The collected works of bri3d - Page 3

VenomousPinecone wrote: Oh it is sketchy here in the states. The Dow suffered its greatest one day loss today, in the span of an hour.

I am not afraid because I trust the sun will rise tomorrow. As long as the sun shines, I can figure out how to thrive.

This. In my few years around I've done just fine for myself regardless of the idiocy of the world at large, and I've surrounded myself with good friends who are doing just fine too. I trust that my future family and children will have what it takes to keep themselves happy too, regardless of the idiocy in the world around us.

Global threats like global warming always hang over us, but if there's anything history has shown us it's that the Earth itself is almost as resilient and adaptable as the humans and animals on it.

Nothing is price-competitive with x86 in terms of raw performance and desktop applications - Intel and AMD produce x86-based CPUs and have poured so much R+D money into their microarchitectures that to compete with them in their arena (general-purpose, commodity computing) is essentially impossible. ARM have a strong hold in the embedded and mobile market and most other CPU architectures remain in their own niches, on the high-end or in specific embedded devices (Nikon digital cameras oddly seem to be the last bastion of SuperH, for example, and Broadcom MIPS SoCs still own the consumer router market). I reached the same conclusion you did before I'd even really owned one, so I can second that - never buy an "alternative"/"vintage"/RISC desktop or server for home expecting to use it daily. There's just no point when spending the same amount on an x86 system gets twice the speed.

That conclusion didn't change my systems collection hobby though - I've just always understood that any money I put into it is not going to much use (thus why I've spent very little, all things considered).

Good luck on the job! Depending on how my current startup goes, I might find myself working some big-iron UNIX stuff come this fall.

zmttoxics wrote: There were faster clocked after market G4s (up to 1.8ghz). A 1.8ghz g4 performed almost identically to the 1.8ghz g5.

In what benchmark? I'd imagine the 1.8Ghz G4 would perform similarly to G5 in synthetic 32-bit int and possibly float (not sure how Motorola's AltiVec units stack up to IBM's SIMD stuff but I'm guessing it's similar). However, the G4 had a painfully (almost ridiculously) slow bus and thus incredibly poor memory bandwidth compared to the G5, so I'd assume in the real world the G5 still blows it away.

I don't know how correct it is to say "x86 is architecturally ugly" when there have been tens of microarchitectures implementing the x86 ISA - if you're talking ISAs, it'd probably be better to specify the x86 instruction set as ugly, and I think that's debatable too (it's certainly huge and not very pretty).
I've always disliked the ARM ISA, especially all of the edge cases surrounding switching between ARM and Thumb mode, and in terms of ISAs, MIPS without extensions (specialized COPs, VFP, etc.) is definitely the cleanest and simplest.

This excerpt was very interesting, and I'm amazed I hadn't seen it before. It really made me think - thank you for the link.

However, as I read the excerpt I began to notice something: the authors seem to have trivialized a very complex, long-standing problem. They've come up with some excellent sound bites about how "kids want to learn," and used these to back up their assertions that rewards-based software doesn't work. This is fine, as we're seeing more and more evidence that rewards-based software really doesn't work. But where's their reasoning for discovery-based learning and simulation software? They point to an "innate desire to learn," and trash "hopeless" kids who are "video addicts," but they don't really provide any reasoning that would suggest that discovery-based learning via simulations will work any better for these kids than the dirty, evil rewards-based software did.
I entirely understand that as the introduction to Mathematica, nobody is expecting a cited paper about discovery-based learning. But there's so much coherent, well-thought reasoning behind their disdain for rewards-based flash-card software that the presentation of simulation software and discovery-based learning as a magic bullet seems out of place. Sure, giving kids flashy rewards is really helping nobody. But there's a reason people tried giving them these rewards. What's going to make a kid want to discover something in Mathematica, when they could be talking to the cute girl two seats to the left, or ditching class and skateboarding? Both involve learning - it's just not the kind of learning that will be horribly conducive to a "successful" future. If I can just set a simulation in front of a kid and have them learn calculus with a little guidance, why have countless discovery-based learning programs never made it past the pilot stage? The last question from the "skeptical bystander" sums up my question perfectly, yet the authors don't actually answer it, instead focusing on the role of flashcard-based learning in educating highly-motivated students.
These authors seem to think the fundamental problem is that kids are somehow "losing their innate desire to learn" and that it needs to be rekindled by challenging them with open-ended problems. I disagree. I think children today have just as much innate desire to learn as they always have. They've just begun directing this desire outside of academics and the things that will lead them to what the academic community think of as "success" in life.
By looking at the issue as one of rekindling, the problem becomes much easier for these authors and the academic community as a whole to "solve" in their excerpts. All that we need to do is put Mathematica in front of them, and make everything meaningful to them, and suddenly it'll work! Sadly, we've tried this, and it's just not that easy.

fu wrote: sybr already gave some of his thoughts, what about the rest of our students? what is it that you like and what is it that you don't?

oT

Well, as some background, I am a student as well - I graduated high school only last year and am currently taking night classes at a local community college while I work my full-time day job as a programmer at a web startup.

