You wrote, "[i]t's still getting itself off the ground," and that worries me. First of all you want to attend a well established institution. This is not only because of the name recognition when you apply for employment after graduation. You want the school to be around long enough for you to be able to graduate and solvent enough to cover its expenses, or the staff and profs will leave. This is from personal experience. My wife's cousin attended a college that was just starting up, but I do not remember the name. He was studying music. A couple of years later the school declared bankruptcy and that was it. He lost all the tution he paid even for classes that he paid for but never took yet due to the bankruptcy. Later, since the school was a virtual unknown and there was no one there to contact, no other school offered him any credit for the work he did while there. In debt he had to get a job and only now, some years later, is he back in school at UIC and not studying music.
The $500 scholarships are worthless, do not bother. I won a handful and in two cases I never saw the money. Also, you have to list them when you apply for financial aid and each year the financial aid office calculate 54% (if I remember correctly) of that to reduce your award from the school. In the end I lost more money than I gained from that and I spent many weekends writing annoying essays about topics like the American Revolution and how I will make the world a better place after my college education.
Depending on our mood my wife and I played either cooperatively or competitively. Currently we play some Frogger game on GC. We take turns each trying to advance farther in the game. Other games that we liked in the past that we took turns to advance were the Abe Oddworld and Rayman games on PS.
The Zelda games did not work well because they took too much time in large chunks to get anywhere, the same with the Final Fantasy games.
We went through a long phase of playing competitively against one another. Some examples here that we liked were Puyo Puyo, Chu Chu Rocket, and Mario Kart. There was also some wierd circles color matching game for PS that I cannot remember the name of. I am ashamed to admit that we even played pong for the PS addictively in two player mode. That was a terrible game but there was just something about yelling, "Take that you stupid rod!"
Now the only thing we play competitively is Mario Party 3, but that is a whole lot more fun when my brother and his girl friend come over.
Since you are married, you should already know what games you like to play together. If you have no video games you both enjoy, it may be the medium. Try some real world games. When we were really competive we liked Risk and Scrabble (in both English and Polish). Now we like doing cross word puzzles together and we have an electronic trivial pursuit that we try to beat our high score in. Outside we liked tennis and swimming. Now we like roller blading and bike rides. The kids like the bike rides too.
Now, I'm open to the concept of automounting in something malicious, but I'm at a loss of what that would be.
I have not tried this so I do not know if it would work. StartupItems are directories. What would happen if you added a/System/Library/StartupItems/evil directory. I hope that by the time/System/Library/StartupItems/NFS loads (which starts the automounter), the system had already looked at all of the startup items to determine the dependencies so this new one would not be picked-up on.
In MacOS X Aqua apps are bundles (really directories). So someone could add a program to your per user startup items. The problem is that this outside party does not know any of the user names on your system so this could be used to plant a trojan that curious user might run in/Applications.
Here is something I have not tried. I believe that whenever a user logs in the programs into Aqua/Library/CFMSupport are run automatically. If this is true, then all an attecker needs to do is mount an/Library/CFMSupport/evil.app directory with a suitible application. Most likely this alone could not be used for a root exploit though. The app would be running with the uid of the login user and so even if an sshd was started on a non-priviledged port, a login for a user with uid 0 should still fail.
Still seems far fetched of how to make this a root remote exploit without something like sshd enabled.
The article itself has very little technical details about the Panther console. By looking at the drawings and the tech specs linked from the article it is easy to conclude what the three mystery ports were for. The mini-DIN on the back, that is the S-VHS connector. The two ports on the side, that would be the two stero headphone jacks and most likely have nothing to do with COMLynx. Both these ports are listed as standard on the tech specs. The small panel on the back, that was most likely where a connector was concealed where you could attach options such as genlock, COMLynx, and modem, none of which were probably ever developed.
I use roff. It is a very simple document formater. The plus is that you automatically get unix style man pages for free. Use it with make to simplify your life as well.
Here is a concrete example. I create a roff file rwlock.man as the source. Say I want a postscript doc, then I add the following to a Makefile.
You can use all sorts of other options to ps2pdf just do a 'man ps2pdf' to learn more. You can install ps2pdf in the usual ways for your system, it is a common package. If you are on MacOS X 10.3 you already have pstopdf which is similar in functionality.
Say I want a plain text file of the documentation, then I add something like this to the Nakefile.
If your system includes GNU nroff, then you can use something like gtroff -man rwlock.man | grotty -buo in the command instead. Some nroff's and their 'an' macro files are a bit old fashioned and do 66 characters per line and 66 lines per page so you may have to experiment a bit on your system. Solaris nroff is a pain with respect to this while FreeBSD gets it right.
Then if you want html, GNU troff is the best way to go.
It generates fairly lean html with some comments that is easy to follow if you ever need to look at the source.
If you have a whole bunch of files to process, then you can use suffix rules in make to simplify that job. There numerous troff, nroff, and man page HOWTOs on the web that you can read that make it a breaze to get started with roff. There shuld be standards if you want to conform to say FreeBSD or Linux man pages.
