Trac works pretty well as an internal bug tracking system where tight integration with the version control repository is important to you. Making it easy for tickets and commits to reference one another can be really helpful. I can't imagine it would be appropriate for the situation being asked about here though.
The current Bugzilla feature list includes time tracking; I'm curious if you tried that but didn't find it adequate, or was that just added since you last upgraded?
Yeah, pretty shabby mistake when you can easily see the commercial multiple places to confirm it's "soft". My God, I'd forgotten how hideous that car was.
Sometimes cycle counts still matter, because not everybody is using a GHz machine--ask any good embedded systems programmer. Back in the 1MHz days when I got started, you never counted up if you could count down instead because it cost you a couple of cycles per loop; standard practice to any 6502 or Z-80 programmer.
When you have a fixed divisor and only care about a limited range, it's possible to reduce integer division to set of more primitive operations like shift/add, which used to be much faster on older hardware. A good example is http://www.agner.org/optimize/optimizing_assembly.pdf , P137 shows a division by 10 method. Table 9.1 breaks down how much slower integer division is than these smaller operations.
Not that any of this really matters, because of course the screen output is the only bottleneck in your program. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a lawn to keep clear.
You damn wasteful kids, just using a CMP like it doesn't cost anything. For the love God, can't you just load bx with the upper boundary and use dec/jnz in that loop? Been faster since day one, and both instructions execute in one cycle on the Pentium and later. Makes it easier to turn into a subroutine, too--make setting bx the first instruction, then you just can put the number you want to sum up to into bx and jump into the second instruction.
Don't even get me started on how you just throw in a div there like they're giving them away for free at the store or something.
The vouchers automatically expire after 90 days. I recall some doom and gloom about this program running out of money some time ago, based on the rate at which vouchers were being issued. Lots of people ordered them immediately, not realizing the expiration date, and discovered there wasn't much hardware you could spend them on yet. But since many of them weren't used that allocated money went back into the available pool again, just like your voucher will after it expires.
The main thing that's different now is that vouchers ordered recently won't expire before the DTV transition, so if the program runs out of money now there won't be a chance to recycle recently issued but unused vouchers until after the deadline.
I have about a dozen Model M keyboards manufactured from 1993 to 1996. The typing feel on the one Unicomp Model M I purchased wasn't the same, they may be using some of the same manufacturing process but the result isn't as good.
It seems to me that even the genuine Model Ms went downhill over the years. All of my 1993 and 1994 samples ("Manufactured for IBM by Lexmark") have noticeably better tactile feedback than any of the 95 and 96 models. After researching why that was, I found notes about reducing the price of keyboards in Lexmark's plans for 1995, so that's probably the root cause here. Basically, if it's not a pre-1995 Model M, it's not a good one as far as I've been able to tell.
If they've have made Megaman 9 any easier, it wouldn't have been as interesting. Had I been able to defeat any boss in any reasonable amount of time, I'd have declared it another boring clone and ignored it. The only reason I got hooked on it was because it was infuriatingly difficult even for those who can breeze right through the older titles.
Hint: do Galaxy Man first, that's the only boss you can beat with only moderate skills and no upgrades. Expect it to take a while (and probably a purchased E tank or two) before you can beat any of the others.
TFA is talking about the OFX interface to their bank not working. OFX in GnuCash is handled by the aqbanking library, which switched to using gnutls rather than OpenSSL a while ago. I didn't find any specific mention of EV certificates on the GNU TLS web page, but since it does support X.509 certificates I wouldn't expect there to be a problem.
I suspect the post you labeled a troll is in fact just someone who has an earlier version of GnuCash and/or aqbanking that's not setup correctly, because it's only very recently that all that worked like it's supposed to out of the box. For example, you need Ubuntu Intrepid for OFXDirectConnect to work--it takes a backport to even make the Hardy GnuCash work correctly here. This code is pretty new, and as you can see on that wiki page it can be difficult to setup, so I wouldn't be surprised to find it still doesn't work for some people.
VirtualBox has supported guest apps running on the host's desktop for a while now, long before Unity was available. I'm glad VMWare has finally caught up, I gave up waiting on them for that feature months ago and just adopted VirtualBox.
The snapshot support in VirtualBox is rudimentary and has some serious undocumented limitations (like not being able to copy a snapshot). But since disk space is cheap and I value the freedom that comes with having source code to the applications I rely on, I just copy the VirtualBox snapshots manually, let them gobble up more room as needed, and continue ignoring VMWare. Having a slicker snapshot interface would be worth $200, but it's not worth making myself dependant on a piece of proprietary software.
