Re:Don't care about the theory, just the results
on
Trick or Treatment
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· Score: 1
Acupuncture stimulates the brain (you can see it on MRI scans) and causes the body to make endorphins, seratonin and other "nice" chemicals. In that way acupuncture works.
This whole business of a point on your foot being related to the liver etc. is a bit more far-fetched though.
The company (or your department) will not last long with a boss like that. Management by Intimidation is rarely successful. Does your department have high staff turnover?
Slamd64 is excellent. I've been using it for just over a year now. My SETI@Home CPU benchmark went up by 55% by going from 32-bit to 64-bit.
With more than 512MB of RAM on an x86 box, a 64-bit Linux is vastly superior due to the way the kernel lays out the memory map and the extra registers.
It's a real shame that there isn't an official 64-bit Slackware, but Slamd64 is more than good enough. I've been on Slackware since 1995. I've used Debian, CentOS, RedHat, SuSE, KNOPPIX and Ubuntu and I will never leave Slackware unless I am forced to.
All of my old boxes run Slackware. All of my new ones will be running Slamd64.
Maybe Pat and Fred should team up semi-officially?
I'd love to be there to see the look on your face when you take Fatima home for some hot passion, as she removed her burka revealing that she is, in fact, Faizal, before shouting, "God is great!" Then detonating.
So yeah, all of that stuff was added to C++ because it was useful... Just as long as you're working on one project, with one version of [OS], with one compiler...
I've found that people from a Windows background overlook the man pages. They are absolutely essential for effective C programming on Linux or other unixes such as Solaris or BSD.
man 3 printf and away you go!
I'd also argue that shell scripting should be a higher priority than PERL at first. Although shell scripts look ugly and confusing to a novice, after a couple of hours with some good references, and some practice on the command line, their power and simplicity become apparent. tldp.org has some excellent sh/bash resources for beginners and experienced coders.
For PERL, you really need the camel book. PERL is a nightmare, but it's a rite of passage, like C++ only worse.
Sun's Niagara processors are not particularly suitable for supercomputers, but they have some innovative useful features for getting around the memory bandwidth problem.
Their truly innovative processor that should be superb for supercomputing is ROCK, if it ever sees the light of day.
As well as multiple cores, multiple threads per core (i.e. "contexts"), powerful floating-point cores and SIMD units, its killer feature is what sounds like a very clever kind of automatic speculative pre-fetching from main memory into cache.
intel's chips always make me laugh a little. All that processing power and no memory or I/O bandwidth. They've only just caught up with AMD in that respect and now they're planning 80 cores with very little improvement in memory bandwidth...
As a UK resident, I am looking forward to NHS weaponry when I start to collect my pension.
I'm afraid we'll be limited to walking sticks. I can't wait to be the one in the Post Office queue having the arbitrary rant at some innocent young bystander, whacking them around the shins with my stick and getting away with it to rounds of applause from the other spectators who are shouting, "National Service! That'll sort 'em out!"
Why should poor people be given guns? If they die because they didn't shoot back, it's their own fault for being too poor to afford a gun. The weak are removed from society by the Great Free Market (all hail). Everyone's a winner!
Americans like to keep things like they were in the Wild West.
You're perfectly at liberty to shoot a stranger on your property in America. People don't even blink. "Well, he was on someone else's property. So what." And life goes on.
As long as it stays in America, who cares? It's what Americans want. Who are we to judge?
Secondary school Computing teachers are notoriously clueless. I was running rings around mine by the age of 14.
Never mind sysadmin. Learn coding. Sysadmin is a depressing dead-end job at the mercy of thankless PHBs.
Now, as for Mathematics, it's not generally obvious what it's useful for in real life. However, mathematical reasoning skills are useful every day. Things like trigonometry, calculus, algebra, vectors, complex number and analysis are very useful in Physics and Computer Science. All the cool stuff that computers do depends on those things. Signal processing (music, video, telecoms...), nuclear physics, medical physics, civil engineering, automotive and aerospace engineering... You name it. That's what maths is for. Even sickly PHB jobs like financial analysis and accountancy need good maths.
