when you are used to only Windows, Linux is harder. Everything you don't know is harder then what you do know. Amen! I come from a Unix background, and I sometimes have problems on Windows trying to figure out which menu item on which control panel controls the feature I want to change. And it's rare you can find a control panel that shows you settings or values that it doesn't allow you to change (c.f. the Network control panel and "ipconfig/all"). And heaven help us if MS decides to move the control panels around again (like when they merged "Services" into "Administrative Tools")!
Of course, it's not just control panels, but they seem to cause me the greatest frustration. I much prefer the Unix philosophy of "You asked for it, you got it" to the Windows "What you see is what you get" one.
That's a pretty damn good price for an opteron workstation, especially one with a name like Sun on the front. It's OK, I wouldn't go so far as to call it "good". It wasn't bad for the time (I bought an Ultra 20 a year or so ago), but you could get comperable performance with an Athlon board for ~20% less money. The Suns did have the nice features, though -- SATA drives, PCI-X, ECC memory. I actually went with the mid-range system, which added an nVidia graphics board (NVS280) and a full gig of memory. I haven't priced Sun's new systems lately (they now have "M2" models which feature dual-core Opterons), maybe they're a little more competitive. One thing that honked me off was the fact that Sun pre-announced these workstations waaay in advance. I think I ordered mine around the end of April (when there weren't too many Opteron systems available), and it finally shipped mid-August. By then, there were a few more choices available, and I might not have gone with the Sun. Oh well, that was my lesson on dealing with a "big-iron" vendor.
Comparing a simple task to Kubuntu (since that's what I am dorking around with at the moment), if you plug in a USB stick, it pops up and asks what I want to do with it. Solaris just sits there. Huh, that's funny, when I pop in a USB stick, I get a Nautilus window (and an icon on my desktop). Which release are you running? I'm on 6/06 (the latest from Sun), my box shipped with 5/03, and it had some issues...
Solaris 10 didn't recognize my NIC at home, either (it's an nForce board, AMD64) That's stranger still, since the Ultra20 is an nForce board (nForce 4, it's a tweaked Tyan S2865). Was it the built-in network card it didn't find, or a separate one?
Re:Are we really making it better for us, or worse
on
Finding New Code
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· Score: 1
I got the impression that the companies weren't using the code entirely, just lifting bits and pieces here and there (e.g., not a whole image library, but maybe the code to read/write JPEGs). Which is just as illegal, but might be a bit harder to prove...
Microsoft was also the first to support the.selectSingleNode and.selectNodes functions of the XMLDocument object. Too bad they can't figure out how to return a hash that supports indexing by name as well as by index for.getElementByTagName(). Mozilla et. al. figured out that handy trick quite some time back...
not great for backing up your pr0n to something you can leave hidden under the mattress Kids today! Back in my day, pr0n wasn't something you backed up, you just hid it directly under the mattress. Then hoped Mom didn't want to wash the sheets...
one time I accidentally typed "DELETE FROM Table; WHERE..." on a production database. This is why you never type anything in on a production database. All updates are scripted, the script is tested on the test database, and only then is it allowed to be executed in production. Stunts like this are the reason the DBA keeps a towel and a bottle of water bungeed to his chair at all times....
Sure a USB key is faster, and can hold more. But don't underestimate the comfort of familiarity for the hundreds of average joes trying to keep their head above silicon waters. Don't overlook the fact that USB keys are more convenient as well. Maybe things have changed since I last used floppies, but it used to be that I had to stick the floppy in the drive, then bring up Windows Explorer and click on the "A:" drive to mount it. With a USB key, I just stick it in and Windows brings it up in its own separate window. I drag my current project to it, and pull it out. Window disappears, and I log out and go home. Once your mythical average joe finds this out, they'll stick with floppies until they notice that USB keys are in the 2G range for about thirty bucks. Then it's bye-bye noisy, bulky floppy.
(USB sticks aren't allowed in the building for ludicrously retarded "security" reasons). So here's what you do: take an old floppy drive, cut off any external connectors, then glue some spare CAT-5 cable to it (say about four feet). Then, glue the other end of the CAT-5 to a USB drive. Presto! You now have a USB floppy drive.
