The main problem is dependency hell. The main culprit is shared libraries - including shared libc. The gcc compiler/linker package can still use static libraries. An alternative is to ship ALL libraries with the binary, isolate them to a single directory, and have a script set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH before starting the main binary.
OK, so I'm a little down on shared libraries. They add overhead to runtime. They mostly don't decrease memory and disk usage (except highly used libraries like libc). They just aren't worth it.
Mark Twain said something like, Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.
Let's say that I think I'm scientifically literate. Let's also say that I think that I can write. Further, let's say that my local paper doesn't have a science section. Clearly, I should contact my paper and get hired for a weekly column.
One thing that has irked me over the years is that even papers with really good science reporters still end up using utterly awful AP articles. Since these things were written for the entire nation, shouldn't a little care be taken to get it right?
Two years ago, i replaced my car's tape player, which died after only 15 years of service, with an MP3 CD player. I cut a CD with 14 hours of my favorite stuff. I put the CD in the car, set it up to play in shuffle mode, and set out on a cross country trip. It was great. Just before i arrived, i heard a repeat. I was so disgusted i hit the eject button. Fortunately, i had another disc with me. Feh, i said. Can't even go 750 miles without having to change the CD.
My no-name 350 MHz Pentium II should have had a 100 Mhz FSB. The default setting was 103 Mhz in the BIOS, making the default system a 360 Mhz system. The BIOS had five settings for the FSB speed. 66 MHz, 100 Mhz, 103 Mhz, 107 Mhz and 117 Mhz. The low three speeds were stable. 107 Mhz tended to run for most of a day, and then would crash. If the system was powered off and allowed to cool, the 117 Mhz setting would run find for about 10 minutes - just long enough to run a quick benchmark. The Pii died - well, both ISA controllers died, and i stopped using it. It lasted five years.
Not published in the article is that the honeymonkeys were duped into revealing credit card numbers, costing Micro$oft hundreds of thousands of dollars.
While the article has some good general points, and, IMO, some bad ones, it fails to tell me what I really want to know.
A good point is that replacement ink can be expensive. However, it does not suggest a way to determine if a particular model suffers from expensive ink or not. Really. How can anyone determine if some HP model gets 30 sheets or 500 from a refill by research alone? The only way to do it is to buy one and try it. Too late!
My strategy is to find cheap off brand refills. I buy $100 of ink at a time to save on shipping, but i get easily five times the ink that i'd get using the printer brand ink for that money. Not all models are supported, so go to one of the online companies and look up prices.
I want a TCO breakdown for many models of ink jet and laser printer. Aquisition cost, cost per page, feature list. Then i can select those features i want, and from my usage, i can figure out what model to get.
Another issue that is simply not addressed. Does your OS support that model? For Linux, Ghostscript lists supported models, more or less. In the past, i chose an IBM model for which the codes were published, and wrote my own driver. This was a filter that accepted PBM Plus bitmaps for input and converted them to escape sequences and data. I miss it now, because it was so much faster than Ghostscript.
In the 1800's, the train schedules were printed using the siderial time at each stop. Since siderial time is differant for each location, you couldn't subtract two times to find out how long it took to get from one station to the next.
But now we have electronics to perform arithmetic. Further, we have GPS, which can tell you where you are to high precision. Combining these allows you to have a sideral time watch that keeps up with the time zone continuously. The whole computation problem goes away (is taken care of) and siderial time just works.
Alternative, cheaper technology for a wristwatch is the FlintStones style sun dial. Hard to get the microsecond accuracy available from GPS, but probably good enough for those on a budget.
I may or may not view the trailer. I've read
the book, so it won't spoil much for me.
But what I was interested in was the release
date. It claims November 2005.
DVDs by Christmas? I doubt it. My Birthday
(late January)? I doubt it.
One, if a literal interpretation of the Bible is correct
It's worse. It's a literal interpretation based
on a bad translation. It's really common to
use, for example, the King James English version,
or even the Volgate (latin), rather than more
original ancient greek texts. The greek does
not use the word "day".
