I switched to the channel listed on my guide, but they has "rassling", or something simliarly weird (definitely fiction, but hardly "sci").
What is the current name of the cable/sat. channel that specializes in "Sci-Fi" (outer space exploration/warfare/..., off-worlders visiting/invading, comedy/action/drama with elements of those)? Nearest I can find is Showtime Beyond, but a lot of that is lame.
BTW, what ever happened to "Space: Above and Beyond"?
The Moon cannot escape the Earth's gravitational field (unless there is a very large external perturbation). As the Moon slows it will orbit increasingly farther out, UNTIL it is traveling too slowly to maintain any orbit, at which point it will spiral in until broken up by tidal forces. Earth will get rings (and more than a few major impacts). If the Moon were traveling at escape velocity, it would already have departed. Since it isn't, it can't (on its own).
There may be a bit of a race condition between the Moon's orbital mechanics and the Sun's progression along the "Main Sequence", which will put it into a "red giant" phase where the extended "surface" may be near, or beyond, Earth's orbit. At that point, both parts of our Earth-Moon system will experience significant drag and spiral into the Sun's core.
The module holds keys, but the Army will not be able to control the installation of keys into the module. How does this make the system trustworthy?
This is a typical (IMO treasonous) Pentagon purchasing scam, rather like buying Boeing planes to get your relatives jobs. There is no excuse for the military to use any Microsoft-provided software, other than the expectations of the purchasing agents to "retire" into fat civilian jobs. The long-documented history of dropping handling for older versions of documents alone is sufficient reason to stay away from Microsoft's products in general "office" use. The complete inability of Microsoft to provide any useful security (despite their "rating") on any system that is not locked in a vault and disconnected from all other computers is sufficient reason to avoid the Operating Systems. If the applications are unusable for reasons of built-in obsolescence and the operating systems are not securable in real-world use, then it must be a scam to specify it.
In a corporate world, most users should have nothing but a thin client (without USB or FireWire ports). Not only can nothing be installed, but they can't "appropriate" any data, either, if the email outbound filtering is working. Data loss when a desktop crashes is minimal-to-none, with the data on an IT-maintained server. Thin clients CAN be built from diskless boot PCs, but it is often simpler to just buy them than do the research to figure out exactly which packages to build into an initrd image to support your corporate app's. It used to be possible to build diskless M$-Windows systems, but I won't have XP, so I don't know the limitations of it's ramdisk. One trick we used to use on di*kless Sun workstations after disk prices came down was to use a disk for/tmp and swap, rather than the networked drives. 'Could probably be done today with some CompactFlash socketed into an IDE port (something like this: http://www.acscontrol.com/Index_ACS.asp?Page=/Page s/Products/CompactFlash/IDE_To_CF_Adapter.htm).
Back in 1970, I received several immunizations in the U.S. Army from needle-free guns. Only got cut once (out of 8 or 9), and it wasn't me flinching, but a suddenly-distracted tech. Before they worried about blood-spatter spreading pathogens, it was a rapid assembly-line way to perform the task: load a vial onto the gun, and "shoot" several individuals before reloading. I don't remember that version as encapuslating the viral/bacterial bits, though, and I think the pressurization agent was nitrogen, 'cause I remember jokes about "the bends". (I know "the bends" are not funny, but a bunch of 18-22 year old guys standing in lines to get "shots" will make jokes about it.)
The species will survive short of a extreme mass extinction worse than the Permian-Triassic event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian-Triassic_exti nction_event/. Humans are capable of exploiting every resource on land and the near ocean, including other humans, for survival.
There are both sufficient resources and the "self-interest" to use them to ensure that there will be a segment of human society that enjoys the benefits of current, or better, medical and convenience technology for much more than 100 years. The proportion of the species represented by that segment will rise, or fall, but you can bank on the wealthy of some region or other to use the troops and tech' that they control to sustain a comfortable lifestyle. Their thugs (for example, most of the population of the United States) will also enjoy just enough to keep them loyal. The rest of the species is simply another resource to be exploited. Only if some of those with the power again stupidly try to "own it all", rather than "dividing the spoils" in mutual self-interest is there any danger that all of human society will be reduced to subsistence farming and herding, or less complexity.
Waves, not particles, grasshooper. Interference (hence "interferometer") is a wave effect. This is an experiment where you do not try to see which way the photon went (which would collapse the wave), so, in very simplistic terms, it went both ways. The question is whether "both ways" took the same amount of time. If not, something differentally shortened, or lengthened, (depending on your point-of-view) the arms.
