I instruct people in Linux, and my biggest complaint with RPM is that the user must solve his dependencies himself.
E.g. we had made an installation, but left out the development tools. When you try to install gcc, it says which packages are missing, but not where you can find them. You have to dig them up yourself from the CD-ROM's, and sometimes you have to look on all of them.
I do not have any problems with the RPM system itself, but why has Red Hat still no system implemented like Debian apt ? After the installation it asks for the CD-ROM's, scans them and builds a database about what packages reside where.
So, in the case of gcc, it would say what packages are missing, select them automatically, load the needed packages onto the disk and asking for the appropriate CD-ROM whenever necessary.
This is much more friendly than the stock Red Hat approach. Oh, I know there are tools to do that with Red Hat, but you still have to install them yourself. It should come out of the box.
My first experience with any Unix was with SCO Xenix, in 1990. I was fresh from school and had to add a serial board to a PC running it. I finished the job, installed the system at the customers site and setup the serial connections. That was the hardest part not knowing anything about Unix systems.
After a couple of months they started to get errors with their harddisk overflowing. I never knew if the company that took care of it found the error.
Anyway, that was a rather bad experience for me and I had vowed 'to never touch again any Unix'.
However, such things do not last long with me, and in 1991 I bought Coherent 2.0, later even 3.0, because I found that there must be more on operating systems than DOS and Windows 3.x.
I can give you one good reason why I rate myself on a higher level with Perl scripting, than my colleagues with Bourne scripting.
Perl gives me the advantage of reading very quick input from large files and process them in minutes.
My colleagues otoh use a construct using head and tail and an index to process sequentially the contents of text files, and then they complain that their scripts are slow, and then they make things even more complex by creating caches for all kinds of data.
> for example, I'm comfortable with c/java/perl/php/ruby syntax, and the only real tool I need is vim.
> If you throw me into a situation like COBOL where you need to work on a mainframe, or a logical language
Probably not!
Why would you be a bad programmer ? I know c/perl/php/python AND cobol. I have known programmers who only could program in Cobol and JCL.
I presume that the testing has mre to do with classifying the drives.
My experience has been that the same drives are sometimes available in several price classes. I suspect that the production process yields drives with a range of tolerances.
The testing then divides the drives in batches which are fit for low-end use and for high-end use. On the low-ends IDE electronics are put, and on the high-end drives SCSI electronics are put (or Fibre Channel).
Since there are probably less high-end drives, it costs more to stock them for warranty purposes etc, SCSI electronics are also made in lower quantities, so high-end drives have several factors which increase their price.
That is the really big question. I work at a large global company, which is selling off several production plants, but on the IT side there is no sign of really trying to lower costs and provide better service. It is as if they lead a completely independent life, with no one (even upper management or the bean counters) questioning their practices.
I do not know how American comics are made, but here in continental Europe, we have broadly two ways of working.
The oldest is the one where there is only one artist, who provides both the story and the drawings. This school is closely related to the papers, most artists of this generation started at the local paper. Most of these are almost all dead, or succeeded by people with not as much talent as the original.
Examples (Belgium) are Willy Vandersteen (Suske en Wiske, or Spike and Suzy), Herge (Kuifje, Tintin), Marc Sleen (Nero).
There is also a school in which there are both a writer and an artist, I think this comes more from the French market, but had its influences here through Brussels. Names to mention are Goscinny and Uderzo (Asterix), Greg, who was a very prolific scenarist, has worked with a lot of artists, there is also Charlier, who also worked with several artists, but had with Hubinon his most success in Buck Danny, Cauvin and Lambil, from which Cauvin is also a very general scenarist.
I just say this to try to convey to you that because it is about comics, it does not mean that there are no real writers at work. Should a real writer be someone who is able to write down a story in novel format, or could it be someone who is able to provide someone with an interesting story ? All of the people mentioned above were or are able to do just that.
What is more, a real creative artist is able to create something that is unique in both respects, I just name Moebius (artistic) and Gottlib (sarcastic).
