A lot of people have mentioned that disk to disk backup seems to be the best way to go.
I agree.
What hasn't been mentioned is rsync, which makes disk to (local or remote) disk backups fast and easy.
It is trival to set up a second disk that is a "stale" mirror of your primary disk(s) that backs up nightly, and will boot off a floppy. This captures some of the advantage of RAID (quick recovery) while being an actual backup, not just fault tolerance.
Rsync can use ssh as a transport, so you can securely back up remote disks as well.
-Peter
Re:Portable MP3 Player to Plug In To Car Audio?
on
Review: SliMP3
·
· Score: 2
Does you car stereo have an "Aux in" jack? Mine doesn't.
Anyway, you can skate with either one of those "CD Adaptors" or a short range FM transmitter that you can tune in.
ANSI C on an Objective C compiler and it's no big deal.
Uh, the same is true of C++.
calling Objective C a "kludge" while suggesting C++ doesn't make much sense if you think about it.
Sure, this is true. They are both C + OO kludged in.
So, Objecive-C and C++ are both backward compatable, OO kludges of C.
You haven't made much of an arguemnet for either one over the other.
OTOH, Objective-C is used by . . . Apple. C++ is used by "everyone" (I suspect this includes Apple).
Bottom line is that there is no rational reason to use Objective-C. Clearly this is a case of Not Invented Here on Apple's part. (AFAIR Objective-C is a NeXT thing, but six of one, half a dozen of the other; it's all Jobs.)
You obviously fell asleep before the climax of RotJ. Surely it was due to all that Ewok nonsense.
Anyway, to catch you up, the Emperor surprised Luke with the fact that his friends were walking into a trap, since the battle station was "fully armed an operational". I'm not sure what that badly animated leech or whatever it was on the side of the Emperor's face had to do with it.
Anyway, Han was a little behind getting the shield down, and Lando realized that it was a trap, since the Rebel's sensors were being jammed. He was too late though, and a lot of brave rebels died at the hands of the Empire with their big green blaster. (BTW, the colors of the blasters always seemed wrong to me. The sabers made sense. Bad guys red, good guys blue, youths green. What gives with that?)
Fortunately, Han got the sheild generator down and Lando was able to blow up the second Death Star just as Luke escaped with Vader's (now Anikin again) body.
You should watch it again. It is on VHS now, so you can fast-forward through all the cutesy Ewok crap.
You can get an idea of what something is shaped like in more conventional ways. Like X-ray.
What is really impressive is that they can see what the surface of a flat object, like a photograph, looks like. Neat!
-Peter
Faster than light communication
on
Quantum Holography
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I don't really understand quantum entanglement but . . .
Couldn't you use it to communicate instantly over any amount of distance?
Imagine:
You are at point A (say, earth) and I'm at point C (say, a spacecraft) and we have a buoy, at point B, precisely half way between us. Let's say that you and I are one light-year apart, and that buoy has been splitting a beam of photons between the point where I am and the point were you are for the last six months.
You have a photoreceptor oriented 90 degrees out from the beam, and I have a mirror at 45 degrees, hooked up to a solenoid. I type you a message in morse code on a switch that controls current to the solenoid. You see it in real-time.
I'm sure that either 1. there is a really good reason why this won't work in theory or 2. someone else has proposed it.
The main advance will be throwing off twenty years of cruft.
As one example, AFAIK the PIV still uses 20 bit addressing which is mapped to 32 bit by the MMU. This really isn't a big deal in terms of performance, but it is an example of the way the x86 architecture has grown into a rigged-up hack on a hack on a hack.
Another big advantage is (again AFAIK) 128 64 bit general purpose registers . If used in a smart way, these could save boatloads of expensive (in terms of speed) memory ops.
I'm really going out on a limb here, but I think it means a larger instruction set without having to resort to multi-word instructions. Love to hear comments on this from someone who actually knows what he's talking about!
