You make some valid points, but regexps are designed to be readable and commented, spread over multiple lines. Here's an excerpt, perhaps not a good example out of context, from a real program (bytewise):
if ($line =~ m/ ^[[:space:]]*block\ \#[0]+[^[:xdigit:]].* #eg: block #0000000... 0x([[:xdigit:]]+) #$1: addr0 ("0x" then >=1 hex digits) \.\.0x([[:xdigit:]]+)\, #$2: addr1 ("..0x", >=1 hex digits, ',') /x) #example for above: #block #000, object at 0x82ce8a4, 2 syms/buckets in 0x8000..0x826e, compiled with gcc2
(had a better example, 10 line regexp, but it had "too many junk characters"..)
Mathematica can evaluate an implementation of a theorem (over a finite domain), but you obviously can't just throw a theorem at it and have it say yes/no.
Actually my experience is with Matlab, the primary use being numerical computation, although it can do various expansions of messy integrals and control systems. Maple can work with/manipulate more complex algebraic expressions.
Still, I'm not sure that these tools could be very useful in such an abstract proof as this. IANAM, but AFAIK proofs requiring "thousands of pages" via purely algebraic/analytical means are rooted in a more "practical" domain such as control systems theory (godawful nightmarishly messy unless you give up, estimate, and solve numerically). I was under the impression that the more "pure" maths of number theory which I assume this proof belongs was more self-contained and clean... a real mathematician might be able to clear this up for us:-)
I'll confess that my blanket statement about a growing culture of greed may have been unfair and - admittedly - unresearched.
Okay.
But my statements about over-representation (not a fault of farmers mind you) still stand, as does my remark on Australia's unbalanced focus on agriculture.
Okay. To say we've got big, nightmarish environmental problems is an understatement. The fact that they've been able to turn a huge salinity problem in VIC into a "salt for cents" business scares the shit out of me and also just about anyone who lives/works/depends on the land. Australian farmers and rural communities are not ignorant, they know the problems. I think you've acknowledged this. You're right that you hit a sore spot of mine - people who've read somewhere that farming is bad (it is, but I believe it can be managed) and hence condemn all rural folk as ignorant in their practices or just outright baddies (some are, most aren't).
Interestingly, it's also a shame that by definition, cities/urban areas emerge from (and consume) our most fertile land. Not that I'm saying this as any defence for negligent, short-sighted farming practices, but instead I usually say this to the person on their high-horse to point out that we are all part of the problem.
hope that you can accept my apology for the unfounded 'culture of greed' comment
Appreciated. I should add that farm operators (not all are family run, as you probably know) aren't saints, there is greed, but it isn't a culture.
if you'll also accept that many of my points on agriculture vs the environment and over-representation are also true or at least warrant some merit.
Sure, although I'll have to take your word for the over-representation issues - I'm almost totally uninformed with the politics, and I have a sore point with spending on roads, which could generate 1000s of words of my thoughts...
I've realised I fell into the trap of blaming rural Australians for the flawed policies of government - which wouldn't be fair even if it made any kind of sense.
Exactly. As a nation that uses it's own agriculture, we're all part of the problem.
I'd also be interested to learn about what you meant by one corporation controlling most of the country's cattle production. It's certainly not something I was aware of.
I'm no expert, my field of interest is actually electronic engineering. However, it's my understanding that the cattle production sector has historically attracted a sort of "enterprise business model" bunch of entrepreneurs, but then again so have the other sectors, I guess. Certainly in the area I grew up there existed a huge cattle property, complete with mansion and servants the owner rarely visited, a landing strip for a private Leer jet (+ paid pilot) and private (non-mustering) chopper (+ paid pilot).
Anyway, found the landline episode and this age article, about the sale of Stanbroke. Stanbroke was already the worlds' largest beef producer, I thought it was being bought by AAC (another significant owner of beef production) but apparently not, had my facts wrong, they actually lost the bid. After reading these articles I've linked I'm now of the impression that the final deal isn't so bad afterall.
Still, the empire grows bigger.
So, I actually think you and I are not on totally different wavelengths afterall. Isn't rational discussion great?:-) My original sentiment for the objection of comparing the American farm lobby and Australian rural politics (of which I admit I know little, being neither a farmer nor interested in it) came from that sbs dateline episode I
I'm perfectly well aware of Australia's worsening soil, salinity and water managment problems. We only just "recently" got a handle on the free-flowing bores, which had been running for up to nearly a century. However, sugar cane is by far not the worst offender.
