So it's another article about bitcoin. Well I just wonder how this will turn out. So far it didn't die.
And I wonder if namecoin will come useful after IPv6 will be used widely. Heh, will IPv6 be used? We hope so. How would you DNS such a giant IP space? Maybe namecoin will come more handy that usual means...
Well, it's time to start a new journal (among 100 000 of already existing journals). Create a huge lab, get lots of funding to pay them for their work. And tell the to reproduce every result from every submitted paper. Publish only if result was reproductible. Expensive as hell, but soon that would be the only journal that people will bother to spend time on reading.
I still have big sentiment to my first contact with sawfish. It was year 2000, and I was playing with my freshly installed debian box. I got rid of windows about 2 years earlier, and I was experimenting with everything that linux could have bring to me. I tried red-hat for 6 months, slackware, etc. Then I settled on debian. Next I was trying all desktop environments & window managers that dselect was showing in package listing (there was no aptitude at that time).
And I installed one by one, and used it for few days, maybe a week. Some of them felt strange, some felt crippled. Others like enlightement were slick, but looked unfinished. Then I found sawfish. It was nothing - just an empty screen. I was already accustomed with weird window managers, so without fear I tried pressing all buttons. Soon to discover that middle button is everything that I will ever need. I found the sawfish configurator and looked at what stuff I can configure. I was like, "whaaaaaa?"
First of all, I was always annoyed that to move a window I need to grab the titlebar, which sometimes is crazy small. So clickety-click told sawfish that I want to move the window by clicking *anywhere* on the window. And it worked! I clicked on the configuration dialog box, and started to move it around with reverence, which occurs to you, only when your wildest dream comes true.
Then a quick realization come to me: I forgot to use any modifier key. Left clicking on window was *only* moving it. I couldn't even click inside the window to start typing in whatever textbox was there. That was utterly cool & awesome! And of course stupid on my side. I used Tab key, and keyboard navigation to fix this problem in the configuration. Now I could move window only with left-click when Alt was pressed. That was awesome experience.
Next I started trying various themes and window frames, soon to discover that I could use a different window frame for every window! I used Bat theme, and called everyone who was at home to see how ridiculous it is:)
After a day or two I moved to another window manager, and kept trying all WMs that were in debian repository at the time. They all were wrong. Just wrong. Nothing could beat that weird window manager that did allow me to break mouse configuration. But I could not remember its name!
One evening I sat down at my PC determined to find that WM even if I will have to try every WM and every desktop environment that was offered in debian. Took a while, because I needed to find configuration options for given WM and check if it was possible to move window just by left-click dragging without modifiers. It was a shock, because soon I discovered that it is impossible in any of window managers, until few hours late at night I encountered this magical window manager: sawfish. What a happy reunion it was!
I don't think that I ever left sawfish alone, after that time.
"Much of the work Microsoft did centers around providing drivers for its own Hyper-V virtualization technology. Microsoft's Hyper-V, part of Windows Server, can run Linux as a guest OS."
Oh, I even got an offer from Richard Stallman to push making sawfish a default GNOME's WM. Though I had to refuse due to lack of time.. since I focus mainly on scientific research and then keeping alive the tools I like (e.g. sawfish).
sorry, my bad. I got those specs wrong. Though I am too lazy to dig it out from the closet and check. I'm sure it had 16MB RAM. And very likely it had 75 MHz. But indeed it couldn't be 286. So probably 386 or 486.
A bit more history: - in 2000 John Harper created sawfish, - in 2005 he abadoned it. - In 2007 he gave me full access to repository. Then I was officially a new sawfish developer. I revived sawfish and made few releases, mainly I brought back previously removed features (such as viewports). Also I concentrated on creating a useful wiki, that would allow everyone to easily submit patches. This wiki worked beyond all my expectations. We had 1 nice patch/feature per week for several years. There was actually a reason to make new sawfish release every three or four months. This work attracted more and more people to the community. - In year 2009 I passed lead to new developer Christopher Bratusek, who was one of the first to join after I got access permissions from John Harper - Currently I am amazed to see that in 2012 Christopher Bratusek is still doing great job
Let me paste here my slashdot post about sawfish, which I wrote some time ago. == I am using sawfish and ROX for over 15 years. I wouldn't change it for anything else. Even though my wife & sister & friends went through various generations KDE, gnome, unity and I learned how to use them (just for the sake of helping them). Still sawfish is the MOST powerful & fastest wm ever. And rox the lightest fm (file manager), but of course I use mc a lot (where I had submitted some patches too, especially with tree view of directories in another panel).
