I guess it's a nice thing that shellsort is getting improved, and I do realize that this is great for genetic research, but, pardon me for being an uneducated ignorant bastard, does it have any practical value, seeing as quicksort is much faster than shellsort? Or am I wrong?
Shell sort has better worst-case running-time than quick sort does.
Most programming these days is all about the common case, but in real-time programming it's all about predictability. Thus there the mergesort is the standard choice over quicksort.
That is because nobody can agree on what "proper OO" really is, including the OO celebrities. They bicker for their viewpoint as much as newbies.
Yep, that is so true. There is also the question of "proper editor"...:-)
Besides such a huge amount of programming indifferences are really about coding style and other irrational issues. Even some of the OO concepts depend on one's liking.
Java does not make procedural programming very simple. I still can't get:
print("hello world");
in Java without dotted thingies hanging from its ass or funky interface declarations for every fricken class that uses it.
Nah, it's just as easy. But nonetheless my point was more along the lines "no matter how we rant about certain language features, the bottom line will always be 'good programmers write good code and crappy ones will crap on their terminals'". I know it sounds awfully trivial, but somehow people do tend to forget. Especially during IT boom few years back every god damn company hired anybody how knew how to spell computer. I've heard of people claiming to know java, but then when allowed ask questions have said "just one, what are all those dots and parentheses for?". (and that's a true story)
I think Sun errored in its OOP-only push. Even many OO fans agree that procedural is sometimes the best approach for *some* things.
I couldn't agree more. We've been writing an OS from scratch in C++ that will run Java bytecode and it's not just the little things that break out of the OO style. There are numerous things in a kernel that doesn't make sense in OO, but also numerous things that naturally go beautyfully that way. I can't help constantly thinking why we're bothering with C++ at all, although that's really my language of choice for most tasks, in this case I'd drop it down to C. That'd give us the most leash and would still let us easily write solid OO implementations where deemed suitable. (a lot like linux kernel has been done)
One might ask that what's there to drop down from C++ to C, well I'll tell you, style. Object orientation using C is far more adaptive for strict memory usage than with ordinary classes in C++. Moreover lot of the benefits in C++ don't really come in handy when writing a kernel.
Its sad how many./ers dont truely understand o/o concepts or the many other cool features of Java. Hell many still think the only place Java exists is within Applets.
Although I agree with you, I must say that "understanding object orientation" amongst programmers is little like "understanding humour" amongst ordinary people. Everybody think they do.
Any language (that I know of, and that is quite a bunch) can be used to write "proper OO code" aswell as plain-old imperative programming.
I think Alan Cox put it well when he said "object orientation is a state of mind". Linux kernel is really object oriented on many many levels.
Sounds like you don't get the point. The reason templates are useful is because it reduces the amount of code you need to write for common situations in a typesafe way. This makes your code more compact (duplicate code) and less error-prone (it's all type safe and you only write it once).
Given how templates exist in C++, all it takes away is just few casts. Which as in comparison to templates are naturally type safe, because with templates you can only handle a certain type in the templated object, thus if in such case you use type casting, where's the problem?
I am a C++ programmer, so don't flame me for that. But seriously all it reduces is few type casts.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm a C++ (and Java) programmer myself, and I do use templates every so often, but seriously that's not the thing you need templates for. If you already have a common interface for the storable items that provides you the stuff you need you really don't need the template at all.
I've seen all sorts of people write all sorts of heavily templated code over the years and I must say that the need for them (besides some heavy trickery and ioccc uses) there's been little accomplished that couldn't have been done equally well using other means.
I never understood why was it so much easier to use templates and rely on the fact that the class has said compareTo method than it is to then declare that your class implements interface Comparable for example.
Besides implementing templates for java all in all escapes me. Although it may strip away few casts, but I wonder wether that really makes things better.
Just out of interest has anyone ever tried the Mandrake or Redhat graphical installers run on a low spec machine? Does Mandrake include a command line only option like Redhat does?
I always use "expert text" to avoid the graphical one. It's really great that redhat has kept supporting the text and the expert versions.
But the 640x480 8bit that the gui based thingie uses is not really high end as-is.
Besides linux X stuff has gotten so bloated already that you cannot run X on a machine with less than 64 megs of memory anyway. And even with 64, you can forget about mozilla and many other programs. The common attitude in linux kernel mailing list for low memory issues and swap usage has been for quite some time "buy more memory and disable swap". That's exactly what I've done in my office box, and yes the interactivity naturally improved, but it's still sad...
Took a train across Denmark the summer before last. Commented to my buddy's buddy in Koebenhavn, "Wow, so many wildflowers between farmers' fields. Totally unlike Germany. Beautiful." He said, "Yeah. That's the law here. They have to grow 'em." So given that I'm favoring the legal system in Denmark - from that one slim evidence (coercive though it be) - what do you, as a Dane, expect from your courts?
Doh, all countries have silly little laws, but I do have to admit that the best ones would appear to be US though... (some are outdated)
Alabama It is illegal for a driver to be blindfolded while operating a vehicle. Brewerton: Use of motor boats forbidden on city streets. Alaska It is forbidden to push a moose out of a plane in motion. It is against the law to look at a moose from an airplane. Fairbanks: No moose is allowed to have sex on city streets. Arizona Glendale: It is against the law for a car to back up. Mohave County: Anyone caught stealing a soap, must wash himself with it, until it's all used up. Arkansas A man has a legal right to beat his wife, but only once a month. It's illegal to mispronounce the name of the state (ie of course Arkansas). Little Rock: Flirtation between the members of the opposite sex on the streets may result in a 30-day jail term.... California A woman cannot drive a car while she is dressed in a house-coat. It is illegal to set a mousetrap without a hunting license. It is illegal for anyone to try and stop a child from playfully jumping over puddles of water. Belvedere: "No dog shall be in a public place without its master on a leash." Blythe: A person must own at least two cows before he is permitted to wear cowboy boots in public. Hollywood: It is illegal to drive more than 2000 sheep down Hollywood Bouleward simultanously. L.A.: A man can legally beat his wife with a leather strap, as long as it is less than two inches wide, or she gives him permission to use a wider strap, preferably in advance. L.A.: You cannot bathe two babies in the same tub at the same time. L.A.: If robbing a bank, shooting at the teller with a water gun is prohibited. Okland: Illegal to rob a birds nest from a public cemetery. Ventura County: Cats and dogs are not allowed to have sex without a permit. Colorado Denver: It is illegal to mistreat rats. Logan County: Illegal for a man to kiss a woman while she is asleep. Pueblo: Illegal to raise or permit a dandelion to grow within the city limits. Sterling: Unlawful to allow a pet cat to run loose without a taillight. Connecticut You can be stopped by the police for biking over 65 miles per hour. Harford: Crossing the street walking on your hands is not allowed. Hartford: Illegal to educate dogs. Delaware Lowes Crossroads: It is a violation of the local law for any pilot or passenger to carry an ice cream cone in their pocket while either flying or waiting to board a plane. District of Colombia It is unlawful for small boys to throw stones, at any time, at any place. Washington: The only acceptable sexual position is the missionary-style position. Any other sexual position is considered illegal. Florida Illegal for single, divorced, or widowed women to parachute on Sunday afternoons. Rats are forbidden from leaving the ships docked in Tampa Bay. An elephants tied to a parking meter must pay a regular parking fee. Women may be fined for falling asleep under a hair dryer, and som may the salon owner. Men may not be seen publicly in any kind of strapless gown. Hunting and killing a dear while swimming is illegal. You're not allowed to break