I've yet to see a crash on my AMD760 ASUS board. It's middle of the pack in performance (read: more than you'll ever need) and rock solid. VIA has a bad rep, no doubt, but this box just works. Maybe you're running a microsoft OS? Or using lots of 3rd-party binary-only drivers including one that's known to trigger AGP-related crashes? My system is Microsoft, nvidia, and binary-only-driver free; it seems to help a lot.
I will be happy on the day that I don't get a motherboard which repeatedly powers down the system, randomly. (FYI: Yes, I tried Linux, WinME, and WinXP)
The problem's not software, it's hardware. There's a line that goes back to the power supply called "power good" and if it's deasserted then your power supply will shut down. There are other possible reasons, like excess heat. Make sure your power supply is working perfectly and your case's internal cooling is adequate before you assume your mainboard is flaky. I've never observed my ASUS A7M266 have this kind of problem, nor on any other board unless the power supply was inadequate or flaky.
I believe Indiana University has two hardware-similar clusters, one running Unix and one running some flavor of DOS. I don't have to URL but it shouldn't be hard to find.
It's just a bit deceptive to note that NetBSD runs on O2 and then imply that Linux does not. In fact Linux is now somewhat more capable on O2 than NetBSD, though it's true that X isn't ready yet. The people working on O2 are putting in a lot of effort toward supporting the numerous neat hardware features. NetBSD was the first to announce a port, and theirs was the first to boot multiuser. Soren deserves credit for this. But the Linux port is in at least as good condition now.
In case you're wondering, I was one of the two people who did the original O2 Linux port, and the IRQ handler, PCI drivers, and setup code in the current version found in the OSS CVS repository are still mine, though other worthies have picked up the work and carried it further. Last I heard they had added on-board ethernet and keyboard/mouse drivers and the ability to run in cached mode, and a framebuffer was nearing completion. So O2 Linux is a very exciting place to be these days; if you have one you should really get involved!
So what? Family Guy is not funny, not original, not creative, not visually elegant or well-done, and not entertaining in any way. There are probably worse programs on TV (Voyager, TNG, and the CowboyNeal Smile Time Variety Hour come to mind) but not by much. I won't miss Family Guy at all. Futurama, I would miss, except that Fox never really showed it after the first few episodes. It was always baseball, or some movie they would start early, or whatever. I would happily pay $100 for a DVD set containing every episode ever made, however.
you buy into the assertion that Earth is warming, the historical record indicates that at times in the distant past (100s MY ago) the Earth was MUCH warmer. Yet, amazingly, the "fossil fuels" we're so bad to be burning weren't yet fossils, humans didn't exist, and Earth didn't become Venus. Shocker. As for slowing rotation, there are plenty of other factors controlling air currents, so even if we were to accurately measure an otherwise (moon, etc) unexplained slowdown in rotation, it doesn't prove that Earth is warming. All it proves is that Earth spins more slowly.
Care for our planet, yes. Act as responsible stewards of our land and oceans, certainly. But spew bogus alarmist rhetoric to confuse and manipulate the mediagoing public, shame on you. This is junk science at its worst.
Well, sure, you can use open source or free software whenever you'd like.
You could also simply pay for the proprietary software that you need to use rather than stealing it.
If you do s/need/choose/ I'd tell you I couldn't have said it better myself. Stealing is wrong. So is wasting the investors' money on the Bill Gates and Larry Ellison Retirement Fund. Therefore, you should choose not to use proprietary software. Of course, if you do choose to use it, you should pay for it and follow all terms of the license.
Seriously, the FSF should join the BSA in licensing crackdowns. It's called "product differentiation."
Anyone know a good system of incoroprating source control with a databases? Oracle and Postgres would do.
