I think you have to weigh the total picture. Is slapping the occasional feathered friend bad for the environment? Is it still bad when considering the downside of fossil fuel consumption?
I went on a tour of the Pickering nuclear plant in Ontario, and they were talking about how the warm water they pump out into the lake was attracting fish, which were getting caught in the pumps and shredded. They tried putting flashing lights on it to scare them away, and apparently in just turned into a fish disco party. I think they eventually used sound to scare them away.
I did also want to address sysadmins separately. From my experience, someone who has in-depth knowledge about network configurations (I'm talking star vs. bus topology, true bandwidth, security, protocol advantages/disadvantages, etc. - not ipconfig for windows) is invaluable when you are trying to set up a high-performance, reliable network. But once it's all running, it really only takes one person's time to plug in a new disk drive when one fails.
This is the difference between a network engineer and a sysadmin. We had some Cisco guys in to talk to my Telecom Engineering class 4th year, and they made the interesting point that if you're desigining a network please, please, please don't make it more complicated than it has to be for 15% more performance. Just make it cookie-cutter simple so Joe Sysadmin can add new systems, departments, etc., etc. as simply as possible, without needing knowledge of all the deep issues.
It's just like the people who designed the phone network are not the ones out there installing new lines, or the guy who designed your house doesn't come over when you need your roof fixed, or a sun room added on.
As we get better University programs for all of this (and the magic of computers fades), the distinctions will become more does.clear. I still remember how I had the highest mark in my computer animation class in high school despite having no art skill to speak of. Just because I knew how to use the damn computer. Now everyone does...just check out the photoshop jobs arty teenagers are pulling on livejournal and what not.
I agree with most of what you say, but please please please do not equate the internet with the web. It doesn't even jive with the rest of your argument.
Gentoo falls into a similar category, but it has an inferior install procedure, and emerge isn't as good as Slackware's package install system (and believe me, I'm no fan of Slackware).
Neither have actual package management, making them both unsuitable for most commercial environments, and Gentoo doesn't even have an installer to speak of.
Oh man. I spent about two years tracking Mandrake development (cooker) religiously, and still am a big fan of URPMI for package management. But to say portage is not a package manager is just preposterous. The only thing I really miss is the reverse dependency checking when you uninstall something (although it's apparently coming soon), but it has other things to compensate.
The most recent thing I found very helpful was when the latest gconf kept my Gnome desktop from booting properly (setting any locale other than the default would just completely hork your settings in 2.8.(=2). I found a patch for the problem on Gnome's bugzilla, and was able to do the various ebuild install steps manually and patch before I compiled. If I was still on cooker, I would have had to wait for two minor version updates before the fix was in, or else just compile all of Gnome from CVS manually and break the whole dependency chain. With Gentoo I got it done in a couple of hours, submitted a bug, and a new ebuild was in unstable within about 48 hours.
Maybe this is possible with src.rpms, but it never seemed like the obvious thing to try on an rpm centric distro.
Gentoo is certainly not perfect, but I've stuck with it for about a month now. It's method for specifying what individual packages you'd like to be unstable is also much better than Mandrake's. Sure you can install some random packages from cooker on a stable release, but they specifically won't support anything other than a stable release, or a full cooker system.
No you don't. An ISP never has as many IP's in their pool at they have customers. They only have to keep as many as they will ever have connected at one time. With cable and DSL that's a higher percentage than it used to be with dial-up, but it's excess cost to keep an IP for each customer.
My cable modem doesn't even have a power switch. Even if all our computers are off, it's on. I find it hard to believe this isn't damn near 100%.
I think it's more an issue where if a lot of more earlier subscribers are leaving than new are signing up they'd get 'holes' in their assigned IP space, so they'd have to buy a bigger block than they needed.
Your bitchy little reply would have had some merit , except that "local settings" and "application data" are hidden folders. By default, n00bs don't have them visible, what with them being set being hidden and all.
Uhhh...Thunderbird stores it's mail in "Application Data", too. Think before you speak.