My grades were consistently awful, and by any traditional metric public school was failing me entirely, but in reality school actually did very well for me - while I didn't get into any top-tier universities or succeed in any traditional sense, I'm doing quite well for myself and am pretty content with where I've ended up. On the other hand, I also attended a high school consistently ranked as one of the best schools in the US, and was with a peer group of intelligent, motivated people - I'm certainly not saying public schools everywhere succeed for everyone, just pointing out that a subset of people failing by a traditional metric can actually be quite successful.

I think that the ultimate understanding people (at least people in the US) fail to have about school is that external factors affect a student's performance by any metric nearly as much or even more more than than their actual schooling. These factors include parenting (the biggest one, in my opinion), peer group, neighbors, and some would even argue they go all the way down to diet and exercise. Yet too often in the US we see parents blaming schools for problems that are ultimately not the school's problem to solve, and schools and teachers being graded and funded mostly based on factors they have no control over. Or, we see academics coming out with writing like this, blaming the problems with education today on a stifling of exploration and the "dumbing down" of teaching. While I think these are symptoms of an underlying problem and can certainly be corrected, I don't think they're the issue - the dumbing down of teaching and indication to students that things should be easy is more a symptom of the expectation parents set for their students (and thus set in their students' minds) than a root problem.

ritchan wrote: In fact I don't really get the draw of shell servers at all, that's why I want to set one up.

x86 "shell servers" (the kind you tend to see people paying money for online) are generally in datacenters and thus are used for anything that demands a stable connection but little resource and bandwidth, generally IRC bots/clients/servers or long-polling low-traffic network services like instant messenger bots.

Non-x86 "shell servers" are usually used to provide developers without ownership of the platform access to it to develop, for example Oregon State's Cell and POWER shell systems and OpenEmbedded.org's old ARM/XScale PDA cluster (which I think has been retired as Linux-based ARM devices propagated everywhere and demand for it waned).

Sometimes "shell servers" are used with distcc et. al. as a build box, but generally online services for this purpose are billed expressly as "build clusters," like the one Sourceforge gives access to and the Ubuntu package build system.

ritchan wrote: Would you guys know enough about this to do it for yourselves? And shouldn't it be reinstall XLC, not reinstall AIX?
http://hardwarebug.org/2009/08/10/drm-the-big-blue-way/

This is an awesome blog - thanks for that link. I wonder why the author remarks that because IBM's DRM is bad, their compiler must be bad as well though - it's a foolish generalization and discards most real-world facts about software licensing. Why waste time making something cracker-proof for a compiler that's so expensive that only straight-laced corporate users are going to purchase it anyway? And how does this naive licensing approach reflect negatively on the merit of compiler developers?

sybrfreq wrote: That post read something like: "Wow! that house was easy to break into, Ionly had to cut two deadbolts. If these people don't bother putting a better lock on their door then I get to break in and do as I wish to their sleeping bodies."

It's all fun and games until you get an assfull of buckshot. I don't even want to think about how big the IBM legal department is... pirating software is one thing, posting a how-to on the internet is another.

I doubt he'll see any legal action. His blog post was pretentious and stupid, but the trial v. full version restrictions at that level are really just to allow engineers to evaluate and then remind them to ask for a purchase order - the piracy/loss risk is pretty low. Corporations like circumventing license restrictions when they can't tell they're doing something wrong (sharing logins to online databases, etc.) but as soon as they're clearly breaking things (i.e. cracking) someone in the process tends to straighten up (be it engineers or management). And it's been proven time and time again that IBM couldn't care less about hobbyists regardless of what they're doing.

I just think it's dumb to criticize compiler developers for writing simplistic/poor DRM when it's a low-priority, symbolic piece of the software, while simultaneously bragging about breaking it when it was dead-obvious how to do so. It's a silly stance I wouldn't have expected considering the intelligent posts elsewhere on that blog.

ritchan wrote: No, you just exemplified what he was talking about here:

I wonder why the author remarks that because IBM's DRM is bad, their compiler must be bad as well though - it's a foolish generalization and discards most real-world facts about software licensing.

Naah, it's ambiguous pronoun reference - the "it" he was referring to was the blog, not the compiler.

Just wanted to point out that anyone else doing this needs to cut at least one battery contact or you'll just drain the new battery across the old one - it's obvious you did this and you mention it in one photo caption - just not in the write-up

Excellent photos - I'm about to have to do a similar mod to my Indy once (if?) I get it back out of storage again. Mine probably won't look as professional

Just FYI, ZFS RAID does not perform quite as well as Linux software RAID or a RAID controller, despite its oft-hyped variable stripe width. While ZFS shines in many areas (replication, snapshotting, quotas, and so on), its RAID is not one of its strong points. The recovery and hot-spare support in RAID-Z is also relatively new and unproven, and for quite a while was just flat-out broken. I wouldn't trust RAID-Z with mission-critical data, especially as it's prone to loss if the ZFS metadata gets damaged.
Of course, there's nothing that keeps you from running ZFS on a controller-backed volume besides cost.