I had no idea that stuff was so easy to buy. I think my department will be getting a can or three of this. We might even actually use it for its intended purpose.:-)
and on a suggestion, shipped my equipment (well-packed),
I saw your images (faster than a speeding/. effect, whoo). I don't mean to sound cruel, but that wasn't "well-packed".
Every so often I get Sun hardware shipped to me. I have learned a few things:
If anything can move around inside the box, you're fucked.
Wadded-up newspaper, styrafoam peanuts, and those little air-cushion pillows can all move around inside the box. See above.
The only air space inside the box should be the space inside the computer case itself. Heavy things will be set on top of the box. Air is compressible.
Basically, if you aren't use molded solid foam, you're in trouble. At minimum you should use foam blocks for the sides of the box, and then fill the gaps inside with stuffed eggshell foam (e.g., you don't have custom-molded foam, e.g., you threw out the foam pieces that the computer/case was originally shipped in).
The other day I got a hardware board about the size of my hand. It was shipped in a box the size of my torso. The outside of the box had gone through a war zone, but thanks to all that foam, the card was pristine.
I'm slowly pushing my users towards KDE2, but it kinda hurts that they can't browse the Winblows network under Konqueror. At one point there was a KIOslave that spoke SMB, but it got removed for some reason.
Do you know offhand whether it's back in KDE3?
(And before anyone jumps on me: no, I can't use smbmount (Linux only), and no, I can't use the workarounds from the public KIOslaves repository (Linux only)). But thanks.)
Microsoft is definitely full of shit when they consider 'export' to be "theoretical" only. But implementing export is hard; witness the number of compilers that have managed to do it so far. I don't blame MS for putting it off; I blame MS for lying about their reasons for doing so. (If they'd just said, "Implementing this is a freakload of work and we'd rather point our engineers in a more revenue-profitable direction," then I could accept that, too.)
The for-loop scoping bug has a command-line switch to toggle correct behavior. Unfortunately, with it on, large chunks of their own MFC code will no longer compile.
Dinkumware was contracted to provide the library for VC++. They have released their own patches (freely downloadable) to the library headers. With those patches applied, your library is as ISO-compliant as it can be given the (immense) deficiencies of the compiler itself.
For me the big killer is templates -- lots of failures in things like partial specialization.
My recommendation to others who have to work under Wintel: there are plenty of good compilers out there, and they're ALL better than VC++. Comeau, IBM, EDG, KAI, you name it...
Anyone else with stories of brilliant, tormented mathematician-types, feel free to englighten me.:)
Lady Ada, daughter of Lord Byron, coworker and lover of Babbage. She was the world's first programmer; invented concepts such as loops and subroutines. And yes, this would be the one that the American DoD named the Ada programming language after, although I think that's a terrible language and a disgrace to her memory.:-)
IIRC -- and I'm not sure that I do, feel free to correct me, people -- she suffered from depression and substance abuse. Eventually died of cancer.
Really tragic story. There are some excellent books on her.
...in his autobiography (mentioned in the story). I heartily recommend it; it's a great read. Huge chunks of the book are descriptions of Raimi-antics and opinions thereof, so it'd be a bit unfair to ask Mr. Campbell to repeat them here.:-)
my definition of freedom will probably always conflict with his. This is my right. I fear that if his vision were the dominant one, I would no longer have this right.
No kidding... In the flerbage article, ESR asked this question of both RMS and Tim O'Reilly (when the latter two were having their debate): if you two could get a law passed making proprietary licenses illegal, would you do it?
Did RMS ever answer? Because if Mr. It's All About the Freedom To Choose wants to forbid the existence of proprietary software -- not just discourage it through discussion, but to forbid it beyond discussion -- then he's clearly unfit for any kind of leadership position.
Got canned after 3 (3? 4? I think 3) seasons. And some of the same writers from the cartoon show are doing the FOX (live-action) version. From what I've heard, lots of what made the cartoon rock are missing in the live-action version.
2001-11-08 16:10:10 White House Backs Off From National ID Cards (articles,usa) (rejected)
Anyhow, my point: this would be a good time to write to your representative. Tell him/her/it that the White House's reasons may not be the same as yours or your rep's, but that the Congress should stand behind this "frowning."
After all, "frowning" is hardly a policy decision. A few campaign contributions from major software companies and Bush will change his mind. Now is the time to say NO and make it stick.
