Really? I live in Ontario. Maybe this is an Ontario thing? Maybe the companies I've been dealing with are ripping me off somehow?
I honestly don't know. It's good to know that this isn't the case across Canada though. Next time I need to order something I'll try and find out more. But I know for a fact that two companies both said they can't ship to me via Canada Post and for some reason (I don't remember anymore) they couldn't use FedEx, only UPS. Weird.
This is completely false. I live in Canada and have had things shipped here by several different methods, UPS being only one of them.
How recently? I've had many things shipped via other means as well. But starting maybe end of last year or beginning of this year suddenly all companies are telling me they must ship via UPS since there was some problem with using the regular post. So now the regular post apparently won't carry packages from companies in the US. For some reason all the companies said it also *had* to be UPS, no FedEx. Don't remember the reason, but supposedly they had no choice. And this is more than one company doing this.
Again, that's bullshit. In some cases you may need to pay a broker's fee to get it through customs, but it doesn't usually apply to individuals (as opposed to corporations), although if you have to pay it once you'll have to pay it each future time you receive a shipment via UPS.
The extra charges *may* be a brokers fee, but UPS certainly wasn't up to explaining it. It wasn't customs, customs were a separate charge. And this charge is nothing a corporation can pay. I did look into this. The companies I was dealing with all said that they paid UPS for all the charges they could. UPS told me that this extra charge was levied by UPS, and there was no way for any company to pay it. It's always the individual. Not to mention it's around $50-70 US and I've had to pay it for items that were valued at around $50. Just silly. Again, this is a recent change. I've ordered things in years past and never had such problems. And if you said this fee isn't usually applied it individuals, it's funny that at least two people I know (the only two to order anything recently) got nailed on this fee. It's just not worth ordering things from the US with rates like that.
Unfortunatly, there is some law that specifies all US companies must use UPS when delivering to Canada. Of course, UPS is not going to waste such an opportunaty, so in addition to 15% taxes we must pay on imported items, we must also pay a *UPS tax* which can sometimes be as high at 100% of the value of the item being shipped!
My family has bought things online in the US for say $50 and in the end payed > $100 for it thanks to these taxes/corporate levies.
It's so bad in fact, that some of my freinds who are into DJing buy their vynl from europe because it's actually *cheaper* to have items shipped overseas rather than pay the UPS tax.
So unfortunatly we cannot just buy stuff in the US.:( Unless we drive there I suppose, but there are numerous problems with that.
Hehe, your right about Solaris. I was afriad of that but was too lazy to do research. Shall we start
BSD/OS has SMP. SunOS *did* have SMP in the later years. But admittedly it seemed to suck as much as Linux 2.0's SMP. SCO had SMP as well, granted it's also now defunkt. Another BSD based system was DEC's Ultrix, which also did SMP. Again, whether it was *good* was questionable. I never used it and don't know enough to comment.
Anyways, the point is, there were a lot of BSD based systems that did SMP. Also keep in mind SysV didn't do SMP even in 1988. If your talking about modern BSD based systems, and not BSD/Mach systems (where it's reallly Mach doing the SMP work I think) then we must limit ourselves to FreeBSD (SMP, soon to be very good SMP), OpenBSD (no SMP, but it seems will evenutally have SMP), NetBSD (Has SMP as of next major release, in other words it's complete), and BSD/OS (has SMP).
So currently most BSD actually have SMP I guess.:) Anyways, it's a pointless argument, I'm not an SMP guru and next time I'll research more before posting.
Be careful what you say there. Most BSDs? What are you classifying as BSD? Most commercial unix systems like solaris are based on BSD.
I assume of course you are talking about the free BSD operating systems. Considering there are only three, I guess two of three can constitute most. But FreeBSD has had SMP for a while already, although until 5.x it hasn't been very good.
On the comercial side of things, most BSDs *do* have SMP. And very good SMP as well.