You can go here to see the results from the 'rwlock' examples from this comment:
http://www-bd.fnal.gov/controls/micro_p/rwlock.h tm l
(Slashcode may break-up that url, I did this post in text because I did not want to deal with the lameness filter for all of the make rules.)
You can do a man on any of the commands above to learn more about them. Also roff can do a whole lot more because you can have it run various other processors as it formats. In this way you can get tables, figures, pictures, references, and even primitive equations.
Once you start doing that though, man pages cannot really look right anymore on a text console and xman is a kludge so often gets this wrong. If you start getting into more sophisticated equations for example, I would recommend latex. It is straight forward to get ps and pdf out of latex and you can try an add-on such as latex2html to get html output.
This depends on your locality. When I lived in California a few years ago it was legal to use an ear piece that only fit over one ear. Now I live in Illinios and here any form of earphones are illegal unless it is some sort of hearing aid for the hearing impaired.
Actually it is good news that Apple is not using the MPC7457 in the iBooks. (This is in fact the G4 that is being used in the newest powerbooks.) The MPC74x7 parts have a BTIC (Branch Target Instruction Cache) bug and the current work around is to disable it. This causes somewhere between 1% to 3% of a performance degradation on typical code. There was a good comment about it on macosxhints a little while back:
The second comment down is the one with good information from this discussion. Here is the choice quote:
The BTIC is a 128-entry, four-way set-associative cache that contains the most recently used branch target instructions (up to four instructions per entry) for b and bc branches. When a taken branch instruction of this type hits in the BTIC, the instructions arrive in the instruction queue a cycle sooner than they would arrive from the instruction cache. Due to an error in the processor, the BTIC may provide corrupted instructions and should not be enabled.
256K vs. 512K of cache also gives a distinction between the iBook and powerbook lines that Apple may wish to have as one of the reasons to justify their price difference as well.
Yes that is correct, I got that wrong in the submission as well. I hope that is it for the mistakes. Thanks for noticing. I feel bad about not getting the basic fact about how many nodes there were correct.
Just to elaborate, the 14 TFlops is if Big Mac achieves 80% of peak with the full 1100 nodes. 14 TFlops with just 256 PPC 970 cpus is completely implausible. I cannot believe I wrote that, sorry about it my mistake.
It is obvious that the $38 million figure includes more than the cluster, otherwise the per node costs would be impossibly huge even including the fiber. A coworker sent me this link that gives some concrete numbers.
Dell's list price of a configuration similar to Lonestar is $1.9 million, with services and installation charges expected to bring the total cost to around $3 million, a Dell spokeswoman said.
Since VT put the system together themselves we should really be comparing the $5.2M figure to Dell's $1.9M figure keeping in mind that Dell's number is list.
This same coworker points out that sustained performance is anywhere between 20% and 60% of peak on the top 500 list so that should be kept in mind. But he did get to do some preliminary QCD lattice simulation test runs on a dual G5 and he was getting 800 MFlops on one cpu and 1400 MFlops with both cpus on lattice sizes that did not fit in cache. This was an interesting result because the one cpu case was comprable to the best performance he has seen on x86 but the two cpu case beat the best dual cpu x86 he has seen by about 200 MFlops due to the better memory bandwidth on the dual G5.
The thing is that he has an SSE2 optimized version of the lattice code that beats the pants off of the G5 version. He expects to see a similar boast to the G5 numbers with AltiVec optimisations but cannot be sure. The trouble is that with AltiVec he can only do single precision. I am not sure which compiler he used on linux for the x86 numbers but he used the beta IBM compiler on OS X for the G5 numbers.
In the preview page there is a sample of the dialog box that will be presented to the user when a plug-in with external data is used. Notice that it only has one button and that is the OK button. This is terrible UI. There should be at least another button, cancel, where the plugin will not be loaded if it is selected and possibly any alt text displayed. It would be nice if there was a simple way to diable plug-ins from that dialog box as well instead of having to hunt and peck through the prefs.
I can just see users getting fed up with this and feeling yelling something like, "No it is NOT okay!"
I am not normally a grammar nazi but this is one of my nits ever since someone pointed it out to me. I used to pluralize acromyms and initialisms with apostrophe s because that is how I saw the NYT do it. For example from the NYT article, Vivendi Posts Higher Operating Profit and Smaller Net Loss, published today:
Universal Music also plans to cut prices for CD's in North America later this year in an effort to stimulate sales, the company said.
According to the Chicago Manual of Style this is incorrect and these are roughly the rules to pluralizing acronyms.
Use an s without an apostrophe in all circumstances unless one of the next points applies.
If the acronym uses periods use an apostrophe s. (Most of the time the use of periods in acronyms is discouraged BTW.)
If the pluralization would cause confusion because it would become a differnent word without the apostrophe. For example, "I got all A's," is the correct pluralization in this case.
