I thought it was illegal for the NSA to spy domestically? Or is that just the CIA.
No laws apply to the NSA. Seriously, I'm not making this up. They cannot even be compelled by Congress to officially admit they exist. They are simply, by charter, not under the authority of anyone (as far as we know, of course. And "Charter" is kind of a vague word here too-- no one outside the agency is really sure what their charter is, as the only document that could be called their "charter" has never been released to anyone, either). And SIGINT is their business, wherever the SIG's may come from, or go to. For the most part, they've tended to view their mission as foreign intelligence, but they've certainly not been above domestic snooping when they feel it's in their interests. Not to mention their collection of domestic data for foreign countries and turning it over unexaminied (UK/USA). Big Brother is most definitely watching.
Hear hear! If there's one thing I pray comes out of open-sourcing Star Office, it's the idea that maybe users don't always need to load an entire desktop to write a letter!
Please, anyone reading this, if you are, or are considering becoming a Star Office developer, see if you can work it so that I can launch star office in segments. Like, just the word processor, or I can hit a toolbar button and launch the spreadsheet program if I need it, later.
It's a great program, and a perfectly usable office suite, but I wish it was a suite, as in several apps, not one big huge-ass app. I mean, even M$ users aren't forced to always launch Word and Excel and Access and a drawing app at the same time if they want to use any one of those things.
Ok, that's my rant. I know a lot of others feel the same, I just hope some of them have to coding talent I don't have, and dig in on this problem!
I haven't seen the cinema display, but I assume they're using the same kind of LCD tech that's in their existing flat-panel displays, and boy are they ever sweet. Anyone who lives near a computer store, get down there and look at Apple's new flat-panel screens. They just totally blow away any ideas you may have had about LCD's being blurry and dark. This thing looked better than my sony CRT. And then go wander over to the wintel section and look at (for example) Viewsonics flat-screen. Doesn't look so cool anymore, all of a sudden. If only Apple would stop crippling all their great hardware with MacOS... if only... sigh.
1) Wow, imagine a whole roomful of heads transplanted onto one large body! It'd be a bitchin' Beowulf!
2) Dood, wasn't this posted before?
3) Hemos spelled Christopher Reeve's name wrong. He should learn to write english blah blah blah...
4) The link doesn't work (oh wait, that one's been covered already)
5) This surgical technique should be Open Sourced, so that anyone can do it, not just millionaires. If we could all open up the patient's neck and fix any problems ourselves, and submit patches back to the patient, this process would be faster, and more stable. But by having a few "elite" surgeons working alone in a "clean O.R." we will all end up with bloated necks that don't even let us move the rest of our body.
6) [insert name of any old random unrelated thing] sucks.
I dunno. I play Q3test on a TNT2 all the time, I've never had a speed complaint. Ok, well, say I'm in a room with 12 or 15 others and we're all shooting rockets and stuff, it does slow down a bit. But is that the card, or the server?
PS-- my machine's a dual P3 450 running RH 6.0. Wonder how much that has to do with it...
Depends on what you want your DB to do, really. I can't speak specifically to syBase (I've also heard good things about it) but I know why we use mySQL. It's fast, and very low overhead for queries.
The caveat to this, of course, is that you must know how to set up your database right. I recently had an opportunity to play around with a fairly large db (upwards of 400,000 records) on mySQL. The records represent people, and some of the fields are birth month, birth date, last name and first name. I wanted to select las and first names for people who were born today. So, with no indexes, the query selected about 600 records, and took 11.8 seconds. Yes, that's right, 11.8 seconds. I was floored! Here's me thinking "mySQL's fast! It'll work great!" Well.
So then I went back through and indexed (birth month, birth date), checked that I had done it right with EXPLAIN, and ran the exact same query again. This time it took 0.8 seconds. A total time savings of 11 seconds. I learned an important lesson that day... Always index everything you're going to use as a key! With this in mind, mySQL is indeed damn fast, and low overhead.
Now, the other thing I can't really speak to is reliability. mySQL doesn't really support referential integrity, and I guess it's up to you whether you need it or not. I've seen my share of M$-trained database folks who use CASCADE as a cheap crutch to paper over their bad code. Rather than write queries that do what they really wnat them to do, they just spend the extra overhead to have CASCADE's do it for them. I've also seen times where this was crucial to a db's function. Either way, it's something to consider. I've also never seen mySQL handle failure, or had to rebuild it after one. Whatever you usde, your strategy should account for this possibility, in any case.