That's all great. And that is fine for college students.
But we aren't talking about college students, are we?
I don't know when or where you went to high school. I graduated in '93 from a suburban school in the USA. I am confident that if we had notebooks with wireless they may as well have closed the doors.
Well, any answer is wrong if you re-frame the question mid stream. Yes, email can be part of education. Sure.
The problem was, however, what to do about students screwing off during class. Part of the answer is "don't let them play with their toys during class."
Point is, there are lots of approaches to education. Handing kids notebooks with wireless and then hoping they pay attention in class isn't one of them.
Now, having said all that, I took a "class" in high school that consisted of three back-to-back periods where the students basically wrote their own syllabus. It was different from individual study in that it was a semi-organized class. That is, you don't really have "class mates" in individual study. It was the best educational experience I ever had in pubic school.
But you can't do it half way. You can't hand out notebook and hope kids learn something.
Finally, all this stuff is great. Technology is great. Independent and self-guided study is great. BUT, I think we could do with a bit more focus on the fundamentals. All that "alternative" stuff is great, but it must be reserved for those who have already learned to sit down, shut up, study and learn, and who have learned to properly read, write and compute (not work a computer, compute).
"Put the laptop under your chair during class, or take an F."
A laptop is a tool (and a toy). It is a tool that has NOTHING to do with learning from someone who is standing in front of you.
The only possible use would be taking notes. Is it condusive to a lecture to have 20-30 students all typing at the same time? Is there anything more than a marginal benefit over the students using a paper notebook?
I think you have made yourself a problem, and that the best solution is to STOP making that problem for yourself (doctor, it hurts when I move my arm like this . ..).
A lot of people are saying "why port Free stuff to windows?" or "why would you want to do this?"
Well, some of us still "have" to run windows sometimes. That's just how it is.
I've been using cygwin (in the larger sense, not just the.dll and one or two apps) and it is GREAT. A real shell, nano (my favorite editor), grep, sed, less, tail, uniq, which, etc. It is all packages in a nice installer (afaik it is just called "setup.exe") which reminds me of the BSD ports system.
The point is, when you are "stuck" with windows the more "real man's" tools available the better!
OTOH, it bugs me a little that this seems to be under the name Debian, which stands (in my mind anyway) for 100% free, no fillers or meat by-products.
I am very skeptical that you are going to find a way to enter formulae as fast as your prof. can write them on the board.
I'd think that a hybrid that captures handwriting as a bitmap for later transcription would be ideal.
I swear I have seen something like the IBM TransNote but more like a normal (paper) notepad with a Palm attached to it and less like a notebook (PC) with a notepad next to it.
(d) Copyright violations. This is one of the regulations for the hosting corporation, and so we usually have to replace text with a link to it. Sometimes we get away with it if we're siting [sic] a literary passage for a debate or something.
What country do you live/operate in?
Even in the US (where, IMHO, we have nutso IP laws) this wouldn't be "getting away" with something; it would unequivocally be fair use.
Yes, java beans is cute, and I get it, but it doesn't tell me squat about the technology.
What does enterprise mean? I'm keeping a running list:
Supports files >2gb
Supports RAM >4gb
Supports fibre channel
We charge you really, really a lot more because you are a big company and we think you can afford it.
Supports LDAP
Has even more proprietary extensions than the "workgroup" version.
I'm not sure if any of these fit.
I think that the IniCaps thing might be even funnier now. Maybe it should be iniCapsCptIniWrd (Initial Capitals exCept Initial Word)!
Yeah, except that the problem was that I couldn't figure out what PACKAGE I needed. (JDK, SDK, JRE, LMNOP, etc) I mean, I'm pretty competent, but this was kept like some state secret.
None of the human beings that I knew at the time seemed to get this either, and all the "cool guy" Java guys and docs just assume you know this.
As I said before, there are some pretty useful walkthroughs for first-timers now.
