I'd really like to see some docs (a book, notes on the web, etc.) for admins.
I'm not a java developer, I don't want to be a Java developer, but I have users who do.
All of the Tomcat docs I've seen are written from the developer perspective. I need to be able to set up and maintain a development environment for students where they can work, and that doesn't crash the tomcat server every time somebody makes a coding error. But I have no desire to learn Java, only enough Tomcat to keep it running.
So after you drink less of a serving of drink you have All Ice left which is unprofessional to suck on for the rest of the day.
I'm happy to be unprofessional then.
I buy the ice. If it's a sweet drink, I'm just as happy to get as little of it as I can. The drink's only real use is to convey the ice to my mouth, 'cause it's "unprofessional" to have to fish around in the cup with my fingers.
There are warmer spots than here -- it seldom gets to 110 degf and humidity is not terribly high, but it's still hot enough that I'm more interested in the ice than in any sweet drink that's easily available.
You're probably right that anyone outside of the IT realm may not understand the value of "always on", but the "always on" nature of broadband is a BIG plus for Aunt Tillie (or Mom, in my case.) The one caveat is that someone with a clue has to do the initial setup.
I originally set my mother up with dialup, since that was all that was available in her area. Once a month or so I had to do telephone support with her to try and figure out what she had broken. The phone number got erased from the dialer program, or the automatic logoff would stop logging off (her phone would be busy for days!) or the automatic logon would go crazy (logging her on every few minutes) or *something* funny would be going on.
She'd go for weeks with things not working "because she didn't want to bother me."
Broadband made a HUGE difference. I put a firewall on her machine, and that lessened my worries about "always on" being a big security hole (no, it's not invulnerable, but it'll encourage to cracker to move on to an easier target...)
But she uses the internet far more often than she used to, because she doesn't have to worry about how to get logged in, it just works! And she can talk on the phone (so I can help her) while she's on the net. She can keep in touch with friends and family using email, which she loves.
The speed is fine, but she doesn't notice it all that much. She really DOES notice that getting on is effortless now, though.
Sometimes complaining about it *is* a valid contribution towards fixing the flaw.
As an OSS user, you ARE the Beta tester, developer, end user and marketing department.
You're right. And guess what? Part of being a beta tester is complaining when things don't work right. Sometimes that is via formal bug reports, and sometimes it's by informally discussing the flaws you can't live with.
Whether it's Open Source or proprietary software, beta testers are valuable. And not just to tell you where your code breaks, also to tell you where it doesn't work the way they expect it to.
If it's a one-off that somebody whipped up to perform some task and then released to the public, then maybe it's unrealistic to expect the developer to listen to or care about feedback. If it's a full blown project, with UI, etc., it's reasonable to assume that the developers *want* people to use it. This means that they *should* want feedback. Sometimes they don't, and sometimes they don't listen even if they get it.
But as long as the feedback is offered in a reasonable manner, this feedback may be the most valuable contribution most of the FOSS community can make. And usability/UI feedback is in many cases exactly what is needed.
Sometimes it works too. Note that ESR's PPS indicates that the CUPS team has taken some of his advice to heart.
I don't care much for Microsoft products. It's been years since my choice was a Microsoft Operating System (DOS 5, I think.)
But monoculture is bad, no matter what that monculture is based on.
We NEED Microsoft. We don't need for Microsoft to be in charge as it is right now for all practical purposes, but we do need for it to exist. Having any player (even FOSS) completely dominate the field is a bad thing.
You're right. Linux is (for me anyway) about choice, and for choice to exist that means even bad choices need to be available.
At least Microsoft doesn't brag about how much trouble they will cause, or intend to cause, me if I don't agree with their "world vision".
What part of "Cut off their air supply" do you not understand? MS has a long history of using dirty tricks to undermine those who oppose them.
