I went to HISD for middle school (84 or so). HISD at least used to have a brilliant magnet/vangard program (I went to TH Rogers). I now do research and teach on the college level as a physicist so hopefully those "math skills" paid off some. Somewhat ironically, i'm continually impressed by how much kids in high school learn today in contrast to what was offered back in the day. At the high school level most of us went up to calculus but it seems now that linear algebra, diff eq, and even pde is taught as separate classes on the high school level and people seem to typically take calculus at the junior level of high school. Take a look at some of the other programs that hisd offers for your kids. I am sure some of the middle school/high school level classes and schools will offer math that will be both challenging and interesting to your son. From what I recall HISD schools don't exactly follow a gaussian curve of quality, so look around and help your son out as much as you can to see if he can get into one of the better magnet programs. (This the MAIN downside of these magnet programs btw, basically hisd is putting in resources to help the "smart kids" and leaving your kid behind (assuming he is not in a magnet program))
"Research has been getting the axe for the last thirty years anyway. Look at Lucent, the sad remnant of Ma Bell's labs. They have some 3,000 employees who must strugle to support 250,000 pensioned retirees."
You see those 250K pensioned retirees were the ones that were doing the brilliant nobel prize quality work back in the day when bell labs was not a "remnant" Part of their job benefits was that the money they invested (and lucent matched) to their pension fund would come back to them after they retired. Its your attitude that is causing the new attitude, work people until they retire and *cheat* them out of their legitimately earned pension funds ala enron ala PGL. Obviously its more "economical" to not pay pension funds to the retirees but how many of those retirees who made bell labs what bell labs was before it was a "sad remnant" do you think would actually have worked there back in the day if they had an inkling they may be taken away at will?
I bought a 5000e from them about 2 years ago but it had/has tons of problems but what has always made dells worth it for me is the splurge on the 3 year *onsite* warranty. Basically it means they come to your house/work at your convienence (w/in a day or two). I have had pretty much the entire machine replaced at this point (motherboard twice, the casing inside and out etc etc). The 5000e was a compal outsource and they stopped selling it pretty quickly but i'm impressed by how quickly/diligently they replace the parts *in warranty*. I appreciate your issues (i.e. once it was out of warranty) but I think it is the dell warranty that makes the machine worth it.. i.e. they can sell me any old piece of shit but I have a $100 (at the time) 3 year guarantee that they fix it on the fly w/out any downtime.
Yea its not as if thats unprecedented either.. There are other "per eyeball" licenses. Numerical Recipes software for instance has a "single screen" license
Actually, this would be an interesting idea in general. Make an autoloader that moves frequently run programs into memory at bootup. The script would be optimized for typical desktop use;that is bootup load your favorite browser, your favorite OS shutdown. On the other hand i've noticed a lot of people dont shutdown anymore ; so if the machine has its APM working properly the point is moot..
I'm a bit surprised by this actually. One of the main reasons I switched over to C++ from C was to have a C with a #ifdeff'd compilable memory leak detector and bounds checker (this was simpler than carrying the bounds checking C around w/ me or using efence) Basically I just templated around new, delete and of course []. Anyway over time i've grown throughly addicted to some portions of stl (i.e. trust it more) and its nice for non-cpu intensive portions of code (i.e. built in hashes i.e. map is great!) But in all seriousness, C++ I've always thought was the answer to memory debuggin hell:)
I use pine.. i've used it continuously since about 94. Every 6-8 months I try and switch to a gui and end up switching back. The sticking features for pine for me are (1) command line interface. I like having my mail sshable from anywhere. Admittedly imap fixes this to some extent except I also like being able to easily grep through my mail as well. Pine autofolders everything into months and it makes a great way of saving everything and being able to quickly scan through old mail. What I would LOVE is a GUI mail program that is compatible with some version of a commandline program (like pine) so I can use GUI locally and commandline remotely. KMAIL is almost there but has its own weird quirks.. Xpine is vaguely pointless.