Well, it's certainly not a GOOD source control system, but I know for a fact that starteam uses a database backend. I'm pretty sure Rational ClearCase does also, and I'm told it sucks a good deal less. Anyway, there are a lot of problems with starteam; one of them being its strong preference for running on microshaft platforms, another its lack of database support (access, sql server, and oracle only - gimme a break!) and its outrageous cost (10s of $k for a small team plus massive server hardware). So, yeah, it's been done, but I'd much rather use even CVS than starteam. ClearCase, well, I'd love the chance to see it, but I never will at this cheapass company.
Yep. When you pay the huge money for these support contracts, you really get support. I've had similar experiences with SGI and Oracle. God, these people know their shit. None of this "call Gateway tech support, sit on hold for 40 minutes, talk to a drone, convince the drone that yes the disk drive is really broken, and they send you a new one 5 days later" bullshit.
all the people who have never used an SGI give their pet theories about how much faster a[n] {Athlon|AthlonXP|Pentium3|Pentium4|Xeon|...} is than the R14k because of {clock speed|pipelines|RAMBUS|...}. *sigh* The SGI is fast. The CPU is fast. The graphics are REALLY fast. The system bus architecture...well, go read SGI's white papers. No PC can compete. Never has, never will. Get over yourselves and recognize that, although the SGI is better than any PC ever made, the price/performance ratio is not so good. Which means that it's not a standard desktop workstation, and sure enough when you look at their target applications list you won't see "word processing" or "web browsing." Imagine that, a machine not targetted at people who read slashdot all day...
The machine is nice, SGI makes a fine product, and with renewed violence on the part of the US military they have some chance of being solvent again in the near future. So relax, enjoy looking at a beautiful product you will never be able to afford, and don't be so jealous.
Go read "The Ten Commandments for C Programmers [kuro5hin.org]," specifically number 5.
Actually, Microsoft's problem has always been #10 - the "all the world's a VAX" principle. By Microsoft's logic - all the world uses winblows - their workarounds actually make sense. Consider - everyone uses winblows, and therefore the workarounds apply to them. So in that case nobody will produce the mail that triggers the bug, and the workaround works fine. *shudder*
...our IT department would rather buy all Microsoft than think for themselves.
If your company is anything like mine, it's not IT's fault at all. I AM IT at this company, and yet every user other than me uses Outhouse. Because they choose to. I tried banning it for security reasons, but as we haven't had our Major Security Breach yet, nobody takes it seriously. When that happens, of course, they'll just fire me and continue using Outhouse... In short, the problem isn't IT, it's management's inability to follow reasonable advice. Just my 2c worth.
Software isn't a bridge where a fuckup is forever. It's much more organic. If one piece is of low quality, it can often be ripped out and replace completely.
Actually, mission-critical software like an operating system is a lot like a bridge. Not so far from here is the dreaded highway 880, the Nimitz Freeway. Many years ago, when it was built, the designers called for 2 2-lane bridges over Brokaw Road. This lack of vision and foresight was a definite fuckup - traffic now moves through that stretch of road at 9 miles per hour because the road can't be widened until the bridges are. Recently a project - a hideously expensive project - was started to do exactly that. Now traffic is even worse because the road is often closed or further restricted so contruction crews can work on the bridges. Pain. But the fuckup is not forever; it can be fixed at great cost during a painful transition period.
So it is with software. Adding SMP support to an OS that didn't have it previously is pain. It means instability and bad performance during the transition. Witness what happened with SunOS's addition of SMP support and then the transition to "real" SMP support in Solaris. Or the same two transitions in Linux 1.2 and again in 2.4. Yeah, it sucked. But, wow, traffic sure moves a lot faster now, doesn't it?
The rest of your assessment is spot-on; I just tire of people saying that software development isn't like the established engineering disciplines. The only real difference is that the software industry hasn't yet had enough time to work out its best practices. But designing and implementing software is pretty much the same as designing and implementing any other complex system.
Once you convince a company that document "retention" is valuable, many managers will immediately declare themselves exempt because they feel that they will one day need that email from a vendor thanking them for buying the Widget 10,000 last week.
