I hate to say this, but the idea of doing this
in the Phillipines (especially the imposition by a non-Phillipine organization) makes the the referenced newspaper article sound like a hoax too.
Be conservative in what you generate, liberal in what you accept.
In other words, only generate documents that are
standards-compliant. But in accepting documents, you shouldn't be penalized for liberally accepting things that are not kosher by the standards.
I don't like Internet Exploder. I don't really
like Netscrape, either. But I won't fault either for rendering a page that's not completely standards compliant; I'd guess that 95% of the pages out there wouldn't render if the browsers
were as strict as, for example, the HTML validator.
I work for a largish non-IT-oriented organization that recently had a committee to allocate fiber bandwidth between various parts of the organization. Each part send a representative to stake out the fiber they needed - or, more appropriately, felt they ought to have. The fire department said they need at least 4 dedicated pairs at all of our hundred locations; police needed at least 6 pairs, etc. Grand total was that if you followed their numbers, we would need over 200 pairs for the whole organization (with only 10000 employees) when in all likelihood the needs could be served with 1 pair.
I think the original poster was referring to the incident a year or two back where a rather serious earthquake in Taiwan took out one of the factorys that produce the wafers
And in Jan. 1995, the Kobe earthquake in Japan took out the factory that makes the black plastic used to encase the memory chips, driving prices up. It's all happened before!
There can be some difficulty in determining, in
a multi-person open source project, who the
author/designer really is. And who did the
coding (good and bad).
This isn't unique to open-source code, of course. For every big succesful commercial project there are plenty of people willing to take credit for the whole thing, too.
While it may seem like the screening process is simplified with these screening tools, in reality he's passing up many qualified candidates for people who plugin repeat certain keywords over and over again
Actually, "PC support" implies repeating the
same things (retry Windows, reboot Windows,
reinstall Windows) over and over again. So maybe repetition in the resume is a good thing!
The problem with all the mainstream distros
is they carry around an enormous amount of
"baggage", in terms of complexity that you
probably don't need. For example: RedHat
installs cron, you don't have any choice about
it. cron needs sendmail. Wham! Bam! You're
stuck with sendmail, even though you probably
don't want it (and in reality you probably do
not need a mail transport on your desktop box
anyway!).
The solution for me: Linux From Scratch. Build exactly what you
need into your system, nothing more!
This is exactly the same as semaphore, a
well-established (if 18th-century) military
communication technology. A
satellite serves as a very tall relay tower:-)
Pre-WWII, getting a degree in physics rarely
meant that you'd spend your life doing basic physics
research. Usually graduates would go into industry, often in chemistry or electronics.
(Read any of Feynman's biography to read about
his early career in the plastics industry.)
From after WWII through the 80's, things were
different: there was a lot of money - usually government money - going into
nuclear and then particle physics research.
There were lots of new academic positions
being created in physics departments, and most of these were basic research.
In the 90's things started swinging the
other way. The Superconducting Supercollider
was canceled. New nuclear physics positions
completely dissapeared early in the decade, and by the end of the decade a lot of particle
physics positions were being cut back. Some
schools eliminated their physics department
entirely. Suddenly physicists that always
had ample research funding from the government were looking at other areas
of research. In retrospect, it became obvious
that the post-war boom was not "normal", it
was the exception.
"Computer speakers" above a certain price
point have expensive-looking styles, but
little else to recommend them. They still
sound tinny, or in the case of subwoofer
systems, tinny and boomy
at the same time.
On the other hand, even a low-end pair of
bookshelf regular-hi-fi speakers have a
naturalness and full-range quality for a
fraction of the price. I use a pair
of fifteen-year-old Radio Shack Minimus 7's that I'm very
happy with.
The only gotcha: computer speakers, by design,
have very wimpy little magnets in them. Hi-fi
speakers tend to have much stronger magnets,
and will require placement much further away
from color monitors.
you can get them on eBay for $30-50 each in 7-9 gig size
Actually, closer to $10 each for the classic
9 gig ST410800N. Shipping costs will
dominate.