Apache was written with reliability as a higher priority than raw speed, hence it's multiprocess rather than multithreaded. Threaded servers will tend to be faster, because there is a definite overhead for starting new server processes rather than starting a new thread, but on the other hand, it's way way harder to write a solid multithreaded server, so if your threading server has a problem, the liklehood is the failing thread will take out the rest of the server. If an Apache process fails, it'll just quietly die, while the server will continue serving.
As for multiprocessor hardware, Linux works just fine for me. I'm writing this on a dual P3, and my other workstation is a dual PPro. I haven't tried it on boxes with > 2 processors though. For a web server, more processors are unlikely to get you any benefit, however. I'm pretty sure that apache on a single processor will easily saturate your network bandwidth, no matter what it is. Now if you're doing really complex CGI's, like, for example, some kind of real-time stock calculations, that require a lot of processing, then multiple processors might help. But if this is the case, I'd probably advocate hooking up several boxes in parallel (Mosix is designed for this) and farming your CGI's out to idle processors on separate machines. Your Database might also benefit from multiple processors, but (for a properly indexed DB) probably only in extremely liminal cases (very, very large DB's), and if so, you should have it on a separate machine too. In general, spend the extra money on RAM instead of another processor. Your clients will thank you:-)
I use this same argument with people when they complain that buying things online is not safe.
But the BIG difference here is that 512-bit keys have been thought safe against all but (perhaps) Major World Governments, until now. What happens when some terrorists finally cotton to this, and realize that with some intelligent cracking, they could very well jeopardize the stability of, oh, say, the US dollar as a currency. An awful lot of bank transactions are secured with 512-bit keys, and (no reference here-- if anyone has real numbers, please contribute!) I believe something like 95% of US currency exists only as bits in computers.
So now, the situation is not that "someone will steal your credit card number," but that someone could potentially steal (or render worthless and nonexistent) >= 50% of all US dollars. That scares me. It ought to scare you too.
And obNote to those not residing in the US, or handling US currency on a daily basis:
It could happen to your country too
And, even if it only happens to us, there will be some great unpleasantness for the rest of the world.
So, HP's doing the bailing wire and sweat work instead. Maybe I should produce these for companies that don't want to do anything, and compete with HP.:-)
Windows apps crashing the system
on
Kernel 2.2.12
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· Score: 1
Alright, most of your arguments do make some sense. But the last one, "video drivers?" When I used to have to use Win 95 at work, applications that routinely crashed the system included Photoshop, Netscape Navigator, Homesite, and Eudora. Now, these are basically all I used, but I'll be charitable and assume that just because every epp I used managed to crash the system eventually doesn't necessarily mean that any app could do it. I mean, Notepad never crashed the system, so that's something right? But my question is, what are Homesite, or Navigator doing that makes it possible for them to bring down my OS?
Oh yeah, another app that crashed the system all the time was soemthing called "explorer.exe..."
I agree, sort of. Except for buying a $1000 real PC. Why not pick up a bunch of "obsolete" P90-class machines, strip the HDD's, and use them as diskless X servers? If you know what you're doing, that's an extremely easy/stable solution to the same problem these HP's are supposed to solve.
And in the above sentence is probably the answer to my question-- IF you know what you're doing. How long till companies start to figure out that paying more for competent admins saves them much more money than they'd save by hiring from the "I just got my MCSE and I'd like $75,000 please" crowd?
Rock on. Good to see somebody with actual training thinking this way. Sometimes I suffer from "Web Developer Inadequacy Syndrome" (WDIS), which is often compounded reading posts on/. which run toward the "If it isn't [C|C++] it's not 'real' programming" theme.
Personally, I don't write Java, because every time I try to learn it, I get a headache. But I do know that a lot of the time, Java is the only way to accomplish things that I want to do, despite the fact that what I want to do is not all that complicated. I mean, something as simple as updating a status bar on a web page, for God's sake. See my other post on this thread for more on what I'm thinking of.
