Yeah, but my problems had nothing to do with hardware. For one thing, my IIS just up and died. No warning, no messages, just dropped off the face of the earth. And, what about Roxio ceasing to function? That's not necessarily a driver issue. That is more along the lines of the CD burning software. Unless a driver was killed off and Roxio crashed on accessing the driver (admittedly possible). That PC was a Compaq, using their built-in CD-RW drive, so I'm not talking about cheap-crap hardware (well... Ok, it's Compaq, but still).
I think that an O/S shouldn't start working poorly because you installed a driver. And, different people shouldn't get different results (like my home machine choking, and yours NOT choking). Another thing -- if you already have.Net framework installed, shouldn't VS.Net be able to detect that, and work around it??? I mean, come on, I'm not asking them to build me a base on mars, here, I just want to be able to patch my machine. It shouldn't be so difficult.
Yeah, really. I mean, I used to run Slackware on that box, and I never got any trouble from THAT... The only reason I put windows on it was so I could bring work home if I had to, but it's been a royal pain in the butt. I'm going to put slackware back on, I think. I never really had any trouble with it. Here's something funny: I found writing firewall rules for iptables easier than working with Norton Internet Security! I don't like firewall GUIs. They're too nonintuitive.
It's not my fault. I work for my state's government, and they're a Microsoft-only shop. Most of my stuff at home runs on FreeBSD or Slackware Linux, with one iBook running OS/9 (it's kind of a mascot, it's too cute to discard). I wanted to run a single desktop machine using Windows so I could take work home, and it was such a pain in the ass to get it working correctly I'm almost ready to just give up and dump it. I'm SO fed up with it... Working with it is just painful.
I can get everything to work if I don't patch it, and I just keep it off the network. But then I won't know if any apps I build will work on a patched machine. It's just a great big pain in my ass. I'm getting close to just putting Slackware on it and dumping all my Windows CDs.
If I need to work, I can always stay late I guess. Our work machines all seem to be working... Which implies that if I tinker enough, eventually I could get my home machine to work. Heh. I can't wait for the next time some Windows evangelist tries to give me a song and dance about how windows doesn't require tinkering...
Well, from what you're saying, your Ph.D gave you the ability to do systems analysis (which a B.S. or a B.A. already gives you if you major in Computer Science) and the ability to write good reports and do public speaking. It seems to me that you could save a lot of money by studying Comp. Sci in the first place, taking a public speaking course, and paying attention in your freshman composition courses. Taking an additional four years to get a Ph.D (not even counting the M.S. you'll probably get in between) seems like kind of a waste of resources.
Well, I'm a developer, and I run Windows 2000 professional at home, with IIS and Visual Studio.Net installed. Wanna talk about patches breaking stuff? Here's my list of woes (noting that Linux has never given me this kind of trouble):
1. If you install the O/S, then patch it, and THEN try to install Visual Studio, the Visual Studio installer crashes. The problem seems to be that if you install Microsoft's updated.Net packages before Visual Studio, Visual Studio can't handle that and it chokes.
2. If you install the O/S, then Visual Studio, then Norton Internet Security (kind of important on a windows 2000 box, which doesn't have an integrated firewall), then try to update Norton and Windows, WHICH OUGHT TO WORK, Norton will update fine, Windows Update will crash several times, and the end result will be your IIS will stop working, so your Visual Studio won't be able to create VS.Net projects. I think this might be related to a recent patch, because it didn't happen before Service Pack 4 came out.
3. If you have a recent copy of Roxio's CD burning software, it'll stop working after you update Windows. The app will start up, but it'll crash as soon as you insert a CD-RW into the drive. I've updated the software from the Roxio site, too, hoping that would help (no luck). It's got to be something in one of the windows patches. So, patch windows or burn CDs! You seem to have to choose one or the other. Older, no longer available copies of Roxio seem to keep working, so if you get a Rio Volt MP3 Cd-player, you can install the older software off of their disk (warning: this might not be true anymore).
