Teehee, shorted another 200 shares at $9.15 when I heard the news. To all my fellow cube-dwellers out there, remember that sometimes reading the message boards can be whole hell of a lot more profitable than whatever the fsk it is that your employer's paying you to do...
I'm not trolling, I'm trying to be insightful, or at least funny. Honest!
Re:Shout louder, SHOUT LOUDER, **SHOUT LOUDER**
on
Real Problems
·
· Score: 1
When my son was three years old, he used to act the same way. If you didn't pay attention to him, he thought the answer was to yell. Or pester. Or throw a tantrum.
My three-year-old was wrong.
...and now he sleeps outside, chained to a post in the yard.
The only ebuild problems I have had were since I switched to accept ~x86 and occasionally when I unmask an ebuild.
That's precisely my point. It's not that the stable ebuilds are broken, it's that they lag by weeks, sometimes months, forcing you to use the unstable ebuilds. These "bleeding-edge" ebuilds are usually only a couple of days behind the times, but they hardly ever work without substantial tweaking. This tweaking, for me, is usually more trouble than just saying "fsck it", and installing from a source tarball manually. Granted, for the majority of packages, the stable builds are just fine, but there are a notable few that throw everything else off. Case in point, ALSA. The current stable rev is 1.3, while Gentoo's "stable" branch is still at the almost-six-month-old 0.9.8. This version-lag creeps into all sorts of other packages that depend on newer versions of ALSA. I guess my real wish is that the people who put out the brand-spanking-new ebuilds would just go the extra mile and bring it up to "stable" build quality.
I haven't tried injecting self-built packages manually in a while, but last time I tried, I found that Gentoo expects certain files to be in certain places, and the tarball builds rarely put them there. To fix this situation, you'd have to go and reverse-engineer the dysfunctional, unstable tarball and figure out what it's trying to do, and at that point you might as well just fix the ebuild yourself.
Sorry for the rant. It's just that I had such high hopes for Gentoo...
Gentoo is a great system, but as time goes by, I find myself somewhat dissatisfied. I've been using Gentoo for about 6 months now, and, in theory, it's a beautiful architecture. The problem is that many of the packages are simply poorly maintained. Bad dependency listings, _very_ slow updates, semi-broken builds, it's all enough to drive me to just go and download the damn tarballs myself. And, like many other package-dependency-based systems, once you install one library/program manually, all the other packages that depend on the first one have to be done manually too.
But don't get me wrong, it's a great system. The maintainers of many of the packages have simply failed to live up to their end of the bargain.
Hey, how come the Aussies get the cool names for the gov't agencies? ARIA, music (as in opera), get it? Both the American and Australian versions are the Recording Industry Associaciation of , but noooOOOoo, we (Americans) had to go for the non-humorous name...
Please, more powerful tools, in the hands of people who know how to use them, lead to greater productivity, not pandemonium. Did the evolution of muzzle-loader muskets into M-16's spark a global surge in violence? D'oh, bad example...okay, the growth of axes into chainsaws helped mankind...deforest our planet at an astonishing rate. There must be a good example here somewhere. Single-prop airplanes into 737's...lead to air and noise pollution. Well, you see where I'm going with this. More powerful tech is only bad if someone uses it in a bad way...which someone always does.
Linux can be used without minix, but it's not a tool for a user yet. Hacker- material (ie I've got gcc, uemacs etc, but no real utils). Wait for Hurd if you want something real.
Yeah, I'm still waiting for Hurd...
Courtesy of our friends at Google: http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1991 Nov10.214 504.5118%40klaava.Helsinki.FI
Coffee drinking is like gambling or smoking -- if you don't develop a taste for it, you'll be better off and the only thing you'll miss out on is satisfying cravings you don't have in the first place.
As a gambling, smoking caffeine addict, I take offense to your (twitch) characterization of me as (tic) slave to my (cough) bad habits.
Time to place another round of short-sell orders! And only 2 days after the order at $13.00 kicked in. Oh, and hold off until right after my next round goes through, mmkay? SCO is such a low-cap stock that even a small herd of Slashdot weenies can affect it...hmmm...
On second thought, everyone go find a broker and short like there's no tomorrow. If we all work together, we can drive SCOX into the ground! Think of it as a chartiable contribution that'll probably earn a sizable return inside of a few months.