more than three dishes a day, or chip the edge off more than four cups and/or saucers. Miami: Illegal to go around imitating animals. Saratoga: Illegal to sing while wearing a bathing suit. Georgia It's unlawful for a barber to advertise his prices. It is a misdemeanor for any citizen to attend church worship on Sunday unless he is equipped with a rifle and it is loaded. Jonesboro: Forbidden to say "Oh, boy". Idaho Illegal for a man to give his sweetheart a box of candy weighing less than fifty pounds. Coeur d'Alene: If police officers suspect a couple is having sex inside a vehicle they must honk their horn three times, and wait two minutes before being allowed to approach the scene. Idaho Falls: Forbidden for anyone over the age of eighty-eight to ride a motorcycle. Wallace: Unlawful for anyone to sleep in a dog kennel. Illinois Women must address bachelors as master instead of mister. It is against the law to speak English in Illinois. Prohibited to drive a car without a steering wheel. Chicago: Eating in a place that is on fire is forbidden. Cicero: Humming on public streets on Sundays prohibited. Evanston: Unlawful to change clothes in an automobile with the curtains drawn, except in case of fire. Kenilworth: Roosters must be at least three hundred feet away from any residence if he wishes to crow. Hens that wish to cackle must be two hundred feet away from any residence. Oblong: It is a crime to make love while fishing or hunting on your wedding day. Urbana: No monster may enter the corporate limits. Zion: Illegal for anyone to give lighted cigars to dogs, cats, and other domesticated animals kept as pets. Indiana Bathing is prohibited during the winter. Citizens are not allowed to attend a movie house or theater nor ride in a public streetcar within at least four hours after eating garlic. Elkhart: It is illegal for a barber to threaten to cut off a youngster's ears. Iowa No kiss may last more than five minutes. Aimes: A husband may not take more than three gulps of beer while lying in bed with his wife, or holding her hands. Ottumwa: "It is unlawful for any male person, within the corporate limits of the (city), to wink at any female person with whom he is unaquainted." Kansas Wichita: A father cannot frighten his daughter's boyfriend with a gun. Kentucky "No female shall appear in a bathing suit on any highway within this state unless she be escorted by at least two officers or unless she be armed with a club." An ammendment to the above law: "The provisions of this statuate shall not apply to females weighing less than 90 pounds nor exceeding 200 pounds, nor shall it apply to female horses." Forbidden to appear on the streets of any town or village in bathing dress without police protection. Transport of an ice cream cone in your pocket is prohibited. Anyone who has been drinking is sober until s/he "cannot hold onto the ground". Everyone must take a bath at least once a year. Louisiana In Louisiana, biting someone with your natural teeth is considered 'simple assault' while biting someone with your false teeth is 'aggravated assault'. Maine Rumford: Illegal to bite the landlord, no matter how much he deserves it. Maryland It is illegal to mistreat oysters. Baltimore: Illegal to wash or scrub sinks, no matter how dirty they get. Baltimore: Illegal to throw bales of hay from a second-story window within the city limits. Baltimore: Illegal to take a lion to the movies. Halethrope: Illegal to kiss for more than one second. Massachusetts Christmas was outlawed in 1659. It is forbidden to put tomatoes in clam chowder. It is unlawful to deliver diapers on Sunday, regardless of emergencies. All dogs required to have their hind legs tied during the month of April. Cooling one's feet by hanging them out the window is forbidden. Law declares that peanuts may not be eaten in court. Mourners at a wake may not eat more than three sandwiches. Snoring is illigal unless all bedroom windows are closed and securely locked. Goatees are illegal unless you first pay a special license fee for the privilege of wearing one in public. Taxi drivers are prohibited from making love in the front seat of their taxi during their shifts. Boston: Illegal to take a bath unless one has been ordered by a physician to do so. Brockton: Any person need a license before they are permitted to enter a sewer. Fitchburg: Barbers are not allowed to carry combs in back of their ears. Holyoke: It is unlawful to water your lawn when it is raining. Salem: Even married couples are forbidden from sleeping nude in rented rooms. Southbridge: Illegal to read books or newspapers after 8 p.m. in the streets. Michigan A woman's hair legally belongs to her husband, consequently she's not allowed to cut her own hair without her husband's permission. If any man kisses his wife on Sunday, the party at fault shall be punished at the discretion of the court. Detroit: Couples are not allowed to make love in an automobile unless the act takes place while the vehicle is parked on the couple's own property. Rochester: Anyone bathing in public must have his or her bathing suit inspected by a police officer. Minnesota Alexandria: Illegal for a husband to make love to his wife if his breath smells like garlic, onions, or sardines. The wife can by law force her husband to brush her teeth. Blue Earth: Law declares that no child under the age of twelve may talk over the telephone unless accompanies by a parent. Missouri Kansas City: Minors are not allowed to purchase cap pistols; they can, however, buy shotguns freely. Merryville: Women are prohibited from wearing corsets because "The privilege of admiring the curvaceous, unencumbered body of a young woman should not be denied to the normal, red-blooded American male." St. Louis: Illegal to sit on the curb of any city street and drink beer from a bucket. Montana Bozeman: You can't perform any sexual acts in the front yard of any home, after sundown, and if you are nude (socks is OK). Helena: A woman cannot dance on a saloon table unless her clothing weights more than three pounds, two ounces. Nebraska A parent can be arrested if his child cannot hold back a burp during a church service. A motorist approaching a horse at night must send up warning red rockets and Roman candles, throw a scenic tarpaulin over his car to conceal it from the horse, and take his machine apart and hide the parts in the grass it the tarpaulin doesn't soothe the horse. Hastings: Hotel owners are required by law to provide a clean, white cotton nightshirt to each guest. According to the law, no couple may have sex unless they are wearing the nightshirts. Omaha: It is against the law for a barber to shave a man's chest. Nevada It is illegal to drive a camel on the highway. Sex without a condom is considered illegal. Eureka: Men who wear moustaches are forbidden from kissing women. New Hampshire It is against the law to tap your feet, nod your head or in any way keep time to the music in a tavern, restaurant or cafe. New Jersey Cresskill: Cats must wear three bells to warn birds of their whereabouts. Liberty Corner: Any couple making out inside a vehicle, and accidentally sounding the horn during their lustful act, may be taken to jail. Trenton: Unlawful to throw any tainted pickles in the streets (good pickles, however). New Mexico Carlsbad: During lunch breaks no couple should engage in a sexual act while parked in their vehicle, unless their car has curtains. Carrizozo: It is forbidden for a female to appear unshaven in public (includes legs and face). New York Albany: Disallowed to play golf in the streets. Carmel: A man cannot go outside wearing unmatching jacket and pants. Greene: Illegal to eat peanuts and walk backwards on the sidewalk during a concert. NYC: Illegal for a man to turn around and look "at a woman in that way", and violators are forced to wear horse blinders. Rochester: Firemen must wear ties while on duty. North Carolina It is illegal to take a dear swimming in water above its knees. Asheville: You can't sneeze on the streets. Barber: Cats and dogs are not allowed to fight. Thomasville: No airplanes are allowed to fly over the town on Sundays during the hours between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Winston-Salem: It is against the law for children under seven years of age to go to college. North Dakota Beer and pretzels cannot be served at the same time in any bar or restaurant. Illegal to go to bed wearing boots or shoes. Ohio Berea: Any animal that is out after dark must have a tail light. Cleveland: Women are not allowed to wear patent-leather shoes. Cleveland: Operating a motor vehicle while sitting in another person's lap is forbidden. Oxford: Illegal for a woman to strip off her clothing while standing in front of a man's picture. Paulding: A policeperson may bite a dog to quiet him. Portsmouth: The law ranks baseball players with "vagrants, thieves and other suspicious characters." Youngstown: Running out of gas is illegal. Oklahoma Criminals can be fined, arrested or jailed for making faces at a dog. Whale hunting is strictly forbidden throughout the entire state. Females are forbidden from doing their own hair without being licensed by the state. Dogs need a mayor-signed permit to congregate in groups of three or more on private property. Clinton: Masturbating while watching two people having sex in a car is forbidden. Tulsa: Kisses lasting more than three minutes are