VirtualBox can have the same kind of new kernel issues as VMWare. I went over tracking one of those down my blog (and this month went over working around the limitations in VirtualBox that prevent you from cloning a snapshot image).
I've found the stuff that VirtualBox has issues with straighforward to work around for the usual reason that makes open-source software easier to cope with: when I do run into a bug or limitation, it's sometimes possible to poke at the source code to figure out what's going on. In that snapshot cloning case, a quick read of CloneToImage and its associated code gave me a decent idea what was going on. That's why I run it instead of VMWare player: given anything close to feature parity, I'll take a slightly buggy program I can see the source code to over one that's closed.
Re:Chiropractic treatment worked for me
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Wait, were you suggesting the muscle relaxants were the more dangerous approach? That's not right at all.
Re:Chiropractic treatment worked for me
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 1
Chiropractic manipulation is effective at increasing mobility to some of your spine, with the lower back being the most likely place to see an improvement. Sometimes muscle pain is caused by your back ending up stuck in a bad position, and just loosening things up in the area is sufficient to get your body to settle into a more comfortable one. I've had similar temporary relief to what you describe for some neck symptoms after a chiropractic visit. (It took a good physical therapist to actually resolve the problem though)
Unfortunately, what chiropractors think they are doing is lining up your spine, which can't happen--studies have proven that doesn't work, and the only way to affect a real change there is by training your muscles to hold yourself in better alignment. This makes visiting them kind of scary, because since they don't actually understand how what they're doing really impacts your body they correspondingly don't know when their manipulation is useful and when it's a bad idea. I watched someone nearly die because a chiropractor thought he could "realign" their neck, when in fact what they needed urgently was to visit a real doctor--part of the bone in her spine had disintegrated, and the chiropractor's X-rays were so crappy he didn't even see it.
I'd suggest that anyone considering chiropractic care read "The Multifidus Back Pain Solution" by Jim Johnson. He's got a chapter in there that addresses this issue quite fairly. He talks about what manipulation can be useful for, while referencing studies that show what the limitations are. It's wrong to dismiss chiropractic care as useless, because there are some very real problems it can be effective treatment for, but the way they play with things they don't really understand is rather scary. In just about every case where someone sees a chiropractor, they'd be better off seeing a physical therapist. They can do the same kinds of manipulations, but they also know when that's not the appropriate therapy and when you need to get more serious medical attention.
That will work fine for a server, as long as you have reasonable expectations for the result. I used to have a server with extremely similar specs here running Linux as a file server, and it's only recently I retired it. I was hard pressed to get much over 200Mbps out of it over the PCI gigabit card I put in there. That's at the low side of real gigabit results, but completely acceptable for most purposes.
I've had nothing but trouble using a regular server OS as a wireless router though. Wasted lots of time trying to get stuff like VPNs and torrents working and similarly tweaking the firewall rules. Nowadays I just buy cheap routers that run DD-WRT instead. For example, the same Linksys router I have that used to have weird problems all the time like you describe (needed regular resets just to work normally) is rock solid running the DD-WRT firmware instead--uptime in months instead of days.
Particularly with cache, storage vendors across the board are offensively stingy (16 gigs of high-quality ECC RAM costs maybe $800, but you'll be lucky if your $100k SAN comes with half that amount).
Sure, but a good SAN has to worry about not losing that cache in case of a power failure, which adds a series of costs and design trade-offs that drive the cost up beyond just the RAM. If you've got an application that wrote and then fsync'd the write, the SAN will say it's committed to the OS once it reaches the write cache. That type of write caching is essential for accelerating database commits for example. But once you've done that, you cannot lose the results, as some applications will end up with inconsistency that ends up corrupting the file if that the writes it did before the fsync are partially committed. So a SAN write cache needs to worry about powering the RAM from a battery if there's a failure, and the good ones will set aside a chunk of a disk just for the purpose of dumping this data there in a hurry for an emergency shutdown. (This can be much, much faster than writing it to the actual disks because the cache can be filled with random writes while the dedicated save area is a contiguous block).
That's one reason why it's not really fair to compare a chunk of RAM to an enterprise grade write caching solution. Sort off topic for the purpose of a home server, unless you want to run a database on one of its mount points that is.
Excel is great for manipulating large sets of data.
Except if the data set if actually large. 1M rows barely makes for a trivial set of test data in my world.