Irrigation is used largely by cotton and dairy farmers.
These two farming sectors alone account for a lot more than half of all the irrigated water used in the country.
you have a farming industry that the government is beholden to far in excess of its percentage of the population
Agriculture and mining account for 7% GDP and 60% exports. Agriculture is directly responsible for 5% of Australia's labour force.
Of course. Everything outside the 6 major capital cities is a desolate, irrelevant, unproductive wasteland that is merely a vacuum in our economy and should be done away with.
Besides, we can just merge all of not-Brisbane, not-Sydney, etc. into one giant electorate for each state. Clearly, communities thousands of kilometers apart will all have the same issues, concerns, and problems to deal with. They're all the same aren't they? Give me a break.
Hence over-representation, and a growing culture of greed - whether or not it is anything like the US lobby
Holy shit, where the FUCK do you get that impression? Exactly what events, things said, let alone transactions would possibly lead you to believe that there is a "growing culture of greed"? Perhaps you're talking about the vast majority of Australia's beef production being owned by one company, now, of course.
Not that I agree with that either, but again, what the fuck? I take it you think McDonalds should be closed down too?
I have honestly no idea where you are coming from. My family lost its farms in the late-80s, "fair and square". Cattle, sheep, wheat, barley. Drought. We got some tax breaks. We did not receive any unusual goverment assistance that I'm aware of. We ended up in a caravan, 200 head of sheep (a tiny fraction of what we had), and the family car.
We were eligible for all sorts of welfare that unemployed "city folk" could get, but we didn't take any of it. We were loaned rent-free land from friends, as well as milk, parts etc. and we got by with both parents working.
I'm now at Uni in Brisbane. I can proudly say that I've never recieved centre-link payments of any kind. I work my arse off during the holidays at a computer shop back home. I pay my own rent, food, books, medical, etc. Parents give me about $500 AUD a semester to help out.
I live in a flat with 8 others. Three are Brisbanites. Two have never even tried to get a job to help pay their way. "Job? That's something you do AFTER you graduate!". These guys fail subjects and can't pick up enough subjects the following semester to be considered "full-time" students by centrelink, and so take totally irrelevant subjects just to get "full benefits" and continue cruising, drinking, partying, more drinking, and failing?
Nothing shits me more than some "ocean-locked" Brisbanite bogan who doesn't even know Australia has a fucking desert. 40% of Australia is fucking sand dunes! How many people on the east coast do you know have been further than 1 hour west of their capital city? The majority of them have absolutely no fucking idea. They seem to live in their own little world full of Big Brother and Today Tonight.
That in itself doesn't bother me, it's not like I'm an enlightened prodigy either, until they start to pass judgement on people they haven't met, form opinions on cultures they haven't even encountered, and then go back to sit in front of the TV and drink another $25 worth of alcohol payed with my taxes.
The "growing culture of greed" statement has earned YOU, sir, the ignorant toss award.
Why place sanctions upon and then invade a country like Australia when you can muscle in on its local laws and markets with empty bribes to a bunch of greedy farmers with grosse over-representation?
You're an ignorant toss. If you are from the U.S.A., if you think our farmers have any sort of lobbying power or greed that even begins to approach anything like your "farming lobby" at all, you are sorely mistaken.
Unlike SOME farming operations, Australian farming business carries it's own weight.
And even if it didn't, it doesn't use politics to get away with it.
Moreover, lots of paper comes not from regulated tree farms, as you imply, but from razing forests and jungles in third worlds, where there is no minimum wage or labor standards and the government isn't strong enough to regulate the industry.
You're right, illegal logging in third world countries is a big problem, but I really don't think that those trees are turned into paper. Old growth/hardwood is used for construction purposes, it's much too "expensive" to turn non-reject logs into chipwood/paper. Or at least, that's my understanding of how it works in Queensland, Australia..
Keep recycling.
I agree - and I'd like to add "re-use" and "use less".
It's a general purpose programmable computer, whether it can execute from storage memory or not is totally irrelevant.
Only thing that kinda sucks on the PIC 16F series what with separate code/data is reading ROM lookup tables... 16F87x has a special set of registers you can setup to read from FLASH, plus there's other tricks, but it's certainly a very useful non von-neumann CPU nontheless.