But since you brought up how much more sense System.out.println() makes vs. cout . . .
Since Java is all logical and stuff, I can get input by just doing System.in.getln() right?
Wah-wah-wah-waaaaah*
Anyway, how do you do the equivalent of "cin >> some_string;" in Java?
-Peter
* the sound on "Let's Make a Deal" when someone gets the donkey
Actually, the complaint about EJB had nothing to do with the technology. I can't criticize it, because I don't know anything about it. Except that it has a non-descriptive name. If it has to do with "containers" why not call it JavaCan (or would that be javaCan?) or numberTenCan (NTC, sounds nice) or whatever?
And my complaint isn't that I am too dumb to learn Java, it is that I seem to be having a significantly higher level of difficulty getting started with Java than I have with other languages in the past. (Of course, I grouse almost as loudly about Perl being too easy in some ways . ..) So, maybe I'm dumber than dirt, but that doesn't appear to be the only issue involved.
Actually, the things I have learned in the course of this thread lead me to believe that the "problem" (maybe it is aesthetic, maybe it is just me, whatever) is due to over-marketing and over-committeizing. IOW, I'm not sure any sane person would arrive at "IniCaps" but a committee of sane people might end up converging on it. No language designer would come up with Enterprise Java Beans, but marketing department sure would. I guess the fact that it doesn't have a "father" (like Wall or K&R) shows.
Maybe we mean different things by jargon? Your message could be read as you are under the impression that since I call EJB "jargon" I don't think it is a real technology. Is that what you meant? Anything technical has jargon. It has to. I'm just saying that I find Java (in the larger sense of Java) to be jargonistic to the extreme, and for its own sake.
-Peter
PS: It is, of course, the only slightly less perverse language, Perl.
Thanks for that link. I found that via the general link provided by the other guy that replied.
I find the name "IniCaps" to describe this laugh out loud funny (since it doesn't comply with itself).
As to variable names, you seem to have ignored two key points in my post. First, in my opinion, the longer names don't actually carry additional info in practice. If you are just saying that in your experience they do, well, that's fine then.
The other is that, as illustrated by the example, the full name (I'm sure there is some cool computer science name for this) can be made to look very good, and it doesn't matter if the name looks vague out of context. This isn't my point, it is K&P's point.
It's true of all languages that until you know the jargon, you will find it confusing. That's the case with Java to the same extent as other languages.
You must be trying to miss my point here. Yes, of course every technical field has its jargon. And every language its own set of jargon. My point is that Java (I guess really Sun) goes way, way beyond what is normal.
One prime example: EJB. You seem to have a personal affinity for meaningful labels. Let's expand EJB. AFAIK it is Enterprise Java Beans. To me that is a buzzword followed by a (maybe) cute but meaningless bit of wordplay. NO INFORMATION. I heard a rumor this is an API. IMO this is going as far as to be deliberately evasive in naming a technology.
The IDE advice sounds like an admission of guilt to me. I'm not saying that a piece of software that watches you for mistakes in inherently bad, but a language that makes it that important is.
Wow, no registers. I'm not saying you are wrong, but I can't imagine how this can be . . . how do you keep track of the top of the stack!
[read, read, read]
Oh, there is a "pc" register which seems to be equivalent to IP on intel. I can't find anything on a stack pointer register. Weird.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people have mentioned that disk to disk backup seems to be the best way to go.
I agree.
What hasn't been mentioned is rsync, which makes disk to (local or remote) disk backups fast and easy.
It is trival to set up a second disk that is a "stale" mirror of your primary disk(s) that backs up nightly, and will boot off a floppy. This captures some of the advantage of RAID (quick recovery) while being an actual backup, not just fault tolerance.
Rsync can use ssh as a transport, so you can securely back up remote disks as well.
-Peter
Does you car stereo have an "Aux in" jack? Mine doesn't.
Anyway, you can skate with either one of those "CD Adaptors" or a short range FM transmitter that you can tune in.
