Datahands are pricey ($900 with a student discount), but well worth it. I've had one since September and my wrists have improved considerably. All that the MS keyboards do is make my wrists hurt more.
However, you must remember that the best hardware in the world isn't going to help much if you keep on typing for 16 hours straight. Take breaks every now and then. Otherwise you'll just get worse again. Even with my Datahand, after a couple hours of typing my wrists are sore and I need a rather long break and need to massage my carpal tunnels.
All the email in the world isn't worth losing your hands. Try to cut as much of it as you can out of your life. Stop reading and posting to high-traffic mailinglists, reduce your time on IRC, etc.; do whatever you can to reduce your typing time. It truly is worth it. ---
Of course, now there will have to be a paper on the meta-meta-slashdot effect, showing both requests to the original slashdot paper due to the meta-slashdot paper, and also showing the hits to the meta-slashdot paper itself.
That could get pretty tiresome after a while. Maybe he'll try to see how long it takes for the recursion to stop, and for people to lose interest in reading papers on meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-slashdotting. ---
Am I the only one who has a problem with running a system with the power supply cover off? Maybe the rest of you think I'm just being a wus, but one time I *was* running my power supply coverless, and I got a nasty shock when I accidentally touched one of the heatsinks. And this is hanging on a wall... imagine a party where someone leans against it unknowing, or splashes some wine. I hope there's plexiglass in *front* too... That'd also have the added benefit of protecting the other components as well.
In the meantime, I have a Proxima LCD panel without a power supply. Does anyone know the power supply pinout? (I don't want to spend $220 for a new supply - hell, I only paid $150 for the panel itself! - , and Proxima's mailserver has been FUBAR for as long as I can remember so I can't ask them.) It'd be cool to make art out of my 486-based proxy and also have a visual display on it (make a pulse-like demoish thing which lets me know when various things happen and the like).
I'd considered reworking my workstation's case to being nice and artistic, but I don't have the time or inclination to do what I wanted. ---
A little research goes a long way (I've actually been looking into this topic a lot recently). On the Mesa3D Homepage at the bottom, there's a thing on the 3D acceleration status report. If you go to it, you'll learn about all the fun happy things going into exactly what you talk about. The most promising one IMO is the GLX XFree extension; it's already got the hooks for hardware-assisted rendering with complete software fallback, it just needs support and drivers. They've already got an early-alpha Permedia driver for it, though I don't have a Permedia card (I have a 3Dfx and will soon be getting a TNT of some sort, probably the Asus 3400, to replace my failing S3 ViRGE).
The GLX implementation with XFree is currently rather sluggish, due to some design issues within XFree (not really XFree's fault), but apparently it's only a latency issue. The nice thing about GLX is that, aside from being how SGI themselves implement it, it is network-transparent (it is technically an X protocol wrapper for OpenGL commands); it even apparently allows an SGI to display on a PC or vice-versa (of course, without hardware rendering, you would probably want the PC displaying on the SGI and not the other way around).
Of course, there's other developments going on (also referenced from the status report), but the GLX one seems most promising, at least for serious rendering. I think the latency issues would impact its usefulness for gaming.:/ It's also the one which is closest to viability; the GGI3D stuff, for example, is still in early design phases, and looks like it's going to be more of a Direct3D-ish thing (that is, a low-level API which OpenGL etc. would sit on top of), which means more APIs for the vendors to support. It's hard enough to get vendors to support both D3D and OGL under Windows, much less Linux.
Given nVidia's Linux-friendly history, though, I wouldn't be surprised if as soon as one of the APIs matures that they make a driver. Since the GLX scheme is the functionally-closest to the Windows ICD mechanism, I have a feeling that the vendors will adopt that first. And why not? It's robust, allows progressive implementation, and network-transparent. Can we say "thin clients?" ---
I was wondering the same thing. They go out of their way to make it look ilke it's a real link, but don't bother to actually make it a real link. What the hell? Fucking annoying. ---
Well, people have already mentioned ethernet addresses.
What about iButtons? My dad has a weather station based on Dallas Semiconductor's iButton/1wire technology, and he's quite impressed with its usability and nifty factor. What makes it so cool is that these little disposable gate-activated switches each have a unique 64-bit serial number.
What about - get this - automobiles? I mean, they have registration numbers on all the parts, including the onboard computer...