Re:Something doesn't add up...
on
Water From Wind
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· Score: 1
Yeah, that was exactly my reaction. Unless said areas get a fair amount of wind that might bring in moisture from a larger area, I don't see this working (you might water the trees, but I don't see you generating any rain). And as someone else said, the areas downwind will be paying the price.
the traffic is encrypted (freenet/tor) then tapping all the traffic for everyone isn't going to solve a whole lot. Depends. If they want the contents of the encrypted traffic, then probably not. However, if the simple presence of encrypted traffic is enough, then it may be. For example, if someone was wardriving through a neighborhood, leeching off insecure WAPs, then the Feds might have "good enough" data merely by observing the traffic. They could find out that encrypted traffic going to a certain IP address/net tended to appear around 9:30AM and last for about a half-hour. With this knowledge, they could send unmarked cars into the neighborhood at that time, searching for anyone parked at the curb with a laptop. Nobody's privacy gets violated, because only traffic destined for a specific target is examined, and then only to the extent necessary to determine if it is encrypted or not.
Of course, I'm not saying that's what they're doing, just that it's plausible.
Ever seen napalm? White phosphorous? Thermite? They'll all melt the flesh off your bones, too, and more people met their ends that way, than have ever died in nuclear blasts. Why so much less outrage there? I was replying to a post that claimed that atomic bombs were humane, not napalm or phosphorus. I'm not unaware of other WMDs, but nobody (before you) brought them into the discussion. FWIW, though, I think the effect of flesh peeling off of apparently-undamaged people is a bit different from seeing someone burn in a fire that can't be extinguished, although I won't venture an opinion as to which is more horrifying.
Nuclear weapons aren't particularly unique. Nuclear weapons aren't unique? You mean that we have other single weapons that can level a small city? If you mean we have a vast panopoly of ways to kill others, then yes, but I'd still argue that nuclear bombs have a distinct niche.
Several of the invasion plans that were tossed around prior to the use of nuclear weapons on Japan involved saturating the islands with nerve gas, and just taking it by default after the population had been decimated. Actually, the nerve toxins available at the time (mostly tabun captured from Germany) weren't all that toxic. They'd sicken people, and probably kill the infirm, but they weren't as nasty as (say) mustard gas. Still, I don't doubt they'd have tried it, if they could have figured out some delivery method.
I didn't write down the exact errors, but I do know that it didn't recognize the @WebService and @WebMethod annotations, and ISTR it didn't support JAXB 2.0 (none of the javax.xml.bind.annotation classes). It also had some issues with my WSDL file, I think it didn't like the "RPC/document" (as opposed to "RPC/encoded") endpoint definition.
They have their uses and are not that inhumane -- supposedly, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings have taken less [sic] lives, than the weeks of conventional bombings before them Sweet! So torturing captives really is OK, since nobody gets killed! And after all, we can claim that the information revealed under torture probably saved some lives, so it's a win-win! Heck, why not go for a hat trick and declare that information gained from torturing detained citizens of foreign governments (what information, we can't reveal) helped to prevent a heinous attack (an attack on what, by whom, on what date, and using what method we can't reveal, because that might reveal the source of the information we can't reveal) on Americans! [WAVE FLAG]
I've been to Hiroshima. I've seen what's left of the Industrial Promtion Hall (so clean, it's eerie...). I heard a survivor recount how flesh peeled from people's bodies, the black rain that burned, wounds that didn't bleed but wouldn't heal. Anybody who thinks atomic bombs are "humane" has some serious functional difficulties, and literacy isn't even at the top of the list.
Why don't people understand the difference between a designer and a developer? The web makes that distinction hazier and hazier. Heh, not in my case. One look at my pages and people know right away I'm a developer...
I hate to disagree with you, but there's plenty of very old electronics in my house and I'm not going to put any of it in the bath. Depends on how old "very old" is. A couple of times now I've taken old tube radios, removed them from the case, removed the tubes and anything else removable (dial cord, etc.) and plunked them in the dishwasher. Run them through a wash-only cycle (i.e., no drying) with no detergent, then stick 'em in the oven at 200F for a few hours. Does an excellent job of cleaning off all the gunk that old radios tend to accumulate, and it doesn't hurt the electronics a bit (although any paper labels on the chassis will take a beating).
Domestic harmony note: clean the dishwasher trap/filter after you're done, and run it empty for a cycle before putting any dishes in it. Whatever entertainment you may find in eating off of dishes that smell like vintage electronics will be more than outweighed...