The Roman Catholic Church still preaches science
based on Aristotle, arguably obsolete in his own time. For example, a Sun centered solar system
predates Aristotle.
And then, one must ask, for what? What
possible use is an ignorant congregation,
who will believe any drivel even in direct
contradiction of evidence?
This is great news for me. I'm working
in a Sybase envirionment. This will let
me set up a more complete independant
development environment. Sure, there
are single tables larger than 5 GB in
production. I don't need it all for test,
however. I'm not going to stress it
enough for the 1 CPU limitation to be
a restriction.
In the last days of a.out, limited dynamic shared library support was available. It was a pain.
It meant that not every binary used it.
Now we have installation hell, borne of the same
DLL nonsense that make installing apps on Windows
hellish. And for much the same reasons.
Mostly dependencies.
Not only do you have to have This version 1.5.3, but you have to have That version
2.0.4 (beta). You install a new distribution,
and gee whiz, libc.so.4 isn't available. So
all your old binaries need to be reinstalled,
or you have to go find a libc.so.4, and perhaps
others.
Now, we could insist that distributed, non
distribution binaries be compiled statically.
However, the idiots that be decided that
static compilation should not be the default.
Why not? If I'm going to take the time to
compile something, what makes anyone think
that I want to do that again, after every
distribution installation, by default?
Feh.
Of course, at this point, I need Elf compatibility.
My 1988 Mazda 626 has an EPA rating of 32.
My average is
about 37. On a trip, it has gotten 41 MPG. This
last was astounding - but hard to dispute. It
got 615 miles from it's 15 gallon tank.
When people say, "My SUV gets great mileage - 25 MPG", I'm thinking, "But my '626 gets 27 MPG
towing a boat. It'd likely do better than
25 MPG towing your truck."
My 626 has a 16 valve 2.2 liter engine with
a 5 speed manual. The high gear is pretty
high, and I spend most of my time in it.
Using cruise control seems to give me 3 or 4
MPG under similar conditions.
Going 65 MPH rather than 75 MPH gives me
approximately 17% improvement in fuel economy.
That is, at 65 MPH I get 40 MPG. At 75 MPH,
I get more like 34. It's still legal to
drive at 65 MPH in a 70 MPH zone as far as
I know.
My other cars typically have gotten mileage
quite close to the EPA.
Last year, I drove 35,000 miles. I've done
the math. Gas is a significant expense for me.
Insurance is cheap on a 16 year old car.
Maintenance has been very low.
My previous car, a 1978 Dodge Omni, had a life
time average of 27 MPG. However, just after
I installed the cruise control, I went on a
trip. I set the cruise for indicated 55 MPH,
and drove for 8 hours. I pulled into a gas
station, and was only able to put 10 gallons
into the tank. I had gone 400 miles. That's
40 MPG. It's also 50 MPH. So, the speedometer
read low by about 5 MPH, and the car went a
long way at 50 MPH. It had a 1.7 liter engine
with a 4 speed manual. Forth gear was really
too low. I really did not need all that torque
once at highway speed. However, car companies
seem to think that torque sells cars - in all
gears. So, few cars come with a proper
cruising gear, in my opinion.
Consider Text To Speech. The computer reads
text. Then all you need is text.
For entertainment, try Project Gutenberg.
10,000 out of copyright books. Science
tends to be historic. There are four on
astronomy - including one in poetry.
I wanted an engineering degree. External discipline
is a waste of time for me. Given something I'm
interested in, I'm plenty self-motivated.
For engineering, I went with Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester Mass. When I was there, it
was strictly pass/fail, with failing grades
dropped from the transcript. I understand that
it's now A/B/C with failing grades dropped.
It's no joke. It's quite expensive, and only
about 30% actually get a degree. However, you
get the freedom to take the courses you want
and persue projects free form. There are two
degree requirement projects. Mine both required
four terms (semesters). I worked both in teams,
though that isn't strictly required.