Acutally, my "router" is in fact a firewall. Statefull in all. Granted, I'll agree with you that most "routers" are not *really* firewalls. But as has been pointed out in another comment, NAT can act as an effective deny all incoming rule. Which is all most users really need anyways.
And as for being a router, well, they DO route. They just don't route much:). On most of them you can even setup static routes for routing other private lan ranges or what not. In fact, the netgear routers even have RIP built in, which as far as I can tell, and I'm not really a network guy, is something only a router would care about.
But ok, they do not by any means close to a heavy weight router. Sure.
Now here's the kicker - as the kernel is open-source (APSL - don't complain), someone's already traced the problem back to a recursive lock in the HFS+ subsystem (hfs_vnops.c). Kewl or wha'?
And here's reality. At least 90% (maybe more) of regular users (not tech gurus) don't care what the problem is, they want it fixed. Of the tech savvy 10%, I bet 90% of those just snort and go, "ok, where's the official fix, I'm not gonna recompile my bloody kernel".
So that means that this whole open-source => can find bugs faster really doesn't effect the majority of the population, and is only *really* important to very small number of people. The most vocal people just like use this as an excuse to scream and yell at how open-source is just *soooo* much better than anything else.
LOL! Wow. Ok. Your right, you really are stingy with pixels.;) You are the definition of special case I think.:)
I guess I can sort of understand, sometimes I like to run my unix machines really thin as well. Of course not THAT thin. Hehe, that's just crazy man!:)
You can't bring yourself to spend 1cm of screen real estate, at the *bottem* of the screen?!?! I will refrain from asking the size of your monitor.
By the way, I'm fairly certain that both gnome and kde allow you to completly hide the kicker. It pops up when you move your mouse to the very bottem edge of the screen.;)
Unfortunatly, the noise cancellation technology is not perfect yet. I've read many review about these headphone systems, and everyone claims that there is this white noise that is generated by the headphones. While the noise is quieter than say a jet engine, it's not that quiet when in a quiet room.
If you canceled the noise of your fans, the question is would the white noise be worse, the same, or better than your fans? This obviously depends on your fans of course. However, my rig has 5 fans, 6 if you include the power supply, and it's already quieter than essentially every other appliance in my house (well, the furnace is quiet actually). I remember reading that the white noise these headphones generate is just as bad as a fridge or something.
Course, I've never used a set of headphones personally, so I can't say if any of this is really true. I'd like to demo some one day.
Hmm. Ok. I see your point.;) I'm surprised actually that the US wouldn't do anything to support it's citiziens from such things. It must cause *some* diplomatic tensions.
Anyways, yes, I guess it is the laws that are really at fault. We live in a scary world.
Sorry for being unclear. Canada wanted to try the murderer in Canada, rather than the US. I agree, the real problem is an unjust law.
But the point I was trying to make is that when you arrest a foreigner, even if that person is in your country, it's somewhat of a dimplomatic situation. Even when the crime is something clearly wrong like murder there can be diplomatic issues. So it is the case that being a foreigner gives you *some* diplomatic protection, in that your home country may fight for your rights.
I think the US should have the political awareness not to enforce questionable laws on foregniers. It's the same thing as say, Iran detaining an American female for violating some weird religous law. We don't say that Iran is *right* in doing this do we? And Iran knows that if it does things like that diplomatic relations will be harmed. In the same way the US is in the wrong in the Dimitri case.
***Disclaimer: I don't know that Iran specifically has crazy relgious laws, but I know certainly some middle east countries do***
Either way, it's the law that's fucked up, not the fact that it was applied to a foreigner. Being from another country doesn't give you diplomatic immunity. And it shouldn't. The US isn't bad in that regard. If you mail a bomb to Italy, and you live in Greece, you'll get deported, or arrested the next time you travel to Italy. Right?