Yeah, geez, talk about picking your battles poorly. A company with less than 400 employees and a $170M market cap, suing its biggest customers. Hey SCO, if you're looking for another huge company with ties to the automobile industry, Exxon is looking pretty good...
Well, it depends on what definition of the word "random" we use. Dictionary.com gives us 3 definions (paraphrased here):
1) No pattern, purpose or objective. A coin flip is NOT random, modern physics can describe it down to the quantum level.
2) Described by a probability curve. A coin flip IS random, i.e. 51/49 probability dictribution.
3) All outcomes equally likely. A coin flip is NOT random, as it's not exactly 50/50
I think that people use the word "random" a lot, when they mean "unpredictable". Specifically, unpredictable with the information that they have. Really, the only source of randomness we have is events that are biased by some quantum factor in a significant way. Everything else is just the product of a bunch of factors that aren't widely known. Not random, just unpredictable. There's a reason they call 'em "pseudo-random" number generators: They appear to be random, unless you know the seed...
The whole thing about "free software" is a lie. It's a dream created and made popular by people who have a keen interest in having cheap software so that they can drive down their own cost and profit...
That's not exactly true. I consume free software, mainly because it's often more dependable and better designed than commercial software. Back in school, I used it for that reason and the fact that it was free, in the lower-case, zero-cost sense. An 18-year-old on work-study pay really doesn't have a whole lotta money for software licenses, and running a web server on Windows 98 just wasn't cutting it. When you write Free software, you really do help out your less fortunate geek brethren.
As for why you write free software, most of the people I know who do it, do so because it's more fun than the code they write at work. Nobody ever said that you should turn down a well-paying job to work on Free software. If you can pull it off and maintain an acceptable standard of living, great, but most of us need a "real" job just to pay the bandwidth bills. Writing Free software is a pastime, and in the long run is probably a whole lot healthier than, say, watching TV in the evenings or mixing up another batch of bathtub crank.
Aside from the absence of Russia, the only thing I find surprising about the list is the high position of Canada - second, 6.8%. Given Canad's relatively small population, that must make them the leader in spam-per-capita - an unpleasant distinction.
/me can't stop humming of that "Blame Canada" song from the South Park movie, and anticipating the inevitable "Spam Wars".
Actually, that'd be a damn good title for a movie.
My previous post on this subject was an example of sarcasm, and the "offtopic" mod was an example of someone obviously not getting the point. I was drawing an analogy between the original article and a ridiculous fictional situation in an attempt to illustrate why the original article was so ridiculous. This is also sometimes referred to as an "allegory". Here's a mapping between elements in my post and the original article, for the less-clueful.
Mini-ATX -> Mini-ATV (henceforth to be referred to as "Clue #1") Neon -> P4 (tho the article compared the cluster to 4 P4's) dogsled team -> computer cluster torque -> computing power monkeys -> software ridiculous, pointless comparison -> same thing
C'mon man, if you don't get the joke, leave it for someone who does.
Why, just the other day, I chained together two dozen Power Wheels (tm) Mini-ATV's dogsled-style and ran some benchmarks. The cluster generated an awe-inspiring 49.4 foot-pounds of torque, not far off from the 56 ft-lbs generated by a '93 Dodge Neon LSi. The tough part was not so much acquiring all the Power Wheels as training the monkey pilots to hit the accelerator on command...
Slashdot Mirror
Teehee, shorted another 200 shares at $9.15 when I heard the news. To all my fellow cube-dwellers out there, remember that sometimes reading the message boards can be whole hell of a lot more profitable than whatever the fsk it is that your employer's paying you to do...
I'm not trolling, I'm trying to be insightful, or at least funny. Honest!
8D
Train as a career counselor. Duh!
When my son was three years old, he used to act the same way. If you didn't pay attention to him, he thought the answer was to yell. Or pester. Or throw a tantrum.
My three-year-old was wrong.
...and now he sleeps outside, chained to a post in the yard.