forbidden. Tulsa: Against the law to open a soda bottle without the supervision of a licensed engineer. Oregon A dead person cannot be required to serve on a jury. Use of canned corn in fishing is illegal. Hood River: You can't juggle without a license. Willowdale: No man may curse while having sex with his wife. Pennsylvania "Any motorist driving along a country road at night must stop every mile and send up a rocket signal, wait 10 minutes for the road to be cleared of livestock, and continue." Housewives may not hide dirt and dust under a rug in a dwelling. No man may purchase alcohol without written consent from his wife. Danville: All fire hydrants must be checked one hour before all fires. Harrisburg: Illegal to have sex with a truck driver inside a toll booth. York: You can't sit down while watering your lawn with a hose. Rhode Island Newport: Illegal to smoke a pipe after sunset. Province: Illegal to sell toothpaste and toothbrush to the same customer on a Sunday. South Carolina Fountain Inn: Horses were once required to wear pants at all times. South Dakota Sioux Falls: Hotels are required by law to furnish their rooms with twin beds only. There should be a minimum of two feet between the beds, and it is illegal for a couple to make love on the floor between the beds. Tennessee It is illegal to use a lasso to catch a fish. It is illegal to drive a car while sleeping. You can't shoot any game other than whales from a moving automobile. Dyersburg: Illegal for a woman to call a man for a date. Memphis: Illegal for a woman to drive by herself; "a man must walk or run in front of the vehicle, waving a red flag in order to warn approaching pedestrians and motorists". Oneida: Forbidden to sing the song "It Ain't Goin' To Rain No Mo'". Texas Criminals are required to give their victims 24 hours notice, either orally or in writing, and to explain the nature of the crime to be committed. Illegal to raise alligators in your home. When two trains meet each other at a railroad crossing, each shall come to a full stop, and neither shall proceed until the other has gone. You need a five-dollar permit to go barefoot. Kingsville: Two pigs cannot have sex on the city's airport property. Lefors: Illegal to take more than three swallows of beer at any time while standing. San Antonio: Illegal for both sexes to flirt or respond to flirtation using the eyes and/or hands. Utah Birds have the right of way on all highways. A husband is responsible for every criminal act commited by his wife while she is in his presence. Utah state legislation outlaws all sex with anyone but your spouse. Adultery, oral and anal sex, masturbation are considered sodomy and can lead to imprisonment. Sex with an animal - unless performed for profit - however is NOT considered sodomy. Polygamy - provided only the missionary position has been applied - is only a misdemeanor. Tremonton: No woman is allowed to have sex with a man while riding in an ambulance. In addition to normal charges, the woman's name will be published in the local newspaper. The man does not receive any punishment. Trout Creek: Pharmacists may not sell gun powder as a headache cure. Vermont It is obligatory for everyone to take at least one bath each week, on Saturday night. Rutland: Cars are forbidden from backfireing. Virginia The statute of The Virginia Code: "To prohibit corrupt practices or bribery by any person other than candidates." Norfolk: No woman may go in public without wearing a corset. Washington All lollipops are forbidden. Having sex with a virgin is illegal under any circumstances (including the wedding night). "It is mandatory for a motorist with criminal intentions to stop at the city limits and telephone the chief of police as he is entering the town." Seattle: Goldfish can ride the city buses in bowls only if they kept still. Seattle: You may not carry a concealed weapon that is longer than six feet. Wilbur: Illegal to ride upon the streets on an ugly horse. West Virginia Children may not attend school if their breath's smelling "wild onions". Peewee: It is illegal to let your horse fall asleep in the airport. Wisconsin Connorsville: No man shall shoot of a gun while his female partner is having a sexual orgasm. Racine: Illegal to wake a fireman when he is asleep. Wyoming Newcastle: Couples are banned from having sex while standing inside a store's walk-in meat freezer.
Then the world will finally see the 4000 Playstation 2's that Saddam used to build a supercomputer
I'm glad you got modded up, but it could've been "insightful" instead of "funny".
Take Xbox for example, neat little box, equiped with P3 something, and quite cheap. Put linux on that and build a relatively cheap cluster out of those. Not that far fetched, if you ask me.
Had these linux capable consoles emerged before 3D revolution the price comparison would've been even better.
And what's best, M$ takes about $50 loss for each XBox sold.
In any case, PC clusters are stepping on the toes of super computers big time. We'll probably either see super computers get cheaper or vanish slowly.
But unlike some slashdot readers, I, Damian Yerrick, can't afford a second motherboard, CPU, case, and keyboard on which to run BSD firewall software [closedbsd.org].
Therefore, I, Damian Yerrick, cannot afford to own a computer system that does not have to be rebooted.
Blah blah blah. You can get a fully functional Pentium I computer for less that what you spend going out one night. Pentium I runs any *BSD or Linux just fine and not just firewalls, you can even run a little trimmed down X (nobullshit wm, say black box, avoid huge ram hogs, etc).
Running linux is dirt cheap, for non business users _especially_ hardwarewise. I know this is redundant, but somehow people tend to forget that Linux doesn't have that high hardware requirements at all. I'm begging my Pentium 2 366MHz laptop to break so that I'd get a reason buy a new one, but as long as it works flawlessly I can't fake a reason to buy a new one because it runs linux and every app I use just fine.
While it's great that Linux has excellent multithreading support, it's a shame, however, that many programmers do not take advantage of multi-threading in their programs.
What a load of crap. There are plenty on threaded applications for linux. The problem is that all these inexperienced threads-every-fucking-where-programmers" that Java spawned fail to understand that threading is NOT the solution for everything. Besides in unix style coding few tings are as common as forking about, which in many cases is the what people also do with java all the time. Real single memory space cloned processes (i.e. threads) have less uses than people actually think.
The worst example of this was the Quake I source code, which was used for many games, including Half-Life. The code was not multi-threaded, and the network code sat idle while everything else drew -- adding about 20ms of lag, unless you cut the frame rate down to about 15 or so.
If you'd EVER actually used threads in linux, you'd know that if there are busy threads you would still get to run atmost once in 20ms and even more likely far less seldom.
It's easy to try out even. Write a code that preforms usleep(1) or sched_yields() every now and then and checks how long that takes. Especially try out the case by putting few totally separate processes in the back ground doing while(1); loops. There's your 20ms and way more...
When quake 1 was written the 20 ms lag was concidered NOTHING. At that time online gaming was limited to mainly xpilot and muds. It started the boots and naturally the demands changed, too. THUS ID wrote the Quake World client which was quite different.
Besides a brutal fact always is that single thread process can be made faster than _ANY_ multithreaded approach, although it's often quite difficult. Moreover, threading is never chosen as an approach due to performance, but rather because it simplifies the structure in some cases.
Given the amount of optimization already present in Quake 1, I feel quite safe saying that lack of threads in Dos had jack to do with Quake 1 being single threaded.
It is relatively well known the Linus has essentially modified the terms of the GPL under which the kernel is distributed w.r.t. loadable modules to allow exactly this functionality. You write a closed source driver for your odd exceeding proprietary hardware, make it a loadable module (not compiled in) and your driver does not have to be released under GPL. As soon as you distribute a version with the module compiled in "all your IP are ours", but as long as you dynamically load it your ok.
I must add to this that, although there are certain reasons as to why write a closed source driver in the first place, it will not be an easy road.
NONE of the kernel developers will be able (or even willing) to assist you, because you're dealing with closed source module that will taint the kernel. They cannot help you because they simply cannot see what your driver does, i.e. see the source code.
In NVidia's case, this have gone tolerably, although many developers aren't happy with their closed source release, but I guess there are some neat tricks they don't want to share with ATI and others. In any case, they've put a lot of effort into it being bugfree, but it wasn't always so. Kernel crashes with non GPL modules loaded will go totally disregarded in the linux developement community.