Hey I thought i'd give a quick review of both since I ended up installing them both on my laptop over the last week or so. The machine is a dell 5000e w/ 16 mb ati 128 vid card. The machine started off as a dual boot rh7.0 win2k machine, where 7.0 was more or less a stock up2dated run. The upgrade detected my video card fine but for some reason totally screwed up my pcmcia ports. I ended up going down to the 2.2 kernel which allowed my wireless card to work (but not the cardbus xircom for some reason) and backing things up. Taking the opportunity to wipe win2k:), i reinstalled 8.0 from scratch, everything installed perfectly including the pcmcia card (So obviously there were some configuration issues w/ old pcmcia-cs files lying around vs the kernel subsystem). However the aironet card on insertion gave all sorts of dire warnings and on ejection gave a kernel panic. (I chaulked this one off as hunting around on google i noticed that ben's drivers were to be incorporated like a month ago so maybe it missed the rh boat..?) The vaguely annoying glitch was trying to import windows fonts would cause konqueror to go into some really nasty crashes at sites like nytimes. (It would take my system down.. didn't we learn our lesson about web browsers being hooked into important things (like your entire window manager!) from err someone else? (I know its vaguely different but the practical upshot is the same..))
Right, so a week later mandrake 8.0 came out and since i had a pretty clean system I thought i'd take the opportunity to give it a whirl.. I installed reiserfs (apparantly those corruption bugs have been removed somewhere btwn 2.4.1->2.4.2 (x fingers)) , it did *not* detect my videocard/screen (luckily i had my old XF86Config-4 files lying around since the old rh7.0 actually didn't do this either so I was expecting an issue here). I have to say the mandrake packaging w/ apps the organized menu system is orders of magnitude better than anything I have ever seen (i.e. the gnome/kde/redhat menus are seperate w/ rh) . W/ regards to pcmcia I had no problems w/ either of my cards (I assume this is due to a later kernel). Some niggling issues are the windows font importer obviously doesn't work (but you can do it manually). They sometimes seem to forget to do things like link libXm.so.4 to libXm.. but the apps.. wow I didn't know half this shit existed actually.. Mandrake really is an OS that you can legitimately install for your parents and have maybe a 60% chance of them actually using it.. Issues that are probably not Mandrake issues.. just playing w/ gnome 1.4 setup I managed to get the control thingy to segfault??!? The antialiasing fonts of kde2.1.1 are *great* for web browsing however setting them will totally screw up your fixed fonts (i.e. your terminal):: i basically now use gnome terminals and kde screen to get around this... but other than that Mandrake is one amazing piece of software..
-avi
When I was an undergrad freshman/soph. year, i worked for a small molecule x-ray crystallographer (this was like 88..,89.. (postdoc now:)).. basically my job was to write a little viewer for him in err dos on an xt (It was the new an upcoming error of pc's that were going to take the ancient beasties over !) Anyway, the cool thing about working for him was that he did his data collection (the computer that sits there hooked up to the x-ray machine and collects data) w/ a pdp-8.. the input was this teletype.. the thing was this giant monster w/ huge cards and 8" floppy disks.. even at the time it was hard to get replacement parts when things went down... dec really had the educational kids secured.. they seem to still have all the physics kids w/ their alpha workstations but it really does seem like that up and coming era of pc's really took over everything including people who like burning cpu cycles for cheap..