Nifty cross-platform Java implementation:
1 1100000 11100000110010101100100001000000110000101110100001 00000010101000110100001101001011011100110101101000 11101100101011001010110101100100000011011110110111 00010000001000001011100000111001001101001011011000 01000000100011001101111011011110110110001110011001 00000010001000110000101111001001011000010000001100 00101101110011001000010000001100001011011000110110 00010000001001001001000000110011101101111011101000 01000000111011101100001011100110010000001110100011 01000011010010111001100100000011011000110111101110 10101110011011110010010000001110011011010000110100 1011100100111010000100001";
public class DecodeMessage {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
StringReader sr=new StringReader(data);
StringBuffer message=new StringBuffer();
while(true) {
char[] binaryDigits=new char[8];
int bitsRead=sr.read(binaryDigits,0,8);
if(bitsRead==-1) {break;}
byte b=Byte.parseByte(new String(binaryDigits),2);
message.append((char)b);
}
System.out.println(message.toString());
}
static String data=
"01001001001000000111001101101000011011110
}
Geez, and I thought I was all badass for going in with some buddies on 600 shares...
The only ebuild problems I have had were since I switched to accept ~x86 and occasionally when I unmask an ebuild.
That's precisely my point. It's not that the stable ebuilds are broken, it's that they lag by weeks, sometimes months, forcing you to use the unstable ebuilds. These "bleeding-edge" ebuilds are usually only a couple of days behind the times, but they hardly ever work without substantial tweaking. This tweaking, for me, is usually more trouble than just saying "fsck it", and installing from a source tarball manually. Granted, for the majority of packages, the stable builds are just fine, but there are a notable few that throw everything else off. Case in point, ALSA. The current stable rev is 1.3, while Gentoo's "stable" branch is still at the almost-six-month-old 0.9.8. This version-lag creeps into all sorts of other packages that depend on newer versions of ALSA. I guess my real wish is that the people who put out the brand-spanking-new ebuilds would just go the extra mile and bring it up to "stable" build quality.
I haven't tried injecting self-built packages manually in a while, but last time I tried, I found that Gentoo expects certain files to be in certain places, and the tarball builds rarely put them there. To fix this situation, you'd have to go and reverse-engineer the dysfunctional, unstable tarball and figure out what it's trying to do, and at that point you might as well just fix the ebuild yourself.
Sorry for the rant. It's just that I had such high hopes for Gentoo...
Gentoo is a great system, but as time goes by, I find myself somewhat dissatisfied. I've been using Gentoo for about 6 months now, and, in theory, it's a beautiful architecture. The problem is that many of the packages are simply poorly maintained. Bad dependency listings, _very_ slow updates, semi-broken builds, it's all enough to drive me to just go and download the damn tarballs myself. And, like many other package-dependency-based systems, once you install one library/program manually, all the other packages that depend on the first one have to be done manually too.
But don't get me wrong, it's a great system. The maintainers of many of the packages have simply failed to live up to their end of the bargain.
Over an infinite amount of time all these things will one day end. It's a definite and provable truth.
Reminds me of an old joke from a friend's sig line: "I plan on living forever. So far, so good."
Hey, how come the Aussies get the cool names for the gov't agencies? ARIA, music (as in opera), get it? Both the American and Australian versions are the Recording Industry Associaciation of , but noooOOOoo, we (Americans) had to go for the non-humorous name...
Please, more powerful tools, in the hands of people who know how to use them, lead to greater productivity, not pandemonium. Did the evolution of muzzle-loader muskets into M-16's spark a global surge in violence? D'oh, bad example...okay, the growth of axes into chainsaws helped mankind...deforest our planet at an astonishing rate. There must be a good example here somewhere. Single-prop airplanes into 737's...lead to air and noise pollution. Well, you see where I'm going with this. More powerful tech is only bad if someone uses it in a bad way...which someone always does.
Ah, I assume you refer to the emerging XXX-XML standard.
Really, I'd love to use Hurd, but it doesn't support some of the funky hardware I use, like the WinTV PVR-250 I use in my MythTV box.
P.S.: Linkage is a good thing.
From an early post by Linus, archived on Google:
1 Nov10.214 504.5118%40klaava.Helsinki.FI
Linux can be used without minix, but it's not a tool for a user yet. Hacker-
material (ie I've got gcc, uemacs etc, but no real utils). Wait for
Hurd if you want something real.
Yeah, I'm still waiting for Hurd...
Courtesy of our friends at Google:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=199
Coffee drinking is like gambling or smoking -- if you don't develop a taste for it, you'll be better off and the only thing you'll miss out on is satisfying cravings you don't have in the first place.
