This is old news, I remember seeing a thing like this three or four years ago.
To answer your question, no, cows generally do not get rowdy in the machine, as it is in their best interest to get milked, as they experiment the breast-equivalent of blue balls.
Another cool feature is that if one cow is quarantined (for instance, giving antibiotics means that you cannot use the milk for a week), it will still be allowed in the machine, still milked (otherwise it will get blue balls), but the milk will just be discarded based on the ID on its collar.
The overall result is happier, healthier cows, and greater yield, compared to standard twice-a-day milkings.
Re:I feel stupid but...
on
How Tomcat Works
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
...or it can be configured to stand behind a web server such as Apache and only handle the servlet and JSP requests that are passed to it.
Ehrm, technically, yes. But I'll be damned if I could get the thing to be stable when I tried to set it up.
See, at my (brand spanking new) dorm, we needed a homepage. So this dude volunteers to make one, and is sent off with the words "It must work on a standard Linux/*BSD platform. No proprietary crap, please."
A week later, he shows us this impressive thing running on his laptop. Only problem is, it runs under Tomcat. So I try my very best to get this thing running on our FreeBSD box, before abandoning it, and just have someone build it with PHP instead.
Lessons learned working with Tomcat:
Documentation and support is near non-existant.
The thing is slow as molasses.
It crashes for no reason, even while not under load.
It might very well be that I am completely incompetent, but for the most parts, I have succeeded in getting stuff up and running once I set my mind to it. But this piece of software does not exactly have my warmest recommendations.
Just one mans experience. You mileage probably varies quite a bit.
Not really answering your question, but there is a thing called MPI (Message Passing Interface) which is a cross-platform standard for parallelized programs. You write your program, and it will run on your Beowolf or that massive 24-way Sun, or even locally on you linux box, if written properly. Of course this will always be slower, in the single CPU case, compared code written the old-fashioned way.
Another very important thing to remember is power consumption and cooling. You might be able to get fifty PII's for free, but powering them, cooling them and maintaining them is not free. Our teeny cluster, consisting of 6 PII-350 nodes, one PIII-450 master and a Cisco switch cost my university $200 to run for a month, and that is not counting cooling. Adjust for power costs in your part of the globe, but still damn expensive for, what in effect, was a ~1200 MHz machine.
I will start by admitting that I am just a dumb university student talking out my ass. I have never set up an enterprise scale cluster.
However, last january we set up a small (six node) cluster with the help of CLIC. Once we realized the link between a Mandrake and consective dead CD drives, we installed the cluster in little time.
CLIC might focus a little too much on userfriendlyness and a little too little on flexibility, but for our purposes it was great. It sports ganglia, gexec, distcc and MPI (and probably more), and administration and deployment of nodes is a breeze.
I heartily recommend CLIC for student/test/proof-of-concept projects.
He should have gone for dual CPU's instead, two comments above my threshold, and slashdotted to pulp.
Anyhoo, I've had dual monitors under linux (KDE) for about six months now. This was with a Matrox G400 dual and two 19" Samsung 900NF CRT's.
The good things: -plenty of space. Hardly ever used virtual desktops anymore. -great when coding, writing in LaTeX, or anything else that has one window editing some source, and another compiling it.
The bad things: -everything broke. All the time. KDE seemed to acknowledge that a window that was miximized should not expand over two full screens, but after an upgrade, that went out the window. -mplayer, a long time favourite of mine, did not play well. It refused to play on one monitor (but it always started there), fullscreen just turned one monitor blank. -Having just upgraded XFree86, it broke something. Back to one monitor untill I get four hours to muck with XF86Config again. -Takes up a boatload of desk space (I know, TFT's would help, but I don't have $1500 to blow on a set of them.) Same goes for heat and electricity, although I don't pay (directly) for that.
OK, one might get better results with two video cards (Why, oh why, did I give away 3 (three) Millenium II's with 4mb RAM?), ironically.
Amen Brother. Having just completed a 2½ week roadtrip in California, it never took us any longer than 20 minutes to locate unencrypted WiFi internet access, no matter the town. The option of good security is great, but don't expect the sheeple to start thinking just because of that.
The point of the Kensington lock is not so much to secure the laptop to something as to ruin the resale value of it by virtue of the damage likely to occur to the laptop if the lock is forcibly removed.