This is a major policy problem in a much wider scope than a document retention/destruction policy. The problem of politically powerful individuals within a company declaring themselves exempt from various policies is a serious one. Ask any systems administrator about it - when you come up with any policy and present it at a meeting, everyone will approve it and say it sounds like a great idea. Later, each person will individually approach you and say that the policy is a great idea for everyone else but the he'she should personally be exempt because of some special circumstance or other that, of course, doesn't apply to anyone else.
If your company is like that (that is, it's like mine), don't even bother with written policies, on document retention or anything else. Even if you own the company or are the CEO and thus powerful enough to force the approval of policies like this, nobody will actually follow them anyway. Your best bet is probably to institute some boilerplate policy you get from your corporate lawyers, post it conspicuously, and make sure everyone agrees to it in writing. As I said, there's no point in trying to make anyone follow it - they won't. But in this case at least you can try to offload all liability on the individual employees who don't bother to follow the policy. It probably won't work especially in the case of SEC troubles or similar, but it's easy and cheap to do.
Honestly, why can't people just accept that they're NOT special?
Maybe we need to add "separation of corporation and state" to our "separation of church and state" in the constitution?
This phrase never appears in the constitution. Instead we have "Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion." Which any reasonable person interprets to mean that religions cannot be banned or discriminated against by Congress. It does not mean exactly what Jefferson wrote regarding the separation of church and state, though the ideas are interrelated.
Now then, "No member of Congress, prospective member of Congress, or agent or representative of same, shall accept consideration from any person or corporation until his term of office shall have expired. Then he may receive consideration only in exchange for goods or services rendered, and only in reasonable compensation at fair-market prices. This prohibition shall begin upon announcing, publicly or otherwise, intention to seek office. Violation shall be punishable by a fine of the greater of one hundred times the value of the consideration accepted or one hundred million dollars. Furthermore, any bill proposed, sponsored, or co-sponsored by said member shall be annulled, and stricken from the United States Code, and that member's vote on all matters which passed before the member shall be null and void." might be a nice start.
Of course we would hope people would not expose the database to the world, but there are plenty of people who do. And more interestingly, the database is usually exposed to some internal networks (for example, a database for financials might sit well inside a firewall in the accounting department - on a corporate network). So there is still risk at least from people who can compromise firewalls, bypass poor security checks in applications, or from disgruntled employees.
The fact that defense in depth is a good idea does not justify allowing one of the layers to be weak. The defenses at every level should be as strong as possible, and that ideally means a bug-free app server and a bug-free database.
And what are the facts, exactly? That windows is a steaming heap of horse shit that's not really good for anything? That vendors haven't bothered to make your 31337 g4m3Z available on Linux? That FreeBSD sucks monkey balls on SMP? That Solaris is dog-slow on even the most expensive hardware on earth? All those are FACTS. None of them are anything people really want to hear, because, frankly, everyone already knows all of them. Sure, the linux zealots don't want to hear it. Neither do windos zealots or any other kind of people, period. It's not interesting. So save us all the trouble and don't post.
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I've yet to see a crash on my AMD760 ASUS board. It's middle of the pack in performance (read: more than you'll ever need) and rock solid. VIA has a bad rep, no doubt, but this box just works. Maybe you're running a microsoft OS? Or using lots of 3rd-party binary-only drivers including one that's known to trigger AGP-related crashes? My system is Microsoft, nvidia, and binary-only-driver free; it seems to help a lot.
The problem's not software, it's hardware. There's a line that goes back to the power supply called "power good" and if it's deasserted then your power supply will shut down. There are other possible reasons, like excess heat. Make sure your power supply is working perfectly and your case's internal cooling is adequate before you assume your mainboard is flaky. I've never observed my ASUS A7M266 have this kind of problem, nor on any other board unless the power supply was inadequate or flaky.
I believe Indiana University has two hardware-similar clusters, one running Unix and one running some flavor of DOS. I don't have to URL but it shouldn't be hard to find.
