I gave Alpha a miss (watching the videos is free), but signed up on the original kickstarter for a level of "all future expansions included" and pretty much got to Beta level. When new console games are basically 50 quid, I figured this was worth the risk of 100 quid... YMMV, and the game should be out this year for a more normal price.
Yeah, but like I said, for this, I'll dual boot windows for the first time in 15 years or so. In other news, installing windows blows, and windows 8/8.1 ?? At least I won't be tempted to stay in Windows any longer than needed to play the game...
Have you seen the new Elite from David Braben? It's in Alpha at the moment (testing of limited scenarios), Beta is expected after another 2 Alpha rounds (6-8 weeks?) and a launch later this year.
Videos etc of real gameplay are up on the site. Personally, it's enough that I've actually bought and installed Windows for the first time in 15 years...
Well I have direct first hand experience of a situation where it was not that we "couldn't use open source software", but we had been given massive discounts on tens of thousands of (enterprise server) licenses on the condition that certain key named internal software projects were developed solely on Windows - any attempt to even investigate porting any of these products to a non-Windows platform would breach the contract and thus incur the full cost of all those licenses for the entire license period.
We were allowed to use other compilers, and certain other technologies, but the point was that we had secured a huge cost savings based on our continued commitment to the Windows platform.
And this part of the commitment to Windows wasn't widely known within the organisation until, well, somebody nearly commissioned what would have been a very costly pilot to explore saving a few hundred thousand dollars...
No, I can't name names, but I have more than 25 years and I don't need to make up BS...
That's why they tend to use timers as well as sensors. But when red-light were first introduced (and the film was itself very expensive) I seem to remember a load of Melbourne Uni students found one such intersection and spent a quiet evening all standing in the middle "mooning" the camera, while a few of their mates swung stainless buckets filled with nuts and bolts etc low over the sensors, so providing the police with a huge number of very expensive photos to process...
Few signals work based purely on the road sensor, most use timing cycles with input from the road sensors (eg they might adapt their cycle length dynamically depending on how whether cars are queued up at a red and the "green" direction seems to have no cars passing through, or only include a "green arrow" filter when there are actually cars queued up for it) - in fact one of my comp sci projects at Melb Uni was to design a system to do precisely this.
In the late 80's, Melbourne traffic planners tried 2 different high profile schemes (on Maroondah Highway and Canterbury Rd I think) - the first was smart and dynamic sync'ing of the lights depending on actual traffic flows so they'd try to identify a dominant block of traffic (eg rush hour in or out of the City) moving at a certain speed and ensure they caught as many consecutive green lights as possible, adjusting the duration of individual cycles to suit. The other scheme (on a largely parallel road) instead had the lights on a linked but less dynamic timing arrangement (eg there were still "rush hour out of the city" patterns etc but the cycles weren't individually adjusted), but in this case large illuminated signs over the road told you the speed to drive at to catch a green light at the next junction.
Of course both systems have their failings, and I take it the first is now the more common solution, but the latter was an interesting experiment (even if lots of people ignored it, on the basis of the joke about "I don't have to run faster than a lion, I just have to run faster than you").
(hit the button to request a pre-launch invite and then ping me on twitter or similar to identify yourself)
It's free and runs in the browser without plugins (but you can export your data locally, an offline mode is fairly straightforward, just not a high priority at this point) - it's aimed more at when you move your files onto the web for storage, but it can handle local files within browser sandbox limitations.
It mixes note-taking, bookmarking, annotation and tagging, reminders, and notifications, but then also features smart integration with other sources, so it knows about things like wikipedia and twitter and actively integrates with such sources via plugins (I'm toying with the idea of a Mendeley plugin).
The aim is not so much to replace lots of other services, but to sit on top of them and give you a smart integration layer, so rather than building a static "bucket" as a repository, you can build something that is more active, and lets you get on with what you need to do with your resources rather than constantly going back and checking them.
And I'm UK based so you may find some of the spellings familiar ("organise"!!)
With the right viewer or editor anything qualifies as human readable. Even ASCII requires a viewer to be read by humans.