Here in ithaca, DSL/Cablemodem's cost about 40-45 a month (maybe $5 cheaper if you get cable (at $30 a or so, or sign up for some LD plan that you don't want).. However lightlink is offering (line of sight) highspeed wireless based on the 802.11 set at $20 a month. (At least thats what they told me when i talked to them). I believe the connection speed is 2mbs up/down (depending on your antenna). The first gigabyte is free and its $7 a gig afterwards, which at $20 a month is still pretty cheap.. I haven't gotten this yet, but keep thinking about it. (These are residential rates, the business rates are much higher). Incidentally Cornell is beta testing 802.11 wireless around campus and we've managed to good sections of the campus hooked up (engineering quads some of the dorms, our coffee shop across the st:)), The linux drivers work fantastic and its awfully cool to be able to walk around campus and still access your stuff. Okay admittedly this happens once a year but it makes going to boring talks/lectures much more productive:)
I think to some extent you're right but there is really more than meets the eye. The RIAA is on the money in promoting this as "tape trading" taken on to a new level. I had stopped buying records about 2 years ago except for "variations of the same theme." Then Livecast came along and all of a sudden I could do searches for bands that I would like and get kids (or whomever) to play me their record collection (To a large extent this falls under the same scenario as what amazon does.. people who like X might also like Y) And all a sudden I (and my friends) all started getting excited about music (this was a serious phenomena). At this point we connected everything together w/ Napster (or lopster for the linux friendly:)) w/ the general pov of "wow this band is not so bad" I wonder if anything else by them doesn't suck.. and we'd do exactly what you said do the search of bands directly (obviously by passing you).. Now this led us individually to go buy records of bands we liked (just so you know significant chunks of our measley stipend goes to a.differentdrum.com now;)).. Now pretty soon we discovered a great way of finding new music is searching for bands that you like (for us it was apop bezerk,vnv,and one etc etc) and then doing a browse on that person, then (since we're on the net) clicking a few songs of each band name that we hadn't heard of.. Now this is really, really like glorified tape trading from the high school days in much the same way.. it gets people (well me anyway) excited about new bands.. Music *is* the main promotional tool and its unfortunate that artists don't realize this (many of them do to be honest) Most people are much likely to buy records/ go to a concert after they've heard a few songs and given the dismal state of radio icecase/napster are finally providing a way of getting bands heard, and I think you'll find if you just poll people that i'm not exactly a rare case.. the "browse user" trick really is a great way of finding good music that pretty much everyone uses (perhaps initially only because they've realized they've found a working connection:)) but more so as a way of finding new music.. Lets face it record reviews suck. They are basically (as far as I can tell) an investigation into the reviewers psyche, actually being able to listen to the songs on the other hand will get me to go buy the album (and albums like it en masse) and go see the band.. while ow your concert/album would have just been another negligable blip on in the back of the village voice:)
Everytime i've tried gnutella i've managed to find nothing in comparision to napster (even wrapster) i've actually tried just randomly downloading things on gnutella i.e. 60k (goatsex) files and just get timed out. I've heard it was much more usable in the summer however. The only upside of the current version of gnutella is that its highly entertaining watching the stream of searches coming in:)
Its been mentioned before but some ways of fixing the situation may include doing things like making the searches bandwidth related to filter out the modems. Perhaps a better idea would be to have an auto peer mode where high bandwidth connections become servers for a cluster of machines near them. (Gaining mojo points to take the mojo example for instance) Then clients can just search the (relatively) finite connection of high bandwidth high speed servers much like in the form of napster but the client/server analogy is a bit more fluid..
Wasn't there supposed to be a release of the
server software or specs so we could run "update agents" or whatever it was called on other servers than redhats? Perhaps we can just subscribe to our friends servers... this would also be useful for people who want to do custom patches for a field of machines.. of course apt-get works for that as well.. but then you have to have debians release cycle:)
No templates no equations no fonts? It seems that anything I want to test (like a decent equation editor) doesn't work. WP5.1's equation editor was the best *imho* so I hope this is similar. I'm actually going to buy WP9 when it comes out.. hopefully buy the whole suite rather than purchase wp8 now.