In case you're wondering, I was one of the two people who did the original O2 Linux port, and the IRQ handler, PCI drivers, and setup code in the current version found in the OSS CVS repository are still mine, though other worthies have picked up the work and carried it further. Last I heard they had added on-board ethernet and keyboard/mouse drivers and the ability to run in cached mode, and a framebuffer was nearing completion. So O2 Linux is a very exciting place to be these days; if you have one you should really get involved!
So what? Family Guy is not funny, not original, not creative, not visually elegant or well-done, and not entertaining in any way. There are probably worse programs on TV (Voyager, TNG, and the CowboyNeal Smile Time Variety Hour come to mind) but not by much. I won't miss Family Guy at all. Futurama, I would miss, except that Fox never really showed it after the first few episodes. It was always baseball, or some movie they would start early, or whatever. I would happily pay $100 for a DVD set containing every episode ever made, however.
Care for our planet, yes. Act as responsible stewards of our land and oceans, certainly. But spew bogus alarmist rhetoric to confuse and manipulate the mediagoing public, shame on you. This is junk science at its worst.
If you do s/need/choose/ I'd tell you I couldn't have said it better myself. Stealing is wrong. So is wasting the investors' money on the Bill Gates and Larry Ellison Retirement Fund. Therefore, you should choose not to use proprietary software. Of course, if you do choose to use it, you should pay for it and follow all terms of the license.
Seriously, the FSF should join the BSA in licensing crackdowns. It's called "product differentiation."
Well, it's certainly not a GOOD source control system, but I know for a fact that starteam uses a database backend. I'm pretty sure Rational ClearCase does also, and I'm told it sucks a good deal less. Anyway, there are a lot of problems with starteam; one of them being its strong preference for running on microshaft platforms, another its lack of database support (access, sql server, and oracle only - gimme a break!) and its outrageous cost (10s of $k for a small team plus massive server hardware). So, yeah, it's been done, but I'd much rather use even CVS than starteam. ClearCase, well, I'd love the chance to see it, but I never will at this cheapass company.
Yep. When you pay the huge money for these support contracts, you really get support. I've had similar experiences with SGI and Oracle. God, these people know their shit. None of this "call Gateway tech support, sit on hold for 40 minutes, talk to a drone, convince the drone that yes the disk drive is really broken, and they send you a new one 5 days later" bullshit.
That's like asking, "So, anybody here have 51 chromosomes?"
Nor will they ever, if every potential employer loses his or her money to investment fraud.
Somebody has to. Back to work, you cog.
The machine is nice, SGI makes a fine product, and with renewed violence on the part of the US military they have some chance of being solvent again in the near future. So relax, enjoy looking at a beautiful product you will never be able to afford, and don't be so jealous.
Actually, Microsoft's problem has always been #10 - the "all the world's a VAX" principle. By Microsoft's logic - all the world uses winblows - their workarounds actually make sense. Consider - everyone uses winblows, and therefore the workarounds apply to them. So in that case nobody will produce the mail that triggers the bug, and the workaround works fine. *shudder*
If your company is anything like mine, it's not IT's fault at all. I AM IT at this company, and yet every user other than me uses Outhouse. Because they choose to. I tried banning it for security reasons, but as we haven't had our Major Security Breach yet, nobody takes it seriously. When that happens, of course, they'll just fire me and continue using Outhouse... In short, the problem isn't IT, it's management's inability to follow reasonable advice. Just my 2c worth.
At least that clusterfuck that is 880 vs 237 is being worked on :P~ I'm sure they'll finish it one day, too!
Not holding my breath; that was going on the first time I ever visited the valley and it just keeps on going...
