I think you'll find Rosegarden a capable alternative. I've had both Cubase (at least on Windows, never tried it on OS X) and Rosegarden crash on me, but that's always been a consistent feature of Steinberg's stuff since the Pro 24 days.
Sounds like you've only tried the OpenBSD and FreeBSD installers. The partitioner in the NetBSD installer is very straightforward, in fact I'd go as far as claiming that it's the best of the BSD installers. The base install is also more minimal than OpenBSD (no Apache for instance, which suits me as only a minority of my machines needs a webserver and even then it isn't Apache). NetBSD is a much better performer than OpenBSD, and the upcoming 4.0 version looks to be an even better performer than current FreeBSD releases on uniprocessor machines.
Err, that's rubbish. NeoOffice opens the default browser when there's an update. The update page happens to have a donation message on it, but the main thing is to inform you that an update is available!
BSD is dead. As long as they have the antique command line tools.
Well Linux, and every other Unix like OS including Mac OS X, are dead then as they also include "antique" command line tools. In fact Windows must be dead as well, as it includes command line tools, albeit piss-poor ones.
Think whatever you want, but I cannot live w/o GNU command line. bash alone isn't sufficient - text-tools, file-tools are also important.
Last time I checked, the ksh that comes with the BSDs can do everything bash can. The BSDs include all the command line tools that the GNU file and text tool packages have, after all they're clones of the Unix ones found in BSD, plus with the BSDs the manpages are actually complete and usually include examples. With the GNU tools you are often faced with an incomplete or out of date manpage that refers you to some difficult to navigate or search "info" pages.
e.g. BSD's moronic find requires directory name - while GNU one picks current directory by default. All GNU tools support --help and --version - try to find common help displaying option in BSD variants. Not that BSD tools helps output is any useful anyway.
Wow, GNU find extends POSIX with one extra feature that I've never used in over a decade of using it. As for --help, that's what manpages are for (sorry, I forgot that your GNU manpages are incomplete), and --version, how often do you need to know what version of find you're using?!?
Also BSD's ps suck big time.
Hmm, last I checked the output of both ps on Linux and NetBSD looked remarkably similar. Note that what you probably consider "GNU ps" is actually "Linux ps", as the implementation of such a command tends to be very closely tied to the kernel it's running on.
The stupid insistence on using 'more' instead of 'less' isn't helping either.
Oh dear, never heard of the PAGER command line variable? I guess your particular brand of Linux just happens to default it to/bin/less. Funnily enough, so does/etc/skel/.profile on my BSD machines.
Also, it might surprise you, 'vi' is no more. Everybody had forgotten what it is - for good - and are using 'vim' instead. But the fact remain: BSD has no sane decent text editor preinstalled. Because POSIX 'vi' cannot be called 'sane' nor 'decent'.
nvi, the default vi on BSDs has more features than the minimum required POSIX - see the Solaris implentation for something approaching that minimalism! Personally I find vim to be a mess, and have had it crash on me a number of times. However, the approach taken with the BSDs is that a minimum is included in the base install and ports or packages can be added to create the "perfect" environment. That said, OpenBSD includes a minimal emacs workalike in the base install which may be more to your taste.
Constructive note. BSD should align themselves with Debian or Gentoo.
God no. Gentoo is grinding to a halt as it's an unstable mess, while Debian reflects the whole GNU mentality of replacing things with new, no less buggy implementations every so often, with no interface consistency and way too many esoteric features. Having fought with aptitude and had it crash far too many times, I'm more than happy with the BSD ports systems instead.
Why don't you download the floppy boot images, do a net install and save having to waste a CDR?
The reason official downloadable ISO images are not available is to encourage people to buy the prepackaged CDs. The revenue from these sales is a significant reason why OpenBSD continues to flourish, as people like Theo de Raadt have an income that allows them to work full time on the project. Hopefully this will prevent a monoculture of Linux on servers, which in some respects would be as bad as the monoculture of Windows on the desktop. Personally I don't need CDs, but if I was using OpenBSD (rather than a certain other BSD) then I would be doing net installs from a server on my own network, and making a donation.