Notice that there is no rule for acronyms ending in s therefore OSs is the correct pluralization even though that looks very strange to me. Possibly somebody with a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style could reply to this post and let me know if I remember correctly or not.
The correct way to pluralize dates is without an apostrophe, therefore 1970s is correct.
Another interesting thing to note is that the plural of Mrs. is Mmes. and the plural of
Mr. is Messrs. while the plural of Dr. is simply Drs. all with the period.
That is what I remember anyway, feel free to flame away.
You might think that people were never confused about the 'any key' message in old programs but I actually encounterred such a fellow. When I was in high school the middle school wrestling coach was having some trouble with his computer and he was talking to my coach about it. My coach told him that I was pretty sharp with computers and that he should ask me for help.
When he came to me I decided that I would write a little turbo pascal program to do what he needed for him. Next practice I gave him the program. Later that day I got a phone call from him. He was stumped by the 'press any key to continue' message!
From that point on I was careful to always use the message 'press a key to continue' instead in all of the programs I wrote. I figured that any sensible person would not have trouble with that prompt. For the clueless, they would read that and decide that it meant to press the 'a' key. (Yes the one next to s.) In either case the program would continue.
The strange thing is that to this day I always press the 'a' key when I get prompted by programs like this. (They still exist, distro installs for example.)
Maybe an editor will notice this post and fix the article.
In the source for the end of the article:
I would score Blind Lake 8/10. As a comparison with other Wilson books: I think it's as good as The Chronoliths, while I would rate Darwinia as a 7/10.
<cite>Darwinia<cite>
should be changed to:
<cite>Darwinia</cite>
Specifically the cite tag needs to be closed properly. The way the article is now, all of the text after the article (including the comments) is italicized.
BTW, rename the files to vacpp.60.macos.beta.dmg (C/C++ toolkit) and xlf.81.macos.beta.dmg (fortran) if your browser does not handle the ftp redirect well. If LaunchServices opens the file with the wrong application when you double click on the disk image, drag the file onto the Disk Copy icon in Applications:Utilities instead.
This looks to be more of VeriTest again. If you look at the Third Quarter 2003 SPEC CPU2000 Results you will see that the Dells have CINT2000 scores in at least the 1100's. Apple gives the results for the Xeon and P4 as 836 and 889. While the Reg gives scores of 836 to the Pentium and 839 to the Xeon. The Reg article does not cite the source for the numbers in the article. I could not find anything I thought was new at Apple about this. Is this from the same statement produced by Apple with the VeriTest results from a while back? Maybe this was the first benchmark with the dual 2Ghz G5's?
In any case there was much consternation in the past about the VeriTest benchmarks becuase they did not use the same compilers that Dell used. Also VeriTest used things like an optimized malloc library on the G5's and faster memory with semi-secret memory timing tweaks in OF. If you want to take these benchmarks with a grain of salt, you should compare the DELL numbers from the SPEC site to those of the G5 from Veritest.
This is an excerpt from
Understanding Computers, an old Time-Life book, that covers how the CG inTRON and The Last Starfighter were done that you may find of interest for your lecture.
Never buy a book by Herbert Schildt. They are typically full of errors and programming pitfalls that make experienced coders and language lawyers cringe.
Some people like his writing style but tutorial and reference books are not novels. It is unacceptable when they are full of mistakes especially when the author does not understand his own errors and appears authoritative to those that do not know an better yet and are just learning the ropes.
This is not a flame, it is important to warn everybody about some BAD C/C++ books out there. You can read more about the opinions of Schildt's books at the ACCU book reviews. The alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++ FAQ has more info on why not to use his books. In particular The Annotated Annotated C Standard lists many of the problems in Schildt's The Annotated C Standard including errors in the transcription of the standard itself.
Here is the best example from the cited interview:
If SCO were to prevail, do you think it would poke holes in the GPL? The difference between SCO and other companies that have put their copyrighted material into the GPL is SCO didn't do it. SCO is not the one that put in these derivative works, which, as SCO has maintained, these companies were not allowed to do pursuant to their license. SCO is not the one that put its copyrighted System 5 source code into the GPL. It was another Unix licensee that violated the terms of their licensing agreement. So the difference is that SCO didn't say, "Here is my copyrighted material, and I'm knowingly and willingly giving it to you under the GPL. Here's my copyrighted work."
Now ask yourself whether Heise gave an answer to the asked question. To me it seems to be just a circumventitive lawyer reply and only the beginning as it went on further. That is an example of why the article was incoherent, but if you look at the answer more closely it raises some interesting points.
Heise seems to be stating that SCO did not put the offending code under the GPL. We all know that SCO had a version of Linux it released under the GPL, but Heise seems to be claiming here that SCO did not notice at the time that other companies (I wish he was specific here, IBM, SGI, which licensee) had included code that SCO feels is its property in Linux. If this is true then that is bad.
The problem is that from the evidence we know about so far, it does not seem to be the case that the offending code is property of SCO in any real sense. What Heise is doing here is a typical lawyer/debate tactic. He is avoiding the question and raising aother not completely related one. This is meant to confuse the issue.
