The collected works of hamei - Page 54

Kumba wrote: Don't make GNU into the enemy you want it to be. It's not. It's a big world we live in with a lot of people from all walks of life.

This would be a lot easier to do if they respected other people's choices too. In the beginning, the open source people were all gung-ho for standards, cross-platform, portable, you choose what you want and I'll choose what I want and we'll all sing around the campfire together.

But it's changed to "Doesn't work ? Use gcc." "You use Irix ? That's deprecated. We removed all that old cruft last version." "You actually want to compile it yourself ?! Wow, that's deprecated. Just apt-yum-git download it from a suppository." In many many cases they have become as bad as the Mickeysoft acolytes they used to despise.

This is a google-sized betrayal

vishnu wrote: How about Siemens NX.

Cool ! Siemens buying those companies was probably the best thing that ever happened to them. Some neat stuff :

http://www.plmworld.org/index.php?mo=cm&op=ld&fid=239

1984, 3072x2304 display ...

This is a trip down memory lane also ...

http://www.plmworld.org/index.php?mo=cm&op=ld&fid=240

Also, it's not CAD but Maya runs great on Linux...

No drawings No dimensions Peculiar to use, too, if you are used to making a box 10 x 10 x 10 ... but it is cool that it runs on Linux. Forgot about that. And there is Ayam, too, which is free and works okay.

Doesn't make up for no word processor tho

vishnu wrote: Linux has something better ...

And the Space Shuttle is an excellent vehicle for a trip to the grocery store

Yo, been using this at least a year now, haven't had any disasters. If a couple more people would kick the tires and give 'er a vote it could move into /current ...

jwp wrote: These are the normal everyday GUI applications that most people would use.

Exactly right. Which could be why the iPad is so popular. Except an iPad is well-designed, small, portable, good screen, consistent interface, has the "Geek squad" (bunch of teenager twits but they get paid to help , not tell you it's open source fix it yourself) and oh yeah : Apple has quality control. If you pay $2 for a program, there's a good chance it will work.

Could this be why the Linux desktop ecosystem has collapsed ?

guardian452 wrote: A lot of users in our hotel management parent company have already transitioned to ipads, since all they really need a computer for is email and office. The IT guys love it, could you imagine them having to support linux desktops???

We should write a note to Ginny :

Dear Madam,

It has come to our attention that 2015 will be the Year of the Dinosaur. The fickle public has now decided that yes indeedy, a glitzy terminal which stores all your data three continents away in the hands of the Russian mafia is by far the best 'solution' to all our computing problems. Accordingly, we would like to offer you this opportunity to drag some of your much-despised dinosaurs out from storage, paint them robin's egg blue with a selection of warm fuzzy clouds, a rainbow or two and perhaps a unicorn : and we will present them to the unwashed masses as the newest thing in high-tech computing*.

Sincerely yours, Mr Ziff and Mr Davis

*This special offer good for thirty days, with billing at double our normal shyster rates. Sorry but the economy is bad and we have big mortgage payments.

vishnu wrote: Okay you smarites, how about Arbortext_Advanced_Print_Publisher Arbor then...

Us smarites usually use OpenOrifice

Seriously, looks okay, kind of like another version of Framemaker ? But I don't see where it runs on Linux but it does cost a king's ransom ...

Looking around tho I did see mention of HP ME10 running on Linux at one time. For 2D that would be really really good. That's a nice program. Rare as a kind-hearted Chinese girl tho, I guess. I can't even find the Irix version and I know that exists, there were links on a Hotmix cd.

vishnu wrote: Last I looked, and it wasn't too long ago, there's nothing BIND can do to stop a classic man-in-the-middle DNS hijack. And what is the GFW if not a classic man-in-the-middle? Doesn't every packet headed out of or into the country go through the GFW? They can bork with them any way they like...

Ja, I'm pretty sure now that this is all coming from Above. When I saw FacEbOOk.com and w ww.TwItTer.com with an ip in Korea, I thought someone else was managing to mess us up. But no, most likely just good ol' China Telecom.

Of course, one nasty side-effect of poisoned dns is that it spreads everywhere, so you really have no idea where it's coming from. It's kind of a pita.

