Where I work, our office manager is a lady who worked for Commodore (corp. ladder, from what I understand) during the "Golden Era"; she maintains that their downfall was due to their management & co. blowing cash and treating it like they had a never ending supply. Go-go 80's and all that, I guess. I was attending preschool in 89, so I wouldn't know.
Although, I did love my C64 (and VIC20!), and BASIC was my first exposure to programming at age 8 or so. So, the software development major is grateful for the exposure, and bitter that BASIC brain damaged me for life. It took several years to unlearn all the crap BASIC taught me, other than curiosity and problem solving. I still miss typing "load,8,1" and starting up the tape drive.
obDisclaimer: by temperment, I'm an assembler programmer, so I consider all y'all wimps. I don't waste any emotion on disliking java, C#, or even Haskell or Smalltalk.
SPARC or x86? I took SPARC ASM a couple of semesters ago... it's... scary. Not to mention intimidating on a 12 core box (cache coherency?!). There's one book for college level SPARC ASM, and it's aged, slim, and mediocre. OTOH, I've got 3 out of 4 of Intel's developer books for x86 ASM, and they've got more op codes and pseudo ops than SPARC by what seems to be a factor of 5. Props to anyone that writes ASM, and mad props if it's on SPARC.
The problem I have with explaining stuff is that I usually work on projects constantly at school, four at a time, all in different languages. If you ask me a question off the top of my head, you'll likely get, "well, the layout is like this, and this interfaces that, and... no, wait! I pulled that layer out a few days ago, it conflicted with a blocking race condition. It raises an exception... erm, that's my ADA project... throws an exception..."
At the end of stumbling through it, you'll likely look at a design feature and say, "well, why didn't you just do X" and I'll recoil in horror as I realize I'll have to tell you that it never occurred to me, although in retrospect, that's really a much simpler... no, wait, that'll have the same issue as the interface I threw out last week.
If you think I'm cheating, you should see me ask a girl out on a date. I'm really talented, but incredibly awkward. The best way to get a design out of me, and know for a fact that I created it, is to give me a white board and let me draw out the program as a diagram. I usually do it in ASCII art in my comments, too. It makes more sense that way, anyways. And it skips a good deal of questions that would send me off on a tangent detailing why I was in the situation that I had to do Y.
This is one of those times where old skool tech is called for. Follow him. Eventually, he'll get back to his house. Not recommended for out of state license plates, though.
OTOH, I bet you could get his email address if he's using WEP. I'd rather like to see the look on someones face when they get an email from 'the car in the left lane' telling them they've just scored a virus on their embedded device for driving like a ticked off teenager. Double points if they are, in fact, a ticked off teenager.
Then again... I might be able to score chicks phone numbers this way... Wait, what were we talking about again?
psh... amateur. I'll be impressed when she can do all that while eating a burger, sipping a shake and enjoying a smoke. The key is to steer with your knees;)
Yeah, it seems like overpriced iron when compared to x86, especially when you look at it through the eyes of 'MHz Myth', but Sun does have great hardware. I don't know about you, but I spend a good deal of time each and every day waiting on bottlenecked busses.
I start feeling it when an X86(-64) box hits a load average of about 3; while the box I SSH to for school (SPARC) chugs along smoothly at a load of 15. Then again, I think Linux and Solaris compute load averages differently, so take it with a grain of salt moreso than most anecdotal stories. I'm thinking about investing in an old SPARC box. They're cheap second hand at Anysys.
I use an old Duron 950 w/ ~512 MB RAM with Slackware on it as a server at my apartment. It's my subversion, samba, file, (LDAP soon), and backup servers. My slimmed down Slackware build takes ~55 MB or so, and the rest is used for cache. You'd be amazed what you can do with older hardware and a stripped down install.
Well, your OS allocates that memory. In the case of Windows, if you hit 40 MB once, it very well may leave that much dedicated to FF, even if it's only using 25 MB internally. So, you have dedicated, unused RAM.