There's just whole bunches of stuff with serial numbers. I have no problem with serial numbers in my chips, even in the CPU; it takes software to broadcast/care about the serial number, and so I just won't run software that violates my privacy by doing that. I mean, plenty of other programs do that without serial numbers in the CPUs; I've seen SNES emulators which use lots of system characteristics to determine a serial number (which, of course, breaks it when you upgrade your memory or CPU or whatever). Motherboards have serial numbers as well, but people don't complain about that. ---
Foreskins and other articles
on
AAAS under way
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· Score: 1
Well, I wanted to read the other articles, particularly the "foreskin foresight" one (I figure it has to do with cloned skin, which I'm interested in, and not just circumcision, which I'm not:) but they seem to have rather... inconsistent CGI handling. At least from the links followed from the articles mentioned specifically here, I got funky CGI errors about "could not execute such-and-such a script with some odd extension which isn't.pl,.cgi, or even.exe/.dll, meaning that we're probably not using any webserver software you've ever even had a glimmer of hearing about, or even have ever come into contact with a photon or air molecule which has ever carried any piece of information regarding this software whatsoever. Fuck you."
I have Win3.1 from an OEM license for an older computer, which is no longer in use. I got a free promotional copy of Win'95 upgrade through the ACM programming competition a few years back. I got Win'98 through work, where I have access to an MSDN subscription. I don't need no rebates.
'Course, that's not to say I use them. Although my hard drive is partitioned about 40/60 for Windows/Linux, usage-wise it's about 0.1/99. (The other 0.9% of the time it's turned off.) Only reason I have so much hard drive space for Windows is because all I have in Windows is games, which typically take 300-400 megs each nowadays. Blah. ---
Rendevous With Rama - get your authors straight
on
Interstellar Travel
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· Score: 1
What did Azimov write in Rama? I didn't realize Arthur Clarke got his help.:) ---
For starters, what does he mean by "Visual Basic remains a 31-bit language"? It sounds cute to mean "it doesn't quite have all the 32-bit OS features" but what it ends up saying is that it's based on 31-bit datatypes.
Also, what's wrong with automatic transmission on a bicycle? The AutoBike has one, and it appears to work great. I've been considering getting one when I have enough money to spend on such things. I hate shifting; it's not as hard as the AutoBike infomercials make it out to be, but it isn't the most pleasant part of bicycling.
I also know that there *is* mouse wheel control stuff for VB. I used to have a crappy programming job which involved VB (no matter how much I protested to the contrary - I eventually ended up quitting) and as such, I got some Visual Basic magazine. One of the articles in it said "Here is how to add support for the mouse wheel to your applications." It detailed how to make an ActiveX-based control to get mousewheel events.
I support ranting and raving about how bad VB is, but he doesn't choose all the right reasons, at least not completely. A good reason to rant about VB is because it's inconsistent in terms of syntax and implementation. It tries to be like some bastard child of C++ and BASIC, and ends up having an uncomfortable resting point inbetween.
His quote about doodads is very, very true, and I agree with it immensely. That is how *all* M$ language products end up. Look at VC++ with MFC... they had a great opportunity to fix (or at least hide) all of the problems with the WinAPI, but instead they ended up making something even more incomprehensible -- but full of so many features. Yay. So tell me, how do you make a form which exhibits proper packing behavior with a minimum of work? Well, Delphi got it down pretty good even in v1.0.
Now, a good language for general-purpose programming is PERL. It's consistent in that you can do anything in about any way you want; the syntax isn't a stumbling block. Are there any good GUI toolkit things for PERL, though? Like, are there GTK or TK bindings? TCL/TK is almost great, except that I could never figure out how to use that language; its syntax seemed inconsistent and unwieldy to me. IMNSHO, of course. ---
Uh, it might make CDs obsolete. It definitely makes tapes obsolete. But a fileformat isn't going to make a stereo obsolete, as without the stereo, you'll have a hard time hearing it without headphones or little powered speakers, which isn't very useful for parties or whatever. Sure, you can use your computer as a stereo by using powered speakers, but you tend to get better (and yet much less expensive) sound by using an actual stereo hooked up to your computer (I do - my complete stereo system with nice speakers and Dolby Pro Logic cost $270 and gives MUCH better sound than any $270 set of Altec Lansings you can find, and has many more features to boot). Also, Average Joe Consumer probably wouldn't want to use a computer as a stereo system; they'd probably prefer something like the Empeg or some dedicated MP3 player unit.
Also, it's "stereos," not "stereo's." One would think that a professional writer who has written so many books would know the difference between the plural and the possessive. ---
POT was created for continuous potential fractals. It's really just a 8bit GIF with two images placed side by side, one for the high bits, one for the low, giving you 16bits. Try opening one in a standard paint program, and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Funny, I never tried that. I always figured it'd just not work. Though the end effect is still that it's a 16bit GIF, more or less. Neat how they made it backwards-compatible like that, though.
I have xfractint here, and I don't see Barnsley's name appear in the credits.
Funny, I coulda sworn it did, as did a lot of other big fractal mathemeticians. Perhaps I'm just remembering a different fractal guy, or maybe even just a credit to him for an algorithm or citation. Again, it was IIRC; I haven't used fractint for years.