To which the stock answer is, yes OpenBSD does run Linux - Linunx binaries at any rate (linux_compat(8)). I don't know about OpenBSD, but on NetBSD this works very well. Before a native JDK 1.4.2 was available for NetBSD I ran the Linux binaries of it under emulation.
If webcams are anything like other classes of device that come from multiple manufacturers, then there are probably lots of quirks in the different devices. This is why USB devices (MIDI interfaces for instance), don't always work with the existing drivers despite the device claiming to use the standard protocol. Perhaps webcams are better than some other devices in this respect, but whichever way you look at it, this guy's driver suppiorting so many different models is damn impressive.
When we'd been using DEC Alphas, the RAID arrays were rock solid. Then when Compaq bought DEC, we were essentially getting the same kit but rebadged (literally in the early days - you could peel away the Compaq label and there'd be a Digitial one underneath). When we went to HP, we assumed that what we'd be getting was decent kit that had benefited from the DEC know how that they'd inherited. Turns out that Compaq hadn't really known what to do with the DEC engineers and that most of them either moved on or were sold to as part of the Alpha team that gave AMD a leg up in the 64 bit stakes. Perhaps we should have looked at some third party storage solutions rather than going with the default option from HP.
When my second to last employer switched OS from Tru64 to Linux, we saw a massive drop in stability. This wasn't a drop in stability or reliability of our applications, but of the OS and hardware. We had been an Alpha and Tru64 shop, and before that a Vax and VMS one. When the writing was on the wall after Compaq acquired DEC and HP then acquired Compaq, we switched to Linux on HP. This was their supposedly high-end machines, complete with huge RAID cabinets with dual redundant everything. From not needing to reboot the Alphas unless we wanted to reinstall the OS, we went to having to reboot the Linux boxes every couple of days. The RAID arrays would simply stop working, but more often than that Linux would go haywire and lock up with unkillable processes chewing up the CPU's. Despite a very expensive support contract, HP couldn't fix either issue, we just came to expect a visit from the engineer to replace the RAID controllers every so often and frequent reboots. As we were selling a logistics system to run warehouses 24/7, we were not happy and started to look at Solaris on Sun hardware. I left before the switch, but unless HP have managed to solve the Linux and RAID issues I expect that they have lost a customer by now.
The tests referred to in your link focused on reads, whereas writes with MyISAM are considerably faster than InnoDB. The most sensible applications for MySQL that use the MyISAM engine are those where there are a high number of writes as well as reads, and the reads involve few if any joins. MySQL has a lousy query optimiser which means that joins have a pretty high performance cost, but for simple queries the short time spent optimising is a benefit.
Sybase ASE may have similarities to SQL Server that make porting a little easier, but the two do differ quite a bit now that Micorsoft don't have to maintain compatability (a period of compatability at the TSQL level was specified in the deal MS struck with Sybase to get the source code). Worse still, Sybase ASE is looking increasingly like a dead end. Version 15 is so unreliable that I don't know anyone who has successfully migrated from 12.5 and Sybase seem to be more interested in "compact" databases for small devices. Overall, Sybase ASE doesn't seem to have evolved much since the early 1990s, and is looking increasingly archaic.
That sounds more like an iPhoto problem than a Firefox one. I don't use iPhoto, but with iTunes I can drag 'n' drop album artwork from a webpage in Firefox to iTunes and it Just Works(tm).
Re:Books for a language? Why?
on
Beginning Ruby
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· Score: 1
Try Haskell - I've been trying to learn it for several weeks now, but coming from a C background I'm really struggling. That's not necessarily a criticism of Haskell, more a sign of how different functional programming is to procedural programming.
Only recently has it become superior. Documentation isn't just a feature, it's a necessity, even with the open source world, and Postgresql's documentation is finally getting to a good point.