The same is true of the GPL vs. Copy Right Act issue. It is really there to confuse. It can be debated vigorously whether the GPL is in violation of the Copy Right Act or not, but here that is not the issue at stake. What really matters is whether others copied code that was property of SCO into Linux.
It does not look good if SCO points to code that it released under a BSD license as evidence of that claim of course.
I used an old notebook (TI TM4000M 486/75) for a firewall and print server. The LCD screen was broken so I just removed it. I could do pretty much everything from a network connection to it and I used an external monitor while setting it up. I used two bargain pccard NIC's. A neat benefit of using an old notebook like this is that you have an automatic UPS for it because it will switch over to battery and you can have it save your print queue to disk.
I used the notebook as a fileserver in college, but that was a bad idea. The hard drive could not handle this. The case of a notebook is tight and with the disk usually spinning there was no opportunity for it to cool down. After one weekend of this the drive was toast. Maybe newer laptops deal better with this. It was fun to replace the internal disk and see how everything was crammed in there though. Plus I was able to replace it with a bigger drive.
This one had a SCSI connector and I did have an old external dirve I used with it later. I tried to use it for file serving again, but there was no way to put enough memory in the machine to use it practically for something like this. With such a low power laptop like this you should be able to do PPPoE, firewall, and print server well but that is about it.
There will be no shortage of computers at college. Save your money, you will need it for books. If you have extra cash use it to buy a bike and lock. This will save you incredible amounts of time getting from one place to another.
You will have computer labs in almost every building. You will most likely share living space with at least one room mate and he or she will probably bring a computer that you will be able to use when you are desperate.
You should get a job while at college. You will probably have access to computers to use at work unless you take a job working behind the counter of a coffee shop. There will be many jobs available where the work will not be demanding. You might not expect a computer nearby, but this is college and reality is distorted there. Jobs where you sit behind a cirulation desk or a counter checking identification cards will often have a handy computer there ostensibly for checking in and out or verifying student information. These can serve double duty for you to work on papers.
You might think it is a good idea to buy a notebook computer so that you can take it to libraries with you. There will be computers at the library which you will be able to use and they will all be networked. Notebook computers will not be a good idea for taking class notes either. Try to do it in a math or science class where there will be equations and strange symbols not on your keyboard and you will see what I mean. The other bonus of not buying a notebook computer is that it will not be stolen.
If you take CS classes, the CS labs will provide computers that meet the requirements for course work. Also, the staff of the lab will most likely be other CS students. The lab will barely ever close its doors to you after a few intro course if you are decent to your classmates because they will be working on their course there at late hours as well. Just do not actually work for the lab itself, that way you can avoid working help desk for all of the idiots in the lab.
If you are thinking about CS, then buy whatever you feel like. If you want to fiddle with BSD or Linux, just install that on your machine and a bonus is that annoying humanities concentrators will only ask once to use Word on your computer when they have hosed their machine. Make it a big desktop, the heavier and more unattractive it is, the less likely it will get stolen. But wait until you get to college to make the purchase. There will be many upper class students and some used computer shops where you can get great deals. Also you will get an idea of what to get based on what your CS program uses.
SCO just reported net income of $4.5 million on revenue of $21.4 million for the second quarter.
$8.3 million of that revenue came from its UNIX licensing program, SCOsource, CNET.
It appears that all of that licensing revenue came from Microsoft and the other licensee that has not been disclosed.
If you disregard the income from licensing, SCO would have had another net loss on their hands.
In fact they would have pulled in $2.4 million less in net income this quarter than the same quarter last year.
Their stock price is down today, so maybe The Street finally sees that the reality of the situation is that their operating systems division is failing.
It is ironic that SCO made a profit selling licences to something that Novell now claims it 'owns' but I really cannot make sense of this mess any more.
So maybe I just misundersand how SCO can sell licenses to something that Novell opwns the copyrights to.
Here is an interesting quote from the article that seems to have been overlooked so far.
"Our investigations reveal that some drivers from ATI also produce a slightly lower total score on this new build of 3DMark03. The drop in performance on the same test system with a Radeon 9800 Pro using the Catalyst 3.4 drivers is 1.9%. This performance drop is almost entirely due to 8.2% difference in the game test 4 result, which means that the test was also detected and somehow altered by the ATI drivers. We are currently investigating this further.
Gasp, what a shock. Everyone seems to be guilty of having cheated on synthetic benchmarks at some time. This has happened before, it will happen again.
Power plugs have always been one of my pet peaves. The Brits do seem to have the most 'feature rich' ones that I have seen but at the cost of bulk.
I always thought that the style used in North America was a reasonable compromise. If the device does not have a fuse itself, have a fuse in the plug itself. If the polarity does not matter, then have both prongs be of the same size, otherwise have the prongs of different sizes. If the device needs a ground then include a third ground prong. Another nice feature is that when a ground prong is used, it is longer than the +/- prongs so that it is first to make contact when inserted and last to lose contact when removed.
