Re:I turned down a well paying job at Walgreens
on
Suit Up Or Ship Out?
·
· Score: 2
Quite difference from the early days of NASA when people routinely worked 20% and more unpaid overtime.
You will not find that at a CMM Level 5 shop.
If they cannot budget the personnel to get the
job done on time, do you think they're gonna
make CMM Level 5? These are outfits that are
way too good to get involved in Death-March class projects.
Again, nothing I write above has anything
to do with wearing suits or not; it all
has to do with the quality of work and
nothing to do with wearing a suit. (Most
suit-type shops wouldn't be able to Make CMM level
2 in any event, they're probably just struggling to emerge from pure chaos.)
And then we'll have what - a half proprietary
(binary only)/half open media player? What's
the point? There are already excellent tools
to deal with the well-documented open multimedia
formats, and these are truly open
projects. If you believe for a second that
this Helix hype is going to be one tenth as useful as those readily-available tools then
you're a sucker.
The slashdot head article gave me no idea what
"Helix DNA" could possibly be, so I go the
Helix Home page and find out that it claims
to do everything for everybody on every platform.
But there's nothing to
download right now.
What does it actually do right now? Sounds like
vaporware to me! To treat it as anything but
pie-in-the-sky fantasy is a great disservice
to all the things that actually exist right
now...
This is another case where the wording of
a law defeats common sense.
For instance, in most places there are signs
(and often laws) forbidding the use of radio
transmitters near explosives. If there
aren't, it's just common sense.
But when a local
high school had a bomb threat, all the teachers
and reporters were running around the scene
talking on their cellphones. A local cop tried
to remind them that cellphones *are* radio
transmitters, but for the most part the
citizenry didn't understand why the
rule should apply, because (after all)
it's a phone, not a transmitter!
These specialized applications are generally
installed only with a single Windows OS release.
The OS is not patched or updated unless by the
vendor. Applications other than what the vendor supplied are not installed. The user does not configure the hardware
or the software; all of this is done by the vendor. If the user does tweak the machine,
it becomes unsupported by the vendor, unless
you pay them big bucks to come in and reinstall everything.
They probably *could* do the same thing under
Linux, but I'd rather that they not do it.
(The situation with Oracle on Linux is already
too close IMHO).
If you want to complete a project in Perl, then just do it
in Perl. If you want to use C for a project, just use C.
But many projects need both low-level access
to X/graphics/system libraries and really
do benefit from the high-level approach of Perl.
In many cases, there are already libraries
available that link the two together (e.g.
Perl/Tk if you're writing in Perl, or associative
array libraries for use from C) but it's never been a secret that
you can call C code from Perl. You seem to
advocate keeping it a secret.
Just like how the US clearcut vast forests for
the lumber and
turned millions of square miles of diverse
swampland into flat farmland, but we're now
trying to stop Brazil from doing the same for
their individual economic gains.
Note that the picture on display in the article
shows a floral scene of browns, oranges, and
yellows. No blues. I'm guessing that the
short lifetime of blue organic LED's is still
a major factor.
That said, the original polaroid and technicolor
processes also lacked any blue - they came later.
If your goal is to reproduce skin tones, you
generall don't need much blue; the eye can
do remarkable things in compensating for lack
of blue illumination but still making you
think you see full-color.
Foley, 30, moved back to his native Southern California earlier this year to work at NBC. He was arrested at his Burbank workplace at 10:10 a.m. yesterday by officers with the Department of Motor Vehicles' computer forensics and investigations office.
The DMV cops? How do they figure in?
Maybe the real cops and the FBI didn't think
there was a case to pursue?
It seems to me that the book itself is
pretty flimsy, content-wise. Yeah, if you
need a lot of hand-holding about the various
polynomial approximations and iterative approaches
to calculating special functions, you'll probably
learn something. But the end
of the book is Runge-Kutta; that's a technique that's covered pretty
early on in Numerical Recipes or even a freshman
class in numerical analysis.
Many Linux distributions ship with a heavily
(and I mean heavily) patched up version of
Vixie-cron as the default cron package. This
is what many people refer to in this thread when
they say "Linux cron".
