Having done something similar (but much MUCH cruder) in the past I guarantee that every
glitch from the time you start using this will
be blamed on the cluster.
We had to stop not for technical reasons but
because people wouldn't let us run the code
on their machines any more.
One thing I have found very helpful is variety in keyboards and mice. Happily my job allows this.
I do most of my work at one place but the other two have different model keyboards and pointer devices and the desk heights are different; this was on purpose. I usually am at each, each workday.
Since the key heights, spaces, strike forces are different I am not doing the exact same motions all day. Two have mice, the 3rd a touchpad.
It takes a few minutes to adjust to the differences but it beats pain and is certainly cheap enough.
Discovered accidentally but now it's my policy.
Another very useful aspect is being part of a smallish team (in academia). In any given day I am doing a wide variety of tasks; we can't afford much specialization with a 3 person support staff so most days I am doing different things throughout. It messed up my programming productivity though; not many opportunities to be alone with the code for enough hours at a stretch.
I am not at all sure one can compare Dr Who and almost anything else. It's pretty much in its own catagory, if only for being on for so long and it had/has a radically different audience in mind as well as a serial format.
Babylon 5 is/was nifty but it too is almost in its own little word. A 5+ year story arc from the beginning is pretty unique.
Blake's 7 (it shared a miniscule effects budget with the good Doctor) and Firefly, on the other hand, are more like really good dysfunctional family dramas with spaceships. Among other things I was amazed Blakes 7 (usually) pulled off having a cranky computer as an interesting major character....I usually hate that sort of thing.
Those who like Blake's 7 and Firefly should also check out...and I know the name is horrible but trust me: "Star Cops". Like Blake's 7: a Chris Boucher series.
Personally I'm just happy to have a few sci-fi shows with some interesting plots and characters in them (and I include Enterprise in there of late).
A big one (not the one that funds them) is they are cool.
Useful sometimes. E.g. PDP-11 on a PCI board with a PDP-11 hardware interface is buyable. It's used, among other places, in the postal system to run hardware that needs a PDP-11. Interestingly, it used to use the PDP-11 on a chip but last I checked used an Intel CPU. XEROX had allegedly bought all
the remaining PDP-11 on a chip machines for their use in copiers.
The article was pushing the "where we came from" aspects. I KNOW how hard it is to keep PDP-10 hardware running. It's rather handy in defeating patents to come up with prior art...from, say, 1964.
The thing here is it's use it or lose it time. You write an emulator and you understand the machine.
Bootstrap Education. A young person can understand a CP/M machine on a level that just isn't going to happen, say, my iBook G4 and use that understanding to bootstrap up to the next level of complexity.
The senator pulls in some $ from his music but it's under $20K/year.
What if iTunes and Napster were to put the best (OK, least awful) cuts on their services and 30,000 techies buy a cut?
That would get his attention in a favorable way.
There are reasons to buy your own stuff that is
partially used for business. Here is an example:
I know a sysadmin who bought his own laptop that he used for his stuff and work. He didn't want to
have to carry around 2 machines and he valued his
privacy. He was and is an honorable guy.
The day came when the Powers That Be wished to paw through everything. They looked through the servers, they looked through the network, they wanted to look through his laptop.
It didn't belong to them so he could say "No". It
took a little while for them to understand why (as is often the case with The Powers) but they
didn't want to get a warrant, they didn't want
to get sued, he didn't cave to pressure. The "No" stood.
He couldn't have done that if he had been using a work box.
In a mixed environment (e.g. a place where some stuff is secret and most stuff isn't) a more typical response is:
iPod, USB drives, whatever, in the building: DA
iPod, USB drives, whatever in the locked rooms where the secrets are: NYET.
Tighten security to what people think are absurd levels and they will ignore it (a corollary: Make a security mistake a fireable offense and you will not be hearing about any security mistakes!). That means both having a sensible policy (see above) and education (here's why we ask you to do inconvenient things).
If a whole building is necessarily secure, this is not at all an absurd policy but you might not be able to hire some very good
people who wont like the vibe.
When I was young something like this was common in
certain states....along with poll taxes (you can only vote
if you come up with the money).
If you were white you tended to pass (often as not the
people running the thing just said you passed if you were
white) and if you were black you tended to fail (often as
not the people running the thing just marked you failed).