If I had the space, I'd cover an acre or so with black plastic, then use white spray paint to spell out satellite read error. I wonder if I can find some taggers who can write using Courier New...
Everyone I know has their cable or dsl modems plugged directly into the computer. I've been pretty successful at pointing out that sticking a simple router between the modem and computer will prevent 99% of virus "attacks", and it's often cheaper than a copy of McAfee or Norton. I also offer to install AVG anti-virus for that 1% that find their way in via some of the more underhanded means.
Data point: I have an old P-II 450 that one of my wife's cow-orkers wanted to borrow while his machine was in the shop. I had been running NetBSD on it, so I wiped the disk and laid down a fresh install of XP. As soon as I had it installed, I hooked the box up to the router so I could hit Windows Update. I (thought I) started the download and left while it installed. One thing led to another, and I didn't get back to the box until the next day. Then I found that a dialog box had popped up just before the install. So I had an unpatched base XP machine connected to the internet via a DSL line for over 24 hours, and I got no viruses, trojans or other nastyness. At least, none that AVG could detect (I installed that immediately after the SP2 upgrade finished installing). And the only thing I had for defense was my old WRT54G.
I'm tempted to stick it into the DMZ and time how long it takes to get compromised, but that's been done before...
in a sense, if you have to learn it, it's not intuitive I won't deny you have a point, perhaps "intuitive" is not the best word for it. I guess it's more like learning an advanced skill — once you learn it, it just feels so much more natural that you can't imagine going back to the old method. Kind of like making the move from Roman numerals to Arabic. Or from Windows to Unix...;)
I just moved into a new office and I was checking the ports to see which were live. I hit a dead one and my laptop automagically tried to connect via WiFi. I saw a bunch of unsecured access points, and a couple of ad-hoc networks. One was hpsetup (a wireless print server maybe?), and one was Free Public WiFi. This is in downtown Lincoln, NE (yes, they have computers here).
Disturbingly, one of the unsecured wireless networks is labelled Itgadmin's PowerBook G4 17". More disturbingly, another is labelled WF Conf Room. I'm across the street from the main Wells Fargo branch...
I'm actually starting to get a little paranoid. It almost seems like WMD-II. "There's water on Mars — we must go!". I'm beginning to wonder if someone's got a real reason for wanting to go, and it's got nothing to do with water.
"Ash, Mother's deciphered part of that transmission. It's not a distress call..."
If you cannot use RPN, buy a cassio calculator. If you cannot use RPN, consider a career in politics. Seriously, learning RPN takes about five minutes. Take any random arithmetic problem (like totalling a grocery reciept) and work it out using RPN. You've got a six-pack at $5.99, a bottle of JD at $23.99, a bottle of Yukon Jack for $4.99[0], three frozen pizzas at $1.29 each, and a bag of chips for $1.79. It's just 5.99 [Enter] 23.99 [+] 4.99 [+] 1.29 [Enter] 3 [*] [+] 1.79 [+]. Once you learn it, it seems so much more intuitive than working things out algebraically. When I heard that HP was going to stop making calculators, I bought a 48GX that I didn't even need, just so I wouldn't get stuck without a working calculator. I'm not sure why I was worried, I still use my original HP-34C (although it's getting a bit flakey), and I have a 16C, a 20C and a 41CV (which needs repair since I loaned it to my roommate and he let the batteries leak in it). I must say, the 20C and the 48GX aren't built to the same standards as the older models, but they're still pretty solid.
[0] Don't forget to send in that $5 rebate coupon!
Now if they could only port Websphere to it! Seriously, I tried to install a web service on a new Websphere server, just upgraded to Websphere 6.0. It wouldn't run, because 6.0 only supports Java 1.4.2! The new V6.1 runs 1.5, but doesn't support web services unless you install an extension, and even then doesn't fully support the spec (only the @WebService and @WebMethod annotations). I find it odd that IBM supposedly has such cutting-edge JVM technology, but it just trickles down to their actual money-making products...
people compare code which is linked into a webserver (java) with external scripting languages like PHP and perl What? Java code is not "linked into a webserver", it runs in some flavor of "container" (e.g., Tomcat is a servlet container that contains the RTE necessary to support Java servlets). You could say that it's linked to a web server, but no more so than PHP or Perl.