We're talking switchboards and blinken lights, methinks. Of course, I believe the Collossus/ENIAC et al. had typewriters hacked in somehow, judging by the pictures.
With any of the first computers, I think a "command console" whilst not impossible, would take up almost all of your memory and make it useless for actual work.
I'm under the impression that in those days, the only person using a program also usually happend to be the one who WROTE the program, so they know which register outputs hold which results (and their meanings, and so on).
Film I/O (input only I would imagine) - apparently used old film instead of punch cards because of paper shortage - I believe they used air, like the old "player pianos" that would play by themselves if you loaded them up with scrolls of paper that had holes punched in them.
This is a total guess, but in my mind, it probably would have had a Program Counter (PC) of some sort. Start at zero. Start rolling film. Each "notch" could read the state of whether a hole is punched or not. Set the program bit via the approptraite relay. Increment PC, read next notch, etc. At the end of it, all your relays are set to whatever state each of the holes were for each notch in the film.
Floating Point - a feature not present in early PCs and absent even in today's embedded low-power microcontrollers - is a number storage format that allows easy representation and manipulation of numbers that are either very large or very small, with a fractional component (ie - not integers). Quite necessary for scientific work, otherwise you'd need to waste precious code space and CPU cycles having to make do with whole integer numbers and conversions/operations.
See the wiki entry for "floating point" or this one for "FPU". In the case of the Z3, the article states 1 bit for sign (+/-), 7 bits for exponent (position of the decimal point when using binary) and 14 bits for mantissa (actual value of the number).
I am working with some of the team members on and off trying to hack the old Tamagotchi devices that once were a craze.
Right, I think you're joking, because they would have surely used OTP (One Time Programmable) microcontrollers or even a custom maskset with their ROM on it.
It's very lightweight. I use it on machines with 32MiB RAM or less (like my laptop).
If you use ssh X forwarding, you can start a gnome panel remotely and you've nearly got a gnome desktop.
Although, you don't want to start nautilus... only thing that doesn't really work in this scenario is the workspace changer. You can do remote gnome panels + working workspace changer with XFCE though.
Just works off you're/etc/hosts file. Uses/etc/resolv.conf for the upstream DNSs. Want DNS cacheing goodness on the dnsmasq box? Add localhost to/etc/resolv.conf.
Huh? We've had a few biodiesel experiments in Australia, and farmers making their own biodiesel said, if I remember the TV segment correctly, are limiting use of their biodiesel to older farm equipment (not the $250K headers and prime-movers), since it seems to damage the injectors...
But then who knows. I don't.
Also, remember the difference between gratis hardware (subsidized by publishers of proprietary software as part of the license fees) and Free hardware (the more general purpose, the more Free).
What companies have I been dealing with then? You have to see proprietry software vendors selling a whole package to a customer, it's quite funny. Their hardware is almost always FAR more expensive than even the most overpriced retail outlets; at the very best they can almost (almost) match reasonable prices.
Mind you I work in a small support shop (10 employees) but of the 5 applicable installations I can think of (accounting, POS applications), hardware was outgrageously expensive.
We provided a quote for one customer, for server hardware with windows 2000 advanced server+client site licenses, that was only slightly cheaper than the software vendor. Customer went with vendor's hardware (suites us, less support calls), but the vendor neglected to tell the customer that operating system and other software licenses were not included in the price.
At the very least, hardware is often twice as expensive as it should be. The worst was a customer whose software ran on SCO OpenServer; something like $5000 AUD for an absolutely bog-standard PC with a single SCSI hard drive, with SCO license (server + site) pack on top of the price.
Hah. Can't be much worse than EAGLE's seemingly random ripup/reroute/guess again router:-)
Mind you, I'm the biggest EAGLE fan there is. I hate Protel with vengence. EAGLE rules (has an very well supported Linux version too). I'm sure OrCAD/Mentor are cool too, but I'd have to sell a kidney and my first born child to get it...
I've never designed a high speed digital board before, but I guess it's to compensate for the transmission line effect.
Let's pick a number. Say 500MHz. Depending on dielectric constant of the PCB substrate, thickness, etc. a ball park figure for the speed of a signal propagating along one of those traces is around 70% the speed of light, so 2.1E+9 m/s. That makes the 500MHz signal have a wavelength of about 4.2m. Now, consider a 20cm trace. That shouldn't be unrealistic on a video card, if you actually followed one around on the PCB, it could be longer.