5. Windows patches keep restoring MS Outlook Express! If I kill it off, it keeps coming back like a friggin' vampire. It's the undead, unwanted email app. Actually, the only easy way I've found to kill it is to change the security on the Outlook Express folder so that no one has read-write priviledges, then boot from a floppy and clean the thing out. This way, Windows can't keep putting the files back (Grr... Windows puts 'em back THREE SECONDS after you delete them, otherwise!).
Ugh. I hate Microsoft. And, I'm a programmer who uses that platform! What does THAT tell you?;)
That's true... And, as long as he's focusing on this weird Friendster thing, he won't be bothering women at bars, so they won't be pre-pissed-off when WE get a turn talking to them...;)
They had them in the 1950's -- the article says they "backed away" from the technology because they figured a loose-cannon field marshall would go a little off his nut and start throwing around mini-nuke shells (which of course, was probably totally true).
But, with this new stuff, I guess it won't be too long before we get a BFG-9000!!! Cool...
The guy who runs it seems to be one of those totally joyless bean-counter types the other programmers all make fun of. He checked out the journalist's friends list, didn't approve of their whimsical photos, got snotty about it, and *while hitting on* one of the journalist's friends, got snotty with her, chiding her for using a "silly" picture!!! What kind of creep insults a chick he's trying to pick up, I mean really! No WONDER he can't get laid.
I suspect this guy is some kind of AV geek with zero social skills and a serious superiority complex, who can't understand why women (and others) don't like him, and who built a website to help him get laid -- then couldn't get laid and got pissed because everyone was having fun but him, so he retaliated by kicking out all the fun people.
Yeeaaah. Riiiight.
Hang out with us... Unlike the crowd at Friendster, we don't care if you post potato chip bags (maybe they're good chips! You'd probably get +1 informative...).
Well... I just didn't want to get hit with the hammer. Damnit, I asked for the Russian model, they sent me model 1... (Wha? Honey, no, I wasn't talking about youWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAM)
You don't like brunettes? Ghost in the Shell's Major Whatsherface had black hair, and she was a stone fox. Although, now that you mention it, there sure do seem to be a lot of chicks with blue, green, and bright red hair on animes... Not complaining, but I like the brunettes.;)
You win my undying respect! Just this past weekend, I was watching City Hunter, too, and this gal was whacking City Hunter with hammers throughout the movie, every time he took an interest in anything female-related. Brutal! But very funny...
The russian's kind of a personal fantasy, based on chicks I've seen in videogames, live-action movies and animes, but not any one specific one, more of a composite. But, yum! Wouldn't she be fun!
I meant it in the slang sense, not the literal sense. Boy, what a tough audience. The slang, at least in NY where I grew up, meant "whatever's between yer legs". Usually, used like "Man, she kicked him in the NADS!" Or, to a gal, "SHOW US YOUR NADS!"
An handheld computer the size of a large paperback, with integrated rugged LCD (no glass, solid plastic), virtual keyboard (touch keys with a stylus), and an 800x600 display in True Color. At least 512MB ram, at least 100GB disk. Waterproof, shockproof, rubberized, and available in a variety of colors. You carry it around, and at work or home, you plug it into a monitor and a "real" keyboard and mouse with a single plug. Wireless connectivity of course... Linux/Java based. Powered by an alcohol fuel cell. If they called it the "Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7" I'd preorder several of them in sheer joy.
Heads up display glasses that don't cost a thousand bucks, with built in nightvision and thermal vision (to see today's REAL version, which isn't *that* unwieldy, check out www.tekgear.com, and look for the "spectre").
Mapping software for the computer described above. Also, some kind of VR overlay, so you can use it while you walk.
Game consoles that are *even better* than today's. Fully cinema-quality 3D immersion, usable with a HUD to really draw you in, and controls that strap on like gloves.
Hydrogen-powered everything! It's the future, you know...;)
Oh, brother... I can see it now, my fellow programmers will come up with the following selection of delectables:
1. Russian Hacker model: She's six feet tall, very thin, black hair, ice-blue eyes, can kick your ass but chooses not to. Wears tight black jeans, a skintight black Linux T-shirt, and a leather jacket (with chains that jingle!). Dirty mind, friendly, but if you make a programming error, she ties you to a chair and mocks you, muttering, "Dahlink, RTFM". Hackable, with a XXX porno mode.
