I don't object to commercial, non-free software either. In fact I buy my Linux distros and some of the toys I run on the boxes. I use Freedom as in Libertas, to choose the best suited tools and distros to get my work done without being forced to keep buying a product line because it evolves to generate cash not to make my life better.
Buying Microsoft products is like having an ex-wife you are obligated to pay all expenses for. When she gets a new dress you have to buy her a new house and abandon the old one. Then the new dress needs all new accessories and even unrelated kitchen appliances and a car.
But then buying Apple products is the same except it starts with a new house and works it's way back to the dress, car, and kitchen appliances which can only come from the same company that built the house.
I am constantly amazed with the people who flock to Apple when they do the same thing at the hardware level that Microsoft does at the software level and that is product line lock in.
The only free choice comes when you use commodity hardware with a Linux or Free/Open/Net BSD OS. Having a geek staff to build and maintain these are no more expensive than buying into the 'Who you gonna sue when it goes bad' thinking so it has to be corporate buys only. When is the last time anyone sued Microsoft successfully for causing millions of dollars in lost revenue and productivity due to security flaws and buggy productivity tools?
My wife is Chinese and keeps bags of those tiny red peppers used in a lot of Asian cooking. Once upon a time I needed some hot sauce to put on beans so I chopped up a bunch of these fiery little devils to put in vinegar. Some time during the chopping I had to pee. I did wash my hands but not nearly well enough. About half way back to the kitchen I realized I had hurt my prize toy. It took several minutes and a combination of soaps to get all the oil off.
The bill was directed to retailers. Is your ISP a retailer? The article is not all that clear about the target but by 'retailer' it seems this is about the local iHop, No-Tell Hotel, or Victoria's Secret storing your credit card and any address, phone number, SS# info way past the authorization cycle.
Having a mortgage, auto payments, and a monthly charge for services (I pay an annual fee for my web hosting) would be normal usage of customer data, but a retailer does not require any bank/credit card info after they receive the money for their product.
A slide rule is nothing more than a convenient way to add and subract logrithms. If you look at a sheet of logrithmic chart papaer it has the same spacing as lines on a slide rule. I've not done this but I believe you could tape/glue two strips of marked chart paper of this type onto a couple of cheap rulers and have the basic C & D scales of the slide rule. You can add or subtract logrithms by hand to check that this works. Logrithms were a way we had to do maths on large numbers and reduce the error rate before we had computers and calculators. Very handy when you are traveling around the globe and needed to find that speck in the middle of ocean or hit the right port using trig to mark your position on a map. Charles Babbage's Difference Machine was built to create the tables of logrithms being done by hand for mariners and he wanted to produce the logrithmic tables quicker and more accurately. Cheaper too than a room full of mathmeticians
Did a college paper on accounting machinery once and that was a factoid from my research. Also did a research paper on the slide rule in high school back when we were waiting for simeone to invent the pocket calculator.
True - modern tunng is a case of 'tempering/fudging' the octave to fit all the notes into regular intervals. And BTW, I'm surprised that there are so many knowlegable folks on slash here that can discuss music and the physics of music.
It's not the use of different A's that make it authentic but rather the use of alternate scales. The modern tempered scale allows us to play music in any key. Older scales having different relationships among the 4ths, 5ths, 3rds, 6ths, minor 3rds, etc within the octave, was what many composers used to make the music have certain charateristics they wanted to bring out in the music. Mozart's "Requiem in D Minor" is a much different creature using the scales of Mozart's time vs the modern tempered scales. J.S. Bach popularized the modern scale with his "Well tempered Clavier" series - teaching pieces in all the scales to train pianist to play in any key. Before this time all instruments were scaled to meet the existing standard meaning differnt length of tubing on brass instruments than modern horns.
I have no idea if the concept of a standard desenses us to nearby frequencies as put forth in the article. I use aural tuning techniques and count beats and match tones to tune. I'm a non-believer in "perfect pitch" as claimed but have known several individduals with very good pitch perception or having "absolute pitch". Frank Sinatra was rumoured to be able to sing any note dead on pitch upon request without a reference note.