Limited signatures - Only one per account and no way to insert during editing a message. A pain for us who use signatures as an Autotext/proforma facility.
Have you looked at Tagzilla? This is one of those things that's perfect for extensions - it would be a pain in the ass for most people if this was included by default.
I just wish it were easier to extract only the packages I like and use them without having to install the whole deal. As I said, I also have the same problem with GNOME, so I'm not picking on KDE.
Personally I was shocked at how tiny, say, MonoDevelop is, because of all the dependencies. Where something like Eclipse or OpenOffice is just MASSIVE, because they don't depend on anything.
I finally just switched to using GTK apps only to avoid having both the Gnome/KDE and KDE/QT dependency trees installed (mainly since my only really necessary apps - Mozilla and Gnucash - are gtk). Once you've installed a few apps, you're usually looking at maybe 10 megs per app, and maybe a few megs of new sets of bindings.
Real users don't want applications dependent on downloading bucketloads of Audio crap when their hardware doesn't even have a sound card.
Many work environments do not allow sound, and why should we have all this aRts stuff unnecesarily?
This is why you install Gentoo with "-arts -esound", etc.
*ducks*....
Re:Burn the disk as an effigy of Greg Fischbach...
on
Buy a Piece of Acclaim
·
· Score: 1
2. A likeness or image, especially of a person.
I believe that was the GP's point. After destroying the original desk (not disk, smart guy), they'd have to construct a fake desk/model of a desk (or effigy) to burn. Or maybe a picture of it. But we've all seen burning pictures before, it's not that effective an image. Just burn the actual pieces.
If they fire 10% of their workforce every quarter then they would have a nearly 40%/year turnover rate simply from the firings. No way.
While this also seems high to me, it would seem likely that most of the 10% would be made up of employees on their first quarter (i.e. replacing the previous 10%).
Of course, the complexity of GPU's makes a huge difference. After all, Doom 3 isn't processor intensive in the way Quake was, becuase the majority of work is done by the graphics card.
Also keep in mind that there are now more transistors in the GPUs than CPUs. They are now using fabrication/memory technology that is at least a generation ahead of the CPU makers. This is expensive.
I used ICQ since 1997, and there was no selective invisibility except through third party clients or blocking a user.
Are you on crack? Since 99 at the very least they had this. Actually, definitely since before I went to University, so 98 or earlier. There's a section called "alert/accept" modes or some such in each user's options. You can specify always visible (which I would use for my roommates, for instance, since they knew I was there anyway), always invisible, and I think even always away or n/a.
I'd like to see it. I type "emerge packagename" and that's the end of it. In Redhat or Debian, I have to wait for a version to be released to RPM or DEB, and I have to pray that I'm running standard hardware and want to use the configuration they built it with.
In Mandrake I had "urpmi packagename", and that was the end of it. Even if the dependencies were across multiple sources.
Don't get me wrong, I just switched to Gentoo and like some of the portage features, but there's things it doesn't do as well. I had to install an extra tool to deal with multiple sources, and they gave to be synced with this extra tool. You also need extra tools (AFAIK) to show what packages will be broken when you unmerge a package. I don't think it would be that crazy to make you put in "--nodeps" if you're unmerging and know what you're doing, I _liked_ that I could try uninstalling different stuff in Mandrake, and it would tell me why it needed to be there. And if I didn't want any of it, I could just tell it to uninstall all of it.
Yes, most of that is possible in gentoo, but not as nice. I did, however, manage to manually patch an error out of gconf using a code snippet from bugs.gnome.org, by doing a step-by-step ebuild/emerge thing. That was quite nice, as otherwise Gnome was opening in an unusable state.
Yes, this is a known problem with linux systems, especially when I have to type it in just to change the screen resolution! come on!!
FWIW, I've seen these on Windows boxes as well. Every try developing in 640x480? *shudder*
I also like the computer labs on University campuses that all have horribly wrong clocks, but insist on locking the user out of changing the time. This seems to be getting better. It was especially bad when you were required to make newsgroup postings by a certain time, and your terminal had it wrong.