Not much. Its currently at v19.6 or thereabouts, and still pretty much just for DOS. The licence isn't very liberal, and the code very platform specific (for performance reasons), so if you wanted to make a decent X Windows fractal program, you'd be better off starting from scratch.
Hm, I suppose, but I'm not really that dedicated to fractals anymore.:) Guess I could do it nice and C++-ish, and actually use the FPU now that FPUs are worth using. What I really liked about Fractint was the built-in language parser for quick prototyping, though, and I don't have much desire to write one of my own.:) Perhaps making a truly-pluggable architecture would work... just use good ol' gcc as the compiler and just dynamically load the new fractal type as a shared library.
What you should learn depends, of course, on what large of a scale you're going to admin on. So, here's some ideas of how you should do things, IMO: (Note that I'm not saying I have all these skills, they're just what I see as what you should go about learning professional sysadmin stuff. Also realize that this is geared towards UNIX administration.)
Administration of whatever UNIXes you're going to be using (start with at least Linux and SOLARIS, though AIX and IRIX will probably be useful as well)
A good grasp on the workings of TCP/IP at a protocol-level, particularly routing and a fairly good knowledge of how both the the TCP and IP parts work individually
NFS - a must, even if you're only administering a single box (NFS can come in handy for a number of things, such as getting data off medias/filesystems/etc. not supported by your current server)
Samba is very useful, particularly if you're working in a heterogenous environment. This also includes configuring the Windows side of things (though the concepts for WFW sharing have been the same since WfW3.1 (yes, there was a WfW before 3.11:))
HTTP server configuration, for a number of servers. Apache is a must; I'd also recommend various Netscape servers. A year ago I'd have said that ICS was good to know, but since IBM has dropped that line of products and has (apparently) gone gung-ho for commercial Apache support, that's no longer really the case, unless you're handed an old server.
Dealing with old and less-common UNIXes that you may suddenly have to work with. HP/UX seems to come up a lot, as well as ULTRIX, SunOS, and every now and then UNICOS. This depends on the age of the companies you're administering for, of course.
DNS, particularly BIND. The closer you get to memorizing how to configure a nameserver from the ground up, the better-off you are.
NTP and SNMP are useful if you are administering multiple machines.
One thing that most people completely forget about but is *very* important - communication skills, including the patience to deal with (often-moronic) users. Remember, you work for them, not the other way around. Also, the ability to listen to a user's advice is a must - although they usually only think they know what they're talking about, quite often then really do. I've found that users who know what they're talking about and give advice to admins are often people to really listen to; you can learn a lot from them.
Learning as many protocols with as many network transports is very useful - and I'm talking low-level. If you're asked to provide an IRC server, for example, learn how to IRC using telnet. Likewise for HTTP. These can be very useful debug tools, particularly when it comes to trying to figure out wtf's wrong with a server or why you can't get your vhosts working.
SMTP, inside and out, both by the standard and for as many SMTPds you can bother yourself to deal with. Sendmail is a must, qmail is recommended, and avoiding Exchange and the other MS mailservers is a definite (though you should still learn about how they work from at least a superficial point of view so that you can deal with other peoples' problems when they affect you).
Also, remember that cracking tools are your friend, not your enemy. You should learn to download and use as many cracking tools (on your own systems, of course) to see where you're vulnerable. If you can break your network with <insert random tool> then some 12-year-old in Wisconsin can too.
Related to HTTP - learn how CGIs work, at the lowest level possible. Both what the client sends to the server, what the server sends back to the client, and what the server sends to the CGI program. Very useful. 100% of the CGI code for hobbes.nmsu.edu was written through reverse-engineering of a sort.
Also, remember to never stop playing with stuff either. As others have posted already, setup and secure as many services as you can find, because chances are someday someone will ask/want/need you to set it up.
Oh, and you may want to learn something about NT administration. Keeps suits happy.
Say it out loud and type it with me, folks... fa/na/ta/ci/sm.
Sorry.:) But yeah, I can't stand all the Star Wars hype on here. Remember when the trailer was going to be shown? There were so many articles on the *trailer*! And many reports of people going to a movie just to see the trailer, and then leaving when the Star Wars trailer was shown or when all the previews were over, whichever came first...
Chalk it up to my never having seen any actual document about PNG. I always thought that was Iterated Systems' partitioned-IFS format, but I guess that doesn't make sense, since Michael Barnsley (mathematical genius that he is) is a cunt when it comes to open standards, and so then there'd be no reason for all these freespeech software products to use it.
(At the risk of sounding like the "GNUlix" AC troll, IMO it'd be a good idea to use freespeech and freebeer as short for their Richard Stallman-inspired phrases. Makes things easier, but then confuses other issues. English sucks.)
