The Guild navigators are essential for commerce in the Dune imperium, but they've mutated into repellent, distasteful monsters, shunned by all good folk, kind of like marketing people.
$50 for a reactive vision processing system? Couple that with a cheap (or free) reliable operating system, and cheap networking that has lots of addresses (IPv6), and you could put watching devices on every street corner, heck in every house (you know, for the safety of the children!).
Well, I just had my first documentation book published (not counting inhouse software manuals), the Samba Administrator's Handbook, ISBN 0-7645-4636-8) so I thought I'd make a few comments from an author's viewpoint.
I'd really like to see the incentive model for writing free documentation. Programmers do free software for fun and fame. That's their compensation. Writing documentation, however, is not fun, and also doesn't give one any brownie points in the community. Writing documentation is just plain hard work. What's the compensation for that work?
Writing is work, boring and tedious, I spent a lot of nights writing when I'd have rather been snuggling with my honey, playing with daughter, building Lego, surfing the web or even configuring my Linux boxes.
I don't think I've gotten any brownie points in the community, though the 5 star review on Amazon was nice. I haven't gotten any book related email either, and I'm not hard to track down (the joy of having a unique last name).
Financially I've done alright though, the advance helped me buy my house.
Also, book writing (even large books) is still a one-person show (as opposite to software writing).
Or a two or three person show, but I get your gist. You don't have 20 member teams writing books.
And if the book you write is good, you can easily make some money out of it. So what is the incentive to give it away? You get credit for software by the community. As a documentation writer, no one even remembers your name in the community. So going to a traditional publisher seems a more natural way for one, in terms of money, as well as fame. And if you don't trust traditional publishers (or don't find one), you can still publish your work yourself.
I could publish any book myself I wanted to, but the printing costs would probably astronomical (unless I used the production printers at work), the distribution costs would be astronomical, and forget getting my books to a brick and mortar bookstore, at the moment, if you want a wide audience for a dead tree book, you probably need to work with a publisher.
Once you do work with a publisher, you can't just write any book you want to. You need to sell your concept to them, submit sample chapters, compromise on what they want to publish, it becomes more of a collaborative effort than one person blindly dumping 400 pages of Word files to the publisher.
It was an interesting time, certainly an ego trip to see my name on Amazon, but I don't think I would do it again for free, the non-financial rewards wouldn't justify all the time and effort.
heh-heh, you got me, though I think if I had asked for 8 programmers and 8 documentation writers, you would have been stumped.
How about this, name 3 people who got fame and renown from primarily programming, and 3 people who got fame and renown from primarily writing documentation.
You never heard of any of the 'great' writers in history, not even one? People who write good are usually good rememberd. Maybe isn't as much the case for just documentation but someone who writes good documentation will also get known!
PostScript varies in its transparency, and the PostScript used to describe a documentation will probably be generated by software (instead of handcoded) and will be opaque.
The PostScript I handcode is easily understood, but since it's just to make tape and CD covers, it's very basic, a bunch of lineto's, fonts and shows. For example:
%!PS 0 setgray 1.5 setlinewidth 72 72 moveto 436 72 lineto 436 416 lineto 72 416 lineto 72 72 lineto stroke /Americana findfont 18 scalefont setfont 108 382 moveto (Grateful Dead) show 108 358 moveto (11/11/73 Ip IIp) show /Americana findfont 12 scalefont setfont 120 334 moveto (Ip) show 108 318 moveto (Weather Report Suite Prelude>) show 108 302 moveto (Weather Report Suite Part 1>) show 108 286 moveto (Let It Grow) show 120 270 moveto (IIp) show 108 254 moveto (Noodling>) show 108 238 moveto (Dark Star>) show 108 222 moveto (Mind Left Body Jam>) show 108 206 moveto (Eyes of the World>) show 108 190 moveto (China Doll) show showpage
You don't even need to know PostScript to get the gist of what I'm doing.
At the other end of the readability scale are the desktop publishing packages. In PostScript I've seen from Frame (IIRC), each letter was individually placed, and most of the PostScript commands were redefined, so instead of something nearly transparent like:
108 238 moveto (Dark Star>) show
You would get something like the following (I don't want to bother finding a copy of Frame to verify):
108 238 mt (D) sh 109 238 mt (a) sh 110 238 mt (r) sh 111 238 mt (k) sh
and so on, and so on. I think the reason they call out each letter individually is for letter by letter placement, Frame decides the typography instead of the PostScript interpreter of the printer.
