I'm a big fan of O'Reilly books and I was severely disappointed after purchasing Practical PostgreSQL.
Most of the book is a duplication of the PostgreSQL manual. At the end of the book contains a chapter that is a 40 page advertisement of the author's proprietary Apache module: LXP.
What would really be appreciated is a book that dealt with individual problems and gotchas that beginning PostgreSQL users, devolpers and administrators commonly encounter.
Come on O'Reilly. Don't tarnish your good reputation by publishing crap like this.
I know there are people that stick modded 80GB+ hard drives into Xboxen.
One question: I had always heard that the 8GB (or whatever) size hard drive in the Xbox was an uncommon, single platter, low heat hard drive. When you replace this with a monster 7200 rpm drive doesn't the Xbox overheat?
One rule of thumb that I have come to believe is: given a sufficient lack of evidence on a given subject, people will invent beliefs.
A simple example: imagine a small village next to a large mountain. The mountain is steep and treacherous so no one has ever climbed the mountain. Telescopes don't exist so no one can see the mountain in detail and there exist parts of the mountain that are completely out of view. Given time you can bet that various dreams/imaginings of the nature of the mountain would turn into stories which would become myths and eventually some people would believe that these well aged stories are true. We would look at this and say "No, believing those stories are silly. The real answer to What is on the mountain? is I don't know." but given an absense of answers people would rather invent answers than face the troubling prospect that they don't know the answer.
Which is a shame since admiting I don't know is a necessary precondition for learning.
If you redefine days to some personal definition then it all works out. Of course, if you give yourself the liberty to redefine terms than any statement can be made true no matter how preposterous.
Maybe you're referring to the Drake Equation? The problem with the drake equation is that you can plug reasonable values into it and get zero and you can also plug reasonable values into it and get a billion. It's really just speculation.
I'm more curious about what was the university/professor that made a statement along the lines of "if we are the only life in the universe then there must be an intelligent creator"
this kind of system cannot even be maintained mathematically. Unbounded systems are inherently unstable.
Next thing you'll be telling us is that a group of genetically engineered Dinosaurs on a remote island are uncontrollable.:)
Seriously, I agree with the substance of your post. Unless MS figures out how to sell Windows to Martians, their stock price is in for a tumble.
Re:Never use a Redhat x.0 release
on
Red Hat Linux 8 Bible
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I'm surprised this post was marked as a troll since "don't use x.0" releases is a pretty good rule of thumb for redhat.
Unfortunately, it's only a rule of thumb and not some absolute law. You really need to look at each distribution and make your own decision. I've run every version of red hat since 6.0 or so and I currently admin boxes that run 7.2, 7.3, and 8.0 and I have to say, redhat 8.0 is the best desktop linux I've ever seen. It really is leaps and bounds above 7.3
Of course, my servers are all running 7.2:)
Re:I was hoping they would wait.
on
New Red Hat Beta
·
· Score: 2
I for one am glad that Red Hat doesn't wait for certain packages to be ready before shipping a distro. Predicting when a particular software package will be stable is very difficult and predicting when an open source package will be stable is practically impossible.
As it is, Red Hat ships a distro every six months like clockwork and whatever packages are ready ship with it. If your favorite package couldn't get a stable release out then they have another chance in six months.
I see lot's of post saying things like why would I want to read this when I have the free 1.4 API javadocs online?
I agree. The best books aren't copies of the API that tell you all the good things about the language. The best books show you the warts and gotchas of the language. For C++ this book was Scott Meyer's Effective C++. Java has a similarly named and equally useful book Effective Java which I have found invaluable. Not as good but still worth the purchase price is Java Pitfalls
Re:I won't move to Mac. Make Mac move to me
on
Moving to Mac Made Easy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"Hmm, I gotta blow a buttload of money on an item that'll last me about as long as an ice cream sandwich - how about I get one that does stuff better, looks better, and doesn't crash?"