External, forced discipline is, in my opinion,
demotivational. However, it appears that most
people require it.
WPI is good for undergraduate education in
Engineering and a few sciences (chemistry,
physics, etc.). Don't even consider it if
this isn't what you want.
No school prepares you with knowledge needed
for what you'll do next. WPI prepares you
with how to figure out how to aquire new skills
as you need them. If you get this, you are
ahead of the game.
My last laptop was a 486sx/25. I got it with
4 MB RAM, 170 MB disk. I loaded Slackware on
it, via floppy - the minium set. Then, I'd
load a package, for example GNU Emacs, and
I'd strip it down to what I actually use.
Of the 20 MB of electric language modes, I
only used C and perl, so everything else
went. That was 19 MB of it, and I never missed
it. When all was said and done, I had all
the tools I wanted, and 70 MB free for my stuff.
C compiler, perl, editors, web server, SQL
database. It could compile its own kernels.
Yes, I ran X windows in 4 MB RAM. It was a
bit sluggish, but was usable. I believe I
used FVWM or some derivitive. 640x480 with
16 greys.
I used PLIP to connect to a desktop - and got
a little over 22 KB/sec. I did backups with
tar and gzip to a file on the desktop.
Some time later, I added RAM to it, bringing
it to 16 MB. I ran X all the time.
The hard disk died, and I stopped using it.
In the early 80's, we'd run 35 users on a VAX
with 4 MB RAM. These systems typically had
600 MB disk, total. They were sluggish, but
held up. 4.2 BSD introduced the faster file
system, which seemed to mostly make up for
the additional overhead - which might have been
sendmail.
What I want now, however, is a distribution
without shared libraries. More to the point,
I want packages like FireFox to come compiled
statically. Why did Linux follow Windows
into DLL hell? Who made that decision?
I have a 160 GB disk drive. I don't care if
shared libraries save me a few MB disk.
Shared libraries aren't saving me RAM.
It's inevitable. 7 of 9 was able to overload
the console of an alien across the galaxy,
and I think, "whoa. I'm glad my PC keyboard
is too stupid to have an overload function!".
But hey, I'm set. I've got more than a dozen
486's, which, deployed serially, will last me
decades - as long as I replace the little
clock batteries.
Slashdot Mirror
The main problem is dependency hell. The main culprit is shared libraries - including shared libc. The gcc compiler/linker package can still use static libraries. An alternative is to ship ALL libraries with the binary, isolate them to a single directory, and have a script set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH before starting the main binary.
OK, so I'm a little down on shared libraries. They add overhead to runtime. They mostly don't decrease memory and disk usage (except highly used libraries like libc). They just aren't worth it.
Let's say that I think I'm scientifically literate. Let's also say that I think that I can write. Further, let's say that my local paper doesn't have a science section. Clearly, I should contact my paper and get hired for a weekly column.
One thing that has irked me over the years is that even papers with really good science reporters still end up using utterly awful AP articles. Since these things were written for the entire nation, shouldn't a little care be taken to get it right?
Here on Earth, we have a magnetic shield and an ocean of air. Is there much research on a magnetic shield for spacecraft?
Two years ago, i replaced my car's tape player, which died after only 15 years of service, with an MP3 CD player. I cut a CD with 14 hours of my favorite stuff. I put the CD in the car, set it up to play in shuffle mode, and set out on a cross country trip. It was great. Just before i arrived, i heard a repeat. I was so disgusted i hit the eject button. Fortunately, i had another disc with me. Feh, i said. Can't even go 750 miles without having to change the CD.
My no-name 350 MHz Pentium II should have had a 100 Mhz FSB. The default setting was 103 Mhz in the BIOS, making the default system a 360 Mhz system. The BIOS had five settings for the FSB speed. 66 MHz, 100 Mhz, 103 Mhz, 107 Mhz and 117 Mhz. The low three speeds were stable. 107 Mhz tended to run for most of a day, and then would crash. If the system was powered off and allowed to cool, the 117 Mhz setting would run find for about 10 minutes - just long enough to run a quick benchmark.
