I think that's reasonable. Windows types can get their cup of coffee like they're used to. And I can edit the scripts so that before the boring servers start, I can do "sleep 10*60" or something. I can log in and do useful stuff, and servers will start in the background whilst I'm checking email.
Maybe this is a silly question, but why cant the boot process be optimized for "workstation" type usage? That is: get a usable X login prompt up as soon as possible.
On my machine, a bunch of random (but useful) things are fired up sequentially, before the prompt appears. Some things are used rarely/not at all, but they're still started. I dont want to disable them, but I dont want to wait for them either. Apache. MySQL. Privoxy.
Why doesnt inetd start all these things? Apache would get started on first use. Likewise with the other services -- I pay for the startup (once) when I want to use them.
On a server, it'll be up for forever so starting everything on boot makes sense. For a workstation, the system should be usable as fast as possible; the rest of the services can just as well wait until later.
I really, really wanted to try 'arch' but failed. I was up and productive with Subversion in about 20 minutes. The very clear and comprehensive PDF book on Svn has been well-used.
The last straw for me was Mr. Lord's attacks on Subversion, which seemed unhelpful to say the least; wheras the cogent response by Mr. Greg Hudson was a model of respectable behavior.
After several months of near-constant use of Subversion -- I love it, it's a joy to work with. It has a number of quibbles, but then again, dont we all?
kudos Subversion team!
I hope the Arch tool comes along, we can never have too many *different* tools, but I cant imagine how much better it would have to be before even contemplating switching from Svn.
read "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum : Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How To Restore The Sanity" by Alan Cooper.
This book clearly and succintly states the difference between how programmers and engineers design (for the edge case), and how people really want things to work (make the common cases easy.) An excellent book, it could be used as a textbook but it's too short. Go read it.
"Forget those grim unemployment numbers. Demographic forces are about to put a squeeze on the labor supply that will make it feel like 1999 all over again"
sounds like crap, yes, but I couldnt see it. They say since the baby boomers are retiring, taking a huge chunk of (older, smarter) people out of the workforce, workers will be much more valuable. Anyone who knows anything will be able to charge for it. In 2010, at least...
That nice guy Bob Block has an article entitled How to build your own Stirling Engine -- powered by a votive candle! It sounds cheap, easy, and fun; just like me.
"Graduate students are wasting 3 years of their lives soldering and repairing robots, instead of making them smart. It's really shocking."'
Rodney Brooks (who's The Man) said something like "a [working] robot is worth a thousand papers." Instead of a top-down view, subsumption architechture robots have a tight connection to sensing and action, but often no memory. One such robot was able to search out, find and grab empty coke cans, then take them to the trash!
(semiquote from Steven Levy's "Artificial Life"; highly recommended introduction.)
our friend Don Lancaster has it all figured out: get a good (PostScript) printer, Adobe Acrobat, and some other stuff -- see his
Book-on-Demand library.
one enterprising soul made a solar-powered, microcontroller-based composting toilet, aka the Dalek Loo. Includes design notes and circuit diagrams and everything.
I've programmed on the old bit-sliced Connection Machines, which are vaguely similar. Two points to ponder:
- it was a *tremendous* pain in the ass. This Star Bridge machine isnt a general-purpose solution, it's only for applications that can stand writing 100% custom software in a custom language.
- the data has to come from somewhere. So you can do 1G operations per second. What's the I/O like? Do they use a PC for a host or an SGI or...? Is there a bunch of DRAM somewhere or do you carve memory out of the (expensive) FPGA?
In these two projects, you hook up wire and sme stuff to the serial port. They both include circuit diagrams, theory (for modifications), and Linux software:
Etlinux takes a tiny kernel, then adds radically stripped-down versions of the standard demons, rewritten in TCL!
This might in fact be your daddy's Linux: 2.0 kernel, and the TCL is a very-stripped-down one. Why? Reduced resource requirements: it'll run on a 386sx with 2M ram and 2M disk/flash!
More features: - embedded cgi-capable WEB server - a telnet server - an email server, with the ability to execute commands sent by email from a remote site - CORBA support - easy-to-use remote file management - a flexible package selection scheme, allowing an easy customization of the system - source code available for every component
Our friends at BG Micro have a GPS module for $15 ($25 incl antenna)! Now, you might have to solder to a wires to a chip to get serial output, but for 90% off who cares?
Another possibility is using a DeLorme Earthmate laptop-type GPS, you can get them cheap on ebay et al. Alas they use a proprietary (ick) Rockwell protocol, but it also spits out some NMEA.
