your stating that we just don't understand how easy it is now just goes to show that you don't understand how easy it has always been (at least since about 1986) for Unix admins.
Servers, obviously, are a bit different, but that 's the case for both sides.
I've got a dual-head setup right now, with gnome 1.4/sawfish in one monitor and afterstep 1.8.10 in the other. I've got both of them running the equivalent of the Pager (deskguide in gnome, Pager in AS), both with control-arrow key switching.
Yes, I picked it up from FVWM, and haven't been able to live without it since. In fact, this feature is why I probably won't by a Mac for my main box this year....
BTW, the deskguide on gnome is incredibly bloated; it's accumulated 32hours of CPU time in the same time when AS's Pager only has 23 seconds.
And according to a post above, sawfish apparently has removed the concept of viewports, thus making this suddenly impossible. The way you do it now is to set shortcuts for "move viewport", with a 3x3 workspace setup.
I'm not that legendary developer, but my solution is to run gnome on my "main" monitor (:0.1), and afterstep on my second one. I tend not to want all the special stuff in my second monitor anyway (well, really, I tend not to really want any special stuff either way...).
Afterstep's pretty easy to get configured with a minimal setup (correct number of workspaces, control-arrow workspace switching, a few rxvt key bindings), and then you never have to touch it again. Unlike gnome... And also unlike gnome, it's not a resource hog: Since my last login, _just_ the deskguide in gnome has accumulated 32H of CPU time, whereas all of afterstep only has 5 minutes, and its equiv. of the deskguide (Pager) has a total of 23 seconds of CPU time...
I generally just kill everything off before I log off, and have scripts which fill my screens in an appropriate way with rxvts.
If you want to be a sysadmin, then there isn't really a college in the country that can teach you that. I heard that one was developing a program, but I wouldn't want to beta-test that.
Get a degree in math, or in science, and focus your efforts on the computer options. You can always get a job at your college as an intern sysadmin for experience, but math and especially science teach you what apparently most computer science programs don't: problem solving.
I currently hire sysadmins and work as a technical/team lead, and I can tell you that the most important skill in a sysadmin is problem solving: How to diagnose a problem, then how to describe it in a language within the system in question (i.e., being able to describe the problem in English doesn't do you any good, because the solution is going to be in perl or whatever), and then iteratively implementing and testing the solution until it works.
I pay good money for this skill, and the only ones I see having it are science and math grads.
Not that you're guaranteed to get those skills in those programs, no more than you're guaranteed a Science paper if you stick with the science, but you're a lot more likely to get them than in any other major.
And as to people saying that you don't need the degree anymore, it's passee: Yah, they might be right in terms of career (although there are still plenty of companies who rely on eduction as a measure of worth, and all of your counter examples of companies that don't, doesn't change that), but in terms of you as a person, you need a degree. It will educate you, grow you as a person, it will get you away from all you know and love and force you to learn to operate on your own. It's your chance to experiment with who you are for four years without someone breathing down your neck saying "You can't change, our relationship won't support that!" Don't ever underestimate the value of being allowed to change; those who went to college may not realize it, but that's probably the most important thing they got out of it.
So basically, don't skip the degree, because it's good for more than your career, but don't get a CS degree, because it's worthless unless you want to be a code monkey. Anyone who thinks that CS is applicable to system administration hasn't tried to apply standard CS tools like make and CVS to system administration--you quickly realize how different the world views are.
Wow, umm, where to start? You have all of your information absolutely wrong (as does the post below yours), so I'll just explain what the 280R is and is not:
The 280R is a single- or dual-proc Ultrasparc-III, supports up to 8GB of RAM, and supports up to two FC-AL (yes, fibrechannel, not SCSI) drives internally, along with one external FC-AL connector and I think four PCI slots. It's 4U, not 5. It also has a remote management card which provides LOM-like features (poweron, poweroff, etc.).
And I think it starts at about $12k, and if you want the dual-proc, it's more like $20k. I don't think Apple ever said this would beat a 280r in all categories, but I would say (as someone who has been building and maintaining Sun boxes for years) that this box compares quite favorably with actually competitive offerings: Windows on Intel.