-Peter
ANSI C on an Objective C compiler and it's no big deal.
Uh, the same is true of C++.
calling Objective C a "kludge" while suggesting C++ doesn't make much sense if you think about it.
Sure, this is true. They are both C + OO kludged in.
So, Objecive-C and C++ are both backward compatable, OO kludges of C.
You haven't made much of an arguemnet for either one over the other.
OTOH, Objective-C is used by . . . Apple. C++ is used by "everyone" (I suspect this includes Apple).
Bottom line is that there is no rational reason to use Objective-C. Clearly this is a case of Not Invented Here on Apple's part. (AFAIR Objective-C is a NeXT thing, but six of one, half a dozen of the other; it's all Jobs.)
-Peter
I see.
Usually I avoid this sort of mistake by recognizing a joke by the fact that it's funny.
I guess I'll have to come up with a new strategy.
-Peter
That's 'cause Lucas messed up the value on the Vader helmet by scribbling on it.
OTOH, maybe a lot of guys are like me, and couldn't sleep with that thing in the house.
-Peter
You obviously fell asleep before the climax of RotJ. Surely it was due to all that Ewok nonsense.
Anyway, to catch you up, the Emperor surprised Luke with the fact that his friends were walking into a trap, since the battle station was "fully armed an operational". I'm not sure what that badly animated leech or whatever it was on the side of the Emperor's face had to do with it.
Anyway, Han was a little behind getting the shield down, and Lando realized that it was a trap, since the Rebel's sensors were being jammed. He was too late though, and a lot of brave rebels died at the hands of the Empire with their big green blaster. (BTW, the colors of the blasters always seemed wrong to me. The sabers made sense. Bad guys red, good guys blue, youths green. What gives with that?)
Fortunately, Han got the sheild generator down and Lando was able to blow up the second Death Star just as Luke escaped with Vader's (now Anikin again) body.
You should watch it again. It is on VHS now, so you can fast-forward through all the cutesy Ewok crap.
-Peter
I'm sorry this was modded down. It is a pretty good interpretation of what I meant!
-Peter
That's some pretty convoluted thinking you have there.
;-)
First those are hardly a tool. Second, the people who posses it are generally the victims.
(Yes, that goes for OE as well
-Peter
You can get an idea of what something is shaped like in more conventional ways. Like X-ray.
What is really impressive is that they can see what the surface of a flat object, like a photograph, looks like. Neat!
-Peter
I don't really understand quantum entanglement but . . .
Couldn't you use it to communicate instantly over any amount of distance?
Imagine:
You are at point A (say, earth) and I'm at point C (say, a spacecraft) and we have a buoy, at point B, precisely half way between us. Let's say that you and I are one light-year apart, and that buoy has been splitting a beam of photons between the point where I am and the point were you are for the last six months.
You have a photoreceptor oriented 90 degrees out from the beam, and I have a mirror at 45 degrees, hooked up to a solenoid. I type you a message in morse code on a switch that controls current to the solenoid. You see it in real-time.
I'm sure that either 1. there is a really good reason why this won't work in theory or 2. someone else has proposed it.
Can someone give me a reference either way?
-Peter
To borrow a phrase; if you outlaw nmap, only outlaws will have nmap.
-Peter
The main advance will be throwing off twenty years of cruft.
As one example, AFAIK the PIV still uses 20 bit addressing which is mapped to 32 bit by the MMU. This really isn't a big deal in terms of performance, but it is an example of the way the x86 architecture has grown into a rigged-up hack on a hack on a hack.
Another big advantage is (again AFAIK) 128 64 bit general purpose registers . If used in a smart way, these could save boatloads of expensive (in terms of speed) memory ops.
I'm really going out on a limb here, but I think it means a larger instruction set without having to resort to multi-word instructions. Love to hear comments on this from someone who actually knows what he's talking about!
-Peter
That's all great. And that is fine for college students.