However Gentoo doesn't replace binaries until a compile has successfully completed so worse case the result is a bit of lost drive space in var and waiting for a package fix.
The problem is when the successfully compiled package hoses your system. For some strange reason last week I decided I didn't want to run an unstable glibc anymore, so I let emerge --update downgrade it. Whoops. When "ls" is giving you segmentation faults, you've got trouble.
Finally, A.I. was an excellent fucking movie, and is totally underrated. It was not a sci-fi movie so much as a sci-fi fairy tale. It started out a bit more "normal" but became much more "fairy-tale like" by the end.
For me the problem with the switch was the first half felt way more creepy-Kubrick, and the second half was more glitzy-neon-schmaltzy-Spielberg. Not that Kubrick didn't take u-turns in his movies... but it just felt too obvious. By the end I was just disappointed.
If you're in any sort of tech industry (which you probably are considering you're here), you might consider an IEEE membership. On top of the magazine and various other semi-tangible benefits, you get an e-mail forwarding address, with optional virus and spam marking/filtering.
I know the non-student dues especially are pretty hefty, but it can be worth it. And I really doubt they're going anywhere, so I'm quite confident I'll have my @ieee.org address until e-mail is no longer the going thing.
Yet, the funny thing is very few people actually want to USE OpenBSD. Maybe that's because they are so "focused" on security that it's difficult to use their system as anything other than a basic firewall, or very basic server?
Just because I don't want to drive an 18-wheeler, doesn't mean I don't rely on their existence.
On a reasonably fast connection it can take longer to connect to a BT swarm than to download a 5 MB file. Not to mention your BT download will be a lot slower.
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They never bother me. I never look at them except during traffic. Billboards are not so invasive, you can just not pay attention.
Exactly. My only problem is that I'm so good at ignoring ads that I miss posters announcing things I actually _want_ to know about.
I think you have to weigh the total picture. Is slapping the occasional feathered friend bad for the environment? Is it still bad when considering the downside of fossil fuel consumption?
I went on a tour of the Pickering nuclear plant in Ontario, and they were talking about how the warm water they pump out into the lake was attracting fish, which were getting caught in the pumps and shredded. They tried putting flashing lights on it to scare them away, and apparently in just turned into a fish disco party. I think they eventually used sound to scare them away.
I did also want to address sysadmins separately. From my experience, someone who has in-depth knowledge about network configurations (I'm talking star vs. bus topology, true bandwidth, security, protocol advantages/disadvantages, etc. - not ipconfig for windows) is invaluable when you are trying to set up a high-performance, reliable network. But once it's all running, it really only takes one person's time to plug in a new disk drive when one fails.
This is the difference between a network engineer and a sysadmin. We had some Cisco guys in to talk to my Telecom Engineering class 4th year, and they made the interesting point that if you're desigining a network please, please, please don't make it more complicated than it has to be for 15% more performance. Just make it cookie-cutter simple so Joe Sysadmin can add new systems, departments, etc., etc. as simply as possible, without needing knowledge of all the deep issues.
It's just like the people who designed the phone network are not the ones out there installing new lines, or the guy who designed your house doesn't come over when you need your roof fixed, or a sun room added on.
As we get better University programs for all of this (and the magic of computers fades), the distinctions will become more does.clear. I still remember how I had the highest mark in my computer animation class in high school despite having no art skill to speak of. Just because I knew how to use the damn computer. Now everyone does...just check out the photoshop jobs arty teenagers are pulling on livejournal and what not.
the internet (read: WWW).
I agree with most of what you say, but please please please do not equate the internet with the web. It doesn't even jive with the rest of your argument.
Gentoo falls into a similar category, but it has an inferior install procedure, and emerge isn't as good as Slackware's package install system (and believe me, I'm no fan of Slackware).
Neither have actual package management, making them both unsuitable for most commercial environments, and Gentoo doesn't even have an installer to speak of.