This generation - don't know they're born etc etc:)
If you can't spot ASCII text strings in a hex dump then you're a tourist - nothing wrong with that, but don't believe that the natives don't understand the local lingo just because it sounds like gibberish to you.
I can install BASH on a Windows machine and open a full screen terminal, does that make Windows Unix too?
Sure, its got a kernel that started out as a Unix variant, but its heavily modified.
The real question is whether its Posix compliant.
No, the question is not POSIX compliance, the question is the unix philosophy.
Any idiot can emulate some system calls (as Windows Posix shell proudly does), the real question is whether you understood the real point of unix
- is everything a file, for elegance, for ease-of-use, for consistanecy, for lack of special case hacks ?
- do you have a small set of tools that do one thing, and apply to everything (because everything's a file) ?
- can you easily compose such small tools because, at a base level, the way you lauch a new process is a fork style mechanism (whereby a new process inherits file handles etc) ?
- are all the API's humane (to nick Jeff Raskin's term) - can system calls be interrupted or are system calls considered strangely privileged and all non-kernel code are undeserving scum ?
Windows is so far from being a unix it's laughable to anybody except PHB's (and "developers" who've never worked for PHB's) - and implementing a few stupid POSIX APIs isn't going to make any difference to that.
Whereas the entire "BSD vs Unix" thing I've always thought was pretty fake, BSD is Unix, Linux is Unix, SunOs and Solaris are Unix, I'd pick any of them over a POS like the DOS/Win16/Win32 brain-dead systems I've had to endure for 20 years...
The amount of compression they apply to do this may not be noticeable on portable radios, car radios, and mini hifis and the like, but I know that I can't play the Oasis album "What's the story (Morning Glory)" on my main hifi as the compression sounds just too strange when played thru a proper amplifier and set of speakers.
Explains why people listen to awful demos in department stores (those horrible tinny Bose cube things with terrible hissy fizzy treble and booming vague bass) and think they sound good simply because it's turned up loud for the midrange.
And no, I don't have "exotic cables", just quality speakers and a hefty power amp with plenty of headroom to spare.
For those who, like me, had heard of dtrace but little more (is it like strace, for example), this is very handy article written by one of the authors in Communications of The ACM
Yeah,it's 5 pages long, so those won't RTFA are even less likely to read this, but it's a good read covering motivation, history, solution compromises and some anecdotes that could qualify for http://thedailywtf.com/
ClearCase: IMHO, CC is not necessary unless you've got a project with a very large team and an extremely large code base (I'm thinking 1 million SLOC and up...)
I'm working on a project of around 2.5 million lines of code with about 100 developers, and unfortunately Clearcase (which is what we're stuck with) is nowhere near up to the job - the merge tools die on merging large files, the reporting tools fall apart when the revision counts for a file get into the thousands, and the whole thing is so slow to do almost anything that we waste hours waiting for it and end up working around it - global use is, in particular, beyond a joke.
Clearcase may have been good 15 years or so ago, but nowadays it's just overpriced rubbish, and it seems to have been abandoned by the current owners... I'd ditch it for perforce or something else a little newer and faster at the drop of a hat...
Runs qpsmtpd (spamassassin, clamd etc.) to host my email, bincimap to serve it up, samba for the storage for Windows machines, etc.
Sits behind a hardware firewall so it doesn't do firewall duty, but it runs SSH and I connect several sessions to it from work (get round the nanny proxy server).
Runs Gentoo nicely with 80Mb RAM and a 6Gb drive. I've run X and even KDE on it, but mostly it's just a server, so runs console mode only most of the time.
Oh, and it has no fans (the hard drive is the loudest component) and only draws 8 watts according to my meter - makes Mini-ITX systems look powerful but power hungry.
One thing if you're going to use old laptops for servers - check the cooling vents, they weren't always intended for 24x7 operation - I removed half the casing from mine...
you're installing what is essentially a platform development kit, including not just the compiler, but every symbol file for the platform, the industry leading programming environment and a few other things
Bwah-ha-ha-ha... you guys kill me... every time...