What has happened though in the last 30 years, is that for some comic books the emphasis has more gone towards children, where they once were enjoyable for both kids and adults alike. There is however also a market for more adult oriented comics of high quality.
I have been reading, no swallowing books since I could read, I have a large collection of books, but I also have a fair collection of comic books. I think that one does not exclude the other.
One of the BEST things I think I've learned from COBOL is the underlying format of data in a "structure" -- don't underestimate the power of "redefines" or a level 88 variable! Investigate these to learn their "counterparts" in other languages...
Most modern languages do not even have the same powerful features. These are like GOTO, very powerful if you know how to handle them, but easy to misuse if you do not grasp their implications.
I do much programming in Perl, but the way you can layout data structures in COBOL is one of the things that I really miss.
When I maintained COBOL code written by other people, I was sometimes appalled at what things some programmers introduce to try to make things run faster.
My experience in this has mostly been : try to understand the problem at hand first, and then implement it with clearly defined loops and subroutines. This helps maintenance, and the compiler has a much better time figuring out its optimisations.
Old monitors in the days before GUI's just had the problem that all was text, and this text changed, but it degraded the CRT nevertheless. THe effect was that after a few years of operation, you could see by the lines on the screen where the text was positioned. A good screensaver then should have just turned off the screen.
You know, some people get in their old age a glandiary deficiency and they start having growth hormones again. What happens is that some parts of their body, especially nose and ears start to grow again...
The difference in log between 80 W and 70 W is only -0.5 dB (10*log(70/80)). Using -2 dB limits your power to about 50 W, using -20 dB limits your power to 0.8 W.
Since books are cheaper, it is easier to produce good science-fiction stories than good science-fiction series or movies.
Movies/series tend to be a) popular, in which case the real SF aspects of it are underplayed and they are a little bit of a disappointment to the real SF fan, or b) the SF is good, but in that case it loses most of its appeal to the general public, and they tend to be cancelled.
Also, movies derived from books tend to have the same problems as above. The most notable exception is probably '2001: A space oddysey' as the film and the book where done in cooperation by Kubrik and Clarke.
The problem with movies and series is to display the underlaying logic of the SF theme. When one reads a good SF book, the logic is consistent and follows from details that are written and emphasised in the book, but which you can almost not do in a screenplay. Sometimes the creators of the screenplay make one of the characters explain the logic, but this is very difficult and tends to mostly end up being pedantic.
All of this said, I think that the one series that mostly stands out for me as a science-fiction series, is the original Star Trek, mostly because a whole lot of stories where created by real SF writers.
Another series, more recent, I like as SF, is 'Sliders'. While the special effects where sometimes below par, it introduced the non-SF knowledged to the concept of parallel universes and had a whole lot of nice ideas worked into it. My wife liked it, and she is not an SF fan.
I can't say much about movies. I've seen most of the classics mentioned here, but I think that most movies are not really capable of being 'hard' science-fiction. They tend to become adventure movies with much special effects and/or violence. I find that among the exceptions are '2001', and an old classic 'The Forbidden Planet'.
In addition to that, and to be consistent, I probably should also classify the Star Trek movies as real SF movies, but I haven't seen one of them. However, one of my favorite writers, Alan Dean Foster (Blood Hype/The Middle World), has worked on these, so they should probably be OK (or did he just enscript the book from the movies ?).
I like the first Star Wars series, but it is probably more a fairy tale with SF elements.
In short, I like the books more, probably also it stimulates the imagination more than a movie.
Slashdot Mirror
Duh, on HP-UX we had an 80 Mb shared library for use with Cobol. Link that static to do "Hello, World!".
I instruct people in Linux, and my biggest complaint with RPM is that the user must solve his dependencies himself.
E.g. we had made an installation, but left out the development tools. When you try to install gcc, it says which packages are missing, but not where you can find them. You have to dig them up yourself from the CD-ROM's, and sometimes you have to look on all of them.