That trace has delayed the signal by 17 degrees, or 0.05 of a wavelength, which may or may not be significant. If we have the 64 data lines in a 64bit bus all different lenghts, you can see that different bits are going to "arrive" at different times.
Transmission line theory is a black voodoo art, where you can do all kinds of neat stuff like "create" reactive components and make matching transformers (impedance matches) or filters (different goal, same method) on your high frequency PCB just by making a carefully calculated sudden change in track width, plus the necessary "stubs"...
This all very over-simplified, but yeah, the squirly bits are to keep them all the same length (my guess). I'd be very worried if digital circuits needed impedance matching transformers made out of microstrips;-)
Though IBM did not invent Linux, does not distribute it and earns nary a penny on it
Has IBM ever made money on an operating system? I thought it was generally understood that IBM's business was selling "solutions"; the whole kit - hardware, services, support, customization, consulting.
Does OS400 run on an IBM AS390 mainframe? (serious question!)
An operating system is just part of the package for IBM - they obviously like Linux for small/medium business environments; people are probably less scared of Linux than AIX/OS400/etc, since there is probably more (and cheaper) non-IBM support for Linux based solutions. I guess in that sense, Linux is the Windows of the Unix world as far as support goes - everyone and their dog knows it.
Whether it's running Linux or not, you're still going to pay through the nose for an IBM kit. I honestly can't see how spending money/resources on Linux could be directly aimed at Microsoft any more than if they spent it on AIX. Perhaps Linux just gives them more bang for buck and makes business sense?
Slashdot Mirror
(had a better example, 10 line regexp, but it had "too many junk characters"..)
I wonder if it could give Inspector Rex a run for his money...
(although the TV show is Austrian, not German...)
Hah! I've read it too - fantastic read. It gives a fascinating insight into the mindset of cultures and philosophers past.
Mathematica can evaluate an implementation of a theorem (over a finite domain), but you obviously can't just throw a theorem at it and have it say yes/no.
:-)
Actually my experience is with Matlab, the primary use being numerical computation, although it can do various expansions of messy integrals and control systems. Maple can work with/manipulate more complex algebraic expressions.
Still, I'm not sure that these tools could be very useful in such an abstract proof as this. IANAM, but AFAIK proofs requiring "thousands of pages" via purely algebraic/analytical means are rooted in a more "practical" domain such as control systems theory (godawful nightmarishly messy unless you give up, estimate, and solve numerically). I was under the impression that the more "pure" maths of number theory which I assume this proof belongs was more self-contained and clean... a real mathematician might be able to clear this up for us
unamericanism
;-)
Unamericanism? Auf Deutschland? Surely not
I'll confess that my blanket statement about a growing culture of greed may have been unfair and - admittedly - unresearched.
:-) My original sentiment for the objection of comparing the American farm lobby and Australian rural politics (of which I admit I know little, being neither a farmer nor interested in it) came from that sbs dateline episode I
Okay.
But my statements about over-representation (not a fault of farmers mind you) still stand, as does my remark on Australia's unbalanced focus on agriculture.
Okay. To say we've got big, nightmarish environmental problems is an understatement. The fact that they've been able to turn a huge salinity problem in VIC into a "salt for cents" business scares the shit out of me and also just about anyone who lives/works/depends on the land. Australian farmers and rural communities are not ignorant, they know the problems. I think you've acknowledged this. You're right that you hit a sore spot of mine - people who've read somewhere that farming is bad (it is, but I believe it can be managed) and hence condemn all rural folk as ignorant in their practices or just outright baddies (some are, most aren't).
Interestingly, it's also a shame that by definition, cities/urban areas emerge from (and consume) our most fertile land. Not that I'm saying this as any defence for negligent, short-sighted farming practices, but instead I usually say this to the person on their high-horse to point out that we are all part of the problem.
hope that you can accept my apology for the unfounded 'culture of greed' comment
Appreciated. I should add that farm operators (not all are family run, as you probably know) aren't saints, there is greed, but it isn't a culture.
if you'll also accept that many of my points on agriculture vs the environment and over-representation are also true or at least warrant some merit.