I do wonder if a "ripple" could resemble an acoustic compression wave and interact with the apparatus such that the "high-density" and "low-density" phases of the ripple lengthened then shortened the arms during the photon's flight time to provide a net "no-effect". Would depend on the wavelength of the ripple, I suspect.
Competent file system handlers can use disk blocks larger or smaller than the file system block size, but there are some benefits to using the same number for both. Although it may provide more data-per-drive to use larger blocks and you can index larger drives with 32-bit numbers, the drive has to use better (larger and more complex) CRCs to ensure sector data integrity integrity, the granularity of replacement blocks may end up wasting more space simply to provide an adequate count of replacements, and there are still some disk space management tools that insist on working in terms of "cylinders", regardless of the fact that the disk drives have had variable density zones for ages. The range from 4K (common disk block size) to 16K works as a decent compromise.
"Back in the day" running System V on SMD drives, where you could use almost any block size from 128 Bytes to 32K (the CRCs were weak after that) and control the cylinder-to-cylinder offset of block 0 from the index, I spent a few days trying different tuning parameters and found that, due to the 4K size of the CPU pages, and of the file blocks and swap it really did give a significant improvement in performance. I tried 8K and 16K, because the file system handler could be convinced to break them up, but didn't get any better performance, so used 4k for the spares granularity.
Perhaps I should take one of my late-model SCSI drives, which support low-level reformatting, and try the tests again. 16KByte file system blocks on 16KByte sectors might really be a win now. Have to do some research to see what I can do with CPU page sizes, too.
Rather than the alien, Nazi, enemy-du-jour, for a Player-Character of whatever gender (Heinlein counted six), start with the standard "my little sister was..." by one, or more, of the following: "body tax" collector at workplace, sexually aggressive cop, serial rapist, politician, street gang, sex slave trader, snuff film producer. You can even go international.
Picture your character with the unions, cops, Feds, and gangs all trying to kill heesh (as you complete each mission, you get a new permanent enemy). After all, real life provides more varied and more truly dangerous situations than the game writers can imagine.
All Apple has to do is put OpenBoot into the boot ROMs instead one of the normal idiot BIOSs. With no BIOS, ntloadr.com won't be able to run and boot Windows, but Linux and *bsd will still work after the startup code from the PPC architectures is added to the x86 arch, and Apple can even keep the same startup code in the released version of OS/X.
This also allows them to migrate the desktops, if they choose, and, assuming that the FCode in existing "Mac" (and Sun/SPARC) -compatible PCI adapters is written correctly (it's supposed to be "endian-agnostic"), they will still work with either CPU family. In fact, it would be nice if Apple could purchase special SMP-capable editions of the Mobile Pentiums, which already use the Xeon bus and chipsets.
Why does their web page show the "caps lock" key on the home row and the "cntl" key off in the ozone under your thumb? No truly useful keyboard has the almost entirely unused "caps lock" cluttering up the valuable real estate and the heavily used "cntl" exiled to an awkward location.
I looked for a better place to state this, but couldn't find it, so here's my (non)take on the subscription system:
I don't/won't use PayPal, so I will not be subscribing for a while. This also gives me a chance to see what happens to/. in the meanwhile. If the ads are too annoying, the coverage changes in ways that do not suit me, or the quality of discussion improves too much (some of the "fun", for me, is the often-brainless commentary, which, sometimes, brings out a really good point in response), I'll just delete the bookmark.
Printed, not electronic, although an electronic insert (CD/DVD of PDF, RTF, HTML,..., but NOT M$-anything) is often a useful inclusion.
I also like to help Open Source creators, or, at least, believe that I do, by buying books about tools (PGP, GIMP, etc.) that look like the creators will get some cut of the book's price.
#1 Programming languages/environments by the creator(s). I want to know how the tool was envisioned by its creator(s). Should I get the M$.NET docs, or a Mono book by Miguel, since that's what I'll write code for?
#2 Better-than-"Howto"s. I could use a good Sawfish book, right now, as I run it bare (no Gnome or KDE), to avoid clutter on my desktop.
Of all of the conceepts originated or popularized by Sun Microsystems, I see OpenBoot as being the most in need of "coming out". It is a way for manufacturers of PCs to escape the Microsoft Tax. M$-Windows boots rely on the BIOS; with OpenBoot, the OEM license need not apply, easing the way for Solaris, *bsd, and Linux. Embedded systems developers would also benefit from a published, cross-platform boot/diagnostic package, which would, again, provide an alterative to Microsoft, in this case CE and Embedded XP. What are the chances of open sourcing Open Boot?