But we aren't talking about college students, are we?
I don't know when or where you went to high school. I graduated in '93 from a suburban school in the USA. I am confident that if we had notebooks with wireless they may as well have closed the doors.
-Peter
Well, any answer is wrong if you re-frame the question mid stream. Yes, email can be part of education. Sure.
The problem was, however, what to do about students screwing off during class. Part of the answer is "don't let them play with their toys during class."
Point is, there are lots of approaches to education. Handing kids notebooks with wireless and then hoping they pay attention in class isn't one of them.
Now, having said all that, I took a "class" in high school that consisted of three back-to-back periods where the students basically wrote their own syllabus. It was different from individual study in that it was a semi-organized class. That is, you don't really have "class mates" in individual study. It was the best educational experience I ever had in pubic school.
But you can't do it half way. You can't hand out notebook and hope kids learn something.
Finally, all this stuff is great. Technology is great. Independent and self-guided study is great. BUT, I think we could do with a bit more focus on the fundamentals. All that "alternative" stuff is great, but it must be reserved for those who have already learned to sit down, shut up, study and learn, and who have learned to properly read, write and compute (not work a computer, compute).
-Peter
"Put the laptop under your chair during class, or take an F."
.).
A laptop is a tool (and a toy). It is a tool that has NOTHING to do with learning from someone who is standing in front of you.
The only possible use would be taking notes. Is it condusive to a lecture to have 20-30 students all typing at the same time? Is there anything more than a marginal benefit over the students using a paper notebook?
I think you have made yourself a problem, and that the best solution is to STOP making that problem for yourself (doctor, it hurts when I move my arm like this . .
-Peter
A lot of people are saying "why port Free stuff to windows?" or "why would you want to do this?"
.dll and one or two apps) and it is GREAT. A real shell, nano (my favorite editor), grep, sed, less, tail, uniq, which, etc. It is all packages in a nice installer (afaik it is just called "setup.exe") which reminds me of the BSD ports system.
Well, some of us still "have" to run windows sometimes. That's just how it is.
I've been using cygwin (in the larger sense, not just the
The point is, when you are "stuck" with windows the more "real man's" tools available the better!
OTOH, it bugs me a little that this seems to be under the name Debian, which stands (in my mind anyway) for 100% free, no fillers or meat by-products.
-Peter
I am very skeptical that you are going to find a way to enter formulae as fast as your prof. can write them on the board.
I'd think that a hybrid that captures handwriting as a bitmap for later transcription would be ideal.
I swear I have seen something like the IBM TransNote but more like a normal (paper) notepad with a Palm attached to it and less like a notebook (PC) with a notepad next to it.
Good luck!
-Peter
(d) Copyright violations. This is one of the regulations for the hosting corporation, and so we usually have to replace text with a link to it. Sometimes we get away with it if we're siting [sic] a literary passage for a debate or something.
What country do you live/operate in?
Even in the US (where, IMHO, we have nutso IP laws) this wouldn't be "getting away" with something; it would unequivocally be fair use.
Of course, I assume you mean "citing" above."
-Peter
You mean Java doesn't magically close the stream when it goes out of scope?
(I say this not as a lazy programmer, but as someone who feels that Java breeds lazy programmers.)
-Peter
You are clearly illustrating my point.
Yes, java beans is cute, and I get it, but it doesn't tell me squat about the technology.
What does enterprise mean? I'm keeping a running list:
Supports files >2gb
Supports RAM >4gb
Supports fibre channel
We charge you really, really a lot more because you are a big company and we think you can afford it.
Supports LDAP
Has even more proprietary extensions than the "workgroup" version.
I'm not sure if any of these fit.
I think that the IniCaps thing might be even funnier now. Maybe it should be iniCapsCptIniWrd (Initial Capitals exCept Initial Word)!
Okay, I'm just being silly now.
-Peter
And for heavens sake: don't forget to preview - or else the trolls will kill you.