I think on Linux, how fast it will put allocated and unused RAM back to the pool will depend on the vfs_cache_pressure, but I'm not sure about that, as that reclaims inodes from cache to make room for the buffers. VM management always confused me.
My choice: Ramen and hardware, FTW! I work with my hardware when I have cash, and write software when I don't.
I'm a software development major, but I have a weak spot for playing with hardware; the more esoteric, the better. For instance, did you know you can pick up old SPARC boxes on the cheap for old used beat up ones?! One place calls them ugly duck specials... open case, previously abused... that saves me the first two steps with new hardware!
The Windows Server 2K8 code base must be better than previous versions of Windows. From what I understood, Windows didn't scale for clustering due to problems with file locking (IIRC, the overhead for tracking locks grew quickly enough that the performance was marginalized past about 4 nodes). Unless they're using an iSCSI SNS server that handles the locks over a clustered file system. Still, this is leaps and bounds beyond previous versions of Windows WRT clustering!
Funny, you can get past the license using a command line switch. If you run NVIDIA-BlahBlahBlah.run --help, you find the following command line option:
[...]
The following arguments will be passed on to the./nvidia-installer
utility:
-a, --accept-license
Bypass the display and prompting for acceptance of the
NVIDIA Software License Agreement. By passing this option
to nvidia-installer, you indicate that you have read and
accept the License Agreement contained in the file
'LICENSE' (in the top level directory of the driver
package).
[...]
Yeah, if their open source drivers are like their Windows drivers, they'll install themselves as root and remove entries for starting, restarting and stopping the service under/etc/init.d (for you SysV guys) or/etc/rc.d (for the BSD guys).
Seriously, HP drivers install themselves in Windows as a service that cannot be stopped or removed by even an admin account. You have to do the old 'at time/interactive cmd.exe' hack, and then crash it and restart it thing to become Local System, just to stop the service.
I know exactly what you mean! The thing that gets me the most about it is when someone comes by, I sense them at my door, hold up my index finger as if to say, "just one minute" while staring at the screen. They always take that as a cue to start talking. I drop all the eggs I'm juggling to say "no, I haven't seen the drill lately" or "sure, I can make you a cat 5 cable, give me five minutes". Especially when I'm focusing and I have the lights off (it really helps me focus... ADD and all that) and they turn the lights on as they come in to my 'office' (I'm an intern with a desk in a finished off section under a stair case, which doubles as a server room) and start talking.
Actually, I pushed for Slack at work, but it made my (MSCE trained) boss nervous; I had to give something up as compromise for them allowing me to run Linux... CentOS being RHEL was enough leverage to get it through. Ironically, I prototyped the Samba server using Slack because all I could get together, hardware wise, to mock something up was an old EMachine 600 MHz clunker with a 20Gb 5.25" Quantum Fireball drive. Slack is the only thing (other than BSD) that would run on it.
At home, I'm a distro hopper on the desktop; Fedora-9 now, Sabayon a few months ago. But both my servers are Slackware (well, BlueWhite64 on the 64 bit side). I don't mind the package management, I compile and roll my own packages that I keep in a svn repo. I've even packaged my own PAM because it makes my life easier. On the desktop though, it's just too much work. But when I want a stable, rock solid, lean-and-mean-compiles-it-all-machine, it's Slackware all the way.
Yeah, it sounds silly until yum updates on a Thursday night, samba jumps up ten patch versions and twenty RHEL security patches and users can't access shares because your config has a setting that didn't cause any harm in the past, while blowing up the new samba version.
True story. It wasn't anyones fault, it was just a disastrous intersection of code bases. Also, Johnny Hughes of the CentOS team, and a regular slashdotter, was nothing short of amazing for email support. I think I heard back from him within the hour and we shot back and fourth emails until the problem was found and put in the bugtraq. Give this guys credit, BTW, they've earned my respect.