I put one in one of my Linux boxes last week. So far, I have read CD-Audio (grip) and CD-ROM (iso9660), DVD-ROM (iso9660), and a Video DVD ("Chicken Run") with no problems. I have written to CD-RW media, both CD-Audio and CD-ROM, with cdrecord.
As soon as I get some time, I will test DVD-Video and DVD-ROM formats on DVD+RW media. Any idea where I should post the results?
I run a "bare" Sawfish, myself (used to use OpenLook, on Linux, not just Suns). I do like that it
is "Gnome-aware", so programs like "Gnorpm" run correctly.
Not everyone likes a "desktop environment"; one of the real benefits of Linux, for me, is that I can have the type of desktop that works the way I work, rather than being forced into someone else's vision of how I should want to work.
I'm about to stop using "distros", since it's getting harder and harder to get a Gnome/KDE/etc-less desktop configured.
Originally it was of funtion of the blitter (hardware), but when the 68020's came out it was changed to a library function because the '020 was faster (still the best CPU of its time, IMO; bit fields on any BIT boundary, none of this integer-aligned nonsense).
Couldn't get to SourceForge, and should probably have the library date when I do. Any other Amigans have this documentation?
Am I the only one who remembers that M$ used the vulnerability holes in IE as a back door to snoop through M$N user's hard drives? Has anyone else noticed how many of the IE vulnerabilities for which M$ has nearly immediate patches (for a company that has regularly been late getting OS releases out the door)? While I am fairly sure that not all of the vulnerabilities in M$ products are back doors (it is a VERY complex system, after all), the company's behavior also make me equally sure that some of those are what I call "bug doors", absolutely intentional trap doors.
I've pulled IE from my home M$-Windows systems (one for the games I cannot get on Linux and one for a system that captures music-keyboard MIDI data to a score, which is another thing that I cannot find for Linux), using IEradicator (http://www.98lite.net) and some registry tweaking, and I've got a couple of layers of firewall running, but I still want to know what holes are in those systems, my Linux boxes, and my Solaris system. I neither want my data stolen or corrupted, nor do I wish to contribute to damaging anyone else's system(s).
>> Software Engineering is *not* "hacking" or "coding" or "programming", it's *engineering*, like building a bridge or a skyscraper.
Not yet, it ain't. Writing software is a craft, or if you're pretentious, an art. In my career, I've watched every attempt to change or deny that simple fact fail. Every couple of years there are new "materials" with which to work and new tools with which to work them. It's as though forty years ago we had stone or bone tools and whatever tree trunks we could acquire with which to build and now we have alloy steel and composites with laser cutters and adhesives. But some of the same guys are doing the work! Even our newest "apprentices" have seen significant change since they entered college.
Some principles and practices may carry over from one tool and meterial set to the next; even "measure twice, cut once" (design, review, implement) still applies.
The Civil Engineering analogy is really more accurate than most of us know, though. If I'm designed/building the nth implementation of a through truss bridge, or yet another concrete dam, I can look at the accumulated knowledge that is called "accepted practice" and build one that will do its job and have it done in a reasonably known amount of time. But if I was building a "brand new, state-of-the-art" suspension bridge several decades ago, I might have built the Tacoma Narrows bridge, or if I'm building a "newfangled" steel truss, I might have ended up with the Tay Rail Bridge.
However, specific software implementations of "nearly the same" widgets W, X, and Y are "trade secrets", "Intellectual Property", ad naseum, so even I'm building yet another, nearly identical, widget Z, I don't have access to reams of implementation details that would allow me to accurately determine how long it will take. Additionally, my company is not likely to be building a "nearly identical" widget Z, but a "revolutionary" Widget ABC, perhaps on brand new hardware; this is essentially a research project, so it will be done "when it is done".
One of the only reasons for this research is that I can see is that M$-Windows is so damned stupid as a window manager. The addition of a "lower" feature, as in Sawfish and Amiga Workbench makes the window-owns-the-desktop metaphor redundant. As I'm sure many others have pointed out, there are times when it is invaluable to be able to have the output of two, or more, different applications visible on the desktop at the same time. Compare the display of a web page by IE and Netscape 4 and 6 simultaneously, for example. You can line them up side-by-side-by-side or stacked one above the other (although M$-Windows makes it hard by always moving the selected browser to "front"). If each browser owned the desktop you'd have to have three monitors, and even then, it would be very hard to compare horizontal borders. Another way that I use this on Sawfish, since it allows me to focus a window and leave it "lowered", is to copy small bits of text, such as sample command lines from "man" pages, to a lowered xterm and run them there.
