I'm a software developer and part-time gamer, I've been using a 2.26 ghz pentium 4 machine for 2 years and I still can't justify an upgrade the way I used to. Once upon a time I could justify the expense and inconvenience by telling myself I would be cutting compile times by half. Now that a full compile of my biggest app takes 12 seconds or so, what's the point?
GTA Vice City is perfectly playable at 1024 x 768 and looks fantastic on my Geforce 4200 Ti. I have a gig of ram, 3 internal 80gb hard drives and 2 external 120s, plus a DVD burner for backups. I know that fiddling with my hardware will lock XP so that I have to go begging to Microsoft cap in hand for a 40-digit code, so I say bugger them all. (I also boot Gentoo linux, and use it on the weekends for web, DVD, TV viewing, etc)
I consider myself a hardware junkie, I've spent tens of thousands on computer gear over the past 20 years, but I'm out of the upgrade loop now. Perhaps when the Athlon 64 pin config has standardised a little and PCI express is widespread, well perhaps then I'll look at things. So far my upgrade frenzy has resulted in computers for my wife and both kids (built from spare parts), they're using 1ghz and 500mhz machines and really don't need an upgrade either.
I also read somewhere in the forums that it is possible to set up a server internal to compile the packages once for the target machines (if they are all the same) and then perform a binary install to each machine from there.
I share my distfiles folder over nfs, mount it on all remote machines as/mnt/portage/distfiles and change/etc/make.conf to point to this location. The first machine to download a missing package puts it in this folder, making it available to the rest.
Next, I shared the/usr/portage/packages folder on the server to all machines with the same architecture (actually, it's more complicated since I have a mix of P3, P4, Athlon XP computers here.) You don't want a P4 putting optimised packages into/usr/portage/packages on the XP server.
/etc/make.conf points to the packages folder (/mount/pkgs) for each architecture, and I also have 'buildpackages' in the make options.
All machines are running distcc. When I emerge -k whatever, it's either already there or built and put there for the next machine.
I'm sure this is documented somewhere, but I messed around until I got what I needed.
I'm off to check now, but does he have a paypal donations account set up? I don't mean buying a set of cds, that eats up the cash in time, postage, media, etc, just pure donations which will go to him directly.
$20k is a lot of dough, but if a bunch of gentoo users threw some cash in there, I'm sure his debt burden could be eased.
Cheers
Simon
Both my kids (6 and 9) are gifted. We moved them to a private school because the public school's attitude was something like 'Great, that's two more we won't have to allocate extra time to.'
What happened to getting the best out of kids? Making them work to their potential, rather than a lowest common denominator? This school suggested moving my then 4-year-old daughter up 2 grades, but my wife and I knew she wouldn't be able to stand up for herself in a class of bigger kids. Turning our kids into defensive introverts with no self-esteem would have been even worse than their being given simple, boring work.
Anyway, things have worked out nicely. They attend a mixed-aged school now, and the teachers allocate work based on what the kids can do, rather than sticking to the right tasks for the age.
My six-year-old used her PC to produce a 4-page newsletter, sectioned up into pets, gardening, school, hobbies, etc, etc. It made a nice change from battling her 9-year-old sister on networked Age of Empires...
Come to Australia... Very little pollution, the language is similar, the people are friendly and we don't fingerprint you on arrival.
Cost of living is cheap, there's free public health and a pension for everyone and...
Wait a minute, what am I saying? I almost let the secret out the bag. Don't come here, it's a horrible place.
I'd be in on that. One of the few apps I use on Windows is Corel Draw 9. I've been using Corel since version 2, so I really have no desire to learn another program, although I update scribus and sodipodi the minute a new version comes out.
On a related note, does anyone know why Wine gives this error on the Windows version of Corel Draw?
X Error of failed request: BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window parameter)
Major opcode of failed request: 70 (X_PolyFillRectangle)
Resource id in failed request: 0x3600102
Serial number of failed request: 3918
Current serial number in output stream: 3977
Same here, but I drive OTHER people nuts. The killer is that I expect others to remember conversations too, and when they don't my first thought is that they're covering up. (Mistakes, whatever).
On the other hand, if the world is full of people who forget what they spoke to you about 6 hours earlier, why am I still guilty about things I said to other kids in 3rd grade, 6th grade, university, at work 10 years ago? To me, they're all yesterday.
Same story here. I'm 36, and I've been employed full time since 1988 and married since 1991.
Although I enjoy gaming a lot, the only multiplayer online game I managed to play was Battlefield 1942. You can jump in for a quick bash, and leave whenever you like. The only time I got a decent online game of C&C, the other bastard quit when I overran him.