Er? I sort of agree with you, but I don't get your use of CGI here. CGI is Common Gateway Interface, which, to tell you the truth, I have no idea what that phrase is supposed to mean, but in any case, it's the stuff that runs on the server. JavaScript has nothing to do with CGI's, other than perhaps you could embed javascript in pages that your CGI returns. And that would be Dynamic HTML (DHTML), which I think is more what you're talking about.
With that interpretation of your post, yeah, I'd agree with what you said. Javascript would be cool if it weren't... err... javascript. First browser that lets me use perl to do UI stuff in the browser wins, hands down! And I don't mean embperl or anything server-side, I mean a way I can code perl functions into my html page and call them with event handlers. That'd be glory. Damn. That might not even be all that hard, now that I think about it. Whip up a little window creator in GTK/perl that does the basic html interpreting, and also allows me to eval code that it finds in the page... Anyone think this sounds sorta do-able? Even, at least, for a demo/prototype kind of thing?
I'd agree with this too. CS-people might sneer, but the future is in web-based applications (or, at the very least, web-ifyable apps, if not actually in the whole "NC" concept). What I'd REALLY like to see is basically a way that I can run web apps in a window which is not really a browser, but sort of acts like one. As in, I'd code my application backend and have it running on some server somewhere. The user would download a binary that used their "interface" libraries to create a window and an interface (which would basically be XML/HTML with better widgets) which would run on their desktop just like any other application. Now mind you, when I say "download," the simplest case is that it's the same as how you "download" a web page today. It could be done on the fly, as needed ("Just-In-Time?"). But ditch all the bloat and crap that goes along with a traditional web browser, cause all we need is a little window to paint our gui onto.
It sounds like mozilla is shaping up to be a potential answer to this need. If nothing else, it's OSS, so it might end up being at least a base that could be used for this. Kind of an "app browser" if you will. I think it'll happen sooner or later, but maybe that's just me:-)
I assume by "solid ride" you mean M$'s web division? I'm implying that from context, mind you, not because that statement represents reality in any way.
M$ has utterly trashed every web venture it's gotten itself into. Does anyone here like the hotmail redesign? No one I know likes it. What about sidewalk.com? That used to be a good resource, until M$ took it over and "improved" (read: bloated, commercialized every square inch of, and generally made wreckage of) it.
This move makes me hope that Belluzo had a plaque for his desk that says "Captain of Sinking Ships." Watch for M$ to lose even more money on their "interactive services division" and pin it on this shlub in the very near future.
Hear hear! This is absolutely true. Perl ALLOWS you to do things right, but it doesn't force you to. When you see ugly-ass perl, it's usually the product of one of two people:
The part-time hack who just wants to "get things done quickly" and who cares if it's butt-ass ugly or not
The "efficiency nut" who was raised to believe that perl programs longer than three lines are a sin, and will lead to an enternity of coding VB in the afterlife
Either or both of these mindsets are fine for short little sysadmin hacks, but as perl matures into a Real Programming Language, complete with OO functionality, a massive wealth of libraries, bindings, and GUI toolkits, and, very soon, even threading (!) both of these sorts of people are increasingly out of their element. Rest assured that there are those of us out there who take the time to code cleanly in Perl (use strict, scope all variables, comment stuff, use descriptive identifiers, etc-- spend enough time coding for mod_perl and you'll learn to scope your damn variables right quick!). And, most importantly, that writing good, clean maintainable, readable code in Perl is fully possible. It's just not FORCED upon you.
So, back to the ivory tower with those who believe that if you can't malloc(), you can't program. Perl is bringing code to the masses, whether they like it or not, and if you care to, you can learn to do it the right way.
And as for "Perl is slower than Java," all I can say is WTF??? Shrug. Some people...
Just downloaded this to check it out. Very cute. Totally useless eye-candy, but cute nonetheless:-).
The only problem I can see with it is that it only goes graphical for the last bit of the boot sequence, when services are starting up, which on my box lasts about 4-5 seconds. I suppose there's no really feasable way to launch it any earlier. Oh well. Nice work, anyway-- I expect to see this popping up one of of these newfangled "user-obsequious" distros any day:-)
if you read the story, their theory is that excessive surfing produces high dopamine levels in the brain. So it is substance addiction, in a way, only you gotta pay the telcos and ISP's for your fix.
