I've had several collections of 'throwaway' computers, with my last 486 and P100 going to that big recycling heap in the sky a few years back.
Right now, I've got nothing super old, but I've been keeping an AMD K6-II alive through the ages. It was my first IBM-compatible machine (after a C= plus/4) and I still use it regularly as a development box (Debian Stable in console mode all around. vi, gcc, perl, ssh, ftp, lynx. What more do you need?).
It is fortunate to have 2(!) USB ports on an add-in interface, so I can still plug a MS Ergo 4000 keyboard and modern optical mouse. Most of the hardware is original and all works, but the three things I've had to replace periodically are the optical drives (several), cpu fan (twice) and memory (twice). Up until about 5 years ago, compatible parts were plentiful from old computers, but I haven't seen the right sized fan or any SDRAM for the picking in ages, and it's now getting harder and harder to find IDE anything, even used.
I still enjoy the hell out of my i5 (and other smatterings of computers lying about) but I'll be sad when I have to put the ol K6 down.
Further proof that tablets and the Cloud(tm) are the paradigm shift into the new memesphere. Nobody needs big, bulky Iron from folks like IBM, HP, EMC, etc.
We'll do it all now on clustered iPads! With Retina Displays! Surfing the web is dead, now we're Hangliding in The Cloud(tm)!!!!
Perhaps Linux needs a minimalist leader. Throw everything out. Then step by step, bring back features and see what works, and what doesn't. In the process make sure that everything has a consistent look and feel.
Believe it or not, that used to be Ubuntu. Back 8 or 10 years ago, there were all these distributions that offered 'choice!' by loading the biggest Gnome or KDE desktop crammed to the gills with EVERY and I mean EVERY app that was available. Stable, beta, working or not. You opened a panel and there were 17 calculators to choose from, 23 IRC clients, about 15 web browsers, 7 different terminal apps... you get the idea. Most of it was half-broken shit.
The beauty of Ubuntu in the beginning (I thought) was that they cut out all of that. You got a nice, slick installer that installed Debian Unstable (which we'd all known for years was fine for everyday use) with a slick graphical installer. You booted up to a nicely themed Gnome desktop with only the best ONE of each type of application installed. They were smart about choosing what apps to include by default, and I felt that their choices resonated very closely with experienced linux users who generally all agreed on the best app for a particular usage. The whole Debian repository was mirrored and available, but you didn't have to dig through a bunch of crap to find the stuff that you most likely would have chosen to install yourself. Configs were all clicky-clicky, but all your fave debian cli tools like aptitude still worked as expected.
I really thought that Ubuntu was going to become the polished distro that brought Year Of The Linux Desktop(tm) from fantasy to reality. I still think that they had a real chance to pull that off. (At least up until about 8.0, then it started to get weird).
So first Facebook's algorithm hides my posts from my friends for reasons known only to Facebook.
Now Facebook is testing the option so I can pay so that my posts they hid will actually show to my friends.
In a way, I really hope Facebook goes through with this, maybe it'll be the straw that finally breaks the camels back and we can get a new social network that actually cares about its users.
While I agree that the new features are silly and a thinly veiled attempt at capitalizing upon the public, shall we all remember that when we post things on Facebook, we are voluntarily using a free service on the Internet? At any point we are all free to delete our account, ignore the parts we don't like, or otherwise not participate in it as a social networking site.
Shit, we may even decide to go outside, into the Big Blue Room and talk to actual people, face to face!
Or, you know, actually worked a job. Where did the idea come from that students should just play during the 20-30 working hours a week that they're not in class?
20-30? I wish. For me it's more like 40-60. And after talking to many of my fellow classmates, I'm fortunate. At least I don't have children.
As a late 30s guy who has a 21 year old woman asleep in his bed right now, I can't decide which is the first thing I should say:
1) It doesn't take drugs, just a charming personality to win them over. 2) There's a smoking hot 21 year old in my bed right now, and I'm up at 2:00am reading old articles on Slashdot.
eh...