Oh man. I spent about two years tracking Mandrake development (cooker) religiously, and still am a big fan of URPMI for package management. But to say portage is not a package manager is just preposterous. The only thing I really miss is the reverse dependency checking when you uninstall something (although it's apparently coming soon), but it has other things to compensate.
The most recent thing I found very helpful was when the latest gconf kept my Gnome desktop from booting properly (setting any locale other than the default would just completely hork your settings in 2.8.(=2). I found a patch for the problem on Gnome's bugzilla, and was able to do the various ebuild install steps manually and patch before I compiled. If I was still on cooker, I would have had to wait for two minor version updates before the fix was in, or else just compile all of Gnome from CVS manually and break the whole dependency chain. With Gentoo I got it done in a couple of hours, submitted a bug, and a new ebuild was in unstable within about 48 hours.
Maybe this is possible with src.rpms, but it never seemed like the obvious thing to try on an rpm centric distro.
Gentoo is certainly not perfect, but I've stuck with it for about a month now. It's method for specifying what individual packages you'd like to be unstable is also much better than Mandrake's. Sure you can install some random packages from cooker on a stable release, but they specifically won't support anything other than a stable release, or a full cooker system.
No you don't. An ISP never has as many IP's in their pool at they have customers. They only have to keep as many as they will ever have connected at one time. With cable and DSL that's a higher percentage than it used to be with dial-up, but it's excess cost to keep an IP for each customer.
My cable modem doesn't even have a power switch. Even if all our computers are off, it's on. I find it hard to believe this isn't damn near 100%.
I think it's more an issue where if a lot of more earlier subscribers are leaving than new are signing up they'd get 'holes' in their assigned IP space, so they'd have to buy a bigger block than they needed.
Your bitchy little reply would have had some merit , except that "local settings" and "application data" are hidden folders. By default, n00bs don't have them visible, what with them being set being hidden and all.
Uhhh...Thunderbird stores it's mail in "Application Data", too. Think before you speak.
Limited signatures - Only one per account and no way to insert during editing a message. A pain for us who use signatures as an Autotext/proforma facility.
Have you looked at Tagzilla? This is one of those things that's perfect for extensions - it would be a pain in the ass for most people if this was included by default.
The rest of Canada might appreciate but the national fiber is too strong here
Too bad you spell fibre like an American. You are clearly some sort of desperate Vermonter.
I just wish it were easier to extract only the packages I like and use them without having to install the whole deal. As I said, I also have the same problem with GNOME, so I'm not picking on KDE.
Personally I was shocked at how tiny, say, MonoDevelop is, because of all the dependencies. Where something like Eclipse or OpenOffice is just MASSIVE, because they don't depend on anything.
I finally just switched to using GTK apps only to avoid having both the Gnome/KDE and KDE/QT dependency trees installed (mainly since my only really necessary apps - Mozilla and Gnucash - are gtk). Once you've installed a few apps, you're usually looking at maybe 10 megs per app, and maybe a few megs of new sets of bindings.
Real users don't want applications dependent on downloading bucketloads of Audio crap when their hardware doesn't even have a sound card.
Many work environments do not allow sound, and why should we have all this aRts stuff unnecesarily?
This is why you install Gentoo with "-arts -esound", etc.
*ducks*....
2. A likeness or image, especially of a person.
I believe that was the GP's point. After destroying the original desk (not disk, smart guy), they'd have to construct a fake desk/model of a desk (or effigy) to burn. Or maybe a picture of it. But we've all seen burning pictures before, it's not that effective an image. Just burn the actual pieces.
If they fire 10% of their workforce every quarter then they would have a nearly 40%/year turnover rate simply from the firings. No way.
While this also seems high to me, it would seem likely that most of the 10% would be made up of employees on their first quarter (i.e. replacing the previous 10%).
Maybe it's 10% of people on probation?
Of course, the complexity of GPU's makes a huge difference. After all, Doom 3 isn't processor intensive in the way Quake was, becuase the majority of work is done by the graphics card.
Also keep in mind that there are now more transistors in the GPUs than CPUs. They are now using fabrication/memory technology that is at least a generation ahead of the CPU makers. This is expensive.