About 1939 A440 was adapted instead of the "French" A435 standard. In recent history some orchestras went to A445 but they are the exception. Modern piano scales are designed for A440. The length, diameter, and tension of the strings are all taken into the scale calculations. To raise pitch on a piano 5 CPS(Hz) is quite an undertaking and can add several hundreds of pounds of tension to the back (wooden part) and plate (big harp looking thingee made of cast iron and usually painted brass color) of a piano, A standard piano can have 11 tons, or more for grands, up to 20 tons of combined tension on the frame. The whole of the piano is designed to handle a certain amount of tension and can be stressed if too much tension is added. Same as letting a piano fall way below in pitch (pitch = tension) and bringing it up to pitch in one sitting. It must be done carefully & quickly to be effective. It isn't pretty to see a piano with the plate bolts sheared off and the plate bowing out from the rim.
I'm a former piano technicain with 25+ years of piano tuning and rebuilding behind me so I've yanked strings on more than a few pianos, raising pitch and doing battle with aged instrments not kept in repair. Also have done complete restringing and rebuilding of all sorts of pianos.
I used to pack a small portable amateur radio staion with me when I flew. Twice I packed it in the check-in luggage and twice the ignorant fools at TSA completely trashed my suitcases because they didn't underestand what they were looking at.
I now carry the whole thing with me as carry-on, a major pain in the butt, just to avoid having my luggage destroyed by one of the TSA idiots using pry bars to smash the support linings and bend the metal braces supporting the rim to prevent damage to the contents. If they had paged me to question me before making such an invasive search it would have been preferable to having to buy new suitcase everytime I fly - and I fly a lot on business.
Algebraic equations don't bother me as with any of the equations I used in electronics. These were the first things I wrote my early programs to do - ham radio stuff. It's only when I put actual numbers to them that I have trouble, As when I do math with numbers from Roman or the Chinese writing which I've learned, since I conceptualize with the Arabic numbers and have to write them down in Arabic. Other numbering systems as words are OK and I can read Arabic numbers fine as words. It's just when I try to do calculations on numbers that it becomes a problem. Hell if I know why. I was in my 40s before I was diagnosed - it was always supposed that I was just stupid and wouldn't be much more than a janitor or gas staation attendant. It was when the early microcomputers came out that I discovered how to make the machine do the heavy lifting - and I've made a damn fine living doing it for other people since.
I have dyscalculia - the trouble with numbers that people have with dyslexia have with letters. Numbers crawl all over the page when I look at them and the harder I concentrate the worse they crawl. I also put numbers into sentences when writing - like 5 for F and otherwise fairly neat block lettering gets pinched and scribbled when I write numbers.
But my analytical skills are sharp. Maybe sharper because I had to learn how to compensate. But having said that, most of my problems as a software architect are 'word problems'. Get this damn pile of rubble to do X,Y, and Z'. I have realized fairly complex math formulas into algorythms to do the math that I couldn't otherwise do at gun point. In fact one of the reason I bought my first computer was to get it to do the math for me that I couldn't. I know how math works, I just can't get the ansmwers on my own.
So when it comes to CS, IMHO - it's better to be a good analyst and detail oriented than be a math major.
Re:It dates back well before the VT100
on
Are 80 Columns Enough?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Does anyone remember Hollerith? He devised the card for the 1880 census and it was that card that was standardized on. Hence in FORTRAN you have a Hollerith constant, meaning a string of 80 characters - if I recall my college days correctly
We haven't had a single problem with the DB servers(or any others) in at least three years that I been doing this. Oracle and DB2 running on pSeries hardware - some recent Solaris 10 containers stacking up a couple of DB servers. We usually only put one DB server on a box, in any configuration, and add light load apps just to bring the CPU & MEM up to 90% at some whacked statistical formula for 95% of the time, plus close checking on the I/O channels so there isn't any time they get bogged down. This approach works fine but you have to have experts doing this sort of thing - not just any MS certified Bozos.
Absolutely not. But we have a crud load of Win3K servers (~600) that I, and most of the team, want to get rid of but they still have life in the product that's running on them. If we can stop more WinTel boxes going up in the future then we can everntually ween the management off Microsoft in the data center which now has a bit over 2000 boxes in it, in just the main center.
