I've got to buy a graphing calculator for a teaching competency exam I'll be taking in about two months. Despite doing 2 years of engineering, I've never used one of these things (they weren't useful for my courses in the 80s), and I'll have to become proficient in that time, as well. Does Slashdot have any recommendations for an inexpensive, easy-to-learn graphing calc?
Interview with Barry Schwartz on Colbert Report, where he "explains why people are paralyzed with indecision when they're offered too many choices."
In a way, an eye opener. I started scratching my back trying to recall when/why that happened to me. Because I had immediately the feeling that it had been happening to me more than often. And then I have recalled.
Buying the computers and PC parts.
Why I bought an Apple MacBook? Because I spent too much time trying to configure a perfect notebook for myself from HP and Lenovo. Way too many choices. Impossible to pick one. Went to the online Apple store: two product lines (plain v. pro) further differentiated by a screen size. Input screen size, input amount of money one's ready to spend - and you get the deal.
Building a desktop was similar experience. Went with cheapest (of recently released) dual-core AMD because figuring out best deal on more expensive Intel CPUs started slowly driving me nuts.
Awesome graphics: shit story.
The National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC) in Thailand announces the Thailand ICT Contest Festival 2010, and the announcement page uses tons of blink tags. OK. Not Really. It uses animated GIFs to do basically the same thing. I thought that shit was dead.
We just got around to watching Firefly for the first time, and Goy can't stop talking about it or whining that it got cancelled. She's not really a sci-fi kind of gal, normally. Quite strange.
I have used chroots several times to install new systems alongside running systems before, finishing by rebooting into the new partition. For the first time, however, I find myself wanting to reintall over a running system, and changing arch'es, too. This sounds impossible to my ears, so I'm calling on some help from my friends here. Any ideas on how to make this work?
Let's test your understanding using a quiz from the book. Which of the following is true?
The answers? 2 and 3. 1 and 4 are false because animals don't think.
This isn't some dinky seminary, folks: it's the state open university. Wow. Just
This is taken from a posting I did in a political forum (certain not to be popular here) on an iphone article. The poster's alias I am quoting and the web site are available upon email request.
Given that Windows is now the only surviving personal computer OS not based on Unix, the point of Microsoft's deflection from Gates' Xenix-centered vision would be interesting to know.
That's a fascinating comment.
in 1979, well prior to MS's link-up with IBM in which they parlayed Tim Paterson's QDOS to IBM as MS-DOS (without telling Paterson what they were up to), Microsoft was plugging a version of Unix called Xenix.
Xenix wasn't a flavor of Unix so much as a licensed port. It was Unix.
Bill Gates himself called MS-DOS 2.0 "the bridge to Xenix," clearly signaling a belief that the future of personal computing rested on this flavor of Unix [cf. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/01/31/ms_sells_stake_in_sco/]. Somehow that vision jumped the rails.
PC-DOS 2.0 was indeed a bridge to Unix. The new DOS calls added were all flavored towards Unix equivalents. I wrote alternative C libraries for two different C compilers in that period (Computer Innovations and Lattice) and already had extensive Unix experience by that point. It's true. The new code was buggy and poorly done in some cases (the globbing code that was more Unix-style than CP/M style was hopelessly bugged in 2.0).
Perhaps IBM drove that... hard to say, and a bit ironic in view of that company's reliance on Linux today. But it could be that the era Ballmer refers to was the turbulent circa-OS|2 era, in which Windows took its current vector.
IBM was driving OS/2 towards a bridge between their mainframes and PCs. I forget all of the details (I was never employed to work on IBM mainframes), but the big deal with OS/2 was supposed to be compatibility between the PC world and IBM mainframe world.
During this time frame, Unix was driving the final coffin nails behind proprietary, lock in systems. See Tracy Kidder's book Soul of a new Machine for the final dying gasp in that era. That was the final OS written by the manufacturer for a specific new machine. DEC VMS was still king in the minicomputer world, but its realm was disintegrating.
By the mid 1980s Unix was making inroads into previously DEC VMS-only territory. I watched that happen in my first job out of college being hired into a VMS shop. By the end of my time there, we were Unix and VMS was a relic of the past.
Microsoft hired the top VMS guys out of DEC to do Microsoft Windows NT in this same time frame. This should have been a clear indication to DEC stockholders to bail on the company, but it took more than a decade for the company to die.
