Forgive me for not being a guru, but I tried to set this up last summer using a guide for Debian Sid, and I couldn't get it to work.
Can you point me to any distributions that have this support built in, or to the setup instructions you used that made it work easily?
Of course, the important thing to remember is that running Linux x64 isn't going to boost your performance that much over 32, even for programs with mild x64 optimizations.
You've obviously done well without a college degree. More power to you. (You sound like an old friend of mine named Jeremy that's in a very similar position.)
To an extent, I think you're right. There are several things I learned in college that I probably would not have forced myself to tackle on my own: lots of practice with speeches and presentations, books on project management like [i]The Mythical Man Month[/i], and design theory and practice.
Those are things you don't pick up from a typical FAQ, and most programming language guides cover them in only a cursory fashion. Now, can I argue that $120,000 in tuition was worth it for maybe 50 speeches, dozens of papers, and perhaps 2 dozen books most developers should read? Of course not. You definitely can learn them on your own.
It probably would have been a good deal if you could run Linux on it immediately after it came out. At that time, the processor and video card were respectable.
But by now I agree with you - for $400 you can assemble a cheap Linux PC that's more useful than a 360 running Linux.
The free60 project ( http://free60.org/ ) has been trying to run Linux on the Xbox360 since it came out, with no success. Microsoft has definitely gone out of their way to prevent this.
Look around the free60 wiki. For instance, from this page (http://wiki.free60.org/HDD) the Xbox360 will only use hard drives that have a Microsoft PNG logo stored in a certain location on them. For someone trying to boot Linux off the hard drive, in addition to the technical hurdles of hacking the OS they also have to wrestle with trademark infringement. The trademark infringement is no big deal for an individual, but it becomes a problem if they try to redistribute their code for other people to do the same thing.
Microsoft absolutely has gone out of their way to prevent people from doing whatever they want with an Xbox 360. Microsoft is a business, they exist to make a profit. The main way to profit from a game console is for people to buy lots of games. Someone using the machine for an alternative operating system is less likely to do that. So they locked it down. I don't think it's bad - this particular business decision is perfectly understandable - but it is true.
It's my understanding that if gaim gets a new version, apt-get update gaim does not automatically recompile it.
So you can build a particular app from source, but (I could be wrong about this) there's no system-wide way to rebuild all packages that were installed from source when they are updated.
The teachers who let the kids screw with your stuff? They're to blame. They're the retarded fucktards I was talking about.
Unless they caught the other kids in the act and have a large body of evidence indicated that this kid does not do similar things to them, what can the teacher do?
There are brilliant liars all over the place. There are kids who act like Jesus Christ in class and then slit throats in back alleys. There are parents who intentionally cause grevious bodily harm to their children just to get attention for themselves. In situations like this, the police, teachers, court system, therapists, and administrators aren't being 'fucktards'. They're doing the best they can with a very tiny amount of facts and a huge amount of unprovable suppositions.
Microsoft dominates the IT industry, so most IT professionals are comfortable with Microsoft. You will only recommend a product you already know.
I work at a company with eight developers. I am one of two that can install, administer, and program for Linux. The other six have only ever used Windows. Our customers all run Windows in their offices. We do everything on Windows because Windows is ubiquitous, not out of any inherent virtues it has over Red Hat. It's simply cheaper to buy product licenses as necessary and reuse existing Windows -only software than to train six developers on Linux, migrate our existing software, install Linux on our existing servers, and convince our customers to migrate. Or in other words, the technical case for Linux is never even discussed because at least for right now the business case is weak.
I have to imagine the same thing is true in other companies, too. Microsoft wins because it's already present, and because more developers and administrators know how to use it. That doesn't necessarily say anything about its superiority (or inferiority) as a product.
Agreed. If you have some system in place that lists every package and its dependencies, and continually updates that database of information each time you update, install, or remove enything... you're 75% of the way towards having a package management system.
Including something like that plus an.rpm,.deb, or portage package system and keeping the two (or three, of four) all in sync with each other is a tremendous amount of needless work.
Nobody should be willing to work in the field I am in for less money than I want to earn, because the competition hurts me.