I'd include 5.25" HP drives from the early-mid-90's in the same category as "built to
last forever", too. Don't see as many of them,
but the C3323 and its brethern are rock-solid.
You say that when you fsck your ext2 filesystems,
you get errors. I'm assuming
that you're only running fsck on dismounted
partitions here.
This indicates, to me, some hardware flakiness
on your end. (Even though you say this happens
on a wide variety of hardware.) In every
account I've seen, journaling filesystems are
more stressful on the hardware because -
surprise! - the journal is constantly being
written to. I'd stick to ext2 if I were you,
and figure out why you get any
errors when you fsck a dismounted file system.
I'm in charge of roughly forty Linux boxes,
including many desktops and many servers. I've
never seen any problems that I could blame
on the filesystem. (Though there have been
kernel releases in the past - including one
in the 2.4.x series, IIRC - where there was a
bad filesystem bug, fixed within a day.)
You've got to break, in particular, out of the
HR Department's mindset that
you are a techie. That is, if you actually
want to get out of the dungeon of coding C
all day or making forms for Visual Basic.
Maybe you don't, you seem to enjoy it.
What you probably need more than anything is
to break out of the "techie" mindset. I agree,
it's great fun to write code and solder hardware
together, but there's only so far that these
skills will take you in the corporate world.
I'd recommend that you either go into systems
engineering (that includes architecture and can
include
business-process re-engineering) if you want to
stay technical or go for an MBA if you want to
plunge into the business end.
The pictures shown are very cool... but other
than knowing they were from a major east coast
bank there unfortunately isn't much context.
I'm guessing from the printouts that the photos
were shot in the late 60's and early 70's, but
there isn't much indication about what the
people were doing (other than being near
the computer) or how they were using the
computer to do it. Are there any other links
that would give some context to these photos?
While there are exceptions, of course, most pages with good content don't concentrate as much on stupid layout-questions (how many i-frames can I use on the square inch and should this border be one pixel to the left or to the right) but focus on making the content accessible.
But the best websites seem to do both.
e.g. amazon.com,
cnn.com.
They make truly extensive use of tables
and images to present headers, trailers,
footers, concurrent columns, etc in a
very appealing eye-candy way. They
are even navigable from browsers like
lynx, because they've avoided imagemaps
and flash (which I regard as truly unnavigable).
IANAL, but I think such `updating' is illegal in the USA (think DMCA).
And this is relevant... how? New Scientist
is a UK-based publication read around the world;
why should the backwards laws of a backwards
country limit their discussions?
I thought they were Apple II's
on
Case Mod Collection
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I always thought the video on the Brazil
terminals was obviously generated by an Apple
II. A Mac? There weren't any freaking
icons on the screen!
These projects will not give us more stable software, just buggy software that will let us do less.
That's the beauty of the thing. They add
complexity, but the slightest bug in the
complex software will probably be exploitable
to make encrypted data available to "normal"
(e.g. non-approved-by-the-Intel-Microsoft-hegemony)
programs.
Just like growing the government has historically added more layers of beauracracy,
making the people safer from the more-massive-and-slower-moving government.
Every Apple II peripheral card had a built-in ROM
with device driver. For the disk drive, it
was a boot ROM. For the printer card, it was
a printer driver, etc. It was seriously cool
to plug in a new peripheral and have it working
within seconds.
That said, the trend these days is towards less
and less intelligence in the peripheral and more
and more dependence on the OS and main CPU.
The Winmodem is an extreme example. So
while you've got a good idea, it's so 1970's
and not nearly trendy enough for today's
manufacturers:-).
SCSI dual-porting absolutely works. It's
been around since day one (well, since SCSI-1
in the mid-80's) and hardware-wise it's all
nice and dandy.
The difficulty you will have will be the software. You sound like you're not planning
to have the same drive mounted on both systems
at the same time, and that's good, and
since you're using a Unix it sounds relatively
simple to make sure that a drive is fully
dismounted from one box before you mount
it on the other. But very very bad things happen if, by some chance, both
boxes do decide to mount a filesystem at the
same time. If you have any sort of automatic
failover between systems you have to be really
really certain that the other box won't spring
back to life and start writing to the filesystem while the other guy has it mounted.