Everytime i've tried partitioning my drive i've got it wrong. For this reason I just split out /home from/. This way, if anything goes *drastically* wrong personal stuff is still there and a clean install is simple. Some of the problems *imho* are books like O'Reilly's installing linux is a bit misleading. Also, the base linux install has a lot more stuff sitting in/bin than most *nixes and has a habit of growing a bit more arbitrarily than most *nixes (where "new" stuff goes in/usr/local
So the TNT2 is a fully *hardware* implemented OpenGL right? Has anyone messed w\ the performance gains of using this card in comparision to either Mesa or a garden variety SGI?
As an aside, I was (replaying) some of my old games in parallel on the DOS/Windows side, particularly doom and x-mame. Doom's responsiveness doesn't seem so bad but the performance loss of x-mame in comparision to the DOS version is really horrendous. Enough so that I thought about comparing the two versions and seeing if the windows version (it is much slicker, supports MMX accel and much other cool stuff like menus for games etc) could be ported back to linux (using qt widget set). So my question is, is the problem X (i.e. if i had a card that implemented X 'properly' as I assume the windows driver is properly optimized) or the software (X-Mame)? Incidentally, I am running a SiS6326 Card which until recently had a kind of buggy X server, but am running X-3.3.4. (all on a amd-k2 350/64 megs ram)
Isn't the cost of chip in the design rather than fabrication? Why don't they just snag the *designs* of ibm's pwr series of chips? That stuff has got to run orders of magnitude faster than ppc chips and still remain relatively compatible. Actually speaking of which, i'm *really* surprised someone at Apple hasn't worked out that it would be great pr campaign if someone ported MacOS (w/ complete compatibility on binary apps) for one the pwrX chips.. Sure it would cost $50k to buy but they'd "win" the PC game:)
Actually I remember SIMD coding on the CM-2 ages back.. what was that thing? 8 1 bit processors per chip? or 32 one bit processors or some nonsense like that?
How good is it? Does it automatically do the security upgrades that are official from redhat's site. I remember ages ago when I used redhat some of the security stuff (putting Xwrappers or something) required a fair amount of hand installing.. i.e. it wasn't just rpm -i (or -u or whatever it was) packagename. It would be nice to have these things select particular distributions from the www.rpm.org as some of them seem more stable and properly configured than others. Also does redhat have a package listing/ftp manager yet i.e. some sort of ncurses/graphics based list of all the current packages w/ descriptions off of various ftp/http sites which we can run search/find/grep etc on and then have it automagically install that new package and its dependencies from the appropriate site? Sort of like a nicer, easier to use version of www.rpm.org (This is one of the other sooper nice features of debian that converted me over a while back. I'm not trying to start a flame war w/ debian/redhat either, i'm really curious because i'd like to switch back to redhat actually (5.1 was the last one I used) as they are doing (imho) a much better job getting releases out.
I think it'll be the same sort of tricks w/ debian.. the debian kidz seem virtually paranoid about compatibility problems and once someone finds your code useful and ports it over he/she will make sure that the.deb package (he makes and sticks in the non-free section or whatever) stays compatible w/ the debian... at that point you can add "debian" compatible to your adverts.. Note this works even if you don't want them to distribute the package for you w/ 'installer' packages.. which will do the conversion etc for you..