DELL started in Michael Dell's dorm room. He'd buy "graymarket" IBM PC's (dealers got steep discounts for large orders, so they would order more than they could sell) and then he'd resell them below Suggested Retail Price.
If anybody would understand about trade-in, reselling and buying a new iPod, wouldn't it be Michael Dell?
Hire a pro who has done offices you like and
even more important: are liked by the people
who work there!
It is possible to design GREAT looking offices that win design awards.....that are counterproductive. I
refer you all to the wonderful book:
"The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman
for examples.
I once hired "professionals" who designed aworkspac that was both inargueably ugly and difficult to use; it was an expensive mistake but the folks we tried after that did an excellent job with a difficult space. Quality varies.
Although it's a LOT more expensive to replace the
media (palm vs. notebook), it's much much easier to backup, and later replace, the data on new media.
Also; there is a tendancy to say "It's just a $0.75 notebook, what's the big deal?" when it becomes inconvenient to retrieve. I don't say that about my Clie even though the data inside is worth more than either.
Finally, in repeating redundancy, as others have pointed out, there is a nicety to being beeped a little while before you have to do something. This has saved my job on ocassion but I acknowledge other more organized people may not need that.
According to http://www.nbc5.com/irresistible/2276786/detail.ht ml, Senator Hatch has made $18,000 in music royalties in
a single year.
A past scandal in congress was over institutional supporters of politicians buying lots and lots of
a book written by that politician.
Maybe the books were in a warehouse
or distributed free to members afterwards but the money
was "royalties".
The above paragraphs probably have nothing to do with each other.
Books/Computers is changing question and we are nearing a tipping point as traditional book costs continue to remain stable (or go up) and computer costs go down.
Schools try to train for tomorrow as well as today. They don't alweays succeed but:
If you have something like a lowend Palm and an internet connection (possibly shared by many) all of a sudden you have a LOT of public domain, classic books, available for very near no cost. Although a library might have 6 copies, the net has as many copies as you have devices to display them.
In some domains, like 19th century english literature: computers are cheaper than traditional books now and I expect that trend to continue.
This is, of course, probably less true in some places than others and books currently mostly have the edge but the trend is probably worldwide and longterm.
I expect traditional books to remain a common item throughout my life but probably not the life of my grandchildren. Makes me a little sad.
Even allowing only for machines: I find it hard to believe there are no surviving tech manuals in at least one of: Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Korean, Latin, that are earlier.
DESCRIPTION
alien is a program that converts between Redhat rpm,
Debian deb, Stampede slp, Slackware tgz, and Solaris pkg
file formats. If you want to use a package from another
linux distribution than the one you have installed on your
system, you can use alien to convert it to your preferred
package format and install it. It also supports LSB pack
ages.
WARNING
Despite the high version number, alien is still (and will
probably always be) rather experimental software. It's
been under development for many years now, but there are
still many bugs and limitations.
Anyone else remember Bush #1 and the "Space Exploration Initiative" speech on the 20th Anniversary of Apollo?
It sounds kind of similar but back then
few took it seriously when he handed the task to the VP of the time (Dan Quayle) and it never got any
serious finding.
Although not reviewed, the reviewer did mention Knoppix.
He mentioned that last years Knoppix did a better job than this years reviewed releases in finding and configuring for his video card and that Knoppix is a free CD-ROM-based Linux.
But yes, the overall point that reviews tend to be 'once-over-lightly' is well taken. This reviewer did appear to take at least some time to get work done in their enviroment using each. That is about as much as I feel I can expect with these things.
That sounds suspiciously like either an MacOS 8/9
machine and/or something is really wrong with the thing and/or 64MB is nowhere near enough any more.
MacOS X on a recent Mac is a nicely stable and rather efficient (if slightly quirky) Unix, at least that's been my experience with a 700Mhz 384MB RAM iBook. It could well be that you need at
least that much RAM before it starts to shine.
The IBM floating point is fast and almost too accurate (Consistency between runs on different architectures is sometimes more important than those last few bits of accuracy). Going to single precision tends to slow it down (extra step in throwing away information).
The bus in the new machines looks awfully nice on paper.
In a cluster: Reliability, Fast networking, fast bus and fast/accurate floating point are mighty big draws.