The Pii died - well, both ISA controllers died, and i stopped using it. It lasted five years.
Not published in the article is that the honeymonkeys were duped into revealing credit card numbers, costing Micro$oft hundreds of thousands of dollars.
While the article has some good general points, and, IMO, some bad ones, it fails to tell me what I really want to know.
A good point is that replacement ink can be expensive. However, it does not suggest a way to determine if a particular model suffers from expensive ink or not. Really. How can anyone determine if some HP model gets 30 sheets or 500 from a refill by research alone? The only way to do it is to buy one and try it. Too late!
My strategy is to find cheap off brand refills. I buy $100 of ink at a time to save on shipping, but i get easily five times the ink that i'd get using the printer brand ink for that money. Not all models are supported, so go to one of the online companies and look up prices.
I want a TCO breakdown for many models of ink jet and laser printer. Aquisition cost, cost per page, feature list. Then i can select those features i want, and from my usage, i can figure out what model to get.
Another issue that is simply not addressed. Does your OS support that model? For Linux, Ghostscript lists supported models, more or less. In the past, i chose an IBM model for which the codes were published, and wrote my own driver. This was a filter that accepted PBM Plus bitmaps for input and converted them to escape sequences and data. I miss it now, because it was so much faster than Ghostscript.
But now we have electronics to perform arithmetic. Further, we have GPS, which can tell you where you are to high precision. Combining these allows you to have a sideral time watch that keeps up with the time zone continuously. The whole computation problem goes away (is taken care of) and siderial time just works.
Alternative, cheaper technology for a wristwatch is the FlintStones style sun dial. Hard to get the microsecond accuracy available from GPS, but probably good enough for those on a budget.
http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/9/7/4/1
5 megabits can be etched into your fingernail.
DVDs by Christmas? I doubt it. My Birthday (late January)? I doubt it.
In addition, there is a stereographic camera currently in orbit around Mars.
It's worse. It's a literal interpretation based on a bad translation. It's really common to use, for example, the King James English version, or even the Volgate (latin), rather than more original ancient greek texts. The greek does not use the word "day".
The Roman Catholic Church still preaches science based on Aristotle, arguably obsolete in his own time. For example, a Sun centered solar system predates Aristotle.
And then, one must ask, for what? What possible use is an ignorant congregation, who will believe any drivel even in direct contradiction of evidence?
It gives all of Christianity a bad name.
And they call themselves conservative.
The list appears to be alphabetical. Homo Sapiens should be under H.
I've been using Postgres for this.
I have some working 486's in my basement.
I'll let them go cheap!
Buyer pays shipping.
Flat screens are still going to have to get
much cheaper before CRTs go away.
Now we have installation hell, borne of the same DLL nonsense that make installing apps on Windows hellish. And for much the same reasons. Mostly dependencies. Not only do you have to have This version 1.5.3, but you have to have That version 2.0.4 (beta). You install a new distribution, and gee whiz, libc.so.4 isn't available. So all your old binaries need to be reinstalled, or you have to go find a libc.so.4, and perhaps others.
Now, we could insist that distributed, non distribution binaries be compiled statically. However, the idiots that be decided that static compilation should not be the default. Why not? If I'm going to take the time to compile something, what makes anyone think that I want to do that again, after every distribution installation, by default?
Feh.
Of course, at this point, I need Elf compatibility.
Life time average: 21 MPG.
However, the EPA is getting it. Total emissions are more closely related to total fuel burned than by other factors.
When people say, "My SUV gets great mileage - 25 MPG", I'm thinking, "But my '626 gets 27 MPG towing a boat. It'd likely do better than 25 MPG towing your truck."