Actually no, being from another country does provide one with some diplomatic immunity. In your mail bomb example both countries agree on that a crime was committed. But even so, it's not always the case that the criminal will be deported. He could be tried in his home country under his home countrie's laws. In fact, even if he went to Italy and got picked up it's STILL not clear who should try him. Take for instance recent cases where a canadian committed murder in the US. The US obviously tried the criminal, but there was the issue of the death penalty. Since Canada doesn't agree with the death penalty there was diplomatic touble. Canada tried to get the guy tried in Canada for this reason.
When laws like the DMCA are applied to foriegners it gets even more complicated. Russia does not acknowledge DCMA and so the company that Dmitri worked for did nothing wrong. I'm not sure if this was the case, but Russia could very well could have fought with the US over the arrest of Dmitri on diplomatic grounds.
So yes, the US is bad in that regard. They are a superpower and so have no problems imposing their own laws on other countires citizins.
Actually, Outcast was for the PC and used a voxel engine. I beleive the article said that Outcase 2, which never came out, was for the Playstation2 and PC. It also mentioned that Outcast 2 was using polygons, and a quick look at the screen shots of the game can confirm this.
I'm not sure what you mean by "good". But here's an example. Suppose the space constraints of mergesort are too expensive. Quicksort has worst-case running time of O(n^2). Randomized quicksort can be used to avoid hitting the worst case runtime for *most* runs.
If you mean better than O(nlogn), then I don't know of one either. I just used random algorithms as an example of algorithms that may not have the best big oh runtime but can still be usefull.
The poster did not specify any runtime properties, average, worst case, or best case. It's not clear that his algorithm is any better than randomized quicksort. But depending on the properties of the poster's algorithm it could be useful so he should properly analyse it.
I believe the technique the parent described is a form of hash sort. You must be able to calculate any giving instance of the mapping function M in O(1) time. The situation of infinite memory described is indeed a special case.
A more common and real example of this is sorting a specific range of consecutive integers [a,b]. The function M can simply be M(x)=x-a and is considered a simple hash function. Once all the elements have been hased according to M(x) into some array A, the array A will contain the sorted elements. This clearly takes only O(n) in the worst case.
I beleive it's been proven that any general sort algorithm that does not reley on special conditions on the data or memory has a lower bound of Omega(nlog). Look up decision tree proofs in you favorite algorithm book.
That's not to say that your algorithm is not usefull though. Often people use things like randomized algorithms as they have better average times. So, talk to your professors. They would be happy to explain the specifics of your algorithm to you.
Also, if your library has online journals, you can search those for sorting algorithms. And don't be afriad to show the algorithm to people. If your worried about IP, don't be. Chances are the university already has IP rights to it as your a student. That doesn't mean you can market your algorithm if it turns out to be somethings spectacular. Just talk to your professors, they are the experts!
Windows Install and Linux Kernel compile.
on
Gnarly Error Messages
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· Score: 1, Insightful
I remember two funny errors. Once, when installing Windows (or maybe it was dos) on a older computer, after the whole process finished it told me so and told me it was going to restart. So the computer restarted, and prompty asked me "DO YOU WANT TO FORMAT C:?"
I don't know or remember that happened. It must have been some old code laying around on a boot disk or something. But why someone would put a format command in a startup script is beyond me.
The other funny experience I had was another "user error", not an error with the software. The first time me and a freind tried to recompile the linux kernel, we were confronted with a large number of technical questions. This was one of those funky text only configuration scripts that asks you if you want support 'X' and support 'Y' and such.
Well, having never compiled the kernel before, we looked at the possible answers (Y/N/M). "Ok", we thought, "Y is for yes, N is for no... but M? What the hell is M???." So, not knowing that Linux had acquired MODULES since we last used it, we jokingly concluded that M must be for "maybe". And we continued, whenever we weren't sure whether we needed an option or not, we just answered maybe!!
Lucky for us, that was the right thing to do. But I thought it was a funny "user error" at any rate. Probalby a bit off topic here though.
"The community is great for getting the work done, but when it comes to making decisions about where Linux is going, that responsibility should entirely rest on the shoulders of Linus. It's his operating system, and we shouldn't be able to take that away."