Have an idea to get around them but not telling what it is

ClassicHasClass wrote: Or, maybe this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/15 ... ing_world/

They already scan all the sms ... had a friend get his shut off for accidentally using a forbidden word. Doubtless the NSA does the same thing, except instead of shutting you off they disappear you to gitmo

What's kind of interesting and kind of aggravating is that all these bogus ip's keep showing up for places I should never go. For instance, tweeter is blocked off seven ways from Sunday. The proxy blocks it, the router grounds it to 127.0.0.1, no tweeter requests should be going anywhere. But if I look in the dns cache


I don't wanna go theah. Eleanoah doesn't wanna go theah. I sure as hell didn't put that there. Yet it keeps appearing in the dns. Now I kill the little bastard ...

then in another day or two there will be

bogus ip wrote: umgawabwana.twitter.com IP 59.24.3.173

Is there really an ac.duckduckgo.com located at 46.51.216.186 ? This claims to be Amazon Cloud registered through Ireland ?

whois wrote: % Information related to '46.51.216.0 - 46.51.223.255'

% Abuse contact for '46.51.216.0 - 46.51.223.255' is '[email protected] '

inetnum: 46.51.216.0 - 46.51.223.255
netname: AMAZON-EU-CF
descr: Amazon AWS Services - Cloudfront
country: IE
admin-c: ADSI2-RIPE
tech-c: ADSI2-RIPE
status: ASSIGNED PA
mnt-by: MNT-ADSI
source: RIPE # Filtered

role: Amazon Data Services Ireland Technical Role Account
address: Amazon Data Services Ireland
address: Digital Depot
address: Thomas Street
address: Dublin 8
address: Ireland
mnt-by: MNT-ADSI
admin-c: MA11338-RIPE
tech-c: AA25560-RIPE
nic-hdl: ADSI2-RIPE
source: RIPE # Filtered

This is a puzzle and a half, to separate the real ip's from the fifth column liars ... and I'm not sure how much of this is websites lying about who and where they really are, either. Or hidden schmutz from the less scrupulous sites.

I give it five years before the web implodes under the weight of all this advertising crap.

vishnu wrote: Makes you wonder how many so-called national security services have backdoors provided graciously and at no extra charge by Cisco, all in the interest of Doing the Right Thing and Not Being Evil...

Was just talking to someone (in the US) about a possible method around this situation, he said, "Oh, but the NSA is sneakier. They don't outright block you, they inject fake 404 pages." And then he went on to describe how he came to that conclusion ...

2 + 2 = 5 ! really, it does, it does !

duck wrote: Hmm, to me this smells like someone is exploiting a bug in IOS' domain lookup. Remember those

Code: Select all

www.microsoft.com.is.a.turd.com

?

Edit: changed it so your browser's wont preemptively load that site if it actually exists.

It redirects to turd.com, "buy this domain !"

At this point I'm thinking it's probably China Telecom, especially since the domains are tweeter and facebook. Not sure what is up with duckduck, whether that is real or a fraud. Also, there is no phony tweeter or facebleep at the Korean ip to steal your passwords, so what would be the point, except to keep you from going to the real thing ?

The "how" of it is still a mystery tho. I've searched around for the exact means of poisoning a dns cache but there is almost nothing. Plenty of "Oooh ! Oooh ! The bad people can hack into your computer ! Be afraid ! Be very afraid !" but no description of the mechanics of it. Without knowing exactly how it's done, pretty hard to check what is happening. What's even stranger is, those are places we don't go.

China Telecom is easy - they just intercept all the dns and send back bad ip's for places they don't like. How they would add domains I didn't ask for is the mystery ... although with web browsers these days, who knows what you are asking for ?

DNS is a pretty easy subject when it's done according to the rules. When you know you are being poisoned it gets tricker

SAQ wrote: Why'd they start replacing /bin/sh with BASH anyway?

Heathen ! get thee hence, thou Unbeliever !

jpstewart wrote: Unfortunately

Nah, that's what q/c is all about - finding problems. Doesn't do any good to have some eager-beaver dork chanting "this is kewl d00d ! ship it !"