2. Japanese anime model 1 (techie chick): About five feet tall, thin, long black hair, green eyes, modernish hip clothes and weird cat ears. Randomly gets annoyed, produces a 1,000 pound hammer, and pulverizes you. Has no nipples or gonads. Warning to the orally fixated: she has little razor-sharp cat teeth which appear when she's feeling mischevious.
3. Japanese anime model 2 (Hentai model!): Like model 1, but instead of cat ears, teeth, etc, she has a schoolgirl uniform, nipples and gonads. Randomly "accidentally" opens a gate into hell, allowing huge perverted demons into this universe, which subsequently violate her "against her will". Beware: some owners have gotten a little too close to the action, resulting in, well, you know. The lawsuits have been settled.
That's cool... But I think that nowadays, I'd still want to put any kind of configuration info in XML, if for no other reason than that I can mix it with a stylesheet and use it in other apps, or in creating a human-friendly version, etc. I figure, it's not that much extra work, and it gives you such a benefit...:)
I see where you're coming from; I think the ideal is where you limit the amount of static data you have to save. After all, if you have so much that your files are out of control, how much are you going to have to stuff in some database table if you convert to using a database for it? And, how are you going to maintain it? Eventually it gets out of hand.
Then again, maybe limiting this sort of data creep is part of the art, eh?;)
In terms of flat files, XML is a great idea. It makes parsing easy, it aids readability, and it can be matched with stylesheets when you want a nice-looking printout of your data. I wouldn't use anything BUT XML for flat files...:)
Well, I mostly do applications programming, so I use a database a lot; it's perfect for certain types of data, especially data which has to be shared among numbers of users or which has to be searchable. And, that's cool. Another tenet of Unix has always been "there's more than one way to skin a cat".
But for data like, for instance, application presets, you definitely want to use flat files. Let me give you an example. Let's say I'm writing a level editor program for a game engine (unfortunately, this would probably be a GUI-based monolithic program, not a "small-is-beautiful" program, but it would probably be using small programs behind the scenes). I want to enable myself to build templates, and presets for most of my editor settings, so I'm not typing in stuff over and over again. I'd put it in a flat file, and maybe while the program is running, I'd keep it in some kind of data structure. This is a nice way to do it; if my system crashes, I can restore my presets by loading the text file from a floppy disk. If I had put them in a database (the way windows programs seem to love using the registry) I'd have a lot more work to do to recover it (or I'd have to rebuild the presets by hand).
Another thing is, using a database for everything isn't efficient. It's much more efficient to store application data in flat files, and read them on initialization, than it is to store them in a database and have to look them up when you need them.
So I think my basic approach is, databases for data I have to share with other computers and search on, and flat files for static data I want to keep handy, like presets and bookmarks and such. What do you think?
What is UP with you guys??? Why are you stuck on the economics of all this??? That's got nothing to do with it.
The Unix Philosophy is a design philosophy, and it has nothing to do with distribution, or licensing, or anything else like that. I described it more fully in another post, but basically it is an approach to O/S design. And, it has nothing to do with AT+T's lawyers.
Sheesh.
At least give the book a shot. It's very well written.
Whereas Multics (which wouldn't run on their PDP) was multiplexed, Unix (which would) was not -- and you've got that whole "Eunuchs/Unix" joke, where the boss says, "I need more Unix programmers, the company nurse will be by later..."
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but my problems had nothing to do with hardware. For one thing, my IIS just up and died. No warning, no messages, just dropped off the face of the earth. And, what about Roxio ceasing to function? That's not necessarily a driver issue. That is more along the lines of the CD burning software. Unless a driver was killed off and Roxio crashed on accessing the driver (admittedly possible). That PC was a Compaq, using their built-in CD-RW drive, so I'm not talking about cheap-crap hardware (well... Ok, it's Compaq, but still).