As a gambling, smoking caffeine addict, I take offense to your (twitch) characterization of me as (tic) slave to my (cough) bad habits.
How do you know that bi_kinky_girl_18 that you've been having some rather explicit chats with recently (yes, we are watching) is not Bin Laden?
'Cuz she sent me a picture of herself. In fact, she looks an awful lot like Pam Anderson...
"...governments tracking private citizens, investigating terrorist links..."
So, you're saying that I should take Osama off of my buddy list if I don't want trouble from the feds?
You are who you call
That explains why I keep getting busy signals...
Time to place another round of short-sell orders! And only 2 days after the order at $13.00 kicked in. Oh, and hold off until right after my next round goes through, mmkay? SCO is such a low-cap stock that even a small herd of Slashdot weenies can affect it...hmmm...
On second thought, everyone go find a broker and short like there's no tomorrow. If we all work together, we can drive SCOX into the ground! Think of it as a chartiable contribution that'll probably earn a sizable return inside of a few months.
Yeah, geez, talk about picking your battles poorly. A company with less than 400 employees and a $170M market cap, suing its biggest customers. Hey SCO, if you're looking for another huge company with ties to the automobile industry, Exxon is looking pretty good...
Well, it depends on what definition of the word "random" we use. Dictionary.com gives us 3 definions (paraphrased here):
1) No pattern, purpose or objective.
A coin flip is NOT random, modern physics can describe it down to the quantum level.
2) Described by a probability curve.
A coin flip IS random, i.e. 51/49 probability dictribution.
3) All outcomes equally likely.
A coin flip is NOT random, as it's not exactly 50/50
I think that people use the word "random" a lot, when they mean "unpredictable". Specifically, unpredictable with the information that they have. Really, the only source of randomness we have is events that are biased by some quantum factor in a significant way. Everything else is just the product of a bunch of factors that aren't widely known. Not random, just unpredictable. There's a reason they call 'em "pseudo-random" number generators: They appear to be random, unless you know the seed...
The whole thing about "free software" is a lie. It's a dream created and made popular by people who have a keen interest in having cheap software so that they can drive down their own cost and profit...
That's not exactly true. I consume free software, mainly because it's often more dependable and better designed than commercial software. Back in school, I used it for that reason and the fact that it was free, in the lower-case, zero-cost sense. An 18-year-old on work-study pay really doesn't have a whole lotta money for software licenses, and running a web server on Windows 98 just wasn't cutting it. When you write Free software, you really do help out your less fortunate geek brethren.
As for why you write free software, most of the people I know who do it, do so because it's more fun than the code they write at work. Nobody ever said that you should turn down a well-paying job to work on Free software. If you can pull it off and maintain an acceptable standard of living, great, but most of us need a "real" job just to pay the bandwidth bills. Writing Free software is a pastime, and in the long run is probably a whole lot healthier than, say, watching TV in the evenings or mixing up another batch of bathtub crank.
Actually, that'd be a damn good title for a movie.
Hey, it's Friday, cut me some slack.
D'oh, caught me. I meant the '93 Geo Metro LSi, which eventually got itself a fourth cylinder to become the Neon we know and love.
Okay, let's try this again...
My previous post on this subject was an example of sarcasm, and the "offtopic" mod was an example of someone obviously not getting the point. I was drawing an analogy between the original article and a ridiculous fictional situation in an attempt to illustrate why the original article was so ridiculous. This is also sometimes referred to as an "allegory". Here's a mapping between elements in my post and the original article, for the less-clueful.
Mini-ATX -> Mini-ATV (henceforth to be referred to as "Clue #1")
Neon -> P4 (tho the article compared the cluster to 4 P4's)
dogsled team -> computer cluster
torque -> computing power
monkeys -> software
ridiculous, pointless comparison -> same thing
C'mon man, if you don't get the joke, leave it for someone who does.
Why, just the other day, I chained together two dozen Power Wheels (tm) Mini-ATV's dogsled-style and ran some benchmarks. The cluster generated an awe-inspiring 49.4 foot-pounds of torque, not far off from the 56 ft-lbs generated by a '93 Dodge Neon LSi. The tough part was not so much acquiring all the Power Wheels as training the monkey pilots to hit the accelerator on command...