First regional Slashdot thread??? :-)
Actually, mission-critical software like an operating system is a lot like a bridge. Not so far from here is the dreaded highway 880, the Nimitz Freeway. Many years ago, when it was built, the designers called for 2 2-lane bridges over Brokaw Road. This lack of vision and foresight was a definite fuckup - traffic now moves through that stretch of road at 9 miles per hour because the road can't be widened until the bridges are. Recently a project - a hideously expensive project - was started to do exactly that. Now traffic is even worse because the road is often closed or further restricted so contruction crews can work on the bridges. Pain. But the fuckup is not forever; it can be fixed at great cost during a painful transition period.
So it is with software. Adding SMP support to an OS that didn't have it previously is pain. It means instability and bad performance during the transition. Witness what happened with SunOS's addition of SMP support and then the transition to "real" SMP support in Solaris. Or the same two transitions in Linux 1.2 and again in 2.4. Yeah, it sucked. But, wow, traffic sure moves a lot faster now, doesn't it?
The rest of your assessment is spot-on; I just tire of people saying that software development isn't like the established engineering disciplines. The only real difference is that the software industry hasn't yet had enough time to work out its best practices. But designing and implementing software is pretty much the same as designing and implementing any other complex system.
This is a major policy problem in a much wider scope than a document retention/destruction policy. The problem of politically powerful individuals within a company declaring themselves exempt from various policies is a serious one. Ask any systems administrator about it - when you come up with any policy and present it at a meeting, everyone will approve it and say it sounds like a great idea. Later, each person will individually approach you and say that the policy is a great idea for everyone else but the he'she should personally be exempt because of some special circumstance or other that, of course, doesn't apply to anyone else.
If your company is like that (that is, it's like mine), don't even bother with written policies, on document retention or anything else. Even if you own the company or are the CEO and thus powerful enough to force the approval of policies like this, nobody will actually follow them anyway. Your best bet is probably to institute some boilerplate policy you get from your corporate lawyers, post it conspicuously, and make sure everyone agrees to it in writing. As I said, there's no point in trying to make anyone follow it - they won't. But in this case at least you can try to offload all liability on the individual employees who don't bother to follow the policy. It probably won't work especially in the case of SEC troubles or similar, but it's easy and cheap to do.
Honestly, why can't people just accept that they're NOT special?
This phrase never appears in the constitution. Instead we have "Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion." Which any reasonable person interprets to mean that religions cannot be banned or discriminated against by Congress. It does not mean exactly what Jefferson wrote regarding the separation of church and state, though the ideas are interrelated.
Now then, "No member of Congress, prospective member of Congress, or agent or representative of same, shall accept consideration from any person or corporation until his term of office shall have expired. Then he may receive consideration only in exchange for goods or services rendered, and only in reasonable compensation at fair-market prices. This prohibition shall begin upon announcing, publicly or otherwise, intention to seek office. Violation shall be punishable by a fine of the greater of one hundred times the value of the consideration accepted or one hundred million dollars. Furthermore, any bill proposed, sponsored, or co-sponsored by said member shall be annulled, and stricken from the United States Code, and that member's vote on all matters which passed before the member shall be null and void." might be a nice start.
The fact that defense in depth is a good idea does not justify allowing one of the layers to be weak. The defenses at every level should be as strong as possible, and that ideally means a bug-free app server and a bug-free database.
And what are the facts, exactly? That windows is a steaming heap of horse shit that's not really good for anything? That vendors haven't bothered to make your 31337 g4m3Z available on Linux? That FreeBSD sucks monkey balls on SMP? That Solaris is dog-slow on even the most expensive hardware on earth? All those are FACTS. None of them are anything people really want to hear, because, frankly, everyone already knows all of them. Sure, the linux zealots don't want to hear it. Neither do windos zealots or any other kind of people, period. It's not interesting. So save us all the trouble and don't post.
Sun Creator3d. Fast as hell, all Free software in xfree86 and ther kernel. Did I mention fast as hell?
who finds saying "W32.Donut" to be really, really, funny? Try it with me, just say it a few times. Well?
Again?
If this is true, why is it still so fucking expensive?