But yeah, these things happen when you have automatic updates. They make maintaining a farm easier, but don't be fooled in to thinking that they're the Silver Bullet. At work I use CentOS, and home I use Slackware; two completely different worlds. On my Slackware boxes, I can usually tell you what version of each major program is running, its patch level and its dependencies (and whether they're compiled as static or shared libraries) within a respectable margin of error.
On the server we have at work, I've kind of given up and yum does its thing. I've fallen in to the "I'll put it out when it catches on fire" mode of thinking due to poor management decisions that are in direct opposition to my advice. Both methods work, depending on how important your boxes and what they do are to you. By hand takes more time, but leaves you with exactly the system you demand. The other is "fire and forget" until you need to know what you fired where.
And if you have the means, for craps sake, use more than one medium. Tape and DVD, FTW! At least one medium should be write protected because as geeks, we have twenty backups/coasters on our desk without labels. If it's a CD/DVD RW, we'll erase it rather than open a canister of discs.
Just something that I feel I should point out: it's all relative. When XP first came out, there was ME and 2K (I was still on 98SE), to compare against it. Is seemed rock stable; I could go weeks without rebooting! It was still buggy, but not compared to 98SE, and ME. However, we're all used to XP SP2 these days. For all intents and purposes SP2 was an OS rewrite. The thing was huge and replaced a good deal of the underlying OS. XP SP2 is a stable, fast system. Pre SP2 just doesn't compare.
They did the undoable; replace an underlying system with a more stable system without breaking everything in the process. If you're a developer, you have to give them props for that (this is coming from a software development major who is also the president of a LUG, mind you!) regardless of what you think of the company itself. They're not going to pull that trick on the Vista codebase. They've lost too much talent since the start of development and no one ever understands a code base as well as the person who m designed it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but I hear that even congressmen are bidding for themselves these days...
Fortunately, they keep losing the bid!
Where I work, our office manager is a lady who worked for Commodore (corp. ladder, from what I understand) during the "Golden Era"; she maintains that their downfall was due to their management & co. blowing cash and treating it like they had a never ending supply. Go-go 80's and all that, I guess. I was attending preschool in 89, so I wouldn't know.
Although, I did love my C64 (and VIC20!), and BASIC was my first exposure to programming at age 8 or so. So, the software development major is grateful for the exposure, and bitter that BASIC brain damaged me for life. It took several years to unlearn all the crap BASIC taught me, other than curiosity and problem solving. I still miss typing "load,8,1" and starting up the tape drive.
But first, we kill all the lawyers!
obDisclaimer: by temperment, I'm an assembler programmer, so I consider all y'all wimps. I don't waste any emotion on disliking java, C#, or even Haskell or Smalltalk.
SPARC or x86? I took SPARC ASM a couple of semesters ago... it's... scary. Not to mention intimidating on a 12 core box (cache coherency?!). There's one book for college level SPARC ASM, and it's aged, slim, and mediocre. OTOH, I've got 3 out of 4 of Intel's developer books for x86 ASM, and they've got more op codes and pseudo ops than SPARC by what seems to be a factor of 5. Props to anyone that writes ASM, and mad props if it's on SPARC.
The problem I have with explaining stuff is that I usually work on projects constantly at school, four at a time, all in different languages. If you ask me a question off the top of my head, you'll likely get, "well, the layout is like this, and this interfaces that, and... no, wait! I pulled that layer out a few days ago, it conflicted with a blocking race condition. It raises an exception... erm, that's my ADA project... throws an exception..."
At the end of stumbling through it, you'll likely look at a design feature and say, "well, why didn't you just do X" and I'll recoil in horror as I realize I'll have to tell you that it never occurred to me, although in retrospect, that's really a much simpler... no, wait, that'll have the same issue as the interface I threw out last week.
