Very true. Hoyle had some unusual ideas, and was never slow to argue against theories he disagreed with. But isn't that half the point of science? To not just accept general opinion and actually think for yourself?
People like Hoyle, argue against other schools of thought (Big Bang vs steady state) not through arrogance, ignorance or refusal to back down, but because they have their own well founded theories with many worthwhile arguments.
People on Slashdot argue against oter schools of thought (Linux vs MS) precisely through arrogance, ignorance and a refusal to back down, so I can see why this post got labelled a troll.
> The linux kernel supports large amounts of pc, > alpha, and sun devices with a huge amounts of > drivers. This one of the reasons why linux is > hot and openserver never really took off
> outside the bussiness world
That's crap. In the dozen or so places I've worked over the last 2 or 3 years I've *never* seen a production linux system running on anything other than x86.
I used Netscape 4.x on Solaris (SPARC and x86) for ages, with no stability problems at all, even using Java. I move to Linux, and *bang* the thing is down every five minutes.
I think part of the reason for the attitude you encountered might be that coding games requires (I imagine - I've never done it!) heavily optimised, very specialised code.
I'm thinking of "hitting the hardware" and writing hacks to get the absolute maximum performance out of the system.
I could well be wrong in assuming that's how games are written - I suspect the days of hitting the hardware may be gone, but I think that's the way a lot of people view game development.
That kind of coding goes very much against the grain with academics who learned how to code from K&R and Knuth, teach how to code out of K&R and Knuth, and place great importance on formal methods etc. In scientific disciplines there's a very strong mindset towards following convention, and many people's view of game development is that it is unconventional. For many academics I think it is too easy to equate uncondtional with incorrect.
As an aside, surely a student will learn so much more from a project they are interested in and engaged by than grinding out a solution to someone else's problem?
Seems to me that CS courses are wildly out of step with the real world.
Ther're so much more to buying Sun kit than CPU cycles.
You get (IMHO) the best OS you can run on a server (*incomparably* more reliable than Linux in my experience).
You get a better build quality than with PC class gear. (not so with the low-end Ultras I know, but have you tried carrying an E450 around lately?) I've worked with Sun boxes (mail hubs, NIS servers etc.) that haven't been swtiched off in 8 or 10 years.
You get excellent support - hardware or software. It costs, but it's worth it.
You get as much SMP as you could want.
You get insane amounts of addressable RAM and faster bus speeds.
In short kids, you get *proper computers* running a *proper OS*.
I don't think that is a good question for sysadmins. Some of the most baffling problems I've worked on have finally been fixed by changing one line in a config file and HUPping.
Sticking a couple of lines in named.conf doesn't sound too impressive as "the most difficult thing I ever did" but it might have taken a day of debugging, chasing down blind alleys and trawling mailing lists to do it.
No sysadmin knows anywhere near everything about whatever little corner of the profession they specialise in. They leave knowing everything to 31337 Star Wars obsessed Linux jerkwads on slashdot.
> "The skills they learned on computers seem to > transfer to the real world."
It's true: only this morning on my way to work I had to blow off a zombie's head with a bazooka, and tomorrow I've got to fly a tie fighter to Dagobah.
I'm guessing that Chapter 1 covers the basics (ls, cd, passwd) then Chapter 2 tells you how to go out into the world and come across as an infallible Unix guru who knows absolutely everything worth knowing.
> What is it which leads mysql to be viewed as
> the default solution for the open-source
> community
It's easy. Any Linux weenie can get MySQL up and running and performing usefully in no time. None of the more involved aspects of a proper database have to be worried about.
That's why I like it. I don't want to have to worry about default tablespaces and rollback and atomic transactions and row-level locking and stored procedures for my website guestbook. MySQL is one step up from flat files, and that suits most people just fine.
Another thing of course is that newbies and over-zealous linux advocates will praise an open source product to high heaven with even the slightest encouragement. Don't know anything about databases but know MySQL powers/.? Recommend it to everyone you know and sound like an expert. There's a lot of that about, especially on Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
<blows>this</blows>
this
Very true. Hoyle had some unusual ideas, and was never slow to argue against theories he disagreed with. But isn't that half the point of science? To not just accept general opinion and actually think for yourself?
People like Hoyle, argue against other schools of thought (Big Bang vs steady state) not through arrogance, ignorance or refusal to back down, but because they have their own well founded theories with many worthwhile arguments.
People on Slashdot argue against oter schools of thought (Linux vs MS) precisely through arrogance, ignorance and a refusal to back down, so I can see why this post got labelled a troll.
> The linux kernel supports large amounts of pc, > alpha, and sun devices with a huge amounts of > drivers. This one of the reasons why linux is > hot and openserver never really took off
> outside the bussiness world
That's crap. In the dozen or so places I've worked over the last 2 or 3 years I've *never* seen a production linux system running on anything other than x86.