Re:Anyone rebuilding their kernel still?
on
Linux 3.3 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I was trying to remember the last time I built a linux kernel. It's going to be somewhere in the early 2.6.x series, on Debian Sid. Even in those early days I didn't really notice a difference in performance (unless I was compiling in drivers for specific hardware). The kernel image was smaller, and I knew that that was better, but other than that it all ran about the same. I almost wonder if the performance "increase" I saw back in the 2.2 days was all in my head now. I used to see some performance differences in compiled FreeBSD kernels on my really old boxes (300mhz K6-II with 128MB), but I think the differences have gotten smaller and smaller since 4.x days.
Like Wonko says, it's not a huge bit of effort to build a kernel. But I don't really see a reason to do it. I should give it a shot just for old time's sake, heh.
Anyone rebuilding their kernel still?
on
Linux 3.3 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Back in the Middle Ages (late 1990s through about 2004) I remember us all getting excited for new kernel releases, and then all rushing to download the source and build it. (By 'us' i mean myself and local geek friends, as well as our cohorts on various IRC channels).
Nowadays with auto-configuring, rolling release desktop distributions being the norm, is kernel building now only done in server room environments and for non-PC hardware?
"Atari Wants To Reinvent Pong" is incorrect. It should be:
"Foreign company that owns the Atari trademark wants someone else to reinvent Pong for them, because they blew it trying to reboot a few of Atari's classic titles themselves."
My only concern for this is that Steam (one of the major forces in PC gaming) moving this direction will discourage Desktop PC game development. Instead of creating games for the latest PC hardware, developers will focus on the 'sure thing' of the Steam Box. We all know the difference in graphics, processing and gameplay between PC and console games of the same title.
The specs of the Steam Box are respectable now (my main PC doesn't have an i7, for instance) but in a few years its specs will be merely 'ok', and I'm not optimistic about being able to upgrade video components, ram or processing capabilities on it without major headaches.
This is one of a series of articles where I've seen that the British can't do math and have trouble with spelling, grammar and apostrophe use. The worst part though, is that most of them end with "at least we're doing much better than those in the United States."
It worries me how bad the U.S. is getting. I should get out more, but now I'm worried about what I'll see.
The unmentioned part of that is "and isn't over a year obsolete".
Debian Stable is behind the times, yes. But there is also Testing and Unstable branches.
Don't let the "Unstable" namesake fool you- I've run it for over a decade and have only had the same amount of trouble that I've gotten from other 'mature' distros. Ubuntu and Mint are both based on the Unstable branch, as most of the other "Debian derived" systems are.
Debian still happens to be "oldschool" enough to where you can start with the base install and build whatever system you want. It's not as "prepackaged" as something like Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu.
Maybe English isn't Joe_Dragon's first language, to which I would give him a pass. However, his mistakes look more like someone who learned it poorly as a first language. There are lots (not lot's) of examples of that on the web, while there are lots of examples of people learning English as a second, third or fourth language who can read and write it perfectly.
Pretty much sums it up. There have also been many posters so far that have mentioned you can't just "make" someone a programmer. They have to want it, to enjoy it and to already "be" a programmer in mind and spirit. Same goes for the new British thing of forcing gradeschool kids to learn programming. Having it available as an option would be great, but forcing them into it won't give you more programmers, much less good ones. Meanwhile, all the kids that were going to become programmers will still do it whether you encourage them or not. Simple as that.
Surely the "Lean" up above is a typo, but there is a serious problem of late with Slashdotters and their spelling and grammar abilities. People who learned English as a second or third language get a pass, but for all you up and coming kids who are native speakers, what the fuck?
(my two hamfisted cents. I'm going back to Skyrim)
I know i'm going to need my Nomex underwear for this post, but...
1) IME, kids who would be 'nerds' tend to be nerds anyways. It's something that they just can't help.
2) Kids who would not be nerds will pretty much not be nerds. Either they don't have the interest, intelligence, or what. But they'll get into other things instead (not that this is bad, it's just the facts).
2) Kids who are on the fence might be brought in by Make or similar, but this percentage is going to be incredibly low.