Everyone that I know (Mac and PC users alike) are reacting to the short lifetime of computers by buying the cheapest box possible. For Windows users this is buying the bottom of the line Dell, for Linux users this assembling a box out of used pieces or even buying that Walmart PC, and for Mac users it's used iMacs or refusing to upgrade. (I know a ton of non-techie Mac users who refuse to upgrade to OS X which boggles me)
People want a cheaper computer and the first company to make a decent $200 box (Sony? Panasonic? other?) will sell a million.
Part of the magic of the original Dune books was the monumental amount of unpublished history written by Frank Herbert. In the actual books, there were references to the "Butlerian Jihad" the "Holtzman Effect" and many other defining events of the universe but the details were kept out of the novels. All these mysteries made the world of the novels a much more interesting place.
Each one of these hack prequels makes the Dune universe more mundane.
I've written several large python programs and I enjoy the syntax as well. After programming in perl, java, C++ or some other language for a few days and then returning to python, I'm always shocked that I don't have to enclose all my if expressions in parentheses or end all of my statements with a semi-colon. If anyone has given python a serious shot (written a medium sized program) then they have to notice this ellegance.
BUT...
Everytime I have to add an outer block to two or more nested inner blocks...I cringe. After adding the outer block I have to carefully indent all of the inner blocks to make sure that I don't change the meaning of the program. With any of the curly brace languages I just add the outer block and C+M+/ (emacs) to re-indent the code.
Has anyone gotten around this annoying, error-generating problem in python?
Keywords are: A for added, R for removed, S for same and U# for upgraded with # being the the index of the version number that was upgraded. e.g. 2.9 to 2.0 is U0 while 1.2 to 1.3 is U1.
Example:
$ grep gcc diff-7.3-8.0
A compat-gcc-7.3-2.96.110.i386.rpm
A compat-gcc-c++-7.3-2.96.110.i386.rpm
A compat-gcc-g77-7.3-2.96.110.i386.rpm
A compat-gcc-java-7.3-2.96.110.i386.rpm
A compat-gcc-objc-7.3-2.96.110.i386.rpm
A gcc-gnat-3.2-7.i386.rpm
A libgcc-3.2-7.i386.rpm
R gcc-chill-2.96-110.i386.rpm
U0 gcc-2.96-110.i386.rpm ==> gcc-3.2-7.i386.rpm
U0 gcc-c++-2.96-110.i386.rpm ==> gcc-c++-3.2-7.i386.rpm
U0 gcc-g77-2.96-110.i386.rpm ==> gcc-g77-3.2-7.i386.rpm
U0 gcc-java-2.96-110.i386.rpm ==> gcc-java-3.2-7.i386.rpm
U0 gcc-objc-2.96-110.i386.rpm ==> gcc-objc-3.2-7.i386.rpm
Please mod parent up. (at least as high as it's parent) There's no need for users of the major distributions to think that their updated systems are insecure.
I wouldn't be so quick to judge the freshmen guinea pigs who attended those first Feynman lectures. It was CalTech (not "party hard" state college) and it was the late fifties / early sixties. There's a decent chance the students were serious science nerds. They definitely weren't chatting on IRC.:)
Maybe you're right and the problem is due to the order we learn physics topics from high school and earlier. It would be interesting to see how someone with no physics training takes to the lectures. Unfortunately, from a practical standpoint that may not even be possible.
From Feynman's preface to the lectures:
... The question, of course, is how well this experiment [the new physics lectures] has succeeded. My own point of view--which, however, does not seem to be shared by most of the people who worked with the students--is pessimistic. When I look at the way the majority of the students handled the problems on the examinations, I think the system was a failure....
A few years ago I decided to tackle physics. I had only taken a couple courses in school (now ten years ago) and I was curious for more.
I read Hawking's popular books: Brief History of Time, etc. While these gave me the gee whiz we live in a weird universe feeling they didn't really help me to understand any of it. I was looking for that light-bulb-over-my-head feeling when you actually understand something.
