The fact that the current language specification states that only ASCII character can be used for identifiers does not imply that future releases of the JLS will *not* allow Unicode identifiers. Destroying the possibility of future i18n for current convenience does not seem wise to me.
i18n. Take a disk from a machine running Linux with character sets. Place in your computer, and attempt to read in a sane way. The *world* doesn't all use ASCII. Sorry. Each character (in binary) may have a different meaning in another language character set, and there's no direct case-insensitive compare that can work on Japanese along with French (think non-ASCII accents) and straight ASCII.
Oh, and just because you program in English does not mean that another person would. USians and the Commonwealth states are not the only ones who program.
Y'all haven't used Solaris much then. The out of box experience (to use an old SGI term) is rather open. Every service enabled. Including sprayd(*). It takes actual work to make a Solaris box reasonably close to secure.
Oh. One more thing. A whole is the sum of the parts. The word you were looking for is "hole." Hell, I've been reading/. too much if I can't let something like this past...
* sprayd: rpc daemon that can trigger a bandwidth allocation DoS attack by design, theoretically used to "test" networks.
...the same choices when building their boxen... so that all Linux installations are compatible with commercial software.
It's not so unbelievable that this would happen, is it? This sounds like the problem the great-grandparent was referring to (and the grandparent brushed off). It's not homogenous -- but it's damned close.
They apparently don't realize that you can bloody well use an imaging tool like Ghost for UNIX as well -- not optimally, to be sure, but it can be done.
Based on what I remember, most of them work at low levels with NTFS or FAT and don't like other filesystems so well. This can be worked around -- image it to the smallest partition size that works for the install. Blow it on to the much larger disk. A few careful first-boot scripts that expand the filesystem to fill the disk (using a FS like ReiserFS and the LVM) and you're set.
Hell, you don't even need to license Ghost -- just bloody use a netboot or CD to load a simple UNIX, create a partition table with the appropriately sized filesystems, and blow the image on with 'gzip -dc image.gz | dd of=/dev/hda1; mount/dev/hda1/target; chroot/target; lilo'
Not to mention using something like Redhat's kickstart...
In "Big Biz," it's bloody unlikely that someone is going to want to go to every workstation that needs an installation of MS Project -- it gets installed *once* by a tech, the box is imaged, and that image gets blown on 3000 other machines. Otherwise, you distribute the software (patches, etc) through GPOs in Active Directory (or Zenworks, for the proud few using NDS^H^H^HeDirectory) -- not running the original pretty graphical installer, in most cases (and assuredly not wanting the user to make decisions or have to click anything.)
Basically, UNIX systems are generally quite a bit easier to do such things on. I can configure cfengine to maintain a certain configuration, ensure that certain packages are up to date, etc. Or, alternately, I can use apt, yum, up2date/RHN, Red Carpet, Progeny's stuff, or whatever I want to update packages.
Yes, it does require that I have a person who can package the software I need for my desktops (RPM, dpkg, etc.) Windows applications and patches need to be repackaged for automated distribution too.
The key thing that I think you're missing is that in a business environment, you don't want Joe Secretary installing a new application on the box without IT involvement. There are people who are exceptions to this policy, and those people will remain the exceptions. I doubt you would ever pry the Macintosh away from a graphic artist, or local control from many developers -- and you don't need to. The vast majority of users don't need to bloody install a new solitaire game. Sorry. All they need for work is Word, Excel and Outlook -- or their OSS equivalents.
At boot time or in single-user mode, I may or may not have/usr. Unless you have a statically-linked mini-Python, I'll stick with/bin/sh for a good percentage of things.
Of course, I know where to draw the line. Another sysadmin here wrote a set of backup scripts (thankfully now lost) that were over 10000 lines of sh, with embedded awk and sed. It maintained a tape database, etc. It was truly insane to debug. Anything more than about 300 lines ends up either as a set of small, easily maintained scripts (and one script that ties them together) or as a Perl or Python (depending on mood and how much of the work is raw text processing -- regex as a language intrinsic is a perl bonus.)
No, what's breaking statelessness is that Reiser doesn't really use inodes and is not a very good choice for a NFS server. Sadly, as it's a beautiful file system. IIRC, ReiserFS generates inode numbers on the fly -- directories in a traditional Un*x filesystem have inode numbers, because they are just files. Ext3, XFS, JFS - all better choices for a NFS server.
So you think kids should spend months memorizing square root and log tables? That's really useful.
You got me wrong on this one. I don't think they should do that at all -- memorization is worthless. But in an advanced math class (advanced for high school, anyway), why would you need to go further than that notation? In fact, if you have to do additional calculations with it, that is an extremely precise number. If I needed to square that result, I could have the result 19.485281, or I could know that it's 11 + 6(sqrt(2)). If I need that as a floating point number for any reason, I can convert it with a calculator, but you should be able to arrive at 3+sqrt(2) without one. Think of trig, with simple angles. I could have 2/3, or some random floating-point number that's hard to work with.