Re:Play nice with Piers Anthony
on
Singularity Sky
·
· Score: 1
Piers Anthony has great concepts. It's a pity he can't (or won't) write. If he could work with a co-author who could actually write (or an editor willing to rein in a Big Name Author), I could see some potential for some decent books.
What he does is over-write. This is as true on the paragraph level as it is on the book level. He'll turn a sentence into a paragraph or two by beating the reader over the head over and over with different restatings of what should be just the topic sentence.
They do teach this in professional driving schools (at least in some.)
But it seems to give most people a warm fuzzy feeling to be able to see the back of their own vehicle in the side mirror. Dunno why, maybe they're afraid it'll just disappear one day and they might not notice without the mirror.
You're right that it's not a very helpful thing to watch when you're in traffic though.
Postgres supports the "numeric" type which is declared at a specific precision and scale, e.g. numeric(8, 2) might be a good choice for US currency up to $999,999.00.
I'm amazed that SQL-Ledger doesn't use this. The Postgres docs do note that numeric types are slower than floating point types.
Postgres also has a deprecated "money" type but recommend "numeric" instead.
This is less true now than it used to be. The ACM guidelines for curriculum have been steadily reducing the emphasis on assembly language, and I predict that within a few years it will only be offered sporadically. As it is right now, there are too many units required in a computer science degree for University Administrations to be happy -- we're not too far from the point where a computer science degree is almost like (in terms of units taken) having a major AND a minor in the same discipline. We're facing having to drop courses from the requirements just to enable students to fit it all in, and ASM is going to be one of the casualties.
My ASM instructor wrote the book we used (in the early 90s) and it's gone out of print. It's not going to go to another printing because the publisher isn't interested -- there are so few colleges offering ASM that they don't sell enough to make it worth while.
ASM in acedemia will probably live on only as long as there are professors who *insist* that it be offered. When they retire, that's it.
(But understanding how assembly instruction sets work, and how compilers work, are both useful for writing better code at the compiler level. Less so now that optimizers are really good - but the understanding is still helpful.)
My understanding of the parent post was that this is exactly what he was saying. I don't think he was claiming that programs written in assembly were better, but that programmers who knew assembly were better programmers.
Isn't the syntax most naturally determined by the processor?
Intel specified the syntax they did because their chips implement the instructions in that same order. You can obviously switch things around as part of the 'macro' in 'macro assembler' (and apparently gas did so) but it seems more 'natural' to stick with how the processor works. Anyway, it does to me.
If you were masochistic enough to look at the numeric code you're producing, it might get confusing if the operands were switched around from what you were expecting. And there have been sometimes when it's been useful if not fun to look at the actual bits.
Maybe if I were better at assembler I wouldn't have to trace it that way, dunno.
There was a time when I travelled quite a bit, but not recently, so that wasn't an issue with me.
Cingular doesn't have a presence in Arizona, or anywhere outside of California/Nevada (as far as I know), however they *do* have coverage there. As I recall I had good coverage most of the way between Phoenix and Tucson (via Voicestream) but about 10 miles east of the city limits of Tucson it vanished abruptly and didn't show up again until I hit I70 in New Mexico.
If I did still travel extensively I might choose a different carrier -- if it was travel by car. Cingular or associates has decent coverage in all the metropolitan areas I've been in, so unless you're driving cross country Cingular is adequate. I'm not aware of any states in which Cingular doesn't have coverage through some affliliate. Not saying there aren't any, but I'd be surprised if there were.
What's the signal coverage like, btw? If I broke down on the highway in New Mexico, could I use my phone?
Depends on your service and on which highway. Two years ago I drove from California to Colorado via New Mexico. Lost reception in Tucson, AZ and didn't get it back until I got almost to I70 in New Mexico. It was spotty until Albuquerque and I lost it again "north" of Santa Fe and really didn't get a reliable signal again until Colorado Springs.
My home system is Cingular and its affiliate through most of my route was Voicestream. I saw what looked like cell towers along the way, but they obviously weren't Voicestream towers. That was two years ago -- the situation may have changed, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Coverage in California is mostly pretty good, even in the boonies, but it's still not everywhere.