If you think I'm cheating, you should see me ask a girl out on a date. I'm really talented, but incredibly awkward. The best way to get a design out of me, and know for a fact that I created it, is to give me a white board and let me draw out the program as a diagram. I usually do it in ASCII art in my comments, too. It makes more sense that way, anyways. And it skips a good deal of questions that would send me off on a tangent detailing why I was in the situation that I had to do Y.
These are official emails that surfaced during antitrust cases. They're real.
This is one of those times where old skool tech is called for. Follow him. Eventually, he'll get back to his house. Not recommended for out of state license plates, though.
OTOH, I bet you could get his email address if he's using WEP. I'd rather like to see the look on someones face when they get an email from 'the car in the left lane' telling them they've just scored a virus on their embedded device for driving like a ticked off teenager. Double points if they are, in fact, a ticked off teenager.
Then again... I might be able to score chicks phone numbers this way... Wait, what were we talking about again?
psh... amateur. I'll be impressed when she can do all that while eating a burger, sipping a shake and enjoying a smoke. The key is to steer with your knees ;)
Yeah, it seems like overpriced iron when compared to x86, especially when you look at it through the eyes of 'MHz Myth', but Sun does have great hardware. I don't know about you, but I spend a good deal of time each and every day waiting on bottlenecked busses.
I start feeling it when an X86(-64) box hits a load average of about 3; while the box I SSH to for school (SPARC) chugs along smoothly at a load of 15. Then again, I think Linux and Solaris compute load averages differently, so take it with a grain of salt moreso than most anecdotal stories. I'm thinking about investing in an old SPARC box. They're cheap second hand at Anysys.
I use an old Duron 950 w/ ~512 MB RAM with Slackware on it as a server at my apartment. It's my subversion, samba, file, (LDAP soon), and backup servers. My slimmed down Slackware build takes ~55 MB or so, and the rest is used for cache. You'd be amazed what you can do with older hardware and a stripped down install.
Hidden compartments... that just gave me an interesting idea... Alternate Data Streams, FTW! Obligatory Wiki link that should sum up my thoughts
Well, your OS allocates that memory. In the case of Windows, if you hit 40 MB once, it very well may leave that much dedicated to FF, even if it's only using 25 MB internally. So, you have dedicated, unused RAM.
I think on Linux, how fast it will put allocated and unused RAM back to the pool will depend on the vfs_cache_pressure, but I'm not sure about that, as that reclaims inodes from cache to make room for the buffers. VM management always confused me.
My choice: Ramen and hardware, FTW! I work with my hardware when I have cash, and write software when I don't.
I'm a software development major, but I have a weak spot for playing with hardware; the more esoteric, the better. For instance, did you know you can pick up old SPARC boxes on the cheap for old used beat up ones?! One place calls them ugly duck specials... open case, previously abused... that saves me the first two steps with new hardware!
The Windows Server 2K8 code base must be better than previous versions of Windows. From what I understood, Windows didn't scale for clustering due to problems with file locking (IIRC, the overhead for tracking locks grew quickly enough that the performance was marginalized past about 4 nodes). Unless they're using an iSCSI SNS server that handles the locks over a clustered file system. Still, this is leaps and bounds beyond previous versions of Windows WRT clustering!
The following arguments will be passed on to the
-a, --accept-license Bypass the display and prompting for acceptance of the NVIDIA Software License Agreement. By passing this option to nvidia-installer, you indicate that you have read and accept the License Agreement contained in the file 'LICENSE' (in the top level directory of the driver package).
[...]
Yeah, if their open source drivers are like their Windows drivers, they'll install themselves as root and remove entries for starting, restarting and stopping the service under /etc/init.d (for you SysV guys) or /etc/rc.d (for the BSD guys).
/interactive cmd.exe' hack, and then crash it and restart it thing to become Local System, just to stop the service.
Seriously, HP drivers install themselves in Windows as a service that cannot be stopped or removed by even an admin account. You have to do the old 'at time
I always stand in the sun when I smoke. Do I break even?