And about the rant below, I apologize for the language, but I stand by the sentiment. You should be able to at least pass for educated without a tool to do it for you. If yoo kant spelll at all without the computer to correct you, I feel sorry for you.
Sorry, don't mean to look like I'm pickin' on Hitler, but there is a huge difference between high school and college: motivation. People are there for entirely different reasons.
And, BTW, I've never been in a college class where a computer was used as anything other than a glorified set of overheads. Repeat after me -- if you're just using powerpoint, you may as well make overheads. The computer in the room is a waste of money. Research at the elementary and high school level should be done with resources that can be cited and will still be there in a year. Bob's web site does not qualify. The Encyclopedia Brittanica does. A book at the library does.
In college classes that I've been in, the computers and Internet access were used as a communication tool, or as a research tool, outside of the class. The only exceptions are classes where learning the tool (the computer) is the primary goal. Even in computer science classes, we haven't touched computers in class, only outside of the actual class time. Apparently, wherever you went to college, they don't seem to actually teach.
Get over your infatuation with the technology and think about the problem that you're trying to solve with it.
People in egypt who built pyramids did not have calculators, why would we need them now?
You meant this as sarcasm, but I see it as truth. Students should not need a calculator in a math class. It's that simple. A few family members of mine are in grade school and high school now, and cannot do simple math without a calculator. A calculator can tell me that a given problem has the "answer" of 4.4121356. It doesn't tell me how to arrive at that answer without entering it in to a magic box. However, I might be able to say that the answer above is 3 + sqrt(2) or 3 - sqrt(2), and know what that means.
Math classes (and computer classes) have become about the tool, not the problem. It's like spending a whole year in shop learning about one tablesaw -- it's not an useful skill. Teach a kid how to build something, and that the tablesaw is one bloody tool that you can use. Hell, make 'em use a handsaw for the first couple of projects so that they understand what the hell they're doing.
Theres an increase in productivity with computers, if you cannot see this then I suggest you move to communist china where you can live in a backwards society in which everyone works 12 hours a day for a penny an hour.
And I respond: Fuck you. Yes, I know, classic argument technique, but school shouldn't be about fucking productivity. If you rely on the spell checker to tell you when you make a fucking mistake, what the fuck do you do on paper when you don't have that tool? All of your examples are about knowledge, not a tool. Think about this: The computer is useless if you don't have a problem to solve with it.
Valve got arse-raped by their proprietary source being widely available on the Internet. If the person or persons who had cracked them open hadn't posted the source, I highly doubt that you would have seen anything. After they had been publically humiliated, it was a better marketing strategy to go for sympathy.
Suppose you do file transfers rather than email--just have programs at each end that compile and de-compile the files into text messages, but while in transit they don't resemble email.
Shit! You want to reinvent UUCP?!?
Seriously, I can't even imagine the tax bills for a newsfeed... since of course, the Tax Man (tm) will find a way to apply said tax to Usenet -- it does *resemble* email enough that it'd probably be covered, under any wording a congresscritter will come up with, but AOL's internal email won't. We know who pays the bills.
If someone were injured or killed in this situation, it is the responsibility of the person who connected this device to a hostile network. Plain and simple. Those devices aren't put on the stock power grid, for $DEITY's sake! Why should you be allowed to connect them to a *hostile* network?
I've dropped away from RH as well (sadly), due to the support policies and the fact that both my employer (educational institution) and myself cannot afford RH's real products, but you need to be fair. They're guaranteeing a 12-18 month release cycle and 5 years of support for any given version. Also, you don't need to run the 64-bit AMD64 version -- the 32-bit x86 version will run fine, especially for most workstation cases.
Actually, from what I understand, the US4 probably won't be that much better than the III. Basically, it's a dual-core III with some slight process improvements. There are no major architectural changes on the roadmap (for the processor core) until the V in 2005 or so with the async core. The real changes are happening outside the mainline -- the IIIi, Gemini, etc.
A IIe system... equivalent to an Opteron? What kind of drugs are you smoking, and are you willing to share?
Look, Sun makes great hardware above the low end, but an old K6-2 beats a Blade 100 desktop in perceived performance and compile speeds. The IIe chip is low power -- in more ways than one. If you don't have a CPU-bound process, like say, a web server for mostly static pages, a Netra X1 or V100 works great, but it's not a fast CPU.
OK. Price/performance. Let's see. SPEC2000 results, Sun Blade 100 (650Mhz US IIe, fastest IIe available in a system) gets 246 integer, 276 floating point. An Opteron 146 (2.0Ghz), on an Asus SK8N board, gets 1262 integer, 1300 floating point.