Good point, that never really occured to me before.
If you ever get the chance to take apart a trashed laptop, try to look at how well the kensington slot is build into the chassis. I've done it on a stolen-then-recovered HP OmniBook, And I was surprised over how much of the laptop you had to break down, in order to get the lock tap out.
The most impressive part of the Sunrays is definitely that they don't feel like thin clients. Things zap around like as if you were on a local computer
You have obviously never been to the Technical University of Denmark, or the CS Department of Copenhagen University.
Those places, especially DTU, almost soil them selves from the sheer joy of deploying hundreds of SunRay thin clients. Problem is, people want their browser, their java apps, their animated gifs and (shudder) their Xitrix Windows sessions.
End result is a very thin client like experience. When I matriculated in 2000, we had a large, bad Sun server (24CPU/24Gig IIRC). This has now been demoted to lowly X-server, and it still runs slow as mollasses.
I think SunRay is a kickass technology, I would love to have one on my desk, quiet, cold, connected to a powerful Linux server in the basement. And I would love to see them in action where there was sufficient power for a good user experience.
I totally understand the Universities that deploy them. A three man team and a bunch of cable plugging monkeys can administrate a four digit seat deployment. But the fact of the matter is that users, in my experience, tend to find other alternatives (the Windows Lab, bring their own laptops.), because the responsiveness is so low.
Well, I'm ranting, and it's pre-coffee, so it's probably coming out a little more bitter than it should. This news about SunRays being able to run off linux is good news in my world, as this will allow administrators to buy very powerful commodity hardware at a fraction of the price of Sun iron.
Up until six months ago, I was running Red Hat on my personal machine, and we are stille running Red Hat on our servers.
Now I run Gentoo on my workstation. I like the nerdiness factor, and package upgrading is super easy. Also, no full reinstalls every year, just emerge world and I'm happy.
On the server side we also got a little tired of the constant upgrade hell, and when Red Hat chose to EOL the standard 8/9 line, we decided to switch to Debian. In is in progress now, and I've been running it on my personal server for about three months, and I am very happy with it.
For me and my friends, easy, available upgrades that we can count on keep coming for years is really what is important.
Ctrl+N to open a new window. IE starts to re-load the contents of the previous window. I start typing a new URL. IE finishes loading the page and inserts the old URL in the middle of my typing.
Exactly my pet peeves with MSIE. Why, oh why, must you reload the *exact same page* when I open a new window? Wouldn't the logical path be that I wanted *to look at a different web page*?!? The only explanation I can see is if you want to fork out in your browsing, say follow a link to the slashdot comments and read the article in a different window, but isn't that what right-click -> open-in-new-window is for?
Also, the thing about focusing the cursor, if I access my webmail, I often start typing before the page is fully loaded. I type my username, hit tab, and start typing my password. In the middle of my password, IE decides to focus the cursor at the start of the login field, and I type half my password in clear view. Argh!
Perhaps this is another form of secrecy - the number of pages indexed never seems to go up, except in huge jumps. According to archive.org, it's been stuck on 4,285,199,774 pages for about a year now:/
Anyone notice 4,285,199,774 just so happens to be ~99.8% of 2^32? Is this a 32bit counter about to overflow?
Arggggh! Not this article while I'm trying to get clean. Going cold turkey, 44 hours and counting. No coffee, no soda, only juice, milk and water. Arrrggh! Must resist temptation to ingest sweet, sweet caffeine.
Seriously, caffeine withdrawal is no fun. I had a serious headache last night, something that happens very rarely for me. Getting better though.
I don't know how wide spread this is outside Europe, but take cellphones for example.
They used to be just plain black og grey. You could switch between a couple of ringing tones, and the networks had the ability to change the logo on the screen, in order to tell you what network you were currently using.
OK, in under a year, a whole industry blossomed. Personalized covers in all kinds of colors, services where you could download new background images, new ringing tones. Now, they have as many different cell phones as there are cars offered. You choose your cellphone like you choose your car; of course it has to meet your needs and not exceed your financial capabilities, but you use it to define yourself, just like the clothes you wear, and how you decorate your home.
So don't give me the "users don't want to personalize". They might be scared of doing it, but if it was simple, then they would.