So PNG is basically an actually-successful format which was inspired by the same circumstances behind POT (basically a 16-bit GIF, which was part of Fractint - which incidentally, Michael Barnsley had a lot to do with as well IIRC).
Speaking of which, whatever happened to Fractint? It's one of the earliest commonly-used open source programs around for the PC (it's been around since what, '87? or earlier?) and certainly the first both usable by "normal" people (EMACS is great, but give that to a Notepad graduate...) and incredibly powerful for people who knew what they were doing... but development seemed to stagnate after v19.2 or so. Was there ever a decent platform-independent port? xfractint blows, as did winfrac (didn't help that winfrac was based on v12, which horribly sucked)... In the meantime, there's no decent (AFAIK) pluggable mathematical exploration systems around which let you explore basically anything, particularly fractals, and do it very quickly. I mean, okay, XaoS is good for that, but it's mostly artistic, and it's not exactly the most modular/flexible program around... ---
For the actual rendering, yes, it's easier (though not strictly necessary - as was pointed out, a 666 colorcube works fine, though I prefer 884 aka 332 (bits) since you can optimize it a little better for speed and it gives you more colors - technicolor be damned:) but I was referring to the actual conversion to a.gif. After everything's rendered, it easily takes less than 256 colors. As such, there'd be no artifacts due to GIF compression. ---
Now, what I'd *really* like to see is an X server based on AA. Wouldn't it be cool to have network-transparent fullscreen ASCII graphics for everything? ASCII-art Netscape!
Actually, if there's an SVGAlib-based X server, then I guess one could just use the aalib wrapper. Then we could even get X under aalib under graphical X... that'd rock.:) ---
Am I the only one whose feet hurt after looking at that twisted GNOME logo? I mean, damn, I feel sore thinking about the sorts of orthopedics that poor gnome has to go through.:)
The reason my head hurts is from slamming my head on the table from their statement regarding image quality: "Please note that the GIF compression may have added artifacts to the images." Sure, if there were more than 256 colors, this may have been the case, but if that was a concern, they could have used a less-colorful titlebar and window decorations, and even as they are they don't look like they'd need 64 colors, much less 256 (though that overly-colorful bitmap in the corner could be a problem). If they didn't want artifacts, they could have just used a somewhat less-colorful test image. Remember, folks, GIF is *non-lossy*. It uses a similar compression scheme to.z,.gz and.zip, and you don't see executables degrading in quality when they're compressed, right?
Heh, this reminds me of some luser on IRC a few years ago, who was insisting that.zip was a lossy compression scheme. His reasoning was this: "When I install Doom, the graphics are just fine. But then when I zip it then unzip it and get up close to someone, the graphics are all chunky!" I had to explain to him how data is data,.zip doesn't know what's image and what's executable, etc.etc., and if.zip were lossy, then doom wouldn't even *run* much less display lossy graphics quality.
Anyway. If any image format will cause lossiness,.png will! It's a fractal compression sceheme, IIRC, right?
That said, the new antialiasing features look very, very nice, althouhg that seems that it'd be at the loss of network-transparency. Although most Linux users these days run their X, clients on the same machine as the server, many still use X terminals in a computer lab in a distributed environment. I hope that there'll be a configuration option to turn anti-aliasing off so that we can keep server-side rendering and reduce the bandwidth overhead (not to mention that server-side is much faster and much less resource-intensive if you have an accelerated graphics card, like almost everyone does now). Anti-aliasing is the sort of thing which should go into the server, not the client, for the most part. ---
DTED level-0 data (which is sufficient for any mapping program) is a free download from the NIMA (www.nima.mil, I believe). It's a rather simple (and actually open) format, though it can be a bit hard to comprehend since all of the format stuff refers to it physically on a tape, but I have some source for reading DTED data (any level) which I wrote on a mapping project, which I'm allowed to do with as I see fit (long story). It's basically a bitmapped data file, except that the data is all in signed-magnitude (I have no idea why) instead of 2's complement, though the conversion is real easy, esp. for values >0.:) The format also has stuff for correcting for the satellite's position and all that, though all of the data I've seen (both level 0 and level 1) is pre-processed to put it on a straight grid anyway.
Also, DTED level 1 is free (beer) under the oft-mentioned FIAA, though it's not free (speech) as its distribution is controlled, IIRC.
As for terrain feature data, there's ITD and VPF, but I'm pretty sure that's controlled, and neither format is very pretty. ITD is basically setup like a funky quasi-vector raster format (don't ask), and VPF is setup like a relational database. Yuck.