Bottom line: that stuff about the floating point error in the PAC-2 system looks neat on paper but it's not at all clear that the faulty calculation was responsible for the loss of life.
Dead on! There's been loads of evidence that NONE of the patriots EVER hit a signle scud. Luckily the scuds had problems of their own with some wing design when going neg-G or something, I can't remember what it was, but anyway quite often they just simply blew up when decending towards a target.
Even I remember Bush the elder boasting (numbers may be inaccurate, but gap was 1) "37 missiles engaged, 36 intercepted". Naturally that raised a few questions about what was this "intercepted" as none of the Patriots ever hit a scud. And... I saw this rather hillarious documentary about all this Patriot fuzz where some US general telling in court what they ment with "intercepted". He said that "intercepted" meant only that at SOME point the patriot's flight path / trajectory crosses that of the scud's.
This is absolutely correct. To reply to all the other posters on this thread: time is a very important part of all competitive chess. There are strict rules about the chess clock and its use. International chess specifies 2 hours for the first 40 moves and then another two hours to reach move 60, for example (IIRC). Losing on time is a very common occurrence - especially on the Internet servers. Nothing like a quick game of 2 minutes blitz to make you appreciate time to think:)
So true, I have played loads of 5 min quickie games and it's way too often so that the guy with less time has the advantage in the game. Naturally so, because he's used more time, thought more. We have a saying about this "if I had just a little more time and if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle".
Companies should bring games to all three markets in a timely fashion. Too many games never make it to certain markets, mod chips actually increase sales of those games for the market it was released in. Plenty of games get brought to NA with awful voice acting in place of the great Japanese.
Yeah, who ever told them "If you'll delay it, they'll wait." Because I for one won't. When a europe release dates are delayed, but the game's already released in US, it's not that difficult a choice to make wether to download it from the net or not.
Same goes for ID with their q3 linux release. Morons released it more than a month later than the windows version and had the nerves to complain how poorly it had sold.
And with regional DVDs... you would think they'd learn but now. Why should I care though, they're just shooting their own feet.
If these folks were real coders instead of marketroids trying to jump into the Linux bandwagon, they'd know that the LSB acronym is already taken. Sorry folks but LSB will always mean "Least Significant Bit".
Son, when you grow older and learn a little more and perhaps one day some people will also concider you a coder, you will realize that _MOST_ of the TLA (three letter acronyms) are already taken and even by several separate things. Especially if you ever start to work on lower level protocols and telecommunications layers.
And geez, Alan Cox? If "real coder" was a honorary title given to only one person on this planet at a time, it'd be him, trust me.
Sadly the late 90ees thrill for four letter acronyms didn't catch more wind.
Members of the kernel development community don't seem to agree that the development kernel will function on IDE drives without destroying them...
Maybe instead of bloating the featureset, they should be working on getting the I/O working?
I/O? Are you seriously complaining that the IO thruput is lacking? I'm guessing you're talking about the interactive feel.
So and so, but I bet you don't even run 2.5.X. Granted the 2.4 imho is still interactively crap. It's been ever since the vm "improvement" starting with 2.4.10-preX and how last fall those fscking db-benchmarkers showed up on lkml. I bet they got their 1% improvements for their db and on the same they bollocksed my developement desktop usability to a level it felt like win95. Atleast I learned a lot more about the vm and scheduling internals and loads of neat tricks how to improve latency (e.g. more memory and no, Hz up, neg-nicing X, nicing back ground stuff, A.Morton's low latency and lock breaking patches.)
BUT I must say that the 2.5 is a step forward from 2.4 also in this manner. I've been running 2.5s all along and these late 2.5.30s, especially 2.5.39, have been goodish. Not the kind of interactivity as there should be, still.
Although I'm still seriously pissed off how all the main developers seemed to disregard all the cries about interactivity last fall and winter on lkml. There SHOULD be a proc or even a compile time possibility to tweak it into serverish/db or desktop usage. On a desktop developement you couldn't care less if your compile or what ever the fsck you're doing on the back ground takes 5% longer, but if what ever you're actually interacting with lags like hell, it annoys the living crap out of you. I mean, if I press the button while I'm compiling, obviously that button press is more important ffs.
actually find some microbes or virii from Venus, Mars, hell even from Ganymede. That'd finally put a full stop to all those religious morons that are so full of "we're the centre of the universe". Just by showing that there's _a_ life form outside earth would remove a huge barrier from all those debates and we could concentrate on more interesting topics.
You're either "FOR copyright facism" or "AGAINST censorship." I think I'll choose against censorship.
I don't know who modded you up, but they sure didn't see the trolling or the stupidity involved here.
Alloving some rental companies alter the contents has jack to do with censorship. You are not forced to be their customer, and I'm_QUITE certain that there will also be rental companies that will rent the films untampered.
There are systems where we simply don't and won't have enough disk
space and where speed is not of the essence. We have them now, and we
will continue to have them in the future.
As someone who has used compression filesystems with Amiga floppy and hardrives, I can tell you exactly why there isn't much interest in them in the Linux community. They are basically a pain-in-the-ass, that's why.
As someone who has used ext2 compression on linux systems, I can tell you things have changed since Amiga times and it's compressed filesystems.
e2compress is really sweet, easy to mark singular files or directories to be compressed, 4 different compression algorithms can all be used on same ext2 partitions alongside with uncompressed files/directories. It really is sweet, especially if you're in need of it, like with a 64Mb flash chipped embedded pc.
There are systems where we simply don't and won't have enough disk space and where speed is not of the essence. We have them now, and we will continue to have them in the future.
Being a linux developer for embedded production boxes and given the current increasing interest over linux in embedded along with embedded boxes typically running _WITHOUT_ hard disks (mostly just flash chips of some sort, due to their better life-time), I cannot help wondering why the kernel mailing list shows little or no interest towards ext2 (or ext3) compression.
JFFS and JFFS2 don't come into question in most cases as they tear through the fs layers and cannot be used with IDE flash chips for example.
Alcatel even released it two weeks ago for 2.4.17... loads of people, like me, must have ported it to 2.4.19 by now. But to get ext2 compression to 2.5.XX, forget it... but why?
This little like the lack interest towards under clocking, eventhough once you've overclocked your main computer to the max, you will start looking for more silent option, if not for the desktop computer, but for the closet firewall. Even if you don't have the interest now, you will, once you shack in with a gal.
Another evil plan with a big red Self Destruct button: one of the supported remote instructions for the network is "run a command" (0x24). All you have to do is find an entry point and command it to killall -9.bugtraq and the command will propagate through the network, killing itself. Doesn't keep it from regenerating on the original https vulnerability vector, but we could perhaps slow down the DDoS attacks.
Propagate? What did I miss here? killall -9 will kill surely kill the process on the target machine, but how could it't propagate, because -9 (SIGKILL) makes sure your process will _not_ execute another single instruction. That will not propagate through the network unless there's another hidden watchdog process that sends out selfdestruct commands to other instances over the network.
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I guess it's a nice thing that shellsort is getting improved, and I do realize that this is great for genetic research, but, pardon me for being an uneducated ignorant bastard, does it have any practical value, seeing as quicksort is much faster than shellsort? Or am I wrong?
Shell sort has better worst-case running-time than quick sort does.
Most programming these days is all about the common case, but in real-time programming it's all about predictability. Thus there the mergesort is the standard choice over quicksort.
That is because nobody can agree on what "proper OO" really is, including the OO celebrities. They bicker for their viewpoint as much as newbies.
:-)
Yep, that is so true. There is also the question of "proper editor"...
Besides such a huge amount of programming indifferences are really about coding style and other irrational issues. Even some of the OO concepts depend on one's liking.