I had a Nokia 5190. With the large battery I could get a good two weeks of life per charge. It was the perfect size, has exactly the features I want (and more that I don't care about) and was solid as a rock. It still works as well as it ever did, but in fringe areas that means as poorly as it ever did.
If I could get that exact phone again with improved reception, I would. But that's not an option.
That's the problem with the second hand market. There are *some* things that the new phones are better at, and in my case one of those is better reception. However much I dislike the other changes, the better reception trumps my other preferences.
I don't care (much) that they add extra features that I'm not interested in (although I think "polyphonic ringtones" are a *bad* idea!) but I'm not terribly happy about the loss of features I value, like decent battery life and a comfortable size.
Given that the resellers perceive this to be true (whether it is or not), phone B will be the only one offered.
The market reality is that phones that are offered for sale will be the "winners" in the market.
Just because I prefer a phone which fits comfortably in my hand and against my ear (with a two week battery) does not mean that such a phone will be the one I buy, since nothing is offered in that size or with that battery capacity. I have to make a choice between an older phone that has those features but also poorer reception in fringe areas, or a tiny little thing with good reception that is less comfortable to use. So I live with the uncomfortable phone that doesn't drop my calls in the fringe areas. And instead of the primitive electronic ring tones that are easy to hear, I get to experience advanced, modern "polyphonic" ring tones that sound much more musical and which are completely muffled by being inside a pocket.
I'd be much happier with a "primitive" phone that got the reception quality of a "modern" phone, but with no other features. But no one will sell me one, at any price. That's "market reality" for you.
Sure, a lot of consumers want the glitz of all the fancy new features, but there are a significant number who want what I do. But we're invisible -- no market analysis will ever see us, since we'll never buy the phones we really want. They don't exist.
I had a professor who had written his own book on assembly language programming. Because ASM is becoming less popular as an academic course (fewer and fewer schools offer it) the book has gone out of print and the publisher has no plans to ever reprint it.
He had to ask permission of his publisher to make it available on his web page to his students as a PDF file (using a password). A few of us were able to find it online through various used book sites, but the rest were able to use it free.
Personally, I need dead tree copies. E-Books don't work for me.
Having separate applications instead of a monolithic suite seems fine to me. I don't especially care about the "integration" aspects of the suite.
What I *DO* care about is the interface, and firebird at least has made non-configurable changes to the interface that I find completely unpalatable.
Until the *birds make it possible for me to configure the elimination of *all* sidebars (without losing functionality and without jumping through a lot of hoops) I'll be sticking with Seamonkey.
In addition to the answers already up, you should note that it is useful [necessary] to have an invariant time base for all scientific measurements. If your time base changes even a little, everything goes out the window.
A time base tied to a planets rotation would not only cause problems when you went to another planet (minor issue) it would also constantly change as the planet's rotation changed. Earth's rotation has historically been not at all constant -- until recently they've had to add in "leap seconds" to keep everything in synch. There's a recent/. story about the consternation when scientists realized that the Earth seems to be keeping good time in recent years (for no apparent reason) and they have had to back out the leap seconds they had been adding.
My company spent 3,570,000 dollars on a infrastructure built around SCO. This infrasture is worthless and can be outperformed by a rival company's that cost a third of that. I should spend another 750,000 on new servers so that I can have a decent OS and another five years and 2 million dollars rewriting custom applications. In the mean time I guess we'll go back to pen and paper since we won't have a functioning infrastructure.
Or we can spend what it takes to get this pile of manure to work so we can continue to function and plan a migration to something better when we can afford it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd really like to see some docs (a book, notes on the web, etc.) for admins.
I'm not a java developer, I don't want to be a Java developer, but I have users who do.
All of the Tomcat docs I've seen are written from the developer perspective. I need to be able to set up and maintain a development environment for students where they can work, and that doesn't crash the tomcat server every time somebody makes a coding error. But I have no desire to learn Java, only enough Tomcat to keep it running.