Oh, the NIMA *has* put out some code, called NIMA-MUSE, which will read any NIMA format, though I've found it to be horrifically buggy. It can't even read DTED level-1. Actually, I couldn't figure out *how* to get it to read *any* DTED level. It read VPF adequately, though it was very slow (like, it took several minutes to read a small file on a P166), and I never got to try it on ITD. I'm pretty sure that the source for MUSE is free (speech) though. ---
This is somewhat similar to the horrible ResRocket DRGN situation. All of their servers are Linux-based, but they have no plans of supporting Linux for a client. They say that if you can get it to work under an emulator, great (which won't happen until Wine does proper lowlevel MIDI support, rather than just remapping the MCI device - if this is no longer the case, PLEASE let me know!) and one guy who used to work there almost did a shell of a half-assed port of the client to Linux... which didn't work.:P
So until then, it's not worth the effort to reboot into Windoze just to try to jam semi-live with people online and find out that everyone on is only listening, nobody's playing. A song of mine on there ("Lackluster") was still sitting there, untouched and undeleted (obviously), for several months last time I connected. I think it was in studio 17. Also last time I connected, I tried to get people to jam with me, and I just ended up recording a solo jazz improv for a while, and then gave up, lonely and depressed.
If I want to do that, there's several Linux MIDI sequencers already.:P ---
Slashdot Mirror
Datahands are pricey ($900 with a student discount), but well worth it. I've had one since September and my wrists have improved considerably. All that the MS keyboards do is make my wrists hurt more.
However, you must remember that the best hardware in the world isn't going to help much if you keep on typing for 16 hours straight. Take breaks every now and then. Otherwise you'll just get worse again. Even with my Datahand, after a couple hours of typing my wrists are sore and I need a rather long break and need to massage my carpal tunnels.
All the email in the world isn't worth losing your hands. Try to cut as much of it as you can out of your life. Stop reading and posting to high-traffic mailinglists, reduce your time on IRC, etc.; do whatever you can to reduce your typing time. It truly is worth it.
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Of course, now there will have to be a paper on the meta-meta-slashdot effect, showing both requests to the original slashdot paper due to the meta-slashdot paper, and also showing the hits to the meta-slashdot paper itself.
That could get pretty tiresome after a while. Maybe he'll try to see how long it takes for the recursion to stop, and for people to lose interest in reading papers on meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-slashdotting.
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Am I the only one who has a problem with running a system with the power supply cover off? Maybe the rest of you think I'm just being a wus, but one time I *was* running my power supply coverless, and I got a nasty shock when I accidentally touched one of the heatsinks. And this is hanging on a wall... imagine a party where someone leans against it unknowing, or splashes some wine. I hope there's plexiglass in *front* too... That'd also have the added benefit of protecting the other components as well.
In the meantime, I have a Proxima LCD panel without a power supply. Does anyone know the power supply pinout? (I don't want to spend $220 for a new supply - hell, I only paid $150 for the panel itself! - , and Proxima's mailserver has been FUBAR for as long as I can remember so I can't ask them.) It'd be cool to make art out of my 486-based proxy and also have a visual display on it (make a pulse-like demoish thing which lets me know when various things happen and the like).
I'd considered reworking my workstation's case to being nice and artistic, but I don't have the time or inclination to do what I wanted.
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A little research goes a long way (I've actually been looking into this topic a lot recently). On the Mesa3D Homepage at the bottom, there's a thing on the 3D acceleration status report. If you go to it, you'll learn about all the fun happy things going into exactly what you talk about. The most promising one IMO is the GLX XFree extension; it's already got the hooks for hardware-assisted rendering with complete software fallback, it just needs support and drivers. They've already got an early-alpha Permedia driver for it, though I don't have a Permedia card (I have a 3Dfx and will soon be getting a TNT of some sort, probably the Asus 3400, to replace my failing S3 ViRGE).
:/ It's also the one which is closest to viability; the GGI3D stuff, for example, is still in early design phases, and looks like it's going to be more of a Direct3D-ish thing (that is, a low-level API which OpenGL etc. would sit on top of), which means more APIs for the vendors to support. It's hard enough to get vendors to support both D3D and OGL under Windows, much less Linux.
The GLX implementation with XFree is currently rather sluggish, due to some design issues within XFree (not really XFree's fault), but apparently it's only a latency issue. The nice thing about GLX is that, aside from being how SGI themselves implement it, it is network-transparent (it is technically an X protocol wrapper for OpenGL commands); it even apparently allows an SGI to display on a PC or vice-versa (of course, without hardware rendering, you would probably want the PC displaying on the SGI and not the other way around).
Of course, there's other developments going on (also referenced from the status report), but the GLX one seems most promising, at least for serious rendering. I think the latency issues would impact its usefulness for gaming.
Given nVidia's Linux-friendly history, though, I wouldn't be surprised if as soon as one of the APIs matures that they make a driver. Since the GLX scheme is the functionally-closest to the Windows ICD mechanism, I have a feeling that the vendors will adopt that first. And why not? It's robust, allows progressive implementation, and network-transparent. Can we say "thin clients?"