The Amiga has one of the best mechanisms for this type of issue: an application could open its windows on one the three "desktops", either the common desktop, as X-windows does now; on a private desktop, as M$-based games sometimes (often, perhaps, I only own a couple) do; on a named, shared desktop. The last allows easy sharing of clips between applications in a "family". Cycling between desktops (I've had as many as eight) uses a feature similar to alt-tab in that the "Amiga" keys (similar to the M$-Windows keys that M$ came up with later) were used to cycle through them.
Too many web sites are cookie-junkies (literally dozens of cookies per page) to use the "ask me to allow each cookie" feature of most browsers. Too many other sites complain if you reject the cookies. I simply set the browser to allow all cookies, then keep the cookies file (Netscape/Mozilla) or directory (IE) read-only. For those rare (so rare I cannot rememeber the last one) times that I want to really allow cookies, I can toggle the file/folder back to read/write, then clean up and toggle again when I'm done.
I have had no problem buying on-line, but that may be luck, in that I haven't tried a site that keeps all of my pending transaction data in cookies. I haven't had any other problems, either. On top of that, I don't have to worry about cookies eating away my disk space.
I don't think it would take 10, more like 6-8. I've seen 12 Mbytes/second on DLT and LTO is supposed to be faster. The bigger question is moving all that data from the cameras to the tapes. You're going to need something more than a typical PC, since the 90 MBytes/second will use up a 32-bit 33 MHz PCI bus. You need a real server-class machine, although low-end, with a couple of 64-bit PCI busses (66 MHz wouldn't hurt; there are compatible SCSI controllers), one for data collection and one for data storage. Any system with that PCI capability should have the memory bandwidth that you need. This all assumes that you have the compression done on the video capture cards, of course. Otherwise you've got to distribute the load across multiple systems to handle the input side bandwidth, although the output side demand would be small.
> Training. The majority of users are already familiar with Office/Windows. Retraining people is not just the cost of a course, or support but the cost of their lost productivity while they get up to speed on how exactly the system works.
Nonsense! SOME users are vaguely familiar with SOME versions of Windows/Office. At every company at which I have worked that was stupid enough to run Windows/Office there has been a perpetual retraining effort, not bi-annually, but semi-annually, since users can't absorb very much of the interface at a time. There are the "power users", those who really do understand Word/Excel/Powerpoint/etc, but those few could just as easily pick up WorkPerfect/StarOffice/Applixware/...
> Staff. Like it or not, Windows systems admins are no problem to find, with easily checkable references and a qualification (MCSE) that is well understood.
Competent Windows administrators are really QUITE rare, too. Fortunately for Windows shops, most of the "administrators" spend their 8 hrs/day reinstalling the corporate standard image on user's systems and restoring the per-user settings, which does not require very much skill, but if anything beyond that is required, they're worse than useless. If Windows/Apps didn't corrupt systems so often, these people would have a hard time getting work washing dishes.
> Appeal. In the case of the school, the board of governors must decide what skills make their pupils most employable - becuase parents will use this when deciding where their children should study. In most cases this means the Windows/Office combination.
> Imagine two schools opposite each other: one promises skills that will be useful if their children want to become Unix gurus; the other offers experience in the same applications seen day-in/day-out in the workplace.
Sounds good, but whatever you learned in college about Windows/Office is obsolete already, because M$ has released a new version, which has new "features" and new interfaces. No one is talking about teaching the students to become "gurus", just providing a usable and cost-concious study environment. Why should parents have to provide a $1000 Windows system for a student that only needs a $400 Goodwill system for email, web browsing, and word processing? Why must the school maintain a Windows server farm (more boxes will have more failures) when a Sun/IBM/... server can do the needed tasks more simply, more reliably, and at less cost?
Redhat should have automatically added the partition to the file (/etc/fstab) that specifies which partions mount where. It's usually called "/mnt/windows"; see if you can navigate there with either your file browser or with "cd/mnt/windows" from the command line.
If the installation did not add the information to "/etc/fstab", you can still mount it manually (as root). First, make sure that there is a directory of an appropriate name (if "ls/mnt/windows" fails, run "mkdir/mnt/windows"), then you need to know the location of the partition. If it was your "C" drive on your first IDE/ATAPI disk, the it's probably "/dev/hda1". The command "mount -t vfat/dev/hda1/mnt/windows" would then do the trick.
There are lots of options to "mount", and you probably want it to mount automatically, so could try "man mount" and "man fstab" to explain those things to you.
Of course, there is the possibility that you no longer have a windows partition; be sure that you can still boot into M$-Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
I switched to the channel listed on my guide, but they has "rassling", or something simliarly weird (definitely fiction, but hardly "sci").