It wouldn't be so bad if at least the answers Excel gave were right on the tiny sets it does support.
Spreadsheet addiction is a good intro to its many flaws; the issues outlined in "Poor statistics" alone are sufficient to render it worthless for the topic of discussion here.
SanDisk Sansa Fuze. Fully geek buzzword compliant--they list Linux and Mac OS support right on the spec sheet (it just looks like a hard drive), and last month's firmware update added support for FLAC and OGG. Main downsides: no large capacity models available--limited to 8GB, although you can add capacity via SD expansion. And it can't match the iPod dock ubiquity in car stereos etc.
Ubuntu has documented the list of 32-bit libraries you need for their distribution, with a whole procedure laid out on their community documentation for how to use a 32-bit Firefox on a 64-bit platform. I found that to be a little weird in regards to getting the Firefox profiles for the two installs to work the way I wanted to, but the actual 32-bit Firefox + 32-bit Flash 9 worked fine as an additional option to the default 64-bit Firefox.
I didn't say it was unstable, just that it would run much hotter than it should. All the fans were running around the clock sometimes, and I was looking into whether I needed even more of them in the larger enclosure because it was cooking the rest of the stuff in the cabinet. That never led to a crash, only the inevitable reduced system life that results from extra heat.
My MythTV box had this intermittent problem where it would overheat. Finally tracked it down recently--it only happened when the program guide page was left open, and the animated content preview (showing you a thumbnail preview of the program) was running. Turned that feature off and problem went away. So there's a case where some silly eye-candy was actually causing the system to have dramatically lower reliability, as the CPU and hard drive would have both been under dramatically lower load had it never been invented.
It makes me kind of sad that anyone has wasted programming resources on animating "transitions between screens" when the basic UI still needs so much work to be friendlier. It looks like some of that has managed to get done anyway though, the sample program display with the categories in a tabbed view is a huge improvement over the old default here. Accidentally scrolling the category up or down instead of the program listing is the most common thing Tivo users trying a MythTV box do if you sit them down in front of one for the first time. I still fall prey to that myself sometimes.
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Trac works pretty well as an internal bug tracking system where tight integration with the version control repository is important to you. Making it easy for tickets and commits to reference one another can be really helpful. I can't imagine it would be appropriate for the situation being asked about here though.
The current Bugzilla feature list includes time tracking; I'm curious if you tried that but didn't find it adequate, or was that just added since you last upgraded?
"...And Justice For All" does appear as part of the Rock Band downloadable content.
I'm surprised it's not tagged "itsatrap" yet.
Bah; a real editor would have found the pro-Dvorak rebuttal, which (like TFA) is also ancient history.
Yeah, pretty shabby mistake when you can easily see the commercial multiple places to confirm it's "soft". My God, I'd forgotten how hideous that car was.
Sometimes cycle counts still matter, because not everybody is using a GHz machine--ask any good embedded systems programmer. Back in the 1MHz days when I got started, you never counted up if you could count down instead because it cost you a couple of cycles per loop; standard practice to any 6502 or Z-80 programmer.
When you have a fixed divisor and only care about a limited range, it's possible to reduce integer division to set of more primitive operations like shift/add, which used to be much faster on older hardware. A good example is http://www.agner.org/optimize/optimizing_assembly.pdf , P137 shows a division by 10 method. Table 9.1 breaks down how much slower integer division is than these smaller operations.
Not that any of this really matters, because of course the screen output is the only bottleneck in your program. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a lawn to keep clear.
You damn wasteful kids, just using a CMP like it doesn't cost anything. For the love God, can't you just load bx with the upper boundary and use dec/jnz in that loop? Been faster since day one, and both instructions execute in one cycle on the Pentium and later. Makes it easier to turn into a subroutine, too--make setting bx the first instruction, then you just can put the number you want to sum up to into bx and jump into the second instruction.
Don't even get me started on how you just throw in a div there like they're giving them away for free at the store or something.
The vouchers automatically expire after 90 days. I recall some doom and gloom about this program running out of money some time ago, based on the rate at which vouchers were being issued. Lots of people ordered them immediately, not realizing the expiration date, and discovered there wasn't much hardware you could spend them on yet. But since many of them weren't used that allocated money went back into the available pool again, just like your voucher will after it expires.
The main thing that's different now is that vouchers ordered recently won't expire before the DTV transition, so if the program runs out of money now there won't be a chance to recycle recently issued but unused vouchers until after the deadline.