Java does not make procedural programming very simple. I still can't get:
print("hello world");
in Java without dotted thingies hanging from its ass or funky interface declarations for every fricken class that uses it.
Nah, it's just as easy. But nonetheless my point was more along the lines "no matter how we rant about certain language features, the bottom line will always be 'good programmers write good code and crappy ones will crap on their terminals'". I know it sounds awfully trivial, but somehow people do tend to forget. Especially during IT boom few years back every god damn company hired anybody how knew how to spell computer. I've heard of people claiming to know java, but then when allowed ask questions have said "just one, what are all those dots and parentheses for?". (and that's a true story)
I think Sun errored in its OOP-only push. Even many OO fans agree that procedural is sometimes the best approach for *some* things.
I couldn't agree more. We've been writing an OS from scratch in C++ that will run Java bytecode and it's not just the little things that break out of the OO style. There are numerous things in a kernel that doesn't make sense in OO, but also numerous things that naturally go beautyfully that way. I can't help constantly thinking why we're bothering with C++ at all, although that's really my language of choice for most tasks, in this case I'd drop it down to C. That'd give us the most leash and would still let us easily write solid OO implementations where deemed suitable. (a lot like linux kernel has been done)
One might ask that what's there to drop down from C++ to C, well I'll tell you, style. Object orientation using C is far more adaptive for strict memory usage than with ordinary classes in C++. Moreover lot of the benefits in C++ don't really come in handy when writing a kernel.
Its sad how many ./ers dont truely understand o/o concepts or the many other cool features of Java. Hell many still think the only place Java exists is within Applets.
Although I agree with you, I must say that "understanding object orientation" amongst programmers is little like "understanding humour" amongst ordinary people. Everybody think they do.
Any language (that I know of, and that is quite a bunch) can be used to write "proper OO code" aswell as plain-old imperative programming.
I think Alan Cox put it well when he said "object orientation is a state of mind". Linux kernel is really object oriented on many many levels.
Sounds like you don't get the point. The reason templates are useful is because it reduces the amount of code you need to write for common situations in a typesafe way. This makes your code more compact (duplicate code) and less error-prone (it's all type safe and you only write it once).
Given how templates exist in C++, all it takes away is just few casts. Which as in comparison to templates are naturally type safe, because with templates you can only handle a certain type in the templated object, thus if in such case you use type casting, where's the problem?
I am a C++ programmer, so don't flame me for that.
But seriously all it reduces is few type casts.
And where is it that you need templates in there?
Don't get me wrong here, I'm a C++ (and Java) programmer myself, and I do use templates every so often, but seriously that's not the thing you need templates for. If you already have a common interface for the storable items that provides you the stuff you need you really don't need the template at all.
I've seen all sorts of people write all sorts of heavily templated code over the years and I must say that the need for them (besides some heavy trickery and ioccc uses) there's been little accomplished that couldn't have been done equally well using other means.
I never understood why was it so much easier to use templates and rely on the fact that the class has said compareTo method than it is to then declare that your class implements interface Comparable for example.
Besides implementing templates for java all in all escapes me. Although it may strip away few casts, but I wonder wether that really makes things better.
Just out of interest has anyone ever tried the Mandrake or Redhat graphical installers run on a low spec machine? Does Mandrake include a command line only option like Redhat does?
I always use "expert text" to avoid the graphical one. It's really great that redhat has kept supporting the text and the expert versions.
But the 640x480 8bit that the gui based thingie uses is not really high end as-is.
Besides linux X stuff has gotten so bloated already that you cannot run X on a machine with less than 64 megs of memory anyway. And even with 64, you can forget about mozilla and many other programs. The common attitude in linux kernel mailing list for low memory issues and swap usage has been for quite some time "buy more memory and disable swap". That's exactly what I've done in my office box, and yes the interactivity naturally improved, but it's still sad...
Took a train across Denmark the summer before last. Commented to my buddy's buddy in Koebenhavn, "Wow, so many wildflowers between farmers' fields. Totally unlike Germany. Beautiful."
He said, "Yeah. That's the law here. They have to grow 'em."
So given that I'm favoring the legal system in Denmark - from that one slim evidence (coercive though it be) - what do you, as a Dane, expect from your courts?
Doh, all countries have silly little laws, but I do have to admit that the best ones would appear to be US though... (some are outdated)
Alabama
It is illegal for a driver to be blindfolded while operating a vehicle.
Brewerton: Use of motor boats forbidden on city streets.
Alaska
It is forbidden to push a moose out of a plane in motion.
It is against the law to look at a moose from an airplane.
Fairbanks: No moose is allowed to have sex on city streets.
Arizona
Glendale: It is against the law for a car to back up.
Mohave County: Anyone caught stealing a soap, must wash himself with it, until it's all used up.
Arkansas
A man has a legal right to beat his wife, but only once a month.
It's illegal to mispronounce the name of the state (ie of course Arkansas).
Little Rock: Flirtation between the members of the opposite sex on the streets may result in a 30-day jail term....
California
A woman cannot drive a car while she is dressed in a house-coat.
It is illegal to set a mousetrap without a hunting license.
It is illegal for anyone to try and stop a child from playfully jumping over puddles of water.
Belvedere: "No dog shall be in a public place without its master on a leash."
Blythe: A person must own at least two cows before he is permitted to wear cowboy boots in public.
Hollywood: It is illegal to drive more than 2000 sheep down Hollywood Bouleward simultanously.
L.A.: A man can legally beat his wife with a leather strap, as long as it is less than two inches wide, or she gives him permission to use a wider strap, preferably in advance.
L.A.: You cannot bathe two babies in the same tub at the same time.
L.A.: If robbing a bank, shooting at the teller with a water gun is prohibited.
Okland: Illegal to rob a birds nest from a public cemetery.
Ventura County: Cats and dogs are not allowed to have sex without a permit.
Colorado
Denver: It is illegal to mistreat rats.
Logan County: Illegal for a man to kiss a woman while she is asleep.
Pueblo: Illegal to raise or permit a dandelion to grow within the city limits.
Sterling: Unlawful to allow a pet cat to run loose without a taillight.
Connecticut
You can be stopped by the police for biking over 65 miles per hour.
Harford: Crossing the street walking on your hands is not allowed.
Hartford: Illegal to educate dogs.
Delaware
Lowes Crossroads: It is a violation of the local law for any pilot or passenger to carry an ice cream cone in their pocket while either flying or waiting to board a plane.
District of Colombia
It is unlawful for small boys to throw stones, at any time, at any place.
Washington: The only acceptable sexual position is the missionary-style position. Any other sexual position is considered illegal.
Florida
Illegal for single, divorced, or widowed women to parachute on Sunday afternoons.
Rats are forbidden from leaving the ships docked in Tampa Bay.
An elephants tied to a parking meter must pay a regular parking fee.
Women may be fined for falling asleep under a hair dryer, and som may the salon owner.
Men may not be seen publicly in any kind of strapless gown.
Hunting and killing a dear while swimming is illegal.
You're not allowed to break more than three dishes a day, or chip the edge off more than four cups and/or saucers.
Miami: Illegal to go around imitating animals.
Saratoga: Illegal to sing while wearing a bathing suit.
Georgia
It's unlawful for a barber to advertise his prices.
It is a misdemeanor for any citizen to attend church worship on Sunday unless he is equipped with a rifle and it is loaded.
Jonesboro: Forbidden to say "Oh, boy".
Idaho
Illegal for a man to give his sweetheart a box of candy weighing less than fifty pounds.
Coeur d'Alene: If police officers suspect a couple is having sex inside a vehicle they must honk their horn three times, and wait two minutes before being allowed to approach the scene.
Idaho Falls: Forbidden for anyone over the age of eighty-eight to ride a motorcycle.