Please keep it up, and thank you. Q/C is important. Once upon a time nekoware was the best.

I had no trouble installing it, however. So I'm not sure your first objection is a real problem. If autogen is just a script inside the autoconf package, it should not be a problem if it's identical ? If autoconf overwrites it, fine. If not, also fine, because it's already there ?

VenomousPinecone wrote: Whaddya' mean? that's not what the floppy drive is for? All these years of my life spent in confusion.

Madame Chiang ! Madame Chiang ! Is it really true ?

Geoman wrote: Modern webbrowsing is the culprit that many otherwise good computers go to the dumpster.

What I am puzzled by is the recent proliferation of totally useless websites. I don't mean on a taste basis .... for example, search < elco> and you'll be swamped in junk such as :

http://boatorchik.net/elco-motor-boats/

There is nothing there. It's some irrelevant common photos and smashed-together gibberish text. Nothing anyone would want to click on, no advertising.

What do people get out of sites like this ? There must be a reason or there wouldn't be 50,000 of them swamping every search. And they aren't free to own, either.

Axatax wrote: it's MIPSpro..

vishnu wrote: ... am I owed a backhand from yet another rider of the MIPSPro only high horse...

Whack ! Whack ! Back to the kitchens with you, gcc knave ! And don't burn the toast again !

robespierre wrote: They're made by and for machines, to SEO certain search terms with links to and from other useless sites.

Could we make seo a capital offense ? Zero tolerance ?

Seriously, if they keep this crap up the web will choke itself in its own entrails.

sgifanatic wrote: On the one hand, I am a little miffed my conservative $10 bid got me nowhere with this. On the other hand, I'm happy to see so much SGI collector enthusiasm. On the third hand, $33 for a darn mug that you can make for < $10???

It's an ex-stockholder who just got an AK-47. He's going to take it out back, set it up on a fence post and blow it to smithereens. Needs a genuine article for the full satisfaction.

sgifanatic wrote: A few things to consider. Yes, what you say is correct, but will it practically matter? The goal here is to approach human capability - that is a real thing that exists - so we have an existence proof of a physical thing delivering the kind of classification resolution we need. Might we scratch our heads when we encounter a page that says, "This page is spam". We might, but do we care? I don't think so. In almost all practical situations if we can approximate human capability in this area, we've come pretty close to making this a non issue.

Umm, no offense but you're being silly.

a) spam is not the issue, spam is crap in your mailbox

b) like spam, the issue would be trivial to solve. The underlying problem is that the people who now control the web do not want to solve it. The people who now control the web (google et al) are the problem. This crap is all a by-product of their commercializing bullshit.

c) even worse, the internet authorities (internic ?) also have their heads up their asses. "You have to promise that the name you registered this site under is real." Yeah, right. That works.

I hated this when I first encountered it but 2014 is not 2000. Probably it's not the only way to clean up this mess but it is one way : In China, you have to have a license for a website. The license is free but you have to produce documents to verify who you are. Then you get an ICP number which must be on the front page of the site. People can easily verify you. No phony companies hiding behind "privacy" curtains*. If there's no ICP number or a phony ICP number on the site then the hosting place gets shut down. No ifs ands or buts. Drastic, but it works. And not perfect, but better than nothing. People can trust that a .cn website belongs to a real physical entity whom they can find. Maybe it's a shitty company but at least it's not an invisible thief.

The uncontrolled web is well on its way to becoming nothing more than cable television for the "consumer" but a telescreen for the powers-what-be. This is not a problem which artificial intelligence can solve.


* The whole "privacy" thing with website registrations is total bullshit. So is the entire domain registration process. This stuff was cute in the beginning but at this point, the internet is a public resource and needs to be regulated. Not pseudo-regulated by google, truly regulated for the good of the public.

sgifanatic wrote: However, a plugin that leverages a text classifier + learns add'l features (e.g. even loosely verified ID tying multiple properties to the same registrant - fake or real) could be used to filter out crap web pages from Google results, as an example.

Make the people who are being roughed up pay more to avoid broken kneecaps ? This is called a protection racket.

