Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Screen, Vim in a VM (Score 1) 1055

by wilsoniya (#28106433) Attached to: What Free IDE Do You Use?

At the moment I'm developing a Python based web app. I started using PyDev/Eclipse but found the environment more hindrance than aid.

I then got the idea to package up my development environment into a Virtualbox VM. I modeled the VM as closely as possible to the production environment. I run a screen session with several Vim instances (using windows and tabs). I then ssh to the VM. I find this convenient for a number of reasons:

  • my development env is as close as possible to the production env
  • I don't need any unnecessary daemons running on my physical OS (e.g. Apache, MySQL, etc)
  • the VM can be versioned (via snapshots)
  • I can suspend the VM and restore it to the exact state it was previously in (same screen/vim sessions, same daemon states)
  • the VM is only has 256MB RAM allocated to it; I can start VirtualBox and restore my VM in less time than it takes to open Eclipse

In my experience, having your development environment behave exactly the same *every* time you use it is not to be overlooked.

Comment More than one Guest OS? (Score 1) 394

by wilsoniya (#27961359) Attached to: Phoenix BIOSOS?
I didn't really RTFA that well. Is it possible to run more than one 'Guest' OS simultaneously? I would love to be able to run many different OSs on top of a very minimalistic hypervisor and hop between them with a hotkey.
Networking

Time To Cut the Ethernet Cable? 496

Posted by kdawson from the restructuring-the-edge dept.
coondoggie writes in with a Network World piece that begins "A range of companies with wireless LANs are discovering that 50% to 90% or more of Ethernet ports now go unused, because Wi-Fi has become so prevalent. They look at racks of unused switches, ports, Ethernet wall jacks, the cabling that connects them all, the yearly maintenance charges for unused switches, electrical charges, and cooling costs. So why not formally drop what many end users have already discarded — the Ethernet cable? 'There's definitely a right-sizing going on,' says Michael King, research director, mobile and wireless, for Gartner. 'By 2011, 70% of all net new ports will be wireless. People are saying, "we don't need to be spending so much on a wired infrastructure if no one is using it."' ... There is debate over whether WLANs, including the high-throughput 802.11n networks, will be able to deliver enough bandwidth." Cisco, which makes both wireless and wired gear, has a spokesman quoted calling this idea of right-sizing a "shortsighted message from a wireless-only provider. It's penny-wise and pound-foolish."

Comment Re:True story (Score 1) 731

by wilsoniya (#27769165) Attached to: Old-School Coding Techniques You May Not Miss
Thats... terrible. I would like to hear these people's description of how a hashtable is 'supposed' to work. Even more puzzling to me is how someone could decide to use a data structure without understanding its behavior (and without at least checking the Java APIs or simply Googling).
Technology

World's First X-Ray Laser Goes Live 238

Posted by timothy from the bring-x-rays-back-to-shoe-stores dept.
smolloy writes "The world's first X-ray laser (LCLS) has seen first light. A Free Electron Laser (FEL) is based on the light that is emitted by accelerated electrons when they are forced to move in a curved path. The beam then interacts with this emitted light in order to excite coherent emission (much like in a regular laser); thus producing a very short, extremely bright, bunch of coherent X-ray photons. The engineering expertise that went into this machine is phenomenal — 'This is the most difficult light source that has ever been turned on,' said LCLS Construction Project Director John Galayda. 'It's on the boundary between the impossible and possible, and within two hours of start-up these guys had it right on.' — and the benefits to the applied sciences from research using this light can be expected to be enormous: 'For some disciplines, this tool will be as important to the future as the microscope has been to the past,' said SLAC Director Persis Drell."
Windows

Submission + - Microsoft: 96% Of Netbooks Run Windows (informationweek.com)

Submitted by wilsoniya
wilsoniya writes: Given all the buzz around /. about Linux on the increasingly important netbook platform, it seemed as though the popular open source operating system was holding its own in this particular market. A quote from Microsoft would seem to point to the contrary:

...Windows' share of the U.S. netbook market has ballooned from less than 10% in the first half of 2008 to 96% as of February.

Has Linux really been relegated to share in the remaining 4% US of the netbook market?

Slashdot Top Deals

Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

Close