It does, of course, still lose in most areas against the 280R, but only if you are a company who would benefit from the Sun box. If you are a school, or a small creative shop, or even a big creative shop, or any shop which already has lots of OS X and no Solaris, this is the box for you.
Many of these people are no less "geeky" than the slashdot crowd. It is foolish to presume that they need something dumbed down or want servers from Apple.
I beg to differ... I have a degree in chemistry, and my wife is in graduate school for cancer biology, and I can tell you that these people know just as much about computers as the average computer jockey knows about science: Just enough to get their jobs done, and absolutely not a stitch more.
Just as in computers, there are always a couple of people around who know more about essentially unrelated topics (yes, computers and science are essentially unrelated), but in general, they're just like your mother WRT computers. But with PhDs.
Be used the following method of determining which app would open a file:
Check for an app preference stored in the file. This was almost never used, but was there in case you wanted it.
Check for an app preference for the file type. This is a system default, set by you, and was the most common method.
Check for an app preference for the file supertype. Remember that this uses MIME types, which have super and subtypes. Again, this is a system-wide preference that you set.
Check for any app that can open that filetype. You can't even do this on most systems!
Notice that nowhere in here does it take into account what app created a file.
Even better, you can always right click on any file (or any list of files of the same type) and get a list of:
The preferred app for that file
The preferred app for that filetype
Any apps that can open that filetype
Any apps that can open the supertype
Any apps that can open any filetype
And the list shows up pretty much instantaneously. Do that in any other system, anywhere, no matter how many hacks you add. And yes, you'd use it every single day of your life if it were available to you.
So no, I'd say that you don't understand the problem.
Only a single piece of metadata can be stored (filetype)
Combining data (filename) and metadata (filetype) kind of belies the definition of metadata in the first place
It can get very confusing to see things like file.txt.rtf
The tendency of systems to want to hide the extension, and the resulting confusion when your FTP client says the file is named stuff.zip but your interface just says "stuff"
isn't it easier and faster to look at the filename than metadata and file contents??
Only if the metadata is stored in some other inode.
In the case of BFS, the inodes are always 1024 bytes, but the inode information is only about 300 bytes; that meant that BFS had 700 free bytes in the inode--free in the sense that they don't take up any more space, but also free in the sense that you don't need to do an extra seek or an extra read to get them. Now that's free! You can go about 700 bytes, but then it needs to allocate more blocks (I don't know if that requires another inode, though).
Also, in this case, even if it is just slightly faster to look at the filename, you lose every other possible metadata feature, just to get an essentially unmeasurable increase in performance. I'd take BFS and all of its features at half the speed if I could use it on any OS I wanted.
In any case, why would Palm have bought Be in the first place if they didn't have any plans for it?
Because they wanted Be's engineers. Yah, they'll probably use some of Be's BeIA code in the next PalmOS, which would be great, but from what I remember their main motivation was a bunch of kick-ass engineers for a pittance. And some decent code too.
There is NOTHING illegal about spending tons and tons of money and making a better/cheaper/whatever product than the opposition.
No, but there is something illegal about doing that and giving the result away if you're a monopoly.
You still don't get it; read the stories again. The laws are different for monopolies! Just because it would be legal for a non-monopoly doesn't necessarily mean it would be legal for a monopoly.
And in this case, Microsoft engaged in predatory pricing (giving the browser away). Whatever you might remember, Netscape was still charging for it's browser when Microsoft released IE for free (here's the only link I can find on short notice), so the fact that Microsoft spent all of this money and then gave the browser away made it illegal, no matter who did it. It's called predatory pricing, and Microsoft didn't invent it, they just brought it to the software world (although I'm sure others have done it there, too).
Please, if you're going to comment on whether Microsoft has broken the law, read the antitrust findings and find out exactly which laws Microsoft was convicted of breaking. Yes, convicted, not charged. They lost the antitrust suit, it was only the remedy that was sent back to the lower courts.
What Xbox has to do with this is Microsoft using money, mindshare, and connections from their monopoly to attempt to illegally extend their monopoly into the gaming console area, which is exactly what the whole case is about.