It doesn't solve the problem.

Axatax wrote: Sent an updated version of MPlayer and some libraries to /incoming.

I'm sitting in front of /incoming like the RCA Victor dog ... thank you very much, ax. Can hardly wait to get this on the disk.

Out of curiosity, there was some friction within the mplayer group about multi-processor support. There was a fork to develop multi-core, then I read that MPlayer had relented and added better multicore support themselves.

Is that factual ? If so, this one should be even better for 2p SGI's than the prior version.

sgibill wrote: is there any interest in having a 4dwm Windows 10 theme developed?

no

bigD wrote: If any of my SGI's booted to something resembling Windows, I'd kick my cat.

If you ever get the hots for a VW 320, that cat better scat

jan-jaap wrote: If you look carefully you can see one of the few mistakes I made during construction: the holes in the wall for the speaker cables are too high...

Set the speakers on some of those fashionable conic supports. That'll give you a few inches and you can say you intended it that way

guardian452 wrote: I'd rather talk about parent issues than how elon musk is going to kill us all with self-driving cars.

Not a direct cause, but one of the effects of the car-society is an increase in narcissism ... It's difficult to imagine yourself as a super-privileged aristocrat when you are stuck sitting in a bus station with 11,000 smelly peasants

me4twb wrote: It comes as a bunch of flat sheets of aluminium and some angle bar and it all screws together. Although honestly, after having done that I would rather make a case myself, it could be more sturdy if they used thicker alu for the frame and bolted it together instead of just screwing into tapped standoff things. It has a bit of wobble no matter how tight you do the screws.

If you replace the aluminum angle with steel it will be 3 times more rigid. Also you can weld the steel channel together, stiffer than bolted. And ditch those ugly screws, replace with buttonhead Allen screws with no washers, will look much nicer. If the side plates are thick enough you can use countersunk allens, that looks decent also.

Of course, at this point you may as well design your own case ...

Ahh, a keyboard again. The new definition of hell is, to have something to type but stuck on an iBad or a "smart"phone.

Oh wait, I must be mistaken ! The Great Innovator Jobs proclaimed that we will all be conducting our affairs on these "high-tech" devices !

Heaven help us.

Oskar45 wrote: ... vitriolic posts?

Mmm. Well, if you are one of those people who get insulted when a sanitation engineer is called a janitor or a marketing specialist a whore, then I guess you could consider it vitriolic. In my day we called a spade, "spade."

Back to Artificial Intelligence, sgifanatic, you can't be serious ? Are you reliving happy childhood memories of Mary Martin or something ? Let's take a quick look at a few examples of the "intelligence" of our current world :

Private sector one : Nokia is a well-known name in phones, yes ? Owned the market, in fact. Hundreds of thousands of units produced, dominated the market for decades. Nokia N900 : battery control is done in software. If the battery runs down, you can't charge the phone. Worthless, just like the fucking idiots who designed it.

Private sector two : Oracle. 250 million dollars for a website that didn't work. "Not our fault ! They had unrealistic expectations !" Yeah, well, you took the job and you took the money, assbreaths. Fail, bigtime.

Public-private cooperation : Oakland - San Francisco bridge. Ooh, this is a good one. Every step of the way this has been a multi-billion dollar fiasco. From the very beginning (thousands of cracks in the welded superstructure - oh, we'll just pay Carnegie-Mellon to say that cracks are okay ! Anyone here ever take mechanical engineering 101 ? Yeah, cracks no problem) to the fasteners that retain the structure sideways in an earthquake that snapped when tightened to now the fasteners that hold the tower onto the base that have been sitting in water rusting for five years or so and cannot be replaced .. oh yeah, this is a certain-sure demonstration of the power of the human brain. Bridges are nineteenth-century "technology" but our highly-educated managers couldn't figure it out. Hmmm.

Public sector : let's go right to the top. Anyone here take a first-semester chemistry course ? The calculation of what burning fossil fuels is doing to the atmosphere could be done on an Indigo. Heck, they could be done on an HP-35. For that matter, you could get a quick approximation with a pencil and a piece of paper. What are we doing about it ? Killing wind energy and promoting fracking, that's what we're doing about it ! Aren't we smart ? That way when the atmosphere cannot sustain the seven billion humans we have, we'll also have screwed up the ground water ! Everything will be poisoned, isn't that cool ?