I do not have any problems with the RPM system itself, but why has Red Hat still no system implemented like Debian apt ? After the installation it asks for the CD-ROM's, scans them and builds a database about what packages reside where.
So, in the case of gcc, it would say what packages are missing, select them automatically, load the needed packages onto the disk and asking for the appropriate CD-ROM whenever necessary.
This is much more friendly than the stock Red Hat approach. Oh, I know there are tools to do that with Red Hat, but you still have to install them yourself. It should come out of the box.
What I envision with this system, is that old programs will probably break new ones, ie. make it impossible to install them or run well.
My first experience with any Unix was with SCO Xenix, in 1990. I was fresh from school and had to add a serial board to a PC running it. I finished the job, installed the system at the customers site and setup the serial connections. That was the hardest part not knowing anything about Unix systems.
After a couple of months they started to get errors with their harddisk overflowing. I never knew if the company that took care of it found the error.
Anyway, that was a rather bad experience for me and I had vowed 'to never touch again any Unix'.
However, such things do not last long with me, and in 1991 I bought Coherent 2.0, later even 3.0, because I found that there must be more on operating systems than DOS and Windows 3.x.
Well, HE was beheaded in the French Revolution because a jealous colleague found that there was nothing to invent anymore in chemistry.
Antoine Lavoisier, 1743-1794
Nuclear power ?
I use vi and emacs on Cygwin, vi on Linux and I do not have any *BSD
I can give you one good reason why I rate myself on a higher level with Perl scripting, than my colleagues with Bourne scripting.
Perl gives me the advantage of reading very quick input from large files and process them in minutes.
My colleagues otoh use a construct using head and tail and an index to process sequentially the contents of text files, and then they complain that their scripts are slow, and then they make things even more complex by creating caches for all kinds of data.
> for example, I'm comfortable with c/java/perl/php/ruby syntax, and the only real tool I need is vim. > If you throw me into a situation like COBOL where you need to work on a mainframe, or a logical language Probably not! Why would you be a bad programmer ? I know c/perl/php/python AND cobol. I have known programmers who only could program in Cobol and JCL.
I presume that the testing has mre to do with classifying the drives.
My experience has been that the same drives are sometimes available in several price classes. I suspect that the production process yields drives with a range of tolerances.
The testing then divides the drives in batches which are fit for low-end use and for high-end use. On the low-ends IDE electronics are put, and on the high-end drives SCSI electronics are put (or Fibre Channel).
Since there are probably less high-end drives, it costs more to stock them for warranty purposes etc, SCSI electronics are also made in lower quantities, so high-end drives have several factors which increase their price.
No, but my experience then leads me to design a unit which has the least possible special cases.
This only holds when one wants to run Windows under Linux. I haven't seen any confirmation that Plex86 can run Linux under Windows.
That is the really big question. I work at a large global company, which is selling off several production plants, but on the IT side there is no sign of really trying to lower costs and provide better service. It is as if they lead a completely independent life, with no one (even upper management or the bean counters) questioning their practices.
I do not know how American comics are made, but here in continental Europe, we have broadly two ways of working.
The oldest is the one where there is only one artist, who provides both the story and the drawings. This school is closely related to the papers, most artists of this generation started at the local paper. Most of these are almost all dead, or succeeded by people with not as much talent as the original.
Examples (Belgium) are Willy Vandersteen (Suske en Wiske, or Spike and Suzy), Herge (Kuifje, Tintin), Marc Sleen (Nero).
There is also a school in which there are both a writer and an artist, I think this comes more from the French market, but had its influences here through Brussels. Names to mention are Goscinny and Uderzo (Asterix), Greg, who was a very prolific scenarist, has worked with a lot of artists, there is also Charlier, who also worked with several artists, but had with Hubinon his most success in Buck Danny, Cauvin and Lambil, from which Cauvin is also a very general scenarist.
I just say this to try to convey to you that because it is about comics, it does not mean that there are no real writers at work. Should a real writer be someone who is able to write down a story in novel format, or could it be someone who is able to provide someone with an interesting story ? All of the people mentioned above were or are able to do just that.