Everyone seems to overlook, again and again, that monopolies aren't illegal, it's only when monopolies are leveraged to create new monopolies that they become illegal.
Thus, tying IE to Windows wasn't illegal per se, except that it leveraged one monopoly to create another, which is illegal.
I'm a heckuva lot more worried about.Net, the Xbox, and copy protection right now, though; those are all cases of Microsoft using their monopoly in Office and Windows to leverage into new spaces.
Not to mention using those monopolies to leverage each other...
Well, yeah, I suppose I was forgetting about the Greek Orthodox. There probably were a few other sects out there, also, but I believe those two constituted the vast majority of Christians worldwide, and I can pretty much guarantee that Catholicism made up nearly all Christians west of Greece, and these were the Christians who actually participated in the Crusades.
In fact, the Pope even tried to call Crusades against the Greek Orthodox, and Constantinople was sacked by the Catholics at one point, I believe.
Of course, there's a bit of difference between the WTC attacks and the Crusades, namely that the WTC attacks were carried out by avowed extremists, whereas the Crusades were specifically supported and often called by the Pope, who was at the time the world leader of Christianity (and that's one of the reasons he lost that role).
That puts a much bigger weight on the Christians of that time than it does on the Muslims of this time.
Of course, as was already mentioned, that was hundreds of years ago, although the Muslims probably feel it is much more recent that we Americans do, since we were founded by Protestants and also weren't even colonies when all of that went on.
It is important to remember, though, how much of an impact the history of the Crusades has on the Muslim view of how Christians treat them. Listen to some Pakastanis talk about how the felt when Bush used the word "Crusade" in the first week after the attack. That was the single largest complaint I heard from Muslims.
Gobe actually has great import/export filters, but they're even better: They actually developed an API that anyone can write to, so if they port the API and the filters over to linux (which they are apparently doing), then any application can choose to just write to that API and will immediately be able to save or write in any of the M$ formats that Gobe supports.
BTW, this functionality is based on how BeOS does translation for other formats, too, mainly graphics. Linux could really use to take a lesson from this, because it was one of the coolest and best functionalities of BeOS. Hopefully Gobe will port the full API over, not just the filters themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
...but only on OS X. We bought it because of it's cross-platform capabilities, but never ended up taking advantage of them.
The features are pretty good, in that I don't often want to scream at it and torch the hardware it's running on, like I do most software I use. My wife does most of the finances (whew!), and she seems to like it. I can't compare it to Quicken or whatever, because I haven't used them, but we always import our Quicken-formatted bank statements into MoneyDance with no problems.
Sorry I can't provide a more helpful review, but I just wanted to drop a "Hey, I'm using it, and it's at least decent" note, since no one else appears to have actually used it.
No, I don't really have any urls. If you search around for "xinerama", you'll find people struggling to get exactly what you have.
:0.1, starts stuff).
Basically, it's a pain to get X to load correctly with two devices sometimes (I've only done it on Solaris), but once you get that, you'll definitely have to start a second WM on the other card. I have a short script that does this for me (sets DISPLAY to
People keep talking about Gnome eventually supporting multiple monitors, but I don't think it's that big of a deal.
BTW, I run this on Solaris, with two video cards. Although I could make those two monitors look like one big workspace with the xinerama extension, but I like it better with the monitors being completely independent. I run Gnome on one monitor (although it's lame enough that I constantly think of just switching back to Afterstep) and something simple like Afterstep on the other monitor.
I have very simple needs in terms of my interfaces; I usually bind a few of the F keys to do things like lock my workstation, open 1-3 terminals (usually in a fixed configuration), and skip songs in xmms. Other than that, I don't use any features of my window manager. This means that WMs like Gnome cause a big burden in terms of management and performance, whereas with Afterstep or FVWM2, I get it right once and I know it's always right, I don't ever have to fight with it. And Afterstep can take very little screen space to do it's job. No, I never use the start key on Gnome. I only use about 6 different windowing apps at work, so I don't need menus for them.
If you're using linux, this is quite easy--just get another video card. It's nearly impossible not to set Unix up this way with multiple cards. I usually run Gnome on one card and something simple like Afterstep on the other card, and I have that flexibility.
