I have to point out that the States are, or at least are supposed to be, sovereign.
Several sovereign States got together and delegated some powers to a central government. There's a big difference between "delegated" and "surrendered".
This means that a State can object to a federal mandate or pull out altogether.
Lincoln's revolution may have changed this in practice, but that's how it's supposed to work.
"State Sovereignty died at Appomattox." -Salmon P. Chase, US Supreme Court Justice, 1864-73
Maintainability
on
Perl Medic
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
A lot of posts are complaining about Perl being unmaintainable, and suited to banging out a quick script in a half hour but not for anything more complex than that.
Baloney. The advantage of Perl is that you have the option to write maintainably if you want to!
If I just need a quick solution to a problem, I can very quickly write gibberish that does the job and then forget about it.
If I'm writing a big app which someone will inherit from me, I can avoid confusing constructs for something easier to follow. I can pass variables in Perl style, C-style, I can use objects if I want. Whatever I think will be most maintainable for somebody else.
Just because you can write gibberish in Perl doesn't mean you can't write good stuff too.
I would say that this is an argument against government funding of scientific research. Why do a few people in Washington know what's important to focus on?
Future advances in this area will come solely because the residents of the states who fund it chose to do so.
I hate to report this, but I uninstalled Web Developer, just to see... And it was like getting a whole new computer. FF is fast. And it's holding at 22MB resident. Normally by now it'd be at 75 at least, and climbing forever and ever.
Maybe I'll see if I can send some info to the developer... It's such a useful extension. But I've never seen FF fly like this.
That's an interesting idea, that extensions could be causing the problem. Sounds like I'm having the same kind of problem as you (see just below your post). What extensions are you running?
I've got:
DOM Inspector 1.0
Tabbrowser Preferences 1.2.4 (disabled)
Sessionsaver.2
Web Developer 0.9.3
I don't know if it's something weird about the Gentoo ebuild, but my Firefox RAM usage is always through the roof.
Once or twice a day, I'll notice the system slow to a crawl and the hard drive thrashing. A quick check of top, and sure enough, Firefox has 250+MB RAM resident on my 512MB machine. Close Firefox, open it again, and things are fine... for a while.
That is what I'm suggesting, although of course I don't have any direct evidence.
Along the same lines, many have said that MS Office's rise to prominence was because of piracy... It was easy to take home from the office, and MS looked the other way, and suddenly everybody and his brother was using it. That was before my time, so perhaps somebody else has first-hand experience with that.
I'm glad the hardware worked out for you. My complaint was more with their intentions, which are obviously to lock people in. And it works most of the time, too. But you're right, it's the recipients who let that happen.
By the way, IIRC, MS considers a VMWare install to be a different machine. So "technically" you can't use a locked license in VMWare. Could be wrong on this, though.
I hope libraries take note of this as well as schools... If libraries aren't the standard-bearer for interoperable Web sites, document formats, and any other kind of information exchange, who will be?
This is the insidious thing about Bill's Foundation. Libraries get placed on the MS upgrade cycle, hooked by the initial free-ness. Then try doing anything with your machines without spending a whole lot of money...
Yes, it is disheartening. But it only mirrors the disingenuous plot of MS itself here. They needed to lower the price of Office without making it look like they were lowering the price, so they did it with a wink and a nod.
You're not talking about.PPS files, are you? I've had people give me.PPS files who think they're executable, but really it just runs PowerPoint in some special mode.
You probably know more about it than I do, and if MS really has added a "save as executable" option, that's pretty cool. Have they?
Ah yes, the Foundation. Get a tax deduction for locking in libraries who'd otherwise switch to Linux. Brilliant!
Your questions:
1) Fortunately, there's not much of a bureaucracy. We're a single library that's actually its own taxing district, so really I only had to convince a couple of people to give it a try.
2) Debian. First Woody with a bunch of backports, upgraded to Sarge not long ago. I'm hoping that Sarge will be stable for a good long time. I'll most likely end up using backports for things like Firefox and OpenOffice. In any case, apt-get upgrade keeps things up to date with a minimum of fuss. Systemimager is used to keep all the machines in sync, so I only have to apt-get in a chroot in the master image.