If you are frustrated by week, ineffectual and un-inspirational maths teachers get K A Stroud's Engineering Mathematics books and work through them on your own.
In my day we had a thing called Certificate of Sixth Year Studies maths. My teachers were cynical old curmudgeons, and I learned everything from Stroud.
Forget sys admin. Get into coding. Start high level with Ruby and work your way down to C.
There is no such thing as a "UK education system." Scotland has an entirely separate system and has been much superior to that of England for the last half century.
I went to a Scottish "comprehensive" and my education was far better than that on offer in England, matching that of many private (formerly known as Public in England) schools.
In England, a Public education meant several pupils being taught in a class versus a Private education which was one to one tuition. What people now call "public" is another word for state (social).
Don't flame me for my grammar and spelling. I'm rusty. It was a long time ago.
NuLabour are doing just as bad a job with state education in England as the Tories (Conservatives) did before them. For goodness' sake England, take the politics out of education!
They hand out "insightful" mods around here because "funny" doesn't count for karma and a lot of people don't get irony or absurdity.
To get noticed on the intartubes nowadays, one has to spout scary authoritarian callousness. You should check out the BBC's "have your say" pages to see the utterly contemptuous, inhumane, ignorant vitriol that gets published and modded up.
One needs a good simplistic, ignorant and morally bankrupt argument on slashdot to get karma. We love it!
When I used to work for Sun, they brought in a new motivational and cost-reduction tool: the 10% rule. It came from GE.
Every year at appraisal time, the staff would be ranked in order of righteousness. The bottom 10% would be fired. No ifs, not buts, just fired. Luckily I got downsized rather than 10%ed. (I was actually ranked fairly high.)
We need something similar for society. Every year, your employer, doctor, family and friends should send an appraisal to the government. The bottom 10% of society could be put to sleep. Just watch productivity grow! Think of the savings on welfare, health costs etc. All slacking would be virtually eliminated over night! No more dead wood, just a continually improving bright, shiny nation of go-getters and successful people. Low taxes, homelessness, drug addition, alcoholism eliminated! Only the wealthy would reproduce. Everyone constantly vigilant striving to improve!
It also probably stems from the fact that I'm in the UK, where none of our spiders are dangerous, and they don't get any bigger than a couple of inches across (including legs).
Dream on. My father has been bitten by large British house spiders. They're not poisonous, but if they're big enough, they can get their fangs in.
When I lived on my own in a flat, one summer after being away for a fortnight, I came home to find a brown and yellow stripy spider with a body at least as large as a 50p piece and a leg span larger than a CD lurking in my net curtains.
I am very arachnophobic and it took me an hour to make a long stick and to try to chase it away out of the patio doors. It wouldn't let go of the net curtains and I ended up hitting it. Three of its legs and a bit of its body fell off and some goo came out, but it clung on tight for a few more minutes. I eventually hit it again and it expired in a tangled gooey mess of legs and body.
At another house surrounded by fields, we were plagued by spiders almost as large. Several times I woke up in the night and went to the bathroom to see 6- or 7-inch span spiders in the bath. One night there were two - one in the bath and one on the shower curtain.
The garage was full of hundreds of them (maximum 4 inches though). Every so often I used to go in with a small vacuum cleaner and spend an hour hoovering up all the webs and spiders lurking in all the webs and corners.
You don't need air conditioning when a garage full of spiders makes you turn freezing cold and shivering. You do need a fridge full of beer, though.
In the loft, the apex of the roof was one massive cobweb with thousands of pairs of wasp and fly wings along it...
Slashdot Mirror
Acupuncture stimulates the brain (you can see it on MRI scans) and causes the body to make endorphins, seratonin and other "nice" chemicals. In that way acupuncture works.
This whole business of a point on your foot being related to the liver etc. is a bit more far-fetched though.
Get a new job.
The company (or your department) will not last long with a boss like that. Management by Intimidation is rarely successful. Does your department have high staff turnover?
Slamd64 is excellent. I've been using it for just over a year now. My SETI@Home CPU benchmark went up by 55% by going from 32-bit to 64-bit.