15 minutes to open my project cos "it's too big", continual crashes of VS, cos the project is "too big", no debug info other than line numbers cos it's too big, no browse info cos it's too big... show me a version of visual studio that does 10% of what emacs does and I'll slap down the cash for the convenience of a debugger, but until then the "evangelists" Microsoft keep sending around can continue to kiss my butt.
Last excuse they gave for the crashes (after a week's careful analysis by 'the expert' from Microsoft) - "your pathnames are too long, can't you try to keep all absolute filenames below 256 characters" - ha ha ha ha ha..... tell me when did you last hear that excuse from another development system vendor ??
I've spent the last 10+ years building teams of people who understand the basics and the fundamentals enough that they can learn any technology in a few days.
And dismissing all those people who may know the latest technology but don't understand it, or know how it compares to what went before (or what will come after).
I get hundreds of CV's from people like Dan, and they all go in the bin - they know something today, but in 12 months they'll be behind the curve without the ability to even know where they are, never mind the self-knowledge to know where to go next.
So ask yourself, do you want just one job, or a career ?
Somehow I think that the last thing that I want to do is compile every damn thing from scratch on a 500MHz UltraSPARC IIe processor
Really ?? I did a stage 1 install on my old Pentium 233MX laptop and it went OK, i Just came back to it a day or so later (without X, admittedly) and that's my home server fully built. I did add X later on, but if you think it takes too long to build KDE on your hardware, then you're probably not going to like the way it runs on there either.
You could always try the emerge distcc support if you have more machines available.
So I normally prefer to use emacs as my IDE, especially for anything complex, but for those times when I need to use Visual Studio I've been getting a little bored with the standard tools so hacked together an add-in (not just the tools or macros, but the proper add-in mechanism) framework entirely in perl... suddenly I can knock up simple reg-exp based editor tools and I don't need to descend to some crappy VB/C# level coding to do so...
But has anyone noticed what a complete mess the Visual Studio add-in API is ? A hybrid mixture of DLL export functions and nearly-COM like objects... very 1993... I think it must count as the biggest hack in Visual Studio.
Perl has multiple OO options ranging from "none whatsover" to "just a bit" to a whole lot more... which one were you talking about, or were you confusing a wealth of options with a single narrow minded single purpose.
No one is gonna code something in an interpreted language for what they would use a compiled language for.
No one ? Well as a pracitcing C++ person since 1990, I tend to use perl... sometimes... when it's appropriate (which is rather often, thank you). Bang goes that argument.
You're full of it!
Hmmmm... cough...
Note I don't tell you what you will and won't do, please return the favour and don't try and tell the world what I will or won't do.
I've never seen 'friend' used other than as a bodge to hide the fact that the original design was botched.
I suggest you read Jiri's Soukup's book "Taming C++" for a very good use of friend - and the only decent use of patterns that I've every seen (spoiler: he has classes that implement a pattern by name but contain no data, and these are friends of the classes that comprise the pattern but in turn these classes are independent of each other and are mostly structs but with all private data memebers. This keeps the pattern explicitly in the code [patterns usually exist in the design docs but mysteriously evaporate away by the time the code gets written] and decouples the data classes from each other to make proper unit testing and re-use possible).
Don't knock something just 'cos you don't use it -I think exceptions are an abomination and an easy excuse for every weak programmer around, but I wouldn't deny their use to other projects.
Maybe an ultralite install on a craptop would cut it. I just hope it will handle the fonky pcmcia nics I have
This is running an old 3com PCMCIA 10/100 NIC without problems (modules pcmcia_core and 3c59x) - the only real problem was that this latop (Acer 312T) has an external PCMCIA CD-ROM and can't boot from it, so getting gentoo on in the first place was a little tricky, but the gentoo installation instructions covered this.
Old laptops make excellent low-use servers (especially if you disconnect the switch that detects when you close the lid so you can hide them away without suspending them) - if this one gives out I'll just hunt round for the cheapest old laptop I can find with a CD-ROM drive and rebuild on that...
can it be installed on a PIII with 256mb ram and an 8gb hdd?