I had a 486/66 w/ a 6.4 gig drive.. You can buy a $30 bios ISA card (I forgot where I got mine.. but off of the net) to allow you to do this.. Watch how you add up all these numbers tho if you are buying everything separately i.e. ird controller, cheap harddrive etc etc.. computers are so dirt cheap it is much better to just buy the cheapest new computer you can find (which will be a million times faster) than start plugging things into your old machine.. (which unfortunately at the time was how I went about it)
The only thing I dont like about C is that it is difficult to get cross-platform memory debuggers.. (i.e. like efence etc..) I switched most of my C code to C++ basically still written C like and wrote templates for malloc() type routines. The bounds checking and memory leak code is #ifdeffed and shows *no* performance hit w/out the flags. (Actually the I did have to manually add all the inlines as well).. But anyway being able to do cool things w/ templates like this converted me over.. Actually the other vaguely cheesy nice thing about c++ is if you write 10 million subroutines you start losing track of their names.. but c++ cuts down on the number of gratuitous subroutine names which is nice when your code becomes too monstrous. Really you can use c++ to be c code w/ cpp on steroids tho:)
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I went to HISD for middle school (84 or so). HISD at least used to have a brilliant magnet/vangard program (I went to TH Rogers). I now do research and teach on the college level as a physicist so hopefully those "math skills" paid off some. Somewhat ironically, i'm continually impressed by how much kids in high school learn today in contrast to what was offered back in the day. At the high school level most of us went up to calculus but it seems now that linear algebra, diff eq, and even pde is taught as separate classes on the high school level and people seem to typically take calculus at the junior level of high school. Take a look at some of the other programs that hisd offers for your kids. I am sure some of the middle school/high school level classes and schools will offer math that will be both challenging and interesting to your son. From what I recall HISD schools don't exactly follow a gaussian curve of quality, so look around and help your son out as much as you can to see if he can get into one of the better magnet programs. (This the MAIN downside of
these magnet programs btw, basically hisd
is putting in resources to help the "smart kids" and leaving your kid behind (assuming he is not in a magnet program))
-avi
"Research has been getting the axe for the last thirty years anyway. Look at Lucent, the sad remnant of Ma Bell's labs. They have some 3,000 employees who must strugle to support 250,000 pensioned retirees."
You see those 250K pensioned retirees were the ones that were doing the brilliant nobel prize quality work back in the day when bell labs was not a "remnant" Part of their job benefits was that the money they invested (and lucent matched) to their pension fund would come back to them after they retired. Its your attitude that is causing the new attitude, work people until they retire and *cheat* them out of their legitimately earned pension funds ala enron ala PGL. Obviously its more "economical" to not pay pension funds to the retirees but how many of those retirees who made bell labs what bell labs was before it was a "sad remnant" do you think would actually have worked there back in the day if they had an inkling they may be taken away at will?
-avi
I bought a 5000e from them about 2 years ago
but it had/has tons of problems but what has always made dells worth it for me is the splurge on the 3 year *onsite* warranty. Basically it means they come to your house/work at your convienence (w/in a day or two). I have had pretty much the entire machine replaced at this point (motherboard twice, the casing inside and out etc etc). The 5000e was a compal outsource and they stopped selling it pretty quickly but i'm impressed by how quickly/diligently they replace the parts *in warranty*. I appreciate your issues (i.e. once it was out of warranty) but I think it is the dell warranty that makes the machine worth it.. i.e. they can sell me any old piece of shit but I have a $100 (at the time) 3 year guarantee that they fix it on the fly w/out any downtime.
-avi
Yea its not as if thats unprecedented either.. There are other "per eyeball" licenses. Numerical Recipes software for instance has a "single screen" license
Actually, this would be an interesting idea in general. Make an autoloader that moves frequently run programs into memory at bootup. The script would be optimized for typical desktop use;that is bootup load your favorite browser, your favorite OS shutdown. On the other hand i've noticed a lot of people dont shutdown anymore ; so if the machine has its APM working properly the point is moot..
I'm a bit surprised by this actually. One of the main reasons I switched over to C++ from C was to have a C with a #ifdeff'd compilable memory leak detector and bounds checker (this was simpler than carrying the bounds checking C around w/ me or using efence) Basically I just templated around new, delete and of course []. Anyway over time i've grown throughly addicted to some portions of stl (i.e. trust it more) and its nice for non-cpu intensive portions of code (i.e. built in hashes i.e. map is great!) But in all seriousness, C++ I've always thought was the answer to memory debuggin hell :)
-avi
I use pine.. i've used it continuously since about 94. Every 6-8 months I try and switch to a gui and end up switching back. The sticking features for pine for me are (1) command line interface. I like having my mail sshable from anywhere. Admittedly imap fixes this to some extent except I also like being able to easily grep through my mail as well. Pine autofolders everything into months and it makes a great way of saving everything and being able to quickly scan through old mail. What I would LOVE is a GUI mail program that is compatible with some version of a commandline program (like pine) so I can use GUI locally and commandline remotely. KMAIL is almost there but has its own weird quirks.. Xpine is vaguely pointless.