My current assignment is with a server consolidation team. One of the things we are doing is reducing the number of servers and virtualizing everything we can. If we can't virualize MS Windows to reduce hardware count then in the future Linux will be the platform of choice for servers. All the major players have Linux versions of the server software I use - databases and web based servers are the majority of corporate servers today so when I design systems I don't even consider a Microsoft based solution. Scalability and security are the main reasons. The Microsoft solution is to throw hardware at a problem requiring more licenses and more expense to the data center at all levels. Since Java runs everywhere, although I prefer other languages, WebSphere and WebLogic are the major players along with Apache for web based applications. Any database I need runs on any UNIX and some Linux distros. So I have no need to fight the PHBs who eat Microsoft FUD for breakfast when I can point to, in this case, millions of dollars in annual savings when they dump every server running Microsoft and never put another one in the data centers.
So leave Gates and Co alone. I don't want them to allow virtualization. It will make my job a whole lot easier.
Nietzsche: God is Dead. Microsoft shill: Linux is dead
God: Nietzsche is dead. Major corporations, desktop users in the millions, governments: Windows is killing us, now they are dead
The China Communist Party is the "administrator"of Hong Kong, ergo Hong Kong is controlled by communist. It was not a week into the return of Hong Kong that there were new school books supplied to children that had been ordered by the CCP. Apparent financial freedom is not the same as political freedom.
Remember this is in Communist China. The press loves to tell us that China is now post-communism since it allows citizens to own businesses. There is still only one political party there, they have very strict policies against just about everything. And very strict punishments for all the offenses. And anything can be considered a crime if you cross the local CCP representatives. There is very little of what most of the rest of the world consider to be basic personal rights allowed there. Sure they can earn and make more money than before but the economy is still centrally controlled and the government has it's hand in the till to build up it's military and maintain it. The People's Liberation Army is there to keep it's citizens in line (Tianamen Square), not to keep people out of the country who want to enjoy having their lives being controlled and being threatened with punishment for just about any action we take for granted. The Chinese do not have freedom of press, speech, religion, freedom to gather in groups unless it is approved, due process of law, and ownership of anything can be revoked by the Communist at any time for any reason.
Remember this when you buy all that cheap Chinese stuff at the stores that it is helping to maintain what is in fact a slave nation.
"No one's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session." Will Rogers said "Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for."and "With Congress, every time they make a joke it's a law, and every time they make a law it's a joke.", "This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when a baby gets hold of a hammer." -
Downloaders take the hint, and alter their behavior before they receive a more serious letter in the mail."
When I read that part I fell out of my chair and spewd my afternoon tea through my nose. That Micheal Geist and the BSA are some kinda crazy funny, ain't they?
We were promised this desktop thingee two years ago. Maybe more. As I recall all IBM was going to have Linux on the desktop/workstation by the end of 2005. Didn't happen and nothing was said about why. Sam Palmisano stood on stage in Las Vegas at the Tivoli convention and announced IBM was going to get aggressive with Linux and nothing more was ever heard. SO I say.... it's about damn time.
These parking garages that stack and rotate cars are all over Taiwan. I've seen small devices on streets that hold a dozen or so cars to very large arrays that hold an estimated hundred cars in the metro areas and for large condo/apartment complexes. Never seen a scrape yet. Of course in Taiwan traffic scratches and scrapes are a fact of life so how can you be sure.
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I don't object to commercial, non-free software either. In fact I buy my Linux distros and some of the toys I run on the boxes. I use Freedom as in Libertas, to choose the best suited tools and distros to get my work done without being forced to keep buying a product line because it evolves to generate cash not to make my life better.
But then buying Apple products is the same except it starts with a new house and works it's way back to the dress, car, and kitchen appliances which can only come from the same company that built the house.
I am constantly amazed with the people who flock to Apple when they do the same thing at the hardware level that Microsoft does at the software level and that is product line lock in.