I'm running gentoo on an old 233 pentium MMX laptop with 80Mb RAM and a 6Gg hard disk (of which 1.5 gb is stil an old windows partition) - it's my home server including my main mail server (built in UPS, only draws about 10 watts, small and quite quiet etc.) and it's running fine.
I rarely run up X on it, I admit, but I've got X installed (so if need be I can run up apps to display on my main machine) and it's happily running qmail (qpsmtpd,spamassassin, clamav,pyzor, razor,dcc etc.), ssh and other "home server" apps, and it doesn't need much room:
I could probably trim this further, but it's fine for me. I have a weekly cron job to "emerge --sync" and "emerge -Dupv world", and I'm thinking of adding "emerge -Du --fetch-only world". Updates compile a little slowly at times, but then I don't have much installed to update, and I could always add a cron job to do the updates too.
I do believe I said: And if anyone is going to point out that regedit/regedt32 etc HAS got a "find" function, or "I could write one myself" then I think they've missed the fundamental point I'm making. which means that, before you wrote your first point, I'd already discounted it. Does grep or any other standard tool work on the registry ? No...
"A bunch of lies" - yeah, that's right, I have nothing better to do with my time than invent some lies - look how inventive I am.
I'm intrigued by your allegation that Windows won't load if some sections get too big though... I used Win98 for years
When you've finished home computing try the world of business, have you heard of NT, Win2000, XP perhaps ??
One single p'n'p driver error writes too much data to the registry and windows itself cannot boot even to the stage of being able to recover the registry (and yes, I've had this happen to me, 3 times with commercial drivers) - "real world" file systems have external recovery tools, where's the equivalent for the registry ?
So of course it's going to look bad if you're ignorant of most of its features.
Ho ho ho... so are you in fact Jeffrey Richter Mr A/C ? Or are you Mark Russinovich ? Or who ? Yeah, you tell me what M to RTF and me, I'll just take my years of experience of programming Windows (I started using it at 1.0, but didn't start programming it until v2.0 - how about you) and I'll shove it up my arse, clearly I am in presence of greatness.
I really love the registry on Windows. It's fast, flexible, and Microsoft have allready defined a standard by their included programs, and Office. I hope Linux sooner or later would like to use this stunning registry-database.
ROFL
Can I grep the registry ? No... Can I add comments to registry entries (such as "what the previous setting was" ? No... Can I easily backup a small part of my registry, while keeping it commented and grep-able, to try something and restore it later (or copy settings to another machine) ? No... Can I set easily set and review access permissions to permit no-access/read-only access to selected parts for selected users ? No... (I know I can set ACL's but where's my simple ability to review this alongside the permissions of other system components like.. say.. the file system). Will Windows refuse to load if certain parts of the regsitry get too big ? Yes.. Does the registry keep seperate sections that hold user intent, system defaults, and dynamic information such as plug and play info ? No...
And if anyone is going to point out that regedit/regedt32 etc HAS got a "find" function, or "I could write one myself" then I think they've missed the fundamental point I'm making.
The registry has been "useful" for one thing only - the god awful mess that is the admin of COM classes, but I'm betting if there wasn't such a horrible nasty pokey little hole of filth hidden away from most users, the authors of COM would have had to come up with something just ever so slightly tidier, less fragile and more tolerant of change.
I hope the registry dies a quick and painful death, real soon now.
Slashdot Mirror
I gave Alpha a miss (watching the videos is free), but signed up on the original kickstarter for a level of "all future expansions included" and pretty much got to Beta level.
When new console games are basically 50 quid, I figured this was worth the risk of 100 quid... YMMV, and the game should be out this year for a more normal price.
Yeah, but like I said, for this, I'll dual boot windows for the first time in 15 years or so.
In other news, installing windows blows, and windows 8/8.1 ??
At least I won't be tempted to stay in Windows any longer than needed to play the game...
Have you seen the new Elite from David Braben?