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Shouldn't this be in 'humor,' not Linux?
I mean, granted, yes, it involves Tux, so the Tux logo is appropriate, but still, could we have some *consistency* here?
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I was wondering the same thing. They go out of their way to make it look ilke it's a real link, but don't bother to actually make it a real link. What the hell? Fucking annoying.
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He said "niggling," not "niggardly." Somewhat of a difference, there.
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while (!fork()) fork();
:)
See, this is cool, because the parent process keeps on changing its PID...
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I like the current John Lennon-style penguin. It's *cute*. :)
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Well, people have already mentioned ethernet addresses.
What about iButtons? My dad has a weather station based on Dallas Semiconductor's iButton/1wire technology, and he's quite impressed with its usability and nifty factor. What makes it so cool is that these little disposable gate-activated switches each have a unique 64-bit serial number.
What about - get this - automobiles? I mean, they have registration numbers on all the parts, including the onboard computer...
There's just whole bunches of stuff with serial numbers. I have no problem with serial numbers in my chips, even in the CPU; it takes software to broadcast/care about the serial number, and so I just won't run software that violates my privacy by doing that. I mean, plenty of other programs do that without serial numbers in the CPUs; I've seen SNES emulators which use lots of system characteristics to determine a serial number (which, of course, breaks it when you upgrade your memory or CPU or whatever). Motherboards have serial numbers as well, but people don't complain about that.
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Well, I wanted to read the other articles, particularly the "foreskin foresight" one (I figure it has to do with cloned skin, which I'm interested in, and not just circumcision, which I'm not :) but they seem to have rather... inconsistent CGI handling. At least from the links followed from the articles mentioned specifically here, I got funky CGI errors about "could not execute such-and-such a script with some odd extension which isn't .pl, .cgi, or even .exe/.dll, meaning that we're probably not using any webserver software you've ever even had a glimmer of hearing about, or even have ever come into contact with a photon or air molecule which has ever carried any piece of information regarding this software whatsoever. Fuck you."
:)
Or perhaps I'm just unlucky.
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I have Win3.1 from an OEM license for an older computer, which is no longer in use. I got a free promotional copy of Win'95 upgrade through the ACM programming competition a few years back. I got Win'98 through work, where I have access to an MSDN subscription. I don't need no rebates.
'Course, that's not to say I use them. Although my hard drive is partitioned about 40/60 for Windows/Linux, usage-wise it's about 0.1/99. (The other 0.9% of the time it's turned off.) Only reason I have so much hard drive space for Windows is because all I have in Windows is games, which typically take 300-400 megs each nowadays. Blah.
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What did Azimov write in Rama? I didn't realize Arthur Clarke got his help. :)
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For starters, what does he mean by "Visual Basic remains a 31-bit language"? It sounds cute to mean "it doesn't quite have all the 32-bit OS features" but what it ends up saying is that it's based on 31-bit datatypes.
Also, what's wrong with automatic transmission on a bicycle? The AutoBike has one, and it appears to work great. I've been considering getting one when I have enough money to spend on such things. I hate shifting; it's not as hard as the AutoBike infomercials make it out to be, but it isn't the most pleasant part of bicycling.
I also know that there *is* mouse wheel control stuff for VB. I used to have a crappy programming job which involved VB (no matter how much I protested to the contrary - I eventually ended up quitting) and as such, I got some Visual Basic magazine. One of the articles in it said "Here is how to add support for the mouse wheel to your applications." It detailed how to make an ActiveX-based control to get mousewheel events.
I support ranting and raving about how bad VB is, but he doesn't choose all the right reasons, at least not completely. A good reason to rant about VB is because it's inconsistent in terms of syntax and implementation. It tries to be like some bastard child of C++ and BASIC, and ends up having an uncomfortable resting point inbetween.
His quote about doodads is very, very true, and I agree with it immensely. That is how *all* M$ language products end up. Look at VC++ with MFC... they had a great opportunity to fix (or at least hide) all of the problems with the WinAPI, but instead they ended up making something even more incomprehensible -- but full of so many features. Yay. So tell me, how do you make a form which exhibits proper packing behavior with a minimum of work? Well, Delphi got it down pretty good even in v1.0.
Now, a good language for general-purpose programming is PERL. It's consistent in that you can do anything in about any way you want; the syntax isn't a stumbling block. Are there any good GUI toolkit things for PERL, though? Like, are there GTK or TK bindings? TCL/TK is almost great, except that I could never figure out how to use that language; its syntax seemed inconsistent and unwieldy to me. IMNSHO, of course.