I would never in my life use a 21" monitor that only cost $300. *shudder* Can people actually use those crappy monitors? If I don't have a Trinitron or better, I go home with headaches every day. It would cost me about $600 for a 21" Trinitron, which is only $200 cheaper than a 19" LCD, so there isn't that much cost difference if you buy a decent monitor.
I just don't understand this whole "CRTs are really cheap" thing; it astounds me that people actually buy monitors that cheap. My wife's boss buys her monitors at Costco, and I get a headache every time I have to use them. Yuck.
I've been using multiple monitors for around 5 years at work now, and hopefully soon at home, too, and this is my experience so far. For the record, I'm a sysadmin, but I spend most of my time coding.
First and probably foremost, like all things, it will vary by the person. I've known people who couldn't effectively use two monitors' worth of space and who just did one thing on one monitor and another on the second, so they might as well have just switched workspaces.
However, I find multiple monitors to be largely indispensable. I can fake it with multiple workspaces, but then I waste a lot of time trying to find the right workspace sometimes, and it's much more difficult.
I code almost entirely in perl, using gvim. I usually do my main coding on the left monitor, and I usually have 1-2 other gvim windows open in the other monitor (does anybody code completely independent files anymore? there are always other files I need to look at), and that leaves me 1-4 other small terminals (I use two small and three large terminals on my 21" monitors) for things like tailing the apache logs (if I'm doing web development), tailing system logs, that kind of thing.
As a sysadmin, I also find that the extra screen space means that I can throw away space that I wouldn't otherwise be able to do--I have a portion of screen space permanently dedicated to a small window tailing a combined syslog from my entire network, and another window dedicated to an IRC session with everyone else in my group. If I only had one monitor, I could not afford this space, and thus would be constantly switching over to check for IRC or syslogs.
If you usually do or should work with multiple windows at once, then you will probably find multiple monitors to be useful. You can usually do without them, but it makes a big difference. I don't know exactly how to measure my productivity, but I do know that if I don't have multiple monitors, I spend a lot more time flipping back and forth doing large context switches, whereas with multiple monitors, I only actually flip around when I'm changing tasks. This is especially true with web development, because web browsers are so large relative to other windows.
And if you happen to be a sysadmin, I think it's an even easier proof, because there are usually multiple things you need to be paying attention to all of the time, and you are also usually at least partially working on more than one thing at once. I love starting a long task in one window while doing development in three other windows, tailing the log files, and watching IRC, all at the same time. I don't ever context switch out of development unless one of the other windows moves, and it takes very little effort to assess whether that new information deserves a full context switch or can just be ignored or whatever.
At this point, if I ever work for a company that won't buy me the extra monitor, I'll buy it for myself; it's only a couple days of work for me, and it's definitely worth the money to me.
Someone who actually understands the issue at hand, in context, even, and is able to give a relatively straightforward and largely unbiased review of what has occurred and why you should care. Crazy!
And for the record, if there were a GNU-AirTraffic piece of software, it would take about 10 years to get to anything resembling 2.7; it would probably spend most of that ten years at version 0.9.x or whatever. What is up with OS projects being totally unwilling to actually go up in versions? Sheesh.
It's not freeware (god forbid you have to pay for something), but I've been using it for a couple months and it's roughly a billion times better than the Space app.
Now all we need is focus-follows-mouse...
Wow, people's ignorance and lack of perspective continually astound me.
How many versions did it take for Windows to make money? 4? What about Microsoft Word? What about DOS? Come on, guys, Microsoft has never succeeded on the first try, but they have pretty consistently gotten the last word in eventually. Because they can afford to keep trying.
Microsoft doesn't give a crap about video games. Video games are merely a foothold. Yah, you just bought an Xbox, so what. Well, with a short download you also have a TiVo-like player. Oh, you also have a WAP with this little wireless card. Oh, and you also have crappy video conferencing, if you just add this wireless camera. Oh, since you've got a WAP all set up running M$, you might as well buy this $100 kitchen appliance for your grocery list, and it will automagically sync to your server on your Xbox, which will sync with your palm.
Yeah, that's a long ways out, but you're crazy if you think Microsoft isn't taking the long view on this.