Re:Changelog lacks any real value.
on
Slash 2.2.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
When I give my indoctrination spiel, uh, er, "training lecture" on CVS to coworkers and lackeys, I usually hand down a list of requirements for log/commit messages and a ChangeLog entry.
You completely misunderstood the point of the previous poster.
"There's simply no reason to run anything but Linux anymore," (quoting from memory, sorry, since/. won't serve me that page) seems pretty blatant to me. The OP was either seriously karma-whoring, or has a seriously unbalanced view of technology.
There's no reason that Solaris (and HP-UX, and AIX) could not ship real tools--they simply do not want to.
There is a reason -- backwards compatability and stability. Major customers depend on their tools working in a certain way; if Sun changes them, then those major customers have serious retooling costs (both time and money) ahead of them.
For us in Linux land, we accept those as a matter of course. For established cutomers with huge entrenched programs, it's not a decision to be made lightly. For example, Solaris' badly non-POSIX/bin/sh will not be changed. If you have/usr/xpg4/bin in your path, then its "sh" points to/bin/ksh, the POSIX "sh". But a lot of people running Solaris have scripts that depend on/bin/sh behaving a certain way, broken though that way may be. Sun cannot simply pull the rug out from under them.
That's why I don't call/bin/sh. I call/bin/ksh or/bin/bash. But I don't expect/bin/sh to suddenly change.:-)
Not only do I admin and program on Solaris boxes, I'm also a GCC library maintainer. There're my qualifications.
Solaris, their operating system, has few advantages over Linux, nowadays. Frankly, without adding the GNU tools, Solaris is virtually unusable!
"Frankly," you're utterly wrong. Not only is Solaris just fine and dandy, it has features for programmers which aren't anywhere near to showing up on Linux. For example:
The proc tools, for manipulating a running process. Try using pldd(1) to find out exactly which libraries have been mapped in, or pstack(1) to print the call stack. Yes, that's right, print the function call stack of a running process from the command line, without a debugger, and it works flawlessly. There're about a dozen of these tools, man -s 1 proc for more.
Kernel watchpoints on memory. Tell the kernel you want to know when a process tries to read or write from an arbitrary block of memory. That process when then be frozen (or killed, as per your instructions), allowing you to find out exactly what piece of code is trashing memory.
A boatload of malloc(3) implementations. Want a version of malloc that uses brk? It's there. Want it to use mmap instead? It's there. Want a version of malloc that never reuses memory? Or a malloc which sets kernel watchpoints on its own bookkeeping structures, for when your code is hosing the malloc internal memory? It's all there.
Linux has none of these.
(And, who's gonna pay $10k for their compiler when GCC does the job?)
Severely uninformed statement, my friend. GCC doesn't generate SPARC code nearly as well as Sun's compiler. (Ask the GCC developers.) It's good but it's not there yet.
GCC cannot even generate a 64-bit binary yet. (Very close, but still some bugs.)
There are plenty of reasons to buy a SPARC, and to use Solaris, and to use Sun's software. It's all about the right tool for the right job, and Linux quite often isn't it. (I write this sitting on a Linux box.) Quit'cher karma whoring.:-)
Oh, certianly CDE sucks asteroids through a garden hse, but it sucks less than OpenWindows. There are far better windowing systems out there. I was just restricting my observations to the 2 choices that are currently shipping with Solaris.
You're only wondering that because you haven't experienced the pain of OpenWindows[tm], winner of the [entirely fictitious and just-invented] Most Unintuitive Interface In The Entire Fscking World Award.
Drop-down menus are dropped down with which button? The first, you say? Oh no, that would be far too obvious and industry-standard. The third button drops down a menu. If you press the first button, it activates the first entry in the menu, without ever dropping the menu down. Sort of a speed-select. Confusing as flaming fuck to people who don't expect it: if the first entry is "New Window" then you merely have windows popping up. "I clicked on "File" and a new window popped up? Huh?"
If the first entry is more, shall we say, "proactive," then you just lost data. Or had a file overwritten when you were just experimenting. Or... who knows what just happened, since there may not be any visual feedback to whatever the fsck the first menu entry happens to be.
I and my users were both extremely happy when we were able to move from OpenWindblows to CDE. They will be happier still if I ever get the chance to build KDE 2.2 for my SPARCs.
I wonder if any studio would make Ringworld, without screwing it up?
