You are absolutely right. No one with serious OS knowledge would say Linux is inferior to Solaris. I use both at work and push as hard as I may to give Solaris the boot in favor of Linux. The antiquity of the hardware is one issue (I'd rather have a cluster of multi-proc Opterons (which, I realize, Sun makes) over one big Sun sparc box any day - when you look at the amount of processing I can do per $ there is NO comparison). The other is the fact that the Linux distros - I prefer SuSE at work, Debian at home - come with far more capable software. What good is Solaris 9 to me if I need to patch every single piece of software with the GNU or other equivalent out of sunfreeware.org, when I can get the same software out of the box with SuSE and have it supported?
I've been drinking quite a bit of wine tonight - so I hope I haven't made a fool of myself.:) No offense intended, but use the best OS that meets your needs and for me, that's Linux over Solaris any day.
I've looked everywhere for it on Sun's java site. The only downloads I can find to Java3D 1.3.1 are for Solaris and Windows. You don't have a link to the Linux and OSX versions, do you?
I switched my 3d development over to Pygame/PyOpenGL a bit ago which I've been happy with so far (but then I like Python more than Java:) ), but this might be a nice option too if it really does end up getting opensourced.
I don't know if Canon makes one, but Nikon has a portable hard-drive device with a nice color LCD that can hold many gigs of images and let you preview them. One problem may be that the various RAW formats (Nikon's is called NEF) is incompatible between manufactures and even between cameras! (It's closely tied to the CCD or CMOS sensor used, from what I understand.) Anyway, for the previewing capability alone, something like this would be tremendous for someone that takes this quantity of pictures (though I'm guessing the author overstates exactly how much is being shot - my 6MP Nikon d70 could put at least 352 raw pictures in 4GB of flash, and I'd have a hell of a time shooting that many in 15 minutes (unless she was really cute)).
I agree with you that java is successful without needing to be opensourced, but I can see some benefits to doing so. Like getting Sun's nicely optimized and jitted VM running on other platforms (like my Linux/PPC iBook) and getting some of the APIs like the Java 3d API available on platforms besides windows and solaris, which is all it was available for last time I looked.
That's about the framerate I got when tribes 2 first came out. Hopefully you drove into things less often than I was. (And hopefully people weren't shooting at you quite as often.)
The differences between an 'average' male face and an 'average' female face are less than the possible differences between two female faces or two male faces. There are lots of hints that a person takes into account when trying to determine what sex a person is, and very often it's things like fashion hints, posture and speech that we rely on. I'd be interested to see if a program based purely on static image recognition could do a very good job of guessing. Particularly if some of the typical hints were ruled out - hair length, facial hair, jewelry and makeup. The secondary sex characteristics that are built into the face that are considered more masculine are a heavier jaw-line, more prominent cheek bones and eyebrow ridges. But as I said before there's more variation in those features among women then there would be among an average woman and an average man.
Interesting question you bring up.
I live in Northeast Ohio and my power supplier is First Energy so it's a rare day when I even have power, but when I do I'm sure the frequency is much closer to 1[NO CARRIER]
Thinking of the NASA DSN as a LAN type network like I'm used to, makes me wonder if they take into account someone attacking it. How hard would it be for someone to broadcast messages to reach and try to take over the rovers? Something tells me that the communications aren't encrypted or authenticated. Are the frequencies and protocols publically available?
If someone did manage to DoS or somehow log in to the rover and damage the software it could be the most damaging single-target attack (dollar wise - at over $400 million per rover) of all time. I think that's kind of scary.
Thanks for the reply - I certainly hope you don't think my query was a "flame" - I didn't intend it that way. I was curious to find out your reasoning, because even though I've never had problems finding work, I do know that my resume gets summarily discarded from about 5% of the desks it lands on. That could be the degree, or it could be that they don't like people with 10 character last names.
I was also intrigued by your post because you stated that the best way to learn programming is by picking up a "learn in 21 days" book and then went on to say you only hire programmers with degrees. That seemed a bit inconsistent, but I understand the difficulties of finding the needle in the haystack. You clearly understand the risk you run using the elimination criteria you use. Thanks again for the answer.
Being a relatively successful coder without a degree, I'm curious as to what skills related to programming are taught in college that you find are lacking from a programmer without that education? In my experience, if you were to graph programmers by their skills the curve for college education programmers would be pretty much identical to the not college educated curve.
Do you give points if a person is at least still working on their degree (I'm about 100 credits into a BS/Math)? What if the degree's not CS? I think college teaches you how to learn, not how to program. Once you know how to learn and how to investigate problems, you then have the tools to be a good programmer. Again, my experience is no doubt different than yours.
Epic said they would switch to a 64 bit platform if one were available to them last year as Unreal Tournament 2k3 was about to come out. Not just for the developers, but the map makers were dying with being limited to the amount of RAM a 32 bit system allows. I guess you could argue that content creators are a specific type of developer.