Wallace: Unlawful for anyone to sleep in a dog kennel.
Illinois
Women must address bachelors as master instead of mister.
It is against the law to speak English in Illinois.
Prohibited to drive a car without a steering wheel.
Chicago: Eating in a place that is on fire is forbidden.
Cicero: Humming on public streets on Sundays prohibited.
Evanston: Unlawful to change clothes in an automobile with the curtains drawn, except in case of fire.
Kenilworth: Roosters must be at least three hundred feet away from any residence if he wishes to crow. Hens that wish to cackle must be two hundred feet away from any residence.
Oblong: It is a crime to make love while fishing or hunting on your wedding day.
Urbana: No monster may enter the corporate limits.
Zion: Illegal for anyone to give lighted cigars to dogs, cats, and other domesticated animals kept as pets.
Indiana
Bathing is prohibited during the winter.
Citizens are not allowed to attend a movie house or theater nor ride in a public streetcar within at least four hours after eating garlic.
Elkhart: It is illegal for a barber to threaten to cut off a youngster's ears.
Iowa
No kiss may last more than five minutes.
Aimes: A husband may not take more than three gulps of beer while lying in bed with his wife, or holding her hands.
Ottumwa: "It is unlawful for any male person, within the corporate limits of the (city), to wink at any female person with whom he is unaquainted."
Kansas
Wichita: A father cannot frighten his daughter's boyfriend with a gun.
Kentucky
"No female shall appear in a bathing suit on any highway within this state unless she be escorted by at least two officers or unless she be armed with a club."
An ammendment to the above law: "The provisions of this statuate shall not apply to females weighing less than 90 pounds nor exceeding 200 pounds, nor shall it apply to female horses."
Forbidden to appear on the streets of any town or village in bathing dress without police protection.
Transport of an ice cream cone in your pocket is prohibited.
Anyone who has been drinking is sober until s/he "cannot hold onto the ground".
Everyone must take a bath at least once a year.
Louisiana
In Louisiana, biting someone with your natural teeth is considered 'simple assault' while biting someone with your false teeth is 'aggravated assault'.
Maine
Rumford: Illegal to bite the landlord, no matter how much he deserves it.
Maryland
It is illegal to mistreat oysters.
Baltimore: Illegal to wash or scrub sinks, no matter how dirty they get.
Baltimore: Illegal to throw bales of hay from a second-story window within the city limits.
Baltimore: Illegal to take a lion to the movies.
Halethrope: Illegal to kiss for more than one second.
Massachusetts
Christmas was outlawed in 1659.
It is forbidden to put tomatoes in clam chowder.
It is unlawful to deliver diapers on Sunday, regardless of emergencies.
All dogs required to have their hind legs tied during the month of April.
Cooling one's feet by hanging them out the window is forbidden.
Law declares that peanuts may not be eaten in court.
Mourners at a wake may not eat more than three sandwiches.
Snoring is illigal unless all bedroom windows are closed and securely locked.
Goatees are illegal unless you first pay a special license fee for the privilege of wearing one in public.
Taxi drivers are prohibited from making love in the front seat of their taxi during their shifts.
Boston: Illegal to take a bath unless one has been ordered by a physician to do so.
Brockton: Any person need a license before they are permitted to enter a sewer.
Fitchburg: Barbers are not allowed to carry combs in back of their ears.
Holyoke: It is unlawful to water your lawn when it is raining.
Salem: Even married couples are forbidden from sleeping nude in rented rooms.
Southbridge: Illegal to read books or newspapers after 8 p.m. in the streets.
Michigan
A woman's hair legally belongs to her husband, consequently she's not allowed to cut her own hair without her husband's permission.
If any man kisses his wife on Sunday, the party at fault shall be punished at the discretion of the court.
Detroit: Couples are not allowed to make love in an automobile unless the act takes place while the vehicle is parked on the couple's own property.
Rochester: Anyone bathing in public must have his or her bathing suit inspected by a police officer.
Minnesota
Alexandria: Illegal for a husband to make love to his wife if his breath smells like garlic, onions, or sardines. The wife can by law force her husband to brush her teeth.
Blue Earth: Law declares that no child under the age of twelve may talk over the telephone unless accompanies by a parent.
Missouri
Kansas City: Minors are not allowed to purchase cap pistols; they can, however, buy shotguns freely.
Merryville: Women are prohibited from wearing corsets because "The privilege of admiring the curvaceous, unencumbered body of a young woman should not be denied to the normal, red-blooded American male."
St. Louis: Illegal to sit on the curb of any city street and drink beer from a bucket.
Montana
Bozeman: You can't perform any sexual acts in the front yard of any home, after sundown, and if you are nude (socks is OK).
Helena: A woman cannot dance on a saloon table unless her clothing weights more than three pounds, two ounces.
Nebraska
A parent can be arrested if his child cannot hold back a burp during a church service.
A motorist approaching a horse at night must send up warning red rockets and Roman candles, throw a scenic tarpaulin over his car to conceal it from the horse, and take his machine apart and hide the parts in the grass it the tarpaulin doesn't soothe the horse.
Hastings: Hotel owners are required by law to provide a clean, white cotton nightshirt to each guest. According to the law, no couple may have sex unless they are wearing the nightshirts.
Omaha: It is against the law for a barber to shave a man's chest.
Nevada
It is illegal to drive a camel on the highway.
Sex without a condom is considered illegal.
Eureka: Men who wear moustaches are forbidden from kissing women.
New Hampshire
It is against the law to tap your feet, nod your head or in any way keep time to the music in a tavern, restaurant or cafe.
New Jersey
Cresskill: Cats must wear three bells to warn birds of their whereabouts.
Liberty Corner: Any couple making out inside a vehicle, and accidentally sounding the horn during their lustful act, may be taken to jail.
Trenton: Unlawful to throw any tainted pickles in the streets (good pickles, however).
New Mexico
Carlsbad: During lunch breaks no couple should engage in a sexual act while parked in their vehicle, unless their car has curtains.
Carrizozo: It is forbidden for a female to appear unshaven in public (includes legs and face).
New York
Albany: Disallowed to play golf in the streets.
Carmel: A man cannot go outside wearing unmatching jacket and pants.
Greene: Illegal to eat peanuts and walk backwards on the sidewalk during a concert.
NYC: Illegal for a man to turn around and look "at a woman in that way", and violators are forced to wear horse blinders.
Rochester: Firemen must wear ties while on duty.
North Carolina
It is illegal to take a dear swimming in water above its knees.
Asheville: You can't sneeze on the streets.
Barber: Cats and dogs are not allowed to fight.
Thomasville: No airplanes are allowed to fly over the town on Sundays during the hours between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.
Winston-Salem: It is against the law for children under seven years of age to go to college.
North Dakota
Beer and pretzels cannot be served at the same time in any bar or restaurant.
Illegal to go to bed wearing boots or shoes.
Ohio
Berea: Any animal that is out after dark must have a tail light.
Cleveland: Women are not allowed to wear patent-leather shoes.
Cleveland: Operating a motor vehicle while sitting in another person's lap is forbidden.
Oxford: Illegal for a woman to strip off her clothing while standing in front of a man's picture.
Paulding: A policeperson may bite a dog to quiet him.
Portsmouth: The law ranks baseball players with "vagrants, thieves and other suspicious characters."
Youngstown: Running out of gas is illegal.
Oklahoma
Criminals can be fined, arrested or jailed for making faces at a dog.
Whale hunting is strictly forbidden throughout the entire state.
Females are forbidden from doing their own hair without being licensed by the state.
Dogs need a mayor-signed permit to congregate in groups of three or more on private property.
Clinton: Masturbating while watching two people having sex in a car is forbidden.
Tulsa: Kisses lasting more than three minutes are forbidden.
Tulsa: Against the law to open a soda bottle without the supervision of a licensed engineer.