Unless something dramatic has happened to MySQL documentation since I last used it (version 4.1), then PostgreSQL has the better documenation and has done since as long as I've been using it. The PostgreSQL documentation reads like a coherent set of books, while MySQL documentation seems to be a random mess that grew out of some simple README file. As for the software itself, PostgreSQL has always been superior - a simple comparison of features alone bears this out, but if you want to go further take a look at the code as the same distinction is found there.
Riiigght. So broken code generates warnings, the programmer elects to ignore those warnings and then wonders why things break. This is just the same as people compiling their C or C++ code using gcc, and electing to ignore warnings from -Wall.
Kiss goodbye to any new drugs if anyone can make "knock offs" as soon as a new one comes to market. IT costs roughly 800 million USD to bring a new drug to market - who's going to bother if you can't get a reasonable return on that investment?
If your attitude towards Java is anything to go by then I doubt you are in an important decision making position anyway, but if you are, then I definitely wouldn't want to rely on you to look into possible solutions for systems that I develop. Let me guess you're a PHP guy.
No one with any familiarity of Soviet history would claim that Khruschev was a monster on a par with Stalin, however he was not the great reformer that some people seem to think. Regular show trials and mass killings certainly ended with Stalin, but the criminal laws were not revised and remained open to abuse. Giving internal passports to people didn't make it easier to move around. The passport had to be carried - failure to do so resulted in immediate arrest - and simply by checking peoples papers their ability to travel could be controlled. As for genetics, Stalin was enthusiastic about the subject. He saw in it a "biological Marxism", a way of influencing the development of plants and animals through manipulation which mirrors the Marxist belief that environment shapes behaviour. Genuine work in the field of genetics was of course hampered by Stalins belief in the charlatan Lysenko. I haven't read enough to comment on the Cuban missile crisis, but I did get the impression that the US and USSR were at the very brink of nuclear war before the ships on their way to Cuba turned around. However, on the matter of "killing Stalin", there is still no conclusive evidence of foul play. The accounts of Stalin's final hours are contradictory, incomplete and likely to stay that way unless convincing new evidence appears.
Indeed there were mass killings under Lenin's rule, and he is on record as approving of them. Trotksy, still a poster boy for old school lefties because he fell out with Stalin, was the main implementor of Lenin's Red Terror. Also notable was Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka - a man so fixated with oppressing perceived enenmies of the revolution that he worked himself to death.
You're also correct that the Gulags continued after the death of Stalin. Despite Khruschev's denunciation of Stalin's crimes, which as a leading figure in that era he himself was complicit in, the camps were not emptied. Yes, some political prisoners received amnesties but many more continued to rot in the labour camps.
As for the grandparent claiming that things becames lot better after Khruschev, that's incorrect. The Brezhnev era saw a tightening of control, although it was thankfully nothing like the Stalin era.
I've worked with CORBA at my last three jobs, and I've been pretty happy with it. I've used OmniORB, Orbacus, JacORB and MICO - all of which work very well, although the licensing cost of Orbacus puts it out of reach for most of the things I work on. I do have to wrap a lot of the C++ stuff in helper classes though, as the mapping for that language is far too baroque. One of the consultants at IONA has produced an open source CORBA utilities library that which is far more extensive than my one.
Does anybody know any good C++ RPC library which uses templates and which does not need code generating with any external tool nor executable?
Yup, sockets. Every RPC-ish system I'm aware of (Sun RPC/XDR, CORBA, SOAP, RMI, ASN.1) needs a code generator that produces the stubs which make it easier than using raw sockets. The code that's produced by these stub compilers can be pretty small and well optimised (apart from SOAP), plus you shouldn't need to edit it by hand. Some compilers, such as a decent one for CORBAs IDL, can also produce the boilerplate code that you then fill in with your implementation of the RPC calls. While I usually dislike generated code, when it comes to RPC systems I'm quite glad they do a decent job of hiding complexity from me.
Slashdot Mirror
Cubase?
I think you'll find Rosegarden a capable alternative. I've had both Cubase (at least on Windows, never tried it on OS X) and Rosegarden crash on me, but that's always been a consistent feature of Steinberg's stuff since the Pro 24 days.