This I completely disagree with this. The standard base should, and probably can, be applied to free systems other than Linux. Linux is only a kernel. The software that matters for standardization, libraries and interfaces, runs on many different kernels. Linux should get *far* less credit in my opinion.
The BSD systems, for instance, can do everything Linux can and were developed separatly from the Linux kernel. In fact, the BSD kernels had some featurs such as USB long before Linux did.
It's unfair to credit Linus with more than he deserves. A lot of people have put equally as much if not more work into the free operating systems than Linus has. Give them credit.
The worst movie science wise I've ever seen is Fortress 2: Re-entry. Don't ever watch this. It's almost as bad as Beowulf.
Anyways, in this movie, The Fortress 2, the main character is on this space station. Of course, he needs to get from one part of the station to another because this sections is blowing up or something. Fine. No spacesuit? Uh oh.
Anyone guess the solution to this dilemma?
Why OF COURSE! Just HOLD YOUR BREATH and jump into space without a spacesuit!!
Even a bottle of wine couldn't save this movie.
P.S. I think Christopher Lambert has played in *the* most amount of lame, cheesy, silly, bad science, bad plot, bad acting movies of any other actor on earth! Seriously, after highlander it was all down hill for this guy.
"linux & win32 plug'n'pray is about equal these days"
LMAO
Before you go off with your elitist attitude towards this poor guy, maybe *you* should know what you are getting into. Myself, I use both unix and windows and know quite a bit about both.
Have you actually used windows plug and play lately? Since, say windows 2000 maybe? As much as
I am pro open source and pro unix, I don't think
anyone who knows even a bit about what their talking about can seriously say that linux is
anywhere remotely close to windows plug and play.
Never mind being equal. Most devices *just work*
in windows. They may not by default get the latest drivers, and the newest hardware may require a driver disk, but compared to linux even
installing a driver manually (which no company requires a user to do) is easy.
If your going to be a hotshot please be an informed hotshot. This guy's points are completly
valid for an average to moderatly advanced computer user out there. I think people who live and breath computers can get a little detached from reality sometimes.
Oh man...speaking of bad acting in sword fighting movies... DON'T EVER see the beuwulf movie with that "immortal" actor guy (don't know his name).
Man, that movie has defined the bottem line for me. Let's see, they wore doc martins in medaeaval times, decapidated people with oversized razor blades, had pointless fire and claws spouting out of castle towers. Even a bottle of wine couldn't save the movie. I guess it was sorta a good laugh though.
I can't believe Scorpion King is worse than beowulf, really.
Perhaps the most amusing thing about this company is that my ad filter, webwasher, decided that United Virtualities' ENTIRE website is an ad and wouldn't let me see it at all! LOL Pretty funny.
Ironically, fault tolerance and redundancy are exactly what sun mainframes give you (that's hardware redundancy). Mainframes are complex beasts, and in reality Linux doesn't offer anything at all to the mainframe market. As for running multiple virtual machines, it's not such a big deal, SGI's Origin series with IRIX already does this. And since IRIX was designed with this in mind, the OS itself has special support for distributing the kernel's among the hardware components (granted thier implementation is not the best).
The point being, mainframes need special support and special staff to maintain. Adding in Linux which was *not* designed for such things and doesn't have the architecture to support mainframe class hardware just doesn't make sense. This is all Sun is saying. I really don't think that Sun cares if they can run multiple OS's on their mainframes. Solaris has years of design and support poured into it, and is made specially to run on Sun hardware. You can't get that kind of reliability and technical support anywhere else.
I've always wanted a tivo....but they aren't avaliable here. I explained the concept to my dad as well... and he wants one also now. If they had better marketing I think they would sell waaaay more.
Since I work in the biotech field, I can say first hand that zaius got it completely correct. The lab I work for commonly withholds information, "until it's published". Unfortunately there is as little honor among scientists as there is among any group of people. Withholding information is the only way to garuntee getting a publication out of it.