Oregon
A dead person cannot be required to serve on a jury.
Use of canned corn in fishing is illegal.
Hood River: You can't juggle without a license.
Willowdale: No man may curse while having sex with his wife.
Pennsylvania
"Any motorist driving along a country road at night must stop every mile and send up a rocket signal, wait 10 minutes for the road to be cleared of livestock, and continue."
Housewives may not hide dirt and dust under a rug in a dwelling.
No man may purchase alcohol without written consent from his wife.
Danville: All fire hydrants must be checked one hour before all fires.
Harrisburg: Illegal to have sex with a truck driver inside a toll booth.
York: You can't sit down while watering your lawn with a hose.
Rhode Island
Newport: Illegal to smoke a pipe after sunset.
Province: Illegal to sell toothpaste and toothbrush to the same customer on a Sunday.
South Carolina
Fountain Inn: Horses were once required to wear pants at all times.
South Dakota
Sioux Falls: Hotels are required by law to furnish their rooms with twin beds only. There should be a minimum of two feet between the beds, and it is illegal for a couple to make love on the floor between the beds.
Tennessee
It is illegal to use a lasso to catch a fish.
It is illegal to drive a car while sleeping.
You can't shoot any game other than whales from a moving automobile.
Dyersburg: Illegal for a woman to call a man for a date.
Memphis: Illegal for a woman to drive by herself; "a man must walk or run in front of the vehicle, waving a red flag in order to warn approaching pedestrians and motorists".
Oneida: Forbidden to sing the song "It Ain't Goin' To Rain No Mo'".
Texas
Criminals are required to give their victims 24 hours notice, either orally or in writing, and to explain the nature of the crime to be committed.
Illegal to raise alligators in your home.
When two trains meet each other at a railroad crossing, each shall come to a full stop, and neither shall proceed until the other has gone.
You need a five-dollar permit to go barefoot.
Kingsville: Two pigs cannot have sex on the city's airport property.
Lefors: Illegal to take more than three swallows of beer at any time while standing.
San Antonio: Illegal for both sexes to flirt or respond to flirtation using the eyes and/or hands.
Utah
Birds have the right of way on all highways.
A husband is responsible for every criminal act commited by his wife while she is in his presence.
Utah state legislation outlaws all sex with anyone but your spouse.
Adultery, oral and anal sex, masturbation are considered sodomy and can lead to imprisonment.
Sex with an animal - unless performed for profit - however is NOT considered sodomy.
Polygamy - provided only the missionary position has been applied - is only a misdemeanor.
Tremonton: No woman is allowed to have sex with a man while riding in an ambulance. In addition to normal charges, the woman's name will be published in the local newspaper. The man does not receive any punishment.
Trout Creek: Pharmacists may not sell gun powder as a headache cure.
Vermont
It is obligatory for everyone to take at least one bath each week, on Saturday night.
Rutland: Cars are forbidden from backfireing.
Virginia
The statute of The Virginia Code: "To prohibit corrupt practices or bribery by any person other than candidates."
Norfolk: No woman may go in public without wearing a corset.
Washington
All lollipops are forbidden.
Having sex with a virgin is illegal under any circumstances (including the wedding night).
"It is mandatory for a motorist with criminal intentions to stop at the city limits and telephone the chief of police as he is entering the town."
Seattle: Goldfish can ride the city buses in bowls only if they kept still.
Seattle: You may not carry a concealed weapon that is longer than six feet.
Wilbur: Illegal to ride upon the streets on an ugly horse.
West Virginia
Children may not attend school if their breath's smelling "wild onions".
Peewee: It is illegal to let your horse fall asleep in the airport.
Wisconsin
Connorsville: No man shall shoot of a gun while his female partner is having a sexual orgasm.
Racine: Illegal to wake a fireman when he is asleep.
Wyoming
Newcastle: Couples are banned from having sex while standing inside a store's walk-in meat freezer.
Help with distributed cancer research [ud.com]
And no linux client?! Bugger off...
Then the world will finally see the 4000 Playstation 2's that Saddam used to build a supercomputer
I'm glad you got modded up, but it could've been "insightful" instead of "funny".
Take Xbox for example, neat little box, equiped with P3 something, and quite cheap. Put linux on that and build a relatively cheap cluster out of those. Not that far fetched, if you ask me.
Had these linux capable consoles emerged before 3D revolution the price comparison would've been even better.
And what's best, M$ takes about $50 loss for each XBox sold.
In any case, PC clusters are stepping on the toes of super computers big time. We'll probably either see super computers get cheaper or vanish slowly.
But unlike some slashdot readers, I, Damian Yerrick, can't afford a second motherboard, CPU, case, and keyboard on which to run BSD firewall software [closedbsd.org].
Therefore, I, Damian Yerrick, cannot afford to own a computer system that does not have to be rebooted.
Blah blah blah. You can get a fully functional Pentium I computer for less that what you spend going out one night. Pentium I runs any *BSD or Linux just fine and not just firewalls, you can even run a little trimmed down X (nobullshit wm, say black box, avoid huge ram hogs, etc).
Running linux is dirt cheap, for non business users _especially_ hardwarewise. I know this is redundant, but somehow people tend to forget that Linux doesn't have that high hardware requirements at all. I'm begging my Pentium 2 366MHz laptop to break so that I'd get a reason buy a new one, but as long as it works flawlessly I can't fake a reason to buy a new one because it runs linux and every app I use just fine.
While it's great that Linux has excellent multithreading support, it's a shame, however, that many programmers do not take advantage of multi-threading in their programs.
What a load of crap. There are plenty on threaded applications for linux. The problem is that all these inexperienced threads-every-fucking-where-programmers" that Java spawned fail to understand that threading is NOT the solution for everything.
Besides in unix style coding few tings are as common as forking about, which in many cases is the what people also do with java all the time. Real single memory space cloned processes (i.e. threads) have less uses than people actually think.
The worst example of this was the Quake I source code, which was used for many games, including Half-Life. The code was not multi-threaded, and the network code sat idle while everything else drew -- adding about 20ms of lag, unless you cut the frame rate down to about 15 or so.
If you'd EVER actually used threads in linux, you'd know that if there are busy threads you would still get to run atmost once in 20ms and even more likely far less seldom.
It's easy to try out even. Write a code that preforms usleep(1) or sched_yields() every now and then and checks how long that takes. Especially try out the case by putting few totally separate processes in the back ground doing while(1); loops. There's your 20ms and way more...
When quake 1 was written the 20 ms lag was concidered NOTHING. At that time online gaming was limited to mainly xpilot and muds. It started the boots and naturally the demands changed, too. THUS ID wrote the Quake World client which was quite different.
Besides a brutal fact always is that single thread process can be made faster than _ANY_ multithreaded approach, although it's often quite difficult. Moreover, threading is never chosen as an approach due to performance, but rather because it simplifies the structure in some cases.
Given the amount of optimization already present in Quake 1, I feel quite safe saying that lack of threads in Dos had jack to do with Quake 1 being single threaded.
And according to this [googlefight.com] VI is more popular than sex, proving that the computer is the geek's tool.
Close, but not quite. You should've said "because of the computer the geek has no use for his tool".
It is relatively well known the Linus has essentially modified the terms of the GPL under which the kernel is distributed w.r.t. loadable modules to allow exactly this functionality. You write a closed source driver for your odd exceeding proprietary hardware, make it a loadable module (not compiled in) and your driver does not have to be released under GPL. As soon as you distribute a version with the module compiled in "all your IP are ours", but as long as you dynamically load it your ok.
I must add to this that, although there are certain reasons as to why write a closed source driver in the first place, it will not be an easy road.
NONE of the kernel developers will be able (or even willing) to assist you, because you're dealing with closed source module that will taint the kernel. They cannot help you because they simply cannot see what your driver does, i.e. see the source code.