I don't think anybody will know for sure if this was a good move until it's been running awhile but it's not an unreasonable thing to try.
Newsforge Reports: Ford Move to Linux Not True?
on
Ford To Move To Linux
·
· Score: 1
According to Newsforge.com:
"Ford Move to Linux Not True". It quotes Joane Witte, Communications Manager for Ford Motor Information Technology.
The U.S. is the only country in the world where people drive 4 miles to the stationary bicycles.
Ever since then I have been bicycling a couple times a week. It gets me to and from work (sometimes in combination with a bus [Seattle has bike racks on the buses]).
Even if it is too far/dangerous/whatever: keeping a beater bike at work and riding around during lunch minutes is pretty helpful. I find the change of scenery makes it less boring than most exercise and being out of the building (albeit nearby and pageable) helps freshen my brain.
Although a using a laptop camera is a cool idea, I have yet to find one that had the resolution to really show what is being written (vs vague squiggles) in any useful way.
You might be able to zoom in an see a tiny part of the board at readable resolution at a time but then you may find yourself fiddling with aiming your laptop instead of listening.
It might be useful with a prof who uses an overhead and writes big or maybe in a class with lots of large drawings being made on the board.
One of the higher end consumer digital video cameras might well be useful with a laptop however.
Mostly it was pretty good (personal opinion) but every once in awhile: Wow. Buffy generally had a few of those Wow episodes every year.
A really excellent example being the famous "Earshot" which was pulled from the air when the Columbine shootings happened a few days earlier which had some parallels. This named the whole "Hellmouth" discussion of Columbine on Slashdot.
Another example: "The Body". Somebody just dies. Bang. More or less natural causes and then dealing with the paramedics and doctors and such afterwards.
Another: Buffy wakes up in a mental institution, which is an often used device but we don't really know which is 'real' in Buffy: The institution or Sunnydale. The doctors make an awfully strong case for her being mentally ill.
Or maybe the whole "High School as Hell" thing just resonates for the nerdly among us (a feature that some of the other similar shows lack).
Throw in some nice character twists (just when you think you know who a character is, some new and often unexpected side turns up....and that twist usually stays with the character...it usually doesn't just disappear the following week as so often happens in series TV), some snappy banter and a willingness to do something unusual from time to time (e.g. the episode "Hush" had almost no dialog and "Once More with Feeling" was a musical) and a penchant to run a parallel between the outer story (e.g. demons steal the voices of everyone) and the inner story (e.g. how DO you communicate with your new love?) and usually a sense each season of a season-long story being shown via the individuals episodes and you have a pretty cool series.
I'm going to miss it. If you don't care for it: that's fine too.
Slashdot Mirror
We had to stop not for technical reasons but because people wouldn't let us run the code on their machines any more.
I do most of my work at one place but the other two have different model keyboards and pointer devices and the desk heights are different; this was on purpose. I usually am at each, each workday.
Since the key heights, spaces, strike forces are different I am not doing the exact same motions all day. Two have mice, the 3rd a touchpad.
It takes a few minutes to adjust to the differences but it beats pain and is certainly cheap enough.
Discovered accidentally but now it's my policy.
Another very useful aspect is being part of a smallish team (in academia). In any given day I am doing a wide variety of tasks; we can't afford much specialization with a 3 person support staff so most days I am doing different things throughout. It messed up my programming productivity though; not many opportunities to be alone with the code for enough hours at a stretch.
Babylon 5 is/was nifty but it too is almost in its own little word. A 5+ year story arc from the beginning is pretty unique.
Blake's 7 (it shared a miniscule effects budget with the good Doctor) and Firefly, on the other hand, are more like really good dysfunctional family dramas with spaceships. Among other things I was amazed Blakes 7 (usually) pulled off having a cranky computer as an interesting major character....I usually hate that sort of thing.
Those who like Blake's 7 and Firefly should also check out...and I know the name is horrible but trust me: "Star Cops". Like Blake's 7: a Chris Boucher series.
Personally I'm just happy to have a few sci-fi shows with some interesting plots and characters in them (and I include Enterprise in there of late).
A big one (not the one that funds them) is they are cool.