And it's not just fame or greed that causes this either. Publications have a direct effect on getting funded, and getting funded is synonymous with keeping your job in science. With the lack of funds governments give to science, getting funding can become a major factor in holding information back for a while.
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Really? I live in Ontario. Maybe this is an Ontario thing? Maybe the companies I've been dealing with are ripping me off somehow?
;)
I honestly don't know. It's good to know that this isn't the case across Canada though. Next time I need to order something I'll try and find out more. But I know for a fact that two companies both said they can't ship to me via Canada Post and for some reason (I don't remember anymore) they couldn't use FedEx, only UPS. Weird.
At any rate, I clearly stand corrected.
How recently? I've had many things shipped via other means as well. But starting maybe end of last year or beginning of this year suddenly all companies are telling me they must ship via UPS since there was some problem with using the regular post. So now the regular post apparently won't carry packages from companies in the US. For some reason all the companies said it also *had* to be UPS, no FedEx. Don't remember the reason, but supposedly they had no choice. And this is more than one company doing this.
Again, that's bullshit. In some cases you may need to pay a broker's fee to get it through customs, but it doesn't usually apply to individuals (as opposed to corporations), although if you have to pay it once you'll have to pay it each future time you receive a shipment via UPS.The extra charges *may* be a brokers fee, but UPS certainly wasn't up to explaining it. It wasn't customs, customs were a separate charge. And this charge is nothing a corporation can pay. I did look into this. The companies I was dealing with all said that they paid UPS for all the charges they could. UPS told me that this extra charge was levied by UPS, and there was no way for any company to pay it. It's always the individual. Not to mention it's around $50-70 US and I've had to pay it for items that were valued at around $50. Just silly. Again, this is a recent change. I've ordered things in years past and never had such problems. And if you said this fee isn't usually applied it individuals, it's funny that at least two people I know (the only two to order anything recently) got nailed on this fee. It's just not worth ordering things from the US with rates like that.
Unfortunatly, there is some law that specifies all US companies must use UPS when delivering to Canada. Of course, UPS is not going to waste such an opportunaty, so in addition to 15% taxes we must pay on imported items, we must also pay a *UPS tax* which can sometimes be as high at 100% of the value of the item being shipped!
:( Unless we drive there I suppose, but there are numerous problems with that.
My family has bought things online in the US for say $50 and in the end payed > $100 for it thanks to these taxes/corporate levies.
It's so bad in fact, that some of my freinds who are into DJing buy their vynl from europe because it's actually *cheaper* to have items shipped overseas rather than pay the UPS tax.
So unfortunatly we cannot just buy stuff in the US.
Hehe, your right about Solaris. I was afriad of that but was too lazy to do research. Shall we start
:) Anyways, it's a pointless argument, I'm not an SMP guru and next time I'll research more before posting.
BSD/OS has SMP. SunOS *did* have SMP in the later years. But admittedly it seemed to suck as much as Linux 2.0's SMP. SCO had SMP as well, granted it's also now defunkt. Another BSD based system was DEC's Ultrix, which also did SMP. Again, whether it was *good* was questionable. I never used it and don't know enough to comment.
Anyways, the point is, there were a lot of BSD based systems that did SMP. Also keep in mind SysV didn't do SMP even in 1988. If your talking about modern BSD based systems, and not BSD/Mach systems (where it's reallly Mach doing the SMP work I think) then we must limit ourselves to FreeBSD (SMP, soon to be very good SMP), OpenBSD (no SMP, but it seems will evenutally have SMP), NetBSD (Has SMP as of next major release, in other words it's complete), and BSD/OS (has SMP).
So currently most BSD actually have SMP I guess.
Be careful what you say there. Most BSDs? What are you classifying as BSD? Most commercial unix systems like solaris are based on BSD.
I assume of course you are talking about the free BSD operating systems. Considering there are only three, I guess two of three can constitute most. But FreeBSD has had SMP for a while already, although until 5.x it hasn't been very good.
