My university (I graduated in Physics in 1993) had no mandatory programming courses in the Physics curriculum, but offered Physics undergrads courses in:
BASIC (I didn't take this course as I already knew BASIC)
FORTRAN (Some bunch of yawn assignments; this course was run by the CS department)
Measurement and control (build a PID controller in software using Turbo C)
C++ (3D graphics in Turbo C++)
mc68000 assembly (3D graphics on an Atari ST)
computer hardware (design and build your own 68008 system; write the ROM too)
computational physics (gravitational collapse of a 10000 star globular cluster)
Those are roughly in chronological order, I think.
Very unlikely. I use a Linn LP12 turntable. I don't think a turntable with built-in USB or build-in CD-R has yet been made to equal an LP12 in terms of quality. This is also the reason why my earlier comment indicated that I was considiering USB-capable sound hardware; because the unit is away from the PC, the electrical noise produced by the PC is less of a problem (or could be, with the right hardware).
I've owned Creative sound cards for years. The only non-Creative sound card I bought was an Aztech sound Galaxy, some years ago; annoyingly it kept losing its config settings over a reboot. It's reasonably easy to verify that the Creative card you're going to buy works on Linux (I've never used Creative's drivers since every PC I've ever owned has run Linux). At the moment I'm using a Creative Labs SB Audigy. However, the machine it's in needs an upgrade (it only has 1GB of RAM, and I want to run virtualised instances of *BSD and other Unixes to make porting software easier).
What sound hardware should I buy for the new machine? My needs are fairly pedestrian apart from the fact that I would like to do high-quality LP transcription occasionally. I will probably also buy a very quiet machine as the upgrade in order to use it as a media PC (and hence need 7.1 support). Since audiophile audio quality and 7.1 are probably more or less incompatible I'm happy to buy two sound cards for the two different purposes, but which to buy?
I've been considering the M-Audio FastTrack Pro (the idea being that I use the device itself for the LP transcription and export SPDIF to an AV amp for the surround stuff). I've heard good things about M-Audio kit. However, it appears not to work with ALSA (yet, at least). What are my other choices?
You indicate that you're looking for elite staff and are complaining that the number you're finding is very low. That's the very definition of elite. The elite are by definition in a tiny minority.
I disagree with this and face this question all the time in work. Disks are cheap, storage systems aren't. If this is for a business that requires reasonable uptime, then the only solution would be to implement a SAN using Fibre Channel or iSCSI and then take out the drives.
Maybe the reason you face this question at work all the time is because you're too dogmatic. There are manifestly other ways of dong this that aren't anything like the "only solution" you mention.
Anyone with a true gift to become a kernel dev has probably engaged in flame wars with his/her professors already, regardless of what she/he teaches.
Piffle. You are equating software engineering talent with a propensity to participate in shouting (or its equivalent) matches. Those things are, to say the least, incommensurate.
If you aren't rigorously checking preconditions on *every* operation you perform, you're not going to cut it as a kernel dev anyway.
I disagree. Once a precondition has been checked once (on entry to whatever subsystem we're talking about) there is no need to re-check it all the time. Especially if it's an invariant of the algorithm. Sometimes such precondition re-checking gives rise to bugs anyway, since the negative arm of the conditional may contain code with a bug in it (though obviously using an assert macro will prevent that) - error cases get poor test coverage so such bugs may persist for a long time, too.
... of an SF book I read a few years ago, where all programs were written by a process of digging into 10,000 years' worth of computer programs in a sort of archaeological way, pulling out something that did more or less what you want and amalgamating it with what you had so far. I thought at first that it was a Vernor Vinge book, but checking the plot summaries on wikipedia, it looks like it was somebody else. Can anybody remember the book I'm thinking of?
I think you have hit the nail on the head there. I'd bet that the technology under consideration is Microsoft's fonts (or perhaps the mechanism for using the associated rendering hints).
If the NSA really is so good that they can outdo the entire rest of the crypto community, well then they can probably break pretty much any of the cryptosystems out there.
Actually I think you're right, but to play Devil's Advocate for a moment, I will note that the UK government agency GCHQ developed a public-key cryptosystem between
1969 and 1973, significantly before Diffie and Hellman's (apparently) ground-breaking paper. So, government agencies are quite capable of beating the public state of the art and not telling anyone about it.
While I'm not sure if it is true in this case, you still sometimes see vendors rounding sizes up, for example selling a 287 x 10^9 byte drive as 300GB.
Actually the EU already protects Wine. Reverse engineering products for the purpose of interoperability is a protected activity in the EU. But don't take my word for it, read PJ's article on reverse engineering at LWN.