Is that about right? By the same logic, people who have higher standard of living costs (maybe they live in the Silicon Valley or just prefer to commute in a Rolls Royce) are getting screwed over by your existence in the work force. If you want to keep older folks out, maybe you should be fair and remove yourself from the job pool too.
It's simply supply and demand. If you don't like it, maybe you should join organizations trying to switch the international capitalist markets to another economic model: socialism, communism, participatory economics (aka ParEcon), or something similar. As long as you work in a somewhat capitalist market (I realize it is not purely capitalist/laissez-faire), the same right you have to compete for jobs at a certain level extends to anyone else.
I can't speak for the other post-writer. I've been trying to learn functional for a while - but I've got school + 6 years of professional work with procedural under my belt, and I'm finding the transition difficult.
Salesman tried to sell me a $300 one year extension to the default one year warranty on my $1200 lawn tractor, and I laughed at him. It's been three years and $1500 in out-of-warranty repairs so far and I can no longer use third gear (which would cost more to fix than replacing the tractor). If I had spent $300 per year on the extended warranty/service plan, I'd be way ahead of the game.
Each of the repair stores I've worked with stated that almost all entry level lawn tractors are built too cheaply to withstand much regular use. The engines will run flawlessly for years, but the pulleys, belts, mowing decks, transmissions, and so forth wear out quickly.
I'm trying to decide which is more worthwhile - $50 per week on a lawn service, a new lawn tractor with a $300 annual maintenance contract, or a $5,000+ commercial lawn tractor that should hold up much better to wear and tear.
What geeks want is slow complexity so that they can feel a sense of accomplishment getting something to work
All this broad stereotyping is foolish. I'm sure some IT geeks like to feel elite by doing things the complex way. But most of us just want things to work, like non-IT people.
I believe most Linux developers fail to make easy GUI applications for common tasks for three reasons:
1. GUI apps are hard work, time consuming, and less interesting than other projects. Once I have my computer up and running, I empathize with people having a problem configuring their MP3 software but I don't find writing a GUI app to ease the setup that exciting.
2. Unless you have a huge cross section of equipment, time, and software available (i.e. a business atmosphere) for testing, it's likely you'll miss things. It's all too easy to write a printer setup application that works fine with HPs and Canons but fails with a particular Epson model. Or make a nice graphical installer for a movie player that breaks with a particular version of GtK. Or a nice application for managing your music files that has the display go fuzzy at a certain display resolution.
3. GUI software requires a graphics or windowing library or engine of some sort, which involves extra work, longer build times, and extra dependencies.
So a command line app is much quicker to write, faster to compile, faster to distribute, and easier to test. I want Linux to become more popular, and I want it to become more popular because it's more free and also more easy and intuitive than Mac or Windows. But there's no hiding from the reality that a user-friendly GUI is a lot of extra hard work.
ReiserFS, however, is a reality, and can do prettymuch what MS advertised with WinFS.
The whole point of WinFS is to extend the data orginization indexing and searching advantages of relational databases to your filesystem.
ReiserFS is a great journaling filesystem, but I don't believe it has anything to do with the concepts behind WinFS. I don't know how NTFS journaling compares to ReiserFS journaling, but NTFS does have journaling already.
(Off topic.)
Check edmunds.com reviews of GM vehicles. They basically shredded every GM product they reviewed from they day they started until 2003. They shredded some of the GM products they've reviewed since then. But a few genuinely good products are emerging: the Cadillac SRX, the 2007 fullsize SUVs, the new pickups, new crossover SUVs, and the 2005+ Corvette and Corvette Z06 (which in addition to being blisteringly quick are the first 400 and 500 horsepower vehicles sold in the US to avoid incurring any gas guzzler tax).
Add the new 5 year/100,000 mile warranty on 2007 models, and it's completely reasonable to say that some GM vehicles are worth serious consideration.