Imagine, that in sawfish you can even UNDO window actions (movement, resize, anything else). Assign different window properties per window type (frame(less) type, coordinates, size, placement strategy). You cannot even imagine how configurable are the keyboard shortcuts. No really. You. Can't. Imagine. Do you want have a totally mouseless workflow in multitude of opened windows? no problem. Want tablet? No problem. Window tabbing & window tling are the BASICS. Not some advance features. I haven't seen tabbing in any of those popular wms, like kwin or metacity.
There is no way I would even seriously consider any other wm than sawfish.
why rox? There's nothing lighter that gives me icons, a desktop and panels. My 8 cores and 32 GB of ram are better spent elsewhere than on clumsy desktop environment. I am running dozen of simultaneous calculations almost all memory is used, and sawfish is still as responsive as if there was nothing clogging the cores. I never stop to be amazed at that. Especially when I look at other people's PCs when they open just a few apps, and their desktop becomes so unresponsive that I would get mad.
This comfort also made me a little lazy to "clean up" my desktops. I have 24 viewports, they are all full of windows - betweeen 100 and 200 windows open (I guess about 150 right now). And they get dusty. After few months I discover some forgotten window on some viewport and it brings nice memories about what I was doing back then. == end paste
side note: Christopher thinks that my desktop is "old school" and outdated;) Mainly because I use plain old simple ROX instead of bells & whistles that are available right now. That's so funny for both of us. And it demonstrates how flexible sawfish is.
to be honest, I did a little cheat there: I run sawfish at -20 nice priority. Because I am really clogging all 8 CPUs with tons of calculations and other stuff (sometimes even too big for 32 GB of RAM that I have). And I do not tolerate any lag on the desktop. I made a special pager background for sawfish-pager so that all my 6*4=24 viewports are labelled, and it amazes my friends when they see how I switch between them:) I have three LCD screens: 1600x1200,1920x1200,1600x1200, all wonderfully working with xinerama (nvidia) and tuxonice hibernation (in case if power runs out, and I can't afford terminating my calculations, so better to hibernate). Heh, I like to brag about this setup sometimes, because I'm proud of how great it works:) Also this big screen setup lead me to find several obscure bugs in sawfish, and to fixing them.
It's not a coincidence that for all this great setup sawfish is the most important ingredient. Without sawfish I would feel like with my hands crippled, almost like without CLI.
Since we are talking about ipad3 here I want to ask: is it possible to configure ipad3 to have internet connection via bluetooth tethered to some phone (not iphone) just a phone with bluetooth?
I have nokia 3120c and it works great with my http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_(console) to provide internet connection over bluetooth. Configuration was painless, just few clicks on pandora and entering a code (to allow bluetooth connection) on the phone. To start internet connection on pandora I only click the network icon on bottom panel and select "enable", pandora then connects via bluetooth to my nokia 3120c, and internet just works. I was amazed the first time I saw it. Now I'm spoiled because this is so crazy comfortable.
Would nokia 3120c work with ipad3 to provide internet connection via bluetooth?
My solution to this problem is painfully simple: about 5 years ago I bought 5 drives 500GB each. I have put a server (made from old parts, like pentium IV and so on) in the basement (where nobody hears it, and it can be as noisy as hell). I installed debian on it and configured cron to call rsnapshot three times per day for doing automatic backups of all PCs in my family. I never touched this machine since then.
With one exception: 3 years ago I started to run out of space, so I bought 2 HDDs 2 TB each, reconfigured raid6, which was extremely easy because for raid I am using mdadm, which supports such operations online. Also I had few more spare drives during the years, so I kept adding them to the array, and currently there are 9 HDDs in this PC. It is very noisy, but nobody cares about that.
It runs flawlessy, untouched for years, and nobody cares about it, except for when somebody in my family accidentally loses or deletes a file. Then suddenly backup comes very handy.
Rsnapshot is especially good, because it keeps hardlinked copies of data from last week, 2 weeks ago, last month, and much more, depending on how you configure/etc/rsnapshot.conf. Currently I have backups dating back about 2 years, with granularity of 1 month. And it only occupies the space on HDD to reflect the changes between data, thanks to hardlinks.
So my raid6 array has total size about 4TB and still 500GB free. And I feel this will last at least a year or two. In case of problems I can start deleting copies that are more than 1 year old. While most recent snapshot uses about 2 TB or such.
Rsnapshot also can backup windows machines, so you don't need to worry about compatibility. Though I don't have windows machines and I don't test that in practice;)
I tried dwarf fortress. Probably about 3 or 5 weeks in total. I learned the basics, tried the adventure mode, etc. Indeed it's a nice complex game with many possibilities. But after that time, and having fully configured dwarf therapist. I decided that this game is not fun for me. It's babysitting mixed with sim city. I decided that I do not want to spend more time learning its quirks.