The AI in Battlefield isn't bad. The original release was ludicrous - every enemy unit on the map would target you within seconds and you'd have battleships, planes, snipers etc plastering you over the landscape the minute you spawned. Now they ignore you a bit more, which is much better.
My local university put Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' on the big screen back in 198x. First (and only) time I've ever seen it, I don't want to spoil it by watching it on a tv.
Yes, if my local theatre puts Life of Brian on I'll go and see it. It's immersion vs entertainment.
My problem with Mozilla (and most mail packages) is that I receive mail for the spacejock.com domain routed through my standard ISP email address. 99% of the mail is for me, 1% is for my wife. When I check mail, I wanted to leave her mail on the server and only download and delete mine. Outlook Express does this, I couldn't find another package that would.
Now I've got a qmail setup on my server and she has an email address on that, so it's no longer an issue. Before, it was a show-stopper, and the other reason I couldn't use Mozilla mail or Thunderbird.
Yes, I wrote it. I wrote it because 99% of the messages I receive in HTML format are advertising. Most of those use dinky little images with referrer IDs to verify your email address is valid. The 1% I really need to see in HTML... well the program has a link so you can view it in your default browser, if you really have to.
I know it's going back to the dark ages, but maybe NOT running javascript, html, etc is actually GOOD when it comes to emails.
I'm not advertising this thing, it's freeware anyway. I was a moderately happy Outlook Express user for years, but the lack of spam torturing implements drove me to write my own. Yes, I tried Mozilla, Eudora, etc etc. I think Thunderbird looks interesting too, and I recommend it. But personally I can't do without my POP3 preview window with colour tagging for spam, valid mail, blocked senders, ignored, etc. And deleting stuff before download. And bayesian filtering. And anything else I feel like adding, whenever I want to.
Apparently Microsoft won't allow computer mags in Australia to put MS Service packs/patches onto cover CDs. That sounds like the dumbest move ever - just about every PC mag here has 2-3 CDs stuck on the cover, laden with demos, freeware, etc. Every other company on the planet seems to allow distribution of their patches this way, but not Microsoft.
Completely nuts. Especially since most users are still on modems, and grabbing a 30-45mb Windows XP patch is not a trivial undertaking.
If you're running Windows (or Wine on Linux) try my freeware ebook reader yBook
I wrote it specifically for the txt files on Gutenberg. They hard-wrap the lines at 76 characters, this prog unwraps them and puts the book back into paragraphs.
This plug brought to you by a shameless karma whore.
"The expectation for GNOME 3.0, however, is that a lot of the platform will use Mono, rather than the C implementation it has now"
Proving once again that choice in desktop environments is a GOOD thing. If they're completely rewriting Gnome, I'll still have a stable desktop using KDE.
I don't think that word means what you think it means
(sic) means you're quoting someone verbatim, even though they spelt something wrong (or used the wrong word). It's a marker to show that you know it's wrong, so that editors and proof readers don't correct it prior to publication.
You don't use '(sic)' on your own writing, you use (sp?)
Probably teaching you to suck eggs, but there you go.
The US computer market must be a lot different to the market in Australia. Here, there seems to be a mom & pop computer store on every corner, and because we're so close to SE Asia the parts come in really, really cheap.
The local papers are stuffed with ads for cheap PCs, and if you ask for 'no Windows' they'll happily delete it from the price. It might be different in the Eastern States (Sydney, Melbourne) where the large US firms have a presence, but Perth, Western Australia is a tech buyers paradise. (If I order from Dell they'd have to ship it 2000+ miles.)
It's as competitive as hell in these shops, they even charge 2% on top if you choose to pay by credit card instead of cash, since the merchant fees are higher than their margins. (I should know, I was a salesman in one of these places for 3 years in the late 80's. I'll never forget my first sight of a '386 PC)
So - do you have thousands of these little stores all over the US, or are you completely beholden to the big guys? I always wonder about it whenever I see 'OEM do this' and 'OEM do that' in US articles on Windows vs Linux.
They release ROTK theatrical, and then a supa-dupa boxed set containing all three extended editions for $200-$300 with a hand-carved statuette of Elrond's naval ring. AND NO ROTK EE!
That's about the only thing they could do to piss me off. I will buy the theatrical, I will buy the EE, but if they screw me around by bundling the 3rd film and NOT making it available separately, I'll build a kick-ass baddie tower, knock up my own set of Palantirs and start breeding orcs.
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I'm a software developer and part-time gamer, I've been using a 2.26 ghz pentium 4 machine for 2 years and I still can't justify an upgrade the way I used to. Once upon a time I could justify the expense and inconvenience by telling myself I would be cutting compile times by half. Now that a full compile of my biggest app takes 12 seconds or so, what's the point?