I guess I can understand the GPL requirements now, most desktop publishers generate opaque PostScript.
"And the cool part is, you can leave your motor (The lasers) at home to send out other light sails. "
Are you sure that's how it works? I though that the idea was to sail on the Sun's light, not try to shoot lasers from Earth. No matter how hard you try, lasers from Earth wont be nearly as powerfull as the Sun's broad-spectrum radiation.
Well, you could do it all from the Sun, but you can get more power by shooting lasers at it, too.
Since the laser's are focused, you can get more power from a laser than from sunlight, which is why people use lasers to cut steel instead of sunlight.
And the laser's would be in orbit, or perhaps on the moon, maybe the asteroids (cf. Niven's Kzinti wars).
Of course, the total energy output from the Sun would far outscale the energy from a laser, but we're talking a small, focused area.
Pulling out the plans for the Saturn V would be quite a trick. Supposedly all the mechanical drawings and all existing tool and die setups for building Saturn V's were destroyed on orders from Nixon as a political favor - to ensure that NASA got funding for the Shuttle.
Supposedly, a semi-intelligent/. reader could use something called the World Wide Web to research an urban legend before posting it. The plans for Saturn V exist on microfilm. The tool and die setups may have been destroyed, but how many tools and die setups from other products of the 1960's still exist?
To summarize from the sci.space.FAQ, the microfilm plans exist, the launch pad and Vehicle Assembly Building have been converted to shuttle use, and much of the specialized hardware (they mention guidance equipment) would have to be built from scratch.
Do light sails only push the ship away from the light source? If so, how does a ship get back from where it came?
Yes, they only push.
Does this mean, using light ships, you can go out, but you can't come back? This could be a real bummer for manned exploration.
Well, yeah, it's pretty much a one way trip, and braking when you enter another solar system is a trip, to slow down, you "set your controls for the heart of the sun" (See Niven and Pournelle's "A Mote In God's Eye" for a description of this).
Even at.1 c, it's practically a one way trip as far as life expectancy goes. But for a colonist ship, it would work. And the cool part is, you can leave your motor (The lasers) at home to send out other light sails.
One of my senior projects as an undergrad was a small solar sail design, it was neat.
..but isn't this good? I mean, Samba piggybacks SMB on top of TCP/IP, increasing packet size. Won't this let Linux do SMB natively, increasing throughput?
Yeah, but, NetBEUI isn't routable, it doesn't scale up like TCP/IP. If you're network has more than 20 or 30 clients, you're in trouble with NetBEUI.
You're going to be running TCP/IP anyway, for web access, why do you want another protocol?
NetBEUI is an old, inflexible protocol, there's a good reason it's on the dust heaps of history.
I only did a little bit of wiring on my first house.
I bought a dual RJ-45 plate and a dual phone plate for my office space, as well as some 25 foot cat 5 cables and lots of phone cord.
I saw that I had an electrical outlet, and used that as a starting point. I went into basement and found the hole in the floor for the outlet.
I then cut holes in the wall on the other side of the stud (since outlet boxes are mounted on studs) for the cat5 and the telephone. I went into the basement and drilled a hole a few inches from the outlet box wiring.
To fish the wiring, I had some left over Nomex house wiring, which was stiff enough to act as a fish cable. At this point I cut the end off the cat5 cables. I stuck the wire up from the basement, bent the end and taped the cables to it.
Going back upstairs, I pulled the wire, and brought the cables up. I separated the cables in the cat 5 wiring, laided them in the outlet, and pushed the outlet together. The other end still have the connectors, which I plugged into a hub.
It's really pretty basic, you just have to know your house, and know where to drill. You could always go wireless, but I'm happier trading my time for much cheaper wiring, and standard NICS.
Some other things I learned.
My SA's warned about running cat5 near lights and wiring, it may cause interference.
Measure twice and drill once.
Wear goggles and a mask if you're drilling up.
Vent pipes, water pipes and drain pipes probably run from the top of your house to the bottom, and usually have decent sized holes, you can string wire along those, too.