IMHO virii is a word construted by nerds here at /. to make themsleve appear smarter than the average person., but like I said thats just IMHO
Nope. Not nerds.
Wannabe nerds. Nerds are usually smarter than that.
So after you drink less of a serving of drink you have All Ice left which is unprofessional to suck on for the rest of the day.
I'm happy to be unprofessional then.
I buy the ice. If it's a sweet drink, I'm just as happy to get as little of it as I can. The drink's only real use is to convey the ice to my mouth, 'cause it's "unprofessional" to have to fish around in the cup with my fingers.
There are warmer spots than here -- it seldom gets to 110 degf and humidity is not terribly high, but it's still hot enough that I'm more interested in the ice than in any sweet drink that's easily available.
You're probably right that anyone outside of the IT realm may not understand the value of "always on", but the "always on" nature of broadband is a BIG plus for Aunt Tillie (or Mom, in my case.) The one caveat is that someone with a clue has to do the initial setup.
I originally set my mother up with dialup, since that was all that was available in her area. Once a month or so I had to do telephone support with her to try and figure out what she had broken. The phone number got erased from the dialer program, or the automatic logoff would stop logging off (her phone would be busy for days!) or the automatic logon would go crazy (logging her on every few minutes) or *something* funny would be going on.
She'd go for weeks with things not working "because she didn't want to bother me."
Broadband made a HUGE difference. I put a firewall on her machine, and that lessened my worries about "always on" being a big security hole (no, it's not invulnerable, but it'll encourage to cracker to move on to an easier target...)
But she uses the internet far more often than she used to, because she doesn't have to worry about how to get logged in, it just works! And she can talk on the phone (so I can help her) while she's on the net. She can keep in touch with friends and family using email, which she loves.
The speed is fine, but she doesn't notice it all that much. She really DOES notice that getting on is effortless now, though.
Sometimes complaining about it *is* a valid contribution towards fixing the flaw.
As an OSS user, you ARE the Beta tester, developer, end user and marketing department.
You're right. And guess what? Part of being a beta tester is complaining when things don't work right. Sometimes that is via formal bug reports, and sometimes it's by informally discussing the flaws you can't live with.
Whether it's Open Source or proprietary software, beta testers are valuable. And not just to tell you where your code breaks, also to tell you where it doesn't work the way they expect it to.
If it's a one-off that somebody whipped up to perform some task and then released to the public, then maybe it's unrealistic to expect the developer to listen to or care about feedback. If it's a full blown project, with UI, etc., it's reasonable to assume that the developers *want* people to use it. This means that they *should* want feedback. Sometimes they don't, and sometimes they don't listen even if they get it.
But as long as the feedback is offered in a reasonable manner, this feedback may be the most valuable contribution most of the FOSS community can make. And usability/UI feedback is in many cases exactly what is needed.
Sometimes it works too. Note that ESR's PPS indicates that the CUPS team has taken some of his advice to heart.
I don't care much for Microsoft products. It's been years since my choice was a Microsoft Operating System (DOS 5, I think.)
But monoculture is bad, no matter what that monculture is based on.
We NEED Microsoft. We don't need for Microsoft to be in charge as it is right now for all practical purposes, but we do need for it to exist. Having any player (even FOSS) completely dominate the field is a bad thing.
You're right. Linux is (for me anyway) about choice, and for choice to exist that means even bad choices need to be available.
At least Microsoft doesn't brag about how much trouble they will cause, or intend to cause, me if I don't agree with their "world vision".
What part of "Cut off their air supply" do you not understand? MS has a long history of using dirty tricks to undermine those who oppose them.
Lois McMaster Bujold.
Another 'B'.
Piers Anthony has great concepts. It's a pity he can't (or won't) write. If he could work with a co-author who could actually write (or an editor willing to rein in a Big Name Author), I could see some potential for some decent books.