Instead my adom nostalgia grown stronger. And after I was finished with dwarf fortress I successfully resisted the urge to play adom. Doing frequent and successful checks for willpower apparently increases it. Looks like adom is quite good at mimicking real life.
About adom, I especially love the single-life no-saving feature in adom. It trains your skills at solving ultra-complex problems with cold head. I still remember the adrenaline rush when in this turn-based game I was fighting Andor Drakon, planning many moves ahead and thinking several seconds before making next move. Lovely, especially the adrenaline!
One of my high scores says: "He saved the world with his brave efforts and became a great ruler while saving himself 2 times." Indeed I saved only two times in this game, and this winning-marathon took about 40h of playing. But also it took one month of dying, before I played the winning game. Heh, my last win was in 2008. But still I need to resist playing it now again. There is lots of interesting research for me to do.
Violence! This is very funny, but for me there is as much violence in adom, as you have in a game of chess. Indeed you can beat the pawns in chess, and they are killed. Same thing in adom, only more complex.
I wonder why I can't have that much fun from other "popular" games like Elder Scrolls or Twilight Princess. Only Diablo 1 is comparable, albeit much worse.
Slashdot Mirror
looks exponential :)
So it's another article about bitcoin. Well I just wonder how this will turn out. So far it didn't die.
And I wonder if namecoin will come useful after IPv6 will be used widely. Heh, will IPv6 be used? We hope so. How would you DNS such a giant IP space? Maybe namecoin will come more handy that usual means...
is that related to any skills you might need at work?
How did you block them?
I was thinking about adding null direction to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts file, but perhaps there is a better way?
This is the first time that I heard about them. This is a great idea, they have my full support.
Well, it's time to start a new journal (among 100 000 of already existing journals). Create a huge lab, get lots of funding to pay them for their work. And tell the to reproduce every result from every submitted paper. Publish only if result was reproductible. Expensive as hell, but soon that would be the only journal that people will bother to spend time on reading.
that link isn't working. Either it's a wrong link or I just discovered that mu pipe is censored somehow.
correction: of course it was sawmill at that time :)
I still have big sentiment to my first contact with sawfish. It was year 2000, and I was playing with my freshly installed debian box. I got rid of windows about 2 years earlier, and I was experimenting with everything that linux could have bring to me. I tried red-hat for 6 months, slackware, etc. Then I settled on debian. Next I was trying all desktop environments & window managers that dselect was showing in package listing (there was no aptitude at that time).
And I installed one by one, and used it for few days, maybe a week. Some of them felt strange, some felt crippled. Others like enlightement were slick, but looked unfinished. Then I found sawfish. It was nothing - just an empty screen. I was already accustomed with weird window managers, so without fear I tried pressing all buttons. Soon to discover that middle button is everything that I will ever need. I found the sawfish configurator and looked at what stuff I can configure. I was like, "whaaaaaa?"
First of all, I was always annoyed that to move a window I need to grab the titlebar, which sometimes is crazy small. So clickety-click told sawfish that I want to move the window by clicking *anywhere* on the window. And it worked! I clicked on the configuration dialog box, and started to move it around with reverence, which occurs to you, only when your wildest dream comes true.
Then a quick realization come to me: I forgot to use any modifier key. Left clicking on window was *only* moving it. I couldn't even click inside the window to start typing in whatever textbox was there. That was utterly cool & awesome! And of course stupid on my side. I used Tab key, and keyboard navigation to fix this problem in the configuration. Now I could move window only with left-click when Alt was pressed. That was awesome experience.
Next I started trying various themes and window frames, soon to discover that I could use a different window frame for every window! I used Bat theme, and called everyone who was at home to see how ridiculous it is :)
After a day or two I moved to another window manager, and kept trying all WMs that were in debian repository at the time. They all were wrong. Just wrong. Nothing could beat that weird window manager that did allow me to break mouse configuration. But I could not remember its name!
One evening I sat down at my PC determined to find that WM even if I will have to try every WM and every desktop environment that was offered in debian. Took a while, because I needed to find configuration options for given WM and check if it was possible to move window just by left-click dragging without modifiers. It was a shock, because soon I discovered that it is impossible in any of window managers, until few hours late at night I encountered this magical window manager: sawfish. What a happy reunion it was!
I don't think that I ever left sawfish alone, after that time.