In NVidia's case, this have gone tolerably, although many developers aren't happy with their closed source release, but I guess there are some neat tricks they don't want to share with ATI and others. In any case, they've put a lot of effort into it being bugfree, but it wasn't always so. Kernel crashes with non GPL modules loaded will go totally disregarded in the linux developement community.
Bottom line: that stuff about the floating point error in the PAC-2 system looks neat on paper but it's not at all clear that the faulty calculation was responsible for the loss of life.
Dead on! There's been loads of evidence that NONE of the patriots EVER hit a signle scud. Luckily the scuds had problems of their own with some wing design when going neg-G or something,
I can't remember what it was, but anyway quite often they just simply blew up when decending towards a target.
Even I remember Bush the elder boasting (numbers may be inaccurate, but gap was 1) "37 missiles engaged, 36 intercepted". Naturally that raised a few questions about what was this "intercepted" as none of the Patriots ever hit a scud. And...
I saw this rather hillarious documentary about
all this Patriot fuzz where some US general telling in court what they ment with "intercepted". He said that "intercepted" meant only that at SOME point the patriot's flight path / trajectory crosses that of the scud's.
This is absolutely correct. To reply to all the other posters on this thread: time is a very important part of all competitive chess. There are strict rules about the chess clock and its use. International chess specifies 2 hours for the first 40 moves and then another two hours to reach move 60, for example (IIRC). Losing on time is a very common occurrence - especially on the Internet servers. Nothing like a quick game of 2 minutes blitz to make you appreciate time to think :)
So true, I have played loads of 5 min quickie games and it's way too often so that the guy with less time has the advantage in the game. Naturally so, because he's used more time, thought more. We have a saying about this "if I had just a little more time and if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle".
Companies should bring games to all three markets in a timely fashion. Too many games never make it to certain markets, mod chips actually increase sales of those games for the market it was released in. Plenty of games get brought to NA with awful voice acting in place of the great Japanese.
Yeah, who ever told them "If you'll delay it, they'll wait." Because I for one won't. When a europe release dates are delayed, but the game's already released in US, it's not that difficult a choice to make wether to download it from the net or not.
Same goes for ID with their q3 linux release. Morons released it more than a month later than the windows version and had the nerves to complain how poorly it had sold.
And with regional DVDs... you would think they'd learn but now. Why should I care though, they're just shooting their own feet.
Careful what you wish for... following is a list of Q and A from the Leisure Suit Larry I Quiz.
..." home of the Mets.
You're missing few questions. I distinctly recall a question "East coast is
You're also missing the fact that most, if not all, questions had TWO correct answers.
If these folks were real coders instead of marketroids trying to jump into the Linux bandwagon, they'd know that the LSB acronym is already taken. Sorry folks but LSB will always mean "Least Significant Bit".
Son, when you grow older and learn a little more and perhaps one day some people will also concider you a coder, you will realize that _MOST_ of the TLA (three letter acronyms) are already taken and even by several separate things.
Especially if you ever start to work on lower level protocols and telecommunications layers.
And geez, Alan Cox? If "real coder" was a honorary title given to only one person on this planet at a time, it'd be him, trust me.
Sadly the late 90ees thrill for four letter acronyms didn't catch more wind.
Members of the kernel development community don't seem to agree that the development kernel will function on IDE drives without destroying them...
Maybe instead of bloating the featureset, they should be working on getting the I/O working?
I/O? Are you seriously complaining that the IO thruput is lacking? I'm guessing you're talking about the interactive feel.
So and so, but I bet you don't even run 2.5.X. Granted the 2.4 imho is still interactively crap. It's been ever since the vm "improvement" starting with 2.4.10-preX and how last fall those fscking db-benchmarkers showed up on lkml. I bet they got their 1% improvements for their db and on the same they bollocksed my developement desktop usability to a level it felt like win95. Atleast I learned a lot more about the vm and scheduling internals and loads of neat tricks how to improve latency (e.g. more memory and no, Hz up, neg-nicing X, nicing back ground stuff, A.Morton's low latency and lock breaking patches.)
BUT I must say that the 2.5 is a step forward from 2.4 also in this manner. I've been running 2.5s all along and these late 2.5.30s, especially 2.5.39, have been goodish. Not the kind of interactivity as there should be, still.
Although I'm still seriously pissed off how all the main developers seemed to disregard all the cries about interactivity last fall and winter on lkml. There SHOULD be a proc or even a compile time possibility to tweak it into serverish/db or desktop usage. On a desktop developement you couldn't care less if your compile or what ever the fsck you're doing on the back ground takes 5% longer, but if what ever you're actually interacting with lags like hell, it annoys the living crap out of you. I mean, if I press the button while I'm compiling, obviously that button press is more important ffs.
actually find some microbes or virii from Venus, Mars, hell even from Ganymede. That'd finally put a full stop to all those religious morons that are so full of "we're the centre of the universe". Just by showing that there's _a_ life form outside earth would remove a huge barrier from all those debates and we could concentrate on more interesting topics.
You're either "FOR copyright facism" or "AGAINST censorship." I think I'll choose against censorship.
I don't know who modded you up, but they sure didn't see the trolling or the stupidity involved here.
Alloving some rental companies alter the contents has jack to do with censorship. You are not forced to be their customer, and I'm_QUITE certain that there will also be rental companies that will rent the films untampered.
In screen shot 4 theres a resolution switcher ala windows where the hell has this been for the other distros?
CTRL-ALT-KP_MINUS and CTRL-ALT-KP_PLUS ?
Been around in X for quite some time.
Or am I missing something?
There are systems where we simply don't and won't have enough disk
space and where speed is not of the essence. We have them now, and we
will continue to have them in the future.
As someone who has used compression filesystems with Amiga floppy and hardrives, I can tell you exactly why there isn't much interest in them in the Linux community. They are basically a pain-in-the-ass, that's why.
As someone who has used ext2 compression on linux systems, I can tell you things have changed since Amiga times and it's compressed filesystems.
e2compress is really sweet, easy to mark singular files or directories to be compressed, 4 different compression algorithms can all be used on same ext2 partitions alongside with uncompressed files/directories. It really is sweet, especially if you're in need of it, like with a 64Mb flash chipped embedded pc.
There are systems where we simply don't and won't have enough disk space and where speed is not of the essence. We have them now, and we will continue to have them in the future.
Being a linux developer for embedded production boxes and given the current increasing interest over linux in embedded along with embedded boxes typically running _WITHOUT_ hard disks (mostly just flash chips of some sort, due to their better life-time), I cannot help wondering why the kernel mailing list shows little or no interest towards ext2 (or ext3) compression.
JFFS and JFFS2 don't come into question in most cases as they tear through the fs layers and cannot be used with IDE flash chips for example.
Alcatel even released it two weeks ago for 2.4.17... loads of people, like me, must have ported it to 2.4.19 by now. But to get ext2 compression to 2.5.XX, forget it... but why?
This little like the lack interest towards under clocking, eventhough once you've overclocked your main computer to the max, you will start looking for more silent option, if not for the desktop computer, but for the closet firewall. Even if you don't have the interest now, you will, once you shack in with a gal.
Another evil plan with a big red Self Destruct button: one of the supported remote instructions for the network is "run a command" (0x24). All you have to do is find an entry point and command it to killall -9 .bugtraq and the command will propagate through the network, killing itself. Doesn't keep it from regenerating on the original https vulnerability vector, but we could perhaps slow down the DDoS attacks.
Propagate? What did I miss here? killall -9 will kill surely kill the process on the target machine, but how could it't propagate, because -9 (SIGKILL) makes sure your process will _not_ execute another single instruction. That will not propagate through the network unless there's another hidden watchdog process that sends out selfdestruct commands to other instances over the network.
Who modded that up?