GTA Vice City is perfectly playable at 1024 x 768 and looks fantastic on my Geforce 4200 Ti. I have a gig of ram, 3 internal 80gb hard drives and 2 external 120s, plus a DVD burner for backups. I know that fiddling with my hardware will lock XP so that I have to go begging to Microsoft cap in hand for a 40-digit code, so I say bugger them all. (I also boot Gentoo linux, and use it on the weekends for web, DVD, TV viewing, etc)
I consider myself a hardware junkie, I've spent tens of thousands on computer gear over the past 20 years, but I'm out of the upgrade loop now. Perhaps when the Athlon 64 pin config has standardised a little and PCI express is widespread, well perhaps then I'll look at things. So far my upgrade frenzy has resulted in computers for my wife and both kids (built from spare parts), they're using 1ghz and 500mhz machines and really don't need an upgrade either.
I also read somewhere in the forums that it is possible to set up a server internal to compile the packages once for the target machines (if they are all the same) and then perform a binary install to each machine from there.
/mnt/portage/distfiles and change /etc/make.conf to point to this location. The first machine to download a missing package puts it in this folder, making it available to the rest.
/usr/portage/packages folder on the server to all machines with the same architecture (actually, it's more complicated since I have a mix of P3, P4, Athlon XP computers here.) You don't want a P4 putting optimised packages into /usr/portage/packages on the XP server.
/etc/make.conf points to the packages folder (/mount/pkgs) for each architecture, and I also have 'buildpackages' in the make options.
I share my distfiles folder over nfs, mount it on all remote machines as
Next, I shared the
All machines are running distcc. When I emerge -k whatever, it's either already there or built and put there for the next machine.
I'm sure this is documented somewhere, but I messed around until I got what I needed.
I'm off to check now, but does he have a paypal donations account set up? I don't mean buying a set of cds, that eats up the cash in time, postage, media, etc, just pure donations which will go to him directly. $20k is a lot of dough, but if a bunch of gentoo users threw some cash in there, I'm sure his debt burden could be eased. Cheers Simon
Both my kids (6 and 9) are gifted. We moved them to a private school because the public school's attitude was something like 'Great, that's two more we won't have to allocate extra time to.'
What happened to getting the best out of kids? Making them work to their potential, rather than a lowest common denominator? This school suggested moving my then 4-year-old daughter up 2 grades, but my wife and I knew she wouldn't be able to stand up for herself in a class of bigger kids. Turning our kids into defensive introverts with no self-esteem would have been even worse than their being given simple, boring work.
Anyway, things have worked out nicely. They attend a mixed-aged school now, and the teachers allocate work based on what the kids can do, rather than sticking to the right tasks for the age.
My six-year-old used her PC to produce a 4-page newsletter, sectioned up into pets, gardening, school, hobbies, etc, etc. It made a nice change from battling her 9-year-old sister on networked Age of Empires...
Yeah, and my Atari ST sure could have used a similar setup.
Come to Australia... Very little pollution, the language is similar, the people are friendly and we don't fingerprint you on arrival.
Cost of living is cheap, there's free public health and a pension for everyone and...
Wait a minute, what am I saying? I almost let the secret out the bag. Don't come here, it's a horrible place.
I'd be in on that. One of the few apps I use on Windows is Corel Draw 9. I've been using Corel since version 2, so I really have no desire to learn another program, although I update scribus and sodipodi the minute a new version comes out.
On a related note, does anyone know why Wine gives this error on the Windows version of Corel Draw?
X Error of failed request: BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window parameter)
Major opcode of failed request: 70 (X_PolyFillRectangle)
Resource id in failed request: 0x3600102
Serial number of failed request: 3918
Current serial number in output stream: 3977
1. Find lots and lots of email addresses 2. Learn to spell common words really, really badly 3. ??? 4. Cl~!ck this l!nk and Pr0fit!!!
Same here, but I drive OTHER people nuts. The killer is that I expect others to remember conversations too, and when they don't my first thought is that they're covering up. (Mistakes, whatever).
On the other hand, if the world is full of people who forget what they spoke to you about 6 hours earlier, why am I still guilty about things I said to other kids in 3rd grade, 6th grade, university, at work 10 years ago? To me, they're all yesterday.
Check out cups-pdf if you're not already using it.
Same story here. I'm 36, and I've been employed full time since 1988 and married since 1991.
Although I enjoy gaming a lot, the only multiplayer online game I managed to play was Battlefield 1942. You can jump in for a quick bash, and leave whenever you like. The only time I got a decent online game of C&C, the other bastard quit when I overran him.
The AI in Battlefield isn't bad. The original release was ludicrous - every enemy unit on the map would target you within seconds and you'd have battleships, planes, snipers etc plastering you over the landscape the minute you spawned. Now they ignore you a bit more, which is much better.