On the comercial side of things, most BSDs *do* have SMP. And very good SMP as well.
Acutally, my "router" is in fact a firewall. Statefull in all. Granted, I'll agree with you that most "routers" are not *really* firewalls. But as has been pointed out in another comment, NAT can act as an effective deny all incoming rule. Which is all most users really need anyways.
:). On most of them you can even setup static routes for routing other private lan ranges or what not. In fact, the netgear routers even have RIP built in, which as far as I can tell, and I'm not really a network guy, is something only a router would care about.
And as for being a router, well, they DO route. They just don't route much
But ok, they do not by any means close to a heavy weight router. Sure.
And here's reality. At least 90% (maybe more) of regular users (not tech gurus) don't care what the problem is, they want it fixed. Of the tech savvy 10%, I bet 90% of those just snort and go, "ok, where's the official fix, I'm not gonna recompile my bloody kernel".
So that means that this whole open-source => can find bugs faster really doesn't effect the majority of the population, and is only *really* important to very small number of people. The most vocal people just like use this as an excuse to scream and yell at how open-source is just *soooo* much better than anything else.
Not much of a kicker to me.
LOL! Wow. Ok. Your right, you really are stingy with pixels. ;) You are the definition of special case I think. :)
:)
I guess I can sort of understand, sometimes I like to run my unix machines really thin as well. Of course not THAT thin. Hehe, that's just crazy man!
You can't bring yourself to spend 1cm of screen real estate, at the *bottem* of the screen?!?! I will refrain from asking the size of your monitor. By the way, I'm fairly certain that both gnome and kde allow you to completly hide the kicker. It pops up when you move your mouse to the very bottem edge of the screen. ;)
Unfortunatly, the noise cancellation technology is not perfect yet. I've read many review about these headphone systems, and everyone claims that there is this white noise that is generated by the headphones. While the noise is quieter than say a jet engine, it's not that quiet when in a quiet room.
If you canceled the noise of your fans, the question is would the white noise be worse, the same, or better than your fans? This obviously depends on your fans of course. However, my rig has 5 fans, 6 if you include the power supply, and it's already quieter than essentially every other appliance in my house (well, the furnace is quiet actually). I remember reading that the white noise these headphones generate is just as bad as a fridge or something.
Course, I've never used a set of headphones personally, so I can't say if any of this is really true. I'd like to demo some one day.
Hmm. Ok. I see your point. ;) I'm surprised actually that the US wouldn't do anything to support it's citiziens from such things. It must cause *some* diplomatic tensions.
Anyways, yes, I guess it is the laws that are really at fault. We live in a scary world.
Sorry for being unclear. Canada wanted to try the murderer in Canada, rather than the US. I agree, the real problem is an unjust law.
But the point I was trying to make is that when you arrest a foreigner, even if that person is in your country, it's somewhat of a dimplomatic situation. Even when the crime is something clearly wrong like murder there can be diplomatic issues. So it is the case that being a foreigner gives you *some* diplomatic protection, in that your home country may fight for your rights.
I think the US should have the political awareness not to enforce questionable laws on foregniers. It's the same thing as say, Iran detaining an American female for violating some weird religous law. We don't say that Iran is *right* in doing this do we? And Iran knows that if it does things like that diplomatic relations will be harmed. In the same way the US is in the wrong in the Dimitri case.
***Disclaimer: I don't know that Iran specifically has crazy relgious laws, but I know certainly some middle east countries do***
Either way, it's the law that's fucked up, not the fact that it was applied to a foreigner. Being from another country doesn't give you diplomatic immunity. And it shouldn't. The US isn't bad in that regard. If you mail a bomb to Italy, and you live in Greece, you'll get deported, or arrested the next time you travel to Italy. Right?