It's in Alpha at the moment (testing of limited scenarios), Beta is expected after another 2 Alpha rounds (6-8 weeks?) and a launch later this year.
http://elite.frontier.co.uk/
Videos etc of real gameplay are up on the site.
Personally, it's enough that I've actually bought and installed Windows for the first time in 15 years...
Well I have direct first hand experience of a situation where it was not that we "couldn't use open source software", but we had been given massive discounts on tens of thousands of (enterprise server) licenses on the condition that certain key named internal software projects were developed solely on Windows - any attempt to even investigate porting any of these products to a non-Windows platform would breach the contract and thus incur the full cost of all those licenses for the entire license period.
We were allowed to use other compilers, and certain other technologies, but the point was that we had secured a huge cost savings based on our continued commitment to the Windows platform.
And this part of the commitment to Windows wasn't widely known within the organisation until, well, somebody nearly commissioned what would have been a very costly pilot to explore saving a few hundred thousand dollars...
No, I can't name names, but I have more than 25 years and I don't need to make up BS...
That's why they tend to use timers as well as sensors.
But when red-light were first introduced (and the film was itself very expensive) I seem to remember a load of Melbourne Uni students found one such intersection and spent a quiet evening all standing in the middle "mooning" the camera, while a few of their mates swung stainless buckets filled with nuts and bolts etc low over the sensors, so providing the police with a huge number of very expensive photos to process...
Few signals work based purely on the road sensor, most use timing cycles with input from the road sensors (eg they might adapt their cycle length dynamically depending on how whether cars are queued up at a red and the "green" direction seems to have no cars passing through, or only include a "green arrow" filter when there are actually cars queued up for it) - in fact one of my comp sci projects at Melb Uni was to design a system to do precisely this.
In the late 80's, Melbourne traffic planners tried 2 different high profile schemes (on Maroondah Highway and Canterbury Rd I think) - the first was smart and dynamic sync'ing of the lights depending on actual traffic flows so they'd try to identify a dominant block of traffic (eg rush hour in or out of the City) moving at a certain speed and ensure they caught as many consecutive green lights as possible, adjusting the duration of individual cycles to suit. The other scheme (on a largely parallel road) instead had the lights on a linked but less dynamic timing arrangement (eg there were still "rush hour out of the city" patterns etc but the cycles weren't individually adjusted), but in this case large illuminated signs over the road told you the speed to drive at to catch a green light at the next junction.
Of course both systems have their failings, and I take it the first is now the more common solution, but the latter was an interesting experiment (even if lots of people ignored it, on the basis of the joke about "I don't have to run faster than a lion, I just have to run faster than you").
If you're interested I can drop you an invitation code to
http://www.mysparebrain.com/
(hit the button to request a pre-launch invite and then ping me on twitter or similar to identify yourself)
It's free and runs in the browser without plugins (but you can export your data locally, an offline mode is fairly straightforward, just not a high priority at this point) - it's aimed more at when you move your files onto the web for storage, but it can handle local files within browser sandbox limitations.
It mixes note-taking, bookmarking, annotation and tagging, reminders, and notifications, but then also features smart integration with other sources, so it knows about things like wikipedia and twitter and actively integrates with such sources via plugins (I'm toying with the idea of a Mendeley plugin).
The aim is not so much to replace lots of other services, but to sit on top of them and give you a smart integration layer, so rather than building a static "bucket" as a repository, you can build something that is more active, and lets you get on with what you need to do with your resources rather than constantly going back and checking them.
And I'm UK based so you may find some of the spellings familiar ("organise"!!)
With the right viewer or editor anything qualifies as human readable. Even ASCII requires a viewer to be read by humans.
This generation - don't know they're born etc etc :)
If you can't spot ASCII text strings in a hex dump then you're a tourist - nothing wrong with that, but don't believe that the natives don't understand the local lingo just because it sounds like gibberish to you.
I can install BASH on a Windows machine and open a full screen terminal, does that make Windows Unix too?
Sure, its got a kernel that started out as a Unix variant, but its heavily modified.
The real question is whether its Posix compliant.