These are only a very few examples of the imbecility that is rife in this human-dominated world. There are thousands more. Hundreds of thousands. Most humans could not pour piss out of a boot with instructions written on the heel - and the "techies" of computerdom are the worst of the lot.

You're going to stand there and seriously claim that "artificial intelligence" is possible for a species as stupid as this ?

sgifanatic wrote: Well, some very great people have held a point of view similar to yours.

Your examples of very great people are an eighteenth-century German writer that no one ever heard of, a wacked-out preacher that no one ever heard of, The Quarterly Review ??, and a patent office commissioner ? The same patent office that gave The Great Innovator a patent for a black rectangle with rounded corners ? I'm overwhelmed with shame that I can't see the brightly glowing light at the end of your tunnel. I guess my eyes don't respond to pixie dust anymore.

In light of Tweeter and Faceblob, the quote of Thoreau seems remarkably prescient.

The problem is not, as some people like to claim, that we are "afraid of the future" or "afraid of technology." The fact is that some of us have seen where "technology" and "the future" have tended to go. We aren't afraid of it. We are afraid that it will truly be the stinking shit that it has shown every sign of becoming.

In fact, I'm not even afraid of that. I'm very certain of it. With the exception of dentistry, I can't think of a single thing that is as good today as it was in 1975. There must be something but ...

sgifanatic wrote: I don't think this discussion is going anywhere, and frankly, after the comment above, I doubt it will go anywhere. Adieu.

we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender ...

Once upon a time the silver and black was a bunch of misfits, graduates of the university of mars. If we were six points behind at the two-minute warning, we would win. If we were ten points behind we would probably win. If we were fourteen points behind, there was a good chance we'd get into overtime. If we were twenty-one points behind it didn't matter, every single Raider would still play his heart out and his ass off until the final whistle.

Not once did any Raider ever go crying back to mommy that the mean joe green spit on the football and he didn't want to touch it.

R-ten-K wrote: self awareness, that post has none...

Could you diagram that sentence, please ? I didn't do very well in my ESL courses

Geoman wrote: So now I've got Gigabit Ethernet up and running at last!

I see you've got it in D ... does that kick you into fastfan ?

vishnu wrote:

Hakimoto wrote: ...MacBook Pro, early 2011, 13" unibody. I finally got her to move away from that! ;-P

You got her off crAp ple? How? To what?

A Prune. We're all getting older

Oskar45 wrote:

hamei wrote: The new definition of hell is, to have something to type but stuck on an iBad or a "smart"phone.

You're not obliged to peruse these - surely, even in China, there's lot of alternative junk to choose from

Until you've actually struggled with the stuff yourself, how can you know the truth ? Marketing sure won't tell you. They know less than a plumber.

In fact, I had a Touch - the iPhone without a phone ? and it seemed like it would be almost good. A larger screen would have made it perfect. So the iBad came out and there we were, perfect.

Except I forgot about software iBad software licks the percolating scrota of deceased bovine creatures which have been rotting in the hot sun for extended periods of time.

So a week ago the Assist bought her Mum a new tablet because they are very nice for portability. And she chose (without any assistance from me) a Toshiba that runs Windows . She chose this so that Mum can run real software, not that worthless "app" crap that smells up the Universe today.

So far so good. The Mum is happy. I wish it were Windows 2000 but still, it's way better than the iBad. In fact, I'm feeling a touch of tablet envy ...

VenomousPinecone wrote: While I see your point on the various failures of the [public and ... ed ] private sector, those aren't really damning considering we are talking about cellphones and websites. Hardly the stuff nightmares are made of.

Yup. If it were not for the current Great Extinction and global warming, I'd be just another tinpot wackoff in a long line of tinpot wackoffs. But unfortunately global warming is not a dolgurn Liberal myth ...

VenomousPinecone wrote: Objectively, marijuana is better now than it was in 75.