But things like Ken Thompson's compiler hack take it to another level, and would be much more difficult to catch.
I'm not sure where exactly a hack of this level could be inserted into the current environment--gcc, the linux kernel, and glibc are all probably a bit obvious at this point--but how many different programs are there out there that are depended on by lots of other programs to convert from source to a running executable?
Somebody in a below post mentions inserting a hack into an Apache module; I don't think that would be enough. It would have to be something like insert a hack into an Apache library such that, when a certain module was compiled, it was compiled with a door enabled.
Could something like that make it past the many readers out there? If so, in which projects, and how nasty would it be?
I think it could happen, but it would have to be somebody who really had something to prove, and was a Roaring BadAss like Ken Thompson was. Who doesn't think Linux could hack the linux kernel to his own benefit?
You know how everyone has been saying "Sun has been doing this for 20 years"? Well, it's because they have. Have you ever managed a Unix network? Have you ever compared them? Do you know where Novell got its inspiration to give you these abilities? Oh, that's right, Sun!
I don't even need SunRays to beat that. If it took me more than about five people to manage 1500 workstations (not including managing the users) I would be pretty pissed; it's trivially easy to replace any of the physical workstations, of course, but it's also trivially easy to rebuild them over the network.
Oops, did I say network? Yes, I did. Notice the total lack of mention of a "boot disk"; I'm not even sure what that is. I can rebuild a Solaris box in, oh, about 15 minutes over 100Mbit Enet. Without ever touching the stupid thing. And all of the actual applications and user data is stored on a central NFS server, so it's never lost and does not have to be copied to 1500 workstations.
But wait, let's say I don't want to do that! Let's say that I don't feel like even having a local copy of the OS! I can even do _that_ without SunRays! I can netboot all of my workstations by default, and all I have to have is a decent NFS server. Then if there's ever a problem, the user just powers the stupid thing off, and powers it back on.
You give power users local copies, as long as they understand that any local data (which _never_ includes /home) can and will be easily removed, and everyone else gets netboot.
The reality is, spanky, if you are impressed by new technology which allows you to manage workstations, you are not using Unix and are not aware of Unix. The windows tools are still just a "ghost" of what Unix tools are available, and your stating that we just don't understand how easy it is now just goes to show that you don't understand how easy it has always been (at least since about 1986) for Unix admins.
Servers, obviously, are a bit different, but that 's the case for both sides.
I've got a dual-head setup right now, with gnome 1.4/sawfish in one monitor and afterstep 1.8.10 in the other. I've got both of them running the equivalent of the Pager (deskguide in gnome, Pager in AS), both with control-arrow key switching.
Yes, I picked it up from FVWM, and haven't been able to live without it since. In fact, this feature is why I probably won't by a Mac for my main box this year....
BTW, the deskguide on gnome is incredibly bloated; it's accumulated 32hours of CPU time in the same time when AS's Pager only has 23 seconds.
And according to a post above, sawfish apparently has removed the concept of viewports, thus making this suddenly impossible. The way you do it now is to set shortcuts for "move viewport", with a 3x3 workspace setup.
I'm not that legendary developer, but my solution is to run gnome on my "main" monitor (:0.1), and afterstep on my second one. I tend not to want all the special stuff in my second monitor anyway (well, really, I tend not to really want any special stuff either way...).
Afterstep's pretty easy to get configured with a minimal setup (correct number of workspaces, control-arrow workspace switching, a few rxvt key bindings), and then you never have to touch it again. Unlike gnome... And also unlike gnome, it's not a resource hog: Since my last login, _just_ the deskguide in gnome has accumulated 32H of CPU time, whereas all of afterstep only has 5 minutes, and its equiv. of the deskguide (Pager) has a total of 23 seconds of CPU time...
I generally just kill everything off before I log off, and have scripts which fill my screens in an appropriate way with rxvts.
If you want to be a sysadmin, then there isn't really a college in the country that can teach you that. I heard that one was developing a program, but I wouldn't want to beta-test that.
Get a degree in math, or in science, and focus your efforts on the computer options. You can always get a job at your college as an intern sysadmin for experience, but math and especially science teach you what apparently most computer science programs don't: problem solving.