All of my Linux desktops have a "feel." It just changes from time to time:-)
Seriously, though, don't forget that a large percentage of us out here don't honestly care if all the "users" ever use linux or not. I use Linux because I spend 10-12 or more hrs a day in front of one computer or another, and crashes/freezes/reboots dramatically lower my productivity and raise my stress level. So I choose to use an OS that doesn't do those things. Some apps look different than some other apps (mostly they all look like my E/GTK theme, but some vary wildly from that), and that's ok by me. Anyone who can't deal with that, I honestly recommend they stick to windows.
Besides all that, I know that if/when the hordes of secretaries or what have you DO start migrating to linux, I'm sure as hell not going to be the one supporting them. So what do I care?
Now, when I do get passionate about this is when someone tries to make ME use windows, especially in a server context. As long as I never have to have anything to do with M$ products, though, I don't give a rat's ass who else uses them.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this post are mine and possibly those of a large majority of people who don't post on/. regularly. They do not necessarily represent the opinions of the 31337 flamers, and zealots who claim to want "world domination" and are guaranteed to flee to some other "cool, alternative" OS as soon as Linux does become popular. Does not include tax, title, license, void where prohibited, Canadian winners will be required to complete a breif, time-limited skill test.
My redhat 6.0 boxes use 2.2.5-15 SMP. It's 2.2.5 with some ac patches. I find it very weird that several people seem to think redhat maintains their own "proprietary" kernel or something. Huh? If anyone thinks they have real evidence of this, please come forward with it.
...that Hemos is actually human. I mean, did you listen to it? That part where he was mumbling in the background, something about vampires and spaceships, I don't know. Man, he's a weird guy. I mean, I'm a weird guy, but he just puts me to shame.
And, having personally been a moderator several times myself, I can definitely tell you that moderators are not human. I was absolutely not a bipedal, primate-descended, carbon-based life form at any time while moderating. It would be unethical, not to mention disingenuous, hirsute, and other infrequently-used adjectives.
Slashdot Mirror
No laws apply to the NSA. Seriously, I'm not making this up. They cannot even be compelled by Congress to officially admit they exist. They are simply, by charter, not under the authority of anyone (as far as we know, of course. And "Charter" is kind of a vague word here too-- no one outside the agency is really sure what their charter is, as the only document that could be called their "charter" has never been released to anyone, either). And SIGINT is their business, wherever the SIG's may come from, or go to. For the most part, they've tended to view their mission as foreign intelligence, but they've certainly not been above domestic snooping when they feel it's in their interests. Not to mention their collection of domestic data for foreign countries and turning it over unexaminied (UK/USA). Big Brother is most definitely watching.
Please, anyone reading this, if you are, or are considering becoming a Star Office developer, see if you can work it so that I can launch star office in segments. Like, just the word processor, or I can hit a toolbar button and launch the spreadsheet program if I need it, later.
It's a great program, and a perfectly usable office suite, but I wish it was a suite, as in several apps, not one big huge-ass app. I mean, even M$ users aren't forced to always launch Word and Excel and Access and a drawing app at the same time if they want to use any one of those things.
Ok, that's my rant. I know a lot of others feel the same, I just hope some of them have to coding talent I don't have, and dig in on this problem!
I haven't seen the cinema display, but I assume they're using the same kind of LCD tech that's in their existing flat-panel displays, and boy are they ever sweet. Anyone who lives near a computer store, get down there and look at Apple's new flat-panel screens. They just totally blow away any ideas you may have had about LCD's being blurry and dark. This thing looked better than my sony CRT. And then go wander over to the wintel section and look at (for example) Viewsonics flat-screen. Doesn't look so cool anymore, all of a sudden. If only Apple would stop crippling all their great hardware with MacOS... if only... sigh.
2) Dood, wasn't this posted before?
3) Hemos spelled Christopher Reeve's name wrong. He should learn to write english blah blah blah...
4) The link doesn't work (oh wait, that one's been covered already)
5) This surgical technique should be Open Sourced, so that anyone can do it, not just millionaires. If we could all open up the patient's neck and fix any problems ourselves, and submit patches back to the patient, this process would be faster, and more stable. But by having a few "elite" surgeons working alone in a "clean O.R." we will all end up with bloated necks that don't even let us move the rest of our body.
6) [insert name of any old random unrelated thing] sucks.