Hey I thought i'd give a quick review of both since I ended up installing them both on my laptop over the last week or so. The machine is a dell 5000e w/ 16 mb ati 128 vid card. The machine started off as a dual boot rh7.0 win2k machine, where 7.0 was more or less a stock up2dated run. The upgrade detected my video card fine but for some reason totally screwed up my pcmcia ports. I ended up going down to the 2.2 kernel which allowed my wireless card to work (but not the cardbus xircom for some reason) and backing things up. Taking the opportunity to wipe win2k :), i reinstalled 8.0 from scratch, everything installed perfectly including the pcmcia card (So obviously there were some configuration issues w/ old pcmcia-cs files lying around vs the kernel subsystem). However the aironet card on insertion gave all sorts of dire warnings and on ejection gave a kernel panic. (I chaulked this one off as hunting around on google i noticed that ben's drivers were to be incorporated like a month ago so maybe it missed the rh boat..?) The vaguely annoying glitch was trying to import windows fonts would cause konqueror to go into some really nasty crashes at sites like nytimes. (It would take my system down.. didn't we learn our lesson about web browsers being hooked into important things (like your entire window manager!) from err someone else? (I know its vaguely different but the practical upshot is the same..))
Right, so a week later mandrake 8.0 came out and since i had a pretty clean system I thought i'd take the opportunity to give it a whirl.. I installed reiserfs (apparantly those corruption bugs have been removed somewhere btwn 2.4.1->2.4.2 (x fingers)) , it did *not* detect my videocard/screen (luckily i had my old XF86Config-4 files lying around since the old rh7.0 actually didn't do this either so I was expecting an issue here). I have to say the mandrake packaging w/ apps the organized menu system is orders of magnitude better than anything I have ever seen (i.e. the gnome/kde/redhat menus are seperate w/ rh) . W/ regards to pcmcia I had no problems w/ either of my cards (I assume this is due to a later kernel). Some niggling issues are the windows font importer obviously doesn't work (but you can do it manually). They sometimes seem to forget to do things like link libXm.so.4 to libXm.. but the apps.. wow I didn't know half this shit existed actually.. Mandrake really is an OS that you can legitimately install for your parents and have maybe a 60% chance of them actually using it.. Issues that are probably not Mandrake issues.. just playing w/ gnome 1.4 setup I managed to get the control thingy to segfault??!? The antialiasing fonts of kde2.1.1 are *great* for web browsing however setting them will totally screw up your fixed fonts (i.e. your terminal) :: i basically now use gnome terminals and kde screen to get around this... but other than that Mandrake is one amazing piece of software..