3) Right now it is INCREDIBLY COOL to be a 'nerd' or a 'geek'. However, this definition doesn't apply to the kids in #1. The 'new' nerds or geeks aren't really nerds or geeks, just those from #2 that have found a way to apply that label to themselves so that they can do whatever they wanted to do in the first place. I'm talking the cosplay/anime types who play video games as opposed to writing them, buy Macbooks instead of building a computer themselves, and get into Rock Band instead of learning to play a real instrument. There will unfortunately be little to no talk about science, computers, scifi, Make Magazine or any of the hallmark stuff that anyone GenX or older would think of when you say "nerd" or "geek". The terms have completely new meanings.
Maybe I've got a tendency towards odd conversation or something, but Cleverbot has never seemed very clever to me.
1) No memory prior to its last statement. As in, it may ask you a question, but it doesn't care about your response. You may ask a question, get an answer, ask a followup question, and it's as if it is a completely new subject.
2) Random tangental responses to questions: "How are you today?" "I like brown peas".
3) Constantly getting asked if I think it is human. All to frequently. In fact, it tends to get repetitious with a few concepts. I would expect something like this to be able to 'learn' from what it is fed and synthesize coherent sentences.
4) It seems to only pay attention to the first sentence you type. Dump a paragraph into it and it will ignore everything else.
In short, you can't really have an actual conversation with it- it's all just single level question/answer responses. It's about as sentient as the Infocom Text Adventures of the 1980s. And that's really pushing it.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had several collections of 'throwaway' computers, with my last 486 and P100 going to that big recycling heap in the sky a few years back.
Right now, I've got nothing super old, but I've been keeping an AMD K6-II alive through the ages. It was my first IBM-compatible machine (after a C= plus/4) and I still use it regularly as a development box (Debian Stable in console mode all around. vi, gcc, perl, ssh, ftp, lynx. What more do you need?).
It is fortunate to have 2(!) USB ports on an add-in interface, so I can still plug a MS Ergo 4000 keyboard and modern optical mouse. Most of the hardware is original and all works, but the three things I've had to replace periodically are the optical drives (several), cpu fan (twice) and memory (twice). Up until about 5 years ago, compatible parts were plentiful from old computers, but I haven't seen the right sized fan or any SDRAM for the picking in ages, and it's now getting harder and harder to find IDE anything, even used.
I still enjoy the hell out of my i5 (and other smatterings of computers lying about) but I'll be sad when I have to put the ol K6 down.
He speaks of compromising a $300 billion industry
Just because there is some 'industry' where some arbitrarily large amount of money is exchanged, it doesn't mean it has any right to exist at all.
This is different, but about as justifiable as the "too big to fail" arguments of yore.
"The Cloud" is only good as secondary backup if you don't care that it becomes public.
Encrypt it all you want. Access to your data is the hardest hurdle and by using the could you give it away.
But.. but.. but... smartphones and virtualization and...and...and...free community wireless internet over dark fiber!!!
(Yes, I'm just being silly. Having a slow day at work and the free coffee sucks)
Further proof that tablets and the Cloud(tm) are the paradigm shift into the new memesphere. Nobody needs big, bulky Iron from folks like IBM, HP, EMC, etc.
We'll do it all now on clustered iPads! With Retina Displays! Surfing the web is dead, now we're Hangliding in The Cloud(tm)!!!!
Perhaps Linux needs a minimalist leader. Throw everything out. Then step by step, bring back features and see what works, and what doesn't. In the process make sure that everything has a consistent look and feel.
Believe it or not, that used to be Ubuntu. Back 8 or 10 years ago, there were all these distributions that offered 'choice!' by loading the biggest Gnome or KDE desktop crammed to the gills with EVERY and I mean EVERY app that was available. Stable, beta, working or not. You opened a panel and there were 17 calculators to choose from, 23 IRC clients, about 15 web browsers, 7 different terminal apps... you get the idea. Most of it was half-broken shit.
The beauty of Ubuntu in the beginning (I thought) was that they cut out all of that. You got a nice, slick installer that installed Debian Unstable (which we'd all known for years was fine for everyday use) with a slick graphical installer. You booted up to a nicely themed Gnome desktop with only the best ONE of each type of application installed. They were smart about choosing what apps to include by default, and I felt that their choices resonated very closely with experienced linux users who generally all agreed on the best app for a particular usage. The whole Debian repository was mirrored and available, but you didn't have to dig through a bunch of crap to find the stuff that you most likely would have chosen to install yourself. Configs were all clicky-clicky, but all your fave debian cli tools like aptitude still worked as expected.