PS-- my machine's a dual P3 450 running RH 6.0. Wonder how much that has to do with it...
The caveat to this, of course, is that you must know how to set up your database right. I recently had an opportunity to play around with a fairly large db (upwards of 400,000 records) on mySQL. The records represent people, and some of the fields are birth month, birth date, last name and first name. I wanted to select las and first names for people who were born today. So, with no indexes, the query selected about 600 records, and took 11.8 seconds. Yes, that's right, 11.8 seconds. I was floored! Here's me thinking "mySQL's fast! It'll work great!" Well.
So then I went back through and indexed (birth month, birth date), checked that I had done it right with EXPLAIN, and ran the exact same query again. This time it took 0.8 seconds. A total time savings of 11 seconds. I learned an important lesson that day... Always index everything you're going to use as a key! With this in mind, mySQL is indeed damn fast, and low overhead.
Now, the other thing I can't really speak to is reliability. mySQL doesn't really support referential integrity, and I guess it's up to you whether you need it or not. I've seen my share of M$-trained database folks who use CASCADE as a cheap crutch to paper over their bad code. Rather than write queries that do what they really wnat them to do, they just spend the extra overhead to have CASCADE's do it for them. I've also seen times where this was crucial to a db's function. Either way, it's something to consider. I've also never seen mySQL handle failure, or had to rebuild it after one. Whatever you usde, your strategy should account for this possibility, in any case.
As for multiprocessor hardware, Linux works just fine for me. I'm writing this on a dual P3, and my other workstation is a dual PPro. I haven't tried it on boxes with > 2 processors though. For a web server, more processors are unlikely to get you any benefit, however. I'm pretty sure that apache on a single processor will easily saturate your network bandwidth, no matter what it is. Now if you're doing really complex CGI's, like, for example, some kind of real-time stock calculations, that require a lot of processing, then multiple processors might help. But if this is the case, I'd probably advocate hooking up several boxes in parallel (Mosix is designed for this) and farming your CGI's out to idle processors on separate machines. Your Database might also benefit from multiple processors, but (for a properly indexed DB) probably only in extremely liminal cases (very, very large DB's), and if so, you should have it on a separate machine too. In general, spend the extra money on RAM instead of another processor. Your clients will thank you :-)
That is what I meant, thanks. Re-reading my original post, I realize this may not have been particularly clear.
But the BIG difference here is that 512-bit keys have been thought safe against all but (perhaps) Major World Governments, until now. What happens when some terrorists finally cotton to this, and realize that with some intelligent cracking, they could very well jeopardize the stability of, oh, say, the US dollar as a currency. An awful lot of bank transactions are secured with 512-bit keys, and (no reference here-- if anyone has real numbers, please contribute!) I believe something like 95% of US currency exists only as bits in computers.
So now, the situation is not that "someone will steal your credit card number," but that someone could potentially steal (or render worthless and nonexistent) >= 50% of all US dollars. That scares me. It ought to scare you too.
And obNote to those not residing in the US, or handling US currency on a daily basis:
So, HP's doing the bailing wire and sweat work instead. Maybe I should produce these for companies that don't want to do anything, and compete with HP. :-)
Oh yeah, another app that crashed the system all the time was soemthing called "explorer.exe..."
If you don't know how to use man(1), why would you type $ man man?
You can never open the same IO::Stream twice.
What's the difference between BSD?
And in the above sentence is probably the answer to my question-- IF you know what you're doing. How long till companies start to figure out that paying more for competent admins saves them much more money than they'd save by hiring from the "I just got my MCSE and I'd like $75,000 please" crowd?
I'm not humor impaired, but, like, that wasn't funny. I seriously didn't even crack a smile once. I dunno about this Roblimo guy...
Personally, I don't write Java, because every time I try to learn it, I get a headache. But I do know that a lot of the time, Java is the only way to accomplish things that I want to do, despite the fact that what I want to do is not all that complicated. I mean, something as simple as updating a status bar on a web page, for God's sake. See my other post on this thread for more on what I'm thinking of.