I was wondering "why the hell?" TFA says:
"Much of the work Microsoft did centers around providing drivers for its own Hyper-V virtualization technology. Microsoft's Hyper-V, part of Windows Server, can run Linux as a guest OS."
Why that couldn't be included in the summary?
badblocks -c 10240 -s -w -t random -v /dev/sda1
that's my standard test for all HDDs
re-reading those archived emails from 2008 shows that I was a little exaggerating, oh sweet lovely memories.
and btw - why all my posts look like a monologue? Perhaps I need to get some sleep :)
Oh, I even got an offer from Richard Stallman to push making sawfish a default GNOME's WM. Though I had to refuse due to lack of time.. since I focus mainly on scientific research and then keeping alive the tools I like (e.g. sawfish).
see full record on:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/sawfish-list/2008-January/msg00007.html
sorry, my bad. I got those specs wrong. Though I am too lazy to dig it out from the closet and check. I'm sure it had 16MB RAM. And very likely it had 75 MHz. But indeed it couldn't be 286. So probably 386 or 486.
A bit more history:
- in 2000 John Harper created sawfish,
- in 2005 he abadoned it.
- In 2007 he gave me full access to repository. Then I was officially a new sawfish developer. I revived sawfish and made few releases, mainly I brought back previously removed features (such as viewports). Also I concentrated on creating a useful wiki, that would allow everyone to easily submit patches. This wiki worked beyond all my expectations. We had 1 nice patch/feature per week for several years. There was actually a reason to make new sawfish release every three or four months. This work attracted more and more people to the community.
- In year 2009 I passed lead to new developer Christopher Bratusek, who was one of the first to join after I got access permissions from John Harper
- Currently I am amazed to see that in 2012 Christopher Bratusek is still doing great job
Let me paste here my slashdot post about sawfish, which I wrote some time ago.
==
I am using sawfish and ROX for over 15 years. I wouldn't change it for anything else. Even though my wife & sister & friends went through various generations KDE, gnome, unity and I learned how to use them (just for the sake of helping them). Still sawfish is the MOST powerful & fastest wm ever. And rox the lightest fm (file manager), but of course I use mc a lot (where I had submitted some patches too, especially with tree view of directories in another panel).
Imagine, that in sawfish you can even UNDO window actions (movement, resize, anything else). Assign different window properties per window type (frame(less) type, coordinates, size, placement strategy). You cannot even imagine how configurable are the keyboard shortcuts. No really. You. Can't. Imagine. Do you want have a totally mouseless workflow in multitude of opened windows? no problem. Want tablet? No problem. Window tabbing & window tling are the BASICS. Not some advance features. I haven't seen tabbing in any of those popular wms, like kwin or metacity.
There is no way I would even seriously consider any other wm than sawfish.
why rox? There's nothing lighter that gives me icons, a desktop and panels. My 8 cores and 32 GB of ram are better spent elsewhere than on clumsy desktop environment. I am running dozen of simultaneous calculations almost all memory is used, and sawfish is still as responsive as if there was nothing clogging the cores. I never stop to be amazed at that. Especially when I look at other people's PCs when they open just a few apps, and their desktop becomes so unresponsive that I would get mad.
This comfort also made me a little lazy to "clean up" my desktops. I have 24 viewports, they are all full of windows - betweeen 100 and 200 windows open (I guess about 150 right now). And they get dusty. After few months I discover some forgotten window on some viewport and it brings nice memories about what I was doing back then.
== end paste
side note: Christopher thinks that my desktop is "old school" and outdated ;) Mainly because I use plain old simple ROX instead of bells & whistles that are available right now. That's so funny for both of us. And it demonstrates how flexible sawfish is.
to be honest, I did a little cheat there: I run sawfish at -20 nice priority. Because I am really clogging all 8 CPUs with tons of calculations and other stuff (sometimes even too big for 32 GB of RAM that I have). And I do not tolerate any lag on the desktop. :) :) Also this big screen setup lead me to find several obscure bugs in sawfish, and to fixing them.
I made a special pager background for sawfish-pager so that all my 6*4=24 viewports are labelled, and it amazes my friends when they see how I switch between them
I have three LCD screens: 1600x1200,1920x1200,1600x1200, all wonderfully working with xinerama (nvidia) and tuxonice hibernation (in case if power runs out, and I can't afford terminating my calculations, so better to hibernate). Heh, I like to brag about this setup sometimes, because I'm proud of how great it works
It's not a coincidence that for all this great setup sawfish is the most important ingredient. Without sawfish I would feel like with my hands crippled, almost like without CLI.
well.. my record is running debian testing on od 286 processor 75 MHz with 16MB RAM. It was quite usable in X with PWM window manager.