Useful sometimes. E.g. PDP-11 on a PCI board with a PDP-11 hardware interface is buyable. It's used, among other places, in the postal system to run hardware that needs a PDP-11. Interestingly, it used to use the PDP-11 on a chip but last I checked used an Intel CPU. XEROX had allegedly bought all the remaining PDP-11 on a chip machines for their use in copiers.
The article was pushing the "where we came from" aspects. I KNOW how hard it is to keep PDP-10 hardware running. It's rather handy in defeating patents to come up with prior art...from, say, 1964. The thing here is it's use it or lose it time. You write an emulator and you understand the machine.
Bootstrap Education. A young person can understand a CP/M machine on a level that just isn't going to happen, say, my iBook G4 and use that understanding to bootstrap up to the next level of complexity.
What if iTunes and Napster were to put the best (OK, least awful) cuts on their services and 30,000 techies buy a cut? That would get his attention in a favorable way.
We have more money than RIAA, we should use some.
I know a sysadmin who bought his own laptop that he used for his stuff and work. He didn't want to have to carry around 2 machines and he valued his privacy. He was and is an honorable guy.
The day came when the Powers That Be wished to paw through everything. They looked through the servers, they looked through the network, they wanted to look through his laptop.
It didn't belong to them so he could say "No". It took a little while for them to understand why (as is often the case with The Powers) but they didn't want to get a warrant, they didn't want to get sued, he didn't cave to pressure. The "No" stood.
He couldn't have done that if he had been using a work box.
In a mixed environment (e.g. a place where some stuff is secret and most stuff isn't) a more typical response is:
iPod, USB drives, whatever, in the building: DA
iPod, USB drives, whatever in the locked rooms where the secrets are: NYET.
Tighten security to what people think are absurd levels and they will ignore it (a corollary: Make a security mistake a fireable offense and you will not be hearing about any security mistakes!). That means both having a sensible policy (see above) and education (here's why we ask you to do inconvenient things).
If a whole building is necessarily secure, this is not at all an absurd policy but you might not be able to hire some very good people who wont like the vibe.
When I was young something like this was common in certain states....along with poll taxes (you can only vote if you come up with the money).
If you were white you tended to pass (often as not the people running the thing just said you passed if you were white) and if you were black you tended to fail (often as not the people running the thing just marked you failed).
If anybody would understand about trade-in, reselling and buying a new iPod, wouldn't it be Michael Dell?
Hire a pro who has done offices you like and even more important: are liked by the people who work there!
It is possible to design GREAT looking offices that win design awards.....that are counterproductive. I refer you all to the wonderful book: "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman for examples.
I once hired "professionals" who designed aworkspac that was both inargueably ugly and difficult to use; it was an expensive mistake but the folks we tried after that did an excellent job with a difficult space. Quality varies.
Although it's a LOT more expensive to replace the media (palm vs. notebook), it's much much easier to backup, and later replace, the data on new media.
Also; there is a tendancy to say "It's just a $0.75 notebook, what's the big deal?" when it becomes inconvenient to retrieve. I don't say that about my Clie even though the data inside is worth more than either.
Finally, in repeating redundancy, as others have pointed out, there is a nicety to being beeped a little while before you have to do something. This has saved my job on ocassion but I acknowledge other more organized people may not need that.
A past scandal in congress was over institutional supporters of politicians buying lots and lots of a book written by that politician. Maybe the books were in a warehouse or distributed free to members afterwards but the money was "royalties".
The above paragraphs probably have nothing to do with each other.
I mean if the disk has a denser "Aura" maybe it could hold more data.
Moderators get to decide if that's a joke or not because I'm not telling.
Schools try to train for tomorrow as well as today. They don't alweays succeed but:
If you have something like a lowend Palm and an internet connection (possibly shared by many) all of a sudden you have a LOT of public domain, classic books, available for very near no cost. Although a library might have 6 copies, the net has as many copies as you have devices to display them.
In some domains, like 19th century english literature: computers are cheaper than traditional books now and I expect that trend to continue.
This is, of course, probably less true in some places than others and books currently mostly have the edge but the trend is probably worldwide and longterm.
I expect traditional books to remain a common item throughout my life but probably not the life of my grandchildren. Makes me a little sad.
Even allowing only for machines: I find it hard to believe there are no surviving tech manuals in at least one of: Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Korean, Latin, that are earlier.