With that interpretation of your post, yeah, I'd agree with what you said. Javascript would be cool if it weren't... err... javascript. First browser that lets me use perl to do UI stuff in the browser wins, hands down! And I don't mean embperl or anything server-side, I mean a way I can code perl functions into my html page and call them with event handlers. That'd be glory. Damn. That might not even be all that hard, now that I think about it. Whip up a little window creator in GTK/perl that does the basic html interpreting, and also allows me to eval code that it finds in the page... Anyone think this sounds sorta do-able? Even, at least, for a demo/prototype kind of thing?
It sounds like mozilla is shaping up to be a potential answer to this need. If nothing else, it's OSS, so it might end up being at least a base that could be used for this. Kind of an "app browser" if you will. I think it'll happen sooner or later, but maybe that's just me :-)
Now the FBI is going to find out about all those copies of Catcher in the Rye I've bought!
M$ has utterly trashed every web venture it's gotten itself into. Does anyone here like the hotmail redesign? No one I know likes it. What about sidewalk.com? That used to be a good resource, until M$ took it over and "improved" (read: bloated, commercialized every square inch of, and generally made wreckage of) it.
This move makes me hope that Belluzo had a plaque for his desk that says "Captain of Sinking Ships." Watch for M$ to lose even more money on their "interactive services division" and pin it on this shlub in the very near future.
- The part-time hack who just wants to "get things done quickly" and who cares if it's butt-ass ugly or not
- The "efficiency nut" who was raised to believe that perl programs longer than three lines are a sin, and will lead to an enternity of coding VB in the afterlife
Either or both of these mindsets are fine for short little sysadmin hacks, but as perl matures into a Real Programming Language, complete with OO functionality, a massive wealth of libraries, bindings, and GUI toolkits, and, very soon, even threading (!) both of these sorts of people are increasingly out of their element. Rest assured that there are those of us out there who take the time to code cleanly in Perl (use strict, scope all variables, comment stuff, use descriptive identifiers, etc-- spend enough time coding for mod_perl and you'll learn to scope your damn variables right quick!). And, most importantly, that writing good, clean maintainable, readable code in Perl is fully possible. It's just not FORCED upon you.So, back to the ivory tower with those who believe that if you can't malloc(), you can't program. Perl is bringing code to the masses, whether they like it or not, and if you care to, you can learn to do it the right way.
And as for "Perl is slower than Java," all I can say is WTF??? Shrug. Some people...
The only problem I can see with it is that it only goes graphical for the last bit of the boot sequence, when services are starting up, which on my box lasts about 4-5 seconds. I suppose there's no really feasable way to launch it any earlier. Oh well. Nice work, anyway-- I expect to see this popping up one of of these newfangled "user-obsequious" distros any day :-)
Cook me up another shot 'a' slashdot. :-)
Seriously, though, don't forget that a large percentage of us out here don't honestly care if all the "users" ever use linux or not. I use Linux because I spend 10-12 or more hrs a day in front of one computer or another, and crashes/freezes/reboots dramatically lower my productivity and raise my stress level. So I choose to use an OS that doesn't do those things. Some apps look different than some other apps (mostly they all look like my E/GTK theme, but some vary wildly from that), and that's ok by me. Anyone who can't deal with that, I honestly recommend they stick to windows.
Besides all that, I know that if/when the hordes of secretaries or what have you DO start migrating to linux, I'm sure as hell not going to be the one supporting them. So what do I care?
Now, when I do get passionate about this is when someone tries to make ME use windows, especially in a server context. As long as I never have to have anything to do with M$ products, though, I don't give a rat's ass who else uses them.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this post are mine and possibly those of a large majority of people who don't post on /. regularly. They do not necessarily represent the opinions of the 31337 flamers, and zealots who claim to want "world domination" and are guaranteed to flee to some other "cool, alternative" OS as soon as Linux does become popular.
Does not include tax, title, license, void where prohibited, Canadian winners will be required to complete a breif, time-limited skill test.
My redhat 6.0 boxes use 2.2.5-15 SMP. It's 2.2.5 with some ac patches. I find it very weird that several people seem to think redhat maintains their own "proprietary" kernel or something. Huh? If anyone thinks they have real evidence of this, please come forward with it.
And, having personally been a moderator several times myself, I can definitely tell you that moderators are not human. I was absolutely not a bipedal, primate-descended, carbon-based life form at any time while moderating. It would be unethical, not to mention disingenuous, hirsute, and other infrequently-used adjectives.
I need more coffee.