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Uh, it might make CDs obsolete. It definitely makes tapes obsolete. But a fileformat isn't going to make a stereo obsolete, as without the stereo, you'll have a hard time hearing it without headphones or little powered speakers, which isn't very useful for parties or whatever. Sure, you can use your computer as a stereo by using powered speakers, but you tend to get better (and yet much less expensive) sound by using an actual stereo hooked up to your computer (I do - my complete stereo system with nice speakers and Dolby Pro Logic cost $270 and gives MUCH better sound than any $270 set of Altec Lansings you can find, and has many more features to boot). Also, Average Joe Consumer probably wouldn't want to use a computer as a stereo system; they'd probably prefer something like the Empeg or some dedicated MP3 player unit.
Also, it's "stereos," not "stereo's." One would think that a professional writer who has written so many books would know the difference between the plural and the possessive.
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POT was created for continuous potential fractals. It's really just a 8bit GIF with two images placed side by side, one for the high bits, one for the low, giving you 16bits. Try opening one in a standard paint program, and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Funny, I never tried that. I always figured it'd just not work. Though the end effect is still that it's a 16bit GIF, more or less. Neat how they made it backwards-compatible like that, though.
I have xfractint here, and I don't see Barnsley's name appear in the credits.
Funny, I coulda sworn it did, as did a lot of other big fractal mathemeticians. Perhaps I'm just remembering a different fractal guy, or maybe even just a credit to him for an algorithm or citation. Again, it was IIRC; I haven't used fractint for years.
Not much. Its currently at v19.6 or thereabouts, and still pretty much just for DOS. The licence isn't very liberal, and the code very platform specific (for performance reasons), so if you wanted to make a decent X Windows fractal program, you'd be better off starting from scratch.
Hm, I suppose, but I'm not really that dedicated to fractals anymore. :) Guess I could do it nice and C++-ish, and actually use the FPU now that FPUs are worth using. What I really liked about Fractint was the built-in language parser for quick prototyping, though, and I don't have much desire to write one of my own. :) Perhaps making a truly-pluggable architecture would work... just use good ol' gcc as the compiler and just dynamically load the new fractal type as a shared library.
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What you should learn depends, of course, on what large of a scale you're going to admin on. So, here's some ideas of how you should do things, IMO: (Note that I'm not saying I have all these skills, they're just what I see as what you should go about learning professional sysadmin stuff. Also realize that this is geared towards UNIX administration.)
Also, remember to never stop playing with stuff either. As others have posted already, setup and secure as many services as you can find, because chances are someday someone will ask/want/need you to set it up.
Oh, and you may want to learn something about NT administration. Keeps suits happy.
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Say it out loud and type it with me, folks... fa/na/ta/ci/sm.
:) But yeah, I can't stand all the Star Wars hype on here. Remember when the trailer was going to be shown? There were so many articles on the *trailer*! And many reports of people going to a movie just to see the trailer, and then leaving when the Star Wars trailer was shown or when all the previews were over, whichever came first...
Sorry.
What a waste of $10.
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Chalk it up to my never having seen any actual document about PNG. I always thought that was Iterated Systems' partitioned-IFS format, but I guess that doesn't make sense, since Michael Barnsley (mathematical genius that he is) is a cunt when it comes to open standards, and so then there'd be no reason for all these freespeech software products to use it.
(At the risk of sounding like the "GNUlix" AC troll, IMO it'd be a good idea to use freespeech and freebeer as short for their Richard Stallman-inspired phrases. Makes things easier, but then confuses other issues. English sucks.)
So PNG is basically an actually-successful format which was inspired by the same circumstances behind POT (basically a 16-bit GIF, which was part of Fractint - which incidentally, Michael Barnsley had a lot to do with as well IIRC).
Speaking of which, whatever happened to Fractint? It's one of the earliest commonly-used open source programs around for the PC (it's been around since what, '87? or earlier?) and certainly the first both usable by "normal" people (EMACS is great, but give that to a Notepad graduate...) and incredibly powerful for people who knew what they were doing... but development seemed to stagnate after v19.2 or so. Was there ever a decent platform-independent port? xfractint blows, as did winfrac (didn't help that winfrac was based on v12, which horribly sucked)... In the meantime, there's no decent (AFAIK) pluggable mathematical exploration systems around which let you explore basically anything, particularly fractals, and do it very quickly. I mean, okay, XaoS is good for that, but it's mostly artistic, and it's not exactly the most modular/flexible program around...
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For the actual rendering, yes, it's easier (though not strictly necessary - as was pointed out, a 666 colorcube works fine, though I prefer 884 aka 332 (bits) since you can optimize it a little better for speed and it gives you more colors - technicolor be damned :) but I was referring to the actual conversion to a .gif. After everything's rendered, it easily takes less than 256 colors. As such, there'd be no artifacts due to GIF compression.