3) The patrons' reaction was somewhat mixed in the beginning. I should point out that there were still quite a few kinks we were working out. Also, at the time, there were quite a few more IE-only sites than there are now. Currently, we rarely have a complaint. Occasionally we catch a grumble that something's different from the way they're used to, but that's about it.
4) We had 11 MS Office licenses, and might as well use them. Also it was comforting to be able to say "Yes, it's a new system, but this browser's pretty much the same and here's your exact same office suite!" Plus, CodeWeavers has educational discounts, and only makes you buy as many licenses as you'll have concurrent users.
I've appended a little HTML document I wrote up after the fact about why switching was good for us. Some of those items could have been done with Windows (with some difficulty), others not. A huge savings has been in my time: Now, instead of dinking with Windows problems, I was able to implement all those features in the public workstations, and then go on to write loads of useful Perl analyzing catalog reports and otherwise helping other aspects of the library. My job has become much more creative and productive.
Some other advantages not mentioned in the document:
1) Users can stick in any USB storage device and use it instantly, without the Hardware Wizard popping up.
2) We put OpenOffice on all the machines, including ones that had never had an office suite before. It's been a big help to have an office suite on every machine.
3) We're looking at fancy things like network scanning and network CD writing.
Probably the biggest problem we're still facing is lack of Shockwave for Linux. CodeWeavers can run this plugin, but that has license implications, and we've chosen for now to not go that route. Mostly it's kids' games that have problems, but they can always find one that's traditional Flash that works. We're not all that concerned about this one.
Our systems sound pretty similar to yours; they're 667-733MHz Dells with 256MB. Originally they had 128MB; we doubled the RAM and saw HUGE performance gains. I should tell you that logging in is fairly slow, especially the first one of the day. We're using KDE because of the great Kiosk mode, and because people are comfortable with it. Of course, with Sarge stable, it's not going to get any slower, and it's acceptable now. Once KDE's loaded, performance is generally fine.
Here's that document. If you need any other info, feel free to mail me at xan@NOSPAMcharbonnet.com.
Advantages of the New Workstation System:
Consistency
Each workstation is in a known state each new session.
Previously,
changes would build up over time, and the 25 workstations would have 25
different configurations. Nobody could be sure how a given workstation was
configured. This led to patrons switching machines frequently
trying to get something to work.
Now, with a combination of the "Log Off"
feature and nightly synchronization with a master workstation, the
patron's experience is independent of which workstation is chosen.
Also, once a problem has been identified and solved, it tends to stay that
wa
Slashdot Mirror
Several sovereign States got together and delegated some powers to a central government. There's a big difference between "delegated" and "surrendered".
This means that a State can object to a federal mandate or pull out altogether.
Lincoln's revolution may have changed this in practice, but that's how it's supposed to work.
"State Sovereignty died at Appomattox." -Salmon P. Chase, US Supreme Court Justice, 1864-73
Baloney. The advantage of Perl is that you have the option to write maintainably if you want to!
If I just need a quick solution to a problem, I can very quickly write gibberish that does the job and then forget about it.
If I'm writing a big app which someone will inherit from me, I can avoid confusing constructs for something easier to follow. I can pass variables in Perl style, C-style, I can use objects if I want. Whatever I think will be most maintainable for somebody else.
Just because you can write gibberish in Perl doesn't mean you can't write good stuff too.
http://geekgazette.com/index2.php?option=com_conte nt&task=view&id=28&Itemid=26&pop=1&page=0
I guess I'll be firing up mplayer's "vf pp=lb" option.
I totally uninstalled it; I didn't want to make my test messy. I would imagine that disabling would give the same results though.
I've posted on the Web Developer extension forum.
Government == Force. They "choose to fund" with money taken at the point of a gun.
What I said was that government funding of science is a bad idea. The few people in Washington were the example because they've taken that authority.
That's right people, there is no federal ban on stem cell research of any kind. No matter what the media tries to tell you.
Maybe I'll see if I can send some info to the developer... It's such a useful extension. But I've never seen FF fly like this.
Hmm, so the only one in common is Web Developer... I really hope that's not it! It's one of the most useful things (to me) about Firefox.
I've got: .2
DOM Inspector 1.0
Tabbrowser Preferences 1.2.4 (disabled)
Sessionsaver
Web Developer 0.9.3
Once or twice a day, I'll notice the system slow to a crawl and the hard drive thrashing. A quick check of top, and sure enough, Firefox has 250+MB RAM resident on my 512MB machine. Close Firefox, open it again, and things are fine... for a while.