Of course, GM still has three big strikes against it. First, they made unreliable, uncompetitive junk for decades and got by mostly on past reputation. Now they work against their poor reputation from the recent past. Second, their weakest segments are family cars and minivans, where their offerings are light years ahead of their 1990s counterparts but still far behind the industry leaders like the Toyota Camry or Honda Odyssey. Third, Toyota can sell giant Sequia SUVs, Ford sells Excursions big enough to serve as aircraft runways, Nissan can sell gas guzzling Armada SUVs, and Mercedes buyers can cart around in behemoth G and GL class SUVs, but when anyone thinks 'gas hog' the first picture in their head is the monstrosity Hummer H2. It doesn't matter if GM sells 50 hybrids, for the next twenty years 'environmental consciousness' and 'General Motors' will be antonyms in the public vocabulary.
I'm not a big fan of Java, but to be fair: Unless you prefer an language in which you can be more productive
Most of the slow development and painful complexity of Java has more to do with complex configuration of the popular application frameworks than the language itself. Our in-house Tomcat/Struts/Hibernate/XDoclet application has nearly 40 different XML configuration files. Java doesn't need any of those XML files beyond the single build file for the Ant build tool.
he libraries are where Java is soooo much nicer than C++ in that all that stuff is already there for you where my collection of C++ libraries are of variable quality and don't come close to matching the breadth of what you get out-of-the-box with any Java implementation.
You can find outstanding C++ library collections all over. Some are every bit as good as what Java has. But if you download 17 different open source C++ apps, you might find that they collectively reference 50 different C++ libraries but no two applications have a single library in common. 17 different open source Java apps might reference 50 different Java libraries, but the vast majority of the code will use Java's built in libraries.
So Java standard libraries make the learning curve for reading and modifying new applications and other developers' code much smaller. And while C++ is huge and guaranteed not to disappear soon, there's nothing moving the industry towards a handful of common standard libraries.
More importantly, software doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Even if someone invents a superior database paradigm (I haven't read any of the theory on this), who's going to spend the time and money migrating countless petabytes of existing databases into the new system? Whether you love or hate C, C++, COBOL, Java, and SQL, they are in widespread use all over the world. Replacement technologies would need to be orders of magnitude better in most metrics and easy for non-technical users to conceptually grasp before they get any headway.
I'm not saying the status quo is great. It certainly has flaws. But a replacement needs to blow people away with its superiority before it gets any reasonable attention.
And of course, students can't get too focused on the language itself instead of the concepts because the demand for Scheme developers just doesn't quite match the demand for Java/VB/C++ developers.
I know Bush bashing is popular (and I'm not fond of most of this Administration's policies myself), but the Bush Administration has dramatically increased federal educational funding. Despite that, a lot of problems still exist. Education will need a tremendous investment in US resources over and above the billions we spend now to make a difference.
And again, the problem at the low end is that minimum wage jobs are such a tremendous disincentive to work that unemployment or crime look attractive by comparison. I know economically unskilled labor is a commodity and does get affected by supply and demand like anything else. But human people can't be literally stuffed in warehouses and shipped around - they don't fit neatly into the commodities economic model because of their sentience. Any economic plan or policies affecting any labor market at any level must take that into consideration.
Nothing is impossible, but I've been checking the free60 site periodically since it was first posted and I agree with you. I don't see them making major headway. Microsoft has definitely done a better job locking down the 360 than they did on the original Xbox.
And yes, before anyone asks, I would like to contribute. But all my software experience is nowhere near the bare metal, so there isn't much I can do.
Goodbye, poor people making low wages. Hello, poor people making no wages at all.
Either way you lose. Offer no mininum wage or a low minimum wage, and people have much less motivation to work. Offer a high minimum wage, and people have much less opportunity to work.
I understand supply and demand. But I think maybe we shouldn't treat the labor of poor people like a commodity to trade right next to beef, corn, and steel. A $3 minimum wage might increase the number of jobs, but it's not going to raise a poor family out of poverty and it certainly isn't going to motivate anyone to do good work.
Slashdot Mirror
Not "fuck off and die". Just "keep buying more stuff from us". Big difference.
Forgive me for not being a guru, but I tried to set this up last summer using a guide for Debian Sid, and I couldn't get it to work.