In our new house, I still have cat5 sprawled along the floor of my study, but when my latest book is done I'll start wiring it up, drops in the attic, master bedroom, living room, study, basement and garage.
I live here in Ontario, where it is legal for women to go topless.
Heck, I live in Rochester, NY, in the good ol'e USA, where the Rochester Seven, a group of seven woman, were arrested for being topless in a public park and took their to New York's highest court (and won). Basically, anywhere a man can be topless in New York, a woman can be too.
Though, you don't see too many woman using this right.
Slashdot Mirror
especially when the kernel probes for my NE-2000 clone!
Whoa.
George
The Guild navigators are essential for commerce in the Dune imperium, but they've mutated into repellent, distasteful monsters, shunned by all good folk, kind of like marketing people.
George
$50 for a reactive vision processing system? Couple that with a cheap (or free) reliable operating system, and cheap networking that has lots of addresses (IPv6), and you could put watching devices on every street corner, heck in every house (you know, for the safety of the children!).
Goodbye privacy.
George
Well, I just had my first documentation book published (not counting inhouse software manuals), the Samba Administrator's Handbook, ISBN 0-7645-4636-8) so I thought I'd make a few comments from an author's viewpoint.
I'd really like to see the incentive model for writing free documentation. Programmers do free software for fun and fame. That's their compensation. Writing documentation, however, is not fun, and also doesn't give one any brownie points in the community. Writing documentation is just plain hard work. What's the compensation for that work?
Writing is work, boring and tedious, I spent a lot of nights writing when I'd have rather been snuggling with my honey, playing with daughter, building Lego, surfing the web or even configuring my Linux boxes.
I don't think I've gotten any brownie points in the community, though the 5 star review on Amazon was nice. I haven't gotten any book related email either, and I'm not hard to track down (the joy of having a unique last name).
Financially I've done alright though, the advance helped me buy my house.
Also, book writing (even large books) is still a one-person show (as opposite to software writing).
Or a two or three person show, but I get your gist. You don't have 20 member teams writing books.
And if the book you write is good, you can easily make some money out of it. So what is the incentive to give it away? You get credit for software by the community. As a documentation writer, no one even remembers your name in the community. So going to a traditional publisher seems a more natural way for one, in terms of money, as well as fame. And if you don't trust traditional publishers (or don't find one), you can still publish your work yourself.
I could publish any book myself I wanted to, but the printing costs would probably astronomical (unless I used the production printers at work), the distribution costs would be astronomical, and forget getting my books to a brick and mortar bookstore, at the moment, if you want a wide audience for a dead tree book, you probably need to work with a publisher.
Once you do work with a publisher, you can't just write any book you want to. You need to sell your concept to them, submit sample chapters, compromise on what they want to publish, it becomes more of a collaborative effort than one person blindly dumping 400 pages of Word files to the publisher.
It was an interesting time, certainly an ego trip to see my name on Amazon, but I don't think I would do it again for free, the non-financial rewards wouldn't justify all the time and effort.
George
heh-heh, you got me, though I think if I had asked for 8 programmers and 8 documentation writers, you would have been stumped.
How about this, name 3 people who got fame and renown from primarily programming, and 3 people who got fame and renown from primarily writing documentation.
Thanks,
George
You never heard of any of the 'great' writers in history, not even one?
People who write good are usually good rememberd. Maybe isn't as much the case for just documentation but someone who writes good documentation will also get known!
Okay then, name five great documentation writers.
Name five great programmers.
Which list came quicker?
George
PostScript varies in its transparency, and the PostScript used to describe a documentation will probably be generated by software (instead of handcoded) and will be opaque.
The PostScript I handcode is easily understood, but since it's just to make tape and CD covers, it's very basic, a bunch of lineto's, fonts and shows. For example:
%!PS
0 setgray
1.5 setlinewidth
72 72 moveto
436 72 lineto
436 416 lineto
72 416 lineto
72 72 lineto
stroke
/Americana findfont 18 scalefont setfont
108 382 moveto
(Grateful Dead) show
108 358 moveto
(11/11/73 Ip IIp) show
/Americana findfont 12 scalefont setfont
120 334 moveto
(Ip) show
108 318 moveto
(Weather Report Suite Prelude>) show
108 302 moveto
(Weather Report Suite Part 1>) show
108 286 moveto
(Let It Grow) show
120 270 moveto
(IIp) show
108 254 moveto
(Noodling>) show
108 238 moveto
(Dark Star>) show
108 222 moveto
(Mind Left Body Jam>) show
108 206 moveto
(Eyes of the World>) show
108 190 moveto
(China Doll) show
showpage
You don't even need to know PostScript to get the gist of what I'm doing.