What is the current name of the cable/sat. channel that specializes in "Sci-Fi" (outer space exploration/warfare/..., off-worlders visiting/invading, comedy/action/drama with elements of those)? Nearest I can find is Showtime Beyond, but a lot of that is lame.
BTW, what ever happened to "Space: Above and Beyond"?
The Moon cannot escape the Earth's gravitational field (unless there is a very large external perturbation). As the Moon slows it will orbit increasingly farther out, UNTIL it is traveling too slowly to maintain any orbit, at which point it will spiral in until broken up by tidal forces. Earth will get rings (and more than a few major impacts). If the Moon were traveling at escape velocity, it would already have departed. Since it isn't, it can't (on its own).
There may be a bit of a race condition between the Moon's orbital mechanics and the Sun's progression along the "Main Sequence", which will put it into a "red giant" phase where the extended "surface" may be near, or beyond, Earth's orbit. At that point, both parts of our Earth-Moon system will experience significant drag and spiral into the Sun's core.
If you can't compete on product and service, you deserve to go out of business.
The module holds keys, but the Army will not be able to control the installation of keys into the module. How does this make the system trustworthy?
This is a typical (IMO treasonous) Pentagon purchasing scam, rather like buying Boeing planes to get your relatives jobs. There is no excuse for the military to use any Microsoft-provided software, other than the expectations of the purchasing agents to "retire" into fat civilian jobs. The long-documented history of dropping handling for older versions of documents alone is sufficient reason to stay away from Microsoft's products in general "office" use. The complete inability of Microsoft to provide any useful security (despite their "rating") on any system that is not locked in a vault and disconnected from all other computers is sufficient reason to avoid the Operating Systems. If the applications are unusable for reasons of built-in obsolescence and the operating systems are not securable in real-world use, then it must be a scam to specify it.
In a corporate world, most users should have nothing but a thin client (without USB or FireWire ports). Not only can nothing be installed, but they can't "appropriate" any data, either, if the email outbound filtering is working. Data loss when a desktop crashes is minimal-to-none, with the data on an IT-maintained server. Thin clients CAN be built from diskless boot PCs, but it is often simpler to just buy them than do the research to figure out exactly which packages to build into an initrd image to support your corporate app's. It used to be possible to build diskless M$-Windows systems, but I won't have XP, so I don't know the limitations of it's ramdisk. One trick we used to use on di*kless Sun workstations after disk prices came down was to use a disk for /tmp and swap, rather than the networked drives. 'Could probably be done today with some CompactFlash socketed into an IDE port (something like this: http://www.acscontrol.com/Index_ACS.asp?Page=/Page s/Products/CompactFlash/IDE_To_CF_Adapter.htm).
Back in 1970, I received several immunizations in the U.S. Army from needle-free guns. Only got cut once (out of 8 or 9), and it wasn't me flinching, but a suddenly-distracted tech. Before they worried about blood-spatter spreading pathogens, it was a rapid assembly-line way to perform the task: load a vial onto the gun, and "shoot" several individuals before reloading. I don't remember that version as encapuslating the viral/bacterial bits, though, and I think the pressurization agent was nitrogen, 'cause I remember jokes about "the bends". (I know "the bends" are not funny, but a bunch of 18-22 year old guys standing in lines to get "shots" will make jokes about it.)
The species will survive short of a extreme mass extinction worse than the Permian-Triassic event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian-Triassic_exti nction_event/. Humans are capable of exploiting every resource on land and the near ocean, including other humans, for survival.
There are both sufficient resources and the "self-interest" to use them to ensure that there will be a segment of human society that enjoys the benefits of current, or better, medical and convenience technology for much more than 100 years. The proportion of the species represented by that segment will rise, or fall, but you can bank on the wealthy of some region or other to use the troops and tech' that they control to sustain a comfortable lifestyle. Their thugs (for example, most of the population of the United States) will also enjoy just enough to keep them loyal. The rest of the species is simply another resource to be exploited. Only if some of those with the power again stupidly try to "own it all", rather than "dividing the spoils" in mutual self-interest is there any danger that all of human society will be reduced to subsistence farming and herding, or less complexity.
Waves, not particles, grasshooper. Interference (hence "interferometer") is a wave effect. This is an experiment where you do not try to see which way the photon went (which would collapse the wave), so, in very simplistic terms, it went both ways. The question is whether "both ways" took the same amount of time. If not, something differentally shortened, or lengthened, (depending on your point-of-view) the arms.