Can you point me to any distributions that have this support built in, or to the setup instructions you used that made it work easily?
Of course, the important thing to remember is that running Linux x64 isn't going to boost your performance that much over 32, even for programs with mild x64 optimizations.
Thanks for the info. Still, I have to wonder why Microsoft bothered if it wasn't for protectionist reasons.
You've obviously done well without a college degree. More power to you. (You sound like an old friend of mine named Jeremy that's in a very similar position.)
To an extent, I think you're right. There are several things I learned in college that I probably would not have forced myself to tackle on my own: lots of practice with speeches and presentations, books on project management like [i]The Mythical Man Month[/i], and design theory and practice.
Those are things you don't pick up from a typical FAQ, and most programming language guides cover them in only a cursory fashion. Now, can I argue that $120,000 in tuition was worth it for maybe 50 speeches, dozens of papers, and perhaps 2 dozen books most developers should read? Of course not. You definitely can learn them on your own.
It probably would have been a good deal if you could run Linux on it immediately after it came out. At that time, the processor and video card were respectable.
But by now I agree with you - for $400 you can assemble a cheap Linux PC that's more useful than a 360 running Linux.
The free60 project ( http://free60.org/ ) has been trying to run Linux on the Xbox360 since it came out, with no success. Microsoft has definitely gone out of their way to prevent this.
Look around the free60 wiki. For instance, from this page (http://wiki.free60.org/HDD) the Xbox360 will only use hard drives that have a Microsoft PNG logo stored in a certain location on them. For someone trying to boot Linux off the hard drive, in addition to the technical hurdles of hacking the OS they also have to wrestle with trademark infringement. The trademark infringement is no big deal for an individual, but it becomes a problem if they try to redistribute their code for other people to do the same thing.
Microsoft absolutely has gone out of their way to prevent people from doing whatever they want with an Xbox 360. Microsoft is a business, they exist to make a profit. The main way to profit from a game console is for people to buy lots of games. Someone using the machine for an alternative operating system is less likely to do that. So they locked it down. I don't think it's bad - this particular business decision is perfectly understandable - but it is true.
It's my understanding that if gaim gets a new version, apt-get update gaim does not automatically recompile it.
So you can build a particular app from source, but (I could be wrong about this) there's no system-wide way to rebuild all packages that were installed from source when they are updated.
The teachers who let the kids screw with your stuff? They're to blame. They're the retarded fucktards I was talking about.
Unless they caught the other kids in the act and have a large body of evidence indicated that this kid does not do similar things to them, what can the teacher do?
There are brilliant liars all over the place. There are kids who act like Jesus Christ in class and then slit throats in back alleys. There are parents who intentionally cause grevious bodily harm to their children just to get attention for themselves. In situations like this, the police, teachers, court system, therapists, and administrators aren't being 'fucktards'. They're doing the best they can with a very tiny amount of facts and a huge amount of unprovable suppositions.
Microsoft dominates the IT industry, so most IT professionals are comfortable with Microsoft. You will only recommend a product you already know.
I work at a company with eight developers. I am one of two that can install, administer, and program for Linux. The other six have only ever used Windows. Our customers all run Windows in their offices. We do everything on Windows because Windows is ubiquitous, not out of any inherent virtues it has over Red Hat. It's simply cheaper to buy product licenses as necessary and reuse existing Windows -only software than to train six developers on Linux, migrate our existing software, install Linux on our existing servers, and convince our customers to migrate. Or in other words, the technical case for Linux is never even discussed because at least for right now the business case is weak.
I have to imagine the same thing is true in other companies, too. Microsoft wins because it's already present, and because more developers and administrators know how to use it. That doesn't necessarily say anything about its superiority (or inferiority) as a product.
Agreed. If you have some system in place that lists every package and its dependencies, and continually updates that database of information each time you update, install, or remove enything... you're 75% of the way towards having a package management system.
.rpm, .deb, or portage package system and keeping the two (or three, of four) all in sync with each other is a tremendous amount of needless work.
Including something like that plus an
Let's generalize your wisdom:
Nobody should be willing to work in the field I am in for less money than I want to earn, because the competition hurts me.