No, the question is not POSIX compliance, the question is the unix philosophy.
Any idiot can emulate some system calls (as Windows Posix shell proudly does), the real question is whether you understood the real point of unix
- is everything a file, for elegance, for ease-of-use, for consistanecy, for lack of special case hacks ?
- do you have a small set of tools that do one thing, and apply to everything (because everything's a file) ?
- can you easily compose such small tools because, at a base level, the way you lauch a new process is a fork style mechanism (whereby a new process inherits file handles etc) ?
- are all the API's humane (to nick Jeff Raskin's term) - can system calls be interrupted or are system calls considered strangely privileged and all non-kernel code are undeserving scum ?
Windows is so far from being a unix it's laughable to anybody except PHB's (and "developers" who've never worked for PHB's) - and implementing a few stupid POSIX APIs isn't going to make any difference to that.
Whereas the entire "BSD vs Unix" thing I've always thought was pretty fake, BSD is Unix, Linux is Unix, SunOs and Solaris are Unix, I'd pick any of them over a POS like the DOS/Win16/Win32 brain-dead systems I've had to endure for 20 years...
Guess I must have been about the same time then...
The weird thing is that I remember my user id number here even tho I've forgotten so many PIN numbers etc in the last few years.
The amount of compression they apply to do this may not be noticeable on portable radios, car radios, and mini hifis and the like, but I know that I can't play the Oasis album "What's the story (Morning Glory)" on my main hifi as the compression sounds just too strange when played thru a proper amplifier and set of speakers.
Explains why people listen to awful demos in department stores (those horrible tinny Bose cube things with terrible hissy fizzy treble and booming vague bass) and think they sound good simply because it's turned up loud for the midrange.
And no, I don't have "exotic cables", just quality speakers and a hefty power amp with plenty of headroom to spare.
Some of them are quite funny - reminds of the line on use on street charity harassers
Sorry, I don't speak English
If they continue I say
See, now you probably meant something by that, but because I don't speak English it just sounded like noise to me
If they try any other language ("parlez francais") I just stare them in the eye and repeat
Sorry, I really, honestly just do not speak English
Always make sure they give up first...
The above is stolen from a comedy sketch on "Big Train" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0sEHFeFsdE
For those who, like me, had heard of dtrace but little more (is it like strace, for example), this is very handy article written by one of the authors in Communications of The ACM
p a=showpage&pid=361&page=1
http://www.acmqueue.org/modules.php?name=Content&
Yeah,it's 5 pages long, so those won't RTFA are even less likely to read this, but it's a good read covering motivation, history, solution compromises and some anecdotes that could qualify for http://thedailywtf.com/
ClearCase: IMHO, CC is not necessary unless you've got a project with a very large team and an extremely large code base (I'm thinking 1 million SLOC and up...)
I'm working on a project of around 2.5 million lines of code with about 100 developers, and unfortunately Clearcase (which is what we're stuck with) is nowhere near up to the job - the merge tools die on merging large files, the reporting tools fall apart when the revision counts for a file get into the thousands, and the whole thing is so slow to do almost anything that we waste hours waiting for it and end up working around it - global use is, in particular, beyond a joke.
Clearcase may have been good 15 years or so ago, but nowadays it's just overpriced rubbish, and it seems to have been abandoned by the current owners... I'd ditch it for perforce or something else a little newer and faster at the drop of a hat...
Runs qpsmtpd (spamassassin, clamd etc.) to host my email, bincimap to serve it up, samba for the storage for Windows machines, etc.
...
Sits behind a hardware firewall so it doesn't do firewall duty, but it runs SSH and I connect several sessions to it from work (get round the nanny proxy server).
Runs Gentoo nicely with 80Mb RAM and a 6Gb drive. I've run X and even KDE on it, but mostly it's just a server, so runs console mode only most of the time.
Oh, and it has no fans (the hard drive is the loudest component) and only draws 8 watts according to my meter - makes Mini-ITX systems look powerful but power hungry.