Supposedly reliable "failover" systems have
this happen all the time if not designed
correctly - remember, 99% of your failures
will be software failures, not hardware failures, so if you design a hardware failover
system without taking into account the flaky
custom-written software you're making a mistake.
In most cases, the version of an open source
package you get from Redhat or Debian (or
whoever) does not directly correspond to
the official release of an open source
project. As an extreme example, Redhat
for several years shipped a version of
gcc that ID'd itself as "2.96" while all the
while the gcc developers were swearing up and
down that there was No Such
Thing as GCC 2.96.
The degree of divergence between the two
determines whether it is appropriate to
send the bug report to either or both. In
most (but not all) cases the distro will be
lagging behind the OSS package bugfixes so
it's very likely that it's already been fixed.
You would truly struggle if
you started physics grad school without a very
thorough physics and appropriate math
background. Typical first-year grad school in physics would have Jackson-level Electrodynamics, some kind of quantum physics, etc. Most physics grad programs offer a "mathematical methods" class to get those who are coming in with a good physics background but maybe a weak physics background up to speed; you'll be needing a lot more than that.
Undoubtedly your undergraduate math classes
(probably first-year calculus and several
statistics classes, given your undergrad
degrees) were sufficient for your current
degrees, but they just aren't
enough for graduate-level physics.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to say this, but the idea of doing this in the Phillipines (especially the imposition by a non-Phillipine organization) makes the the referenced newspaper article sound like a hoax too.
I don't like Internet Exploder. I don't really like Netscrape, either. But I won't fault either for rendering a page that's not completely standards compliant; I'd guess that 95% of the pages out there wouldn't render if the browsers were as strict as, for example, the HTML validator.
I work for a largish non-IT-oriented organization that recently had a committee to allocate fiber bandwidth between various parts of the organization. Each part send a representative to stake out the fiber they needed - or, more appropriately, felt they ought to have. The fire department said they need at least 4 dedicated pairs at all of our hundred locations; police needed at least 6 pairs, etc. Grand total was that if you followed their numbers, we would need over 200 pairs for the whole organization (with only 10000 employees) when in all likelihood the needs could be served with 1 pair.
And in Jan. 1995, the Kobe earthquake in Japan took out the factory that makes the black plastic used to encase the memory chips, driving prices up. It's all happened before!
Which "few years ago"? This happens every couple of years in the memory industry, in a pattern that has been in place for a quarter century:
- New expensive memory technology is invented.
- Companies pour millions (today, billions) of dollars into chip fabs for the new technology.
- Memory prices rise to pay for the fabs, until...
- All the fabs go online, there's a huge glut of memory, and prices plummet.
The only thing that's new are the newbies who believe that the cycle they're in is the only cycleThis isn't unique to open-source code, of course. For every big succesful commercial project there are plenty of people willing to take credit for the whole thing, too.
Actually, "PC support" implies repeating the same things (retry Windows, reboot Windows, reinstall Windows) over and over again. So maybe repetition in the resume is a good thing!
The solution for me: Linux From Scratch. Build exactly what you need into your system, nothing more!
This is exactly the same as semaphore, a well-established (if 18th-century) military communication technology. A satellite serves as a very tall relay tower :-)
From after WWII through the 80's, things were different: there was a lot of money - usually government money - going into nuclear and then particle physics research. There were lots of new academic positions being created in physics departments, and most of these were basic research.
In the 90's things started swinging the other way. The Superconducting Supercollider was canceled. New nuclear physics positions completely dissapeared early in the decade, and by the end of the decade a lot of particle physics positions were being cut back. Some schools eliminated their physics department entirely. Suddenly physicists that always had ample research funding from the government were looking at other areas of research. In retrospect, it became obvious that the post-war boom was not "normal", it was the exception.
telnet www.microsoft.com 80
GET / HTTP/1.0
On the other hand, even a low-end pair of bookshelf regular-hi-fi speakers have a naturalness and full-range quality for a fraction of the price. I use a pair of fifteen-year-old Radio Shack Minimus 7's that I'm very happy with.