With more than 512MB of RAM on an x86 box, a 64-bit Linux is vastly superior due to the way the kernel lays out the memory map and the extra registers.
It's a real shame that there isn't an official 64-bit Slackware, but Slamd64 is more than good enough. I've been on Slackware since 1995. I've used Debian, CentOS, RedHat, SuSE, KNOPPIX and Ubuntu and I will never leave Slackware unless I am forced to.
All of my old boxes run Slackware. All of my new ones will be running Slamd64.
Maybe Pat and Fred should team up semi-officially?
Well, I didn't know about him releasing this album DRM free until I heard it here. Because it's DRM free, I'll go buy it.
Let me know when he's paying people to listen to his music. Life is short and my time is valuable.
I hope you were a good citizen and informed the IWF.
I have a burka fetish. Take that, Saudi Arabia!
I'd love to be there to see the look on your face when you take Fatima home for some hot passion, as she removed her burka revealing that she is, in fact, Faizal, before shouting, "God is great!" Then detonating.
You're far too reasonable to be British. Please leave. When you get there, let me know where you went so I can come too.
What is C other than a slightly higher level assembly language than nasm?
Indeed. And with ubiquitous free PeeCee emulators (bochs, qemu etc.) portability is not an issue.
So yeah, all of that stuff was added to C++ because it was useful... Just as long as you're working on one project, with one version of [OS], with one compiler...
Once again the AC speaks the truth.
C. And don't forget the man pages.
I've found that people from a Windows background overlook the man pages. They are absolutely essential for effective C programming on Linux or other unixes such as Solaris or BSD.
man 3 printf and away you go!
I'd also argue that shell scripting should be a higher priority than PERL at first. Although shell scripts look ugly and confusing to a novice, after a couple of hours with some good references, and some practice on the command line, their power and simplicity become apparent. tldp.org has some excellent sh/bash resources for beginners and experienced coders.
For PERL, you really need the camel book. PERL is a nightmare, but it's a rite of passage, like C++ only worse.
Sun's Niagara processors are not particularly suitable for supercomputers, but they have some innovative useful features for getting around the memory bandwidth problem.
Their truly innovative processor that should be superb for supercomputing is ROCK, if it ever sees the light of day.
As well as multiple cores, multiple threads per core (i.e. "contexts"), powerful floating-point cores and SIMD units, its killer feature is what sounds like a very clever kind of automatic speculative pre-fetching from main memory into cache.
intel's chips always make me laugh a little. All that processing power and no memory or I/O bandwidth. They've only just caught up with AMD in that respect and now they're planning 80 cores with very little improvement in memory bandwidth...
We have a winner! :-)
The UK is getting to be a scary place these days. Being absurd is becoming increasingly difficult.
As a UK resident, I am looking forward to NHS weaponry when I start to collect my pension.
I'm afraid we'll be limited to walking sticks. I can't wait to be the one in the Post Office queue having the arbitrary rant at some innocent young bystander, whacking them around the shins with my stick and getting away with it to rounds of applause from the other spectators who are shouting, "National Service! That'll sort 'em out!"
Why should poor people be given guns? If they die because they didn't shoot back, it's their own fault for being too poor to afford a gun. The weak are removed from society by the Great Free Market (all hail). Everyone's a winner!
Americans like to keep things like they were in the Wild West.
You're perfectly at liberty to shoot a stranger on your property in America. People don't even blink. "Well, he was on someone else's property. So what." And life goes on.
As long as it stays in America, who cares? It's what Americans want. Who are we to judge?
Secondary school Computing teachers are notoriously clueless. I was running rings around mine by the age of 14.
Never mind sysadmin. Learn coding. Sysadmin is a depressing dead-end job at the mercy of thankless PHBs.
Now, as for Mathematics, it's not generally obvious what it's useful for in real life. However, mathematical reasoning skills are useful every day. Things like trigonometry, calculus, algebra, vectors, complex number and analysis are very useful in Physics and Computer Science. All the cool stuff that computers do depends on those things. Signal processing (music, video, telecoms...), nuclear physics, medical physics, civil engineering, automotive and aerospace engineering... You name it. That's what maths is for. Even sickly PHB jobs like financial analysis and accountancy need good maths.