Depends on what you mean by "data" but this is from Debian "Woody" (aka Stable on this date). I have seen it work, at least sometimes.
ALIEN(1) User Contributed Perl Documentation
NAME alien - Convert or install an alien binary package
SYNOPSIS
alien [--to-deb] [--to-rpm] [--to-tgz] [--to-slp] [options] file [...]
DESCRIPTION
alien is a program that converts between Redhat rpm, Debian deb, Stampede slp, Slackware tgz, and Solaris pkg file formats. If you want to use a package from another linux distribution than the one you have installed on your system, you can use alien to convert it to your preferred package format and install it. It also supports LSB pack ages.
WARNING
Despite the high version number, alien is still (and will probably always be) rather experimental software. It's been under development for many years now, but there are still many bugs and limitations.
It sounds kind of similar but back then few took it seriously when he handed the task to the VP of the time (Dan Quayle) and it never got any serious finding.
He mentioned that last years Knoppix did a better job than this years reviewed releases in finding and configuring for his video card and that Knoppix is a free CD-ROM-based Linux.
But yes, the overall point that reviews tend to be 'once-over-lightly' is well taken. This reviewer did appear to take at least some time to get work done in their enviroment using each. That is about as much as I feel I can expect with these things.
MacOS X on a recent Mac is a nicely stable and rather efficient (if slightly quirky) Unix, at least that's been my experience with a 700Mhz 384MB RAM iBook. It could well be that you need at least that much RAM before it starts to shine.
The IBM floating point is fast and almost too accurate (Consistency between runs on different architectures is sometimes more important than those last few bits of accuracy). Going to single precision tends to slow it down (extra step in throwing away information).
The bus in the new machines looks awfully nice on paper.
In a cluster: Reliability, Fast networking, fast bus and fast/accurate floating point are mighty big draws.
I don't think anybody will know for sure if this was a good move until it's been running awhile but it's not an unreasonable thing to try.
"Ford Move to Linux Not True". It quotes Joane Witte, Communications Manager for Ford Motor Information Technology.
I do believe Percival Lowell worked out approximately where would be a good place to look though.
The U.S. is the only country in the world where people drive 4 miles to the stationary bicycles.
Ever since then I have been bicycling a couple times a week. It gets me to and from work (sometimes in combination with a bus [Seattle has bike racks on the buses]).
Even if it is too far/dangerous/whatever: keeping a beater bike at work and riding around during lunch minutes is pretty helpful. I find the change of scenery makes it less boring than most exercise and being out of the building (albeit nearby and pageable) helps freshen my brain.
I remember cases where organizations would do massive book buys to support a politician or does he really do that much business with individuals?
You might be able to zoom in an see a tiny part of the board at readable resolution at a time but then you may find yourself fiddling with aiming your laptop instead of listening.
It might be useful with a prof who uses an overhead and writes big or maybe in a class with lots of large drawings being made on the board.
One of the higher end consumer digital video cameras might well be useful with a laptop however.
A really excellent example being the famous "Earshot" which was pulled from the air when the Columbine shootings happened a few days earlier which had some parallels. This named the whole "Hellmouth" discussion of Columbine on Slashdot.
Another example: "The Body". Somebody just dies. Bang. More or less natural causes and then dealing with the paramedics and doctors and such afterwards.
Another: Buffy wakes up in a mental institution, which is an often used device but we don't really know which is 'real' in Buffy: The institution or Sunnydale. The doctors make an awfully strong case for her being mentally ill.
Or maybe the whole "High School as Hell" thing just resonates for the nerdly among us (a feature that some of the other similar shows lack).
Throw in some nice character twists (just when you think you know who a character is, some new and often unexpected side turns up....and that twist usually stays with the character...it usually doesn't just disappear the following week as so often happens in series TV), some snappy banter and a willingness to do something unusual from time to time (e.g. the episode "Hush" had almost no dialog and "Once More with Feeling" was a musical) and a penchant to run a parallel between the outer story (e.g. demons steal the voices of everyone) and the inner story (e.g. how DO you communicate with your new love?) and usually a sense each season of a season-long story being shown via the individuals episodes and you have a pretty cool series.
I'm going to miss it. If you don't care for it: that's fine too.