Are you wearing sun screen while doing so?I know exactly what you mean! The thing that gets me the most about it is when someone comes by, I sense them at my door, hold up my index finger as if to say, "just one minute" while staring at the screen. They always take that as a cue to start talking. I drop all the eggs I'm juggling to say "no, I haven't seen the drill lately" or "sure, I can make you a cat 5 cable, give me five minutes". Especially when I'm focusing and I have the lights off (it really helps me focus... ADD and all that) and they turn the lights on as they come in to my 'office' (I'm an intern with a desk in a finished off section under a stair case, which doubles as a server room) and start talking.
Actually, I pushed for Slack at work, but it made my (MSCE trained) boss nervous; I had to give something up as compromise for them allowing me to run Linux... CentOS being RHEL was enough leverage to get it through. Ironically, I prototyped the Samba server using Slack because all I could get together, hardware wise, to mock something up was an old EMachine 600 MHz clunker with a 20Gb 5.25" Quantum Fireball drive. Slack is the only thing (other than BSD) that would run on it.
At home, I'm a distro hopper on the desktop; Fedora-9 now, Sabayon a few months ago. But both my servers are Slackware (well, BlueWhite64 on the 64 bit side). I don't mind the package management, I compile and roll my own packages that I keep in a svn repo. I've even packaged my own PAM because it makes my life easier. On the desktop though, it's just too much work. But when I want a stable, rock solid, lean-and-mean-compiles-it-all-machine, it's Slackware all the way.
Yeah, it sounds silly until yum updates on a Thursday night, samba jumps up ten patch versions and twenty RHEL security patches and users can't access shares because your config has a setting that didn't cause any harm in the past, while blowing up the new samba version.
True story. It wasn't anyones fault, it was just a disastrous intersection of code bases. Also, Johnny Hughes of the CentOS team, and a regular slashdotter, was nothing short of amazing for email support. I think I heard back from him within the hour and we shot back and fourth emails until the problem was found and put in the bugtraq. Give this guys credit, BTW, they've earned my respect.
But yeah, these things happen when you have automatic updates. They make maintaining a farm easier, but don't be fooled in to thinking that they're the Silver Bullet. At work I use CentOS, and home I use Slackware; two completely different worlds. On my Slackware boxes, I can usually tell you what version of each major program is running, its patch level and its dependencies (and whether they're compiled as static or shared libraries) within a respectable margin of error.
On the server we have at work, I've kind of given up and yum does its thing. I've fallen in to the "I'll put it out when it catches on fire" mode of thinking due to poor management decisions that are in direct opposition to my advice. Both methods work, depending on how important your boxes and what they do are to you. By hand takes more time, but leaves you with exactly the system you demand. The other is "fire and forget" until you need to know what you fired where.
And if you have the means, for craps sake, use more than one medium. Tape and DVD, FTW! At least one medium should be write protected because as geeks, we have twenty backups/coasters on our desk without labels. If it's a CD/DVD RW, we'll erase it rather than open a canister of discs.
But what if the admins are upstairs? However would a Dalek get up there?!
I've heard those words before. In hindsight, that's a win for the dudes.
Just something that I feel I should point out: it's all relative. When XP first came out, there was ME and 2K (I was still on 98SE), to compare against it. Is seemed rock stable; I could go weeks without rebooting! It was still buggy, but not compared to 98SE, and ME. However, we're all used to XP SP2 these days. For all intents and purposes SP2 was an OS rewrite. The thing was huge and replaced a good deal of the underlying OS. XP SP2 is a stable, fast system. Pre SP2 just doesn't compare.
They did the undoable; replace an underlying system with a more stable system without breaking everything in the process. If you're a developer, you have to give them props for that (this is coming from a software development major who is also the president of a LUG, mind you!) regardless of what you think of the company itself. They're not going to pull that trick on the Vista codebase. They've lost too much talent since the start of development and no one ever understands a code base as well as the person who m designed it.