If you are frustrated by week, ineffectual and un-inspirational maths teachers get K A Stroud's Engineering Mathematics books and work through them on your own.
In my day we had a thing called Certificate of Sixth Year Studies maths. My teachers were cynical old curmudgeons, and I learned everything from Stroud.
Forget sys admin. Get into coding. Start high level with Ruby and work your way down to C.
You may be 'into computers' but you evidently don't have the hacker mindset.
He/she/it did say that it wants to be a sysadmin vs. an engineer.
There is no such thing as a "UK education system." Scotland has an entirely separate system and has been much superior to that of England for the last half century.
I went to a Scottish "comprehensive" and my education was far better than that on offer in England, matching that of many private (formerly known as Public in England) schools.
In England, a Public education meant several pupils being taught in a class versus a Private education which was one to one tuition. What people now call "public" is another word for state (social).
Don't flame me for my grammar and spelling. I'm rusty. It was a long time ago.
NuLabour are doing just as bad a job with state education in England as the Tories (Conservatives) did before them. For goodness' sake England, take the politics out of education!
The best sort of visual indication of status to the PHB is the severed head of another PHB on a spike at the entrance to the data centre.
And there was no reason for 10% (as opposed to 5% or 15%) other than "just because."
They hand out "insightful" mods around here because "funny" doesn't count for karma and a lot of people don't get irony or absurdity.
To get noticed on the intartubes nowadays, one has to spout scary authoritarian callousness. You should check out the BBC's "have your say" pages to see the utterly contemptuous, inhumane, ignorant vitriol that gets published and modded up.
One needs a good simplistic, ignorant and morally bankrupt argument on slashdot to get karma. We love it!
I did expand a bit.
I fear for society too. Or maybe I'm just paranoid... Who can tell?
That has given me an excellent idea.
When I used to work for Sun, they brought in a new motivational and cost-reduction tool: the 10% rule. It came from GE.
Every year at appraisal time, the staff would be ranked in order of righteousness. The bottom 10% would be fired. No ifs, not buts, just fired. Luckily I got downsized rather than 10%ed. (I was actually ranked fairly high.)
We need something similar for society. Every year, your employer, doctor, family and friends should send an appraisal to the government. The bottom 10% of society could be put to sleep. Just watch productivity grow! Think of the savings on welfare, health costs etc. All slacking would be virtually eliminated over night! No more dead wood, just a continually improving bright, shiny nation of go-getters and successful people. Low taxes, homelessness, drug addition, alcoholism eliminated! Only the wealthy would reproduce. Everyone constantly vigilant striving to improve!
I hear it leaves stout old ladies standing.
It also probably stems from the fact that I'm in the UK, where none of our spiders are dangerous, and they don't get any bigger than a couple of inches across (including legs).
Dream on. My father has been bitten by large British house spiders. They're not poisonous, but if they're big enough, they can get their fangs in.
When I lived on my own in a flat, one summer after being away for a fortnight, I came home to find a brown and yellow stripy spider with a body at least as large as a 50p piece and a leg span larger than a CD lurking in my net curtains.
I am very arachnophobic and it took me an hour to make a long stick and to try to chase it away out of the patio doors. It wouldn't let go of the net curtains and I ended up hitting it. Three of its legs and a bit of its body fell off and some goo came out, but it clung on tight for a few more minutes. I eventually hit it again and it expired in a tangled gooey mess of legs and body.
At another house surrounded by fields, we were plagued by spiders almost as large. Several times I woke up in the night and went to the bathroom to see 6- or 7-inch span spiders in the bath. One night there were two - one in the bath and one on the shower curtain.
The garage was full of hundreds of them (maximum 4 inches though). Every so often I used to go in with a small vacuum cleaner and spend an hour hoovering up all the webs and spiders lurking in all the webs and corners.
You don't need air conditioning when a garage full of spiders makes you turn freezing cold and shivering. You do need a fridge full of beer, though.
In the loft, the apex of the roof was one massive cobweb with thousands of pairs of wasp and fly wings along it...
Flagship demo projects like this often get exceedingly big discounts from the vendors.