Sure, although I'll have to take your word for the over-representation issues - I'm almost totally uninformed with the politics, and I have a sore point with spending on roads, which could generate 1000s of words of my thoughts...
I've realised I fell into the trap of blaming rural Australians for the flawed policies of government - which wouldn't be fair even if it made any kind of sense.
Exactly. As a nation that uses it's own agriculture, we're all part of the problem.
I'd also be interested to learn about what you meant by one corporation controlling most of the country's cattle production. It's certainly not something I was aware of.
I'm no expert, my field of interest is actually electronic engineering. However, it's my understanding that the cattle production sector has historically attracted a sort of "enterprise business model" bunch of entrepreneurs, but then again so have the other sectors, I guess. Certainly in the area I grew up there existed a huge cattle property, complete with mansion and servants the owner rarely visited, a landing strip for a private Leer jet (+ paid pilot) and private (non-mustering) chopper (+ paid pilot).
Anyway, found the landline episode and this age article, about the sale of Stanbroke. Stanbroke was already the worlds' largest beef producer, I thought it was being bought by AAC (another significant owner of beef production) but apparently not, had my facts wrong, they actually lost the bid. After reading these articles I've linked I'm now of the impression that the final deal isn't so bad afterall.
Still, the empire grows bigger.
So, I actually think you and I are not on totally different wavelengths afterall. Isn't rational discussion great?
Ignorance starts at home.
Indeed.
Yours.
Why don't we take a look at some facts, then.
brought up by flood-irrigation
I'm perfectly well aware of Australia's worsening soil, salinity and water managment problems. We only just "recently" got a handle on the free-flowing bores, which had been running for up to nearly a century. However, sugar cane is by far not the worst offender.
Irrigation is used largely by cotton and dairy farmers.
These two farming sectors alone account for a lot more than half of all the irrigated water used in the country.
you have a farming industry that the government is beholden to far in excess of its percentage of the population
Agriculture and mining account for 7% GDP and 60% exports. Agriculture is directly responsible for 5% of Australia's labour force. Of course. Everything outside the 6 major capital cities is a desolate, irrelevant, unproductive wasteland that is merely a vacuum in our economy and should be done away with.
Besides, we can just merge all of not-Brisbane, not-Sydney, etc. into one giant electorate for each state. Clearly, communities thousands of kilometers apart will all have the same issues, concerns, and problems to deal with. They're all the same aren't they? Give me a break.
Hence over-representation, and a growing culture of greed - whether or not it is anything like the US lobby
Holy shit, where the FUCK do you get that impression? Exactly what events, things said, let alone transactions would possibly lead you to believe that there is a "growing culture of greed"? Perhaps you're talking about the vast majority of Australia's beef production being owned by one company, now, of course.
Not that I agree with that either, but again, what the fuck ? I take it you think McDonalds should be closed down too?
I have honestly no idea where you are coming from. My family lost its farms in the late-80s, "fair and square". Cattle, sheep, wheat, barley. Drought. We got some tax breaks. We did not receive any unusual goverment assistance that I'm aware of. We ended up in a caravan, 200 head of sheep (a tiny fraction of what we had), and the family car.
We were eligible for all sorts of welfare that unemployed "city folk" could get, but we didn't take any of it. We were loaned rent-free land from friends, as well as milk, parts etc. and we got by with both parents working.
I'm now at Uni in Brisbane. I can proudly say that I've never recieved centre-link payments of any kind. I work my arse off during the holidays at a computer shop back home. I pay my own rent, food, books, medical, etc. Parents give me about $500 AUD a semester to help out.
I live in a flat with 8 others. Three are Brisbanites. Two have never even tried to get a job to help pay their way. "Job? That's something you do AFTER you graduate!". These guys fail subjects and can't pick up enough subjects the following semester to be considered "full-time" students by centrelink, and so take totally irrelevant subjects just to get "full benefits" and continue cruising, drinking, partying, more drinking, and failing?
Nothing shits me more than some "ocean-locked" Brisbanite bogan who doesn't even know Australia has a fucking desert. 40% of Australia is fucking sand dunes! How many people on the east coast do you know have been further than 1 hour west of their capital city? The majority of them have absolutely no fucking idea. They seem to live in their own little world full of Big Brother and Today Tonight.