I do wonder if a "ripple" could resemble an acoustic compression wave and interact with the apparatus such that the "high-density" and "low-density" phases of the ripple lengthened then shortened the arms during the photon's flight time to provide a net "no-effect". Would depend on the wavelength of the ripple, I suspect.
Competent file system handlers can use disk blocks larger or smaller than the file system block size, but there are some benefits to using the same number for both. Although it may provide more data-per-drive to use larger blocks and you can index larger drives with 32-bit numbers, the drive has to use better (larger and more complex) CRCs to ensure sector data integrity integrity, the granularity of replacement blocks may end up wasting more space simply to provide an adequate count of replacements, and there are still some disk space management tools that insist on working in terms of "cylinders", regardless of the fact that the disk drives have had variable density zones for ages. The range from 4K (common disk block size) to 16K works as a decent compromise.
"Back in the day" running System V on SMD drives, where you could use almost any block size from 128 Bytes to 32K (the CRCs were weak after that) and control the cylinder-to-cylinder offset of block 0 from the index, I spent a few days trying different tuning parameters and found that, due to the 4K size of the CPU pages, and of the file blocks and swap it really did give a significant improvement in performance. I tried 8K and 16K, because the file system handler could be convinced to break them up, but didn't get any better performance, so used 4k for the spares granularity.
Perhaps I should take one of my late-model SCSI drives, which support low-level reformatting, and try the tests again. 16KByte file system blocks on 16KByte sectors might really be a win now. Have to do some research to see what I can do with CPU page sizes, too.
Rather than the alien, Nazi, enemy-du-jour, for a Player-Character of whatever gender (Heinlein counted six), start with the standard "my little sister was ..." by one, or more, of the following: "body tax" collector at workplace, sexually aggressive cop, serial rapist, politician, street gang, sex slave trader, snuff film producer. You can even go international.
Picture your character with the unions, cops, Feds, and gangs all trying to kill heesh (as you complete each mission, you get a new permanent enemy). After all, real life provides more varied and more truly dangerous situations than the game writers can imagine.
All Apple has to do is put OpenBoot into the boot ROMs instead one of the normal idiot BIOSs. With no BIOS, ntloadr.com won't be able to run and boot Windows, but Linux and *bsd will still work after the startup code from the PPC architectures is added to the x86 arch, and Apple can even keep the same startup code in the released version of OS/X.
This also allows them to migrate the desktops, if they choose, and, assuming that the FCode in existing "Mac" (and Sun/SPARC) -compatible PCI adapters is written correctly (it's supposed to be "endian-agnostic"), they will still work with either CPU family. In fact, it would be nice if Apple could purchase special SMP-capable editions of the Mobile Pentiums, which already use the Xeon bus and chipsets.
Why does their web page show the "caps lock" key on the home row and the "cntl" key off in the ozone under your thumb? No truly useful keyboard has the almost entirely unused "caps lock" cluttering up the valuable real estate and the heavily used "cntl" exiled to an awkward location.
I looked for a better place to state this, but couldn't find it, so here's my (non)take on the subscription system:
/. in the meanwhile. If the ads are too annoying, the coverage changes in ways that do not suit me, or the quality of discussion improves too much (some of the "fun", for me, is the often-brainless commentary, which, sometimes, brings out a really good point in response), I'll just delete the bookmark.
I don't/won't use PayPal, so I will not be subscribing for a while. This also gives me a chance to see what happens to
Printed, not electronic, although an electronic insert (CD/DVD of PDF, RTF, HTML, ..., but NOT M$-anything) is often a useful inclusion.
.NET docs, or a Mono book by Miguel, since that's what I'll write code for?
I also like to help Open Source creators, or, at least, believe that I do, by buying books about tools (PGP, GIMP, etc.) that look like the creators will get some cut of the book's price.
#1 Programming languages/environments by the creator(s). I want to know how the tool was envisioned by its creator(s). Should I get the M$
#2 Better-than-"Howto"s. I could use a good Sawfish book, right now, as I run it bare (no Gnome or KDE), to avoid clutter on my desktop.
Of all of the conceepts originated or popularized by Sun Microsystems, I see OpenBoot as being the most in need of "coming out". It is a way for manufacturers of PCs to escape the Microsoft Tax. M$-Windows boots rely on the BIOS; with OpenBoot, the OEM license need not apply, easing the way for Solaris, *bsd, and Linux. Embedded systems developers would also benefit from a published, cross-platform boot/diagnostic package, which would, again, provide an alterative to Microsoft, in this case CE and Embedded XP. What are the chances of open sourcing Open Boot?