Web Developer Extension
What if it's Sarge? I think I'll be pretty OK rolling that out when it's released...
Along the same lines, many have said that MS Office's rise to prominence was because of piracy... It was easy to take home from the office, and MS looked the other way, and suddenly everybody and his brother was using it. That was before my time, so perhaps somebody else has first-hand experience with that.
By the way, IIRC, MS considers a VMWare install to be a different machine. So "technically" you can't use a locked license in VMWare. Could be wrong on this, though.
Teachers' unions and the politicians who support them are doing more harm to education in this country than anything else.
This is the insidious thing about Bill's Foundation. Libraries get placed on the MS upgrade cycle, hooked by the initial free-ness. Then try doing anything with your machines without spending a whole lot of money...
Yes, it is disheartening. But it only mirrors the disingenuous plot of MS itself here. They needed to lower the price of Office without making it look like they were lowering the price, so they did it with a wink and a nod.
Dan Rather found this out the hard way, didn't he?
You probably know more about it than I do, and if MS really has added a "save as executable" option, that's pretty cool. Have they?
Your questions:
1) Fortunately, there's not much of a bureaucracy. We're a single library that's actually its own taxing district, so really I only had to convince a couple of people to give it a try.
2) Debian. First Woody with a bunch of backports, upgraded to Sarge not long ago. I'm hoping that Sarge will be stable for a good long time. I'll most likely end up using backports for things like Firefox and OpenOffice. In any case, apt-get upgrade keeps things up to date with a minimum of fuss. Systemimager is used to keep all the machines in sync, so I only have to apt-get in a chroot in the master image.
3) The patrons' reaction was somewhat mixed in the beginning. I should point out that there were still quite a few kinks we were working out. Also, at the time, there were quite a few more IE-only sites than there are now. Currently, we rarely have a complaint. Occasionally we catch a grumble that something's different from the way they're used to, but that's about it.
4) We had 11 MS Office licenses, and might as well use them. Also it was comforting to be able to say "Yes, it's a new system, but this browser's pretty much the same and here's your exact same office suite!" Plus, CodeWeavers has educational discounts, and only makes you buy as many licenses as you'll have concurrent users.
I've appended a little HTML document I wrote up after the fact about why switching was good for us. Some of those items could have been done with Windows (with some difficulty), others not. A huge savings has been in my time: Now, instead of dinking with Windows problems, I was able to implement all those features in the public workstations, and then go on to write loads of useful Perl analyzing catalog reports and otherwise helping other aspects of the library. My job has become much more creative and productive.
Some other advantages not mentioned in the document:
1) Users can stick in any USB storage device and use it instantly, without the Hardware Wizard popping up.
2) We put OpenOffice on all the machines, including ones that had never had an office suite before. It's been a big help to have an office suite on every machine.
3) We're looking at fancy things like network scanning and network CD writing.
Probably the biggest problem we're still facing is lack of Shockwave for Linux. CodeWeavers can run this plugin, but that has license implications, and we've chosen for now to not go that route. Mostly it's kids' games that have problems, but they can always find one that's traditional Flash that works. We're not all that concerned about this one.
Our systems sound pretty similar to yours; they're 667-733MHz Dells with 256MB. Originally they had 128MB; we doubled the RAM and saw HUGE performance gains. I should tell you that logging in is fairly slow, especially the first one of the day. We're using KDE because of the great Kiosk mode, and because people are comfortable with it. Of course, with Sarge stable, it's not going to get any slower, and it's acceptable now. Once KDE's loaded, performance is generally fine.
Here's that document. If you need any other info, feel free to mail me at xan@NOSPAMcharbonnet.com.
Advantages of the New Workstation System:
Each workstation is in a known state each new session.
Previously, changes would build up over time, and the 25 workstations would have 25 different configurations. Nobody could be sure how a given workstation was configured. This led to patrons switching machines frequently trying to get something to work.
Now, with a combination of the "Log Off" feature and nightly synchronization with a master workstation, the patron's experience is independent of which workstation is chosen.
Also, once a problem has been identified and solved, it tends to stay that wa