There are other cron packages out there for Linux;
for example, fcron. Section 2.2
of the fcron FAQ says:
First, you must understand that fcron determines, for each job, its next time and date of execution. It then determines which of those
jobs would be the next to run and then, sleeps until that job should be run. In other words, fcron doesn't wake up like Vixie cron each
minute to check all job in case one should be run... and it avoids some problems associated with clock adjusts.
This means that if the new time value is set into the past, fcron won't run a particular job again. For instance, suppose the real time
and system clock are 3:00, so the next job cannot be scheduled to run before 3:00, as it would have already been run and re-scheduled.
First, suppose you set your system clock into the past, say to 2:00, Presuming that the last run was shortly before 3:00. then fcron will
sleep until the next job should be executed. The execution time for a job is determined by identifying the last time that the job ran and
computing the next scheduled time. This means that the next scheduled time must be on or after 3:01. Therefore, in this example,
fcron will not run a job for at least one hour.
Next, if you set the system time into the future, say to 4:00, fcron will run every job scheduled between the old and the new time
value once, regardless of how many times it would have been scheduled. When fcron wakes up to run a job after the time value has
changed, it runs all the jobs which should have run during the interval because they are scheduled to run in a past time.
As special case is when "@xxx" style scheduling rules are involved, you must consider the "adjustment-interval". The
"adjustment-interval" is the time difference between the original system time and the new system time. If the... run at
"adjust-interval" too early or too late depending of the nature of the adjust.
To conclude, fcron behaves quite well for small clock adjusts. Each job which should have run does so once, but not exactly at the
correct time as if the job were scheduled within the adjustment interval. But, if you have to make a big change in the time and date,
you should probably reset all the scheduled "nextexe" by running "fcrontab -z" on all the fcrontabs.
And to further complicate matters, most
commercial Unix-type OS's are either completely
independent of Vixie-cron or they genetically
"diverged" from Vixie-cron so long ago that
they bear only faint resemblance to the original.
Maybe those technical people who you are questioning worked on a non-Linux system
that doesn't suffer from the idiosyncrancies
of Vixie-cron, or maybe they use fcron.
As others have noted, making the only disk drive
be a CD or booting over the net is a good
way to dissuade tinkering/tampering.
But the problem becomes your wide range of
hardware. Making a single custom distribution CD
or a single network boot image that will work on all
donated computers will be extremely difficult
and time-consuming. At some point you'd probably
decide to buy all-the-same $199 Wal-Mart PC's.
This was all settled years ago. A long neglected Usenet group, news.announce.important, is
reserved for these global earth-shattering
events. For Example:
(b) "The Internet is running out of IP addresses, please conserve your
addresses and give any you are not using back to the NIC." Approved.
Re:This is only slightly off-topic but,
on
LFS 4.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Three points:
Cron is not essential.
Cron has historically been a security risk. What's the patch level on Vixie-Cron?:-)
Cron packages generally (there are exceptions) require a sendmail-like mail system for reporting
results. Sendmail (and even its not so
cumbersome clones) isn't generally necessary
or even wanted.
All that said, there's a wide choice of crons
you can install, just see the BLFS (Beyond Linux From Scratch) hints.
Re:Only for Windows, Macintosh and Linux computers
on
IDE to SCSI Converters?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I've used Addonics converters on VAXstation
SCSI ports under many versions of VMS going
back to 5.5, and they worked to drive both hard
drives and CD-R's. There was the limitation that
booting from hard drives larger than 1Gbytes
on a VAXStation 3100/30 isn't supported, but
that's the computer's firmware, not Addonics'
fault.
So they do work on other brands, just not
necessarily guaranteed to work.
The
VIA C3 EPIA
motherboard in the ITX
form factor, while mainly
targeted at home entertainment-type applications,
also makes a really spiffy server as
well as a desktop. Mine draws
20W at idle, 30W at load, with a 7200
RPM drive in it; that's a third what the
"Green PC" needs.
And most impressive: it's got a solid-metal
case that's much more recyclable than any plastic,
and costs
one-eighth ($200) what the "Green PC"
does ($1600).
Just coincidentally, I studied nuclear physics
in grad schools, and now my former employers are
getting barrages of clueless questions from FBI
and NSA type people about the security risk
I pose. Most of them are along the lines
of So, are you the guy with the bomb?!