Stay away from the Windows/Wine DeLorme software: it sucks hard. The best software I've found, hands down is... MS MapPoint or StreetMap. Beautiful accurate maps, hi resolution, good features, etc; around $20 at Sam's Club or other larger outlets.
just a coupla points for you geeks to pontificate on,
in what I'd guess is a piece of miraculous timing, there's a documentary of crop circles coming around the same time. Directed by Emmy-award winning William Gazecki.
back in the day, many of our clients *insisted* on using Oracle for the most trivial of applications, like BBSes or a phone-lookup service. They thought that by paying truckloads of cash their apps would be faster or something. Hell, even mySQL and Postgres would be overkill for some applications... The clients would rather pay than think!
I left the industry after clients started using similar glassy-eyed statements about Java. Both Java and Oracle have their place, but considering Oracle's insane price and administration overhead, it needs quite a bit of research before deployment.
by Godfrey Reggio, one of the genii behind Koyaanisqatsi. It's a 8 min film watching kids watching television!
I saw part of this without remembering what it was: I was initially disturbed that a movie would make fun of retarded kids! The groups of 3-10 four year olds stared blankly at the camera, mouths often open, swaying gently. Watching children watching television was unnerving, seeing them be still and quiet for many seconds just didnt seem right.
Evidence is chilling, and quite moving -- go see it.
be surprised: read/watch Dead Man Walking
on
A Beautiful Mind
·
· Score: 2
Dead Man Walking, the book, is half about the two convicts Sister Helen Prejean "adopts" on death row. Although not a professional writer, Prejean's story is quite interesting, even though I had no previous interest about capital punishment. The other half of the book (interspersed) is a listing of facts and figures and data about which states have more prisons, effectiveness of different procedures, etc. I began to skip those parts. Overall, I liked the book, even with it's faults.
The movie is totally different. Where the book focused on facts and a literal storytelling, the film concentrated entirely on the Sister's relationship with the death-row inmate (a composite of the two real people.) Susan Sarandon rightly won the Oscar for this role.
The movie is emotional, the book is factual, but they both fit together perfectly as two viewpoints on the same story. Amazing!
Slashdot Mirror
not quite.... "Profanity is the one language all programmers know best." If you stub your toe and are at a loss for words, then you've hit burn out!
err, have you read Slashot at -1 lately?
thanks -- that's exactly what I was looking for!
I'd forgotten inetd grabs the I/O. Drat. I'll have to write a little workaround for "start server on port access"...
(and: for a personal webserver, inetd vs apache isnt much difference. Especially if you use micro_httpd or something.)
I think that's reasonable. Windows types can get their cup of coffee like they're used to. And I can edit the scripts so that before the boring servers start, I can do "sleep 10*60" or something. I can log in and do useful stuff, and servers will start in the background whilst I'm checking email.
Maybe this is a silly question, but why cant the boot process be optimized for "workstation" type usage? That is: get a usable X login prompt up as soon as possible.
On my machine, a bunch of random (but useful) things are fired up sequentially, before the prompt appears. Some things are used rarely/not at all, but they're still started. I dont want to disable them, but I dont want to wait for them either. Apache. MySQL. Privoxy.
Why doesnt inetd start all these things? Apache would get started on first use. Likewise with the other services -- I pay for the startup (once) when I want to use them.
On a server, it'll be up for forever so starting everything on boot makes sense. For a workstation, the system should be usable as fast as possible; the rest of the services can just as well wait until later.
I really, really wanted to try 'arch' but failed. I was up and productive with Subversion in about 20 minutes. The very clear and comprehensive PDF book on Svn has been well-used.
The last straw for me was Mr. Lord's attacks on Subversion, which seemed unhelpful to say the least; wheras the cogent response by Mr. Greg Hudson was a model of respectable behavior.
After several months of near-constant use of Subversion -- I love it, it's a joy to work with. It has a number of quibbles, but then again, dont we all?
kudos Subversion team!
I hope the Arch tool comes along, we can never have too many *different* tools, but I cant imagine how much better it would have to be before even contemplating switching from Svn.
read "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum : Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How To Restore The Sanity" by Alan Cooper.
This book clearly and succintly states the difference between how programmers and engineers design (for the edge case), and how people really want things to work (make the common cases easy.) An excellent book, it could be used as a textbook but it's too short. Go read it.
programs will be stored ... so that programmers can represent and process data and meta-data uniformly.
Yup. Back in the day, we called this "Lisp". It was about as readable as XML, but a hella lot more fun.
perl -- into sadism, then?
My antique Acura gets ~28mpg, range ~300 miles -- same range as this car. Doesnt sound limiting to me!
"Forget those grim unemployment numbers. Demographic forces are about to put a squeeze on the labor supply that will make it feel like 1999 all over again"
sounds like crap, yes, but I couldnt see it. They say since the baby boomers are retiring, taking a huge chunk of (older, smarter) people out of the workforce, workers will be much more valuable. Anyone who knows anything will be able to charge for it. In 2010, at least...
check the article
out for yourself
That nice guy Bob Block has an article entitled How to build your own Stirling Engine -- powered by a votive candle! It sounds cheap, easy, and fun; just like me.