I currently hire sysadmins and work as a technical/team lead, and I can tell you that the most important skill in a sysadmin is problem solving: How to diagnose a problem, then how to describe it in a language within the system in question (i.e., being able to describe the problem in English doesn't do you any good, because the solution is going to be in perl or whatever), and then iteratively implementing and testing the solution until it works.
I pay good money for this skill, and the only ones I see having it are science and math grads.
Not that you're guaranteed to get those skills in those programs, no more than you're guaranteed a Science paper if you stick with the science, but you're a lot more likely to get them than in any other major.
And as to people saying that you don't need the degree anymore, it's passee: Yah, they might be right in terms of career (although there are still plenty of companies who rely on eduction as a measure of worth, and all of your counter examples of companies that don't, doesn't change that), but in terms of you as a person, you need a degree. It will educate you, grow you as a person, it will get you away from all you know and love and force you to learn to operate on your own. It's your chance to experiment with who you are for four years without someone breathing down your neck saying "You can't change, our relationship won't support that!" Don't ever underestimate the value of being allowed to change; those who went to college may not realize it, but that's probably the most important thing they got out of it.
So basically, don't skip the degree, because it's good for more than your career, but don't get a CS degree, because it's worthless unless you want to be a code monkey. Anyone who thinks that CS is applicable to system administration hasn't tried to apply standard CS tools like make and CVS to system administration--you quickly realize how different the world views are.
Wow, umm, where to start? You have all of your information absolutely wrong (as does the post below yours), so I'll just explain what the 280R is and is not:
The 280R is a single- or dual-proc Ultrasparc-III, supports up to 8GB of RAM, and supports up to two FC-AL (yes, fibrechannel, not SCSI) drives internally, along with one external FC-AL connector and I think four PCI slots. It's 4U, not 5. It also has a remote management card which provides LOM-like features (poweron, poweroff, etc.).
And I think it starts at about $12k, and if you want the dual-proc, it's more like $20k. I don't think Apple ever said this would beat a 280r in all categories, but I would say (as someone who has been building and maintaining Sun boxes for years) that this box compares quite favorably with actually competitive offerings: Windows on Intel.
It does, of course, still lose in most areas against the 280R, but only if you are a company who would benefit from the Sun box. If you are a school, or a small creative shop, or even a big creative shop, or any shop which already has lots of OS X and no Solaris, this is the box for you.
Many of these people are no less "geeky" than the slashdot crowd. It is foolish to presume that they need something dumbed down or want servers from Apple.
I beg to differ... I have a degree in chemistry, and my wife is in graduate school for cancer biology, and I can tell you that these people know just as much about computers as the average computer jockey knows about science: Just enough to get their jobs done, and absolutely not a stitch more.
Just as in computers, there are always a couple of people around who know more about essentially unrelated topics (yes, computers and science are essentially unrelated), but in general, they're just like your mother WRT computers. But with PhDs.
No, you don't.
Be used the following method of determining which app would open a file:
Notice that nowhere in here does it take into account what app created a file.
Even better, you can always right click on any file (or any list of files of the same type) and get a list of:
- The preferred app for that file
- The preferred app for that filetype
- Any apps that can open that filetype
- Any apps that can open the supertype
- Any apps that can open any filetype
And the list shows up pretty much instantaneously. Do that in any other system, anywhere, no matter how many hacks you add. And yes, you'd use it every single day of your life if it were available to you.So no, I'd say that you don't understand the problem.
Ugh, don't get me started... Here's a short list:
- Only a single piece of metadata can be stored (filetype)
- Combining data (filename) and metadata (filetype) kind of belies the definition of metadata in the first place
- It can get very confusing to see things like file.txt.rtf
- The tendency of systems to want to hide the extension, and the resulting confusion when your FTP client says the file is named stuff.zip but your interface just says "stuff"
isn't it easier and faster to look at the filename than metadata and file contents??Only if the metadata is stored in some other inode.