If Microsoft had to offer the same price to tiny reseller outfits who sell in small volume but sell expensive stuff (e.g. because they add lots of value by shipping special-purpose systems), then that price will need to be quite high; if you ship only 50 units per year but still have support needs, the cost of supporting you and keeping you informed about products etc. is quite high.
The high-volume box-shifters often operate on such low margins that they couldn't tolerate this. Forcing a certain behaviour on retailers is also unfair. They are not Microsoft, and have not themselves been convicted of any monopolistic practice. As I understand things the principle of the OEM license is that the OEM provides first-line support. Why should Microsoft be forced to provide support for the Retail version at no extra cost? (Though perhaps I just see things this way because, using no Microsoft products, I am insensitive to the costs of getting support for Microsoft products).
Certainly your proposal has teeth. But I think Microsoft would not be the only company bitten by those teeth. Antitrust remedies are generally intended to adjust the behaviour of the miscreant, not make business difficult for everybody in the PC manufacturing industry.
MapReduce? There is hardly a paper on Google's Labs site which explains a technology less suited for the kind of high-availability server side applications that the poster is asking about!
On the basis of the information in the NW article, I can't make out what the general nature alleged fault is on the "faulty" routers. I get that some routing table size limit was exceeded. But what was the nature of the problem?
Did a manual change exceed a design limit? If so, why wasn't the manual change rejected? (If it was rejected, that's not a fauilt, it's user error)
Did an automatic change (like fail-over) applied to a valid configuration produce an invalid one? If so, did the routers report this, generate some kind of trap or alarm? If so, I guess the problem is a bit nebulous; maybe a monitoring failure, but maybe the system could have issued warnings that certain kinds of possible failover could exceed implementation limits. Hard to know without more detailed information.
Did an automatic change silently produce the wrong result (like forwarding some traffic and not other traffic) *without* generating a trap or alert? If so, I would certainly call this a fault (bug). But the article doesn't contain enough information to point conclusively in this direction.
The event is big news, so I guess NW felt they had to say *something*. But while I'm no big fan of Cisco gear, it looks to me that the explanation is as likely to be human error as equipment faults or bugs. One potential cause of problems in big routers is that the high-level software's view of the state of the routing engine gets out of sync with the actual state of the ASICs. I wonder if that happened here.
My guess is that once more details of the incident emerge it will turn into a not-news story.
I used to drink coffee made from a press, but my current employer has espresso machines in the staff kitchens, and so I started drinking espresso at home too. I haven't looked back.
I make the coffee with a Gaggia Classic Espresso machine, and grind the beans in a grinder, immediately before using them. How you use the grinder is quite important. A given type of bean needs a certain fineness of grind, which you basically need to discover by trying combinations. To get coffee of the right strength, you need to squish the coffee in the filter the right amount. Too much and the coffee is made too slowly and is too bitter. Too little and you get no crema. It takes a bit of practice to figure out whether your latest cup was ground too coarse and squished too much, or ground too fine and under-squished. I grind the beans relatively finely and tamp the grounds down in the filter holder to flatten them, without using any force.
Next to grinding to the right grade there is also choosing good beans. I've tried a number of varieties, but on the whole I prefer Illy beans. The other type I prefer is sold by a chap in the Dublin city centre market (the one in Temple Bar, next to the photography museum) on Saturdays. He roasts it himself. Unfortunately, he brings one of four varieties each week, and I can't remember which is the subset I like best. I grind the beans as needed and keep the can of as-yet unground beans in the fridge. I guess a can lasts me most of a week. I also have a can of pre-ground decaf but it tastes awful, as the pre-ground coffee goes stale so fast. Yuck. In the fridge I also have a packet of Lavazza espresso coffee, but it's only in there in case the coffee grinder ever breaks and leaves me with no other way to make coffee.
In the past I have bought vacuum-packed beans and frozen them. I wasn't that keen on the result, and think it was more because of the beans themselves than the freezing, but I'm only 75% sure of that.
Keeping the machine clean is important too. Coffee-making leaves behind a residue on the external parts of the machine (e.g. the filter plate that goes directly above the filter holder and filter). Build-up of bitter oils here can negatively affect the taste of the coffee, so cleaning it is good. The water tank needs to be cleaned roughly weekly, too. A quick job is OK for that. The instructions for the machine tell you to de-scale every 3 months, but I'm sure that every 6 is fine here (I live in Dublin, where there are not significant levels of dissolved calcium salts in the tapwater).
When I bought the machine, I gave the sales assistant a close questioning about whether the machine would yield hot water for making Americanos. She tried to tell me yes, you can adjust the steam nozzle to do this (as on my previous, faulty, Krups machine). In fact that's not practical, but I seem anyway to prefer drinking the espresso straight now.
2. I've gone through all 15 of the.c files in my FreeBSD tree, exactly 2 of them have what *may* be a non-waived clause three: kvm_arm.c, and kvm_powerpc.c. The rest of the files are either copyright the Regents, don't have clause three, or use the CMU license.