.Net framework installed, shouldn't VS.Net be able to detect that, and work around it??? I mean, come on, I'm not asking them to build me a base on mars, here, I just want to be able to patch my machine. It shouldn't be so difficult.
I think that an O/S shouldn't start working poorly because you installed a driver. And, different people shouldn't get different results (like my home machine choking, and yours NOT choking). Another thing -- if you already have
Yeah, really. I mean, I used to run Slackware on that box, and I never got any trouble from THAT... The only reason I put windows on it was so I could bring work home if I had to, but it's been a royal pain in the butt. I'm going to put slackware back on, I think. I never really had any trouble with it. Here's something funny: I found writing firewall rules for iptables easier than working with Norton Internet Security! I don't like firewall GUIs. They're too nonintuitive.
It's not my fault. I work for my state's government, and they're a Microsoft-only shop. Most of my stuff at home runs on FreeBSD or Slackware Linux, with one iBook running OS/9 (it's kind of a mascot, it's too cute to discard). I wanted to run a single desktop machine using Windows so I could take work home, and it was such a pain in the ass to get it working correctly I'm almost ready to just give up and dump it. I'm SO fed up with it... Working with it is just painful.
I can get everything to work if I don't patch it, and I just keep it off the network. But then I won't know if any apps I build will work on a patched machine. It's just a great big pain in my ass. I'm getting close to just putting Slackware on it and dumping all my Windows CDs.
If I need to work, I can always stay late I guess. Our work machines all seem to be working... Which implies that if I tinker enough, eventually I could get my home machine to work. Heh. I can't wait for the next time some Windows evangelist tries to give me a song and dance about how windows doesn't require tinkering...
Thanks for the tip! All I want to kill off is Outlook Express... It makes my system feel unclean. ;)
Well, from what you're saying, your Ph.D gave you the ability to do systems analysis (which a B.S. or a B.A. already gives you if you major in Computer Science) and the ability to write good reports and do public speaking. It seems to me that you could save a lot of money by studying Comp. Sci in the first place, taking a public speaking course, and paying attention in your freshman composition courses. Taking an additional four years to get a Ph.D (not even counting the M.S. you'll probably get in between) seems like kind of a waste of resources.
Well, I'm a developer, and I run Windows 2000 professional at home, with IIS and Visual Studio .Net installed. Wanna talk about patches breaking stuff? Here's my list of woes (noting that Linux has never given me this kind of trouble):
.Net packages before Visual Studio, Visual Studio can't handle that and it chokes.
;)
1. If you install the O/S, then patch it, and THEN try to install Visual Studio, the Visual Studio installer crashes. The problem seems to be that if you install Microsoft's updated
2. If you install the O/S, then Visual Studio, then Norton Internet Security (kind of important on a windows 2000 box, which doesn't have an integrated firewall), then try to update Norton and Windows, WHICH OUGHT TO WORK, Norton will update fine, Windows Update will crash several times, and the end result will be your IIS will stop working, so your Visual Studio won't be able to create VS.Net projects. I think this might be related to a recent patch, because it didn't happen before Service Pack 4 came out.
3. If you have a recent copy of Roxio's CD burning software, it'll stop working after you update Windows. The app will start up, but it'll crash as soon as you insert a CD-RW into the drive. I've updated the software from the Roxio site, too, hoping that would help (no luck). It's got to be something in one of the windows patches. So, patch windows or burn CDs! You seem to have to choose one or the other. Older, no longer available copies of Roxio seem to keep working, so if you get a Rio Volt MP3 Cd-player, you can install the older software off of their disk (warning: this might not be true anymore).
5. Windows patches keep restoring MS Outlook Express! If I kill it off, it keeps coming back like a friggin' vampire. It's the undead, unwanted email app. Actually, the only easy way I've found to kill it is to change the security on the Outlook Express folder so that no one has read-write priviledges, then boot from a floppy and clean the thing out. This way, Windows can't keep putting the files back (Grr... Windows puts 'em back THREE SECONDS after you delete them, otherwise!).