Is that about right? By the same logic, people who have higher standard of living costs (maybe they live in the Silicon Valley or just prefer to commute in a Rolls Royce) are getting screwed over by your existence in the work force. If you want to keep older folks out, maybe you should be fair and remove yourself from the job pool too.
It's simply supply and demand. If you don't like it, maybe you should join organizations trying to switch the international capitalist markets to another economic model: socialism, communism, participatory economics (aka ParEcon), or something similar. As long as you work in a somewhat capitalist market (I realize it is not purely capitalist/laissez-faire), the same right you have to compete for jobs at a certain level extends to anyone else.
Boy, I bet you convert 1 or 2 people to using Linux every day.
I can't speak for the other post-writer. I've been trying to learn functional for a while - but I've got school + 6 years of professional work with procedural under my belt, and I'm finding the transition difficult.
Salesman tried to sell me a $300 one year extension to the default one year warranty on my $1200 lawn tractor, and I laughed at him. It's been three years and $1500 in out-of-warranty repairs so far and I can no longer use third gear (which would cost more to fix than replacing the tractor). If I had spent $300 per year on the extended warranty/service plan, I'd be way ahead of the game.
Each of the repair stores I've worked with stated that almost all entry level lawn tractors are built too cheaply to withstand much regular use. The engines will run flawlessly for years, but the pulleys, belts, mowing decks, transmissions, and so forth wear out quickly.
I'm trying to decide which is more worthwhile - $50 per week on a lawn service, a new lawn tractor with a $300 annual maintenance contract, or a $5,000+ commercial lawn tractor that should hold up much better to wear and tear.
What geeks want is slow complexity so that they can feel a sense of accomplishment getting something to work
All this broad stereotyping is foolish. I'm sure some IT geeks like to feel elite by doing things the complex way. But most of us just want things to work, like non-IT people.
I believe most Linux developers fail to make easy GUI applications for common tasks for three reasons:
1. GUI apps are hard work, time consuming, and less interesting than other projects. Once I have my computer up and running, I empathize with people having a problem configuring their MP3 software but I don't find writing a GUI app to ease the setup that exciting.
2. Unless you have a huge cross section of equipment, time, and software available (i.e. a business atmosphere) for testing, it's likely you'll miss things. It's all too easy to write a printer setup application that works fine with HPs and Canons but fails with a particular Epson model. Or make a nice graphical installer for a movie player that breaks with a particular version of GtK. Or a nice application for managing your music files that has the display go fuzzy at a certain display resolution.
3. GUI software requires a graphics or windowing library or engine of some sort, which involves extra work, longer build times, and extra dependencies.
So a command line app is much quicker to write, faster to compile, faster to distribute, and easier to test. I want Linux to become more popular, and I want it to become more popular because it's more free and also more easy and intuitive than Mac or Windows. But there's no hiding from the reality that a user-friendly GUI is a lot of extra hard work.
ReiserFS, however, is a reality, and can do prettymuch what MS advertised with WinFS.
The whole point of WinFS is to extend the data orginization indexing and searching advantages of relational databases to your filesystem.
ReiserFS is a great journaling filesystem, but I don't believe it has anything to do with the concepts behind WinFS. I don't know how NTFS journaling compares to ReiserFS journaling, but NTFS does have journaling already.
(Off topic.)
Check edmunds.com reviews of GM vehicles. They basically shredded every GM product they reviewed from they day they started until 2003. They shredded some of the GM products they've reviewed since then. But a few genuinely good products are emerging: the Cadillac SRX, the 2007 fullsize SUVs, the new pickups, new crossover SUVs, and the 2005+ Corvette and Corvette Z06 (which in addition to being blisteringly quick are the first 400 and 500 horsepower vehicles sold in the US to avoid incurring any gas guzzler tax).
Add the new 5 year/100,000 mile warranty on 2007 models, and it's completely reasonable to say that some GM vehicles are worth serious consideration.