I added those features back. Then Christopher took over and continues his great work.
Since we are talking about ipad3 here I want to ask: is it possible to configure ipad3 to have internet connection via bluetooth tethered to some phone (not iphone) just a phone with bluetooth?
I have nokia 3120c and it works great with my http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_(console) to provide internet connection over bluetooth. Configuration was painless, just few clicks on pandora and entering a code (to allow bluetooth connection) on the phone. To start internet connection on pandora I only click the network icon on bottom panel and select "enable", pandora then connects via bluetooth to my nokia 3120c, and internet just works. I was amazed the first time I saw it. Now I'm spoiled because this is so crazy comfortable.
Would nokia 3120c work with ipad3 to provide internet connection via bluetooth?
My solution to this problem is painfully simple: about 5 years ago I bought 5 drives 500GB each. I have put a server (made from old parts, like pentium IV and so on) in the basement (where nobody hears it, and it can be as noisy as hell). I installed debian on it and configured cron to call rsnapshot three times per day for doing automatic backups of all PCs in my family. I never touched this machine since then.
With one exception: 3 years ago I started to run out of space, so I bought 2 HDDs 2 TB each, reconfigured raid6, which was extremely easy because for raid I am using mdadm, which supports such operations online. Also I had few more spare drives during the years, so I kept adding them to the array, and currently there are 9 HDDs in this PC. It is very noisy, but nobody cares about that.
It runs flawlessy, untouched for years, and nobody cares about it, except for when somebody in my family accidentally loses or deletes a file. Then suddenly backup comes very handy.
Rsnapshot is especially good, because it keeps hardlinked copies of data from last week, 2 weeks ago, last month, and much more, depending on how you configure /etc/rsnapshot.conf. Currently I have backups dating back about 2 years, with granularity of 1 month. And it only occupies the space on HDD to reflect the changes between data, thanks to hardlinks.
So my raid6 array has total size about 4TB and still 500GB free. And I feel this will last at least a year or two. In case of problems I can start deleting copies that are more than 1 year old. While most recent snapshot uses about 2 TB or such.
Rsnapshot also can backup windows machines, so you don't need to worry about compatibility. Though I don't have windows machines and I don't test that in practice ;)
I tried dwarf fortress. Probably about 3 or 5 weeks in total. I learned the basics, tried the adventure mode, etc. Indeed it's a nice complex game with many possibilities. But after that time, and having fully configured dwarf therapist. I decided that this game is not fun for me. It's babysitting mixed with sim city. I decided that I do not want to spend more time learning its quirks.
Instead my adom nostalgia grown stronger. And after I was finished with dwarf fortress I successfully resisted the urge to play adom. Doing frequent and successful checks for willpower apparently increases it. Looks like adom is quite good at mimicking real life.
About adom, I especially love the single-life no-saving feature in adom. It trains your skills at solving ultra-complex problems with cold head. I still remember the adrenaline rush when in this turn-based game I was fighting Andor Drakon, planning many moves ahead and thinking several seconds before making next move. Lovely, especially the adrenaline!
One of my high scores says: "He saved the world with his brave efforts and became a great ruler while saving himself 2 times." Indeed I saved only two times in this game, and this winning-marathon took about 40h of playing. But also it took one month of dying, before I played the winning game. Heh, my last win was in 2008. But still I need to resist playing it now again. There is lots of interesting research for me to do.
Violence! This is very funny, but for me there is as much violence in adom, as you have in a game of chess. Indeed you can beat the pawns in chess, and they are killed. Same thing in adom, only more complex.
I wonder why I can't have that much fun from other "popular" games like Elder Scrolls or Twilight Princess. Only Diablo 1 is comparable, albeit much worse.
well... back to QED
I'm not a basement gaming zombie ;) I'm a scientist.
I'm careful to avoid playing adom more often than once per 2 or 4 years. Otherwise a month is lost.
My favorite NP-hard game is adom. Just try it - see my sig.
My favorites were Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley when I was 18-22 years old. Currently I love reading Stanislaw Lem
thanks, now it all started to make sense. But I'm still curious how does this operator exactly look like in position representation.
OK, Majorana Fermion is a particle for which a=a+
But by definition the second quantization operators [a,a+]=(aa+)-(a+a)=1
So we have a contradiction here, because if a=a+, then [a,a+]=0, which does not obey to the definition of second quantization operator.
Someone cares to enlighten me?
How do those Majorana a and a+ operators look in positional representation? How does the first wave function look like?
I'll try later to find original Majorana papers, but in meantime if you have some hints I'd be glad to hear.