My 626 has a 16 valve 2.2 liter engine with a 5 speed manual. The high gear is pretty high, and I spend most of my time in it.
Using cruise control seems to give me 3 or 4 MPG under similar conditions. Going 65 MPH rather than 75 MPH gives me approximately 17% improvement in fuel economy. That is, at 65 MPH I get 40 MPG. At 75 MPH, I get more like 34. It's still legal to drive at 65 MPH in a 70 MPH zone as far as I know.
My other cars typically have gotten mileage quite close to the EPA.
Last year, I drove 35,000 miles. I've done the math. Gas is a significant expense for me. Insurance is cheap on a 16 year old car. Maintenance has been very low.
My previous car, a 1978 Dodge Omni, had a life time average of 27 MPG. However, just after I installed the cruise control, I went on a trip. I set the cruise for indicated 55 MPH, and drove for 8 hours. I pulled into a gas station, and was only able to put 10 gallons into the tank. I had gone 400 miles. That's 40 MPG. It's also 50 MPH. So, the speedometer read low by about 5 MPH, and the car went a long way at 50 MPH. It had a 1.7 liter engine with a 4 speed manual. Forth gear was really too low. I really did not need all that torque once at highway speed. However, car companies seem to think that torque sells cars - in all gears. So, few cars come with a proper cruising gear, in my opinion.
For entertainment, try Project Gutenberg. 10,000 out of copyright books. Science tends to be historic. There are four on astronomy - including one in poetry.
I use festival under Linux for text to speech.
I listen in my car, rather than at work.
For engineering, I went with Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester Mass. When I was there, it was strictly pass/fail, with failing grades dropped from the transcript. I understand that it's now A/B/C with failing grades dropped.
It's no joke. It's quite expensive, and only about 30% actually get a degree. However, you get the freedom to take the courses you want and persue projects free form. There are two degree requirement projects. Mine both required four terms (semesters). I worked both in teams, though that isn't strictly required.
External, forced discipline is, in my opinion, demotivational. However, it appears that most people require it.
WPI is good for undergraduate education in Engineering and a few sciences (chemistry, physics, etc.). Don't even consider it if this isn't what you want.
No school prepares you with knowledge needed for what you'll do next. WPI prepares you with how to figure out how to aquire new skills as you need them. If you get this, you are ahead of the game.
My last laptop was a 486sx/25. I got it with 4 MB RAM, 170 MB disk. I loaded Slackware on it, via floppy - the minium set. Then, I'd load a package, for example GNU Emacs, and I'd strip it down to what I actually use. Of the 20 MB of electric language modes, I only used C and perl, so everything else went. That was 19 MB of it, and I never missed it. When all was said and done, I had all the tools I wanted, and 70 MB free for my stuff. C compiler, perl, editors, web server, SQL database. It could compile its own kernels.
Yes, I ran X windows in 4 MB RAM. It was a bit sluggish, but was usable. I believe I used FVWM or some derivitive. 640x480 with 16 greys.
I used PLIP to connect to a desktop - and got a little over 22 KB/sec. I did backups with tar and gzip to a file on the desktop.
Some time later, I added RAM to it, bringing it to 16 MB. I ran X all the time.
The hard disk died, and I stopped using it.
In the early 80's, we'd run 35 users on a VAX with 4 MB RAM. These systems typically had 600 MB disk, total. They were sluggish, but held up. 4.2 BSD introduced the faster file system, which seemed to mostly make up for the additional overhead - which might have been sendmail.
What I want now, however, is a distribution without shared libraries. More to the point, I want packages like FireFox to come compiled statically. Why did Linux follow Windows into DLL hell? Who made that decision? I have a 160 GB disk drive. I don't care if shared libraries save me a few MB disk. Shared libraries aren't saving me RAM.
Perhaps we'll see virtual petty church political squabbling in the chat rooms. I can hardly wait.
But hey, I'm set. I've got more than a dozen 486's, which, deployed serially, will last me decades - as long as I replace the little clock batteries.