Ugh. I hate Microsoft. And, I'm a programmer who uses that platform! What does THAT tell you?
That's true... And, as long as he's focusing on this weird Friendster thing, he won't be bothering women at bars, so they won't be pre-pissed-off when WE get a turn talking to them... ;)
They had them in the 1950's -- the article says they "backed away" from the technology because they figured a loose-cannon field marshall would go a little off his nut and start throwing around mini-nuke shells (which of course, was probably totally true).
But, with this new stuff, I guess it won't be too long before we get a BFG-9000!!! Cool...
The guy who runs it seems to be one of those totally joyless bean-counter types the other programmers all make fun of. He checked out the journalist's friends list, didn't approve of their whimsical photos, got snotty about it, and *while hitting on* one of the journalist's friends, got snotty with her, chiding her for using a "silly" picture!!! What kind of creep insults a chick he's trying to pick up, I mean really! No WONDER he can't get laid.
I suspect this guy is some kind of AV geek with zero social skills and a serious superiority complex, who can't understand why women (and others) don't like him, and who built a website to help him get laid -- then couldn't get laid and got pissed because everyone was having fun but him, so he retaliated by kicking out all the fun people.
Yeeaaah. Riiiight.
Hang out with us... Unlike the crowd at Friendster, we don't care if you post potato chip bags (maybe they're good chips! You'd probably get +1 informative...).
Well... I just didn't want to get hit with the hammer. Damnit, I asked for the Russian model, they sent me model 1... (Wha? Honey, no, I wasn't talking about youWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAM)
You don't like brunettes? Ghost in the Shell's Major Whatsherface had black hair, and she was a stone fox. Although, now that you mention it, there sure do seem to be a lot of chicks with blue, green, and bright red hair on animes... Not complaining, but I like the brunettes. ;)
Oh, HELLZ no. None for me... Although, just for kicks, I'd buy one for a friend and watch the fireworks, occasionally piping in to stir the pot!
Friend: "No, honey, I didn't drink a drop, we just played darts."
Me: "Ha! Right! I guess those Sam Adams' evaporated."
Friend: "Gah!"
Irish bot: "Ah, NOW I see, you're thinking you'll be putting one over on me, eh?"
Chaos ensues...
You win my undying respect! Just this past weekend, I was watching City Hunter, too, and this gal was whacking City Hunter with hammers throughout the movie, every time he took an interest in anything female-related. Brutal! But very funny...
The russian's kind of a personal fantasy, based on chicks I've seen in videogames, live-action movies and animes, but not any one specific one, more of a composite. But, yum! Wouldn't she be fun!
I meant it in the slang sense, not the literal sense. Boy, what a tough audience. The slang, at least in NY where I grew up, meant "whatever's between yer legs". Usually, used like "Man, she kicked him in the NADS!" Or, to a gal, "SHOW US YOUR NADS!"
We were coarse, but we were fun...
An handheld computer the size of a large paperback, with integrated rugged LCD (no glass, solid plastic), virtual keyboard (touch keys with a stylus), and an 800x600 display in True Color. At least 512MB ram, at least 100GB disk. Waterproof, shockproof, rubberized, and available in a variety of colors. You carry it around, and at work or home, you plug it into a monitor and a "real" keyboard and mouse with a single plug. Wireless connectivity of course... Linux/Java based. Powered by an alcohol fuel cell. If they called it the "Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7" I'd preorder several of them in sheer joy.
;)
Heads up display glasses that don't cost a thousand bucks, with built in nightvision and thermal vision (to see today's REAL version, which isn't *that* unwieldy, check out www.tekgear.com, and look for the "spectre").
Mapping software for the computer described above. Also, some kind of VR overlay, so you can use it while you walk.
Game consoles that are *even better* than today's. Fully cinema-quality 3D immersion, usable with a HUD to really draw you in, and controls that strap on like gloves.
Hydrogen-powered everything! It's the future, you know...