A Mr. Arie Rubenstein has helped us out here --
"To make [the SCO vs Linux thing] easier to understand, I put it in familiar terms -- Dukes of Hazzard"!
(warning: mirror needed)
"Graduate students are wasting 3 years of their lives soldering and repairing robots, instead of making them smart. It's really shocking."'
Rodney Brooks (who's The Man) said something like "a [working] robot is worth a thousand papers." Instead of a top-down view, subsumption architechture robots have a tight connection to sensing and action, but often no memory. One such robot was able to search out, find and grab empty coke cans, then take them to the trash!
(semiquote from Steven Levy's "Artificial Life"; highly recommended introduction.)
our friend Don Lancaster has it all figured out: get a good (PostScript) printer, Adobe Acrobat, and some other stuff -- see his Book-on-Demand library.
one enterprising soul made a solar-powered, microcontroller-based composting toilet, aka the Dalek Loo. Includes design notes and circuit diagrams and everything.
I've programmed on the old bit-sliced Connection Machines, which are vaguely similar. Two points to ponder:
...? Is there a bunch of DRAM somewhere or do you carve memory out of the (expensive) FPGA?
- it was a *tremendous* pain in the ass. This Star Bridge machine isnt a general-purpose solution, it's only for applications that can stand writing 100% custom software in a custom language.
- the data has to come from somewhere. So you can do 1G operations per second. What's the I/O like? Do they use a PC for a host or an SGI or
- two LEDs and a switch
- TTY control: 7 buttons and 3 leds.
I built a simpler version of #2 last week, and it was a lot of fun and very easy!Etlinux takes a tiny kernel, then adds radically stripped-down versions of the standard demons, rewritten in TCL!
This might in fact be your daddy's Linux: 2.0 kernel, and the TCL is a very-stripped-down one. Why? Reduced resource requirements: it'll run on a 386sx with 2M ram and 2M disk/flash!
More features:
- embedded cgi-capable WEB server
- a telnet server
- an email server, with the ability to execute commands sent by email from a remote site
- CORBA support
- easy-to-use remote file management
- a flexible package selection scheme, allowing an easy customization of the system
- source code available for every component
Our friends at BG Micro have a GPS module for $15 ($25 incl antenna)! Now, you might have to solder to a wires to a chip to get serial output, but for 90% off who cares?
... MS MapPoint or StreetMap. Beautiful accurate maps, hi resolution, good features, etc; around $20 at Sam's Club or other larger outlets.
Another possibility is using a DeLorme Earthmate laptop-type GPS, you can get them cheap on ebay et al. Alas they use a proprietary (ick) Rockwell protocol, but it also spits out some NMEA.
Stay away from the Windows/Wine DeLorme software: it sucks hard. The best software I've found, hands down is
just a coupla points for you geeks to pontificate on,
- john
in what I'd guess is a piece of miraculous timing, there's a documentary of crop circles coming around the same time. Directed by Emmy-award winning William Gazecki.
http://www.cropcirclesthemovie.com/
(Disclaimer: I'm not associated with the movie and havent seen it, but I've worked on the website.)
- j
.... wait for it...
Ishtar! , which scored 3.6/10 on imdb. Major suckage.
- j
back in the day, many of our clients *insisted* on using Oracle for the most trivial of applications, like BBSes or a phone-lookup service. They thought that by paying truckloads of cash their apps would be faster or something. Hell, even mySQL and Postgres would be overkill for some applications... The clients would rather pay than think!
I left the industry after clients started using similar glassy-eyed statements about Java. Both Java and Oracle have their place, but considering Oracle's insane price and administration overhead, it needs quite a bit of research before deployment.
by Godfrey Reggio, one of the genii behind Koyaanisqatsi. It's a 8 min film watching kids watching television!
I saw part of this without remembering what it was: I was initially disturbed that a movie would make fun of retarded kids! The groups of 3-10 four year olds stared blankly at the camera, mouths often open, swaying gently. Watching children watching television was unnerving, seeing them be still and quiet for many seconds just didnt seem right.
Evidence is chilling, and quite moving -- go see it.
Dead Man Walking, the book, is half about the two convicts Sister Helen Prejean "adopts" on death row. Although not a professional writer, Prejean's story is quite interesting, even though I had no previous interest about capital punishment. The other half of the book (interspersed) is a listing of facts and figures and data about which states have more prisons, effectiveness of different procedures, etc. I began to skip those parts. Overall, I liked the book, even with it's faults.
The movie is totally different. Where the book focused on facts and a literal storytelling, the film concentrated entirely on the Sister's relationship with the death-row inmate (a composite of the two real people.) Susan Sarandon rightly won the Oscar for this role.
The movie is emotional, the book is factual, but they both fit together perfectly as two viewpoints on the same story. Amazing!