It is true that they tend to fall/pull out easily and it is annoying that (especially for bricks) both +/- prongs can be easily exposed at the top. But when we were having our new house built I made sure that the builders put in all of the wall sockets side ways with the hot prong at the bottom. This solves the problem of both +/- prongs being exposed at the top and the plugs should not fall out of the sockets as easily.
Some continental European sockets rile me up the most. Setting aside all of the minor differences that happen between some groups of countries that make them mostly compatible with each other but enough not so to pester me, the ones where the ground prong is in the socket itself are fundamentally flawed. You can easily plug a device that requires ground into a socket that has no ground prong! Also there is no way to differentiate polatity in a plug without ground and the sockets are too wide for no real reason that I can think of. There are some nice ideas there though. The sockets tend to be recessed and most plugs have prongs that are insulated a portion of their length. These two features do well to limit the exposure of the +/- prongs.
Who would have thought that there were so many details that can be though out carefully in the design of something so common place as a wall socket and plug.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a decent article available at space.com with some more information from the press conference and the first color image as well.
You wrote, "[i]t's still getting itself off the ground," and that worries me. First of all you want to attend a well established institution. This is not only because of the name recognition when you apply for employment after graduation. You want the school to be around long enough for you to be able to graduate and solvent enough to cover its expenses, or the staff and profs will leave. This is from personal experience. My wife's cousin attended a college that was just starting up, but I do not remember the name. He was studying music. A couple of years later the school declared bankruptcy and that was it. He lost all the tution he paid even for classes that he paid for but never took yet due to the bankruptcy. Later, since the school was a virtual unknown and there was no one there to contact, no other school offered him any credit for the work he did while there. In debt he had to get a job and only now, some years later, is he back in school at UIC and not studying music.
The $500 scholarships are worthless, do not bother. I won a handful and in two cases I never saw the money. Also, you have to list them when you apply for financial aid and each year the financial aid office calculate 54% (if I remember correctly) of that to reduce your award from the school. In the end I lost more money than I gained from that and I spent many weekends writing annoying essays about topics like the American Revolution and how I will make the world a better place after my college education.
Depending on our mood my wife and I played either cooperatively or competitively. Currently we play some Frogger game on GC. We take turns each trying to advance farther in the game. Other games that we liked in the past that we took turns to advance were the Abe Oddworld and Rayman games on PS.
The Zelda games did not work well because they took too much time in large chunks to get anywhere, the same with the Final Fantasy games.
We went through a long phase of playing competitively against one another. Some examples here that we liked were Puyo Puyo, Chu Chu Rocket, and Mario Kart. There was also some wierd circles color matching game for PS that I cannot remember the name of. I am ashamed to admit that we even played pong for the PS addictively in two player mode. That was a terrible game but there was just something about yelling, "Take that you stupid rod!"
Now the only thing we play competitively is Mario Party 3, but that is a whole lot more fun when my brother and his girl friend come over.
Since you are married, you should already know what games you like to play together. If you have no video games you both enjoy, it may be the medium. Try some real world games. When we were really competive we liked Risk and Scrabble (in both English and Polish). Now we like doing cross word puzzles together and we have an electronic trivial pursuit that we try to beat our high score in. Outside we liked tennis and swimming. Now we like roller blading and bike rides. The kids like the bike rides too.
I have not tried this so I do not know if it would work. StartupItems are directories. What would happen if you added a /System/Library/StartupItems/evil directory. I hope that by the time /System/Library/StartupItems/NFS loads (which starts the automounter), the system had already looked at all of the startup items to determine the dependencies so this new one would not be picked-up on.
In MacOS X Aqua apps are bundles (really directories). So someone could add a program to your per user startup items. The problem is that this outside party does not know any of the user names on your system so this could be used to plant a trojan that curious user might run in /Applications.
Here is something I have not tried. I believe that whenever a user logs in the programs into Aqua /Library/CFMSupport are run automatically. If this is true, then all an attecker needs to do is mount an /Library/CFMSupport/evil.app directory with a suitible application. Most likely this alone could not be used for a root exploit though. The app would be running with the uid of the login user and so even if an sshd was started on a non-priviledged port, a login for a user with uid 0 should still fail.
Still seems far fetched of how to make this a root remote exploit without something like sshd enabled.
The article itself has very little technical details about the Panther console. By looking at the drawings and the tech specs linked from the article it is easy to conclude what the three mystery ports were for. The mini-DIN on the back, that is the S-VHS connector. The two ports on the side, that would be the two stero headphone jacks and most likely have nothing to do with COMLynx. Both these ports are listed as standard on the tech specs. The small panel on the back, that was most likely where a connector was concealed where you could attach options such as genlock, COMLynx, and modem, none of which were probably ever developed.