I used ICQ since 1997, and there was no selective invisibility except through third party clients or blocking a user.
Are you on crack? Since 99 at the very least they had this. Actually, definitely since before I went to University, so 98 or earlier. There's a section called "alert/accept" modes or some such in each user's options. You can specify always visible (which I would use for my roommates, for instance, since they knew I was there anyway), always invisible, and I think even always away or n/a.
I'd like to see it. I type "emerge packagename" and that's the end of it. In Redhat or Debian, I have to wait for a version to be released to RPM or DEB, and I have to pray that I'm running standard hardware and want to use the configuration they built it with.
In Mandrake I had "urpmi packagename", and that was the end of it. Even if the dependencies were across multiple sources.
Don't get me wrong, I just switched to Gentoo and like some of the portage features, but there's things it doesn't do as well. I had to install an extra tool to deal with multiple sources, and they gave to be synced with this extra tool. You also need extra tools (AFAIK) to show what packages will be broken when you unmerge a package. I don't think it would be that crazy to make you put in "--nodeps" if you're unmerging and know what you're doing, I _liked_ that I could try uninstalling different stuff in Mandrake, and it would tell me why it needed to be there. And if I didn't want any of it, I could just tell it to uninstall all of it.
Yes, most of that is possible in gentoo, but not as nice. I did, however, manage to manually patch an error out of gconf using a code snippet from bugs.gnome.org, by doing a step-by-step ebuild/emerge thing. That was quite nice, as otherwise Gnome was opening in an unusable state.
Yes, this is a known problem with linux systems, especially when I have to type it in just to change the screen resolution! come on!!
FWIW, I've seen these on Windows boxes as well. Every try developing in 640x480? *shudder*
I also like the computer labs on University campuses that all have horribly wrong clocks, but insist on locking the user out of changing the time. This seems to be getting better. It was especially bad when you were required to make newsgroup postings by a certain time, and your terminal had it wrong.
However Gentoo doesn't replace binaries until a compile has successfully completed so worse case the result is a bit of lost drive space in var and waiting for a package fix.
The problem is when the successfully compiled package hoses your system. For some strange reason last week I decided I didn't want to run an unstable glibc anymore, so I let emerge --update downgrade it. Whoops. When "ls" is giving you segmentation faults, you've got trouble.
Finally, A.I. was an excellent fucking movie, and is totally underrated. It was not a sci-fi movie so much as a sci-fi fairy tale. It started out a bit more "normal" but became much more "fairy-tale like" by the end.
For me the problem with the switch was the first half felt way more creepy-Kubrick, and the second half was more glitzy-neon-schmaltzy-Spielberg. Not that Kubrick didn't take u-turns in his movies... but it just felt too obvious. By the end I was just disappointed.
On Mandrake/Firefox it would sometimes show up blank the first time after I opened the browser, then work fine if I went back in.
The only game I've ever stopped playing for that reason is Hitman 2. Very disturbing.
I doubt that adding even more of them would help much, no matter how out-of-order they're made. Instruction dependencies will always exist.
Consider adding enough cores that multiple branches can be executed, and then the correct one picked later. Kind of like poor-man's quantum.
If you're in any sort of tech industry (which you probably are considering you're here), you might consider an IEEE membership. On top of the magazine and various other semi-tangible benefits, you get an e-mail forwarding address, with optional virus and spam marking/filtering.
I know the non-student dues especially are pretty hefty, but it can be worth it. And I really doubt they're going anywhere, so I'm quite confident I'll have my @ieee.org address until e-mail is no longer the going thing.
Yet, the funny thing is very few people actually want to USE OpenBSD. Maybe that's because they are so "focused" on security that it's difficult to use their system as anything other than a basic firewall, or very basic server?
Just because I don't want to drive an 18-wheeler, doesn't mean I don't rely on their existence.
On a reasonably fast connection it can take longer to connect to a BT swarm than to download a 5 MB file. Not to mention your BT download will be a lot slower.