Actually no, being from another country does provide one with some diplomatic immunity. In your mail bomb example both countries agree on that a crime was committed. But even so, it's not always the case that the criminal will be deported. He could be tried in his home country under his home countrie's laws. In fact, even if he went to Italy and got picked up it's STILL not clear who should try him. Take for instance recent cases where a canadian committed murder in the US. The US obviously tried the criminal, but there was the issue of the death penalty. Since Canada doesn't agree with the death penalty there was diplomatic touble. Canada tried to get the guy tried in Canada for this reason.
When laws like the DMCA are applied to foriegners it gets even more complicated. Russia does not acknowledge DCMA and so the company that Dmitri worked for did nothing wrong. I'm not sure if this was the case, but Russia could very well could have fought with the US over the arrest of Dmitri on diplomatic grounds.
So yes, the US is bad in that regard. They are a superpower and so have no problems imposing their own laws on other countires citizins.
Actually, Outcast was for the PC and used a voxel engine. I beleive the article said that Outcase 2, which never came out, was for the Playstation2 and PC. It also mentioned that Outcast 2 was using polygons, and a quick look at the screen shots of the game can confirm this.
:)
But you had an interesting post none the less.
I'm not sure what you mean by "good". But here's an example. Suppose the space constraints of mergesort are too expensive. Quicksort has worst-case running time of O(n^2). Randomized quicksort can be used to avoid hitting the worst case runtime for *most* runs.
If you mean better than O(nlogn), then I don't know of one either. I just used random algorithms as an example of algorithms that may not have the best big oh runtime but can still be usefull.
The poster did not specify any runtime properties, average, worst case, or best case. It's not clear that his algorithm is any better than randomized quicksort. But depending on the properties of the poster's algorithm it could be useful so he should properly analyse it.
I believe the technique the parent described is a form of hash sort. You must be able to calculate any giving instance of the mapping function M in O(1) time. The situation of infinite memory described is indeed a special case.
A more common and real example of this is sorting a specific range of consecutive integers [a,b]. The function M can simply be M(x)=x-a and is considered a simple hash function. Once all the elements have been hased according to M(x) into some array A, the array A will contain the sorted elements. This clearly takes only O(n) in the worst case.
I beleive it's been proven that any general sort algorithm that does not reley on special conditions on the data or memory has a lower bound of Omega(nlog). Look up decision tree proofs in you favorite algorithm book.
That's not to say that your algorithm is not usefull though. Often people use things like randomized algorithms as they have better average times. So, talk to your professors. They would be happy to explain the specifics of your algorithm to you.
Also, if your library has online journals, you can search those for sorting algorithms. And don't be afriad to show the algorithm to people. If your worried about IP, don't be. Chances are the university already has IP rights to it as your a student. That doesn't mean you can market your algorithm if it turns out to be somethings spectacular. Just talk to your professors, they are the experts!
I remember two funny errors. Once, when installing Windows (or maybe it was dos) on a older computer, after the whole process finished it told me so and told me it was going to restart. So the computer restarted, and prompty asked me "DO YOU WANT TO FORMAT C:?"
I don't know or remember that happened. It must have been some old code laying around on a boot disk or something. But why someone would put a format command in a startup script is beyond me.
The other funny experience I had was another "user error", not an error with the software. The first time me and a freind tried to recompile the linux kernel, we were confronted with a large number of technical questions. This was one of those funky text only configuration scripts that asks you if you want support 'X' and support 'Y' and such.
Well, having never compiled the kernel before, we looked at the possible answers (Y/N/M). "Ok", we thought, "Y is for yes, N is for no... but M? What the hell is M???." So, not knowing that Linux had acquired MODULES since we last used it, we jokingly concluded that M must be for "maybe". And we continued, whenever we weren't sure whether we needed an option or not, we just answered maybe!!
Lucky for us, that was the right thing to do. But I thought it was a funny "user error" at any rate. Probalby a bit off topic here though.
"The community is great for getting the work done, but when it comes to making decisions about where Linux is going, that responsibility should entirely rest on the shoulders of Linus. It's his operating system, and we shouldn't be able to take that away."