Of course, GM still has three big strikes against it. First, they made unreliable, uncompetitive junk for decades and got by mostly on past reputation. Now they work against their poor reputation from the recent past. Second, their weakest segments are family cars and minivans, where their offerings are light years ahead of their 1990s counterparts but still far behind the industry leaders like the Toyota Camry or Honda Odyssey. Third, Toyota can sell giant Sequia SUVs, Ford sells Excursions big enough to serve as aircraft runways, Nissan can sell gas guzzling Armada SUVs, and Mercedes buyers can cart around in behemoth G and GL class SUVs, but when anyone thinks 'gas hog' the first picture in their head is the monstrosity Hummer H2. It doesn't matter if GM sells 50 hybrids, for the next twenty years 'environmental consciousness' and 'General Motors' will be antonyms in the public vocabulary.
I'm not a big fan of Java, but to be fair:
Unless you prefer an language in which you can be more productive
Most of the slow development and painful complexity of Java has more to do with complex configuration of the popular application frameworks than the language itself. Our in-house Tomcat/Struts/Hibernate/XDoclet application has nearly 40 different XML configuration files. Java doesn't need any of those XML files beyond the single build file for the Ant build tool.
I keep meaning to learn the STL and keep putting it off. (I do Java programming at work, for now, so it's not an issue.) Thanks for the reminder.
he libraries are where Java is soooo much nicer than C++ in that all that stuff is already there for you where my collection of C++ libraries are of variable quality and don't come close to matching the breadth of what you get out-of-the-box with any Java implementation.
You can find outstanding C++ library collections all over. Some are every bit as good as what Java has. But if you download 17 different open source C++ apps, you might find that they collectively reference 50 different C++ libraries but no two applications have a single library in common. 17 different open source Java apps might reference 50 different Java libraries, but the vast majority of the code will use Java's built in libraries.
So Java standard libraries make the learning curve for reading and modifying new applications and other developers' code much smaller. And while C++ is huge and guaranteed not to disappear soon, there's nothing moving the industry towards a handful of common standard libraries.
More importantly, software doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Even if someone invents a superior database paradigm (I haven't read any of the theory on this), who's going to spend the time and money migrating countless petabytes of existing databases into the new system? Whether you love or hate C, C++, COBOL, Java, and SQL, they are in widespread use all over the world. Replacement technologies would need to be orders of magnitude better in most metrics and easy for non-technical users to conceptually grasp before they get any headway.
I'm not saying the status quo is great. It certainly has flaws. But a replacement needs to blow people away with its superiority before it gets any reasonable attention.
And of course, students can't get too focused on the language itself instead of the concepts because the demand for Scheme developers just doesn't quite match the demand for Java/VB/C++ developers.
I know Bush bashing is popular (and I'm not fond of most of this Administration's policies myself), but the Bush Administration has dramatically increased federal educational funding. Despite that, a lot of problems still exist. Education will need a tremendous investment in US resources over and above the billions we spend now to make a difference.
And again, the problem at the low end is that minimum wage jobs are such a tremendous disincentive to work that unemployment or crime look attractive by comparison. I know economically unskilled labor is a commodity and does get affected by supply and demand like anything else. But human people can't be literally stuffed in warehouses and shipped around - they don't fit neatly into the commodities economic model because of their sentience. Any economic plan or policies affecting any labor market at any level must take that into consideration.
Nothing is impossible, but I've been checking the free60 site periodically since it was first posted and I agree with you. I don't see them making major headway. Microsoft has definitely done a better job locking down the 360 than they did on the original Xbox.
And yes, before anyone asks, I would like to contribute. But all my software experience is nowhere near the bare metal, so there isn't much I can do.
Goodbye, poor people making low wages. Hello, poor people making no wages at all.
Either way you lose. Offer no mininum wage or a low minimum wage, and people have much less motivation to work. Offer a high minimum wage, and people have much less opportunity to work.
I understand supply and demand. But I think maybe we shouldn't treat the labor of poor people like a commodity to trade right next to beef, corn, and steel. A $3 minimum wage might increase the number of jobs, but it's not going to raise a poor family out of poverty and it certainly isn't going to motivate anyone to do good work.