I really thought that Ubuntu was going to become the polished distro that brought Year Of The Linux Desktop(tm) from fantasy to reality. I still think that they had a real chance to pull that off. (At least up until about 8.0, then it started to get weird).
My $0.02 plus tax.
We're talking about Sweden, Finland and Russia.
40 years is a metric century.
So first Facebook's algorithm hides my posts from my friends for reasons known only to Facebook.
Now Facebook is testing the option so I can pay so that my posts they hid will actually show to my friends.
In a way, I really hope Facebook goes through with this, maybe it'll be the straw that finally breaks the camels back and we can get a new social network that actually cares about its users.
While I agree that the new features are silly and a thinly veiled attempt at capitalizing upon the public, shall we all remember that when we post things on Facebook, we are voluntarily using a free service on the Internet? At any point we are all free to delete our account, ignore the parts we don't like, or otherwise not participate in it as a social networking site.
Shit, we may even decide to go outside, into the Big Blue Room and talk to actual people, face to face!
Enjoy your 30's buddy
You ain't ever gonna get that back
Unfortunately I'm all too aware of this.
Or, you know, actually worked a job.
Where did the idea come from that students should just play during the 20-30 working hours a week that they're not in class?
20-30? I wish. For me it's more like 40-60. And after talking to many of my fellow classmates, I'm fortunate. At least I don't have children.
As a late 30s guy who has a 21 year old woman asleep in his bed right now, I can't decide which is the first thing I should say:
1) It doesn't take drugs, just a charming personality to win them over.
2) There's a smoking hot 21 year old in my bed right now, and I'm up at 2:00am reading old articles on Slashdot.
eh...
I was trying to remember the last time I built a linux kernel. It's going to be somewhere in the early 2.6.x series, on Debian Sid. Even in those early days I didn't really notice a difference in performance (unless I was compiling in drivers for specific hardware). The kernel image was smaller, and I knew that that was better, but other than that it all ran about the same. I almost wonder if the performance "increase" I saw back in the 2.2 days was all in my head now. I used to see some performance differences in compiled FreeBSD kernels on my really old boxes (300mhz K6-II with 128MB), but I think the differences have gotten smaller and smaller since 4.x days.
Like Wonko says, it's not a huge bit of effort to build a kernel. But I don't really see a reason to do it. I should give it a shot just for old time's sake, heh.
Back in the Middle Ages (late 1990s through about 2004) I remember us all getting excited for new kernel releases, and then all rushing to download the source and build it. (By 'us' i mean myself and local geek friends, as well as our cohorts on various IRC channels).
Nowadays with auto-configuring, rolling release desktop distributions being the norm, is kernel building now only done in server room environments and for non-PC hardware?
This doesn't matter much, I'm just curious.
"Atari Wants To Reinvent Pong" is incorrect. It should be:
"Foreign company that owns the Atari trademark wants someone else to reinvent Pong for them, because they blew it trying to reboot a few of Atari's classic titles themselves."
My only concern for this is that Steam (one of the major forces in PC gaming) moving this direction will discourage Desktop PC game development. Instead of creating games for the latest PC hardware, developers will focus on the 'sure thing' of the Steam Box. We all know the difference in graphics, processing and gameplay between PC and console games of the same title.
The specs of the Steam Box are respectable now (my main PC doesn't have an i7, for instance) but in a few years its specs will be merely 'ok', and I'm not optimistic about being able to upgrade video components, ram or processing capabilities on it without major headaches.
This is one of a series of articles where I've seen that the British can't do math and have trouble with spelling, grammar and apostrophe use. The worst part though, is that most of them end with "at least we're doing much better than those in the United States."
It worries me how bad the U.S. is getting. I should get out more, but now I'm worried about what I'll see.