I almost gave this to you ... but then I had a flashback In 1975 you could walk up Telegraph and for the princely sum of $2 per hit pick up acid, mescaline, psilocybin, THC, MDMA, and/or 714's. Quaaludes vs modern smoke, hmm. You lose

THC in a cap is pretty nice, btw. You should try it

VenomousPinecone wrote: I think it means we should just be and watch what becomes of us as humans, because we cannot predict the future even with all the pessimism in the world.

Absolutely. Now if we could just do that without destroying the Earth so that little Jamie Dimon could have elevators for his cars, things would be okay. What the fuck do these assholes need so badly that they are willing to destroy the entire planet to get it ? And the bigger question, why do we allow them to do it ?

R-ten-K wrote: Well, right there is your problem...

I know ... it's a bitch. I have all these repressed memories, see ? So when I go to the dentist office I am not in a good place to absorb the wealth of knowledge in those learned journals. I have to use my own brain, which is a poor puny thing compared to all those industry pundits and marketing department press releases.

R-ten-K wrote:

self awareness, that post has none...

Don't sell yourself short dude. I'm sure if you put your mind to it, even a lackluster student like yourself can get the gist of that sentence.

I dunno To start with, I wasn't aware that a "post", i.e. some electronic words on an electronic page, could in some way be self-aware ? In fact, as a sentence, you seem to be trying to say "That post has no self-awareness." Which is, well, kind of obvious ? Sort of like saying "That tree has no uranium" or "That girl has no rutabaga" or "elephant tusks, that bird has none."

I am guessing you were trying to express some sort of meaning but what it might be escapes me ? Could you explain this in English ? Thank you for your assistance in this matter.

Geoman wrote: Sherry Chang - Parallelization of Codes on the SGI Origins

http://people.nas.nasa.gov/~schang/origin_parallel.html

Ideally, one would like to have 100% of a code executed in parallel. In reality, this is never achieved. If for some segments of a code, a dependence exists between program statements when the order of statement execution affects the results of the program, these segments must be executed in serial. Dependency is usually the cause why a code can not be well parallelized.

Nice find but I will now start a fight ... from the standpoint of a desktop (and quite possibly a bigger machine) she is entirely wrong. The Unix People have their heads in a dark place about this.

Her first sentence is a dead giveaway that she hasn't got a clue. To put this into a different context, if you have three grains of rice to take to the market, do you want to put one each into separate dump trucks and drive them there ? Obviously what you want to do is parallelize the things that can be improved by being processed in parallel and leave the other stuff alone.

This means you have to look at what am I trying to accomplish ? instead of how can I make this code run on eight processors ?

For a trivial example, let's take zipping or unzipping. If you have a six megabyte file to compress and four processors, would it make sense to split the file into quarters and let each processor work on one piece ? I would guess so.

But if the file to be zipped is 256k and you have 512 processors, are you going to split it into 512 pieces of 500 bytes and expect this to work well ?

Obviously not, that would be stupid. But this is the approach she is advocating. This whole fixation with determining how many processors a box has, then splitting a task into that many parts is stupid.

For one thing, a multi-tasking computer is doing other stuff so you never get that many processors anyhow. Most likely it is doing several other things, so using the number p to determine your parallelizing is mentally retarded. You're never going to get that many resources no matter what, so quit fixating on that fantasy.

For a second thing, the amount of parallelism should be determined by the task, as demonstrated by the zip example. So why not first figure out the most efficient way to split up the task, then hand over however many threads you decided on to the operating system's scheduler ? It has a hell of a lot more information about the current situation than any applications programmer ever will, so let it do its job. I know this is assuming that the people making operating systems are the top guys (not always a warranted assumption) but hey. Between the people building an os and the people creating gtk3, I'll have to go with the kernel creators.

IBM figured this out twenty-five years ago. Why are the Unix people so thick-headed about this subject ?

(One additional nasty little feature here is that she spends a great deal of time talking about OpenMP. But OpenMP on Irix does not work with pthreads. This is not going to be a joy for anyone writing average daily-use parallel programs on Irix. Sproc, totally different from everyone else, oh goody.)

Geoman wrote: Wow! That's an extensive analysis - as interesting to read as the original article.