The copyright statement at the top of the file is not a reliable guideline as to who the copyright holders in the file are. You have to examine all the nontrivial modifications to the file as well. That means that even if the file has a "Regents of the University of California..." copyright header, they may be other copyright holders too, and they might not have waived the advertising clause. So that header does help a bit, but it doesn't solve the problem.
The two files are copyright Wolfgang Solfrank and TooLs GmbH. I would submit that there is probably a clause three waiver from these folks; it's just that we haven't found it yet. Also, removing the two effected files would have no effect on functionality.
Many of the smaller UK cities (Birmingham, Manchetser and Leeds, for example) have licensed hansom cabs, too. But the key thing is that they also regulate their minicabs too. It's possible to do both.
So the problem is not that London regulates its black cabs. The problem is that it doesn't regulate the minicabs.
Slashdot Mirror
- BASIC (I didn't take this course as I already knew BASIC)
- FORTRAN (Some bunch of yawn assignments; this course was run by the CS department)
- Measurement and control (build a PID controller in software using Turbo C)
- C++ (3D graphics in Turbo C++)
- mc68000 assembly (3D graphics on an Atari ST)
- computer hardware (design and build your own 68008 system; write the ROM too)
- computational physics (gravitational collapse of a 10000 star globular cluster)
Those are roughly in chronological order, I think.Reminds me of a similar experience. The one and only Pascal program I ever wrote was somebody else's electrical engineering homework :)
Very unlikely. I use a Linn LP12 turntable. I don't think a turntable with built-in USB or build-in CD-R has yet been made to equal an LP12 in terms of quality. This is also the reason why my earlier comment indicated that I was considiering USB-capable sound hardware; because the unit is away from the PC, the electrical noise produced by the PC is less of a problem (or could be, with the right hardware).
I've owned Creative sound cards for years. The only non-Creative sound card I bought was an Aztech sound Galaxy, some years ago; annoyingly it kept losing its config settings over a reboot. It's reasonably easy to verify that the Creative card you're going to buy works on Linux (I've never used Creative's drivers since every PC I've ever owned has run Linux). At the moment I'm using a Creative Labs SB Audigy. However, the machine it's in needs an upgrade (it only has 1GB of RAM, and I want to run virtualised instances of *BSD and other Unixes to make porting software easier).
What sound hardware should I buy for the new machine? My needs are fairly pedestrian apart from the fact that I would like to do high-quality LP transcription occasionally. I will probably also buy a very quiet machine as the upgrade in order to use it as a media PC (and hence need 7.1 support). Since audiophile audio quality and 7.1 are probably more or less incompatible I'm happy to buy two sound cards for the two different purposes, but which to buy?
I've been considering the M-Audio FastTrack Pro (the idea being that I use the device itself for the LP transcription and export SPDIF to an AV amp for the surround stuff). I've heard good things about M-Audio kit. However, it appears not to work with ALSA (yet, at least). What are my other choices?
You indicate that you're looking for elite staff and are complaining that the number you're finding is very low. That's the very definition of elite. The elite are by definition in a tiny minority.
... of an SF book I read a few years ago, where all programs were written by a process of digging into 10,000 years' worth of computer programs in a sort of archaeological way, pulling out something that did more or less what you want and amalgamating it with what you had so far. I thought at first that it was a Vernor Vinge book, but checking the plot summaries on wikipedia, it looks like it was somebody else. Can anybody remember the book I'm thinking of?
I forgot that TrueType wasn't actually owned by Microsoft. But it seems they own plenty of other printer-related patents.
I think you have hit the nail on the head there. I'd bet that the technology under consideration is Microsoft's fonts (or perhaps the mechanism for using the associated rendering hints).
Well, as at the end of last year, they had $11,243,914,000 in cash or equivalent per their 10K filing.
While I'm not sure if it is true in this case, you still sometimes see vendors rounding sizes up, for example selling a 287 x 10^9 byte drive as 300GB.
No, if you buy a Google appliance, the index is stored on the appliance, not on Google's servers. That's kinda the point.
So, how about that Cross-Site-Scripting then?
Actually the EU already protects Wine. Reverse engineering products for the purpose of interoperability is a protected activity in the EU. But don't take my word for it, read PJ's article on reverse engineering at LWN.
You're right. This is the same thinking that brought us OpenRCS...
I believe that your proposal is quite unfair.
If Microsoft had to offer the same price to tiny reseller outfits who sell in small volume but sell expensive stuff (e.g. because they add lots of value by shipping special-purpose systems), then that price will need to be quite high; if you ship only 50 units per year but still have support needs, the cost of supporting you and keeping you informed about products etc. is quite high.