I use roff. It is a very simple document formater. The plus is that you automatically get unix style man pages for free. Use it with make to simplify your life as well.
h tm l
Here is a concrete example. I create a roff file rwlock.man as the source. Say I want a postscript doc, then I add the following to a Makefile.
rwlock.ps : rwlock.man
groff -man rwlock.man > rwlock.ps
This uses GNU troff, on other systems you might use the troff included with your system and pipe through dpost.
If I need a pdf file, that is easy from the postscript file.
rwlock.pdf : rwlock.ps
ps2pdf -dCompatibilityLevel=1.1 rwlock.ps rwlock.pdf
You can use all sorts of other options to ps2pdf just do a 'man ps2pdf' to learn more. You can install ps2pdf in the usual ways for your system, it is a common package. If you are on MacOS X 10.3 you already have pstopdf which is similar in functionality.
Say I want a plain text file of the documentation, then I add something like this to the Nakefile.
rwlock.txt : rwlock.man
nroff -man rwlock.man | col -bx > rwlock.txt
If your system includes GNU nroff, then you can use something like gtroff -man rwlock.man | grotty -buo in the command instead. Some nroff's and their 'an' macro files are a bit old fashioned and do 66 characters per line and 66 lines per page so you may have to experiment a bit on your system. Solaris nroff is a pain with respect to this while FreeBSD gets it right.
Then if you want html, GNU troff is the best way to go.
rwlock.html : rwlock.man
groff -man -Thtml rwlock.man > rwlock.html
It generates fairly lean html with some comments that is easy to follow if you ever need to look at the source.
If you have a whole bunch of files to process, then you can use suffix rules in make to simplify that job. There numerous troff, nroff, and man page HOWTOs on the web that you can read that make it a breaze to get started with roff. There shuld be standards if you want to conform to say FreeBSD or Linux man pages.
You can go here to see the results from the 'rwlock' examples from this comment:
http://www-bd.fnal.gov/controls/micro_p/rwlock.
(Slashcode may break-up that url, I did this post in text because I did not want to deal with the lameness filter for all of the make rules.)
You can do a man on any of the commands above to learn more about them. Also roff can do a whole lot more because you can have it run various other processors as it formats. In this way you can get tables, figures, pictures, references, and even primitive equations.
Once you start doing that though, man pages cannot really look right anymore on a text console and xman is a kludge so often gets this wrong. If you start getting into more sophisticated equations for example, I would recommend latex. It is straight forward to get ps and pdf out of latex and you can try an add-on such as latex2html to get html output.
Hope this helps.
This depends on your locality. When I lived in California a few years ago it was legal to use an ear piece that only fit over one ear. Now I live in Illinios and here any form of earphones are illegal unless it is some sort of hearing aid for the hearing impaired.
PPC 7457 performance tweak for new PowerBooks
The second comment down is the one with good information from this discussion. Here is the choice quote:
256K vs. 512K of cache also gives a distinction between the iBook and powerbook lines that Apple may wish to have as one of the reasons to justify their price difference as well.Yes that is correct, I got that wrong in the submission as well. I hope that is it for the mistakes. Thanks for noticing. I feel bad about not getting the basic fact about how many nodes there were correct.
Just to elaborate, the 14 TFlops is if Big Mac achieves 80% of peak with the full 1100 nodes. 14 TFlops with just 256 PPC 970 cpus is completely implausible. I cannot believe I wrote that, sorry about it my mistake.
Since VT put the system together themselves we should really be comparing the $5.2M figure to Dell's $1.9M figure keeping in mind that Dell's number is list.
This same coworker points out that sustained performance is anywhere between 20% and 60% of peak on the top 500 list so that should be kept in mind. But he did get to do some preliminary QCD lattice simulation test runs on a dual G5 and he was getting 800 MFlops on one cpu and 1400 MFlops with both cpus on lattice sizes that did not fit in cache. This was an interesting result because the one cpu case was comprable to the best performance he has seen on x86 but the two cpu case beat the best dual cpu x86 he has seen by about 200 MFlops due to the better memory bandwidth on the dual G5.
The thing is that he has an SSE2 optimized version of the lattice code that beats the pants off of the G5 version. He expects to see a similar boast to the G5 numbers with AltiVec optimisations but cannot be sure. The trouble is that with AltiVec he can only do single precision. I am not sure which compiler he used on linux for the x86 numbers but he used the beta IBM compiler on OS X for the G5 numbers.
In the preview page there is a sample of the dialog box that will be presented to the user when a plug-in with external data is used. Notice that it only has one button and that is the OK button. This is terrible UI. There should be at least another button, cancel, where the plugin will not be loaded if it is selected and possibly any alt text displayed. It would be nice if there was a simple way to diable plug-ins from that dialog box as well instead of having to hunt and peck through the prefs.
I can just see users getting fed up with this and feeling yelling something like, "No it is NOT okay!"
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Use an s without an apostrophe in all circumstances unless one of the next points applies.
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If the acronym uses periods use an apostrophe s. (Most of the time the use of periods in acronyms is discouraged BTW.)
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If the pluralization would cause confusion because it would become a differnent word without the apostrophe. For example, "I got all A's," is the correct pluralization in this case.