Well, take it with a pound of salt. But I've used smp on slow processors on a system that has it figured out, and Unix is terribly disappointing in comparison. An O350 should be much more responsive than an old Z-Pro with a pair of Pentium Pro's, but it isn't

And that lady's fixation on OpenMP ... except for the fact that you can't use it on Irix with pthreads, I s'pose it's great. That includes libraries, so for a desktop ....

guardian452 wrote: Ahhh, hamei, I don't know in china where they sell you a windows CD for $0.50

Nah, I wouldn't pay that ! Windows we just borrow from a friend. Or download

here at the shooping mall there is an apple store and a microsoft store next to each other. At the apple store you can buy a last-year's ipad for about $250. The windows tablets from microsoft are starting at about triple that. I think their cheapest is over 600.

Run over to Best Buy. There's a gazillion Androids and two Toshiba tablets. The Toshiba is the Echo or Event or Ex-Lax or some such hooey. Small one is $199, larger one $260. New. Windows 8.1 installed. They look decent. Full report from Mum in a week or so.

Although the microsofties are much more fun because they have xboxes and etc.

And (as far as I can tell) you can run Windows programs on them. This is a key feature for many of us.

I've been in the apple store only once even though I have at least half dozen of their machines now. It looks dreadful and the people that work there are clueless assholes.

It's a different demographic for sure

The software is plenty good enough for the 99.9999% of the people that buy them - all they need is internet safari and angry birds.

Mostly agree but also disagree. It's not really a question of "good enough." For example, the Mum is a typical product of the Cultural Revolution. Technologically speaking, she's a knuckle-dragger. But she does do a few things on the computer : play the stock market (Alibaba red for fifteen yuan, please !) and online card games. Neither one exists on the iBad.

For me, I can adapt if I have to but the stinking iBad is not built for human-sized fingers. You can't put the cursor where you want. And even if you could, the p.o.s. insists on capitalizing words I don't want capitalized, changing the spelling, making suggestions, and getting in the way. I scream at it: "mother please, I'd rather do it myself !" but that doesn't help. And then when you go to a website or try to get your mail, the idiot webtwits insist on trying to shove some crappy "app" down your throat. Thank you very much but I don't want your worthless arfing app. I want the same damned interface I've been using for the past five years.

When using an iBad I spend half the time swearing "Get the fuck out of my way you stupid little idiot !" (So much for Artificial Intelligence.) It's a Rich Internet Experience for sure.

Go to Best Buy, take a look at the Toshiba. Maybe it's okay.

josehill wrote: She was writing about the kinds of codes running on NASA Origin systems

Hence the very first sentence, "for desktop use"

Fine, her first sentence was an overstatement, but I'm sure her intended audience understood it in the context of those kinds of jobs.

I think I disagree with you here. I think those people actually think that way. They are living in a DOS world where THEY control the computer ! THEY decide what happens when and where ! THEY make the choices !

I think this is a problem.

Her intended audience almost certainly was not interested in writing interactive desktop applications.

True. But unfortunately ...

... a lot of her points are applicable to certain kinds of desktop jobs).

THERE is the problem. Her points are not applicable to desktop jobs. Desktops should be entirely different, yet they are not because too many people read this stuff intended for huge machines running large scientific codes and think that's how it should be.

It shouldn't. A desktop is not an Origin 3800 any more than a Mack truck is a Lotus Elan.

Any programmer who understands what she wrote would not make the kinds of architectural mistakes you suggested, hamei.

Then there is no one in the Unix or Linux kermyooonity who understands what she wrote, because that's exactly what they do for desktops all the time. It hasn't been two months since jwp here was writing a little utility to determine the number of processors in a box so he could set the number of cpu's in an application. That is so wrong .

And it's not just him. It's all of them. I bet there isn't a single Linux application that is properly written for multi-tasking, multi-user computing. Not one.

To be fair, though, I have been amazed by the number of developers (on any platform) who really don't understand parallelization at all.

Agreed 10,000%.