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Now, what I'd *really* like to see is an X server based on AA. Wouldn't it be cool to have network-transparent fullscreen ASCII graphics for everything? ASCII-art Netscape!
:)
Actually, if there's an SVGAlib-based X server, then I guess one could just use the aalib wrapper. Then we could even get X under aalib under graphical X... that'd rock.
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Am I the only one whose feet hurt after looking at that twisted GNOME logo? I mean, damn, I feel sore thinking about the sorts of orthopedics that poor gnome has to go through. :)
.z, .gz and .zip, and you don't see executables degrading in quality when they're compressed, right?
.zip was a lossy compression scheme. His reasoning was this: "When I install Doom, the graphics are just fine. But then when I zip it then unzip it and get up close to someone, the graphics are all chunky!" I had to explain to him how data is data, .zip doesn't know what's image and what's executable, etc.etc., and if .zip were lossy, then doom wouldn't even *run* much less display lossy graphics quality.
.png will! It's a fractal compression sceheme, IIRC, right?
The reason my head hurts is from slamming my head on the table from their statement regarding image quality: "Please note that the GIF compression may have added artifacts to the images." Sure, if there were more than 256 colors, this may have been the case, but if that was a concern, they could have used a less-colorful titlebar and window decorations, and even as they are they don't look like they'd need 64 colors, much less 256 (though that overly-colorful bitmap in the corner could be a problem). If they didn't want artifacts, they could have just used a somewhat less-colorful test image. Remember, folks, GIF is *non-lossy*. It uses a similar compression scheme to
Heh, this reminds me of some luser on IRC a few years ago, who was insisting that
Anyway. If any image format will cause lossiness,
That said, the new antialiasing features look very, very nice, althouhg that seems that it'd be at the loss of network-transparency. Although most Linux users these days run their X, clients on the same machine as the server, many still use X terminals in a computer lab in a distributed environment. I hope that there'll be a configuration option to turn anti-aliasing off so that we can keep server-side rendering and reduce the bandwidth overhead (not to mention that server-side is much faster and much less resource-intensive if you have an accelerated graphics card, like almost everyone does now). Anti-aliasing is the sort of thing which should go into the server, not the client, for the most part.
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DTED level-0 data (which is sufficient for any mapping program) is a free download from the NIMA (www.nima.mil, I believe). It's a rather simple (and actually open) format, though it can be a bit hard to comprehend since all of the format stuff refers to it physically on a tape, but I have some source for reading DTED data (any level) which I wrote on a mapping project, which I'm allowed to do with as I see fit (long story). It's basically a bitmapped data file, except that the data is all in signed-magnitude (I have no idea why) instead of 2's complement, though the conversion is real easy, esp. for values >0. :) The format also has stuff for correcting for the satellite's position and all that, though all of the data I've seen (both level 0 and level 1) is pre-processed to put it on a straight grid anyway.
Also, DTED level 1 is free (beer) under the oft-mentioned FIAA, though it's not free (speech) as its distribution is controlled, IIRC.
As for terrain feature data, there's ITD and VPF, but I'm pretty sure that's controlled, and neither format is very pretty. ITD is basically setup like a funky quasi-vector raster format (don't ask), and VPF is setup like a relational database. Yuck.
Oh, the NIMA *has* put out some code, called NIMA-MUSE, which will read any NIMA format, though I've found it to be horrifically buggy. It can't even read DTED level-1. Actually, I couldn't figure out *how* to get it to read *any* DTED level. It read VPF adequately, though it was very slow (like, it took several minutes to read a small file on a P166), and I never got to try it on ITD. I'm pretty sure that the source for MUSE is free (speech) though.
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This is somewhat similar to the horrible ResRocket DRGN situation. All of their servers are Linux-based, but they have no plans of supporting Linux for a client. They say that if you can get it to work under an emulator, great (which won't happen until Wine does proper lowlevel MIDI support, rather than just remapping the MCI device - if this is no longer the case, PLEASE let me know!) and one guy who used to work there almost did a shell of a half-assed port of the client to Linux... which didn't work. :P
:P
So until then, it's not worth the effort to reboot into Windoze just to try to jam semi-live with people online and find out that everyone on is only listening, nobody's playing. A song of mine on there ("Lackluster") was still sitting there, untouched and undeleted (obviously), for several months last time I connected. I think it was in studio 17. Also last time I connected, I tried to get people to jam with me, and I just ended up recording a solo jazz improv for a while, and then gave up, lonely and depressed.
If I want to do that, there's several Linux MIDI sequencers already.
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Recently, a large manufacturer of cashew-based products had to issue a recall of a lot of cashew butter. The reason?
They forgot to put on a warning label stating that it was made using cashews and may cause an allergic reaction to those allergic to cashews.
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