I put one in one of my Linux boxes last week. So far, I have read CD-Audio (grip) and CD-ROM (iso9660), DVD-ROM (iso9660), and a Video DVD ("Chicken Run") with no problems. I have written to CD-RW media, both CD-Audio and CD-ROM, with cdrecord.
As soon as I get some time, I will test DVD-Video and DVD-ROM formats on DVD+RW media. Any idea where I should post the results?
I run a "bare" Sawfish, myself (used to use OpenLook, on Linux, not just Suns). I do like that it
is "Gnome-aware", so programs like "Gnorpm" run correctly.
Not everyone likes a "desktop environment"; one of the real benefits of Linux, for me, is that I can have the type of desktop that works the way I work, rather than being forced into someone else's vision of how I should want to work.
I'm about to stop using "distros", since it's getting harder and harder to get a Gnome/KDE/etc-less desktop configured.
Originally it was of funtion of the blitter (hardware), but when the 68020's came out it was changed to a library function because the '020 was faster (still the best CPU of its time, IMO; bit fields on any BIT boundary, none of this integer-aligned nonsense).
Couldn't get to SourceForge, and should probably have the library date when I do. Any other Amigans have this documentation?
Am I the only one who remembers that M$ used the vulnerability holes in IE as a back door to snoop through M$N user's hard drives? Has anyone else noticed how many of the IE vulnerabilities for which M$ has nearly immediate patches (for a company that has regularly been late getting OS releases out the door)? While I am fairly sure that not all of the vulnerabilities in M$ products are back doors (it is a VERY complex system, after all), the company's behavior also make me equally sure that some of those are what I call "bug doors", absolutely intentional trap doors.
I've pulled IE from my home M$-Windows systems (one for the games I cannot get on Linux and one for a system that captures music-keyboard MIDI data to a score, which is another thing that I cannot find for Linux), using IEradicator (http://www.98lite.net) and some registry tweaking, and I've got a couple of layers of firewall running, but I still want to know what holes are in those systems, my Linux boxes, and my Solaris system. I neither want my data stolen or corrupted, nor do I wish to contribute to damaging anyone else's system(s).
>> Software Engineering is *not* "hacking" or "coding" or "programming", it's *engineering*, like building a bridge or a skyscraper.
Not yet, it ain't. Writing software is a craft, or if you're pretentious, an art. In my career, I've watched every attempt to change or deny that simple fact fail. Every couple of years there are new "materials" with which to work and new tools with which to work them. It's as though forty years ago we had stone or bone tools and whatever tree trunks we could acquire with which to build and now we have alloy steel and composites with laser cutters and adhesives. But some of the same guys are doing the work! Even our newest "apprentices" have seen significant change since they entered college.
Some principles and practices may carry over from one tool and meterial set to the next; even "measure twice, cut once" (design, review, implement) still applies.
The Civil Engineering analogy is really more accurate than most of us know, though. If I'm designed/building the nth implementation of a through truss bridge, or yet another concrete dam, I can look at the accumulated knowledge that is called "accepted practice" and build one that will do its job and have it done in a reasonably known amount of time. But if I was building a "brand new, state-of-the-art" suspension bridge several decades ago, I might have built the Tacoma Narrows bridge, or if I'm building a "newfangled" steel truss, I might have ended up with the Tay Rail Bridge.
However, specific software implementations of "nearly the same" widgets W, X, and Y are "trade secrets", "Intellectual Property", ad naseum, so even I'm building yet another, nearly identical, widget Z, I don't have access to reams of implementation details that would allow me to accurately determine how long it will take. Additionally, my company is not likely to be building a "nearly identical" widget Z, but a "revolutionary" Widget ABC, perhaps on brand new hardware; this is essentially a research project, so it will be done "when it is done".
One of the only reasons for this research is that I can see is that M$-Windows is so damned stupid as a window manager. The addition of a "lower" feature, as in Sawfish and Amiga Workbench makes the window-owns-the-desktop metaphor redundant. As I'm sure many others have pointed out, there are times when it is invaluable to be able to have the output of two, or more, different applications visible on the desktop at the same time. Compare the display of a web page by IE and Netscape 4 and 6 simultaneously, for example. You can line them up side-by-side-by-side or stacked one above the other (although M$-Windows makes it hard by always moving the selected browser to "front"). If each browser owned the desktop you'd have to have three monitors, and even then, it would be very hard to compare horizontal borders. Another way that I use this on Sawfish, since it allows me to focus a window and leave it "lowered", is to copy small bits of text, such as sample command lines from "man" pages, to a lowered xterm and run them there.
