5/28    RIP Phil Hartman -- Goodbye Phil!
        \_ Who?
           \_ Actor from Saturday Night Live, Newsradio and the Simpsons
        \_ Chris Farley, I could tolerate, but Phil was actually funny.
        \_ so lame -- killed by his wife.

5/28    John Tank update:
        -John has postponed tankdom until June '99
        -John wants to postpone tankdom until further
        -John found out that if he gets a tank, he really won't get to
         shoot up Germany or roll over small cars all that much
        -John is officially disgusted and trying to get out of the whole
         thing after finding out he would have to do pushups
        -John bought a big car and an air rifle
        -John is now officially trying to avoid having to do pushups
         or civil service or having to pay army avoidance taxes
        -Elite ZOG shock troopers will crush evil Swiss army goons
         Justice will be served
        \_ Does anyone have a clue what the heck he's talking about???
           \_ he's talking about why he should come back to the US
           \_ Yes.  Anyone who knows John knows exactly what he's talking
              about.  These aren't the only reasons he should come back.
              I can think up about 275 million more reasons.

5/27    Do people REALLY have to post such stupid trolls?
        \_ Yes, because it makes people like you reply which is the whole
           point of trolling.  Think of it as a fishing expedition.
           \_ No.  Fishing you catch fish.  Trolling you catch trolls.  -John
            \_ deleting a troll isn't responding to it.
                \_ Sure it is.  I love seeing that people have taken the
                   time and effort to delete my trolls.  -troll
                        \_ takes less time than creating them.

5/27    UCNet dumps Sprint, http://ucb.net.announce for more info
        \_ Be very afraid : "At this time, there is no announced schedule for
           the transition, but it is likely to begin fairly soon."
          \_ Flee!  Fear!  Buy your own net access.

5/27    Is there a program that can generate jpeg images from text files?
        \_ make text into a jpg, or a jpeg into text? - danh
           \_ text into jpeg (or some graphics format)
              \_ Try to get it into postscript first. --dim
        \_ if you're desperate, read a flat file into excel, SelectAll, then
           <shift> Edit->Copy Picture (Bitmap Format), and you'll have a bmp.
           Then find some way to convert bmp to jpg.

5/27    How heavily cached is the file system? If I read a file over and over
        again, how much (in terms of mb) is it usually in memory, in systems
        like FreeBSD?
        \_ Your hard drive has a cache as well.
           \_ Note that this matters less and less as you get a big software
              cache -- in the worst case, if your hardware and software caches
              were the same size and used the same policy, you wouldn't get
              any benefit from the hardware cache at all.
              \_ You fail to mention hard drives that prefetch into their
                 cache.

              This is pretty much unrelated to the original question, whose
              answer is "usually most of it; run top to see how much of your
              physical memory is allocated to cache".
        \_ If the file you're reading over and over again is a read-only
           file, or changes in small incremental, it may be wise to use a
           database who's sole task is "smart disk cache".
           \_ Shut up, cmlee.
              \_ Good call.
        \_ FreeBSD has a unified vm/buffer cache, meaning that file
           caching and process memory both contend for the same physical memory
           (in other words, the memory isn't segmented between the two).  so
           really, the answer to your question depends on how loaded the system
           is, both vm and i/o-wise.  now, if you don't want your file cached
           (because you're only reading sequentially, or something), look at
           madvise().

5/26    New grads looking for jobs with a great startup checkout
        /csua/pub/jobs/OPC_Tech.  Check it out even if you are not
        a new grad, but would like to work in great company with lucrative
        stock options and all the beef jerky, chips, drinks,
        granola bars, power bars, etc. you can eat.
        \_ why oh why do all these geek companies offer all the
          (supply some junk food here) you can eat?  And why do
          geeks care about this?
          \_ Because it makes the company sound hip and k00l and non-
             corporate even if its just a lame ploy for the corporate
             people running it just to tweak geeks onto the payroll
             for less cash because "we're hip! we give beef jerky!"
          \_ Actually, the company supplies food and drinks because
             most people are at work a large part of the day and enjoy
             having free snacks on their breaks.  Obviously nobody would
             choose a company because of free snacks, but why would anyone
             complain about them? - emin
                \_ the complaint is that free snacks are put forth as some
                   sort of useful benefit, on par with stock options, above.
                   "we may or may not have a health plan, but you can get
                   free chips!"  -tom
                \_ Gimme a higher salary.  I'll buy my own.
        \_ Try Siebel Systems at http://www.siebel.com we do not supply any junk
           food besides free drinks..
                \_ Ah ha!
                \_ According to Chronicle, Siebel was the fastest growing
                   company for the past 3 yrs in the bay area. They kick
                   ass.
        \_ Intel charges everything from coffee, candy bar, all the way to
           your employee badge necklace (the blue one with Intel on it).
           ALL the food, except water, is charged to make sure that old
           engineers don't get fat and die of heart attack.
                \_ "Old" means over 35 right?
                \_ That's so the shareholders get maximum profit. So shut up
                   and get the f_ck back to your pathetic compressed cage.
                   Engineers are worthless scum, if we fed them, they wouldn't
                   work as hard.

5/28    Dell laptop for sale.  14" Active Matrix.  20x CD.  80 MB, 8GB.
        266MHz Pentium 2.  Ethernet + 56K modem.  Case included. Asking $2.5k.
        mail ari for details or with any reasonable offers.
        -thinkpad's are much nicer and new one's are on recently on sale
        \_ thinkpads SUCK.  Nothing is standard.  You can't even see the
           COM ports on a 770 without downloading drivers.