That in itself doesn't bother me, it's not like I'm an enlightened prodigy either, until they start to pass judgement on people they haven't met, form opinions on cultures they haven't even encountered, and then go back to sit in front of the TV and drink another $25 worth of alcohol payed with my taxes. The "growing culture of greed" statement has earned YOU, sir, the ignorant toss award.
Hopefully you start to understand my grimace.
And vice versa.
You're an ignorant toss
Actually, no offence was intended. I probably should have worded that differently.
Why place sanctions upon and then invade a country like Australia when you can muscle in on its local laws and markets with empty bribes to a bunch of greedy farmers with grosse over-representation?
You're an ignorant toss. If you are from the U.S.A., if you think our farmers have any sort of lobbying power or greed that even begins to approach anything like your "farming lobby" at all, you are sorely mistaken.
Unlike SOME farming operations, Australian farming business carries it's own weight.
And even if it didn't, it doesn't use politics to get away with it.
An old but insightful dateline segment.
You do realize that dumping surplus agriculture output onto developing countries is undermining their own local primary industries, right?
My point being, you've grossly over-simplified a complex problem.
Moreover, lots of paper comes not from regulated tree farms, as you imply, but from razing forests and jungles in third worlds, where there is no minimum wage or labor standards and the government isn't strong enough to regulate the industry.
You're right, illegal logging in third world countries is a big problem, but I really don't think that those trees are turned into paper. Old growth/hardwood is used for construction purposes, it's much too "expensive" to turn non-reject logs into chipwood/paper. Or at least, that's my understanding of how it works in Queensland, Australia..
Keep recycling.
I agree - and I'd like to add "re-use" and "use less".
It's a general purpose programmable computer, whether it can execute from storage memory or not is totally irrelevant.
Only thing that kinda sucks on the PIC 16F series what with separate code/data is reading ROM lookup tables... 16F87x has a special set of registers you can setup to read from FLASH, plus there's other tricks, but it's certainly a very useful non von-neumann CPU nontheless.
5 flops (at a high accuracy rate) is much, MUCH faster than any engineer I know ;-)
Command console? Hahahaha :-)
We're talking switchboards and blinken lights, methinks. Of course, I believe the Collossus/ENIAC et al. had typewriters hacked in somehow, judging by the pictures.
With any of the first computers, I think a "command console" whilst not impossible, would take up almost all of your memory and make it useless for actual work.
I'm under the impression that in those days, the only person using a program also usually happend to be the one who WROTE the program, so they know which register outputs hold which results (and their meanings, and so on).
Film I/O (input only I would imagine) - apparently used old film instead of punch cards because of paper shortage - I believe they used air, like the old "player pianos" that would play by themselves if you loaded them up with scrolls of paper that had holes punched in them.
This is a total guess, but in my mind, it probably would have had a Program Counter (PC) of some sort. Start at zero. Start rolling film. Each "notch" could read the state of whether a hole is punched or not. Set the program bit via the approptraite relay. Increment PC, read next notch, etc. At the end of it, all your relays are set to whatever state each of the holes were for each notch in the film.
Floating Point - a feature not present in early PCs and absent even in today's embedded low-power microcontrollers - is a number storage format that allows easy representation and manipulation of numbers that are either very large or very small, with a fractional component (ie - not integers). Quite necessary for scientific work, otherwise you'd need to waste precious code space and CPU cycles having to make do with whole integer numbers and conversions/operations.
See the wiki entry for "floating point" or this one for "FPU". In the case of the Z3, the article states 1 bit for sign (+/-), 7 bits for exponent (position of the decimal point when using binary) and 14 bits for mantissa (actual value of the number).
So I repeat, why the heck did he go with such a slow clock speed?
It did FLOATING POINT.
5.33 Hz was the speed of the first machine (Z1, 1941), which used less than 2000 mechanical relays, whereas ENIAC used 18,000 valve tubes.
So I repeat, not only was the Z1 mechanical because of lacking tube technology, it did FLOATING POINT .
I am working with some of the team members on and off trying to hack the old Tamagotchi devices that once were a craze.
Right, I think you're joking, because they would have surely used OTP (One Time Programmable) microcontrollers or even a custom maskset with their ROM on it.
It's very lightweight. I use it on machines with 32MiB RAM or less (like my laptop).
If you use ssh X forwarding, you can start a gnome panel remotely and you've nearly got a gnome desktop.
Although, you don't want to start nautilus... only thing that doesn't really work in this scenario is the workspace changer. You can do remote gnome panels + working workspace changer with XFCE though.