-avi
When I was an undergrad freshman/soph. year, i worked for a small molecule x-ray crystallographer (this was like 88..,89.. (postdoc now
-avi
Here in ithaca, DSL/Cablemodem's cost about 40-45 a month (maybe $5 cheaper if you get cable (at $30 a or so, or sign up for some LD plan that you don't want).. However lightlink is offering (line of sight) highspeed wireless based on the 802.11 set at $20 a month. (At least thats what they told me when i talked to them). I believe the connection speed is 2mbs up/down (depending on your antenna). The first gigabyte is free and its $7 a gig afterwards, which at $20 a month is still pretty cheap .. I haven't gotten this yet, but keep thinking about it. (These are residential rates, the business rates are much higher). Incidentally Cornell is beta testing 802.11 wireless around campus and we've managed to good sections of the campus hooked up (engineering quads some of the dorms, our coffee shop across the st :)), The linux drivers work fantastic and its awfully cool to be able to walk around campus and still access your stuff. Okay admittedly this happens once a year but it makes going to boring talks/lectures much more productive :)
-avi
I think to some extent you're right but there is really more than meets the eye. The RIAA is on the money in promoting this as "tape trading" taken on to a new level. I had stopped buying records about 2 years ago except for "variations of the same theme." Then Livecast came along and all of a sudden I could do searches for bands that I would like and get kids (or whomever) to play me their record collection (To a large extent this falls under the same scenario as what amazon does .. people who like X might also like Y) And all a sudden I (and my friends) all started getting excited about music (this was a serious phenomena). At this point we connected everything together w/ Napster (or lopster for the linux friendly :)) w/ the general pov of "wow this band is not so bad" I wonder if anything else by them doesn't suck.. and we'd do exactly what you said do the search of bands directly (obviously by passing you).. Now this led us individually to go buy records of bands we liked (just so you know significant chunks of our measley stipend goes to a.differentdrum.com now ;)) .. Now pretty soon we discovered a great way of finding new music is searching for bands that you like (for us it was apop bezerk,vnv,and one etc etc) and then doing a browse on that person, then (since we're on the net) clicking a few songs of each band name that we hadn't heard of.. Now this is really, really like glorified tape trading from the high school days in much the same way.. it gets people (well me anyway) excited about new bands.. Music *is* the main promotional tool and its unfortunate that artists don't realize this (many of them do to be honest) Most people are much likely to buy records/ go to a concert after they've heard a few songs and given the dismal state of radio icecase/napster are finally providing a way of getting bands heard, and I think you'll find if you just poll people that i'm not exactly a rare case.. the "browse user" trick really is a great way of finding good music that pretty much everyone uses (perhaps initially only because they've realized they've found a working connection :)) but more so as a way of finding new music.. Lets face it record reviews suck. They are basically (as far as I can tell) an investigation into the reviewers psyche, actually being able to listen to the songs on the other hand will get me to go buy the album (and albums like it en masse) and go see the band.. while ow your concert/album would have just been another negligable blip on in the back of the village voice :)
-blooser
Everytime i've tried gnutella i've managed to find nothing in comparision to napster (even wrapster) i've actually tried just randomly downloading things on gnutella i.e. 60k (goatsex) files and just get timed out. I've heard it was much more usable in the summer however. The only upside of the current version of gnutella is that its highly entertaining watching the stream of searches coming in :)
Its been mentioned before but some ways of fixing the situation may include doing things like making the searches bandwidth related to filter out the modems. Perhaps a better idea would be to have an auto peer mode where high bandwidth connections become servers for a cluster of machines near them. (Gaining mojo points to take the mojo example for instance) Then clients can just search the (relatively) finite connection of high bandwidth high speed servers much like in the form of napster but the client/server analogy is a bit more fluid..
Wasn't there supposed to be a release of the :)
server software or specs so we could run "update agents" or whatever it was called on other servers than redhats? Perhaps we can just subscribe to our friends servers... this would also be useful for people who want to do custom patches for a field of machines.. of course apt-get works for that as well.. but then you have to have debians release cycle
Any chance these things will be on laptops in the future? I'd guess that it would do wonders for battery life (or maybe not)
-me
I live on 122nd street (manhattan) and they don't
have cablemodems here either
No templates no equations no fonts? It seems that anything I want to test (like a decent equation editor) doesn't work. WP5.1's equation editor was the best *imho* so I hope this is similar. I'm actually going to buy WP9 when it comes out.. hopefully buy the whole suite rather than purchase wp8 now.
Don't forget gnu make, which is an order of magnitude better than most makes and tar w/ the built in -z is entirely too cool
Everytime i've tried partitioning my drive i've
got it wrong. For this reason I just split out
/home from
So the TNT2 is a fully *hardware* implemented OpenGL right? Has anyone messed w\ the performance gains of using this card in comparision to either Mesa or a garden variety SGI?