Next I cracked my old college textbook. This was a mistake as my text lacked clarity, thorough examples, and diagrams to make learning easy. I went to the university and browsed all the available textbooks and one stood above the rest Physics for Scientists and Engineers by Paul Tipler. It's a great book. The only disadvantage is that you need a basic understanding of calculus. This isn't so bad because I'm not sure if you can really understand physics without understanding calculus anyway.
A few people have recommended Feynmann's lectures. Feynmann turns a first year physics course on its' head by changing the order and methods that most topics are presented. This is great if you are having trouble understanding the traditional methods but can also be very confusing to a first time physics student. The lectures are a great resource in addition to a standard textbook but I wouldn't recommend them as your sole book.
I had a friend who believed in numerology: specifically that showing that if some numbers could be converted to other numbers via simple equations then that proved that these numbers had some kind of divine association and thus revealed something about the universe. I thought this was incorrect (kind words) and decided to write a program that would take any set of input numbers, a set of operators, plus a desired output number and then use a genetic algorithm to find the smallest equation to link the two. The individuals in the population were equations and they would behave similar to a biological population in that they would sexually reproduce, mutate, inferior equations are pruned, etc.
The program could go through 1000 generations rather quickly and produced very small equations. I never found numbers that couldn't be related by a very small equation.
One time the best equation looked something like the following (I forget the exact equation so this is just a non-real example):
666*666*666+666*666+666=7
The equation was obviously incorrect so I had no idea why it was chosen as the best equation. I then ran it through my evaluation function and it actually worked! It took a bit of head scratching but it turned out that my evaluation function was ignoring overflow and underflow in operations thus large values would eventually become negative. The genetic algorithm took advantage of this fact and produced equations that cleverly used overflow and underflow!
I thought this was pretty cool but it also felt a little creepy.
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I'm a big fan of O'Reilly books and I was severely disappointed after purchasing Practical PostgreSQL.
Most of the book is a duplication of the PostgreSQL manual. At the end of the book contains a chapter that is a 40 page advertisement of the author's proprietary Apache module: LXP.
What would really be appreciated is a book that dealt with individual problems and gotchas that beginning PostgreSQL users, devolpers and administrators commonly encounter.
Come on O'Reilly. Don't tarnish your good reputation by publishing crap like this.
I know there are people that stick modded 80GB+ hard drives into Xboxen.
One question: I had always heard that the 8GB (or whatever) size hard drive in the Xbox was an uncommon, single platter, low heat hard drive. When you replace this with a monster 7200 rpm drive doesn't the Xbox overheat?
One rule of thumb that I have come to believe is: given a sufficient lack of evidence on a given subject, people will invent beliefs.
A simple example: imagine a small village next to a large mountain. The mountain is steep and treacherous so no one has ever climbed the mountain. Telescopes don't exist so no one can see the mountain in detail and there exist parts of the mountain that are completely out of view. Given time you can bet that various dreams/imaginings of the nature of the mountain would turn into stories which would become myths and eventually some people would believe that these well aged stories are true. We would look at this and say "No, believing those stories are silly. The real answer to What is on the mountain? is I don't know." but given an absense of answers people would rather invent answers than face the troubling prospect that they don't know the answer.
Which is a shame since admiting I don't know is a necessary precondition for learning.
If you redefine days to some personal definition then it all works out. Of course, if you give yourself the liberty to redefine terms than any statement can be made true no matter how preposterous.
Maybe you're referring to the Drake Equation? The problem with the drake equation is that you can plug reasonable values into it and get zero and you can also plug reasonable values into it and get a billion. It's really just speculation.
I'm more curious about what was the university/professor that made a statement along the lines of "if we are the only life in the universe then there must be an intelligent creator"
this kind of system cannot even be maintained mathematically. Unbounded systems are inherently unstable.
Next thing you'll be telling us is that a group of genetically engineered Dinosaurs on a remote island are uncontrollable. :)
Seriously, I agree with the substance of your post. Unless MS figures out how to sell Windows to Martians, their stock price is in for a tumble.