The high-volume box-shifters often operate on such low margins that they couldn't tolerate this. Forcing a certain behaviour on retailers is also unfair. They are not Microsoft, and have not themselves been convicted of any monopolistic practice. As I understand things the principle of the OEM license is that the OEM provides first-line support. Why should Microsoft be forced to provide support for the Retail version at no extra cost? (Though perhaps I just see things this way because, using no Microsoft products, I am insensitive to the costs of getting support for Microsoft products).
Certainly your proposal has teeth. But I think Microsoft would not be the only company bitten by those teeth. Antitrust remedies are generally intended to adjust the behaviour of the miscreant, not make business difficult for everybody in the PC manufacturing industry.
MapReduce? There is hardly a paper on Google's Labs site which explains a technology less suited for the kind of high-availability server side applications that the poster is asking about!
- Did a manual change exceed a design limit? If so, why wasn't the manual change rejected? (If it was rejected, that's not a fauilt, it's user error)
- Did an automatic change (like fail-over) applied to a valid configuration produce an invalid one? If so, did the routers report this, generate some kind of trap or alarm? If so, I guess the problem is a bit nebulous; maybe a monitoring failure, but maybe the system could have issued warnings that certain kinds of possible failover could exceed implementation limits. Hard to know without more detailed information.
- Did an automatic change silently produce the wrong result (like forwarding some traffic and not other traffic) *without* generating a trap or alert? If so, I would certainly call this a fault (bug). But the article doesn't contain enough information to point conclusively in this direction.
The event is big news, so I guess NW felt they had to say *something*. But while I'm no big fan of Cisco gear, it looks to me that the explanation is as likely to be human error as equipment faults or bugs. One potential cause of problems in big routers is that the high-level software's view of the state of the routing engine gets out of sync with the actual state of the ASICs. I wonder if that happened here. My guess is that once more details of the incident emerge it will turn into a not-news story.I used to drink coffee made from a press, but my current employer has espresso machines in the staff kitchens, and so I started drinking espresso at home too. I haven't looked back.
I make the coffee with a Gaggia Classic Espresso machine, and grind the beans in a grinder, immediately before using them. How you use the grinder is quite important. A given type of bean needs a certain fineness of grind, which you basically need to discover by trying combinations. To get coffee of the right strength, you need to squish the coffee in the filter the right amount. Too much and the coffee is made too slowly and is too bitter. Too little and you get no crema. It takes a bit of practice to figure out whether your latest cup was ground too coarse and squished too much, or ground too fine and under-squished. I grind the beans relatively finely and tamp the grounds down in the filter holder to flatten them, without using any force.
Next to grinding to the right grade there is also choosing good beans. I've tried a number of varieties, but on the whole I prefer Illy beans. The other type I prefer is sold by a chap in the Dublin city centre market (the one in Temple Bar, next to the photography museum) on Saturdays. He roasts it himself. Unfortunately, he brings one of four varieties each week, and I can't remember which is the subset I like best. I grind the beans as needed and keep the can of as-yet unground beans in the fridge. I guess a can lasts me most of a week. I also have a can of pre-ground decaf but it tastes awful, as the pre-ground coffee goes stale so fast. Yuck. In the fridge I also have a packet of Lavazza espresso coffee, but it's only in there in case the coffee grinder ever breaks and leaves me with no other way to make coffee.
In the past I have bought vacuum-packed beans and frozen them. I wasn't that keen on the result, and think it was more because of the beans themselves than the freezing, but I'm only 75% sure of that.
Keeping the machine clean is important too. Coffee-making leaves behind a residue on the external parts of the machine (e.g. the filter plate that goes directly above the filter holder and filter). Build-up of bitter oils here can negatively affect the taste of the coffee, so cleaning it is good. The water tank needs to be cleaned roughly weekly, too. A quick job is OK for that. The instructions for the machine tell you to de-scale every 3 months, but I'm sure that every 6 is fine here (I live in Dublin, where there are not significant levels of dissolved calcium salts in the tapwater).
When I bought the machine, I gave the sales assistant a close questioning about whether the machine would yield hot water for making Americanos. She tried to tell me yes, you can adjust the steam nozzle to do this (as on my previous, faulty, Krups machine). In fact that's not practical, but I seem anyway to prefer drinking the espresso straight now.
The copyright statement at the top of the file is not a reliable guideline as to who the copyright holders in the file are. You have to examine all the nontrivial modifications to the file as well. That means that even if the file has a "Regents of the University of California..." copyright header, they may be other copyright holders too, and they might not have waived the advertising clause. So that header does help a bit, but it doesn't solve the problem.
ITYM "affected" not "effected".
So the problem is not that London regulates its black cabs. The problem is that it doesn't regulate the minicabs.