The Amiga has one of the best mechanisms for this type of issue: an application could open its windows on one the three "desktops", either the common desktop, as X-windows does now; on a private desktop, as M$-based games sometimes (often, perhaps, I only own a couple) do; on a named, shared desktop. The last allows easy sharing of clips between applications in a "family". Cycling between desktops (I've had as many as eight) uses a feature similar to alt-tab in that the "Amiga" keys (similar to the M$-Windows keys that M$ came up with later) were used to cycle through them.
Too many web sites are cookie-junkies (literally dozens of cookies per page) to use the "ask me to allow each cookie" feature of most browsers. Too many other sites complain if you reject the cookies. I simply set the browser to allow all cookies, then keep the cookies file (Netscape/Mozilla) or directory (IE) read-only. For those rare (so rare I cannot rememeber the last one) times that I want to really allow cookies, I can toggle the file/folder back to read/write, then clean up and toggle again when I'm done.
I have had no problem buying on-line, but that may be luck, in that I haven't tried a site that keeps all of my pending transaction data in cookies. I haven't had any other problems, either. On top of that, I don't have to worry about cookies eating away my disk space.
I don't think it would take 10, more like 6-8. I've seen 12 Mbytes/second on DLT and LTO is supposed to be faster. The bigger question is moving all that data from the cameras to the tapes. You're going to need something more than a typical PC, since the 90 MBytes/second will use up a 32-bit 33 MHz PCI bus. You need a real server-class machine, although low-end, with a couple of 64-bit PCI busses (66 MHz wouldn't hurt; there are compatible SCSI controllers), one for data collection and one for data storage. Any system with that PCI capability should have the memory bandwidth that you need. This all assumes that you have the compression done on the video capture cards, of course. Otherwise you've got to distribute the load across multiple systems to handle the input side bandwidth, although the output side demand would be small.
> Training. The majority of users are already familiar with Office/Windows. Retraining people is not just the cost of a course, or support but the cost of their lost productivity while they get up to speed on how exactly the system works.
Nonsense! SOME users are vaguely familiar with SOME versions of Windows/Office. At every company at which I have worked that was stupid enough to run Windows/Office there has been a perpetual retraining effort, not bi-annually, but semi-annually, since users can't absorb very much of the interface at a time. There are the "power users", those who really do understand Word/Excel/Powerpoint/etc, but those few could just as easily pick up WorkPerfect/StarOffice/Applixware/...
> Staff. Like it or not, Windows systems admins are no problem to find, with easily checkable references and a qualification (MCSE) that is well understood.
Competent Windows administrators are really QUITE rare, too. Fortunately for Windows shops, most of the "administrators" spend their 8 hrs/day reinstalling the corporate standard image on user's systems and restoring the per-user settings, which does not require very much skill, but if anything beyond that is required, they're worse than useless. If Windows/Apps didn't corrupt systems so often, these people would have a hard time getting work washing dishes.
> Appeal. In the case of the school, the board of governors must decide what skills make their pupils most employable - becuase parents will use this when deciding where their children should study. In most cases this means the Windows/Office combination.
> Imagine two schools opposite each other: one promises skills that will be useful if their children want to become Unix gurus; the other offers experience in the same applications seen day-in/day-out in the workplace.
Sounds good, but whatever you learned in college about Windows/Office is obsolete already, because M$ has released a new version, which has new "features" and new interfaces. No one is talking about teaching the students to become "gurus", just providing a usable and cost-concious study environment. Why should parents have to provide a $1000 Windows system for a student that only needs a $400 Goodwill system for email, web browsing, and word processing? Why must the school maintain a Windows server farm (more boxes will have more failures) when a Sun/IBM/... server can do the needed tasks more simply, more reliably, and at less cost?
Redhat should have automatically added the partition to the file (/etc/fstab) that specifies which partions mount where. It's usually called "/mnt/windows"; see if you can navigate there with either your file browser or with "cd /mnt/windows" from the command line.
/mnt/windows" fails, run "mkdir /mnt/windows"), then you need to know the location of the partition. If it was your "C" drive on your first IDE/ATAPI disk, the it's probably "/dev/hda1". The command "mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows" would then do the trick.
If the installation did not add the information to "/etc/fstab", you can still mount it manually (as root). First, make sure that there is a directory of an appropriate name (if "ls
There are lots of options to "mount", and you probably want it to mount automatically, so could try "man mount" and "man fstab" to explain those things to you.
Of course, there is the possibility that you no longer have a windows partition; be sure that you can still boot into M$-Windows.