I for one can't afford the amount of RAM that an A64 system would technically allow me to have. And I have to admit that 512 MB seems to do me fine. Ah the price of progress.:)
Heh - typically no, I haven't had that problem. But that would be an issue on *any* gcc platform, wouldn't it? I know during my try at being an OSX user I saw several versions of gcc for OSX come and go, and some of the things I tried to compile from the OSS world simply wouldn't work with the gcc I currently had on my iBook. It seemed like gcc was much more of a moving target on OSX than on any of the Linuxes that I use.
I bought an iBook last year and OSX lasted about a month on it. I like how in Linux all my development tools "just work" and I don't need to futz with gcc and libraries and maybe run X and maybe not to get my tools to work. I guess it's all in what you expect for your user experience, isn't it?
As for installing Linux, YellowDog was incredibly easy to get running, and all the hardware, suspend mode, airport card, even keyboard buttons for brightness, sound and cdrom eject work perfectly without fiddling. I also think that Linux works much faster in the limited (256mb) RAM I have and relatively slow (600mhz G3) processor. It feels much more sprightly than OSX ever did, even with all the eye-candy turned off.
This is off the topic of your comment, and probably off the topic on the whole, but I don't get why people say Linux has a long way to go on the desktop. I really enjoy using gnome 2.4. Everything is easy to find and manipulate. It's a nice balance of being light and fast without being difficult to configure or use. People say, "the typical user wants to plug in their digital camera or mp3 player and have it work!" - well mine do and I hardly did anything special for that to happen. It's got all the apps I need for common office work - it's got games - it's got nice e-mail and web programs, and most importantly for me it's a fantastic environment to do development in. I honestly don't get what people are complaining about.
I was a nerd just to be sufficiently counter-culture. Does this mean I have to be a goth now? God, I hope not. At least it's better than being a furry.
Actually the fact that I don't watch TV and I like classical music makes me freaky enough for most people. Parents already grab their children and pull them away from me in fear. At least I think that's why they do that.
I was on the fedora web site today. They do not appear to actually have a release. So I take it this is how it works, or at least works in theory on the test release? How established is their update network? And is this built into the distro or something you need to add on and configure?
I always had problems connecting and downloading the updates with Redhat, Mandrake and SuSE - particularly just after urgent updates were released. That hasn't been an issue with Debian since I switched.
Believe me, I'm not a Debian biggot, but I definitely think I found a good thing. When I find something that works better for me I'll be all over that. I haven't done slackware since it fit (easily) on floppies. Maybe I'll give that a whirl next.:)
Don't fear the Debian - I'm a recent convert myself. It can be a bit more challenging to install (it was a beast on my iBook to get working) but on a server you wouldn't necessarily bother with the more complex pieces like X. And nothing beats maintaining a Debian server:
No, wait... Are you trying to tell me that pissing off your customers isn't a good business model? Please explain to me the rationale behind this statement of yours, I don't understand.
I think so, because there is no oversight on the process. It doesn't sound like the FBI needs to ask a judge to invoke this portion of the patriot act. Essentially, they could to go anyone they want and say give us what we want and don't tell anyone or else.
If I understand how a gag order would work is that someone involved in the proceedings (like the prosecutor) would ask the judge to impose a gag order, or the judge could do so to protect witnesses and the like.
Lots of other people have mentioned this, but the article clearly states that the reporters are being threatened with legal action should they tell anyone (even their lawyers) that this information has been requested from them.
This "say anything and we'll take you down too" attitude is the cause of the first amendment furor.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been drinking quite a bit of wine tonight - so I hope I haven't made a fool of myself. :) No offense intended, but use the best OS that meets your needs and for me, that's Linux over Solaris any day.
I switched my 3d development over to Pygame/PyOpenGL a bit ago which I've been happy with so far (but then I like Python more than Java :) ), but this might be a nice option too if it really does end up getting opensourced.
I don't know if Canon makes one, but Nikon has a portable hard-drive device with a nice color LCD that can hold many gigs of images and let you preview them. One problem may be that the various RAW formats (Nikon's is called NEF) is incompatible between manufactures and even between cameras! (It's closely tied to the CCD or CMOS sensor used, from what I understand.) Anyway, for the previewing capability alone, something like this would be tremendous for someone that takes this quantity of pictures (though I'm guessing the author overstates exactly how much is being shot - my 6MP Nikon d70 could put at least 352 raw pictures in 4GB of flash, and I'd have a hell of a time shooting that many in 15 minutes (unless she was really cute)).
Wow - media ready mammaries! Reminds me of a certain Playstation 2 Accessory. (Sorry - no link right to Ping...)