OK, remember the dude who put a couple dozen LED's on a spinning arm (think windmill) and triggered them at just the right time, so when the arm span, he'd have graphics or text or whatever in mid-air.
Place all 120 of them on an arm, but spin it around its own length (think driveshaft) in the middle of a room. If you were able to control them individually (even though they were spinning) you could have whatever graphics you wanted on the walls.
Fire requires three things, temperature, oxygen and material that can burn. Take away any one of those, and there can be no fire. When you blow cool air at a sufficiently high rate at a fire, the flames die down, creating a path for the firemen to enter and engage the fire.
Anyone whose ever tried kickstarting a campfire by waving something planar as fast as possible know how this works.
In late 2002 I got three used IBM laptops from work. These had been bought in 98-99. One of them missed a little plastic cover in front of the harddrive. Being a geek, I looked up the FRU-number (Faulty Replacement Unit), and called our hardware pusher for a quote. He called back the next day. I don't remember the exact price, but I do remember it was more than $200 plus tax. I laughed a little, thanked him for his time, and went on to sell the laptop without the cover.
Hey, this is interesting. I always press Left Ctrl- Left Alt - Delete-between-Enter-and-End, as in the one above the upside down T arrows. Maybe this is a new poll?
Since you're not mentioning what kind of Solaris boxes you're looking at, and what they should be able to do, this might not be the right direction, but have you looked at the SunRay thin client offerings from Sun?
We have a boatload (600+) of them at our school.
Good Things:
Terminals are cheap (less than $400 a piece).
Easy to administrate.
Homogenous all over campus.
Flashy smartcard so you can bring your session anywhere.
Bad Things:
Crappy, crappy CDE windowmanager. Yes, you can have Gnome, but apperently our admins haven't discovered that yet.
SLOW under load. We're talking a full half second response time in matlab here, folks.
Nowhere to stick CD's/floppys (but who needs those anyway?).
People don't like them after a while, and thinks that everything UNIX is equally bad.
Slashdot Mirror
This is old news, I remember seeing a thing like this three or four years ago.
To answer your question, no, cows generally do not get rowdy in the machine, as it is in their best interest to get milked, as they experiment the breast-equivalent of blue balls.
Another cool feature is that if one cow is quarantined (for instance, giving antibiotics means that you cannot use the milk for a week), it will still be allowed in the machine, still milked (otherwise it will get blue balls), but the milk will just be discarded based on the ID on its collar.
The overall result is happier, healthier cows, and greater yield, compared to standard twice-a-day milkings.
Ehrm, technically, yes. But I'll be damned if I could get the thing to be stable when I tried to set it up.
See, at my (brand spanking new) dorm, we needed a homepage. So this dude volunteers to make one, and is sent off with the words "It must work on a standard Linux/*BSD platform. No proprietary crap, please." A week later, he shows us this impressive thing running on his laptop. Only problem is, it runs under Tomcat. So I try my very best to get this thing running on our FreeBSD box, before abandoning it, and just have someone build it with PHP instead. Lessons learned working with Tomcat:
- Documentation and support is near non-existant.
- The thing is slow as molasses.
- It crashes for no reason, even while not under load.
It might very well be that I am completely incompetent, but for the most parts, I have succeeded in getting stuff up and running once I set my mind to it. But this piece of software does not exactly have my warmest recommendations.Just one mans experience. You mileage probably varies quite a bit.
Not really answering your question, but there is a thing called MPI (Message Passing Interface) which is a cross-platform standard for parallelized programs. You write your program, and it will run on your Beowolf or that massive 24-way Sun, or even locally on you linux box, if written properly. Of course this will always be slower, in the single CPU case, compared code written the old-fashioned way.
Another very important thing to remember is power consumption and cooling. You might be able to get fifty PII's for free, but powering them, cooling them and maintaining them is not free. Our teeny cluster, consisting of 6 PII-350 nodes, one PIII-450 master and a Cisco switch cost my university $200 to run for a month, and that is not counting cooling. Adjust for power costs in your part of the globe, but still damn expensive for, what in effect, was a ~1200 MHz machine.
I will start by admitting that I am just a dumb university student talking out my ass. I have never set up an enterprise scale cluster.
However, last january we set up a small (six node) cluster with the help of CLIC. Once we realized the link between a Mandrake and consective dead CD drives, we installed the cluster in little time.