The only free choice comes when you use commodity hardware with a Linux or Free/Open/Net BSD OS. Having a geek staff to build and maintain these are no more expensive than buying into the 'Who you gonna sue when it goes bad' thinking so it has to be corporate buys only. When is the last time anyone sued Microsoft successfully for causing millions of dollars in lost revenue and productivity due to security flaws and buggy productivity tools?
Lesson learned. Pain is a great teacher.
The bill was directed to retailers. Is your ISP a retailer? The article is not all that clear about the target but by 'retailer' it seems this is about the local iHop, No-Tell Hotel, or Victoria's Secret storing your credit card and any address, phone number, SS# info way past the authorization cycle. Having a mortgage, auto payments, and a monthly charge for services (I pay an annual fee for my web hosting) would be normal usage of customer data, but a retailer does not require any bank/credit card info after they receive the money for their product.
Did a college paper on accounting machinery once and that was a factoid from my research. Also did a research paper on the slide rule in high school back when we were waiting for simeone to invent the pocket calculator.
True - modern tunng is a case of 'tempering/fudging' the octave to fit all the notes into regular intervals. And BTW, I'm surprised that there are so many knowlegable folks on slash here that can discuss music and the physics of music.
It's not the use of different A's that make it authentic but rather the use of alternate scales. The modern tempered scale allows us to play music in any key. Older scales having different relationships among the 4ths, 5ths, 3rds, 6ths, minor 3rds, etc within the octave, was what many composers used to make the music have certain charateristics they wanted to bring out in the music. Mozart's "Requiem in D Minor" is a much different creature using the scales of Mozart's time vs the modern tempered scales. J.S. Bach popularized the modern scale with his "Well tempered Clavier" series - teaching pieces in all the scales to train pianist to play in any key. Before this time all instruments were scaled to meet the existing standard meaning differnt length of tubing on brass instruments than modern horns.
I have no idea if the concept of a standard desenses us to nearby frequencies as put forth in the article. I use aural tuning techniques and count beats and match tones to tune. I'm a non-believer in "perfect pitch" as claimed but have known several individduals with very good pitch perception or having "absolute pitch". Frank Sinatra was rumoured to be able to sing any note dead on pitch upon request without a reference note.
About 1939 A440 was adapted instead of the "French" A435 standard. In recent history some orchestras went to A445 but they are the exception. Modern piano scales are designed for A440. The length, diameter, and tension of the strings are all taken into the scale calculations. To raise pitch on a piano 5 CPS(Hz) is quite an undertaking and can add several hundreds of pounds of tension to the back (wooden part) and plate (big harp looking thingee made of cast iron and usually painted brass color) of a piano, A standard piano can have 11 tons, or more for grands, up to 20 tons of combined tension on the frame. The whole of the piano is designed to handle a certain amount of tension and can be stressed if too much tension is added. Same as letting a piano fall way below in pitch (pitch = tension) and bringing it up to pitch in one sitting. It must be done carefully & quickly to be effective. It isn't pretty to see a piano with the plate bolts sheared off and the plate bowing out from the rim. I'm a former piano technicain with 25+ years of piano tuning and rebuilding behind me so I've yanked strings on more than a few pianos, raising pitch and doing battle with aged instrments not kept in repair. Also have done complete restringing and rebuilding of all sorts of pianos.
I used to pack a small portable amateur radio staion with me when I flew. Twice I packed it in the check-in luggage and twice the ignorant fools at TSA completely trashed my suitcases because they didn't underestand what they were looking at. I now carry the whole thing with me as carry-on, a major pain in the butt, just to avoid having my luggage destroyed by one of the TSA idiots using pry bars to smash the support linings and bend the metal braces supporting the rim to prevent damage to the contents. If they had paged me to question me before making such an invasive search it would have been preferable to having to buy new suitcase everytime I fly - and I fly a lot on business.