Oh, brother... I can see it now, my fellow programmers will come up with the following selection of delectables:
1. Russian Hacker model: She's six feet tall, very thin, black hair, ice-blue eyes, can kick your ass but chooses not to. Wears tight black jeans, a skintight black Linux T-shirt, and a leather jacket (with chains that jingle!). Dirty mind, friendly, but if you make a programming error, she ties you to a chair and mocks you, muttering, "Dahlink, RTFM". Hackable, with a XXX porno mode.
2. Japanese anime model 1 (techie chick): About five feet tall, thin, long black hair, green eyes, modernish hip clothes and weird cat ears. Randomly gets annoyed, produces a 1,000 pound hammer, and pulverizes you. Has no nipples or gonads. Warning to the orally fixated: she has little razor-sharp cat teeth which appear when she's feeling mischevious.
3. Japanese anime model 2 (Hentai model!): Like model 1, but instead of cat ears, teeth, etc, she has a schoolgirl uniform, nipples and gonads. Randomly "accidentally" opens a gate into hell, allowing huge perverted demons into this universe, which subsequently violate her "against her will". Beware: some owners have gotten a little too close to the action, resulting in, well, you know. The lawsuits have been settled.
That's cool... But I think that nowadays, I'd still want to put any kind of configuration info in XML, if for no other reason than that I can mix it with a stylesheet and use it in other apps, or in creating a human-friendly version, etc. I figure, it's not that much extra work, and it gives you such a benefit... :)
I see where you're coming from; I think the ideal is where you limit the amount of static data you have to save. After all, if you have so much that your files are out of control, how much are you going to have to stuff in some database table if you convert to using a database for it? And, how are you going to maintain it? Eventually it gets out of hand.
;)
Then again, maybe limiting this sort of data creep is part of the art, eh?
Yeah, but I meant for program data, not logs. Like settings and such. Logs are a totally separate thing.
We who grew up in the eighties used to say, "Live fast, die young, leave a good looking corpse". Words to live by...
In terms of flat files, XML is a great idea. It makes parsing easy, it aids readability, and it can be matched with stylesheets when you want a nice-looking printout of your data. I wouldn't use anything BUT XML for flat files... :)
Well, I mostly do applications programming, so I use a database a lot; it's perfect for certain types of data, especially data which has to be shared among numbers of users or which has to be searchable. And, that's cool. Another tenet of Unix has always been "there's more than one way to skin a cat".
But for data like, for instance, application presets, you definitely want to use flat files. Let me give you an example. Let's say I'm writing a level editor program for a game engine (unfortunately, this would probably be a GUI-based monolithic program, not a "small-is-beautiful" program, but it would probably be using small programs behind the scenes). I want to enable myself to build templates, and presets for most of my editor settings, so I'm not typing in stuff over and over again. I'd put it in a flat file, and maybe while the program is running, I'd keep it in some kind of data structure. This is a nice way to do it; if my system crashes, I can restore my presets by loading the text file from a floppy disk. If I had put them in a database (the way windows programs seem to love using the registry) I'd have a lot more work to do to recover it (or I'd have to rebuild the presets by hand).
Another thing is, using a database for everything isn't efficient. It's much more efficient to store application data in flat files, and read them on initialization, than it is to store them in a database and have to look them up when you need them.
So I think my basic approach is, databases for data I have to share with other computers and search on, and flat files for static data I want to keep handy, like presets and bookmarks and such. What do you think?
Phil
Woah... Not me, bud. I'll let someone else do it. But, you know... If we stay in the vicinity, the fireworks ought to be interesting!
What is UP with you guys??? Why are you stuck on the economics of all this??? That's got nothing to do with it.
The Unix Philosophy is a design philosophy, and it has nothing to do with distribution, or licensing, or anything else like that. I described it more fully in another post, but basically it is an approach to O/S design. And, it has nothing to do with AT+T's lawyers.
Sheesh.
At least give the book a shot. It's very well written.
Plus, I like the built-in multilayer pun:
Whereas Multics (which wouldn't run on their PDP) was multiplexed, Unix (which would) was not -- and you've got that whole "Eunuchs/Unix" joke, where the boss says, "I need more Unix programmers, the company nurse will be by later..."