In the case of BFS, the inodes are always 1024 bytes, but the inode information is only about 300 bytes; that meant that BFS had 700 free bytes in the inode--free in the sense that they don't take up any more space, but also free in the sense that you don't need to do an extra seek or an extra read to get them. Now that's free! You can go about 700 bytes, but then it needs to allocate more blocks (I don't know if that requires another inode, though).
Also, in this case, even if it is just slightly faster to look at the filename, you lose every other possible metadata feature, just to get an essentially unmeasurable increase in performance. I'd take BFS and all of its features at half the speed if I could use it on any OS I wanted.
In any case, why would Palm have bought Be in the first place if they didn't have any plans for it?
Because they wanted Be's engineers. Yah, they'll probably use some of Be's BeIA code in the next PalmOS, which would be great, but from what I remember their main motivation was a bunch of kick-ass engineers for a pittance. And some decent code too.
No, but there is something illegal about doing that and giving the result away if you're a monopoly.
You still don't get it; read the stories again. The laws are different for monopolies! Just because it would be legal for a non-monopoly doesn't necessarily mean it would be legal for a monopoly.
And in this case, Microsoft engaged in predatory pricing (giving the browser away). Whatever you might remember, Netscape was still charging for it's browser when Microsoft released IE for free (here's the only link I can find on short notice), so the fact that Microsoft spent all of this money and then gave the browser away made it illegal, no matter who did it. It's called predatory pricing, and Microsoft didn't invent it, they just brought it to the software world (although I'm sure others have done it there, too).
Please, if you're going to comment on whether Microsoft has broken the law, read the antitrust findings and find out exactly which laws Microsoft was convicted of breaking. Yes, convicted, not charged. They lost the antitrust suit, it was only the remedy that was sent back to the lower courts.
Learn the laws, and then make an informed post.
What Xbox has to do with this is Microsoft using money, mindshare, and connections from their monopoly to attempt to illegally extend their monopoly into the gaming console area, which is exactly what the whole case is about.
.Net, the Xbox, and copy protection right now, though; those are all cases of Microsoft using their monopoly in Office and Windows to leverage into new spaces.
Everyone seems to overlook, again and again, that monopolies aren't illegal, it's only when monopolies are leveraged to create new monopolies that they become illegal.
Thus, tying IE to Windows wasn't illegal per se, except that it leveraged one monopoly to create another, which is illegal.
I'm a heckuva lot more worried about
Not to mention using those monopolies to leverage each other...
Seeing how offtopic we can be...
6^6 == 6x6x6x6x6x6 == 46656.
Therefore, (6^6)^6 == 6^46656 == a really big number.
Well, yeah, I suppose I was forgetting about the Greek Orthodox. There probably were a few other sects out there, also, but I believe those two constituted the vast majority of Christians worldwide, and I can pretty much guarantee that Catholicism made up nearly all Christians west of Greece, and these were the Christians who actually participated in the Crusades.
In fact, the Pope even tried to call Crusades against the Greek Orthodox, and Constantinople was sacked by the Catholics at one point, I believe.
Of course, there's a bit of difference between the WTC attacks and the Crusades, namely that the WTC attacks were carried out by avowed extremists, whereas the Crusades were specifically supported and often called by the Pope, who was at the time the world leader of Christianity (and that's one of the reasons he lost that role).
That puts a much bigger weight on the Christians of that time than it does on the Muslims of this time.
Of course, as was already mentioned, that was hundreds of years ago, although the Muslims probably feel it is much more recent that we Americans do, since we were founded by Protestants and also weren't even colonies when all of that went on.
It is important to remember, though, how much of an impact the history of the Crusades has on the Muslim view of how Christians treat them. Listen to some Pakastanis talk about how the felt when Bush used the word "Crusade" in the first week after the attack. That was the single largest complaint I heard from Muslims.
Gobe actually has great import/export filters, but they're even better: They actually developed an API that anyone can write to, so if they port the API and the filters over to linux (which they are apparently doing), then any application can choose to just write to that API and will immediately be able to save or write in any of the M$ formats that Gobe supports.
BTW, this functionality is based on how BeOS does translation for other formats, too, mainly graphics. Linux could really use to take a lesson from this, because it was one of the coolest and best functionalities of BeOS. Hopefully Gobe will port the full API over, not just the filters themselves.