The only gotcha: computer speakers, by design, have very wimpy little magnets in them. Hi-fi speakers tend to have much stronger magnets, and will require placement much further away from color monitors.
Actually, closer to $10 each for the classic 9 gig ST410800N. Shipping costs will dominate.
I'd include 5.25" HP drives from the early-mid-90's in the same category as "built to last forever", too. Don't see as many of them, but the C3323 and its brethern are rock-solid.
This indicates, to me, some hardware flakiness on your end. (Even though you say this happens on a wide variety of hardware.) In every account I've seen, journaling filesystems are more stressful on the hardware because - surprise! - the journal is constantly being written to. I'd stick to ext2 if I were you, and figure out why you get any errors when you fsck a dismounted file system.
I'm in charge of roughly forty Linux boxes, including many desktops and many servers. I've never seen any problems that I could blame on the filesystem. (Though there have been kernel releases in the past - including one in the 2.4.x series, IIRC - where there was a bad filesystem bug, fixed within a day.)
You've got to break, in particular, out of the HR Department's mindset that you are a techie. That is, if you actually want to get out of the dungeon of coding C all day or making forms for Visual Basic. Maybe you don't, you seem to enjoy it.
I'd recommend that you either go into systems engineering (that includes architecture and can include business-process re-engineering) if you want to stay technical or go for an MBA if you want to plunge into the business end.
I'm guessing from the printouts that the photos were shot in the late 60's and early 70's, but there isn't much indication about what the people were doing (other than being near the computer) or how they were using the computer to do it. Are there any other links that would give some context to these photos?
But the best websites seem to do both. e.g. amazon.com, cnn.com. They make truly extensive use of tables and images to present headers, trailers, footers, concurrent columns, etc in a very appealing eye-candy way. They are even navigable from browsers like lynx, because they've avoided imagemaps and flash (which I regard as truly unnavigable).
And this is relevant... how? New Scientist is a UK-based publication read around the world; why should the backwards laws of a backwards country limit their discussions?
I always thought the video on the Brazil terminals was obviously generated by an Apple II. A Mac? There weren't any freaking icons on the screen!
That's the beauty of the thing. They add complexity, but the slightest bug in the complex software will probably be exploitable to make encrypted data available to "normal" (e.g. non-approved-by-the-Intel-Microsoft-hegemony) programs.
Just like growing the government has historically added more layers of beauracracy, making the people safer from the more-massive-and-slower-moving government.
That said, the trend these days is towards less and less intelligence in the peripheral and more and more dependence on the OS and main CPU. The Winmodem is an extreme example. So while you've got a good idea, it's so 1970's and not nearly trendy enough for today's manufacturers :-).
The difficulty you will have will be the software. You sound like you're not planning to have the same drive mounted on both systems at the same time, and that's good, and since you're using a Unix it sounds relatively simple to make sure that a drive is fully dismounted from one box before you mount it on the other. But very very bad things happen if, by some chance, both boxes do decide to mount a filesystem at the same time. If you have any sort of automatic failover between systems you have to be really really certain that the other box won't spring back to life and start writing to the filesystem while the other guy has it mounted. Supposedly reliable "failover" systems have this happen all the time if not designed correctly - remember, 99% of your failures will be software failures, not hardware failures, so if you design a hardware failover system without taking into account the flaky custom-written software you're making a mistake.
The degree of divergence between the two determines whether it is appropriate to send the bug report to either or both. In most (but not all) cases the distro will be lagging behind the OSS package bugfixes so it's very likely that it's already been fixed.
The real solution, of course, is to ditch all distros and build everything from sources yourself.
Undoubtedly your undergraduate math classes (probably first-year calculus and several statistics classes, given your undergrad degrees) were sufficient for your current degrees, but they just aren't enough for graduate-level physics.