One thing if you're going to use old laptops for servers - check the cooling vents, they weren't always intended for 24x7 operation - I removed half the casing from mine
you're installing what is essentially a platform development kit, including not just the compiler,
... you guys kill me ... every time...
but every symbol file for the platform, the industry leading programming environment and a few other things
Bwah-ha-ha-ha
15 minutes to open my project cos "it's too big", continual crashes of VS, cos the project is "too big", no debug info other than line numbers cos it's too big, no browse info cos it's too big... show me a version of visual studio that does 10% of what emacs does and I'll slap down the cash for the convenience of a debugger, but until then the "evangelists" Microsoft keep sending around can continue to kiss my butt.
Last excuse they gave for the crashes (after a week's careful analysis by 'the expert' from Microsoft) - "your pathnames are too long, can't you try to keep all absolute filenames below 256 characters" - ha ha ha ha ha..... tell me when did you last hear that excuse from another development system vendor ??
I've spent the last 10+ years building teams of people who understand the basics and the fundamentals enough that they can learn any technology in a few days.
And dismissing all those people who may know the latest technology but don't understand it, or know how it compares to what went before (or what will come after).
I get hundreds of CV's from people like Dan, and they all go in the bin - they know something today, but in 12 months they'll be behind the curve without the ability to even know where they are, never mind the self-knowledge to know where to go next.
So ask yourself, do you want just one job, or a career ?
Somehow I think that the last thing that I want to do is compile every damn thing from scratch on a 500MHz UltraSPARC IIe processor
Really ?? I did a stage 1 install on my old Pentium 233MX laptop and it went OK, i Just came back to it a day or so later (without X, admittedly) and that's my home server fully built. I did add X later on, but if you think it takes too long to build KDE on your hardware, then you're probably not going to like the way it runs on there either.
You could always try the emerge distcc support if you have more machines available.
So I normally prefer to use emacs as my IDE, especially for anything complex, but for those times when I need to use Visual Studio I've been getting a little bored with the standard tools so hacked together an add-in (not just the tools or macros, but the proper add-in mechanism) framework entirely in perl... suddenly I can knock up simple reg-exp based editor tools and I don't need to descend to some crappy VB/C# level coding to do so...
But has anyone noticed what a complete mess the Visual Studio add-in API is ? A hybrid mixture of DLL export functions and nearly-COM like objects... very 1993... I think it must count as the biggest hack in Visual Studio.
This must be a troll.
... cough ...
Yeah it must.
Perl has an atrocious OO implementation.
Perl has multiple OO options ranging from "none whatsover" to "just a bit" to a whole lot more... which one were you talking about, or were you confusing a wealth of options with a single narrow minded single purpose.
No one is gonna code something in an interpreted language for what they would use a compiled language for.
No one ? Well as a pracitcing C++ person since 1990, I tend to use perl... sometimes... when it's appropriate (which is rather often, thank you).
Bang goes that argument.
You're full of it!
Hmmmm
Note I don't tell you what you will and won't do, please return the favour and don't try and tell the world what I will or won't do.
I've never seen 'friend' used other than as a bodge to hide the fact that the original design was botched.
I suggest you read Jiri's Soukup's book "Taming C++" for a very good use of friend - and the only decent use of patterns that I've every seen (spoiler: he has classes that implement a pattern by name but contain no data, and these are friends of the classes that comprise the pattern but in turn these classes are independent of each other and are mostly structs but with all private data memebers. This keeps the pattern explicitly in the code [patterns usually exist in the design docs but mysteriously evaporate away by the time the code gets written] and decouples the data classes from each other to make proper unit testing and re-use possible).
Don't knock something just 'cos you don't use it -I think exceptions are an abomination and an easy excuse for every weak programmer around, but I wouldn't deny their use to other projects.
Maybe an ultralite install on a craptop would cut it. I just hope it will handle the fonky pcmcia nics I have
This is running an old 3com PCMCIA 10/100 NIC without problems (modules pcmcia_core and 3c59x) - the only real problem was that this latop (Acer 312T) has an external PCMCIA CD-ROM and can't boot from it, so getting gentoo on in the first place was a little tricky, but the gentoo installation instructions covered this.