At the other end of the readability scale are the desktop publishing packages. In PostScript I've seen from Frame (IIRC), each letter was individually placed, and most of the PostScript commands were redefined, so instead of something nearly transparent like:
108 238 moveto
(Dark Star>) show
You would get something like the following (I don't want to bother finding a copy of Frame to verify):
108 238 mt
(D) sh
109 238 mt
(a) sh
110 238 mt
(r) sh
111 238 mt
(k) sh
and so on, and so on. I think the reason they call out each letter individually is for letter by letter placement, Frame decides the typography instead of the PostScript interpreter of the printer.
I guess I can understand the GPL requirements now, most desktop publishers generate opaque PostScript.
George
we heer in flagstaff have them new cabel modems. i use mine to throw at sheeps.
Hey now!
If yer gonna immoblize dem sheeps, the cabel that comes with those cabel modems is lots stronger than that cabel that comes with those DSL modems.
You rap a sheeps legs with that DSL cabel, they kin break it and run away, and you look silly with yer pants down around your feet.
You rap a sheeps legs with that coacks cabel, them sheeps stay put!
George
Version 9000 of High Availability Linux has soem incredible uptime features.
HAL-9000# shutdown -r now
I'm sorry root, I can't do that.
George
"And the cool part is, you can leave your motor (The lasers) at home to send out other light sails. "
Are you sure that's how it works? I though that the idea was to sail on the Sun's light, not try to shoot lasers from Earth. No matter how hard you try, lasers from Earth wont be nearly as powerfull as the Sun's broad-spectrum radiation.
Well, you could do it all from the Sun, but you can get more power by shooting lasers at it, too.
Since the laser's are focused, you can get more power from a laser than from sunlight, which is why people use lasers to cut steel instead of sunlight.
And the laser's would be in orbit, or perhaps on the moon, maybe the asteroids (cf. Niven's Kzinti wars).
Of course, the total energy output from the Sun would far outscale the energy from a laser, but we're talking a small, focused area.
George
Augh!!!!!
/. reader could use something called the World Wide Web to research an urban legend before posting it. The plans for Saturn V exist on microfilm. The tool and die setups may have been destroyed, but how many tools and die setups from other products of the 1960's still exist?
Pulling out the plans for the Saturn V would be quite a trick. Supposedly all the mechanical drawings and all existing tool and die setups for building Saturn V's were destroyed on orders from Nixon as a political favor - to ensure that NASA got funding for the Shuttle.
Supposedly, a semi-intelligent
To summarize from the sci.space.FAQ, the microfilm plans exist, the launch pad and Vehicle Assembly Building have been converted to shuttle use, and much of the specialized hardware (they mention guidance equipment) would have to be built from scratch.
George
Do light sails only push the ship away from the light source? If so, how does a ship get back from where it came?
.1 c, it's practically a one way trip as far as life expectancy goes. But for a colonist ship, it would work. And the cool part is, you can leave your motor (The lasers) at home to send out other light sails.
Yes, they only push.
Does this mean, using light ships, you can go out, but you can't come back? This could be a real bummer for manned exploration.
Well, yeah, it's pretty much a one way trip, and braking when you enter another solar system is a trip, to slow down, you "set your controls for the heart of the sun" (See Niven and Pournelle's "A Mote In God's Eye" for a description of this).
Even at
One of my senior projects as an undergrad was a small solar sail design, it was neat.
George
I thought Samba already managed NetBEUI interoperability pretty well. What kind of improvements does this bring to the table?
No, Samba does NetBIOS over TCP/IP, NetBEUI is another kind of network protocol, like TCP/IP, or IPX/SPX.
NetBEUI isn't routable though, which is usually a bad thing.
Microsoft itself has been moving away from NetBUIS to NetBIUOS over TCP/IP for Windows networking.