As an aside, I was (replaying) some of my old games in parallel on the DOS/Windows side, particularly doom and x-mame. Doom's responsiveness doesn't seem so bad but the performance loss of x-mame in comparision to the DOS version is really horrendous. Enough so that I thought about comparing the two versions and seeing if the windows version (it is much slicker, supports MMX accel and much other cool stuff like menus for games etc) could be ported back to linux (using qt widget set). So my question is, is the problem X (i.e. if i had a card that implemented X 'properly' as I assume the windows driver is properly optimized) or the software (X-Mame)? Incidentally, I am running a SiS6326 Card which until recently had a kind of buggy X server, but am running X-3.3.4. (all on a amd-k2 350/64 megs ram)
Isn't the cost of chip in the design rather than fabrication? Why don't they just snag the *designs* of ibm's pwr series of chips? That stuff has got to run orders of magnitude faster than ppc chips and still remain relatively compatible. Actually speaking of which, i'm *really* surprised someone at Apple hasn't worked out that it would be great pr campaign if someone ported MacOS (w/ complete compatibility on binary apps) for one the pwrX chips.. Sure it would cost $50k to buy but they'd "win" the PC game :)
-avi
I hope they make LISP the first language on it
Actually I remember SIMD coding on the CM-2 ages back.. what was that thing? 8 1 bit processors per chip? or 32 one bit processors or some nonsense like that?
How good is it? Does it automatically do the security upgrades that are official from redhat's site. I remember ages ago when I used redhat some of the security stuff (putting Xwrappers or something) required a fair amount of hand installing.. i.e. it wasn't just rpm -i (or -u or whatever it was) packagename. It would be nice to have these things select particular distributions from the www.rpm.org as some of them seem more stable and properly configured than others. Also does redhat have a package listing/ftp manager yet i.e. some sort of ncurses/graphics based list of all the current packages w/ descriptions off of various ftp/http sites which we can run search/find/grep etc on and then have it automagically install that new package and its dependencies from the appropriate site? Sort of like a nicer, easier to use version of www.rpm.org (This is one of the other sooper nice features of debian that converted me over a while back. I'm not trying to start a flame war w/ debian/redhat either, i'm really curious because i'd like to switch back to redhat actually (5.1 was the last one I used) as they are doing (imho) a much better job getting releases out.
-avi
I think it'll be the same sort of tricks w/ debian.. the debian kidz seem virtually paranoid about compatibility problems and once someone finds your code useful and ports it over he/she will make sure that the .deb package (he makes and sticks in the non-free section or whatever) stays compatible w/ the debian... at that point you
can add "debian" compatible to your adverts.. Note this works even if you don't want them to distribute the package for you w/ 'installer' packages.. which will do the conversion etc for you..
-avi
I had a 486/66 w/ a 6.4 gig drive.. You can buy a $30 bios ISA card (I forgot where I got mine.. but off of the net) to allow you to do this.. Watch how you add up all these numbers tho if you are buying everything separately i.e. ird controller, cheap harddrive etc etc.. computers are so dirt cheap it is much better to just buy the cheapest new computer you can find (which will be a million times faster) than start plugging things into your old machine.. (which unfortunately at the time was how I went about it)
The only thing I dont like about C is that it is difficult to get cross-platform memory debuggers.. (i.e. like efence etc..) I switched most of my C code to C++ basically still written C like and wrote templates for malloc() type routines. The bounds checking and memory leak code is #ifdeffed and shows *no* performance hit w/out the flags. (Actually the I did have to manually add all the inlines as well).. But anyway being able to do cool things w/ templates like this converted me over.. Actually the other vaguely cheesy nice thing about c++ is if you write 10 million subroutines you start losing track of their names.. but c++ cuts down on the number :)
of gratuitous subroutine names which is nice when your code becomes too monstrous. Really you can use c++ to be c code w/ cpp on steroids tho