Algebraic equations don't bother me as with any of the equations I used in electronics. These were the first things I wrote my early programs to do - ham radio stuff. It's only when I put actual numbers to them that I have trouble, As when I do math with numbers from Roman or the Chinese writing which I've learned, since I conceptualize with the Arabic numbers and have to write them down in Arabic. Other numbering systems as words are OK and I can read Arabic numbers fine as words. It's just when I try to do calculations on numbers that it becomes a problem. Hell if I know why. I was in my 40s before I was diagnosed - it was always supposed that I was just stupid and wouldn't be much more than a janitor or gas staation attendant. It was when the early microcomputers came out that I discovered how to make the machine do the heavy lifting - and I've made a damn fine living doing it for other people since.
I have dyscalculia - the trouble with numbers that people have with dyslexia have with letters. Numbers crawl all over the page when I look at them and the harder I concentrate the worse they crawl. I also put numbers into sentences when writing - like 5 for F and otherwise fairly neat block lettering gets pinched and scribbled when I write numbers. But my analytical skills are sharp. Maybe sharper because I had to learn how to compensate. But having said that, most of my problems as a software architect are 'word problems'. Get this damn pile of rubble to do X,Y, and Z'. I have realized fairly complex math formulas into algorythms to do the math that I couldn't otherwise do at gun point. In fact one of the reason I bought my first computer was to get it to do the math for me that I couldn't. I know how math works, I just can't get the ansmwers on my own. So when it comes to CS, IMHO - it's better to be a good analyst and detail oriented than be a math major.
Does anyone remember Hollerith? He devised the card for the 1880 census and it was that card that was standardized on. Hence in FORTRAN you have a Hollerith constant, meaning a string of 80 characters - if I recall my college days correctly
We haven't had a single problem with the DB servers(or any others) in at least three years that I been doing this. Oracle and DB2 running on pSeries hardware - some recent Solaris 10 containers stacking up a couple of DB servers. We usually only put one DB server on a box, in any configuration, and add light load apps just to bring the CPU & MEM up to 90% at some whacked statistical formula for 95% of the time, plus close checking on the I/O channels so there isn't any time they get bogged down. This approach works fine but you have to have experts doing this sort of thing - not just any MS certified Bozos.
Absolutely not. But we have a crud load of Win3K servers (~600) that I, and most of the team, want to get rid of but they still have life in the product that's running on them. If we can stop more WinTel boxes going up in the future then we can everntually ween the management off Microsoft in the data center which now has a bit over 2000 boxes in it, in just the main center.
So leave Gates and Co alone. I don't want them to allow virtualization. It will make my job a whole lot easier.
And I'll be back where I was 6 - 7 years ago, running only FreeBSD. So long and thanks for all the fish.
Nietzsche: God is Dead. Microsoft shill: Linux is dead
God: Nietzsche is dead. Major corporations, desktop users in the millions, governments: Windows is killing us, now they are dead
The China Communist Party is the "administrator"of Hong Kong, ergo Hong Kong is controlled by communist. It was not a week into the return of Hong Kong that there were new school books supplied to children that had been ordered by the CCP. Apparent financial freedom is not the same as political freedom.
Remember this when you buy all that cheap Chinese stuff at the stores that it is helping to maintain what is in fact a slave nation.
My wife rented Gattaca this weekend. Some what of a yawner but then I'd watch Uma Thurman read a phone book.
Will Rogers said "Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for."and
"With Congress, every time they make a joke it's a law, and every time they make a law it's a joke.",
"This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when a baby gets hold of a hammer." -
Amen, Brother. Amen.
Read more Will Rogers here
When I read that part I fell out of my chair and spewd my afternoon tea through my nose. That Micheal Geist and the BSA are some kinda crazy funny, ain't they?
We were promised this desktop thingee two years ago. Maybe more. As I recall all IBM was going to have Linux on the desktop/workstation by the end of 2005. Didn't happen and nothing was said about why. Sam Palmisano stood on stage in Las Vegas at the Tivoli convention and announced IBM was going to get aggressive with Linux and nothing more was ever heard. SO I say.... it's about damn time.
These parking garages that stack and rotate cars are all over Taiwan. I've seen small devices on streets that hold a dozen or so cars to very large arrays that hold an estimated hundred cars in the metro areas and for large condo/apartment complexes. Never seen a scrape yet. Of course in Taiwan traffic scratches and scrapes are a fact of life so how can you be sure.