This I completely disagree with this. The standard base should, and probably can, be applied to free systems other than Linux. Linux is only a kernel. The software that matters for standardization, libraries and interfaces, runs on many different kernels. Linux should get *far* less credit in my opinion.
The BSD systems, for instance, can do everything Linux can and were developed separatly from the Linux kernel. In fact, the BSD kernels had some featurs such as USB long before Linux did.
It's unfair to credit Linus with more than he deserves. A lot of people have put equally as much if not more work into the free operating systems than Linus has. Give them credit.
The worst movie science wise I've ever seen is Fortress 2: Re-entry. Don't ever watch this. It's almost as bad as Beowulf.
Anyways, in this movie, The Fortress 2, the main character is on this space station. Of course, he needs to get from one part of the station to another because this sections is blowing up or something. Fine. No spacesuit? Uh oh.
Anyone guess the solution to this dilemma?
Why OF COURSE! Just HOLD YOUR BREATH and jump into space without a spacesuit!!
Even a bottle of wine couldn't save this movie.
P.S. I think Christopher Lambert has played in *the* most amount of lame, cheesy, silly, bad science, bad plot, bad acting movies of any other actor on earth! Seriously, after highlander it was all down hill for this guy.
LMAO
Before you go off with your elitist attitude towards this poor guy, maybe *you* should know what you are getting into. Myself, I use both unix and windows and know quite a bit about both.
Have you actually used windows plug and play lately? Since, say windows 2000 maybe? As much as I am pro open source and pro unix, I don't think anyone who knows even a bit about what their talking about can seriously say that linux is anywhere remotely close to windows plug and play. Never mind being equal. Most devices *just work* in windows. They may not by default get the latest drivers, and the newest hardware may require a driver disk, but compared to linux even installing a driver manually (which no company requires a user to do) is easy.
If your going to be a hotshot please be an informed hotshot. This guy's points are completly valid for an average to moderatly advanced computer user out there. I think people who live and breath computers can get a little detached from reality sometimes.
Oh man...speaking of bad acting in sword fighting movies... DON'T EVER see the beuwulf movie with that "immortal" actor guy (don't know his name). Man, that movie has defined the bottem line for me. Let's see, they wore doc martins in medaeaval times, decapidated people with oversized razor blades, had pointless fire and claws spouting out of castle towers. Even a bottle of wine couldn't save the movie. I guess it was sorta a good laugh though. I can't believe Scorpion King is worse than beowulf, really.
Perhaps the most amusing thing about this company is that my ad filter, webwasher, decided that United Virtualities' ENTIRE website is an ad and wouldn't let me see it at all! LOL Pretty funny.
Ironically, fault tolerance and redundancy are exactly what sun mainframes give you (that's hardware redundancy). Mainframes are complex beasts, and in reality Linux doesn't offer anything at all to the mainframe market. As for running multiple virtual machines, it's not such a big deal, SGI's Origin series with IRIX already does this. And since IRIX was designed with this in mind, the OS itself has special support for distributing the kernel's among the hardware components (granted thier implementation is not the best). The point being, mainframes need special support and special staff to maintain. Adding in Linux which was *not* designed for such things and doesn't have the architecture to support mainframe class hardware just doesn't make sense. This is all Sun is saying. I really don't think that Sun cares if they can run multiple OS's on their mainframes. Solaris has years of design and support poured into it, and is made specially to run on Sun hardware. You can't get that kind of reliability and technical support anywhere else.
I've always wanted a tivo....but they aren't avaliable here. I explained the concept to my dad as well... and he wants one also now. If they had better marketing I think they would sell waaaay more.
Since I work in the biotech field, I can say first hand that zaius got it completely correct. The lab I work for commonly withholds information, "until it's published". Unfortunately there is as little honor among scientists as there is among any group of people. Withholding information is the only way to garuntee getting a publication out of it.
And it's not just fame or greed that causes this either. Publications have a direct effect on getting funded, and getting funded is synonymous with keeping your job in science. With the lack of funds governments give to science, getting funding can become a major factor in holding information back for a while.