What is more, a real creative artist is able to create something that is unique in both respects, I just name Moebius (artistic) and Gottlib (sarcastic).
What has happened though in the last 30 years, is that for some comic books the emphasis has more gone towards children, where they once were enjoyable for both kids and adults alike. There is however also a market for more adult oriented comics of high quality.
I have been reading, no swallowing books since I could read, I have a large collection of books, but I also have a fair collection of comic books. I think that one does not exclude the other.
Security through obsolescence...
One of the BEST things I think I've learned from COBOL is the underlying format of data in a "structure" -- don't underestimate the power of "redefines" or a level 88 variable! Investigate these to learn their "counterparts" in other languages...
Most modern languages do not even have the same powerful features. These are like GOTO, very powerful if you know how to handle them, but easy to misuse if you do not grasp their implications.
I do much programming in Perl, but the way you can layout data structures in COBOL is one of the things that I really miss.
See subject
Or like D. Knuth has put it :
Premature optimisation is the root of all evil.
When I maintained COBOL code written by other people, I was sometimes appalled at what things some programmers introduce to try to make things run faster.
My experience in this has mostly been : try to understand the problem at hand first, and then implement it with clearly defined loops and subroutines. This helps maintenance, and the compiler has a much better time figuring out its optimisations.
Well, since the amount of money available is finite, that should somewhere be the limit on the system.
Old monitors in the days before GUI's just had the problem that all was text, and this text changed, but it degraded the CRT nevertheless. THe effect was that after a few years of operation, you could see by the lines on the screen where the text was positioned. A good screensaver then should have just turned off the screen.
In some schools the BIOS is also locked down. If someone wants to reset the BIOS, he has to open up the case.
Didn't South Africa invent segregation (Apartheid by any other name) ?
No regeneration, not exactly...
You know, some people get in their old age a glandiary deficiency and they start having growth hormones again. What happens is that some parts of their body, especially nose and ears start to grow again...
The difference in log between 80 W and 70 W is only -0.5 dB (10*log(70/80)). Using -2 dB limits your power to about 50 W, using -20 dB limits your power to 0.8 W.
Since books are cheaper, it is easier to produce good science-fiction stories than good science-fiction series or movies.
Movies/series tend to be a) popular, in which case the real SF aspects of it are underplayed and they are a little bit of a disappointment to the real SF fan, or b) the SF is good, but in that case it loses most of its appeal to the general public, and they tend to be cancelled.
Also, movies derived from books tend to have the same problems as above. The most notable exception is probably '2001: A space oddysey' as the film and the book where done in cooperation by Kubrik and Clarke.
The problem with movies and series is to display the underlaying logic of the SF theme. When one reads a good SF book, the logic is consistent and follows from details that are written and emphasised in the book, but which you can almost not do in a screenplay. Sometimes the creators of the screenplay make one of the characters explain the logic, but this is very difficult and tends to mostly end up being pedantic.
All of this said, I think that the one series that mostly stands out for me as a science-fiction series, is the original Star Trek, mostly because a whole lot of stories where created by real SF writers.
Another series, more recent, I like as SF, is 'Sliders'. While the special effects where sometimes below par, it introduced the non-SF knowledged to the concept of parallel universes and had a whole lot of nice ideas worked into it. My wife liked it, and she is not an SF fan.
I can't say much about movies. I've seen most of the classics mentioned here, but I think that most movies are not really capable of being 'hard' science-fiction. They tend to become adventure movies with much special effects and/or violence. I find that among the exceptions are '2001', and an old classic 'The Forbidden Planet'.
In addition to that, and to be consistent, I probably should also classify the Star Trek movies as real SF movies, but I haven't seen one of them. However, one of my favorite writers, Alan Dean Foster (Blood Hype/The Middle World), has worked on these, so they should probably be OK (or did he just enscript the book from the movies ?).
I like the first Star Wars series, but it is probably more a fairy tale with SF elements.
In short, I like the books more, probably also it stimulates the imagination more than a movie.