CLIC might focus a little too much on userfriendlyness and a little too little on flexibility, but for our purposes it was great. It sports ganglia, gexec, distcc and MPI (and probably more), and administration and deployment of nodes is a breeze.
I heartily recommend CLIC for student/test/proof-of-concept projects.
He should have gone for dual CPU's instead, two comments above my threshold, and slashdotted to pulp.
Anyhoo, I've had dual monitors under linux (KDE) for about six months now. This was with a Matrox G400 dual and two 19" Samsung 900NF CRT's.
The good things:
-plenty of space. Hardly ever used virtual desktops anymore.
-great when coding, writing in LaTeX, or anything else that has one window editing some source, and another compiling it.
The bad things:
-everything broke. All the time. KDE seemed to acknowledge that a window that was miximized should not expand over two full screens, but after an upgrade, that went out the window.
-mplayer, a long time favourite of mine, did not play well. It refused to play on one monitor (but it always started there), fullscreen just turned one monitor blank.
-Having just upgraded XFree86, it broke something. Back to one monitor untill I get four hours to muck with XF86Config again.
-Takes up a boatload of desk space (I know, TFT's would help, but I don't have $1500 to blow on a set of them.) Same goes for heat and electricity, although I don't pay (directly) for that.
OK, one might get better results with two video cards (Why, oh why, did I give away 3 (three) Millenium II's with 4mb RAM?), ironically.
Bo
Amen Brother. Having just completed a 2½ week roadtrip in California, it never took us any longer than 20 minutes to locate unencrypted WiFi internet access, no matter the town. The option of good security is great, but don't expect the sheeple to start thinking just because of that.
The point of the Kensington lock is not so much to secure the laptop to something as to ruin the resale value of it by virtue of the damage likely to occur to the laptop if the lock is forcibly removed.
Good point, that never really occured to me before.
If you ever get the chance to take apart a trashed laptop, try to look at how well the kensington slot is build into the chassis. I've done it on a stolen-then-recovered HP OmniBook, And I was surprised over how much of the laptop you had to break down, in order to get the lock tap out.
The most impressive part of the Sunrays is definitely that they don't feel like thin clients. Things zap around like as if you were on a local computer
You have obviously never been to the Technical University of Denmark, or the CS Department of Copenhagen University.
Those places, especially DTU, almost soil them selves from the sheer joy of deploying hundreds of SunRay thin clients. Problem is, people want their browser, their java apps, their animated gifs and (shudder) their Xitrix Windows sessions.
End result is a very thin client like experience. When I matriculated in 2000, we had a large, bad Sun server (24CPU/24Gig IIRC). This has now been demoted to lowly X-server, and it still runs slow as mollasses.
I think SunRay is a kickass technology, I would love to have one on my desk, quiet, cold, connected to a powerful Linux server in the basement. And I would love to see them in action where there was sufficient power for a good user experience.
I totally understand the Universities that deploy them. A three man team and a bunch of cable plugging monkeys can administrate a four digit seat deployment. But the fact of the matter is that users, in my experience, tend to find other alternatives (the Windows Lab, bring their own laptops.), because the responsiveness is so low.
Well, I'm ranting, and it's pre-coffee, so it's probably coming out a little more bitter than it should. This news about SunRays being able to run off linux is good news in my world, as this will allow administrators to buy very powerful commodity hardware at a fraction of the price of Sun iron.
And while we're at it:
"Memory is like orgasms, it's a lot better when you don't have to fake it."
--Seymour Cray on virtual memory
Isn't the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant parking lot next door neighbours to The Simpson House?
Up until six months ago, I was running Red Hat on my personal machine, and we are stille running Red Hat on our servers.
Now I run Gentoo on my workstation. I like the nerdiness factor, and package upgrading is super easy. Also, no full reinstalls every year, just emerge world and I'm happy.
On the server side we also got a little tired of the constant upgrade hell, and when Red Hat chose to EOL the standard 8/9 line, we decided to switch to Debian. In is in progress now, and I've been running it on my personal server for about three months, and I am very happy with it.
For me and my friends, easy, available upgrades that we can count on keep coming for years is really what is important.
Ctrl+N to open a new window. IE starts to re-load the contents of the previous window. I start typing a new URL. IE finishes loading the page and inserts the old URL in the middle of my typing.