Sounds like you've only tried the OpenBSD and FreeBSD installers. The partitioner in the NetBSD installer is very straightforward, in fact I'd go as far as claiming that it's the best of the BSD installers. The base install is also more minimal than OpenBSD (no Apache for instance, which suits me as only a minority of my machines needs a webserver and even then it isn't Apache). NetBSD is a much better performer than OpenBSD, and the upcoming 4.0 version looks to be an even better performer than current FreeBSD releases on uniprocessor machines.
If this isn't modded +5 Funny by the time I come back from lunch then the puppy gets it.
Err, that's rubbish. NeoOffice opens the default browser when there's an update. The update page happens to have a donation message on it, but the main thing is to inform you that an update is available!
BSD is dead. As long as they have the antique command line tools.
Well Linux, and every other Unix like OS including Mac OS X, are dead then as they also include "antique" command line tools. In fact Windows must be dead as well, as it includes command line tools, albeit piss-poor ones.
Think whatever you want, but I cannot live w/o GNU command line. bash alone isn't sufficient - text-tools, file-tools are also important.
Last time I checked, the ksh that comes with the BSDs can do everything bash can. The BSDs include all the command line tools that the GNU file and text tool packages have, after all they're clones of the Unix ones found in BSD, plus with the BSDs the manpages are actually complete and usually include examples. With the GNU tools you are often faced with an incomplete or out of date manpage that refers you to some difficult to navigate or search "info" pages.
e.g. BSD's moronic find requires directory name - while GNU one picks current directory by default. All GNU tools support --help and --version - try to find common help displaying option in BSD variants. Not that BSD tools helps output is any useful anyway.
Wow, GNU find extends POSIX with one extra feature that I've never used in over a decade of using it. As for --help, that's what manpages are for (sorry, I forgot that your GNU manpages are incomplete), and --version, how often do you need to know what version of find you're using?!?
Also BSD's ps suck big time.
Hmm, last I checked the output of both ps on Linux and NetBSD looked remarkably similar. Note that what you probably consider "GNU ps" is actually "Linux ps", as the implementation of such a command tends to be very closely tied to the kernel it's running on.
The stupid insistence on using 'more' instead of 'less' isn't helping either.
Oh dear, never heard of the PAGER command line variable? I guess your particular brand of Linux just happens to default it to /bin/less. Funnily enough, so does /etc/skel/.profile on my BSD machines.
Also, it might surprise you, 'vi' is no more. Everybody had forgotten what it is - for good - and are using 'vim' instead. But the fact remain: BSD has no sane decent text editor preinstalled. Because POSIX 'vi' cannot be called 'sane' nor 'decent'.
nvi, the default vi on BSDs has more features than the minimum required POSIX - see the Solaris implentation for something approaching that minimalism! Personally I find vim to be a mess, and have had it crash on me a number of times. However, the approach taken with the BSDs is that a minimum is included in the base install and ports or packages can be added to create the "perfect" environment. That said, OpenBSD includes a minimal emacs workalike in the base install which may be more to your taste.
Constructive note. BSD should align themselves with Debian or Gentoo.
God no. Gentoo is grinding to a halt as it's an unstable mess, while Debian reflects the whole GNU mentality of replacing things with new, no less buggy implementations every so often, with no interface consistency and way too many esoteric features. Having fought with aptitude and had it crash far too many times, I'm more than happy with the BSD ports systems instead.
Why don't you download the floppy boot images, do a net install and save having to waste a CDR?
The reason official downloadable ISO images are not available is to encourage people to buy the prepackaged CDs. The revenue from these sales is a significant reason why OpenBSD continues to flourish, as people like Theo de Raadt have an income that allows them to work full time on the project. Hopefully this will prevent a monoculture of Linux on servers, which in some respects would be as bad as the monoculture of Windows on the desktop. Personally I don't need CDs, but if I was using OpenBSD (rather than a certain other BSD) then I would be doing net installs from a server on my own network, and making a donation.