Speaking of big Origins, I just found this. Pretty neat !

http://www.rent-a-sgi.com/

Has anyone seen this one anywhere else ? (The cursor editor, not the paintjet driver. My cursor is too small. Shaddup, wise guys.)

guardian452 wrote: I like riding the bus, it just doesn't take me where I need to go here (unfortunately). I don't live on a route and neither does my work

hamei luuuuvs riding the subway. Besides the obvious (no car payments, no insurance payments, no parking hassles, no hassles with the pigs) there's the added benefit that there's lots of girls on the subway. And many of them appear to be mammals.

Don't people like sex anymore ? How many female persons can you meet driving down the middle lane of the freeway ?

Oskar45 wrote: Aren't you a bit too old to lay them all?

So do you have to run with those cheetahs, bwana sahib, or is it okay to just look and enjoy ?

VenomousPinecone wrote: All I know is that it is easier to stay in your rut as long as the it is less painful than getting out of it. Maybe thats what we have, humanity in some giant rut where letting mobsters and con-men run the show is just easier than actually doing something about it.

You are doubtless correct. But that is very similar to sitting in the comfy deck chair on the Titanic while the bow goes under. Honest, some features of the future really are predictable.

Same thing for anthropogenic climate change; both sides are full of liars with ideological axes to grind, politicians and big business ne'er-do-wells.

But you don't need to listen to either "side". Chemistry 101 will answer the question for you. Or even easier, just go take a dump in the vegetable compartment of your refrigerator and see what happens. The chemistry of this is simple. How many billions of tons of crap can we add to the atmosphere while expecting it to stay the same ?

I don't see politicians fixing the problem no matter how good the science is or how well intentioned the bureaucrats are. Bureaucracy is the King Midas of shit, everything it touches turns to shit and all they and their private sector cohorts can do is manage the consumer/voter expectations of said shit-storm.

I guess I'm an optimist, in that I believe things could be much better. But you are probaly right, as long as Harry and Jamie are running the show and the buffoons who inhabit the world keep doing what they do, we're toast.

I forgot you have Harry ... that's a cross for anyone to bear. Good thing today's weed is such high quality

Bureaucracy does not have to be as bad as you think. China really is better than the US. Oh, they have their heads up their butts a great deal of the time but they aren't as mentally-retarded as Americans. At least the commies try to do what's best for the country. e.g., I hear these ignorant little twat foreigners arriving with their "The evil gumbint shouldn't prescribe a one-child policy, they should have economic incentives." I want to slap them so hard their noses fly off : rich people can have as many children as they want, everyone else can have none ? Money-grubbing ignorant Dimon-indoctrinated little turds.

There is no fix that involves either the Jamie Dimon's or Harry Reid's of this world. You can't vote with your dollar if all you got is the company store.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

foetz wrote:

hamei wrote: An O350 should be much more responsive than an old Z-Pro with a pair of Pentium Pro's, but it isn't

if that's the case then you have the worst config possible or the thing is simply broken

You could be correct but I don't think so

In reference to this article and in general, I don't think Unix programmers understand multi-tasking at all . You yourself have noticed that the O350 will block you out for periods of time. And your O350 is doubtless better than mine Thunderbird just blocked on me a few minutes ago, I've had terminals stay unresponsive for periods up to ten seconds, Fireflop is a pig in this respect ... connecting to ... connecting to ... connecting to .... . The people who wrote that abortion don't have a clue.

Okay, that's not correct. The truth is they don't care about the user, not even a tiny little bit. They are interested in jamming their shit down our throats no matter what -- those are the real Mozilla Foundation Goals. Their propaganda is, quite simply, lies.

Anyway, I could be mistaken but I've looked and looked at Linux "how to program with threads" docs and never found anything that explains why like this :

http://www.edm2.com/index.php/Writing_M ... s_Programs

IBM was adamant about user-responsiveness. No one else seems to give a shit. Or even understand why you would want to. They all want to control the volume themselves, to hell with the person who bought and paid for that computer

foetz wrote: as for smp, i used a 16 cpu origin 2000 for pretty much all of the 6.5 packages i provided over the years and i can assure you that multiple cpus and shared memory, especially the way sgi did it, does pay off

Exhibit A for the defense : Fireflop