Posts tagged Don
Crontab Configuration
Dec 22nd
Crontab is automated. Don’t bother configuring /etc/cron.hourly etc…. Just configure a crontab line and it will propogate to the /etc subdirectories accordingly.
Crontab lines are configured with:
sudo crontab -e
There are five starts in front. The first is minutes the second is hours. Third fourth and fith are for days of the week, day of the month and month of the year. I usually only bother with the first two to get various scripts to run daily. If you set a crontab to 00 02 * * * it will run every day at 2 am. Note that it is military time.
PS3′s What Else are They Good For
Nov 28th
I Don’t have a PS3, I have an XBox. But I still think the PS3s are great, and I’ve heard that they are relatively powerful. Apparently their chips can process at upwards of 150 gigaflops per second. This is a relatively powerful chips for something publicly available. Some of the more powerful supercomputers, in the world, process at under 2 teraflops, therefore the PS3 processes at about 1/10 the computations respectively. By hooking up the PS3 consecutively, and/or adjacently the processing power can be effectively multiplied by subcontracting the operations. The US military does just this, which is questionable considering how Sony deals with the game terminal.
Sony sells the PS3s at a loss to make profit from kickbacks on game sales. Because of this the US military is effectily causing Sony to loose money. The US military is clearly not purchasing several thousand systems for gaming purposes, therefore a cumulative loss is incurred by the veteran gaming company.
According US military documentation Sony is supplying 2536 PS3 for superclustering purposes. An nice analysis of the documentation is provided by reghardware.
Windows 7 – Thoughts and Considerations
Oct 20th
Frankly Windows is pretty. I like Windows, the only things that really annoys me is viruses. Because of the thousands of viruses and attacks that can be performed, antivirus software is an absolute requirement of a Windows powered computer. Antivirus software takes a lot of power, because it is constantly scanning incoming files, and making sure files on the system are clean. Also antispyware software is a requirement. This software will make sure that files are not changing on the system, especially critical system files that should never change. These two applications are constantly running in the background and draining resources. These two types of applications are required because there are some 25,000 viruses for Windows based machines.
Windows 7
On the other hand Linux is getting better and better. There are only a handful of viruses, and typical website attacks are non functional most of the time. In other words Linux based machines are relatively immune to the vast majority of Windows attacks. This makes antivirus software not necessary. This also makes use of anti spyware software a moot consideration. If you like the look of Windows you can make Linux look comparable. Overall the only reason to use WIndows is for graphics card compatibility for gaming. Also for iTunes! But there are even alternative for iTunes on Linux. I will try and use Windows 7. I purchased a Vaio P; it came with Vista and if Sony offers me a free upgrade I will definitely install it over XP. Ive heard that it is less bloated that Vista, and it will be clearly more functional than XP. I think it will be interesting, and I look forward to trying to get my hands on it. Don’t get me wrong I still think you can do much more in a Linux PC. MythTV, and the way VirtualBox works are much better than comparable functionality on a straight Windows PC. Plus there is Compiz 
The 3D desktop effects of Windows, even the aftermarket apps like Deskspaces, are not comparable to the degree of seamless integration achieved on Linux.