It looks really nice when I do "view source" though.
Anyway, thanks!
So the key here is "new BufferedReader". Am I correct in the belief that there is no "free br" allowed/needed?
-Peter
Yeah, except that the problem was that I couldn't figure out what PACKAGE I needed. (JDK, SDK, JRE, LMNOP, etc) I mean, I'm pretty competent, but this was kept like some state secret.
None of the human beings that I knew at the time seemed to get this either, and all the "cool guy" Java guys and docs just assume you know this.
As I said before, there are some pretty useful walkthroughs for first-timers now.
But since you brought up how much more sense System.out.println() makes vs. cout . . .
Since Java is all logical and stuff, I can get input by just doing System.in.getln() right?
Wah-wah-wah-waaaaah*
Anyway, how do you do the equivalent of "cin >> some_string;" in Java?
-Peter
* the sound on "Let's Make a Deal" when someone gets the donkey
Actually, the complaint about EJB had nothing to do with the technology. I can't criticize it, because I don't know anything about it. Except that it has a non-descriptive name. If it has to do with "containers" why not call it JavaCan (or would that be javaCan?) or numberTenCan (NTC, sounds nice) or whatever?
.) So, maybe I'm dumber than dirt, but that doesn't appear to be the only issue involved.
And my complaint isn't that I am too dumb to learn Java, it is that I seem to be having a significantly higher level of difficulty getting started with Java than I have with other languages in the past. (Of course, I grouse almost as loudly about Perl being too easy in some ways . .
Actually, the things I have learned in the course of this thread lead me to believe that the "problem" (maybe it is aesthetic, maybe it is just me, whatever) is due to over-marketing and over-committeizing. IOW, I'm not sure any sane person would arrive at "IniCaps" but a committee of sane people might end up converging on it. No language designer would come up with Enterprise Java Beans, but marketing department sure would. I guess the fact that it doesn't have a "father" (like Wall or K&R) shows.
Maybe we mean different things by jargon? Your message could be read as you are under the impression that since I call EJB "jargon" I don't think it is a real technology. Is that what you meant? Anything technical has jargon. It has to. I'm just saying that I find Java (in the larger sense of Java) to be jargonistic to the extreme, and for its own sake.
-Peter
PS: It is, of course, the only slightly less perverse language, Perl.
Thanks for that link. I found that via the general link provided by the other guy that replied.
I find the name "IniCaps" to describe this laugh out loud funny (since it doesn't comply with itself).
As to variable names, you seem to have ignored two key points in my post. First, in my opinion, the longer names don't actually carry additional info in practice. If you are just saying that in your experience they do, well, that's fine then.
The other is that, as illustrated by the example, the full name (I'm sure there is some cool computer science name for this) can be made to look very good, and it doesn't matter if the name looks vague out of context. This isn't my point, it is K&P's point.
It's true of all languages that until you know the jargon, you will find it confusing. That's the case with Java to the same extent as other languages.
You must be trying to miss my point here. Yes, of course every technical field has its jargon. And every language its own set of jargon. My point is that Java (I guess really Sun) goes way, way beyond what is normal.
One prime example: EJB. You seem to have a personal affinity for meaningful labels. Let's expand EJB. AFAIK it is Enterprise Java Beans. To me that is a buzzword followed by a (maybe) cute but meaningless bit of wordplay. NO INFORMATION. I heard a rumor this is an API. IMO this is going as far as to be deliberately evasive in naming a technology.
-Peter
The IDE advice sounds like an admission of guilt to me. I'm not saying that a piece of software that watches you for mistakes in inherently bad, but a language that makes it that important is.
Wow, no registers. I'm not saying you are wrong, but I can't imagine how this can be . . . how do you keep track of the top of the stack!
[read, read, read]
Oh, there is a "pc" register which seems to be equivalent to IP on intel. I can't find anything on a stack pointer register. Weird.
-Peter