I agree with you that java is successful without needing to be opensourced, but I can see some benefits to doing so. Like getting Sun's nicely optimized and jitted VM running on other platforms (like my Linux/PPC iBook) and getting some of the APIs like the Java 3d API available on platforms besides windows and solaris, which is all it was available for last time I looked.
That's about the framerate I got when tribes 2 first came out. Hopefully you drove into things less often than I was. (And hopefully people weren't shooting at you quite as often.)
You must be very tiny.
I for one would like to welcome our new Pantopian overlords.
The differences between an 'average' male face and an 'average' female face are less than the possible differences between two female faces or two male faces. There are lots of hints that a person takes into account when trying to determine what sex a person is, and very often it's things like fashion hints, posture and speech that we rely on. I'd be interested to see if a program based purely on static image recognition could do a very good job of guessing. Particularly if some of the typical hints were ruled out - hair length, facial hair, jewelry and makeup. The secondary sex characteristics that are built into the face that are considered more masculine are a heavier jaw-line, more prominent cheek bones and eyebrow ridges. But as I said before there's more variation in those features among women then there would be among an average woman and an average man. Interesting question you bring up.
Most women would do well to avoid the geeky looking guy holding a mirror.
I live in Northeast Ohio and my power supplier is First Energy so it's a rare day when I even have power, but when I do I'm sure the frequency is much closer to 1[NO CARRIER]
Me too. And oddly enough my christian friends who took the movie far too seriously even chuckly when I call it that.
If someone did manage to DoS or somehow log in to the rover and damage the software it could be the most damaging single-target attack (dollar wise - at over $400 million per rover) of all time. I think that's kind of scary.
I was also intrigued by your post because you stated that the best way to learn programming is by picking up a "learn in 21 days" book and then went on to say you only hire programmers with degrees. That seemed a bit inconsistent, but I understand the difficulties of finding the needle in the haystack. You clearly understand the risk you run using the elimination criteria you use. Thanks again for the answer.
Do you give points if a person is at least still working on their degree (I'm about 100 credits into a BS/Math)? What if the degree's not CS? I think college teaches you how to learn, not how to program. Once you know how to learn and how to investigate problems, you then have the tools to be a good programmer. Again, my experience is no doubt different than yours.
I for one can't afford the amount of RAM that an A64 system would technically allow me to have. And I have to admit that 512 MB seems to do me fine. Ah the price of progress. :)
Heh - typically no, I haven't had that problem. But that would be an issue on *any* gcc platform, wouldn't it? I know during my try at being an OSX user I saw several versions of gcc for OSX come and go, and some of the things I tried to compile from the OSS world simply wouldn't work with the gcc I currently had on my iBook. It seemed like gcc was much more of a moving target on OSX than on any of the Linuxes that I use.
As for installing Linux, YellowDog was incredibly easy to get running, and all the hardware, suspend mode, airport card, even keyboard buttons for brightness, sound and cdrom eject work perfectly without fiddling. I also think that Linux works much faster in the limited (256mb) RAM I have and relatively slow (600mhz G3) processor. It feels much more sprightly than OSX ever did, even with all the eye-candy turned off.
This is off the topic of your comment, and probably off the topic on the whole, but I don't get why people say Linux has a long way to go on the desktop. I really enjoy using gnome 2.4. Everything is easy to find and manipulate. It's a nice balance of being light and fast without being difficult to configure or use. People say, "the typical user wants to plug in their digital camera or mp3 player and have it work!" - well mine do and I hardly did anything special for that to happen. It's got all the apps I need for common office work - it's got games - it's got nice e-mail and web programs, and most importantly for me it's a fantastic environment to do development in. I honestly don't get what people are complaining about.
Oh, you proved I really am a nerd - I never even thought about getting laid.
Actually the fact that I don't watch TV and I like classical music makes me freaky enough for most people. Parents already grab their children and pull them away from me in fear. At least I think that's why they do that.
I always had problems connecting and downloading the updates with Redhat, Mandrake and SuSE - particularly just after urgent updates were released. That hasn't been an issue with Debian since I switched.
Believe me, I'm not a Debian biggot, but I definitely think I found a good thing. When I find something that works better for me I'll be all over that. I haven't done slackware since it fit (easily) on floppies. Maybe I'll give that a whirl next. :)
I really haven't missed Redhat.
Thanks,
Darl McBride
I think so, because there is no oversight on the process. It doesn't sound like the FBI needs to ask a judge to invoke this portion of the patriot act. Essentially, they could to go anyone they want and say give us what we want and don't tell anyone or else.
If I understand how a gag order would work is that someone involved in the proceedings (like the prosecutor) would ask the judge to impose a gag order, or the judge could do so to protect witnesses and the like.
Of course my understanding could be off.
Lots of other people have mentioned this, but the article clearly states that the reporters are being threatened with legal action should they tell anyone (even their lawyers) that this information has been requested from them.
This "say anything and we'll take you down too" attitude is the cause of the first amendment furor.