Of course not.:-) Some parts require a bit of thinking, and that's more than what the typical studio audience will put up with. Mmmmmm... actually, somebody's already purchased the movie rights, I think. I forget who. They're just sitting on it.
The sequels would be ever harder to make; each one requires more physics knowledge on the part of the reader/viewer than the one before.
I vaguely recall an interview with Mr. Waterhouse in which he states that, for the Castrovalva shoot, he had gotten massively drunk the night before with the rest of the cast. First scene he shot involved lots of running.
Apparently the boom mike swung around and picked up the sound of him puking his guts out behind a tree. Fortunately (to hear him tell it) it wasn't on camera, just on the soundtrack.
Anyone who has worked at HP would also know that you never write the name as H-P; the hyphen is used only when the founders are named in full.
I never claimed to work there. I never claimed to be an authoritative source. Did you miss the "If I Recall Correctly" bits? I have no idea which of their billion labs generated this tale.
my understanding of what goes on is that your first two sentences are correct, and the third is just totally bogus
Hey, we could both be wrong.:-) Let's not lose any sleep over it.
On an ironical note, it seems you have less flexibility than the folks in HP Labs where the IT folks provide support for a lot more than just Windows. It may come as a shock, but the kind of IT support in various places depends on what kind of work people are expected to be doing.
Uh... All I wrote is that our IT doesn't mind when local users have local admin rights under Win2K. I didn't say anything about which OSes they support, or don't, or what their other policies are. Please don't generalize or make assumptions.
If there's only a single OS listed in boot.ini, then no boot menu is given. (What would be the point?) The bootloader just boots it without prompting.
By default, Windows is the only one it lists. (No surprise there.) I copied my Linux bootsector to BOOTSECT.LNX, added another line to boot.ini, and then I had a choice at boot time: Windows 2000, or Linux. To do all this I followed the mini-HOWTO at linuxdoc.org; that HOWTO is now several years old, I believe. It was originally written for NT 4.something.
...is that IT has the One True Canonical Disk Image. IT performs backups of the network drives; if you want anything safe, you keep it on the network drives. Anything goes wrong on your machine, their first step is *WHOMP* reimage the machine.
Also IIRC they allow users to install stuff, make local changes and tweaks, etc. I think they might even have machine-local administrator rights. But if you change anything, it breaks, and you complain, *WHOMP*.
(On an ironical note, I work for a military research lab, and IT is not at all alarmed when users have local admin rights to their Lose2K boxes. It makes things far easier for everybody, including IT. (IT can still do remote admin.))
Slashdot Mirror
I had no idea that stuff was so easy to buy. I think my department will be getting a can or three of this. We might even actually use it for its intended purpose. :-)
Thanks!
I saw your images (faster than a speeding /. effect, whoo). I don't mean to sound cruel, but that wasn't "well-packed".
Every so often I get Sun hardware shipped to me. I have learned a few things:
Basically, if you aren't use molded solid foam, you're in trouble. At minimum you should use foam blocks for the sides of the box, and then fill the gaps inside with stuffed eggshell foam (e.g., you don't have custom-molded foam, e.g., you threw out the foam pieces that the computer/case was originally shipped in).
The other day I got a hardware board about the size of my hand. It was shipped in a box the size of my torso. The outside of the box had gone through a war zone, but thanks to all that foam, the card was pristine.
I'm slowly pushing my users towards KDE2, but it kinda hurts that they can't browse the Winblows network under Konqueror. At one point there was a KIOslave that spoke SMB, but it got removed for some reason.
Do you know offhand whether it's back in KDE3?
(And before anyone jumps on me: no, I can't use smbmount (Linux only), and no, I can't use the workarounds from the public KIOslaves repository (Linux only)). But thanks.)
Microsoft is definitely full of shit when they consider 'export' to be "theoretical" only. But implementing export is hard; witness the number of compilers that have managed to do it so far. I don't blame MS for putting it off; I blame MS for lying about their reasons for doing so. (If they'd just said, "Implementing this is a freakload of work and we'd rather point our engineers in a more revenue-profitable direction," then I could accept that, too.)
The for-loop scoping bug has a command-line switch to toggle correct behavior. Unfortunately, with it on, large chunks of their own MFC code will no longer compile.
Dinkumware was contracted to provide the library for VC++. They have released their own patches (freely downloadable) to the library headers. With those patches applied, your library is as ISO-compliant as it can be given the (immense) deficiencies of the compiler itself.