I have about a dozen Model M keyboards manufactured from 1993 to 1996. The typing feel on the one Unicomp Model M I purchased wasn't the same, they may be using some of the same manufacturing process but the result isn't as good.
It seems to me that even the genuine Model Ms went downhill over the years. All of my 1993 and 1994 samples ("Manufactured for IBM by Lexmark") have noticeably better tactile feedback than any of the 95 and 96 models. After researching why that was, I found notes about reducing the price of keyboards in Lexmark's plans for 1995, so that's probably the root cause here. Basically, if it's not a pre-1995 Model M, it's not a good one as far as I've been able to tell.
If they've have made Megaman 9 any easier, it wouldn't have been as interesting. Had I been able to defeat any boss in any reasonable amount of time, I'd have declared it another boring clone and ignored it. The only reason I got hooked on it was because it was infuriatingly difficult even for those who can breeze right through the older titles.
Hint: do Galaxy Man first, that's the only boss you can beat with only moderate skills and no upgrades. Expect it to take a while (and probably a purchased E tank or two) before you can beat any of the others.
TFA is talking about the OFX interface to their bank not working. OFX in GnuCash is handled by the aqbanking library, which switched to using gnutls rather than OpenSSL a while ago. I didn't find any specific mention of EV certificates on the GNU TLS web page, but since it does support X.509 certificates I wouldn't expect there to be a problem.
I suspect the post you labeled a troll is in fact just someone who has an earlier version of GnuCash and/or aqbanking that's not setup correctly, because it's only very recently that all that worked like it's supposed to out of the box. For example, you need Ubuntu Intrepid for OFXDirectConnect to work--it takes a backport to even make the Hardy GnuCash work correctly here. This code is pretty new, and as you can see on that wiki page it can be difficult to setup, so I wouldn't be surprised to find it still doesn't work for some people.
VirtualBox has supported guest apps running on the host's desktop for a while now, long before Unity was available. I'm glad VMWare has finally caught up, I gave up waiting on them for that feature months ago and just adopted VirtualBox.
The snapshot support in VirtualBox is rudimentary and has some serious undocumented limitations (like not being able to copy a snapshot). But since disk space is cheap and I value the freedom that comes with having source code to the applications I rely on, I just copy the VirtualBox snapshots manually, let them gobble up more room as needed, and continue ignoring VMWare. Having a slicker snapshot interface would be worth $200, but it's not worth making myself dependant on a piece of proprietary software.
VirtualBox can have the same kind of new kernel issues as VMWare. I went over tracking one of those down my blog (and this month went over working around the limitations in VirtualBox that prevent you from cloning a snapshot image).
I've found the stuff that VirtualBox has issues with straighforward to work around for the usual reason that makes open-source software easier to cope with: when I do run into a bug or limitation, it's sometimes possible to poke at the source code to figure out what's going on. In that snapshot cloning case, a quick read of CloneToImage and its associated code gave me a decent idea what was going on. That's why I run it instead of VMWare player: given anything close to feature parity, I'll take a slightly buggy program I can see the source code to over one that's closed.
Right, one of them is much more likely to kill you on the spot.
Wait, were you suggesting the muscle relaxants were the more dangerous approach? That's not right at all.
Chiropractic manipulation is effective at increasing mobility to some of your spine, with the lower back being the most likely place to see an improvement. Sometimes muscle pain is caused by your back ending up stuck in a bad position, and just loosening things up in the area is sufficient to get your body to settle into a more comfortable one. I've had similar temporary relief to what you describe for some neck symptoms after a chiropractic visit. (It took a good physical therapist to actually resolve the problem though)
Unfortunately, what chiropractors think they are doing is lining up your spine, which can't happen--studies have proven that doesn't work, and the only way to affect a real change there is by training your muscles to hold yourself in better alignment. This makes visiting them kind of scary, because since they don't actually understand how what they're doing really impacts your body they correspondingly don't know when their manipulation is useful and when it's a bad idea. I watched someone nearly die because a chiropractor thought he could "realign" their neck, when in fact what they needed urgently was to visit a real doctor--part of the bone in her spine had disintegrated, and the chiropractor's X-rays were so crappy he didn't even see it.
I'd suggest that anyone considering chiropractic care read "The Multifidus Back Pain Solution" by Jim Johnson. He's got a chapter in there that addresses this issue quite fairly. He talks about what manipulation can be useful for, while referencing studies that show what the limitations are. It's wrong to dismiss chiropractic care as useless, because there are some very real problems it can be effective treatment for, but the way they play with things they don't really understand is rather scary. In just about every case where someone sees a chiropractor, they'd be better off seeing a physical therapist. They can do the same kinds of manipulations, but they also know when that's not the appropriate therapy and when you need to get more serious medical attention.