What he does is over-write. This is as true on the paragraph level as it is on the book level. He'll turn a sentence into a paragraph or two by beating the reader over the head over and over with different restatings of what should be just the topic sentence.
* Hard drive is only 5200 rpm.
Good luck finding something faster.
In a laptop.
They do teach this in professional driving schools (at least in some.)
But it seems to give most people a warm fuzzy feeling to be able to see the back of their own vehicle in the side mirror. Dunno why, maybe they're afraid it'll just disappear one day and they might not notice without the mirror.
You're right that it's not a very helpful thing to watch when you're in traffic though.
Postgres supports the "numeric" type which is declared at a specific precision and scale, e.g. numeric(8, 2) might be a good choice for US currency up to $999,999.00.
I'm amazed that SQL-Ledger doesn't use this. The Postgres docs do note that numeric types are slower than floating point types.
Postgres also has a deprecated "money" type but recommend "numeric" instead.
This is less true now than it used to be. The ACM guidelines for curriculum have been steadily reducing the emphasis on assembly language, and I predict that within a few years it will only be offered sporadically. As it is right now, there are too many units required in a computer science degree for University Administrations to be happy -- we're not too far from the point where a computer science degree is almost like (in terms of units taken) having a major AND a minor in the same discipline. We're facing having to drop courses from the requirements just to enable students to fit it all in, and ASM is going to be one of the casualties.
My ASM instructor wrote the book we used (in the early 90s) and it's gone out of print. It's not going to go to another printing because the publisher isn't interested -- there are so few colleges offering ASM that they don't sell enough to make it worth while.
ASM in acedemia will probably live on only as long as there are professors who *insist* that it be offered. When they retire, that's it.
(But understanding how assembly instruction sets work, and how compilers work, are both useful for writing better code at the compiler level. Less so now that optimizers are really good - but the understanding is still helpful.)
My understanding of the parent post was that this is exactly what he was saying. I don't think he was claiming that programs written in assembly were better, but that programmers who knew assembly were better programmers.
I think you were agreeing with him.
Isn't the syntax most naturally determined by the processor?
Intel specified the syntax they did because their chips implement the instructions in that same order. You can obviously switch things around as part of the 'macro' in 'macro assembler' (and apparently gas did so) but it seems more 'natural' to stick with how the processor works. Anyway, it does to me.
If you were masochistic enough to look at the numeric code you're producing, it might get confusing if the operands were switched around from what you were expecting. And there have been sometimes when it's been useful if not fun to look at the actual bits.
Maybe if I were better at assembler I wouldn't have to trace it that way, dunno.
There was a time when I travelled quite a bit, but not recently, so that wasn't an issue with me.
Cingular doesn't have a presence in Arizona, or anywhere outside of California/Nevada (as far as I know), however they *do* have coverage there. As I recall I had good coverage most of the way between Phoenix and Tucson (via Voicestream) but about 10 miles east of the city limits of Tucson it vanished abruptly and didn't show up again until I hit I70 in New Mexico.
If I did still travel extensively I might choose a different carrier -- if it was travel by car. Cingular or associates has decent coverage in all the metropolitan areas I've been in, so unless you're driving cross country Cingular is adequate. I'm not aware of any states in which Cingular doesn't have coverage through some affliliate. Not saying there aren't any, but I'd be surprised if there were.
I didn't choose any provider for that region.
I chose a provider for California and just happened to be travelling through AZ, NM and CO.
What's the signal coverage like, btw? If I broke down on the highway in New Mexico, could I use my phone?
Depends on your service and on which highway. Two years ago I drove from California to Colorado via New Mexico. Lost reception in Tucson, AZ and didn't get it back until I got almost to I70 in New Mexico. It was spotty until Albuquerque and I lost it again "north" of Santa Fe and really didn't get a reliable signal again until Colorado Springs.