What Samba really needs is the ability to run as a Primary Domain Controller. Will this contribution help meet that goal?
No, but the beta version of Samba already has this, you just have to compile the code yourself.
IIRC, Samba PDC code doesn't work well with BDC though.
George
..but isn't this good? I mean, Samba piggybacks SMB on top of TCP/IP, increasing packet size. Won't this let Linux do SMB natively, increasing throughput?
Yeah, but, NetBEUI isn't routable, it doesn't scale up like TCP/IP. If you're network has more than 20 or 30 clients, you're in trouble with NetBEUI.
You're going to be running TCP/IP anyway, for web access, why do you want another protocol?
NetBEUI is an old, inflexible protocol, there's a good reason it's on the dust heaps of history.
George
NetBEUI is so old and icky, I'd avoid it like the plague.
What's next, punch card readers for Linux, drum memory interfaces?
Yuck,
George
Vent pipes? If they're hot air exhaust, such as from a gas water heater, stay away from them. Too hot for the cable.
No, no, noxious sewer gas vent pipes, the ones about 8 inches in diameter made of cast iron, they also fucntion as the main drain pipe.
George
IIRC, the onion has always been available in print, and then went on the web.
/.'ers want to vouch for this?
Any midwest
George
dang italics.
I only did a little bit of wiring on my first house.
I bought a dual RJ-45 plate and a dual phone plate for my office space, as well as some 25 foot cat 5 cables and lots of phone cord.
I saw that I had an electrical outlet, and used that as a starting point. I went into basement and found the hole in the floor for the outlet.
I then cut holes in the wall on the other side of the stud (since outlet boxes are mounted on studs) for the cat5 and the telephone. I went into the basement and drilled a hole a few inches from the outlet box wiring.
To fish the wiring, I had some left over Nomex house wiring, which was stiff enough to act as a fish cable. At this point I cut the end off the cat5 cables. I stuck the wire up from the basement, bent the end and taped the cables to it.
Going back upstairs, I pulled the wire, and brought the cables up. I separated the cables in the cat 5 wiring, laided them in the outlet, and pushed the outlet together. The other end still have the connectors, which I plugged into a hub.
It's really pretty basic, you just have to know your house, and know where to drill. You could always go wireless, but I'm happier trading my time for much cheaper wiring, and standard NICS.
Some other things I learned.
My SA's warned about running cat5 near lights and wiring, it may cause interference.
Measure twice and drill once.
Wear goggles and a mask if you're drilling up.
Vent pipes, water pipes and drain pipes probably run from the top of your house to the bottom, and usually have decent sized holes, you can string wire along those, too.
In our new house, I still have cat5 sprawled along the floor of my study, but when my latest book is done I'll start wiring it up, drops in the attic, master bedroom, living room, study, basement and garage.
Good luck,
George
This is SO cool! With this stuff you can turn your computer off, turn it back on and be right where you left off!
Even better, when you're not using your computer, you can stick it to the 'fridge.
George
Great book; I loved it. Tee hee.
L.D.
Is Tis better than Angela's Ashes? That I couldn't stand, I found it very boring, tedious and repetive.
I found the much vaunted humor to be about as funny as tying two cats together at the tail and flinging them over a clothesline.
The pathos was terrible, a rehashed Dickens.
These sentiments make me a pariah in my wife's Irish descended family, but their literary tastes are suspect, never having even read any Pynchon.
About the only saving grace is that I can't wait for Lego to come out with official Angela's Ashes sets, so I can build lots of grey, dingy buildings.
George
I live here in Ontario, where it is legal for women to go topless.
Heck, I live in Rochester, NY, in the good ol'e USA, where the Rochester Seven, a group of seven woman, were arrested for being topless in a public park and took their to New York's highest court (and won). Basically, anywhere a man can be topless in New York, a woman can be too.
Though, you don't see too many woman using this right.
George
I don't think so, it's just a star vehicle for Leo.
This sucks.
George
IMHO, moderation is important when discussing personality traits.
I agree wholeheartedly. When I go to a party I try to moderate myself to +2 funny if I have the points left. It makes me less introverted.
George
heh-heh-heh, ex AOL workers, someone had to say it.
George
George