Notice that there is no rule for acronyms ending in s therefore OSs is the correct pluralization even though that looks very strange to me. Possibly somebody with a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style could reply to this post and let me know if I remember correctly or not.The correct way to pluralize dates is without an apostrophe, therefore 1970s is correct.
Another interesting thing to note is that the plural of Mrs. is Mmes. and the plural of Mr. is Messrs. while the plural of Dr. is simply Drs. all with the period.
That is what I remember anyway, feel free to flame away.
You might think that people were never confused about the 'any key' message in old programs but I actually encounterred such a fellow. When I was in high school the middle school wrestling coach was having some trouble with his computer and he was talking to my coach about it. My coach told him that I was pretty sharp with computers and that he should ask me for help.
When he came to me I decided that I would write a little turbo pascal program to do what he needed for him. Next practice I gave him the program. Later that day I got a phone call from him. He was stumped by the 'press any key to continue' message!
From that point on I was careful to always use the message 'press a key to continue' instead in all of the programs I wrote. I figured that any sensible person would not have trouble with that prompt. For the clueless, they would read that and decide that it meant to press the 'a' key. (Yes the one next to s.) In either case the program would continue.
The strange thing is that to this day I always press the 'a' key when I get prompted by programs like this. (They still exist, distro installs for example.)
In the source for the end of the article:
I would score Blind Lake 8/10. As a comparison with other Wilson books: I think it's as good as The Chronoliths, while I would rate Darwinia as a 7/10.
<cite>Darwinia<cite>
should be changed to:
<cite>Darwinia</cite>
Specifically the cite tag needs to be closed properly. The way the article is now, all of the text after the article (including the comments) is italicized.
BTW, rename the files to vacpp.60.macos.beta.dmg (C/C++ toolkit) and xlf.81.macos.beta.dmg (fortran) if your browser does not handle the ftp redirect well. If LaunchServices opens the file with the wrong application when you double click on the disk image, drag the file onto the Disk Copy icon in Applications:Utilities instead.
In any case there was much consternation in the past about the VeriTest benchmarks becuase they did not use the same compilers that Dell used. Also VeriTest used things like an optimized malloc library on the G5's and faster memory with semi-secret memory timing tweaks in OF. If you want to take these benchmarks with a grain of salt, you should compare the DELL numbers from the SPEC site to those of the G5 from Veritest.
This is an excerpt from Understanding Computers, an old Time-Life book, that covers how the CG inTRON and The Last Starfighter were done that you may find of interest for your lecture.
Some people like his writing style but tutorial and reference books are not novels. It is unacceptable when they are full of mistakes especially when the author does not understand his own errors and appears authoritative to those that do not know an better yet and are just learning the ropes.
This is not a flame, it is important to warn everybody about some BAD C/C++ books out there. You can read more about the opinions of Schildt's books at the ACCU book reviews. The alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++ FAQ has more info on why not to use his books. In particular The Annotated Annotated C Standard lists many of the problems in Schildt's The Annotated C Standard including errors in the transcription of the standard itself.
Here is the best example from the cited interview:
If SCO were to prevail, do you think it would poke holes in the GPL?
The difference between SCO and other companies that have put their copyrighted material into the GPL is SCO didn't do it. SCO is not the one that put in these derivative works, which, as SCO has maintained, these companies were not allowed to do pursuant to their license. SCO is not the one that put its copyrighted System 5 source code into the GPL. It was another Unix licensee that violated the terms of their licensing agreement. So the difference is that SCO didn't say, "Here is my copyrighted material, and I'm knowingly and willingly giving it to you under the GPL. Here's my copyrighted work."
Now ask yourself whether Heise gave an answer to the asked question. To me it seems to be just a circumventitive lawyer reply and only the beginning as it went on further. That is an example of why the article was incoherent, but if you look at the answer more closely it raises some interesting points.
Heise seems to be stating that SCO did not put the offending code under the GPL. We all know that SCO had a version of Linux it released under the GPL, but Heise seems to be claiming here that SCO did not notice at the time that other companies (I wish he was specific here, IBM, SGI, which licensee) had included code that SCO feels is its property in Linux. If this is true then that is bad.
The problem is that from the evidence we know about so far, it does not seem to be the case that the offending code is property of SCO in any real sense. What Heise is doing here is a typical lawyer/debate tactic. He is avoiding the question and raising aother not completely related one. This is meant to confuse the issue.
The same is true of the GPL vs. Copy Right Act issue. It is really there to confuse. It can be debated vigorously whether the GPL is in violation of the Copy Right Act or not, but here that is not the issue at stake. What really matters is whether others copied code that was property of SCO into Linux.
It does not look good if SCO points to code that it released under a BSD license as evidence of that claim of course.
I used an old notebook (TI TM4000M 486/75) for a firewall and print server. The LCD screen was broken so I just removed it. I could do pretty much everything from a network connection to it and I used an external monitor while setting it up. I used two bargain pccard NIC's. A neat benefit of using an old notebook like this is that you have an automatic UPS for it because it will switch over to battery and you can have it save your print queue to disk.