For me the big killer is templates -- lots of failures in things like partial specialization.
My recommendation to others who have to work under Wintel: there are plenty of good compilers out there, and they're ALL better than VC++. Comeau, IBM, EDG, KAI, you name it...
Lady Ada, daughter of Lord Byron, coworker and lover of Babbage. She was the world's first programmer; invented concepts such as loops and subroutines. And yes, this would be the one that the American DoD named the Ada programming language after, although I think that's a terrible language and a disgrace to her memory. :-)
IIRC -- and I'm not sure that I do, feel free to correct me, people -- she suffered from depression and substance abuse. Eventually died of cancer.
Really tragic story. There are some excellent books on her.
...in his autobiography (mentioned in the story). I heartily recommend it; it's a great read. Huge chunks of the book are descriptions of Raimi-antics and opinions thereof, so it'd be a bit unfair to ask Mr. Campbell to repeat them here.
No kidding... In the flerbage article, ESR asked this question of both RMS and Tim O'Reilly (when the latter two were having their debate): if you two could get a law passed making proprietary licenses illegal, would you do it?
Did RMS ever answer? Because if Mr. It's All About the Freedom To Choose wants to forbid the existence of proprietary software -- not just discourage it through discussion, but to forbid it beyond discussion -- then he's clearly unfit for any kind of leadership position.
I'd nominate the same person, but for his tcp_wrappers instead. (I have no expereince with postfix, so I can't speak to that point.)
Got canned after 3 (3? 4? I think 3) seasons. And some of the same writers from the cartoon show are doing the FOX (live-action) version. From what I've heard, lots of what made the cartoon rock are missing in the live-action version.
Does
Anyhow, my point: this would be a good time to write to your representative. Tell him/her/it that the White House's reasons may not be the same as yours or your rep's, but that the Congress should stand behind this "frowning."
After all, "frowning" is hardly a policy decision. A few campaign contributions from major software companies and Bush will change his mind. Now is the time to say NO and make it stick.
When I give my indoctrination spiel, uh, er, "training lecture" on CVS to coworkers and lackeys, I usually hand down a list of requirements for log/commit messages and a ChangeLog entry.
Most of the time it's a variation on http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/changelogs/guile -changelogs_toc.html,
or sometimes the rules used for ChangeLogs in the GCC project, which I've found to be of immense value when tracking down changes.
Personally I can't stand changelogs that don't say a thing. It's just enough "open source" to look good, but not open enough to actually invite help.
You completely misunderstood the point of the previous poster.
"There's simply no reason to run anything but Linux anymore," (quoting from memory, sorry, since /. won't serve me that page) seems pretty blatant to me. The OP was either seriously karma-whoring, or has a seriously unbalanced view of technology.
There's no reason that Solaris (and HP-UX, and AIX) could not ship real tools--they simply do not want to.
There is a reason -- backwards compatability and stability. Major customers depend on their tools working in a certain way; if Sun changes them, then those major customers have serious retooling costs (both time and money) ahead of them.
For us in Linux land, we accept those as a matter of course. For established cutomers with huge entrenched programs, it's not a decision to be made lightly. For example, Solaris' badly non-POSIX /bin/sh will not be changed. If you have /usr/xpg4/bin in your path, then its "sh" points to /bin/ksh, the POSIX "sh". But a lot of people running Solaris have scripts that depend on /bin/sh behaving a certain way, broken though that way may be. Sun cannot simply pull the rug out from under them.
That's why I don't call /bin/sh. I call /bin/ksh or /bin/bash. But I don't expect /bin/sh to suddenly change. :-)
Not only do I admin and program on Solaris boxes, I'm also a GCC library maintainer. There're my qualifications.
"Frankly," you're utterly wrong. Not only is Solaris just fine and dandy, it has features for programmers which aren't anywhere near to showing up on Linux. For example:
Linux has none of these.
Severely uninformed statement, my friend. GCC doesn't generate SPARC code nearly as well as Sun's compiler. (Ask the GCC developers.) It's good but it's not there yet.
GCC cannot even generate a 64-bit binary yet. (Very close, but still some bugs.)
There are plenty of reasons to buy a SPARC, and to use Solaris, and to use Sun's software. It's all about the right tool for the right job, and Linux quite often isn't it. (I write this sitting on a Linux box.) Quit'cher karma whoring. :-)
Damn straight! I always prefer espresso when exchanging information and ideas about progr-
Oh. expressive. Never mind. :-)
(Personal pet peeve of mine is when people do the reverse: refer to the coffee drink as "expresso".)