Actually that usage report is fascinating.
Looks like people don't like using IE for their pr0n.
How on earth do you get the time to add links and more to the point, comment on them? Every day?
dnsmasq
/etc/hosts file. Uses /etc/resolv.conf for the upstream DNSs. Want DNS cacheing goodness on the dnsmasq box? Add localhost to /etc/resolv.conf.
Just works off you're
Huh? We've had a few biodiesel experiments in Australia, and farmers making their own biodiesel said, if I remember the TV segment correctly, are limiting use of their biodiesel to older farm equipment (not the $250K headers and prime-movers), since it seems to damage the injectors... But then who knows. I don't.
Also, remember the difference between gratis hardware (subsidized by publishers of proprietary software as part of the license fees) and Free hardware (the more general purpose, the more Free).
What companies have I been dealing with then? You have to see proprietry software vendors selling a whole package to a customer, it's quite funny. Their hardware is almost always FAR more expensive than even the most overpriced retail outlets; at the very best they can almost (almost) match reasonable prices.
Mind you I work in a small support shop (10 employees) but of the 5 applicable installations I can think of (accounting, POS applications), hardware was outgrageously expensive.
We provided a quote for one customer, for server hardware with windows 2000 advanced server+client site licenses, that was only slightly cheaper than the software vendor. Customer went with vendor's hardware (suites us, less support calls), but the vendor neglected to tell the customer that operating system and other software licenses were not included in the price.
At the very least, hardware is often twice as expensive as it should be. The worst was a customer whose software ran on SCO OpenServer; something like $5000 AUD for an absolutely bog-standard PC with a single SCSI hard drive, with SCO license (server + site) pack on top of the price.
Hah. Can't be much worse than EAGLE's seemingly random ripup/reroute/guess again router :-)
Mind you, I'm the biggest EAGLE fan there is. I hate Protel with vengence. EAGLE rules (has an very well supported Linux version too). I'm sure OrCAD/Mentor are cool too, but I'd have to sell a kidney and my first born child to get it...
I've never designed a high speed digital board before, but I guess it's to compensate for the transmission line effect.
;-)
Let's pick a number. Say 500MHz. Depending on dielectric constant of the PCB substrate, thickness, etc. a ball park figure for the speed of a signal propagating along one of those traces is around 70% the speed of light, so 2.1E+9 m/s. That makes the 500MHz signal have a wavelength of about 4.2m. Now, consider a 20cm trace. That shouldn't be unrealistic on a video card, if you actually followed one around on the PCB, it could be longer.
That trace has delayed the signal by 17 degrees, or 0.05 of a wavelength, which may or may not be significant. If we have the 64 data lines in a 64bit bus all different lenghts, you can see that different bits are going to "arrive" at different times.
Transmission line theory is a black voodoo art, where you can do all kinds of neat stuff like "create" reactive components and make matching transformers (impedance matches) or filters (different goal, same method) on your high frequency PCB just by making a carefully calculated sudden change in track width, plus the necessary "stubs"...
This all very over-simplified, but yeah, the squirly bits are to keep them all the same length (my guess). I'd be very worried if digital circuits needed impedance matching transformers made out of microstrips
# infringes on music copyrights... applaud ... applaud
# infringes on non-GPL licensing stipulations
Since when do slashdotters advocate this?
infringes on website owner copyrights by putting up an (unauthorized) mirror of the same material
This, I agree, is annoying.
Though IBM did not invent Linux, does not distribute it and earns nary a penny on it
Has IBM ever made money on an operating system? I thought it was generally understood that IBM's business was selling "solutions"; the whole kit - hardware, services, support, customization, consulting.
Does OS400 run on an IBM AS390 mainframe? (serious question!)
An operating system is just part of the package for IBM - they obviously like Linux for small/medium business environments; people are probably less scared of Linux than AIX/OS400/etc, since there is probably more (and cheaper) non-IBM support for Linux based solutions. I guess in that sense, Linux is the Windows of the Unix world as far as support goes - everyone and their dog knows it.
Whether it's running Linux or not, you're still going to pay through the nose for an IBM kit. I honestly can't see how spending money/resources on Linux could be directly aimed at Microsoft any more than if they spent it on AIX. Perhaps Linux just gives them more bang for buck and makes business sense?