Yeah, and can you run Oracle on OpenBSD?
> If it runs Apache, it is Unix.
Windows runs Apache.
> Zeppelin NT?
> Now we get the Blue Blimps of Death...
All the problems will be ironed out in Zeppelin 2000.
> I can't imagine how some one could post a web page and not expect visitors.
You never worked for a dotcom startup then?
> P. S. I'm not trolling, I'm a manager.
So you had to get one of your tech guys to help you post this, right?
And hey, abusing the stapler is all the fun we have left since they stopped us downloading pr0n.
I used Netscape 4.x on Solaris (SPARC and x86) for ages, with no stability problems at all, even using Java. I move to Linux, and *bang* the thing is down every five minutes.
> I just wish it had an option to double-buffer on X Window
It does, if you compile it yourself.
./configure --disable-double-buffer
That's stupid. The amount of machines Code Blue could attack would be vastly diminished because so many people patched against Code Red.
Worms like this propogate because people aren't prepared for them. Why alert everyone to the existence very security hole you plan to exploit?
I think part of the reason for the attitude you encountered might be that coding games requires (I imagine - I've never done it!) heavily optimised, very specialised code.
I'm thinking of "hitting the hardware" and writing hacks to get the absolute maximum performance out of the system.
I could well be wrong in assuming that's how games are written - I suspect the days of hitting the hardware may be gone, but I think that's the way a lot of people view game development.
That kind of coding goes very much against the grain with academics who learned how to code from K&R and Knuth, teach how to code out of K&R and Knuth, and place great importance on formal methods etc. In scientific disciplines there's a very strong mindset towards following convention, and many people's view of game development is that it is unconventional. For many academics I think it is too easy to equate uncondtional with incorrect.
As an aside, surely a student will learn so much more from a project they are interested in and engaged by than grinding out a solution to someone else's problem?
Seems to me that CS courses are wildly out of step with the real world.
Ther're so much more to buying Sun kit than CPU cycles.
You get (IMHO) the best OS you can run on a server (*incomparably* more reliable than Linux in my experience).
You get a better build quality than with PC class gear. (not so with the low-end Ultras I know, but have you tried carrying an E450 around lately?) I've worked with Sun boxes (mail hubs, NIS servers etc.) that haven't been swtiched off in 8 or 10 years.
You get excellent support - hardware or software. It costs, but it's worth it.
You get as much SMP as you could want.
You get insane amounts of addressable RAM and faster bus speeds.
In short kids, you get *proper computers* running a *proper OS*.
I don't think that is a good question for sysadmins. Some of the most baffling problems I've worked on have finally been fixed by changing one line in a config file and HUPping.
Sticking a couple of lines in named.conf doesn't sound too impressive as "the most difficult thing I ever did" but it might have taken a day of debugging, chasing down blind alleys and trawling mailing lists to do it.
> Not every sysadmin knows everything
No sysadmin knows anywhere near everything about whatever little corner of the profession they specialise in. They leave knowing everything to 31337 Star Wars obsessed Linux jerkwads on slashdot.
> "The skills they learned on computers seem to > transfer to the real world."
It's true: only this morning on my way to work I had to blow off a zombie's head with a bazooka, and tomorrow I've got to fly a tie fighter to Dagobah.
I'm guessing that Chapter 1 covers the basics (ls, cd, passwd) then Chapter 2 tells you how to go out into the world and come across as an infallible Unix guru who knows absolutely everything worth knowing.
> I mean, for 5000$ you can get machine to store your entire pr0n-collection!
Speak for yourself.
Isn't this kind of like Sir Killalot being nominated for a BAFTA?
> No more squinting at tiny Media Player windows!
I think my 56k modem might struggle to get 24fps of 20 million 24 bit pixels, and anyway, I'm not sure my 1Mb S3 ViRGE is compatible with it.
> What is it which leads mysql to be viewed as
/.? Recommend it to everyone you know and sound like an expert. There's a lot of that about, especially on Slashdot.
> the default solution for the open-source
> community
It's easy. Any Linux weenie can get MySQL up and running and performing usefully in no time. None of the more involved aspects of a proper database have to be worried about.
That's why I like it. I don't want to have to worry about default tablespaces and rollback and atomic transactions and row-level locking and stored procedures for my website guestbook. MySQL is one step up from flat files, and that suits most people just fine.
Another thing of course is that newbies and over-zealous linux advocates will praise an open source product to high heaven with even the slightest encouragement. Don't know anything about databases but know MySQL powers
what else do people use computers for?
> The question is, what OS will they use on the prop computers?
Don't know, but I guess the database will be Oracle 8i Enterprise Edition. Sorry. That was inexcusable.
I applied the patch and my kernel won't boot. It's FOLKed up my whole system.