I used the notebook as a fileserver in college, but that was a bad idea. The hard drive could not handle this. The case of a notebook is tight and with the disk usually spinning there was no opportunity for it to cool down. After one weekend of this the drive was toast. Maybe newer laptops deal better with this. It was fun to replace the internal disk and see how everything was crammed in there though. Plus I was able to replace it with a bigger drive.
This one had a SCSI connector and I did have an old external dirve I used with it later. I tried to use it for file serving again, but there was no way to put enough memory in the machine to use it practically for something like this. With such a low power laptop like this you should be able to do PPPoE, firewall, and print server well but that is about it.
There will be no shortage of computers at college. Save your money, you will need it for books. If you have extra cash use it to buy a bike and lock. This will save you incredible amounts of time getting from one place to another.
You will have computer labs in almost every building. You will most likely share living space with at least one room mate and he or she will probably bring a computer that you will be able to use when you are desperate.
You should get a job while at college. You will probably have access to computers to use at work unless you take a job working behind the counter of a coffee shop. There will be many jobs available where the work will not be demanding. You might not expect a computer nearby, but this is college and reality is distorted there. Jobs where you sit behind a cirulation desk or a counter checking identification cards will often have a handy computer there ostensibly for checking in and out or verifying student information. These can serve double duty for you to work on papers.
You might think it is a good idea to buy a notebook computer so that you can take it to libraries with you. There will be computers at the library which you will be able to use and they will all be networked. Notebook computers will not be a good idea for taking class notes either. Try to do it in a math or science class where there will be equations and strange symbols not on your keyboard and you will see what I mean. The other bonus of not buying a notebook computer is that it will not be stolen.
If you take CS classes, the CS labs will provide computers that meet the requirements for course work. Also, the staff of the lab will most likely be other CS students. The lab will barely ever close its doors to you after a few intro course if you are decent to your classmates because they will be working on their course there at late hours as well. Just do not actually work for the lab itself, that way you can avoid working help desk for all of the idiots in the lab.
If you are thinking about CS, then buy whatever you feel like. If you want to fiddle with BSD or Linux, just install that on your machine and a bonus is that annoying humanities concentrators will only ask once to use Word on your computer when they have hosed their machine. Make it a big desktop, the heavier and more unattractive it is, the less likely it will get stolen. But wait until you get to college to make the purchase. There will be many upper class students and some used computer shops where you can get great deals. Also you will get an idea of what to get based on what your CS program uses.
Their stock price is down today, so maybe The Street finally sees that the reality of the situation is that their operating systems division is failing. It is ironic that SCO made a profit selling licences to something that Novell now claims it 'owns' but I really cannot make sense of this mess any more. So maybe I just misundersand how SCO can sell licenses to something that Novell opwns the copyrights to.
Here is an interesting quote from the article that seems to have been overlooked so far.
"Our investigations reveal that some drivers from ATI also produce a slightly lower total score on this new build of 3DMark03. The drop in performance on the same test system with a Radeon 9800 Pro using the Catalyst 3.4 drivers is 1.9%. This performance drop is almost entirely due to 8.2% difference in the game test 4 result, which means that the test was also detected and somehow altered by the ATI drivers. We are currently investigating this further.
Gasp, what a shock. Everyone seems to be guilty of having cheated on synthetic benchmarks at some time. This has happened before, it will happen again.
Power plugs have always been one of my pet peaves. The Brits do seem to have the most 'feature rich' ones that I have seen but at the cost of bulk.
I always thought that the style used in North America was a reasonable compromise. If the device does not have a fuse itself, have a fuse in the plug itself. If the polarity does not matter, then have both prongs be of the same size, otherwise have the prongs of different sizes. If the device needs a ground then include a third ground prong. Another nice feature is that when a ground prong is used, it is longer than the +/- prongs so that it is first to make contact when inserted and last to lose contact when removed.
It is true that they tend to fall/pull out easily and it is annoying that (especially for bricks) both +/- prongs can be easily exposed at the top. But when we were having our new house built I made sure that the builders put in all of the wall sockets side ways with the hot prong at the bottom. This solves the problem of both +/- prongs being exposed at the top and the plugs should not fall out of the sockets as easily.
Some continental European sockets rile me up the most. Setting aside all of the minor differences that happen between some groups of countries that make them mostly compatible with each other but enough not so to pester me, the ones where the ground prong is in the socket itself are fundamentally flawed. You can easily plug a device that requires ground into a socket that has no ground prong! Also there is no way to differentiate polatity in a plug without ground and the sockets are too wide for no real reason that I can think of. There are some nice ideas there though. The sockets tend to be recessed and most plugs have prongs that are insulated a portion of their length. These two features do well to limit the exposure of the +/- prongs.
Who would have thought that there were so many details that can be though out carefully in the design of something so common place as a wall socket and plug.