Old laptops make excellent low-use servers (especially if you disconnect the switch that detects when you close the lid so you can hide them away without suspending them) - if this one gives out I'll just hunt round for the cheapest old laptop I can find with a CD-ROM drive and rebuild on that...
Have fun
--
T
can it be installed on a PIII with 256mb ram and an 8gb hdd?
/dev/hda6 2.9G 1.8G 1019M 64% /
/dev/hda5 17M 8.7M 7.5M 54% /boot
/dev/hda7 1.1G 560M 529M 52% /usr/portage
I'm running gentoo on an old 233 pentium MMX laptop with 80Mb RAM and a 6Gg hard disk (of which 1.5 gb is stil an old windows partition) - it's my home server including my main mail server (built in UPS, only draws about 10 watts, small and quite quiet etc.) and it's running fine.
I rarely run up X on it, I admit, but I've got X installed (so if need be I can run up apps to display on my main machine) and it's happily running qmail (qpsmtpd,spamassassin, clamav,pyzor, razor,dcc etc.), ssh and other "home server" apps, and it doesn't need much room:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
I could probably trim this further, but it's fine for me. I have a weekly cron job to "emerge --sync" and "emerge -Dupv world", and I'm thinking of adding "emerge -Du --fetch-only world".
Updates compile a little slowly at times, but then I don't have much installed to update, and I could always add a cron job to do the updates too.
I do believe I said: And if anyone is going to point out that regedit/regedt32 etc HAS got a "find" function, or "I could write one myself" then I think they've missed the fundamental point I'm making. which means that, before you wrote your first point, I'd already discounted it. Does grep or any other standard tool work on the registry ? No...
k b; en-us;269075
... so are you in fact Jeffrey Richter Mr A/C ? Or are you Mark Russinovich ? Or who ? Yeah, you tell me what M to RTF and me, I'll just take my years of experience of programming Windows (I started using it at 1.0, but didn't start programming it until v2.0 - how about you) and I'll shove it up my arse, clearly I am in presence of greatness.
"A bunch of lies" - yeah, that's right, I have nothing better to do with my time than invent some lies - look how inventive I am.
I'm intrigued by your allegation that Windows won't load if some sections get too big though... I used Win98 for years
When you've finished home computing try the world of business, have you heard of NT, Win2000, XP perhaps ??
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=
One single p'n'p driver error writes too much data to the registry and windows itself cannot boot even to the stage of being able to recover the registry (and yes, I've had this happen to me, 3 times with commercial drivers) - "real world" file systems have external recovery tools, where's the equivalent for the registry ?
So of course it's going to look bad if you're ignorant of most of its features.
Ho ho ho
I really love the registry on Windows. It's fast, flexible, and Microsoft have allready defined a standard by their included programs, and Office. I hope Linux sooner or later would like to use this stunning registry-database.
... deep breaths ...
ROFL
Can I grep the registry ? No...
Can I add comments to registry entries (such as "what the previous setting was" ? No...
Can I easily backup a small part of my registry, while keeping it commented and grep-able, to try something and restore it later (or copy settings to another machine) ? No...
Can I set easily set and review access permissions to permit no-access/read-only access to selected parts for selected users ? No... (I know I can set ACL's but where's my simple ability to review this alongside the permissions of other system components like.. say.. the file system).
Will Windows refuse to load if certain parts of the regsitry get too big ? Yes..
Does the registry keep seperate sections that hold user intent, system defaults, and dynamic information such as plug and play info ? No...
And if anyone is going to point out that regedit/regedt32 etc HAS got a "find" function, or "I could write one myself" then I think they've missed the fundamental point I'm making.
The registry has been "useful" for one thing only - the god awful mess that is the admin of COM classes, but I'm betting if there wasn't such a horrible nasty pokey little hole of filth hidden away from most users, the authors of COM would have had to come up with something just ever so slightly tidier, less fragile and more tolerant of change.
I hope the registry dies a quick and painful death, real soon now.
And relax