I'm surprised this post was marked as a troll since "don't use x.0" releases is a pretty good rule of thumb for redhat.
Unfortunately, it's only a rule of thumb and not some absolute law. You really need to look at each distribution and make your own decision. I've run every version of red hat since 6.0 or so and I currently admin boxes that run 7.2, 7.3, and 8.0 and I have to say, redhat 8.0 is the best desktop linux I've ever seen. It really is leaps and bounds above 7.3
Of course, my servers are all running 7.2 :)
I for one am glad that Red Hat doesn't wait for certain packages to be ready before shipping a distro. Predicting when a particular software package will be stable is very difficult and predicting when an open source package will be stable is practically impossible.
As it is, Red Hat ships a distro every six months like clockwork and whatever packages are ready ship with it. If your favorite package couldn't get a stable release out then they have another chance in six months.
mmmmmMMMMMMM! This BBQ baby sandwich sure tastes good.
...I just wish it wasn't made out of chopped up babies.
The fourth edition of Running Linux came out this month. Great for beginners.
...your post reminds me of the classic sig:
"Linux is user friendly, it's just selective about who its' friends are."
The only two shows that I make sure to watch are Futurama and Firefly.
Anyone want to buy a cheap TV, barely used?
I see lot's of post saying things like why would I want to read this when I have the free 1.4 API javadocs online?
I agree. The best books aren't copies of the API that tell you all the good things about the language. The best books show you the warts and gotchas of the language. For C++ this book was Scott Meyer's Effective C++. Java has a similarly named and equally useful book Effective Java which I have found invaluable. Not as good but still worth the purchase price is Java Pitfalls
I haven't read More Java Pitfalls Has anyone read this? Is it any good?
"Hmm, I gotta blow a buttload of money on an item that'll last me about as long as an ice cream sandwich - how about I get one that does stuff better, looks better, and doesn't crash?"
Everyone that I know (Mac and PC users alike) are reacting to the short lifetime of computers by buying the cheapest box possible. For Windows users this is buying the bottom of the line Dell, for Linux users this assembling a box out of used pieces or even buying that Walmart PC, and for Mac users it's used iMacs or refusing to upgrade. (I know a ton of non-techie Mac users who refuse to upgrade to OS X which boggles me)
People want a cheaper computer and the first company to make a decent $200 box (Sony? Panasonic? other?) will sell a million.
Of course Dune ripped off Lawrence of Arabia, right? :)
I agree.
Part of the magic of the original Dune books was the monumental amount of unpublished history written by Frank Herbert. In the actual books, there were references to the "Butlerian Jihad" the "Holtzman Effect" and many other defining events of the universe but the details were kept out of the novels. All these mysteries made the world of the novels a much more interesting place.
Each one of these hack prequels makes the Dune universe more mundane.
It looks like emacs also has this region indenting/unindenting with C-c < and C-c > Problem solved by having me RTFM. Thanks for the help!
I've written several large python programs and I enjoy the syntax as well. After programming in perl, java, C++ or some other language for a few days and then returning to python, I'm always shocked that I don't have to enclose all my if expressions in parentheses or end all of my statements with a semi-colon. If anyone has given python a serious shot (written a medium sized program) then they have to notice this ellegance.
BUT...
Everytime I have to add an outer block to two or more nested inner blocks...I cringe. After adding the outer block I have to carefully indent all of the inner blocks to make sure that I don't change the meaning of the program. With any of the curly brace languages I just add the outer block and C+M+/ (emacs) to re-indent the code.
Has anyone gotten around this annoying, error-generating problem in python?
Guns don't kill people. People kill people.
Bullets don't kill people. The hole does.
Games don't kill people. Sitting for 86 hours without food or water kills people.
Here's a list of all changed rpms between 7.3 and 8.0
Keywords are: A for added, R for removed, S for same and U# for upgraded with # being the the index of the version number that was upgraded. e.g. 2.9 to 2.0 is U0 while 1.2 to 1.3 is U1.