Exactly my pet peeves with MSIE. Why, oh why, must you reload the *exact same page* when I open a new window? Wouldn't the logical path be that I wanted *to look at a different web page*?!? The only explanation I can see is if you want to fork out in your browsing, say follow a link to the slashdot comments and read the article in a different window, but isn't that what right-click -> open-in-new-window is for?
Also, the thing about focusing the cursor, if I access my webmail, I often start typing before the page is fully loaded. I type my username, hit tab, and start typing my password. In the middle of my password, IE decides to focus the cursor at the start of the login field, and I type half my password in clear view. Argh!
Perhaps this is another form of secrecy - the number of pages indexed never seems to go up, except in huge jumps. According to archive.org, it's been stuck on 4,285,199,774 pages for about a year now :/
Anyone notice 4,285,199,774 just so happens to be ~99.8% of 2^32? Is this a 32bit counter about to overflow?
Arggggh! Not this article while I'm trying to get clean. Going cold turkey, 44 hours and counting. No coffee, no soda, only juice, milk and water. Arrrggh! Must resist temptation to ingest sweet, sweet caffeine.
Seriously, caffeine withdrawal is no fun. I had a serious headache last night, something that happens very rarely for me. Getting better though.
People want to personalize.
I don't know how wide spread this is outside Europe, but take cellphones for example.
They used to be just plain black og grey. You could switch between a couple of ringing tones, and the networks had the ability to change the logo on the screen, in order to tell you what network you were currently using.
OK, in under a year, a whole industry blossomed. Personalized covers in all kinds of colors, services where you could download new background images, new ringing tones. Now, they have as many different cell phones as there are cars offered. You choose your cellphone like you choose your car; of course it has to meet your needs and not exceed your financial capabilities, but you use it to define yourself, just like the clothes you wear, and how you decorate your home.
So don't give me the "users don't want to personalize". They might be scared of doing it, but if it was simple, then they would.
...at first, I read it as "Nokia takes control of Sybian"...
It's Hejlsberg, and it's pronounced more like "heil-s-bear", heil as in "sieg heil" or "tile".
I should know, as we come from the same country.
Make sure to also check out finnish company Ekahau for 802.11* positioning.
Easily the best movie I have seen in theatres this year. Can wait for the sequel.
Would like to see Bubba Ho-Tep, but since it's an indy film, I'm going to have a hard time finding it here in my shitty country.
Bo
OK, remember the dude who put a couple dozen LED's on a spinning arm (think windmill) and triggered them at just the right time, so when the arm span, he'd have graphics or text or whatever in mid-air.
Place all 120 of them on an arm, but spin it around its own length (think driveshaft) in the middle of a room. If you were able to control them individually (even though they were spinning) you could have whatever graphics you wanted on the walls.
The same reason you can blow out a candle...
Fire requires three things, temperature, oxygen and material that can burn. Take away any one of those, and there can be no fire. When you blow cool air at a sufficiently high rate at a fire, the flames die down, creating a path for the firemen to enter and engage the fire.
Anyone whose ever tried kickstarting a campfire by waving something planar as fast as possible know how this works.
...What does the title mean? I might be getting the "Ho" part, but that's about it.
In late 2002 I got three used IBM laptops from work. These had been bought in 98-99. One of them missed a little plastic cover in front of the harddrive. Being a geek, I looked up the FRU-number (Faulty Replacement Unit), and called our hardware pusher for a quote. He called back the next day. I don't remember the exact price, but I do remember it was more than $200 plus tax. I laughed a little, thanked him for his time, and went on to sell the laptop without the cover.
Hey, this is interesting. I always press Left Ctrl- Left Alt - Delete-between-Enter-and-End, as in the one above the upside down T arrows. Maybe this is a new poll?
We have a boatload (600+) of them at our school.
Good Things:
- Terminals are cheap (less than $400 a piece).
- Easy to administrate.
- Homogenous all over campus.
- Flashy smartcard so you can bring your session anywhere.
Bad Things:- Crappy, crappy CDE windowmanager. Yes, you can have Gnome, but apperently our admins haven't discovered that yet.
- SLOW under load. We're talking a full half second response time in matlab here, folks.
- Nowhere to stick CD's/floppys (but who needs those anyway?).
- People don't like them after a while, and thinks that everything UNIX is equally bad.
Bo