Oh, certianly CDE sucks asteroids through a garden hse, but it sucks less than OpenWindows. There are far better windowing systems out there. I was just restricting my observations to the 2 choices that are currently shipping with Solaris.
You're only wondering that because you haven't experienced the pain of OpenWindows[tm], winner of the [entirely fictitious and just-invented] Most Unintuitive Interface In The Entire Fscking World Award.
Drop-down menus are dropped down with which button? The first, you say? Oh no, that would be far too obvious and industry-standard. The third button drops down a menu. If you press the first button, it activates the first entry in the menu, without ever dropping the menu down. Sort of a speed-select. Confusing as flaming fuck to people who don't expect it: if the first entry is "New Window" then you merely have windows popping up. "I clicked on "File" and a new window popped up? Huh?"
If the first entry is more, shall we say, "proactive," then you just lost data. Or had a file overwritten when you were just experimenting. Or... who knows what just happened, since there may not be any visual feedback to whatever the fsck the first menu entry happens to be.
I and my users were both extremely happy when we were able to move from OpenWindblows to CDE. They will be happier still if I ever get the chance to build KDE 2.2 for my SPARCs.
That's because only we Americans have lousy enough taste to both:
:-)
Oi, thanks for answering!
Of course not. :-) Some parts require a bit of thinking, and that's more than what the typical studio audience will put up with. Mmmmmm... actually, somebody's already purchased the movie rights, I think. I forget who. They're just sitting on it.
The sequels would be ever harder to make; each one requires more physics knowledge on the part of the reader/viewer than the one before.
I vaguely recall an interview with Mr. Waterhouse in which he states that, for the Castrovalva shoot, he had gotten massively drunk the night before with the rest of the cast. First scene he shot involved lots of running.
Apparently the boom mike swung around and picked up the sound of him puking his guts out behind a tree. Fortunately (to hear him tell it) it wasn't on camera, just on the soundtrack.
In one of his author's notes somewhere, Niven mentions that Sternbach's cover art for Tales of Known Space contains, somewhere, a very tiny Ringworld.
Wil, did you ever find it?
Anyone who has worked at HP would also know that you never write the name as H-P; the hyphen is used only when the founders are named in full.
I never claimed to work there. I never claimed to be an authoritative source. Did you miss the "If I Recall Correctly" bits? I have no idea which of their billion labs generated this tale.
my understanding of what goes on is that your first two sentences are correct, and the third is just totally bogus
Hey, we could both be wrong. :-) Let's not lose any sleep over it.
On an ironical note, it seems you have less flexibility than the folks in HP Labs where the IT folks provide support for a lot more than just Windows. It may come as a shock, but the kind of IT support in various places depends on what kind of work people are expected to be doing.
Uh... All I wrote is that our IT doesn't mind when local users have local admin rights under Win2K. I didn't say anything about which OSes they support, or don't, or what their other policies are. Please don't generalize or make assumptions.
Uh, dude, I'm not replying to the main article. I'm replying to another comment. Care to check again?
If there's only a single OS listed in boot.ini, then no boot menu is given. (What would be the point?) The bootloader just boots it without prompting.
By default, Windows is the only one it lists. (No surprise there.) I copied my Linux bootsector to BOOTSECT.LNX, added another line to boot.ini, and then I had a choice at boot time: Windows 2000, or Linux. To do all this I followed the mini-HOWTO at linuxdoc.org; that HOWTO is now several years old, I believe. It was originally written for NT 4.something.
Your article is complete uninformed flamebait.
...is that IT has the One True Canonical Disk Image. IT performs backups of the network drives; if you want anything safe, you keep it on the network drives. Anything goes wrong on your machine, their first step is *WHOMP* reimage the machine.
Also IIRC they allow users to install stuff, make local changes and tweaks, etc. I think they might even have machine-local administrator rights. But if you change anything, it breaks, and you complain, *WHOMP*.
(On an ironical note, I work for a military research lab, and IT is not at all alarmed when users have local admin rights to their Lose2K boxes. It makes things far easier for everybody, including IT. (IT can still do remote admin.))
Excellent! They've added quite a few features since the last time I checked. The whole threading tree on the left-hand side is new to me too.
Okay, ignore my rant, then. :-)