The AUD is now 0.74, and was recently 0.80 US cents. Makes Amazon much better value for us aussies ;-)
My local university put Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' on the big screen back in 198x. First (and only) time I've ever seen it, I don't want to spoil it by watching it on a tv.
Yes, if my local theatre puts Life of Brian on I'll go and see it. It's immersion vs entertainment.
My problem with Mozilla (and most mail packages) is that I receive mail for the spacejock.com domain routed through my standard ISP email address. 99% of the mail is for me, 1% is for my wife. When I check mail, I wanted to leave her mail on the server and only download and delete mine. Outlook Express does this, I couldn't find another package that would.
Now I've got a qmail setup on my server and she has an email address on that, so it's no longer an issue. Before, it was a show-stopper, and the other reason I couldn't use Mozilla mail or Thunderbird.
... using email software which doesn't render HTML, and instead shows it as plain text without images?
... well the program has a link so you can view it in your default browser, if you really have to.
Yes, I wrote it. I wrote it because 99% of the messages I receive in HTML format are advertising. Most of those use dinky little images with referrer IDs to verify your email address is valid. The 1% I really need to see in HTML
I know it's going back to the dark ages, but maybe NOT running javascript, html, etc is actually GOOD when it comes to emails.
I'm not advertising this thing, it's freeware anyway. I was a moderately happy Outlook Express user for years, but the lack of spam torturing implements drove me to write my own. Yes, I tried Mozilla, Eudora, etc etc. I think Thunderbird looks interesting too, and I recommend it. But personally I can't do without my POP3 preview window with colour tagging for spam, valid mail, blocked senders, ignored, etc. And deleting stuff before download. And bayesian filtering. And anything else I feel like adding, whenever I want to.
Apparently Microsoft won't allow computer mags in Australia to put MS Service packs/patches onto cover CDs. That sounds like the dumbest move ever - just about every PC mag here has 2-3 CDs stuck on the cover, laden with demos, freeware, etc. Every other company on the planet seems to allow distribution of their patches this way, but not Microsoft.
Completely nuts. Especially since most users are still on modems, and grabbing a 30-45mb Windows XP patch is not a trivial undertaking.
In a nutshell? He's deflating US currency.
If you're running Windows (or Wine on Linux) try my freeware ebook reader yBook
I wrote it specifically for the txt files on Gutenberg. They hard-wrap the lines at 76 characters, this prog unwraps them and puts the book back into paragraphs.
This plug brought to you by a shameless karma whore.
If a billion people set out to re-invent the wheel, perhaps we'd end up with an even better one?
"The expectation for GNOME 3.0, however, is that a lot of the platform will use Mono, rather than the C implementation it has now"
Proving once again that choice in desktop environments is a GOOD thing. If they're completely rewriting Gnome, I'll still have a stable desktop using KDE.
I don't think that word means what you think it means
(sic) means you're quoting someone verbatim, even though they spelt something wrong (or used the wrong word). It's a marker to show that you know it's wrong, so that editors and proof readers don't correct it prior to publication.
You don't use '(sic)' on your own writing, you use (sp?)
Probably teaching you to suck eggs, but there you go.
What'd you expect? Point a beagle at a patch of dirt and it's going to dig a hole...
The US computer market must be a lot different to the market in Australia. Here, there seems to be a mom & pop computer store on every corner, and because we're so close to SE Asia the parts come in really, really cheap.
The local papers are stuffed with ads for cheap PCs, and if you ask for 'no Windows' they'll happily delete it from the price. It might be different in the Eastern States (Sydney, Melbourne) where the large US firms have a presence, but Perth, Western Australia is a tech buyers paradise. (If I order from Dell they'd have to ship it 2000+ miles.)
It's as competitive as hell in these shops, they even charge 2% on top if you choose to pay by credit card instead of cash, since the merchant fees are higher than their margins. (I should know, I was a salesman in one of these places for 3 years in the late 80's. I'll never forget my first sight of a '386 PC)
So - do you have thousands of these little stores all over the US, or are you completely beholden to the big guys? I always wonder about it whenever I see 'OEM do this' and 'OEM do that' in US articles on Windows vs Linux.
My worst nightmare is this:
They release ROTK theatrical, and then a supa-dupa boxed set containing all three extended editions for $200-$300 with a hand-carved statuette of Elrond's naval ring. AND NO ROTK EE!
That's about the only thing they could do to piss me off. I will buy the theatrical, I will buy the EE, but if they screw me around by bundling the 3rd film and NOT making it available separately, I'll build a kick-ass baddie tower, knock up my own set of Palantirs and start breeding orcs.