Don't confuse a Java app server with a web server. An app server takes a lot more memory and often can't be tuned for performance to the same extent as a standalone web server. OTOH, you can usually front an app server with one or more standalone web servers for serving static content (images, boilerplate text, CSS) and get the improved performance, plus the ability to serve dynamic content.
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Of course, it's not just control panels, but they seem to cause me the greatest frustration. I much prefer the Unix philosophy of "You asked for it, you got it" to the Windows "What you see is what you get" one.
I got the impression that the companies weren't using the code entirely, just lifting bits and pieces here and there (e.g., not a whole image library, but maybe the code to read/write JPEGs). Which is just as illegal, but might be a bit harder to prove...
Of course, it's Monday, so what do I know...
Yeah, that was exactly my reaction. Unless said areas get a fair amount of wind that might bring in moisture from a larger area, I don't see this working (you might water the trees, but I don't see you generating any rain). And as someone else said, the areas downwind will be paying the price.
Of course, I'm not saying that's what they're doing, just that it's plausible.
I didn't write down the exact errors, but I do know that it didn't recognize the @WebService and @WebMethod annotations, and ISTR it didn't support JAXB 2.0 (none of the javax.xml.bind.annotation classes). It also had some issues with my WSDL file, I think it didn't like the "RPC/document" (as opposed to "RPC/encoded") endpoint definition.
I've been to Hiroshima. I've seen what's left of the Industrial Promtion Hall (so clean, it's eerie...). I heard a survivor recount how flesh peeled from people's bodies, the black rain that burned, wounds that didn't bleed but wouldn't heal. Anybody who thinks atomic bombs are "humane" has some serious functional difficulties, and literacy isn't even at the top of the list.
Or General Failure...
Domestic harmony note: clean the dishwasher trap/filter after you're done, and run it empty for a cycle before putting any dishes in it. Whatever entertainment you may find in eating off of dishes that smell like vintage electronics will be more than outweighed...
If I had the space, I'd cover an acre or so with black plastic, then use white spray paint to spell out satellite read error. I wonder if I can find some taggers who can write using Courier New...
Data point: I have an old P-II 450 that one of my wife's cow-orkers wanted to borrow while his machine was in the shop. I had been running NetBSD on it, so I wiped the disk and laid down a fresh install of XP. As soon as I had it installed, I hooked the box up to the router so I could hit Windows Update. I (thought I) started the download and left while it installed. One thing led to another, and I didn't get back to the box until the next day. Then I found that a dialog box had popped up just before the install. So I had an unpatched base XP machine connected to the internet via a DSL line for over 24 hours, and I got no viruses, trojans or other nastyness. At least, none that AVG could detect (I installed that immediately after the SP2 upgrade finished installing). And the only thing I had for defense was my old WRT54G.
I'm tempted to stick it into the DMZ and time how long it takes to get compromised, but that's been done before...
I just moved into a new office and I was checking the ports to see which were live. I hit a dead one and my laptop automagically tried to connect via WiFi. I saw a bunch of unsecured access points, and a couple of ad-hoc networks. One was hpsetup (a wireless print server maybe?), and one was Free Public WiFi. This is in downtown Lincoln, NE (yes, they have computers here).
Disturbingly, one of the unsecured wireless networks is labelled Itgadmin's PowerBook G4 17". More disturbingly, another is labelled WF Conf Room. I'm across the street from the main Wells Fargo branch...
I'm actually starting to get a little paranoid. It almost seems like WMD-II. "There's water on Mars — we must go!". I'm beginning to wonder if someone's got a real reason for wanting to go, and it's got nothing to do with water.
"Ash, Mother's deciphered part of that transmission. It's not a distress call..."
[0] Don't forget to send in that $5 rebate coupon!
Now if they could only port Websphere to it! Seriously, I tried to install a web service on a new Websphere server, just upgraded to Websphere 6.0. It wouldn't run, because 6.0 only supports Java 1.4.2! The new V6.1 runs 1.5, but doesn't support web services unless you install an extension, and even then doesn't fully support the spec (only the @WebService and @WebMethod annotations). I find it odd that IBM supposedly has such cutting-edge JVM technology, but it just trickles down to their actual money-making products...
Don't confuse a Java app server with a web server. An app server takes a lot more memory and often can't be tuned for performance to the same extent as a standalone web server. OTOH, you can usually front an app server with one or more standalone web servers for serving static content (images, boilerplate text, CSS) and get the improved performance, plus the ability to serve dynamic content.