Let us all welcome our shiny metal overlord. I look forward to his New Washington D.C., with Blackjack and Hookers. In fact, forget the blackjack!
The unmentioned part of that is "and isn't over a year obsolete".
Debian Stable is behind the times, yes. But there is also Testing and Unstable branches.
Don't let the "Unstable" namesake fool you- I've run it for over a decade and have only had the same amount of trouble that I've gotten from other 'mature' distros. Ubuntu and Mint are both based on the Unstable branch, as most of the other "Debian derived" systems are.
Debian still happens to be "oldschool" enough to where you can start with the base install and build whatever system you want. It's not as "prepackaged" as something like Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu.
It's worth a look.
I would love a better KDE distro, but it has to use the Debian package management system and have huge respositories.
Any suggestions?
How about Debian? It uses the Debian package management system and has huge repositories.
Han Solo: Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side.
Obi Wan: But the forth will be with you, always.
I was about to post the same thing.
Maybe English isn't Joe_Dragon's first language, to which I would give him a pass. However, his mistakes look more like someone who learned it poorly as a first language. There are lots (not lot's) of examples of that on the web, while there are lots of examples of people learning English as a second, third or fourth language who can read and write it perfectly.
*sighs*
Lemme guess...someone stole your sweet roll?
You get +5 Bethesda points, Anonymous Coward.
Peter Norvig's "Teach Yourself To Programming In Ten Years" http://norvig.com/21-days.html
Pretty much sums it up. There have also been many posters so far that have mentioned you can't just "make" someone a programmer. They have to want it, to enjoy it and to already "be" a programmer in mind and spirit. Same goes for the new British thing of forcing gradeschool kids to learn programming. Having it available as an option would be great, but forcing them into it won't give you more programmers, much less good ones. Meanwhile, all the kids that were going to become programmers will still do it whether you encourage them or not. Simple as that.
Surely the "Lean" up above is a typo, but there is a serious problem of late with Slashdotters and their spelling and grammar abilities. People who learned English as a second or third language get a pass, but for all you up and coming kids who are native speakers, what the fuck?
(my two hamfisted cents. I'm going back to Skyrim)
I know i'm going to need my Nomex underwear for this post, but...
1) IME, kids who would be 'nerds' tend to be nerds anyways. It's something that they just can't help.
2) Kids who would not be nerds will pretty much not be nerds. Either they don't have the interest, intelligence, or what. But they'll get into other things instead (not that this is bad, it's just the facts).
2) Kids who are on the fence might be brought in by Make or similar, but this percentage is going to be incredibly low.
3) Right now it is INCREDIBLY COOL to be a 'nerd' or a 'geek'. However, this definition doesn't apply to the kids in #1. The 'new' nerds or geeks aren't really nerds or geeks, just those from #2 that have found a way to apply that label to themselves so that they can do whatever they wanted to do in the first place. I'm talking the cosplay/anime types who play video games as opposed to writing them, buy Macbooks instead of building a computer themselves, and get into Rock Band instead of learning to play a real instrument. There will unfortunately be little to no talk about science, computers, scifi, Make Magazine or any of the hallmark stuff that anyone GenX or older would think of when you say "nerd" or "geek". The terms have completely new meanings.
There are many examples, but y'all get the gist.
I'm pretty sure I saw that one too. When I was 8, I had a subscription to both PS and Ranger Rick.
Maybe I've got a tendency towards odd conversation or something, but Cleverbot has never seemed very clever to me.
1) No memory prior to its last statement. As in, it may ask you a question, but it doesn't care about your response. You may ask a question, get an answer, ask a followup question, and it's as if it is a completely new subject.
2) Random tangental responses to questions: "How are you today?" "I like brown peas".
3) Constantly getting asked if I think it is human. All to frequently. In fact, it tends to get repetitious with a few concepts. I would expect something like this to be able to 'learn' from what it is fed and synthesize coherent sentences.
4) It seems to only pay attention to the first sentence you type. Dump a paragraph into it and it will ignore everything else.
In short, you can't really have an actual conversation with it- it's all just single level question/answer responses. It's about as sentient as the Infocom Text Adventures of the 1980s. And that's really pushing it.