Let's ignore the technical and financial
issues about running a satellite network and
look at the legal hurdles:
Just in the US: You got lots of not-so-baby
bells who will challenge you in the courts if
you start competing with them.
Then there's the issue of giving FBI/CIA/NSA
the ability to wiretap the data flow. They
certainly like tapping Osama's satellite calls and they don't want to give up on that when he moves to voice-over-IP!
Then there's the foreign countries. You know, most of the world. Usually the government is the phone company, and they won't like the competition nor the loss of wiretap ability one bit. So you have literally hundreds of agreements to pound out, in countries that often have barely functioning legal systems. I'm sure some big donations from Bill won't hurt the situation in many countries, but others won't be so easily convinced.
So, in my completely unprofessional opinion: Ignore the technical and financial risks. The legal risks alone will kill the project.
I never understood. Limp Bizkit vs Steely Dan.
Limp Bizkit vs Steely Dan. Not that I'm in the
market, but if I was looking, the choice seems
pretty obvious to me.
The Via mini-ITX form factor, while mainly
targeted at home entertainment-type applications,
also makes a really spiffy server. Very
low power consumption and the fact that several
of the ITX power supplies will run directly
from 12V is appealing.
My current DNS, mail, and web server is 11.5" x 2.5" x 10.75" and draws about
20 watts. It's based on the VIA C3 EPIA
motherboard. The only downside for your use
is that there's only room for one hard drive
inside this tiny case. But it's cheap (less
than $200) and as the power input is 12V,
I use two paralleled gel-cells for a UPS. (That
way I can swap out one battery for maintenance
without interrupting anything.) My DSL router
also runs off 12V. Linux
installed very easily.
There's a similar VIA-CPU based low power motherboard for a little less money that draws
so little power that there's no CPU fan. For
reliability this may be a good choice as it reduces the number of moving parts.
If you insist on room for two hard drives, see
these cases.
I don't use KDE or Gnome. I think a serial
console is pretty nifty. And these glass TTY's
sure are a lot faster than a Model 33ASR, but sometimes I
miss the paper punch.
Slashdot Mirror
You will not find that at a CMM Level 5 shop. If they cannot budget the personnel to get the job done on time, do you think they're gonna make CMM Level 5? These are outfits that are way too good to get involved in Death-March class projects.
Again, nothing I write above has anything to do with wearing suits or not; it all has to do with the quality of work and nothing to do with wearing a suit. (Most suit-type shops wouldn't be able to Make CMM level 2 in any event, they're probably just struggling to emerge from pure chaos.)
And then we'll have what - a half proprietary (binary only)/half open media player? What's the point? There are already excellent tools to deal with the well-documented open multimedia formats, and these are truly open projects. If you believe for a second that this Helix hype is going to be one tenth as useful as those readily-available tools then you're a sucker.
What does it actually do right now? Sounds like vaporware to me! To treat it as anything but pie-in-the-sky fantasy is a great disservice to all the things that actually exist right now...
For instance, in most places there are signs (and often laws) forbidding the use of radio transmitters near explosives. If there aren't, it's just common sense. But when a local high school had a bomb threat, all the teachers and reporters were running around the scene talking on their cellphones. A local cop tried to remind them that cellphones *are* radio transmitters, but for the most part the citizenry didn't understand why the rule should apply, because (after all) it's a phone, not a transmitter!
They probably *could* do the same thing under Linux, but I'd rather that they not do it. (The situation with Oracle on Linux is already too close IMHO).
But many projects need both low-level access to X/graphics/system libraries and really do benefit from the high-level approach of Perl.
In many cases, there are already libraries available that link the two together (e.g. Perl/Tk if you're writing in Perl, or associative array libraries for use from C) but it's never been a secret that you can call C code from Perl. You seem to advocate keeping it a secret.
Send it back? We're talking el-cheapo-no-manufacturer-name NIC's here. I've seen the same thing on $10 NE2000-era ISA cards from a few years ago.
In fact, just apply this fact iteratively and you'll find that any program can be written in zero bytes!
Just like how the US clearcut vast forests for the lumber and turned millions of square miles of diverse swampland into flat farmland, but we're now trying to stop Brazil from doing the same for their individual economic gains.