I don't agree with all the things that VMS did, but it (DCL) allowed sufficient customization and had so many cool features that it was possible to reduce the pain level of using that system to a point where you could get a bit of enjoyment out of using the system. EDIT/TPU (which was a DEC reimplementation of Emacs, complete with provided source code for most of the editing features) was part of that. DEC SHELL, which was a native CLI that emulated the Unix Bourne shell was so buggy that I was banned from using it after I caused multiple cluster crashes in one day. Sigh.
I'm a Linux developer, have been before the kernel was a gleam in Linus' eye. I've been a Unix fan since 1981. Unix's strengths have always been a simple system call interface and lack of really complicated things like VMS RMS (Record Management System) which never made much sense and hardcoded extensions having special meaning. If a file has the execute bit turned on, it can be run. If it doesn't it can't. Contrast that to a hypothetical email attachment named sarahpalinnude.jpg.exe in the current Microsoft world.
I'm not particularly a Microsoft hater and I never got involved in Open Source because I hated Microsoft DOS or Microsoft Windows, I never cared for those systems in the first place (exception below). I got involved because I wanted to have a system that was all in source code that could never be abandoned and taken away from me by the company I bought it from.
I got a significant amount of enthusiasm by working on my roommate-of-the-time's PC on PC-DOS 2.0. I thought it was a great idea, no matter how buggy.
Mac OS X is Unix inside and Unix is not an acronym. Please don't call us "geeks". I've run multiuser, multitasking systems at home since 1985 starting with System V boxes. Before my Macbook Pro, the x86 systems I have owned ran Linux.
I care that:
I'm not going to upgrade to Snow Leopard for Microsoft Windows support. The Citrix client runs the only app I need to run for work.
I keep a fair distance away from Microsoft Windows. On the unfortunate occasions when I've tried to use it, I've always felt like either gouging my eyes out because of the eye-searing color contrast, or driving a screwdriver through my forehead because of the frustrating user interface, or both.
Sun had viable desktop graphics systems before there was ever a Microsoft Windows. They did great work in GUIs in the early to mid 80s. Unfortunately they have always been economically challenged when it came to price points and I suppose that's the main reason why they sold themselves to Oracle.
When Jobs was in exile he did the NeXT, a direct competitor to Sun on the desktop and with a similar architecture (Unix inside). NeXTStep, the NeXT user interface was later reborn as OS X.
There is a long history of GUIs on top of Unix (and its descendents) as an OS.
What kind of system will I buy my sons when they're old enough?
"Your homework assignment for tonight son, is how many places can you find Daddy's name in Changelogs."
No brainer, at least for me. Unix, live free or die!
Unix was created by Ken & Dennis after coming off of the Multics project. Unix is a "weak pun" on Multics. Ken Thompson needed something to run a space war game on a shiny new PDP 7. Dennis Ritchie wrote a compiler for him. Deciding they needed to prove to their managers that they were really working, they sold the project to management as a document writing platform. Dennis Ritchie wrote the first file system (the setuid bit patent bears his name). Joe Ossanna wrote troff. The memory pressure that troff brought to bear on the system lead them to divide i & d space thus bringing the total process memory to a whopping 128k.
Writing the kernel mostly in a high level language proved to be a stroke of genius that would change the computing world forever, though it would take another decade and a half for the rest of the world to figure this out.
Dennis Ritchie's compiler was never ported away from the PDP. Steve Johnson wrote the "portable C compiler" which would ultimately inspire gcc.
Due to AT&T's status as a telephone monopoly, they were not allowed to commercialize the system. That wouldn't come until the 1980s and they did that as badly as they anything non-technical - "AT&T couldn't market eternal life".
Because they couldn't market the system, it was distributed as source code to Universities and eventually folks at Berkeley picked it up and hacked on it to produce BSD. Source licenses were typical through the 1980s. My first official on-the-job experience with Unix in 1987 was on a Pyramid that had a hybrid interface divided into universes (with source code). You could either select a BSD-ish or a System V-ish style system interface. Sadly, Pyramid did not revolutionize the world, but they were awesome machines for their time.
The earliest Unix box I got my hands on personally was a Stride 440 running a beta System V/R2 in 1985. Sadly, their Unix port never supported the bit mapped graphics that their hardware supported. The AT&T 3B1 aka Unix PC, which was the first commercial Unix desktop, predated Microsoft Windows and did support bitmapped graphics and a mouse, but was marketed very badly. It didn't become particularly reasonable to buy until after it was EOLed.
Oh Unix, how I love thee (and how good you look on my Macbook Pro)
http://www.newmediacampaigns.com/page/map-and-reduce-implemented-in-php
http://commonphp.blogspot.com/ (from a Hacker News discussion about the first link above: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782370)
"Money is the root of all money." -- the moving finger