Just in case you meant the US IIIi, as used in the new V210, V240, V250, and Blade 1500, the results on a V210 (server chassis, 1002 Mhz) are 555 integer, 841 floating point. If and when Sun can get the IIIi up to 2Ghz, that would not quite match the Opteron for integer ops, and just beat it for floating point. Of course, by that time, the Opteron will probably be up to 3Ghz and smoke any available IIIi.
Any more bullshit to sling about price/performance?
Benchmarks from www.spec.org, as published by the vendors. Configurations of the boxes are detailed there.
That MS takes care of the hard part and doesn't leave much control to the end user as a result. ie; It just works..
If only that were true... with a Macintosh, it usually is.</flamebait>
It doesn't disable MusicMatch - it disables communication with the iPod from programs other than iTunes. Have you ever tried to get three different programs to sync with a PalmOS device? It's an interesting experiment. Make sure to back everything up with the original software first. The program is clear at install time that this will occur, it's not checking and removing it at startup, and by reinstalling MusicMatch, it works (and you are now unsupported by Apple).
For your example, if MS disabled Netscape and replaced it with IE when you did a major upgrade, yes, I would be annoyed. If it disabled WinAMP's ability to talk to the (fictional) msPod when you installed WMP XP 1.2, sure, it'd be annoying, but I would say the same damned thing. Boot manager? That's a bloody support issue. Annoying? Yes. Would I do it if I were them? Yes, and I would not apologize -- operating as documented. Don't like it? Don't dual-boot.
I'm not apologizing for Apple. I don't necessarily agree with the decision, but I don't know why that decision was made. If MusicMatch does something that's extremely incompatible with iTunes and damages data on the iPod, would you blame Apple for not warning you?
I'm paranoid, I'll freely admit, but this is the same l0pht^H^H^H^H^H @stake that canned someone who was critical of Microsoft? Hmmp.
$credibility{'@stake'}--;
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The fact that the current language specification states that only ASCII character can be used for identifiers does not imply that future releases of the JLS will *not* allow Unicode identifiers. Destroying the possibility of future i18n for current convenience does not seem wise to me.
Oh, and just because you program in English does not mean that another person would. USians and the Commonwealth states are not the only ones who program.
Oh. One more thing. A whole is the sum of the parts. The word you were looking for is "hole." Hell, I've been reading /. too much if I can't let something like this past...
* sprayd: rpc daemon that can trigger a bandwidth allocation DoS attack by design, theoretically used to "test" networks.
It's not so unbelievable that this would happen, is it? This sounds like the problem the great-grandparent was referring to (and the grandparent brushed off). It's not homogenous -- but it's damned close.
Yes, I do know. No, it will not work from Win9x.
Based on what I remember, most of them work at low levels with NTFS or FAT and don't like other filesystems so well. This can be worked around -- image it to the smallest partition size that works for the install. Blow it on to the much larger disk. A few careful first-boot scripts that expand the filesystem to fill the disk (using a FS like ReiserFS and the LVM) and you're set.
Hell, you don't even need to license Ghost -- just bloody use a netboot or CD to load a simple UNIX, create a partition table with the appropriately sized filesystems, and blow the image on with 'gzip -dc image.gz | dd of=/dev/hda1; mount /dev/hda1 /target; chroot /target; lilo'
Not to mention using something like Redhat's kickstart...
Basically, UNIX systems are generally quite a bit easier to do such things on. I can configure cfengine to maintain a certain configuration, ensure that certain packages are up to date, etc. Or, alternately, I can use apt, yum, up2date/RHN, Red Carpet, Progeny's stuff, or whatever I want to update packages.
Yes, it does require that I have a person who can package the software I need for my desktops (RPM, dpkg, etc.) Windows applications and patches need to be repackaged for automated distribution too.
The key thing that I think you're missing is that in a business environment, you don't want Joe Secretary installing a new application on the box without IT involvement. There are people who are exceptions to this policy, and those people will remain the exceptions. I doubt you would ever pry the Macintosh away from a graphic artist, or local control from many developers -- and you don't need to. The vast majority of users don't need to bloody install a new solitaire game. Sorry. All they need for work is Word, Excel and Outlook -- or their OSS equivalents.
Of course, I know where to draw the line. Another sysadmin here wrote a set of backup scripts (thankfully now lost) that were over 10000 lines of sh, with embedded awk and sed. It maintained a tape database, etc. It was truly insane to debug. Anything more than about 300 lines ends up either as a set of small, easily maintained scripts (and one script that ties them together) or as a Perl or Python (depending on mood and how much of the work is raw text processing -- regex as a language intrinsic is a perl bonus.)
Sorry, dude.