To which the stock answer is, yes OpenBSD does run Linux - Linunx binaries at any rate (linux_compat(8)). I don't know about OpenBSD, but on NetBSD this works very well. Before a native JDK 1.4.2 was available for NetBSD I ran the Linux binaries of it under emulation.
Except this driver is written in plain old C (not that you can't do OOP in C - see Glib and GTK+ - but it wasn't designed with it in mind).
If webcams are anything like other classes of device that come from multiple manufacturers, then there are probably lots of quirks in the different devices. This is why USB devices (MIDI interfaces for instance), don't always work with the existing drivers despite the device claiming to use the standard protocol. Perhaps webcams are better than some other devices in this respect, but whichever way you look at it, this guy's driver suppiorting so many different models is damn impressive.
When we'd been using DEC Alphas, the RAID arrays were rock solid. Then when Compaq bought DEC, we were essentially getting the same kit but rebadged (literally in the early days - you could peel away the Compaq label and there'd be a Digitial one underneath). When we went to HP, we assumed that what we'd be getting was decent kit that had benefited from the DEC know how that they'd inherited. Turns out that Compaq hadn't really known what to do with the DEC engineers and that most of them either moved on or were sold to as part of the Alpha team that gave AMD a leg up in the 64 bit stakes. Perhaps we should have looked at some third party storage solutions rather than going with the default option from HP.
Linux not stable? Give me a break.
When my second to last employer switched OS from Tru64 to Linux, we saw a massive drop in stability. This wasn't a drop in stability or reliability of our applications, but of the OS and hardware. We had been an Alpha and Tru64 shop, and before that a Vax and VMS one. When the writing was on the wall after Compaq acquired DEC and HP then acquired Compaq, we switched to Linux on HP. This was their supposedly high-end machines, complete with huge RAID cabinets with dual redundant everything. From not needing to reboot the Alphas unless we wanted to reinstall the OS, we went to having to reboot the Linux boxes every couple of days. The RAID arrays would simply stop working, but more often than that Linux would go haywire and lock up with unkillable processes chewing up the CPU's. Despite a very expensive support contract, HP couldn't fix either issue, we just came to expect a visit from the engineer to replace the RAID controllers every so often and frequent reboots. As we were selling a logistics system to run warehouses 24/7, we were not happy and started to look at Solaris on Sun hardware. I left before the switch, but unless HP have managed to solve the Linux and RAID issues I expect that they have lost a customer by now.
The tests referred to in your link focused on reads, whereas writes with MyISAM are considerably faster than InnoDB. The most sensible applications for MySQL that use the MyISAM engine are those where there are a high number of writes as well as reads, and the reads involve few if any joins. MySQL has a lousy query optimiser which means that joins have a pretty high performance cost, but for simple queries the short time spent optimising is a benefit.
Sybase ASE may have similarities to SQL Server that make porting a little easier, but the two do differ quite a bit now that Micorsoft don't have to maintain compatability (a period of compatability at the TSQL level was specified in the deal MS struck with Sybase to get the source code). Worse still, Sybase ASE is looking increasingly like a dead end. Version 15 is so unreliable that I don't know anyone who has successfully migrated from 12.5 and Sybase seem to be more interested in "compact" databases for small devices. Overall, Sybase ASE doesn't seem to have evolved much since the early 1990s, and is looking increasingly archaic.
That sounds more like an iPhoto problem than a Firefox one. I don't use iPhoto, but with iTunes I can drag 'n' drop album artwork from a webpage in Firefox to iTunes and it Just Works(tm).
Try Haskell - I've been trying to learn it for several weeks now, but coming from a C background I'm really struggling. That's not necessarily a criticism of Haskell, more a sign of how different functional programming is to procedural programming.
That's odd, as the plugin works fine on my 64bit machine running Solaris. Perhaps it's some qurk of the Intel/AMD 64bit implementation ...
Only recently has it become superior. Documentation isn't just a feature, it's a necessity, even with the open source world, and Postgresql's documentation is finally getting to a good point.