That said, the original polaroid and technicolor processes also lacked any blue - they came later. If your goal is to reproduce skin tones, you generall don't need much blue; the eye can do remarkable things in compensating for lack of blue illumination but still making you think you see full-color.
The DMV cops? How do they figure in?
Maybe the real cops and the FBI didn't think there was a case to pursue?
It seems to me that the book itself is pretty flimsy, content-wise. Yeah, if you need a lot of hand-holding about the various polynomial approximations and iterative approaches to calculating special functions, you'll probably learn something. But the end of the book is Runge-Kutta; that's a technique that's covered pretty early on in Numerical Recipes or even a freshman class in numerical analysis.
Many Linux distributions ship with a heavily (and I mean heavily) patched up version of Vixie-cron as the default cron package. This is what many people refer to in this thread when they say "Linux cron".
There are other cron packages out there for Linux; for example, fcron. Section 2.2 of the fcron FAQ says:
And to further complicate matters, most commercial Unix-type OS's are either completely independent of Vixie-cron or they genetically "diverged" from Vixie-cron so long ago that they bear only faint resemblance to the original.
Maybe those technical people who you are questioning worked on a non-Linux system that doesn't suffer from the idiosyncrancies of Vixie-cron, or maybe they use fcron.
But the problem becomes your wide range of hardware. Making a single custom distribution CD or a single network boot image that will work on all donated computers will be extremely difficult and time-consuming. At some point you'd probably decide to buy all-the-same $199 Wal-Mart PC's.
- Cron is not essential.
- Cron has historically been a security risk. What's the patch level on Vixie-Cron?
:-)
- Cron packages generally (there are exceptions) require a sendmail-like mail system for reporting
results. Sendmail (and even its not so
cumbersome clones) isn't generally necessary
or even wanted.
All that said, there's a wide choice of crons you can install, just see the BLFS (Beyond Linux From Scratch) hints.So they do work on other brands, just not necessarily guaranteed to work.
And most impressive: it's got a solid-metal case that's much more recyclable than any plastic, and costs one-eighth ($200) what the "Green PC" does ($1600).
Just coincidentally, I studied nuclear physics in grad schools, and now my former employers are getting barrages of clueless questions from FBI and NSA type people about the security risk I pose. Most of them are along the lines of So, are you the guy with the bomb?!
-
Just in the US: You got lots of not-so-baby
bells who will challenge you in the courts if
you start competing with them.
Then there's the issue of giving FBI/CIA/NSA
the ability to wiretap the data flow. They
certainly like tapping Osama's satellite calls and they don't want to give up on that when he moves to voice-over-IP!
- Then there's the foreign countries. You know, most of the world. Usually the government is the phone company, and they won't like the competition nor the loss of wiretap ability one bit. So you have literally hundreds of agreements to pound out, in countries that often have barely functioning legal systems. I'm sure some big donations from Bill won't hurt the situation in many countries, but others won't be so easily convinced.
So, in my completely unprofessional opinion: Ignore the technical and financial risks. The legal risks alone will kill the project.I never understood. Limp Bizkit vs Steely Dan. Limp Bizkit vs Steely Dan. Not that I'm in the market, but if I was looking, the choice seems pretty obvious to me.
I repeatedly uttered "fascinating" while watching this episode from the viewscreen on the bridge.
If this is the first, where does The New Hacker's Dictionary come in? Not mainstream enough? It is much more than just the Jargon File.
My current DNS, mail, and web server is 11.5" x 2.5" x 10.75" and draws about 20 watts. It's based on the VIA C3 EPIA motherboard. The only downside for your use is that there's only room for one hard drive inside this tiny case. But it's cheap (less than $200) and as the power input is 12V, I use two paralleled gel-cells for a UPS. (That way I can swap out one battery for maintenance without interrupting anything.) My DSL router also runs off 12V. Linux installed very easily.
There's a similar VIA-CPU based low power motherboard for a little less money that draws so little power that there's no CPU fan. For reliability this may be a good choice as it reduces the number of moving parts.
If you insist on room for two hard drives, see these cases.
I don't use KDE or Gnome. I think a serial console is pretty nifty. And these glass TTY's sure are a lot faster than a Model 33ASR, but sometimes I miss the paper punch.