Ah. 2/3 should be 2(pi)/3. Preview is your friend. Apparently π is not the HTML entity for pi...
We have a winner! I agree with you on this one, and don't see where we actually disagree.
And about the rant below, I apologize for the language, but I stand by the sentiment. You should be able to at least pass for educated without a tool to do it for you. If yoo kant spelll at all without the computer to correct you, I feel sorry for you.
Happy now?
And, BTW, I've never been in a college class where a computer was used as anything other than a glorified set of overheads. Repeat after me -- if you're just using powerpoint, you may as well make overheads. The computer in the room is a waste of money. Research at the elementary and high school level should be done with resources that can be cited and will still be there in a year. Bob's web site does not qualify. The Encyclopedia Brittanica does. A book at the library does.
In college classes that I've been in, the computers and Internet access were used as a communication tool, or as a research tool, outside of the class. The only exceptions are classes where learning the tool (the computer) is the primary goal. Even in computer science classes, we haven't touched computers in class, only outside of the actual class time. Apparently, wherever you went to college, they don't seem to actually teach.
Get over your infatuation with the technology and think about the problem that you're trying to solve with it.
Math classes (and computer classes) have become about the tool, not the problem. It's like spending a whole year in shop learning about one tablesaw -- it's not an useful skill. Teach a kid how to build something, and that the tablesaw is one bloody tool that you can use. Hell, make 'em use a handsaw for the first couple of projects so that they understand what the hell they're doing.
And I respond: Fuck you. Yes, I know, classic argument technique, but school shouldn't be about fucking productivity. If you rely on the spell checker to tell you when you make a fucking mistake, what the fuck do you do on paper when you don't have that tool? All of your examples are about knowledge, not a tool. Think about this: The computer is useless if you don't have a problem to solve with it.</rant>
Valve got arse-raped by their proprietary source being widely available on the Internet. If the person or persons who had cracked them open hadn't posted the source, I highly doubt that you would have seen anything. After they had been publically humiliated, it was a better marketing strategy to go for sympathy.
Seriously, I can't even imagine the tax bills for a newsfeed... since of course, the Tax Man (tm) will find a way to apply said tax to Usenet -- it does *resemble* email enough that it'd probably be covered, under any wording a congresscritter will come up with, but AOL's internal email won't. We know who pays the bills.
Ah. A common misunderstanding. AIDS and the flu didn't kill (or scare) any congresscritters, therefore they are much lower priority.
Jebus...
</burn fuel="karma">
Look, Sun makes great hardware above the low end, but an old K6-2 beats a Blade 100 desktop in perceived performance and compile speeds. The IIe chip is low power -- in more ways than one. If you don't have a CPU-bound process, like say, a web server for mostly static pages, a Netra X1 or V100 works great, but it's not a fast CPU.
OK. Price/performance. Let's see. SPEC2000 results, Sun Blade 100 (650Mhz US IIe, fastest IIe available in a system) gets 246 integer, 276 floating point. An Opteron 146 (2.0Ghz), on an Asus SK8N board, gets 1262 integer, 1300 floating point.
Just in case you meant the US IIIi, as used in the new V210, V240, V250, and Blade 1500, the results on a V210 (server chassis, 1002 Mhz) are 555 integer, 841 floating point. If and when Sun can get the IIIi up to 2Ghz, that would not quite match the Opteron for integer ops, and just beat it for floating point. Of course, by that time, the Opteron will probably be up to 3Ghz and smoke any available IIIi.
Any more bullshit to sling about price/performance?
Benchmarks from www.spec.org, as published by the vendors. Configurations of the boxes are detailed there.
It doesn't disable MusicMatch - it disables communication with the iPod from programs other than iTunes. Have you ever tried to get three different programs to sync with a PalmOS device? It's an interesting experiment. Make sure to back everything up with the original software first. The program is clear at install time that this will occur, it's not checking and removing it at startup, and by reinstalling MusicMatch, it works (and you are now unsupported by Apple).
For your example, if MS disabled Netscape and replaced it with IE when you did a major upgrade, yes, I would be annoyed. If it disabled WinAMP's ability to talk to the (fictional) msPod when you installed WMP XP 1.2, sure, it'd be annoying, but I would say the same damned thing. Boot manager? That's a bloody support issue. Annoying? Yes. Would I do it if I were them? Yes, and I would not apologize -- operating as documented. Don't like it? Don't dual-boot.
I'm not apologizing for Apple. I don't necessarily agree with the decision, but I don't know why that decision was made. If MusicMatch does something that's extremely incompatible with iTunes and damages data on the iPod, would you blame Apple for not warning you?
I'm paranoid, I'll freely admit, but this is the same l0pht^H^H^H^H^H @stake that canned someone who was critical of Microsoft? Hmmp.
$credibility{'@stake'}--;