Example:
$ grep gcc diff-7.3-8.0
A compat-gcc-7.3-2.96.110.i386.rpm
A compat-gcc-c++-7.3-2.96.110.i386.rpm
A compat-gcc-g77-7.3-2.96.110.i386.rpm
A compat-gcc-java-7.3-2.96.110.i386.rpm
A compat-gcc-objc-7.3-2.96.110.i386.rpm
A gcc-gnat-3.2-7.i386.rpm
A libgcc-3.2-7.i386.rpm
R gcc-chill-2.96-110.i386.rpm
U0 gcc-2.96-110.i386.rpm ==> gcc-3.2-7.i386.rpm
U0 gcc-c++-2.96-110.i386.rpm ==> gcc-c++-3.2-7.i386.rpm
U0 gcc-g77-2.96-110.i386.rpm ==> gcc-g77-3.2-7.i386.rpm
U0 gcc-java-2.96-110.i386.rpm ==> gcc-java-3.2-7.i386.rpm
U0 gcc-objc-2.96-110.i386.rpm ==> gcc-objc-3.2-7.i386.rpm
Please mod parent up. (at least as high as it's parent) There's no need for users of the major distributions to think that their updated systems are insecure.
I wouldn't be so quick to judge the freshmen guinea pigs who attended those first Feynman lectures. It was CalTech (not "party hard" state college) and it was the late fifties / early sixties. There's a decent chance the students were serious science nerds. They definitely weren't chatting on IRC. :)
Maybe you're right and the problem is due to the order we learn physics topics from high school and earlier. It would be interesting to see how someone with no physics training takes to the lectures. Unfortunately, from a practical standpoint that may not even be possible.
From Feynman's preface to the lectures:
A few years ago I decided to tackle physics. I had only taken a couple courses in school (now ten years ago) and I was curious for more.
I read Hawking's popular books: Brief History of Time, etc. While these gave me the gee whiz we live in a weird universe feeling they didn't really help me to understand any of it. I was looking for that light-bulb-over-my-head feeling when you actually understand something.
Next I cracked my old college textbook. This was a mistake as my text lacked clarity, thorough examples, and diagrams to make learning easy. I went to the university and browsed all the available textbooks and one stood above the rest Physics for Scientists and Engineers by Paul Tipler. It's a great book. The only disadvantage is that you need a basic understanding of calculus. This isn't so bad because I'm not sure if you can really understand physics without understanding calculus anyway.
A few people have recommended Feynmann's lectures. Feynmann turns a first year physics course on its' head by changing the order and methods that most topics are presented. This is great if you are having trouble understanding the traditional methods but can also be very confusing to a first time physics student. The lectures are a great resource in addition to a standard textbook but I wouldn't recommend them as your sole book.
I had a similar experience to this.
I had a friend who believed in numerology: specifically that showing that if some numbers could be converted to other numbers via simple equations then that proved that these numbers had some kind of divine association and thus revealed something about the universe. I thought this was incorrect (kind words) and decided to write a program that would take any set of input numbers, a set of operators, plus a desired output number and then use a genetic algorithm to find the smallest equation to link the two. The individuals in the population were equations and they would behave similar to a biological population in that they would sexually reproduce, mutate, inferior equations are pruned, etc.
The program could go through 1000 generations rather quickly and produced very small equations. I never found numbers that couldn't be related by a very small equation.
One time the best equation looked something like the following (I forget the exact equation so this is just a non-real example):
666*666*666+666*666+666=7
The equation was obviously incorrect so I had no idea why it was chosen as the best equation. I then ran it through my evaluation function and it actually worked! It took a bit of head scratching but it turned out that my evaluation function was ignoring overflow and underflow in operations thus large values would eventually become negative. The genetic algorithm took advantage of this fact and produced equations that cleverly used overflow and underflow!
I thought this was pretty cool but it also felt a little creepy.