My home system is Cingular and its affiliate through most of my route was Voicestream. I saw what looked like cell towers along the way, but they obviously weren't Voicestream towers. That was two years ago -- the situation may have changed, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Coverage in California is mostly pretty good, even in the boonies, but it's still not everywhere.
I had a Nokia 5190. With the large battery I could get a good two weeks of life per charge. It was the perfect size, has exactly the features I want (and more that I don't care about) and was solid as a rock. It still works as well as it ever did, but in fringe areas that means as poorly as it ever did.
If I could get that exact phone again with improved reception, I would. But that's not an option.
That's the problem with the second hand market. There are *some* things that the new phones are better at, and in my case one of those is better reception. However much I dislike the other changes, the better reception trumps my other preferences.
I don't care (much) that they add extra features that I'm not interested in (although I think "polyphonic ringtones" are a *bad* idea!) but I'm not terribly happy about the loss of features I value, like decent battery life and a comfortable size.
Given that the resellers perceive this to be true (whether it is or not), phone B will be the only one offered.
The market reality is that phones that are offered for sale will be the "winners" in the market.
Just because I prefer a phone which fits comfortably in my hand and against my ear (with a two week battery) does not mean that such a phone will be the one I buy, since nothing is offered in that size or with that battery capacity. I have to make a choice between an older phone that has those features but also poorer reception in fringe areas, or a tiny little thing with good reception that is less comfortable to use. So I live with the uncomfortable phone that doesn't drop my calls in the fringe areas. And instead of the primitive electronic ring tones that are easy to hear, I get to experience advanced, modern "polyphonic" ring tones that sound much more musical and which are completely muffled by being inside a pocket.
I'd be much happier with a "primitive" phone that got the reception quality of a "modern" phone, but with no other features. But no one will sell me one, at any price. That's "market reality" for you.
Sure, a lot of consumers want the glitz of all the fancy new features, but there are a significant number who want what I do. But we're invisible -- no market analysis will ever see us, since we'll never buy the phones we really want. They don't exist.
I had a professor who had written his own book on assembly language programming. Because ASM is becoming less popular as an academic course (fewer and fewer schools offer it) the book has gone out of print and the publisher has no plans to ever reprint it.
He had to ask permission of his publisher to make it available on his web page to his students as a PDF file (using a password). A few of us were able to find it online through various used book sites, but the rest were able to use it free.
Personally, I need dead tree copies. E-Books don't work for me.
Hee
Having separate applications instead of a monolithic suite seems fine to me. I don't especially care about the "integration" aspects of the suite.
What I *DO* care about is the interface, and firebird at least has made non-configurable changes to the interface that I find completely unpalatable.
Until the *birds make it possible for me to configure the elimination of *all* sidebars (without losing functionality and without jumping through a lot of hoops) I'll be sticking with Seamonkey.
In addition to the answers already up, you should note that it is useful [necessary] to have an invariant time base for all scientific measurements. If your time base changes even a little, everything goes out the window.
/. story about the consternation when scientists realized that the Earth seems to be keeping good time in recent years (for no apparent reason) and they have had to back out the leap seconds they had been adding.
A time base tied to a planets rotation would not only cause problems when you went to another planet (minor issue) it would also constantly change as the planet's rotation changed. Earth's rotation has historically been not at all constant -- until recently they've had to add in "leap seconds" to keep everything in synch. There's a recent
Ransom Love used to be Caldera's CEO.
Unless something has changed, I don't believe he has been involved with the company since *before* it became SCO and went off the deep end.
My company spent 3,570,000 dollars on a infrastructure built around SCO. This infrasture is worthless and can be outperformed by a rival company's that cost a third of that. I should spend another 750,000 on new servers so that I can have a decent OS and another five years and 2 million dollars rewriting custom applications. In the mean time I guess we'll go back to pen and paper since we won't have a functioning infrastructure.
Or we can spend what it takes to get this pile of manure to work so we can continue to function and plan a migration to something better when we can afford it.