Unless something dramatic has happened to MySQL documentation since I last used it (version 4.1), then PostgreSQL has the better documenation and has done since as long as I've been using it. The PostgreSQL documentation reads like a coherent set of books, while MySQL documentation seems to be a random mess that grew out of some simple README file. As for the software itself, PostgreSQL has always been superior - a simple comparison of features alone bears this out, but if you want to go further take a look at the code as the same distinction is found there.
Riiigght. So broken code generates warnings, the programmer elects to ignore those warnings and then wonders why things break. This is just the same as people compiling their C or C++ code using gcc, and electing to ignore warnings from -Wall.
Kiss goodbye to any new drugs if anyone can make "knock offs" as soon as a new one comes to market. IT costs roughly 800 million USD to bring a new drug to market - who's going to bother if you can't get a reasonable return on that investment?
If your attitude towards Java is anything to go by then I doubt you are in an important decision making position anyway, but if you are, then I definitely wouldn't want to rely on you to look into possible solutions for systems that I develop. Let me guess you're a PHP guy.
No one with any familiarity of Soviet history would claim that Khruschev was a monster on a par with Stalin, however he was not the great reformer that some people seem to think. Regular show trials and mass killings certainly ended with Stalin, but the criminal laws were not revised and remained open to abuse. Giving internal passports to people didn't make it easier to move around. The passport had to be carried - failure to do so resulted in immediate arrest - and simply by checking peoples papers their ability to travel could be controlled. As for genetics, Stalin was enthusiastic about the subject. He saw in it a "biological Marxism", a way of influencing the development of plants and animals through manipulation which mirrors the Marxist belief that environment shapes behaviour. Genuine work in the field of genetics was of course hampered by Stalins belief in the charlatan Lysenko. I haven't read enough to comment on the Cuban missile crisis, but I did get the impression that the US and USSR were at the very brink of nuclear war before the ships on their way to Cuba turned around. However, on the matter of "killing Stalin", there is still no conclusive evidence of foul play. The accounts of Stalin's final hours are contradictory, incomplete and likely to stay that way unless convincing new evidence appears.
Indeed there were mass killings under Lenin's rule, and he is on record as approving of them. Trotksy, still a poster boy for old school lefties because he fell out with Stalin, was the main implementor of Lenin's Red Terror. Also notable was Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka - a man so fixated with oppressing perceived enenmies of the revolution that he worked himself to death.
You're also correct that the Gulags continued after the death of Stalin. Despite Khruschev's denunciation of Stalin's crimes, which as a leading figure in that era he himself was complicit in, the camps were not emptied. Yes, some political prisoners received amnesties but many more continued to rot in the labour camps.
As for the grandparent claiming that things becames lot better after Khruschev, that's incorrect. The Brezhnev era saw a tightening of control, although it was thankfully nothing like the Stalin era.
IANAL (I do have most of a Paralegal degree, sans only Ethics.)
I gather that the difference between a Paralegal degree and a Lawyer one is that there isn't an Ethics course in the latter.
I've worked with CORBA at my last three jobs, and I've been pretty happy with it. I've used OmniORB, Orbacus, JacORB and MICO - all of which work very well, although the licensing cost of Orbacus puts it out of reach for most of the things I work on. I do have to wrap a lot of the C++ stuff in helper classes though, as the mapping for that language is far too baroque. One of the consultants at IONA has produced an open source CORBA utilities library that which is far more extensive than my one.
Does anybody know any good C++ RPC library which uses templates and which does not need code generating with any external tool nor executable?
Yup, sockets. Every RPC-ish system I'm aware of (Sun RPC/XDR, CORBA, SOAP, RMI, ASN.1) needs a code generator that produces the stubs which make it easier than using raw sockets. The code that's produced by these stub compilers can be pretty small and well optimised (apart from SOAP), plus you shouldn't need to edit it by hand. Some compilers, such as a decent one for CORBAs IDL, can also produce the boilerplate code that you then fill in with your implementation of the RPC calls. While I usually dislike generated code, when it comes to RPC systems I'm quite glad they do a decent job of hiding complexity from me.