That will work fine for a server, as long as you have reasonable expectations for the result. I used to have a server with extremely similar specs here running Linux as a file server, and it's only recently I retired it. I was hard pressed to get much over 200Mbps out of it over the PCI gigabit card I put in there. That's at the low side of real gigabit results, but completely acceptable for most purposes.
I've had nothing but trouble using a regular server OS as a wireless router though. Wasted lots of time trying to get stuff like VPNs and torrents working and similarly tweaking the firewall rules. Nowadays I just buy cheap routers that run DD-WRT instead. For example, the same Linksys router I have that used to have weird problems all the time like you describe (needed regular resets just to work normally) is rock solid running the DD-WRT firmware instead--uptime in months instead of days.
Particularly with cache, storage vendors across the board are offensively stingy (16 gigs of high-quality ECC RAM costs maybe $800, but you'll be lucky if your $100k SAN comes with half that amount).
Sure, but a good SAN has to worry about not losing that cache in case of a power failure, which adds a series of costs and design trade-offs that drive the cost up beyond just the RAM. If you've got an application that wrote and then fsync'd the write, the SAN will say it's committed to the OS once it reaches the write cache. That type of write caching is essential for accelerating database commits for example. But once you've done that, you cannot lose the results, as some applications will end up with inconsistency that ends up corrupting the file if that the writes it did before the fsync are partially committed. So a SAN write cache needs to worry about powering the RAM from a battery if there's a failure, and the good ones will set aside a chunk of a disk just for the purpose of dumping this data there in a hurry for an emergency shutdown. (This can be much, much faster than writing it to the actual disks because the cache can be filled with random writes while the dedicated save area is a contiguous block).
That's one reason why it's not really fair to compare a chunk of RAM to an enterprise grade write caching solution. Sort off topic for the purpose of a home server, unless you want to run a database on one of its mount points that is.
Excel is great for manipulating large sets of data.
Except if the data set if actually large. 1M rows barely makes for a trivial set of test data in my world.
It wouldn't be so bad if at least the answers Excel gave were right on the tiny sets it does support.
Spreadsheet addiction is a good intro to its many flaws; the issues outlined in "Poor statistics" alone are sufficient to render it worthless for the topic of discussion here.
Guess you missed this antitrust lawsuit over the iPod?
I'm still waiting for the Nintendo Power Glove interface to the game
SanDisk Sansa Fuze. Fully geek buzzword compliant--they list Linux and Mac OS support right on the spec sheet (it just looks like a hard drive), and last month's firmware update added support for FLAC and OGG. Main downsides: no large capacity models available--limited to 8GB, although you can add capacity via SD expansion. And it can't match the iPod dock ubiquity in car stereos etc.
Ubuntu has documented the list of 32-bit libraries you need for their distribution, with a whole procedure laid out on their community documentation for how to use a 32-bit Firefox on a 64-bit platform. I found that to be a little weird in regards to getting the Firefox profiles for the two installs to work the way I wanted to, but the actual 32-bit Firefox + 32-bit Flash 9 worked fine as an additional option to the default 64-bit Firefox.
I didn't say it was unstable, just that it would run much hotter than it should. All the fans were running around the clock sometimes, and I was looking into whether I needed even more of them in the larger enclosure because it was cooking the rest of the stuff in the cabinet. That never led to a crash, only the inevitable reduced system life that results from extra heat.
My MythTV box had this intermittent problem where it would overheat. Finally tracked it down recently--it only happened when the program guide page was left open, and the animated content preview (showing you a thumbnail preview of the program) was running. Turned that feature off and problem went away. So there's a case where some silly eye-candy was actually causing the system to have dramatically lower reliability, as the CPU and hard drive would have both been under dramatically lower load had it never been invented.
It makes me kind of sad that anyone has wasted programming resources on animating "transitions between screens" when the basic UI still needs so much work to be friendlier. It looks like some of that has managed to get done anyway though, the sample program display with the categories in a tabbed view is a huge improvement over the old default here. Accidentally scrolling the category up or down instead of the program listing is the most common thing Tivo users trying a MythTV box do if you sit them down in front of one for the first time. I still fall prey to that myself sometimes.
Been obvious they're circling the drain since the whole LinkScanner debacle